Perceptions of policy choice in contemporary democracies

Though the concept of choice is essential to democracy, little is known about how citizens make sense of the diversity of policies offered by political elites. Research has found that institutional arrangements such as low electoral thresholds and multiple party competitors are associated with greater policy choice. Other work emphasises non‐institutional factors. No research, however, examines what the voters think. In this article these alternative explanations are assessed in terms of whether citizens believe parties to provide choice over policy. Evidence from 25 democracies reveals that electoral and party systems have no direct effect. Choice perceptions are instead affected by non‐policy factors: social heterogeneity and individual political dispositions. This result contrasts with analyses showing a strong connection between electoral rules and the diversity of messages communicated by parties during campaigns. The article also shows how choice perceptions matter for political behaviour. Overall, study findings imply that the promise of institutions for fostering representation is weaker than previously assumed.     

Long-term associative issue ownership change: a panel study in Belgium

Issue ownership has gained a prominent position as one of the key theories to understand how voter’s issue perceptions affect their electoral behavior. Yet, whereas the original theory assumed that party reputations were relatively stable, various studies have shown that issue ownership perceptions fluctuate over time. Despite the growing evidence that ownership perceptions are dynamic, we know surprisingly little about the determinants of change, especially at the individual level. This paper develops an individual-level framework to understand how issue ownership perceptions change over time, arguing that mediated party communication is a key driver of change. It also incorporates individual features of voters, most notably their political predispositions – as determinants of changing issue ownership perceptions. We test our model on unique longitudinal panel data from Belgium, spanning a five-year period. The results suggest that party communications, government participation, party size and voter’s party preferences determine changes in ownership perceptions.     

Fair treatment,fair play? The relationship between fair treatment perceptions,political trust and compliant and cooperative attitudes cross-nationally

Obtaining citizens’ voluntary compliance with political decisions is a fundamental democratic challenge. Fair treatment by public officials plays a key role in theoretical and empirical studies on citizens’ compliance and cooperation. Yet it is unclear whether citizens within different societies react to (un)fair treatment in the same way. Using multilevel structural equation modelling and multilevel regression analysis on the European Social Survey 2010–2 (N = 52,458), this article shows that perceptions of fair treatment by police officers are associated with higher levels of trust in political institutions and in turn stronger compliant and cooperative attitudes of citizens in 27 countries. Yet the link between perceptions of unfair treatment and institutional trust is stronger in countries in which fair behaviour is more prevalent. While fair treatment is often considered to be a universal norm affecting citizens in a uniform way, this article sheds light on important cross-national variations.     

Thinking locally,acting supranationally: Niche party behaviour in the European Parliament

Recent research on the European Parliament (EP) has neglected the idiosyncrasies of niche parties. Similarly, analyses of niche parties have not fully engaged the literature on the EP. This article builds on both literatures by analysing niche party behaviour in the EP as a distinct phenomenon. It is argued that niche parties will respond differently to institutional stimuli than parties more generally. To test this argument, Hix, Noury and Roland's work on EP party voting behaviour is replicated concentrating on niche parties only. It is found that participation in national government and institutional changes affect niche party legislators' voting behaviour, whereas they do not for legislators in the EP overall. These results have important implications for understanding both party behaviour in the EP and niche party behaviour more generally.     

Ingredients of institutional reputations and citizen engagement with regulators

The purpose of this study is to examine the link between the reputational components of efficacy and moral reliability of institutions, and citizens' compliance with institutional recommendations. Research on bureaucratic reputations highlights the significance of positive political reputations based on credibility and legitimacy, but the impact of these components is not systematically isolated and studied. We draw insights from political psychology to move beyond a positive‐negative valence‐based approach of reputation, and highlight the different effect of efficacy and moral reliability components of reputation on citizens' cooperation, engagement in water saving activities, and levels of complaints. We use the Cypriot Water Authority as a case study and inquire how its institutional reputation influences Cypriot citizens' behavior regarding water use. Our data was collected via a representative national survey administered to a random sample of 800 Cypriots in the spring of 2009 and show that favorable perceptions of particular components of institutional reputation shape the levels of satisfaction with specific organizational outputs.     

Investigating the Roots of Civic Morality: Trust, Social Capital, and Institutional Performance

In the last decade considerable research in social sciences has focused on interpersonal trust, treating it as a remedy for most maladies modern democracies suffer from. Yet, if others act dishonestly, trust is turned into gullibility, thus mechanisms linking interpersonal trust with institutional success refer implicitly to honesty and civic morality. This paper investigates the roots of civic morality. It applies hierarchical models to data from 38 countries, and tests the individual, community and structural explanatory factors. The results of the analysis point to the relevance of an institutional dimension, both in the form of individuals’ perceptions as well as the quality of governance: confidence in political institutions and their objective quality are the strongest predictors of civic morality. At the same time, the findings show that the recently popular claims about the importance of social capital for citizens’ moral standards are largely unfounded.

The New Institutionalism and EC Governance: The Promise and Limits of Institutional Analysis

The "new" institutionalisms" in rational choice and historical analysis are being applied with increasing sophistication and accuracy to the study of European Community governance. The basic premise of such institutional approaches is that EC institutions, once created, "take on a life of their own," acting as independent or intervening variables between the preferences and power of the member governments on the one hand, and the ultimate policy outputs of EC governance on the other. The challenge for institutionalist theory consists in constructing a precise analytical tool-box that will allow us to make specific predictions about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, EC institutions may exert such an independent causal influence. EC institutions matter, I suggest, insofar as they: lend stability to an existing institutional structure; shape any subsequent amendment of those institutions; allow individual member governments to be outvoted by qualified majority; cause member states to lose control of events through lock-ins; and subject member governments to the actions of supranational agents whose behavior they can control only imperfectly.     

Prisoners and escapees: improving the institutional responsibility square in Bangladesh

The article argues that explanations of problematic governance are institutional rather than organizational and have their roots in the deep structures of society. Bangladesh is used as an exemplar for such analysis, deploying the notion of the institutional responsibility square comprising four institutional domains of state, market, community and household. A prior or ‘total institution’ metaphor is used to describe the ways in which different classes are obliged to pursue their livelihoods, entrapped within the problematic social embeddedness of these four institutional domains. The article develops this argument via three themes: permeability between these domains (i.e., blurred moral boundaries between public and private behaviour); problem of legitimation of public institutions, given this permeability; and the incorporated rather than independent characteristics of civil society, thus limiting optimism about its potential to create reform. Nevertheless the article offers a strategic agenda of institutional improvement (i.e., escape from the prison) based on the principles of shifting people's rights from the problematic, uncertain informal sphere towards the formal realm. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Global poverty and responsibility: Identifying the duty-bearers of human rights

Many rights theorists argue that global poverty violates certain human rights, so that responsibility to address poverty involves carrying out the duties that correspond with relevant rights-claims. Liberatirians argue that the rights and duties associated with global poverty, especially what are sometimes thought of as “positive” rights, or rights of assistance, are inappropriately agent-neutral, giving them less justificatory force than agent-relative rights and duties. To counter libertarian concerns, Thomas Pogge tries to reframe the responsibilities corresponding to human rights as institutional rather than as belonging to agents. While admirable, his approach inadequately expalains the relationships between institutional responsibility and individual and collective action. A better way to respond to libertarian concerns—that is also compatible with Pogge’s emphasis on institutional responsibility—is to show that the duties regarding global poverty are indeed agent-relative, but by virtue of individual and collective action within institutions.     

The price of personalizing politics: Political distrust and economic performance in Latin America, 1996–2006

While research has provided evidence that culture and institutional performance shape individual level trust in political institutions, scholars have neglected to adequately estimate the effect of political institutions and macroeconomic conditions on trust. Using data from the World Value Surveys for eleven Latin American cases, we test if countries with “partyizing” electoral systems - those with rules that encourage voters to hold the party, not individuals, accountable for government performance - experience lower levels of distrust in political parties and the legislature in times of poor economic conditions than those countries with “personalizing” electoral rules. Our analysis shows that the macro political and economic context largely conditions the impact of culture and institutional performance on political trust.     

Understanding micro-processes of institutionalization: stewardship contracting and national forest management

This paper examines micro-processes of institutionalization, using the case of stewardship contracting within the US Forest Service. Our basic premise is that, until a new policy becomes an everyday practice among local actors, it will not become institutionalized at the macro-scale. We find that micro-processes of institutionalization are driven by a mixture of large-scale institutional dynamics and how frontline decision-makers understand and interpret these dynamics, given the local social and ecological context in which they operate. For example, this paper suggests that a new policy may become institutionalized when it is understood to solve problems that old institutions at once create and demand to be solved. Agency actors cannot be conceptualized as untethered from the institutions in which they operate. Yet, within larger institutional dynamics, field personnel make key choices about whether to adopt a new policy, making them important players in the micro-processes of policy institutionalization. The interplay of actors and institutions turns agencies, such as the Forest Service, into complex systems that cannot be understood as artifacts of their own history or as a sum of the decisions of individual actors. This dynamic also implies that macro-level institutional change will be uneven, incomplete, and gradual, mirroring uneven, contingent micro-level processes.     

The fable of policy entrepreneurship? Understanding policy change as an ontological problem with critical realism and institutional theory

How is policy change possible if policy entrepreneurs’ cognition, rationality and identity are conditioned by the very policy institutions they wish to change? To solve this paradox of embedded agency, we must avoid either voluntarism that inflates the role of actors to change policies as by existing policy entrepreneurship applications, or determinism whereby policy changes are decided by contextual forces. Instead, drawing on institutional theory, critical realism sees structures, institutions, and actions that constitute policy dynamics as existing in separate yet intertwined reality domains: structures (e.g., social relationships), and institutions (e.g., formal rules and norms such as institutional logics) in the Real domain, enable and constrain policy actors’ navigation of their social environments; the Actual domain represents the level at which events (actions) happen, as these actors constantly interpret varied institutions to adjust their structurally embedded actions when pursuing policy changes that can be observed in the Empirical domain. Put differently, structures and institutions are mechanisms in the Real domain that affect individual practices and events in the Actual domain, and only some of these events are realized in the Empirical domain as policy changes. We empirically illustrate this critical realist approach with a Chinese example on health care reform.

     

Economic strain and perceptions of social cohesion in Europe: Does institutional trust matter?

The degree to which different social groups get along is a key indicator of the cohesiveness of a society. This study examines perceptions of social cohesion among Europeans and explains variations in those perceptions by considering the separate and combined effects of economic strain and institutional trust. Analyses were conducted with the 27 member countries of the EU based on the Eurobarometer 74.1 on poverty and social exclusion conducted in 2010. Results show that individuals living in households experiencing economic strain perceive social cohesion to be weaker than their less economically hard‐pressed counterparts. By contrast, individuals trusting their political institutions perceived there to be higher levels of cohesion. Furthermore, institutional trust substantially moderates the negative relationship between economic strain and perceptions of cohesion. These results are robust to various model specifications. Moreover, extending the analysis revealed that this moderating effect held when considering social relations between the poor and rich and between different racial and ethnic groups. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

The Contingent Diffusion of Parliamentary Oversight Institutions in the European Union

What explains the variation in institutional adaptation of national parliaments to European integration? Whereas the existing literature has mainly focused on domestic conditions, this article explains institutional adaptation to integration by focusing on inter‐parliamentary diffusion. The argument draws on ‘learning’ mechanisms of diffusion on the demand side and on ‘emulation’ mechanisms on the supply side. Parliamentary demand for external inspiration is related to uncertainty about functional oversight institutions, and the selection of sources to perceptions of similarity and success. Demand arises in new European Union member parliaments and young democracies that then turn towards culturally alike countries and old democracies. Using spatial econometrics, support is demonstrated for the argument in the article while ruling out alternative diffusion mechanisms such as spatial proximity and learning from Scandinavian frontrunners once links along cultural similarity and democratic experience are controlled for. The results underline the limits of the ‘isolated polity’ approach in the comparative study of institutions in Europe's closely integrated political system, while also showing that, even in this favourable environment, diffusion pathways are contingent on the mechanisms generating demand among policy makers and shaping their selection of sources for external information.     

Political judgments,perceptions of facts,and partisan effects

We test two competing hypotheses about the impact of partisanship and information on people's political judgments and perceptions of facts using Canadians' reactions to a major scandal. Our findings with respect to subjective political judgments confirm the argument that partisan predispositions are crucial. But there is no evidence to support the argument that the polarizing effect of partisanship is most evident among the most informed. When it comes to perceptions of “objective” facts, the results are consistent with Zaller's reception axiom: the more informed people are, the more likely they are to correctly perceive objective facts. Partisanship does not appear to affect these perceptions.     

Street-Level Bureaucrats as Individual Policymakers: The Relationship between Attitudes and Coping Behavior toward Vulnerable Children and Youth

Lipsky (1980) pointed out that street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) are important policymakers due to the discretion they exercise and argued from a structural perspective that these workers manifest relatively similar coping behaviors owing to their shared working conditions, characterized by chronically limited resources and non-voluntary clients. Using data from a national survey of municipal child welfare caseworkers in Denmark, we further develop Lipsky's theory from an agency perspective by focusing on variation in coping among SLBs and examining the extent to which such variation is explained by SLBs’ attitudes towards the target group, the objectives and content of their jobs, and their perceptions of the capacity of their institutions. We find that SLBs’ aversion to and tolerance of the client group, their perceptions of institutional capacity in terms of municipal resources and local political inefficacy, and their conceptual modification of job contents are all related to their use of coping.     

When Do Welfare Attitudes Become Racialized? The Paradoxical Effects of Education

Recent research suggests that welfare attitudes may be shaped by negative perceptions of blacks, suggesting an implicit racialization of the policy. But what might inhibit the racialization of welfare? In this vein, research indicating that education facilitates tolerance suggests that negative racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be less related among the educated. However, education may also be associated with a greater ability to connect general predispositions with specific policy attitudes. Somewhat paradoxically, this suggests that the association between racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be stronger among the college‐educated, despite their lower overall levels of racial hostility. Study 1 shows that education attenuates negative racial perceptions, while strengthening their impact on public‐assistance attitudes—but only when assistance is described as “welfare.” Study 2 extends and qualifies this finding, showing that education strengthens the relationship between perceptions of welfare recipients and global welfare attitudes only when recipients are black.     

The aftermath of Heysel: The 1985 Belgian election

The institutional approach to generalised trust creation is based on the assumption that only institutions with certain features give people reason to trust strangers. This article offers a revised version of this approach by arguing that there is an indirect rather than a direct link between the properties of institutions and trust among strangers. Referring to a neo-institutional idea of institutions, it is suggested that the potential of institutions for enabling people to trust strangers rests on institutions' power to structure individual action. The endurance and efficacy of institutions rather than their normative principles give us significant clues that our anonymous fellow citizens think about institutions as we do and accordingly feel committed to the rules of action. This, in turn, provides good reasons to believe that most of them will behave in an ‘appropriate’ manner so that we can trust them even if they are strangers.     

Revenue Diversification in Public Higher Education: Comparing the University and Polytechnic Sectors

Financial stringency has been an increasing concern in the higher education sector, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis. As a result, public higher education institutions have been under increasing pressure to diversify their funding sources through tuition fees and other nonpublic revenues. This article reflects on the institutional impact of those changes by analyzing a panel of 30 higher education institutions from the Portuguese public university and polytechnic sectors for the period between 2003 and 2009. The authors explore the relevance of institutional characteristics such as enrollments in undergraduate and postgraduate programs, the qualifications of academic staff, and the regional environment where institutions are located. Results suggest that certain institutional characteristics related to mission differentiation and the path of development of binary systems are important determinants of higher education institutions’ ability to earn income from tuition fees and other nonpublic sources.     

The Dynamics of Abstract and Manifest Institutional Change: MITI and the Japanese "Economic Miracle" Reconsidered

Modern institutional theory specifies two different aspects of institutions. The first aspect—and by far the predominant perspective—sees institutions as recurrent patterns of behavior, values, norms and practices which guide social and political behavior. The second aspect refers to the manifest institutional systems of the state. These two sides of institutions are supposed to be mutually reinforcing. Thus, institutions are "embedded" in overarching systems of values at the same time as they "constrain" behavior. This article takes exactly the opposite approach and seeks to separate the two different meanings of institutions in order to explain changes in the effective capabilities of manifest institutions. Using the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) as an empirical case, the argument advanced in the article is that variations in the institutional leverage and capacity of MITI can to a significant extent be explained by changes in the relationship between "abstract" and "manifest" institutions, i.e. the extent to which the institutional arrangement of the state reflects predominant systems of values, norms and beliefs in society. In addition to the vast literature on institutional theory, the article draws on a series of interviews with MITI senior officials between 1988 and 1996 as well as on the literature on Japanese political economy.