Can Government Cope?

This article was originally presented as a paper to the National Conference of the Institute of Public Administration Australia on 1 December 2000. It considers why governments have adopted a more market-oriented approach to governance, concluding that this change in means has generally helped them to achieve their preferred courses of action. However, the principal threats to government capacity are political not technical, and the article also discusses the limitations of market-based policies in this respect.     

Electoral Incentives and Individual Parliament Members’ Rights

Cameral procedures define the modus operandi of a parliament. This article examines how the electoral environment affects parliaments’ rules of procedures and legislators’ rights. It argues that when the electoral environment motivates legislators to act individualistically governments are incentivised to restrict cameral procedures to curtail legislators’ behaviour. Materialising such incentives depends on the government’s ability to pass restrictive procedural changes. To test the assertion, four decades (1967–2007) of amendments to the Israeli Knesset’s rules of procedure were examined and support provided for co-variation of the electoral environment and restrictive Knesset’s procedures. The analysis then details the factors that enabled Israeli governments to pass such restrictive measures. Indeed, governments seem to use the rules of procedure strategically in their attempt to improve their control and curtail legislators’ behaviour.     

Do Voters Polarize When Radical Parties Enter Parliament?

Do voters polarize ideologically when radical views gain political legitimacy, or does the rise of radical voices merely reflect societal conflict? We argue that elite polarization as signaled by radical parties' first entrance into parliament leads to voter divergence. Immediately after the election, legitimization and backlash effects mean that voters on both ideological sides move toward the extremes. In the longer term, this polarization is solidified because of radical parties' parliamentary presence. A panel study of Dutch voters shows that the 2002 parliamentary entrance of a radical‐right party indeed led to immediate ideological polarization across the political spectrum. Estimating time‐series cross‐sectional models on Eurobarometer data from 17 countries (1973–2016) shows an additional long‐term impact of radical‐right party entry on polarization. The presence of radical voices on the right has polarizing effects, illustrating how such institutional recognition and legitimization can have a far‐reaching impact on society.     

Whatever Happened to Overloaded Government?

Anthony King was, among other things, an outstandingly acute public intellectual. His work on overload and policy fiasco exemplifies this. His original diagnosis in his famous paper of 1975 was deeply pessimistic in character, but subsequent adaptations by government solved many of the original problems arising from dependency relations. These adaptations amounted to the creation of a Madisonian system of regulation that insulated policy makers from democratic pressures. But these adaptations in turn created new difficulties that lie at the root of the analysis in King and Crewe's The Blunders of our Governments, published nearly four decades after King's original classic paper.     

Does Enhanced Veto Authority Centralize Government?

Previous theoretical and empirical research findsenhanced veto authority has little systematic effecton level of spending. This paper takes a new tact,examining the effect of veto power on thecentralization of governmental services. It proposesand tests a model of federalism in which differenttypes of veto authority lead to differing degrees ofcentralization when the executive and legislature havedisparate preferences over the level of governmentthat should provide services. Empirical resultsindicate governors in the United States use enhancedveto authority to centralize state and localgovernment spending.     

The European Parliament Elections of June 2004: Still Second-Order?

A quarter of a century ago the first series of European Parliament elections were characterised as second-order national elections. Much has changed since, which might have had an impact upon this diagnosis. In this article the central assumptions and predictions of the second-order elections model are restated and evaluated against the outcome of the 2004 European Parliament election and a post-election survey. Surprisingly enough, the findings confirm the persisting second-order nature of EP elections for Western Europe. Matters look very different, however, in the eight new Central and East European member countries.     

Responsible Government and Capitalism’s Cycles

This article explores the tensions Peter Mair identified between responsible and responsive government in relation to the constraints and opportunities of an internationally integrated and instituted economy. Drawing on the example of the short period of democratic stability and its subsequent breakdown in the Weimar Republic, the article argues that in Weimar Germany’s ‘golden twenties’, governments could bridge the gap between responsibility – defined as a commitment to deep international integration – and responsiveness to its citizens mainly through the availability of cheap credits. With the onset of the Great Depression, responsible government became tantamount to increasingly drastic austerity policies. These policies were not only an economic failure, they also made the gap between responsible and responsive government unbridgeable. The article also shows how a similar cycle of good and bad times, with similar consequences with regard to the tensions between responsible and responsive government seem to have occurred in the crisis that has been affecting the Eurozone since 2009.     

Does the Network Centrality of Government Actors Matter? Examining the Role of Government Organizations in Aquaculture Partnerships

The growth in the use of collaborative governance arrangements has been accompanied by burgeoning scholarship in the field of public affairs that seeks to understand the benefits of engaging diverse stakeholders in common venues. However, few scholars have formally assessed the role of government actors in facilitating outcomes for individual participants in such efforts. Moreover, little work on collaborative governance examines how individual incentives and barriers to collective action are formed within the nested nature of these contexts. We contribute to the study of collaborative governance by formally investigating how the relative centrality of government actors in collaborative policy‐making venues affects individual relationship building and learning for participants therein. We find that government actor centrality is positively associated with relationship building and learning. However, in testing two different conceptualizations of “centrality,” we find that the definition of this construct clearly matters.     

Why bother campaigning? Campaign effectiveness in the 2009 European Parliament elections

This paper explores the effectiveness of European Parliament candidates' campaigns. We analyze the relationship between candidates' spending and their likelihood of success, controlling for a range of relevant co-varying factors. We then investigate whether the effects of electoral spending are conditioned by two variables: ballot design and incumbency. We find that, ceteris paribus, spending was positively related to a candidate's likelihood of electoral success in the 2009 campaign, though this effect is small in scale. We also reveal that the electorally positive effects of spending are observable across both 'party-centered' and ‘candidate-centered’ ballot structures, and that there is some evidence that incumbent spending is less effective than challenger spending.     

Do Voters’ Coalition Preferences Affect Government Formation?

Studies on coalition formation assume that political parties have two major goals: they aim to maximise office and policy payoffs. This paper shows that decision-making in the government formation game is also determined by the voters’ coalition preferences. Since the coalition formation process is not a one-shot game, parties have to take the coalition preferences of the electorate into account when they evaluate the utility of potential coalitions. If parties fail to comply with the coalition preferences of voters, they are likely to be penalised in future elections. The argument is tested by an analysis of government formation in the 16 German states between 1990 and 2009. The results support the argument: the formation of coalitions – at least in the German states – is not only determined by office- and policy-seeking behaviour of political parties, but also by the preferences of voters regarding their preferred outcome of the coalition game.     

Absent yet popular? Explaining news visibility of Members of the European Parliament

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) represent their citizens in European Union policy making, having the power to approve, amend or reject the near majority of legislation. The media inform EU citizens about their representatives and are able to hold them publicly accountable. However, we know little about whether, and to what extent, MEPs are visible in the news. This study investigates the visibility of MEPs in national broadsheets in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. It seeks to explain individual‐level variation by employing an original dataset of news visibility of 302 MEPs over a period of 25 months (September 2009–September 2011) and tests the applicability of the news values and mirror theories in the context of supranational politics. The results show that political office, length of tenure and domestic party leadership have a positive effect. Legislative activities have a mixed effect on MEP news visibility. Attendance negatively affects news visibility, while non‐attached MEPs receive more news coverage. In short, despite the core supranational nature of EP legislative politics, MEP news visibility primarily depends on journalists’ domestic considerations. This informs both our understanding of MEP parliamentary behaviour and journalism studies in the context of the EU.     

Towards the Mainstream? UKIP and the 2009 Elections to the European Parliament

This article examines the performance of the UK Independence party (UKIP) at the 2009 European Parliament election, and asks whether the party's second-place finish indicates that it is now entering the political mainstream. It argues that while UKIP's success at these elections marks an important step in its development, the party continues to face significant barriers to further electoral progress. The article also considers the implications for the Conservative party under David Cameron, and cautions that UKIP's success could signal a more generalised shift towards the acceptance of the populist right in Britain. Finally, the article argues that the rise and recent success of UKIP is deserving of greater academic attention, and outlines possible research agendas to take this work forward.     

The Transparency President? The Obama Administration and Open Government

President Obama has trumpeted transparency as a major part of his agenda, promising "unprecedented" openness throughout the federal government. Although Obama benefits politically from the contrast with his predecessor's reputation for secrecy, in the long run an excessive emphasis on fishbowl governance can raise unrealistic expectations and ultimately backfire. After all, at some point transparency has its costs, such as when disclosure dampens internal deliberation or undermines privacy. The real issue, then, is how much transparency and what type. Despite its rhetoric, the Obama Administration has placed limits on transparency and will likely continue to do so. Yet members of the public and open government activists are unlikely to appreciate the need for such limits, leading to disappointment and charges of hypocrisy. It remains unclear whether Barack Obama will earn the mantle of the "transparency president"—or whether the hopes he has raised will, when unfulfilled, only reinforce public cynicism.     

Working or shirking? Expenses and attendance in?the?UK?Parliament

This paper studies the determinants of MPs?? expense claims and of their attendance at Parliamentary meetings. Using a multiple regression framework, we correlate the expenses with three sets of variables: constituency characteristics, political variables, and individual characteristics. We then look at the ratio of parliamentary expenses claimed to votes cast in Parliament as a crude measure of value for money. This take on the data provides a somewhat benign view of the usage of expense claims. We use the results to reflect on two views of the motivation of MPs??the public choice view and the public service view.     

Fostering Dialogue or Monologue? Estonian Party Websites During the 2009 European Parliament Elections

This paper presents data from the analyses of political party web pages during the 2009 European Parliament elections in Estonia. It examines the presence and absence of web 2.0 features on the sites and aims to find out whether interactivity-based applications are used by parties to increase participation and to foster deliberative politics. Estonia as a small ex-Soviet country has emerged after the Soviet Union collapse as one of the most advanced e-societies in the world. Therefore, Estonia is chosen as a case study to explore whether and how decision makers use web 2.0 elements for fostering Habermasian dialogue between the citizens and the power holders in the society where technical obstacles for deliberative politics do not exist any longer. The results show that the Estonian parties still focus on the one-sided or top-down model of communication, based on web 1.0 features, even though all conditions for deliberation from the technical and infrastructural side in Estonia are fulfilled. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possible reasons parties might not be interested in using web 2.0 elements in their web campaign and how it might be linked to the conditions where citizens’ participation and interest in politics is low. There is also emphasis on the need for further systematic comparative research in order to draw conclusions on the changes in the online campaigning and political communication process in the era of cyber-democracy.     

Whole of Government: the Solution to Managing Crises?

The frequency and severity of natural disasters has placed a clear emphasis on the role of governments in responding to these crises. During the past decade, disaster events have had a significant impact on the relevant communities as well as raising questions regarding the role of government and the bureaucratic coordination of planning and response processes. These events have placed a renewed focus on the ability of governments to plan, prepare, and respond in an effective way to crises. They have also tended to indicate that there remain serious challenges to government coordination and that crises create a unique series of challenges for the public sector. At the heart of understanding how governments respond to crises are notions of bureaucratic coordination. It has been suggested that joined‐up or whole of government arrangements may provide an appropriate means in which to approach crisis management. As a result a number of key themes emerge including the nature of crisis management, role of leadership, understanding coordination, impact of organisational culture, and the interactions between individuals and institutions. This paper will consider these issues and provide a review of the relevant literature, to understand the synergies that exist in connected responses to crises.