Political Ideology,Political Party,and Support for Greater Federal Spending on Environmental Protection in the United States: Evidence from the General Social Surveys, 1993–2018

This paper focuses on the effects of political ideology and party affiliation on support for more government spending on environmental protection. Pooled‐sample results show that Liberals (Democrats) are more likely to support higher government spending on environmental protection than Moderates (Independents), who, in turn, are more likely to support higher spending levels than Conservatives (Republicans). The results persist even when we control for respondents' opinions concerning whether the federal government, in general, does too little or too much. When stratifying by party, ideological divisions generally narrow, while stratifying by ideology leads to slightly wider divisions between Democrats and Republicans. Together, these results suggest that when Liberals and Conservatives form opinions about government spending on the environment, party affiliation, to some degree, dampens the effects of ideology. Between 2014 and 2018 the probability of supporting more environmental spending increased, albeit slightly, for all ideologies and parties, but more so for Liberals and Democrats.     

Political ideology and nuclear energy: Perception,proximity, and trust

Political ideology is an increasingly powerful force in support of public policy. Historically, nuclear energy has found more support among political conservatives. This study updates the literature on political ideology and support for nuclear energy by examining how political ideology is associated with perceptions of nuclear energy and trust of nuclear information sources. After excluding participants with incomplete data, and participants within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor, the analytical sample size for the analysis examining political ideology and perceptions of nuclear energy was 4153. The analytical sample includes a total of 1035 participants within a 50-mile radius of INL, 710 participants from within Idaho who lived further than 50 miles from INL, 1899 participants from other states (more than 50 miles from a nuclear reactor), and 509 Non-Idaho participants living within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor. Logistic regression was used to determine how political ideology was associated with perceptions of nuclear energy and trust in different sources regarding radioactive waste, after controlling for demographics and location. While liberal participants near INL were less favorable towards nuclear energy, and more trusting in impact scientists to tell the truth about radioactive waste than their conservative counterparts, this was not consistent across the US. Our findings reveal the complexity of political ideology and the perceptions of nuclear issues and how proximity influences perceptions. The perceptions of political moderates were particularly important in providing a more complex understanding of political ideology and nuclear energy issues.     

Policy Preferences and Political Distrust: A Comparison of Norway, Sweden and the United States

Many modern democracies have experienced a decrease in citizen support for government in recent decades. This article examines attitudes toward public policy as a plausible theoretical explanation for this phenomenon. The connection between public policy and support for the political regime has received considerable academic attention in the United States. Yet very little comparative work has examined whether citizens' policy preferences are related to a decline in diffuse support across different political systems. This article offers a clearer, more concise theoretical specification of the hypothesized relationship between public evaluations of policy outputs and support for the political regime. After specifying the theoretical concerns more succinctly, the article analyzes data from Norway, Sweden and the United States for the quarter century from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The analysis reveals that shifts in evaluations of foreign policy and race-related policies help explain change in political trust for all three countries despite differences in the political systems. Moral issues, such as abortion, however, have no impact on political trust in any of the countries.     

Modeling spending preferences & public policy

Understanding preferences over government spending is important for understanding electoral behavior and many other aspects of the political world. Using data on relative preferences for more or less spending across different issue areas, we estimate the general spending preferences of individuals and congressional candidates along a left-right spending dimension. Our modeling approach also allows us to estimate the location of policies on this same dimension, permitting direct comparison of people's spending preferences with where they perceive policy to be. We find that public shows very low levels of polarization on spending preferences, even across characteristics like partisanship, ideology, or income level. The distribution of candidates' spending preferences shows much more sorting by party, but candidates are significantly less polarized than is contemporary voting in Congress.     

Effect of the Political System on Local Financial Condition: Empirical Evidence for Spain's Largest Municipalities

The significant relationship between public spending and political system has led to a considerable increase in the studies being carried out to analyze how the latter affects public spending, debt, and fiscal pressures. Given the effect that municipal finance has on the quantity and quality of the public services that future generations will enjoy, the aim of this study is to analyze the effect that political ideology and strength have on local government management overall through analysis of the financial condition. With this goal in mind, the study applied panel data methods that allow unobservable heterogeneity to be controlled to a sample of 153 of Spain's largest municipalities for the 1988–2008 period. The results show that the municipalities governed by progressive political parties are worse off financially than those governed by conservatives. Likewise, strong citizen support guarantees greater budgetary solvency.     

Public preferences about government spending: Partisan,social, and attitudinal sources of policy differences

Although the causes and consequences of the growth of government have become the focus of increasing scholarly attention, relatively little empirical research has been done about the nature and determinants of individual fiscal preferences. The present study analyzes patterns of partisan, socioeconomic, and attitudinal differentiation in public spending preferences for a variety of government functions. Two important findings emerge from our analysis. First, attitudes about the adequacy of government spending for each of the functions considered are shown to have two dimensions—a support for spending dimension and a support for change dimension. Second, the patterns of partisan and socioeconomic cleavages about government spending are shown to vary significantly across policy domains. This fracturing of demand structures, it is argued, may be one of the root causes of the performance crisis of political institutions.     

Ideology and Political Alienation

A substantial literature over the years has focused on the relationship between political alienation and ideology. Much of this research contends that conservatives are more alienated than liberals because philosophically they believe that the best government is that which governs least. A close reading of the literature, however, reveals little consistency in the empirical findings. Survey data from Norway, Sweden, and the United States are used to provide a more extensive and consistent test of the hypothesis. Ideology is defined as both left/right self-identification and policy preference on economic and "new political" issues. The evidence reveals that in Scandinavia higher levels of alienation are found among conservatives, whereas in the US the left has been consistently more alienated, except on "new politics" issues. The discrepancy between the citizen's preferred ideological orientation and that which the public perceives the government to take, is used to explain the different findings for the three countries and the shifts in the relationship between ideology and alienation across time.     

Seat-vote curves, loyalty effects and the provincial distribution of Canadian government spending

Federal government spending in the Canadian provinces for 1962–2002 is examined with emphasis on the role of seat-vote elasticities in majoritarian electoral systems. Fixed effects regressions establish that per capita federal spending in a province increases with political competition, as measured by provincial seat-vote elasticities, and with loyalty to the federal government as measured by the degree of provincial support for the federal government. However, too much loyalty can be counter-productive because very loyal provinces are uncompetitive with low seat-vote elasticities.     

The Importance of Trust in Government for Public Administration: The Case of Zoning

Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens' willingness to cede policy-making power to government. This article tests theories about political trust and citizen competence using the case of zoning. Trust in local government is found to be an important predictor of support for zoning, but trust in state government and trust in national government have no effect. These findings suggest that trust affects policy choice and helps determine how much power citizens grant to local administrators.     

Political Reinforcement: How Rising Inequality Curbs Manifested Welfare Generosity

We propose a political reinforcement hypothesis, suggesting that rising inequality moves party politics on welfare state issues to the right, strengthening rather than modifying the impact of inequality. We model policy platforms by incorporating ideology and opportunism of party members and interests and sympathies of voters. If welfare spending is a normal good within income classes, a majority of voters moves rightward when inequality increases. As a response, the left, in particular, shift their welfare policy platform toward less generosity. We find support for our arguments using data on the welfare policy platforms of political parties in 22 OECD countries.     

Voter Ideology, the Economy, and the International Environment in Western Democracies, 1952–1989

Although it is commonly assumed that voters shift on an ideological spectrum over time, there has been relatively little scientific inquiry into the reasons for shifts in voter ideology. In this article, we attempt to explain why voter ideological shifts occur utilizing an interval measure of voter ideology recently developed by Kim and Fording. A pooled time-series analysis of 13 Western democracies for the period of 1952–1989 identifies several internal and external factors causing shifts in voter ideology. With respect to domestic influences, the state of the country's national economy, primarily inflation, seems to drive movement in voter ideology in a most significant way, but we find that the direction of this relationship is dependent on the ideological disposition of the incumbent government. With respect to international influences, we find significant ideological diffusion across neighboring countries of Western democracies. The effects of ideological diffusion are strongest within countries that are small relative to their neighbors. We also find that ideology is influenced by the international political environment, especially the level of East-West tension during the Cold War.     

The European lavender vote: Sexuality,ideology and vote choice in Western Europe

In many European democracies, political punditry has highlighted the attempts of political parties on the left to court the ‘lavender vote’ of lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals. This article examines the presence of a gay vote in Western Europe with a focus on assessing the role of sexuality in shaping individuals’ political preferences and voting behaviour. Empirically, the effect of sexuality on both ideological identification as well as party vote choice is analysed. Using a cumulative dataset of eight rounds of the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2017, this article demonstrates that partnered lesbians and gay men are more likely than comparable heterosexuals to identify with the left, support leftist policy objectives and vote for left-of-centre political parties. The analysis represents the first empirical cross-national European study of the voting behaviour of homosexual individuals and sheds new light on the importance of sexuality as a predictor of political ideology and voting behaviour within the Western European context.     

Do opportunistic snap elections affect political trust? Evidence from a natural experiment

Snap elections, those triggered by incumbents in advance of their original date in the electoral calendar, are a common feature of parliamentary democracies. In this paper, I ask: do snap elections influence citizens’ trust in the government? Theoretically, I argue that providing citizens with an additional means of endorsing or rejecting the incumbent – giving voters a chance to ‘have their say’ – can be interpreted by citizens as normatively desirable and demonstrative of the incumbent's desire to legitimise their agenda by (re)-invigorating their political mandate. Leveraging the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May's, shock announcement of early elections in April 2017 with the fieldwork for the Eurobarometer survey, I demonstrate that the announcement of snap elections had a sizeable and significant positive effect on political trust. This trust-inducing effect is at odds with the observed electoral consequences of the 2017 snap elections. Whilst incumbent-triggered elections can facilitate net gains for the sitting government, May's 2017 gamble cost the Conservative Party their majority. Snap elections did increase political trust. These trust-inducing effects were not observed symmetrically for all citizens. Whilst Eurosceptics and voters on the right of the ideological spectrum – those most inclined to support the incumbent May-led Conservative government in 2017 – became more trusting, no such changes in trust were observed amongst left-wing or non-Eurosceptic respondents. This study advances the understanding of a relatively understudied yet not uncommon political phenomenon, providing causal evidence that snap elections have implications for political trust.     

Buttery Guns and Welfare Hawks: The Politics of Defense Spending in Advanced Industrial Democracies

In this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non‐military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left‐right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect governments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low‐level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time‐series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post–World War II period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfare and international positions, interacts with the international security environment to affect defense spending.     

Downbound spiral? Economic grievances,perceived social protection and political distrust

Abstract

Momentous events in Western democracies have brought renewed attention to how various aspects of government-controlled policy outputs and outcomes affect citizens’ trust in politics. Unlike most previous research, this study uses individual-level panel data to test the link between government performance evaluations and political trust. Moreover, it gauges performance in more policy areas than previous research, including key aspects of government-controlled social services as well as a wide range of economic risks. The study finds that evaluations of government performance affect political trust but that the evidence is stronger for evaluations of social protection than for economic risks. Crucially, the analysis suggests that the relationship between performance evaluations and distrust is reciprocal. The relationship may be described as a ‘downbound spiral’ where dissatisfied groups develop distrust, which in turn makes for a more pessimistic interpretation of economic risks and welfare state performance.     

Social spending,partisan bias and vote choice. Evidence from the US

Most models in political science and political economy assume that benefiting from public spending increases the likelihood of voting for the government. However, we do not have much empirical evidence on the conditions under which recipients of public spending reward governments for their public transfers. This article studies the electoral implications of welfare spending cuts in the early years of the Reagan Presidency, when public spending changes were particularly pronounced. Using 1982 NES data, this paper demonstrates that voters who lost public benefits punished Reagan but this only occurred when they identified with the Democratic Party. By contrast, benefit recipients not affected by government cuts were more likely to support Reagan, but again this was only significant among voters identifying with the party of government. This paper thus finds that governments cannot automatically “buy” votes by using welfare spending, the influence of which is instead cushioned by party identification.     

Electoral Choice,Ideological Conflict,and Political Participation

Generations of democratic theorists argue that democratic systems should present citizens with clear and distinct electoral choices. Responsible party theorists further argued that political participation increases with greater ideological conflict between competing electoral options. Empirical evidence on this question, however, remains deeply ambiguous. This article introduces new joint estimates of citizen preferences and the campaign platforms chosen by pairs of candidates in U.S. House and Senate races. The results show that increasing levels of ideological conflict reduce voter turnout, and are robust across a wide range of empirical specifications. Furthermore, the findings provide no support for existing accounts that emphasize how ideology or partisanship explains the relationship between ideological conflict and turnout. Instead, I find that increasing levels of candidate divergence reduce turnout primarily among citizens with lower levels of political sophistication. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date for how mass political behavior is conditioned by electoral choice.     

Do budgetary institutions mitigate the common pool problem? New empirical evidence for the EU

We analyze how budgetary institutions affect government budget deficits in member states of the European Union during 1984–2003 employing new indicators provided by Hallerberg et al. (2009). Using panel fixed effects models, we examine whether the impact of budgetary institutions on budget deficits is conditioned by political fragmentation (i.e., ideological differences among parties in government) and size fragmentation (i.e., the effective number of parties in government or the number of spending ministers). Our results suggest that strong budgetary institutions, no matter whether they are based on delegation to a strong minister of finance or on fiscal contracts, reduce the deficit bias in case of strong ideological fragmentation. In contrast, the impact of budgetary institutions is not conditioned by size fragmentation.     

Race,Sophistication, and White Opinion on Government Spending

The conventional wisdom in public opinion research suggests that the white public views government spending as a single race-coded issue. This article develops an alternative theory that rests on two propositions. First, the white public sees government spending not as a single issue, but rather, as two distinct issues: spending on the deserving poor and spending on the undeserving poor. Second, political sophistication strengthens the impact racial stereotypes have on attitudes toward spending on the undeserving poor, and it does not affect the relationship between stereotypes and attitudes toward spending on the deserving poor. These hypotheses are tested using data from the 1996 and 1992 NES surveys. The empirical results provide strong support for both propositions.     

Treating Poorly Healed Wounds: Partisan Choices and Human Rights Policies in Latin America

Despite the common trauma of systematic human rights violations under military rule, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay have responded in markedly different ways to their troubling pasts. This paper explains differences in human rights policies over time and across countries by looking at varying domestic conditions, including the ideological orientation of the governing party and the structure of party competition, as well as constraints and opportunities presented by external events. Government support for human rights derives in part from ideological proclivity but even more from the ability to build popular support for such a policy. Conservative and center-right politicians lack credibility among voters on human rights and therefore have little political incentive to adopt an activist stance on this issue. Leftist politicians are ideologically predisposed toward championing human rights but may be hamstrung by concerns about alienating centrist voters. Leftist politicians will only come out strongly in favor of human rights when they enjoy a clear political majority; leftist leaders who rely upon centrist allies will adopt a low-profile approach to human rights. Conversely, centrist political leaders who rely upon leftist allies have a strong political incentive to emphasize human rights. Once political momentum begins to shift to the right, however, centrist politicians will downplay human rights. Finally, external events may significantly alter national discourse on human rights, allowing cautious governments to gain political cover for more progressive human rights policy. By drawing attention to the important role of ideology and the structure of party competition, this paper offers a more complete explanation of the sources of human rights policy. It also provides a novel perspective on the ways in which external and international influences are filtered through national political systems.