Does the number of parties to place affect the placement of parties? Results from an expert survey experiment

Expert surveys are frequently used in comparative politics to measure the ideological locations of political parties. However, it is possible that increasing the number of parties to place systematically biases results as experts try to fit more actors onto a common space. We test this possibility with an experiment embedded in an “expert” survey – with graduate students serving as our pool of experts to ensure an adequate sample size – by varying the number of parties to be placed in the United Kingdom and Germany. We find some tendency for the variance of Labor and SPD placements to diminish when more parties are present, and for SPD placements to move toward the center given more parties. However, we find no consistent evidence that the number of parties systematically affects mean or median party placements. Our results support the reliability of expert surveys as an indicator of party ideology.     

Measuring and explaining the complexity of left-right perceptions of political parties

This paper examines the dimensional complexity in voter perceptions of party left-right locations. Most of the theoretical and empirical research on electoral politics treats left-right party locations as based on a one-dimensional ideological spectrum. We measure variation in the complexity of voters’ perceptions of left-right party locations and demonstrate that the dimensionality varies widely. First, we generate a measurement of the complexity of perceived left-right party placements and apply this to data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). This measure, based on the dimensional fits of scaled party placements, allows us to compare left-right complexity cross-nationally. We then examine several possible correlates of this cross-national variation, finding relationships with political polarization, party nationalization, and democratic experience. We conclude with a comparison of left-right complexity to the concept of issue dimensionality using data from the European Election Study (EES).     

Private Placements and the Cost of Borrowing in the Municipal Debt Market

Private placements continue to be issued in the municipal debt market and remain a topic of interest for municipalities, investors, and regulators. Private placements are often sold without an underwriter to relatively sophisticated investors and are typically “buy‐to‐hold” transactions. Therefore, compared with traditional competitive or negotiated sales, there are fewer financial intermediaries and fewer regulatory disclosure requirements that accompany private placements. Savings on “flotation” costs can be substantial enough to make private placements a less costly method of debt offering. Conditional on selectivity in the method of sale and key market covariates, private placements offer lower arbitrage yields and issuance costs compared to both competitive and negotiated debt offerings.     

Incognizance and Perceptual Deviation: Individual and Institutional Sources of Variation in Citizens’ Perceptions of Party Placements on the Left–Right Scale

In this paper we use comparative study of electoral systems data to understand the variation in citizens’ perceptions of political party placements on the left–right scale. We estimate multilevel models to assess the extent to which individual characteristics, party characteristics, and institutional designs contribute to variability observed in citizens’ perceptions of party placements. Because lack of information on the part of the citizens may be revealed through failure to respond to the left–right scale questions or through random components to actual placements, we develop models that include assessments of both types of responses to reduce bias from considering only one source. We find that individual-, party-, and institutional-level variables are relevant to understanding variation in citizens’ perceptions of party placements. Finally, we demonstrate that an inability to cognize the left–right scale (incognizance) and a deviation in the perceptions of party positions (perceptual deviation) have important consequences for citizens’ thermometer evaluations of political parties.     

Does Political Information Matter? An Experimental Test Relating to Party Positions on Europe

This article focuses on whether the provision of 'objectively' correct information to voters about where parties stand on an issue affects their placement of the parties, and ultimately their own position, on that issue. Classic theories of how mass publics make voting decisions assume that voters are able relatively accurately to place themselves and the parties on various issue dimensions. While these assumptions have been challenged, it is generally assumed that the provision of new information makes voters' placements more informed. We explicitly test this idea using a survey experiment focusing on one political issue – European integration. In the experiment, all respondents were twice asked to place the three main British parties and themselves on a bipolar scale of European integration. This was done towards the beginning, and then at the end of the survey. Most respondents were also given information on the 'informed' positions of the parties, derived from expert survey placement. Our analyses indicate that individuals' placements did change, and the tendency was related to both political sophistication and the inherent difficulty of placing the party. Only less sophisticated voters updated their placements, and these changes are concentrated on the placement of the Labour party, where the elite stance on Europe has been more conflicted. For all respondents we do not detect any corresponding changes in self-placement that would be congruent with 'cueing' effects.     

The politics of regulatory enforcement and compliance: Theorizing and operationalizing political influences

There is broad consensus in the literature on regulatory enforcement and compliance that politics matters. However, there is little scholarly convergence on what politics is or rigorous theorization and empirical testing of how politics matters. Many enforcement and compliance studies omit political variables altogether. Among those that address political influences on regulatory outcomes, politics has been defined in myriad ways and, too often, left undefined. Even when political constructs are explicitly operationalized, the mechanisms by which they influence regulatory outcomes are thinly hypothesized or simply ignored. If politics is truly as important to enforcement and compliance outcomes as everyone in the field seems to agree, regulatory scholarship must make a more sustained and systematic effort to understand their relationship, because overlooking this connection risks missing what is actually driving regulatory outcomes. This article examines how the construct of “politics” has been conceptualized in regulatory theory and analyzes how it has been operationalized in empirical studies of regulatory enforcement and compliance outcomes. It brings together scholarship across disciplines that rarely speak but have much to say to one another on this subject in order to constitute a field around the politics of regulation. The goal is to sharpen theoretical and empirical understandings of when and how regulation works by better accounting for the role politics plays in its enforcement.     

Rethinking Local Politics: Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Entrepreneurial Cities

The territorial dimensions of the state are undergoing substantial changes. Political entities, such as cities and regions, are gaining in importance. Described as entrepreneurial city politics, policy-makers of contemporary cities are using new, economically oriented strategies to strengthen their city's position in interurban competition. Despite this state of affairs, social science still tends to treat local politics as equal to sub-national politics. This has especially been the case in Scandinavia, where local governments have traditionally functioned as an extension of the central welfare state. Since processes associated with entrepreneurial city politics are manifested in Scandinavia as well, this article argues that there is a need to rethink what local politics ultimately is about. The article proposes the ideas recently formed at the ‘Lancaster School of Cultural Political Economy’ as an approach with which to reconceptualise local politics. In the final section, some remarks on a future research agenda, centred on the cultural political economy of contemporary city politics, are presented.     

Assimilation and contrast effects in voter projections of party locations: Evidence from Norway, France, and the USA

In the standard Downsian model, voters are assumed to choose parties based on the extent of ideological proximity between the voter's own position and that of the party. Yet it is also well known that there are rationalization and projection effects such that voters tend to misestimate the policy platforms of candidates or parties to which they are sympathetic by overstating the correspondence between those positions and the voter's own preferences (see, e.g., Markus & Converse 1979; Granberg & Brent 1980; Granberg & Holmberg 1988; Merrill & Grofman 1999). Here we follow insights in the psychological literature on persuasion (Sherif & Hovland 1961; Parducci & Marshall 1962) by distinguishing between assimilation and contrast effects. Assimilation refers to shortening the perceived ideological distance between oneself and parties one favors; contrast refers to exaggerating the distance to parties for which one does not intend to vote. Using survey data on voter self–placements and party placements on ideological scales for the seven major Norwegian parties, five major French parties, and two major American parties we show that both assimilation and contrast effects are present in each country to a considerable degree.We also investigate the possible effects of randomness in party placement and scale interpretation – effects that can easily be confounded with assimilation but not so easily with contrast.     

Legislative Victory, Electoral Uncertainty: Explaining Outcomes in the Battles over Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights

Previous studies indicate that in cases of relatively low issue salience, the interest group model best explains lesbian and gay antidiscrimination policy in the American states. The analysis of state and local public policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation concludes that for cases of high issue salience, the morality politics model best describes outcomes. The interest group politics model is used here in a case study of Wisconsin's passage of a comprehensive antidiscrimination policy, while the morality politics model is used to investigate the electoral outcomes of anti‐gay ballot initiatives in several states. The results of this analysis conform with prior research—when lesbian and gay issues are not salient, the interest group politics model best explains resulting policy, however, under salient conditions, the morality politics model best describes outcomes. Finally, the implications of this research for social scientists and activists are discussed.     

The politics of redistribution in local government

Abstract. This paper deals with the politics of redistribution in local government. Traditionally, it has been assumed that redistributive policies are crucial in electoral competition and party politics, both in national and local political systems. From this perspective, differences in local competition and party systems are essential to an explanation of local redistributive efforts. Peterson (1981), however, claims that redistributive policies are excluded from the local agenda because they impair local economic prosperity. These policies are therefore not conceived as instruments in the vote-maximizing strategies of local political parties. In this paper, hypotheses on the impact of party competition and party politics on local redistribution are formulated and tested on data for 342 Dutch municipalities. The results show that, contrary to what would be expected from Peterson's perspective, municipal redistributive efforts were related to electoral competitiveness and the party system. The proposed model, however, proved to be unsatisfactory in accurately predicting the direction of the effects of these explanatory variables. These results suggest that, rather than abandoning the study of local redistribution as a non-issue in subnational politics, an effort should be made to develop a better theoretical understanding of the ways in which competition and party politics shape these policies.     

Alternative models of issue voting: The case of the 1991 and 1995 elections in Belgium

Abstract. Previous research has indicated that the success of the directional model of issue voting depends on levels of political sophistication and how party position is measured. Using 1991 and 1995 Belgian Election Surveys, the predictive power of proximity and directional measures are compared controlling for both variables. It is shown that when one uses overall mean placements, instead of mean placements by level of political sophistication, the proximity effect declines most among the highly sophisticated voters. The article also compares the performance of the proximity and directional measures across party systems. Contrary to theoretical expectations, party–system differences between Flanders and Wallonia do not affect the explanatory power of either of these measures. It is only in the cases of the liberal, socialist and extreme right parties that the directional measure is clearly superior. A closer analysis of this result indicates that the relative success of the directional measure is due to the limited number of issues from which those parties draw support.     

The politics-violence frontier

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how early twenty-first century political activists in Italy construct the frontier between politics and violence. It puts these constructions into the context of more conventionally theoretical accounts of violence and politics. Analysis of internet discourse published by left/anarchist bloggers and group members focusses on how activists criticize the conventional view that electoral politics is non-violent, and endorse the view that violence is politics’ main means. This means that the role of violence in oppositional politics then has to be negotiated. Discourse analysis shows how ideas of resistance, and anti-state force, are articulated in such a way as to draw distinctions between us and them, and their politics and ours. The article discusses the significance of these articulations of the politics-violence distinction for the construction of political agency, and for the justification of forms of political action, seeking to show that boundary work is fundamental to political agency.     

Assimilation and contrast effects in voter projections of party locations: Evidence from Norway,France, and the USA

Abstract. In the standard Downsian model, voters are assumed to choose parties based on the extent of ideological proximity between the voter's own position and that of the party. Yet it is also well known that there are rationalization and projection effects such that voters tend to misestimate the policy platforms of candidates or parties to which they are sympathetic by overstating the correspondence between those positions and the voter's own preferences (see, e.g., Markus & Converse 1979; Granberg & Brent 1980; Granberg & Holmberg 1988; Merrill & Grofman 1999). Here we follow insights in the psychological literature on persuasion (Sherif & Hovland 1961; Parducci & Marshall 1962) by distinguishing between assimilation and contrast effects. Assimilation refers to shortening the perceived ideological distance between oneself and parties one favors; contrast refers to exaggerating the distance to parties for which one does not intend to vote. Using survey data on voter self–placements and party placements on ideological scales for the seven major Norwegian parties, five major French parties, and two major American parties we show that both assimilation and contrast effects are present in each country to a considerable degree.We also investigate the possible effects of randomness in party placement and scale interpretation – effects that can easily be confounded with assimilation but not so easily with contrast.     

Die Bekämpfung der Unsicherheit: Politikerkarrieren und Karrierepolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Political Careers differ from other professional careers in several regards, but most significantly in the peculiar degree of insecurity they impose. This insecurity is due to the democratic accountability to voters, which includes the possibility of electoral defeat and deprofessionalization. Therefore a continuous career is rendered much more difficult than in other occupations. This calls for specific strategies of access to and staying in political positions, which may be subsumed under the rubric of “career politics”. This article deals with political careers in the Federal Republic of Germany and the elements of individual career politics that may be reconstructed from these careers. The analysis is based on a dataset comprising the political biographics of all 1948 German state legislators with the date being taken from the official legislative handbooks. The features that are most interesting here are the succession and the cumulation of different political offices. Four strategies of career politics can be distinguished: a local politics, a party politics, an interest group, and a fourth strategy, that proceeds via staff positions. In analyzing these strategies the article wants to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between political careers and career politics.     

Are non‐voters cynics anyway?

It has been argued that recent low turnouts for elections in Britain have been fostered by increased cynicism among voters, a cynicism that has been fostered by the increasingly critical tone in which politics are reported by the media. While survey data confirm that voters have become more cynical about politics, they provide little evidence that this trend was particularly strong between 1997 and 2001 among (regular) readers of the (tabloid) press or among regular watchers of television news. Nor do such data suggest that the rise in cynicism had much impact on the level of turnout for the 2001 general election. The biggest challenge facing coverage of politics in the media in general, and newspapers in particular, is not the impact that the tone of its coverage may be having on voters' attitudes towards how they are governed, but rather the increasing reluctance of voters with little interest in politics to read a newspaper at all. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Cosmopolitanism and Global Politics

This article discusses whether global politics are the best means for achieving cosmopolitan ends. It distinguishes the cosmopolitan goal of global obligations from the cosmopolitan politics of global governance. Evidence for cosmopolitanism in society and culture is not strong. In global politics states pursue their own material interests rather than cosmopolitan goals. Copenhagen and the financial crisis did not lead to global cosmopolitan politics as might have been hoped. The article argues that it is dangerous to continue to believe in cosmopolitan politics in such a context. Cosmopolitanism is better pursued through a politics that recognises material interests, conflict, is bottom‐up and based in what is happening, rather than top‐down and optimistic about cosmopolitan attitudes.     

Environmental Politics in China: An Issue Area in Review

This article takes a thematic approach to review the existing literature (in both Chinese and English) of environmental politics in the broad context of China studies. Examined themes include state and environmental governance, public awareness and environmental social activism, and environmental foreign relations. Findings and arguments are assessed with two important questions in mind: What differentiates the environmental arena from Chinese politics in general? What new insights into Chinese politics can be gained from case studies of environmental protection? Scholarship on environmental politics contributes not only empirical findings, but also critical challenges to the conventional knowledge and frameworks of Chinese politics.     

公共权力与私人资本的博弈:政商关系之历史与现实

社会现实告诉我们,公共权力与私有资本都必须受到制约。在人类历史上,政商关系先后经历了前资本主义社会权力神化、资本主义社会权力道德化和社会主义社会权力客观化三个阶段。其中,资本主义社会私有资本第一次真正实现了有效地制约公共权力,将其关进了私有资本的笼子里。我国现在处于社会主义初级阶段,应当依靠发展社会主义民主政治,在社会主义市场经济基础上,建立相配套的社会主义市场政治上层建筑来制约公共权力;在此基础上,必须用公共权力将私有资本关进科学制度的笼子里,不能放任私有资本从经济走向政治染指国家政权,要坚持国家公共权力对私有资本的驾驭。因此,推进政治体制改革以重塑强大的科学的公共权力优越和正确处理政商关系,是全面完善社会主义市场经济的相辅相成不可分割的两个重要方面,特别是保持一种强大的科学的公共权力优越是社会主义市场经济至关重要的支撑。     

Performative Bodies,Tactical Agents and Political Selves: Rethinking the Political Geographies of Childhood

Theoretical elaboration and conceptualisation of children's political geographies is presently in a state of modification. Since the concepts of childhood and politics are not commonly brought together, there is plenty of work to be done. This article concentrates on revealing some political aspects of childhood and bringing up other focal questions concerning children's political geographies. Special attention is paid to children's agency and tactics to reach a better understanding of their ways of participating in politics. The theoretical foundations for this paper are in critical social theory. Following the thoughts of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Nigel Thrift on the potentials of non-representational theory, it explores performativity and body politics in general.