Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition

This paper models balanced-budget redistribution between socio-economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties. Equilibrium is unique in the present model, and a sufficient condition for existence is given, requiring that there be enough ‘stochastic heterogeneity’ with respect to party preferences in the electorate. The validity of Hotelling's ‘principle of minimum differentiation’, and of ‘Director's Law’, are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions, and voter's possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties. The policy strategy of expected-plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality. Incomes are fixed and known, so lump-sum taxation is feasible. However, constraints on tax/transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis.     

Children's acquisition of political opinions

This paper reports and discusses the results of a survey of English and Welsh schoolchildren aged 11–18, conducted in March–May 2003, covering their attitudes to and knowledge of politics, politicians and political issues. It concentrates in particular on the way these attitudes develop as pupils get older, and also discusses the sources of information on which young people depend, and which may be the key to developing this neglected political ‘market’. It finds that pupils are unenthused by politics, but not ‘apathetic’. Both knowledge and interest increase as pupils grow older; however, negative or cynical attitudes to politicians and to political parties seem to grow at the same time. Yet young people also hold positive attitudes to the electoral process in general, though many do not accept that they will have a ‘duty to vote’ when old enough. The media, though distrusted, is the principal source of information, though it is clear that the family is highly influential; schools seem less influential. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

The Politics of the Strategic Defence and Security Review: Centralisation and Cuts

This article examines the politics of the October 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), focussing on the points of difference between the main political parties (and within the Cameron coalition government) and the political dynamics of the review process. In examining how the government's core mission to reduce the country's ‘historic deficit’ impacted on the review process and outcomes, we are also able to highlight the practical results of a political philosophy that is currently being implemented across Whitehall. We argue that defence is a path‐finding policy area for a new kind of post‐industrial bureaucratic environment typified by a ‘thin‐client’ and ‘smart customer’ function that interacts with industry.     

Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change

Most countries struggle to implement CO₂ reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.     

Keeping the rascals in: Anti‐political‐establishment parties and their cost of governing in established democracies

Coalition governments in established democracies incur, on average, an electoral ‘cost of governing’. This cost varies across coalition partners, and is higher for anti‐political‐establishment parties. This is because, if such a party participates in a coalition, it loses the purity of its message by being seen to cooperate with the political establishment. In order to demonstrate that anti‐political‐establishment parties suffer an additional cost of governing, this article builds on the work by Van der Brug et al. and refines the standard cost of governing theory by ‘bringing the party back in’. The results of the analyses, based on 594 observations concerning 51 parties in seven Western European countries, cast doubt on the conventional concept of a cost of governing that pertains to all parties equally. The findings call for a major revision of the standard cost of governing literature, while adding a significant contribution to the debate on strategies against parties that may constitute a danger to democracy.     

Political parties in parliamentary democracies: Making delegation and accountability work

Abstract. In modern democracies political parties exist because (1) they reduce transaction costs in the electoral, parliamentary and governmental arenas and (2) help overcome the dilemma of collective action. In Western Europe political parties are the central mechanism to make the constitutional chain of political delegation and accountability work in practice. Party representatives in public office are ultimately the agents of the extra–parliamentary party organization. In order to contain agency loss parties rely on party–internal mechanisms and the institutionalisation of party rights in public rules and, in contrast to US parties, they apply the full range of ex ante and ex post mechanisms. Generally, the role of party is weaker the further down the chain of delegation.     

No Sex Scandals Please,We’re French: French Attitudes towards Politicians’ Public and Private Conduct

The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicians’ private affairs, but there has been little empirical evidence for this proposition. Drawing on original survey data, this paper demonstrates clearly that French citizens draw a sharp distinction between politicians’ public and private transgressions, and are more tolerant of the latter.     

Party bureaucrats,independent professionals,or politicians? A study of party employees

The number of party employees is increasing, but to what extent and in what sense are party employees integrated into their parties? Based on the literature on party change, the article identifies three important dimensions ? ties, tasks, and career plans ? and constructs a typology of four ideal types of party employees – technical assistants, party bureaucrats, independent professionals, and unelected politicians. Data on Norwegian party employees suggest that they have strong party ties and are entrusted with a wide range of political tasks. However, career plans rarely include elected office. The results indicate that party employees have stronger party ties than envisaged in influential party models. Professionalisation does not render party grassroots irrelevant, but rather turns some grassroots activists into professionals – what can be called ‘unelected politicians’. In conclusion, the article discusses implications for contemporary understandings of political parties.     

Smoke but No Fire? The Politics of a ‘British’ Bill of Rights

This article systematically explores the political context behind Labour and the Conservatives' new commitment to a British Bill of Rights. This is linked to conflicting incentives to resist the current trajectory towards rights constitutionalism (‘Constitutional Freeze’), to further encourage further rights constitutionalism (‘Constitutional Fire’) and to engage in largely cosmetic change (‘Constitutional Smoke’). Ultimately, the latter has proved dominant for both parties. This demonstrates the difficulty of building political momentum behind significant revision of institutional responsibility for protecting human rights in stable, democratic settings. It specifically illustrates the strong barriers which both a hegemonic policy preserving and an ‘aversive’ constitutionalising dynamic must overcome to succeed.     

What's an Elite to Do? The Threat of Populism from Left,Right and Centre

Anthony Painter's report for Policy Network correctly describes populism as a ‘democratic argument’ which sets up a morally pure ‘people’ against vilified ‘elites’, in binary opposition. This is an argument which is increasingly prominent in political discourse, whether the elites in question are political, financial or technocratic. Painter focuses on the now‐familiar ‘radical right‐wing’ version of populism, as reflected across Europe in the rise of parties such as the UKIP. He omits discussion of other types of populism (of the left and centre), which perhaps represent the future for populist politics.     

Too much of a good thing: the ‘problem’ of political communications in a mass media democracy

• Francis Fukuyama asks: ‘… is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?’ This paper argues that one of these ‘internal contradictions’ is the political communications process and it can be sufficiently serious to undermine the democratic system—but such an undermining is not inevitable. The problem can be described as follows: Democratic systems require that citizens are kept fully informed by governments (and others) in the interests of transparency and ultimately accountability. Hence, all political communications have, as their final objective, the accountability of politicians at the ballot box. Thus all political communications have what can be described as ‘above’ and ‘below’ the line content. The above‐the‐line is the actual content of the message, the below‐the‐line is the implicit one of ‘think better of me and my colleagues think worse of my opponents’. Consequently, no matter how personally honest and open an individual politician might be, the democratic system requires her or him to be always thinking about securing a successful result at the ballot box. Thus we have the ‘political communications paradox’. Voters want politicians to be honest and accountable but this very demand means that politicians, implicitly, always have to have another agenda in operation when they are communicating with the public, i.e. securing their approval and then their support. As a result the trust which is a fundamental to the workings of a democratic system is constantly being undermined. This has two effects. First, that governments are obliged to make communications, rather than delivery, their real priority and second trust, not just in politicians but in the political system as a whole, tends to wane over time, which in turn endangers the very system it was designed to underpin. But this decline is not inevitable because the system has some in‐built self‐correcting mechanisms These include: the rise of new parties and/or leaders who portray themselves as ‘new’ and ‘untainted’—New Labour, New Conservatives, etc., an almost regular ‘re‐balancing’ of the power relationship that exists between politicians and the civil service, particularly in the communications field, the rise of new forms of communication that seek to by‐pass the institutional roadblocks that are perceived as being the cause of the problems and finally increased attention by journalists and academics to the process of political communications makes it more difficult for politicians to continue with ‘business as usual’ as far as their communication activities are concerned.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bargaining in legislatures,portfolio allocation,and the electoral costs of governing

What motivates political parties in the legislative arena? Existing legislative bargaining models stress parties’ office and policy motivations. A particularly important question concerns how parties in coalition government agree the distribution of cabinet seats. This article adds to the portfolio allocation literature by suggesting that future electoral considerations affect bargaining over the allocation of cabinet seats in multi-party cabinets. Some parties are penalised by voters for participating in government, increasing the attractiveness of staying in opposition. This ‘cost of governing’ shifts their seat reservation price – the minimum cabinet seats demanded in return for joining the coalition. Results of a randomised survey experiment of Irish legislators support our expectation, demonstrating that political elites are sensitive to future electoral losses when contemplating the distribution of cabinet seats. This research advances our understanding of how parties’ behaviour between elections is influenced by anticipation of voters’ reactions.     

Introduction: Gender Parity and Quotas in European Politics

Since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which clearly endorsed measures to ensure the equal participation of women in decision-making, many nations across the globe have adopted and implemented laws requiring political parties to nominate gender-balanced slates of candidates. This symposium brings together new research on the fairly recent gender quota and parity reforms in Portugal, France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain and the efforts of the European Union to promote them. In keeping with the single-case, comparative, and international gender quota literature, the articles stress the role of domestic and international actors/factors (political parties and elites, women's groups active inside and/or outside political parties, and international and European organizations) in the adoption of reforms as well as the reforms' specific provisions (placement rules and sanctions for non-compliance) and how well they fit in with the electoral system when assessing their impact. At the same time, the articles also offer intriguing insights related to the labelling of reforms as either ‘parity’ or ‘quota’ or both in different contexts, the involvement of different political parties in their adoption, and, finally, their qualitative upshots and, more specifically, their impact on citizens and elites' attitudes towards women in politics and measures to enhance it.     

Trading policy: Constituents and party in U.S. trade policy

Studies of US trade policy legislation focus on the effect of constituents on trade policy voting and give less weight to institutions such as political parties. To demonstrate that political parties affect voting, I compare the votes of politicians who share constituency characteristics but differ in political party affiliation. This approach requires less reliance on assumptions about, or empirical measures of, constituents’ trade preferences. The results demonstrate that political parties play a significant role in legislative voting on trade policy. Theories of political economy therefore should incorporate how constituency interests and partisan pressures affect legislative voting.     

Bring in the experts? Citizen preferences for independent experts in political decision-making processes

Do citizens welcome the involvement of independent experts in politics? Theoretical and empirical work so far provides conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, citizens may demand expert involvement in political decision-making processes in order to ensure efficient and effective governance solutions. On the other hand, citizens can be distrustful of experts and reject the unaccountable and non-transparent nature of expert-based governance. This note investigates citizen preferences for the involvement of experts in different stages of political processes and across ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ political issues. Results show that, in the absence of explicit output information, respondents prefer independent experts over national elected representatives in the policy design and implementation stages, across political issues. For the crucial stage of decision making, respondents show no difference in their evaluation of processes that delegate decisions to experts or to elected representatives, with the exception of environmental policy, where expert decision making is preferred. These findings are relevant for ongoing discussions on how to incorporate independent experts in political decision making in a way that citizens find legitimate and on how to address increased citizen dissatisfaction with the representative democratic functions performed by political parties, governments and politicians.     

Attention! The meanings of attention to politics in surveys

This research note explores the role of reported attention to politics in survey overclaiming about politics. Using recognition of real and fictitious political parties in the context of the UK's 2019 European Parliament elections, we find that people who report higher attention to politics are more likely to over-report recognition of fictitious parties, and are also more likely to recognize new real political parties - those that emerged around the issue of ‘Brexit’ in the months before the election. To resolve these patterns, we show that political attention makes little difference to the accuracy of responses for people who have high political knowledge, or if it does so, it increases accuracy. However, for those with lower political knowledge, high reported political attention is a source of potential survey error and bias. These findings are consistent with higher survey satisficing and norm compliance among those who report having greater attention to politics, particularly among those who have lower knowledge. The implications are important for understanding the meaning and consequences of ‘attention to politics’ in surveys.     

When do middlemen matter? Evidence from variation in corruption in India

Corruption is a persistent problem in developing countries, and recent scholarship suggests that middlemen play an important role in corrupt acts. Yet, while intermediaries can reduce transaction costs in illicit exchange, they also increase agency costs and reduce benefits to others. The involvement of middlemen may thus vary. I argue that middlemen are most likely to engage in, and benefit from, the subset of corruption transactions that are repeated frequently, but not by the same parties. I test the implications of this argument using survey experiments administered to a large sample of politicians and bureaucrats at multiple levels of government in India. I show that middlemen are critical, but far from ubiquitous. Intermediaries are more relevant where corrupt deals are frequent but involve unfamiliar potential principals. My results suggest that anticorruption efforts must pay greater attention to the type of corruption and the incentives of middlemen.     

Protests against Welfare Retrenchment: Healthcare Restructuring in Sweden

The ‘new politics’ perspective in welfare state research holds that class‐based parties and unions have lost some of their influence and that they have been replaced by client organizations that are capable of resisting retrenchment pressures. However, scholars within the ‘power resource tradition’ contend that class is still fundamental and that client interests are weak in corporatist countries with a strong labour movement. It is argued in this article that scholars within the power resource approach have focused too much on social insurance programmes and traditional forms of political participation, and that this has made them blind to client protests. An empirical study of political efforts to close down nighttime emergency surgery in Swedish hospitals is presented. The Swedish counties planned to close down emergency surgery in 17 hospitals in the period 2003–04. The political proposals to close down emergency departments were met with strong protests from client groups, and politicians often withdrew their proposals of closures. In this case study, politicians claim that it was client protests that made them withdraw a decision to close the emergency surgery. This result suggests that client protests are politically important and diverges from the expectations deduced from the power‐resource approach but lends credibility to the theory of the new politics of the welfare state.     

Think global,talk local: getting the party political message across in the age of the internet

This paper seeks to test the view that the Internet will provide politicians and political parties with a means of directly communicating with electors, so circumnavigating the perceived bias of the mass media, and explores how the political use of the Internet will impact on campaigning, particularly at the local/personal level. The evidence surveyed shows that political use of the Internet is, despite the hype, still in its infancy, but that more extensive use will lead to changes in the style and mode of political communications. The Internet will eventually enable politicians and parties to address a mass audience in qualitative new ways, tailoring their message and information dissemination to individual and local concerns. But this will bring all the consequences of direct communication, such as increased workloads and the danger of atomising the political process. Politicians and parties may hanker for the days when the traditional mass media intervened in the process of political communications. This paper is an edited version of the one presented to 'On Message: A Conference on Political Communication and Marketing sponsored by the Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group, Loughborough University, September 2000. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

The double-edged sword: the political appropriation of the concept of populism

ABSTRACT

The concept of populism has been in use in political debate for over a century. Because ‘populist’ is often used in a pejorative sense today, those to whom it is applied to tend to reject it. However, a closer look at the history of the concept reveals that while its meaning may fluctuate and even be dismissed as irrelevant, its use can become a political tool. This study of the use of ‘populism’ refrains from making value judgments on the actual populist nature of certain parties or political tendencies. Instead, it analyzes uses of the concept from a historical perspective. Special emphasis is placed on politicians who chose to define themselves as populist, or accept the label imposed by others, with particular focus on the Finns Party of Finland. Such self-identified populists draw their conceptions of populism from the ever-growing field of populism research, striving to appropriate and realize what scholars have only hypothetically described as a professed ideal. A closer look at the uses of populism as a political self-identity forces us to rethink its uses as a pejorative, or as an analytical, concept.