Elite strategies and incremental policy change: The expansion of primary education in India

This article analyzes India's recent enactment of universal primary education. This programmatic policy change is puzzling given the clientelistic features of Indian democracy. Drawing on interviews and official documents, I demonstrate the catalytic role of committed state elites, who introduced incremental reforms over three decades. These officials operated beneath the political radar, layering small‐scale initiatives on top of the mainstream school system. Following India's globalization in the 1990s, support from the World Bank gave committed officials the political opportunity to experiment with new programs in underperforming regions, which they progressively extended across the country. These incremental reforms supplied the institutional blueprint for India's universal primary education program. Along with state initiative from above, civil society mobilized from below, using the judiciary to hold the state legally responsible for policy implementation. Reforms exposed acute gaps in service delivery, propelling new civic demands for state accountability.     

Repealing Federal Oversight of State Health Policy: Lessons from the Boren Amendment

The Boren Amendment is frequently cited as an example where judicial involvement markedly shaped the implementation of federal legislation. Unlike other controversial health policies, Boren was eventually rescinded by Congress. Results indicate that the Amendment was repealed because changing socioeconomic, political, and programmatic conditions combined with policy‐oriented learning to facilitate a shift in policy venue away from the judiciary toward the President and Congress. This is because during the devolutionary climate of the mid‐to‐late 1990s, both the executive and legislature proved more conducive to the policy image promulgated by state officials that the Amendment unnecessarily restricted state discretion, than the policy image promulgated by providers that without the Amendment, low reimbursement levels would compromise access and quality. Data for this analysis derive from archival documents, secondary sources, and 101 interviews with state and federal experts.     

Microblogs and the Adaptation of the Chinese Party‐State's Governance Strategy

The Chinese party‐state is currently adapting its governance strategy. The recent debate in China on the role of microblogs in the governance process, as documented in the reports issued by Chinese research institutes and advisory bodies, illustrates the efforts being undertaken by China's political elites to integrate microblogs into their new public management strategy. Mass protests and large‐scale online criticism—voiced via microblogs—directly threaten the regime's survival. As a consequence, legitimacy is no longer regarded as being inherent, but as something that has instead to be permanently regained and reaffirmed. To increase the system's efficiency and to generate a new kind of symbolic legitimacy, China's political elites tend to base the political decision‐making process on strategic calculations intended to be reflective of public online opinion. The turn toward a more responsive way of governing by the Chinese party‐state demonstrates once more the adaptability of authoritarian one‐party states in the digital era.     

State‐Building and the European Union's Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus: Why Legitimacy Matters

This article asks under which conditions the state‐building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites “from below.”     

A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy

If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite‐driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue‐taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results from five survey experiments where we show that cues from social peers are at least as strong as those from political elites. Our theory and results build on a growing number of findings that individuals are embedded in a social context that combines with their general orientations toward foreign policy in shaping responses toward the world around them. Thus, we suggest the public is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign affairs than many of our top‐down models claim.     

The Real Winner's Curse

Traditional theories of democracy suggest that political representation of excluded groups can reduce their incentives to engage in conflict and lead to lower violence. However, this argument ignores the response of established elites when (1) their interests are threatened by the policy stance of new political actors and (2) elites have a comparative advantage in the exercise of violence. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we show that the narrow election of previously excluded left‐wing parties to local executive office in Colombia results in a one standard deviation increase in violent events by right‐wing paramilitaries. We interpret this surge in violence as a reaction of traditional elites to offset the increase in outsiders' access to formal political power. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that violence by left‐wing guerrillas and other actors is unaffected and that violence is not influenced by the victory of right‐wing or other new parties in close elections.     

Unlikely Democrats: Economic Elite Uncertainty under Dictatorship and Support for Democratization

Influential recent scholarship assumes that authoritarian rulers act as perfect agents of economic elites, foreclosing the possibility that economic elites may at times prefer democracy absent a popular threat from below. Motivated by a puzzling set of democratic transitions, we relax this assumption and examine how elite uncertainty about dictatorship—a novel and generalizable causal mechanism impacting democratization—can induce elite support for democracy. We construct a noisy signaling model in which a potential autocrat attempts to convince economic elites that he will be a faithful partner should elites install him in power. The model generates clear predictions about how two major types of elite uncertainty—uncertainty in a potential autocratic successor's policies produced by variance in the pool of would‐be dictator types, and uncertainty in the truthfulness of policy promises made by potential autocratic successors—impact the likelihood of elite‐driven democratization. We demonstrate the model's plausibility in a series of cases of democratic transition.     

Partisan Elites as Culprits? How Party Cues Shape Partisan Perceptual Gaps

Partisanship often colors how citizens perceive real‐world conditions. For example, an oft‐documented finding is that citizens tend to view the state of the national economy more positively if their party holds office. These partisan perceptual gaps are usually taken as a result of citizens' own motivated reasoning to defend their party identity. However, little is known about the extent to which perceptual gaps are shaped by one of the most important forces in politics: partisan elites. With two studies focusing on perceptions of the economy—a quasi‐experimental panel study and a randomized experiment—we show how partisan perceptual differences are substantially affected by messages coming from party elites. These findings imply that partisan elites are more influential on, and more responsible for, partisan perceptual differences than previous studies have revealed.     

The Polarization of American Environmental Policy: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Senate and House Votes, 1971–2013

The partisan polarization of environmental policy is an important development in American politics, but it remains unclear how much such polarization reflects voter preferences, as opposed to disagreements between partisan elites. We conduct a regression discontinuity analysis of all major environmental and energy votes in the Senate and the House, 1971–2013. In total, we have 368,974 individual roll call votes by senators and House Representatives. The causal effect of electing a Democrat instead of a Republican in close elections on pro‐environmental voting is large: when a Democrat wins, pro‐environmental voting increases by over 40 percentage points. Because of the quasi‐experimental research design, this difference cannot be attributed to the median voter's preferences. Next, we test hypotheses concerning possible explanations for the elite partisan conflict. The Democrat–Republican gap is the widest when fossil fuel interests make contributions exclusively to Republicans and when state‐level public opinion is polarized.     

Schools with a Difference: Policy Discourses and Education Reform in Britain and Germany

Throughout the 1990s, corruption cases, policy failure and scandals tarnished Belgium's international reputation. In this article, we analyse the effect of federalism and political culture on corruption and policy failures and their impact on the likelihood of such occurrences becoming scandals. Survey material suggests that there are few differences between French- and Dutch-speakers in the perception and tolerance of corruption. We then list a number of variables that can explain corruption in Belgium and argue that the independent effect of federalism is very limited. Next we demonstrate that federalism has played a much more significant role in lowering the risk of policy failure, while at the same time creating a few new vulnerabilities. Finally, we argue that the regional political elites do not often engage in policy learning and frequently put forward federalism as the main solution to the avoidance of policy failure and scandal. In this sense, regional political elites do not seize the opportunity for policy experimentation and transfer that is generally seen as one of the main virtues of a federal system of government.     

The Dynamics of Critical Realignments: An Analysis Across Time and Space

Much of the scholarly interest in critical realignments results from the pivotal role that ordinary citizens play during these periods. By altering their voting behavior, citizens hold political elites accountable and forge non-incremental change in policy outputs. A central question regarding realignments is thus how are citizens changing their behavior to hold elites accountable? Are citizens producing realignments by converting from one party to the opposition? Are previous non-voters becoming mobilized in response to emerging issues or crises? Or are one party’s supporters disproportionately abstaining from voting and altering the partisan balance in the process? This article makes four central contributions to our understanding of these realignment processes, or dynamics. We present a theoretical framework for the analysis of realignment dynamics, based upon the Michigan model of voting and its conception of the normal vote. Where previous dynamics studies have collectively only examined two realignments, we examine the dynamics of all presidential realignments in American electoral history. Where previous studies have often focused on national, sectional, or state levels of analysis, we focus on city- and county-level realignments, a critical advancement for an inherently local-level phenomenon such as critical realignments. Finally, unlike previous studies, we identify the factors that promote particular realignment dynamics. We find that the conversion of active partisans has produced most of the enduring change in voting behavior in the United States, with the relative contribution of different dynamics varying both across time and space. Political factors such as the strength of state and local parties and demographic factors such as changes in the size of local immigrant populations have each favored particular realignment dynamics in American electoral history.     

Reconstruction of the state: Lobbying against political corruption in the Czech Republic

High level of distrust in political elites accompanied with a strong perception of corruption in Czech Republic has led to an increase of several anti‐corruption nongovernmental organisations' activities. About 18 organisations have created in 2013 an open coalition and established a project called “Reconstruction of the State” (Rekonstrukce státu). This project is oriented towards political parties and political elites to lead them to adopt nine anti‐corruption legislative proposals. This paper analyses how the project operates in its formal and informal aspects, which communication means are preferred and how the lobbyists interact with the politicians and political parties. Apart from the analysis of publicly available pieces of information from the project's website and official printed materials, semistructured interviews with activists and field research were performed. It can be seen that Reconstruction of the state has been most successful regarding agenda‐setting, but in the context of the legislative process, it has to face many obstacles either from legislators themselves or competitors with different goals.     

Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs

Economic elites regularly seek to exert political influence. But what policies do they support? Many accounts implicitly assume economic elites are homogeneous and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. We shed new light on heterogeneity in economic elites' political preferences, arguing that economic elites from an industry can share distinctive preferences due in part to sharing distinctive predispositions. Consequently, how increases in economic elites' influence affect inequality depends on which industry's elites are gaining influence and which policy issues are at stake. We demonstrate our argument with four original surveys, including the two largest political surveys of American economic elites to date: one of technology entrepreneurs—whose influence is burgeoning—and another of campaign donors. We show that technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies—a bundle of preferences rare among other economic elites. These differences appear to arise partly from their distinctive predispositions.     

The Quality of Management and Government Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the American States

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public administration, and political science. Government's administrative arrangements and managerial behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, considering public management's effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School's Government Performance Project to examine the relationship between state governments' managerial capacity and a measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state management capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely (that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place managerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influence on government activities.     

Programmatic action in Chinese health policy—The making and design of “Healthy China 2030”

The Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a powerful analytical perspective to advance our understanding of policy change by stressing the role of programmatic groups and how they promote their preferred policy programs. While the PAF has been applied successfully to European countries and the US, a considerable research gap remains regarding its explanatory power in other regions and political settings. To step into this research gap, we apply the PAF to authoritarian China through a qualitative case study of the making of “Healthy China 2030”, a national health policy program. We explore two research questions: firstly, to what extent can the PAF be operationalized in a nondemocracy to identify programmatic groups and evaluate policy design, and second, what are the limitations and challenges facing the application of the PAF to nondemocracies? Our empirical analysis shows that the design of this policy program involves actors from different policy areas, despite the top-down political structure. With regards to the transfer of PAF hypotheses, we show that the framework is a helpful lens to identify programmatic groups and to evaluate policy programs' potential for success based on coherence, responsiveness, and program fit. Meanwhile, the research process of our study revealed the challenges of applying policy process theories to China, including hard-to-reach political actors for data collection, lack of transparency regarding collaboration processes between actors, and a lack of publicly available program-related information.     

The centre holds: The 1986 Netherlands election

It is often argued that clientelism is a key feature of electoral mobilisation in southern European democracies. This article examines the evidence for clientelism in the Spanish case, assessing the recruitment, redistributive strategies and electoral performance of governing parties in the 1977–96 period. It finds little evidence of extensive clientelistic mobilisation; instead, political parties’ use of state resources is largely consistent with their programmatic and ideological positions. ‘Old’ clientelism from the pre‐democratic era mostly did not survive the change of regime, whilst ‘new’ clientelism based on the expansion of state employment contributed to the Socialist Party's organisational consolidation, but was not a significant feature of its strategy of electoral mobilisation.     

No direct taxation without new elite representation: Industrialization and the domestic politics of taxation

The nineteenth century marked the founding period of modern public finance. We examine the domestic and non-war related determinants of direct taxation in this early democratic period and in a state building context. We argue that the reasons for the expansion of direct taxation can be found in the political competition between different elite groups in the context of industrialization. Systematically differentiating between economic and political arenas, we show that intra-elite competition in industrializing economies leads to higher levels of direct taxation only if the new economic elites are able to translate their economic power into the political arena, either through the representative system or by extra-parliamentary means. In addition, we demonstrate that these processes are directly linked to public investments in policy areas related to the interests of new economic elites such as public education. Our analysis is based on novel subnational data from the period 1850 to 1910, enabling us to concentrate on the domestic determinants of direct taxation.     

Measuring State Environmental Policy

Studies of environmental policy employ various empirical strategies for measuring state environmental effort. The majority of these strategies can be divided into four categories: indices of state programmatic indicators, government expenditures, pollution abatement costs, and regulatory enforcement actions. In this article, we argue that these measures are empirically distinct, capture different attributes of state environmental policy, and are correlated with different intrastate factors. Thus, the choice among environmental policy measures is substantively important for researchers to consider, and we conclude by providing advice to scholars concerning choosing among these measures.     

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.     

Does the Federal Government Learn from the States? Medicaid and the Limits of Expertise in the Intergovernmental Lobby

State programmatic expertise is an important asset to federalsystems, but this expertise is not always informative to federaldecision-makers. I argue the degree to which state expertiseis informative to federal decision-makers depends on how wellthe policy interests of state and federal levels are aligned.I illustrate variation in these conditions using case studiesof congressional politics over the Medicaid program. I thenapply a statistical test, which demonstrates that states’programmatic expertise regarding Medicaid is less persuasiveto congressional committee members compared to other witnesseswho are equally knowledgeable. The results suggest a "failureof federalism," where the public good potential of state programmaticexpertise often is not realized in the federal system.