Prime ministers and the electoral cost of using the confidence vote in legislative bargaining: evidence from France

Do prime ministers pay an electoral penalty for using procedural force to pass laws? Influential theories of parliamentary governance and legislative bargaining assume that the use of the confidence vote procedure – parliamentary governments’ most powerful legislative weapon – entails an electoral cost, but evidence on this important claim has been scarce. This article provides the first estimates of how prime ministers’ public approval responds to their use of the confidence vote. Analysing time series data from France 1979–2008, it is found that prime ministers experience a considerable drop in approval after their use of the confidence vote that is not accounted for by standard economic and political covariates. The effect size is similar to a 1 per cent decline in economic growth. The findings help explain French prime ministers’ selective use of the confidence vote procedure. They also suggest that political costs constrain the bargaining power conferred by the confidence vote.     

Dodging the bullet: How crises trigger technocrat‐led governments

Governments led by nonpartisan, ‘technocratic’ prime ministers are a rare phenomenon in parliamentary democracies, but have become more frequent since the late 1980s. This article focuses on the factors that lead to the formation of such cabinets. It posits that parliamentary parties with the chance to win the prime ministerial post will only relinquish it during political and economic crises that drastically increase the electoral costs of ruling and limit policy returns from governing. Statistical analyses of 469 government formations in 29 European democracies between 1977 and 2013 suggest that political scandals and economic recessions are major drivers of the occurrence of technocratic prime ministers. Meanwhile, neither presidential powers nor party system fragmentation and polarisation have any independent effect. The findings suggest that parties strategically choose technocrat‐led governments to shift blame and re‐establish their credibility and that of their policies in the face of crises that de‐legitimise their rule.     

Testing times: Exploring staged responses and the impact of blame management strategies in two examination fiasco cases

This article examines the responses of ministers facing high levels of blame in the press after serious failures in the public exam system for school-leavers in Scotland in 2000 and England in 2002. It develops a method for systematic analysis and comparison of the behaviour of officeholders facing blame, tests the hypothesis that ministers will accept personal culpability only after other ways of handling blame have been exhausted and uses time series intervention models to show how one can estimate the impact of strategies on the next day's blame level. The basic sequencing hypothesis is partially upheld by the observed behaviour in these cases, though many other kinds of blame responses do not display a clear sequence. The intervention analysis also raises questions about the claimed effectiveness of presentational strategies for managing blame.     

Electoral Rules,Labor Market Coordination and Macroeconomic Performance

Two distinct literatures have studied the macroeconomic effects of electoral systems and of labor market structures, respectively. Results include a positive association between proportional representation (PR) electoral systems and growth, but also between PR and inflation, as well as negative or hump‐shaped relationships between labor market coordination and the ‘misery variables’, unemployment and inflation. However, these results could be biased; particular electoral system and labor market features co‐vary systematically, and extant studies have typically not taken this into account. Effects attributed to PR systems could really stem from labor market coordination, and vice versa. In this article the relationships with macroeconomic outcomes for both electoral systems and labor market structures are re‐evaluated by modelling them jointly. Employing data from more than 30 democracies, with time‐series from the period 1960–2010, some robust and some non‐robust associations are identified. First, PR systems are, indeed, associated with higher growth rates, but not with higher inflation. Regarding labor market coordination, robust curvilinear relationships with unemployment and inflation are identified; intermediate levels of coordination correspond with worse macroeconomic performance – albeit not lower growth – even when accounting for electoral system features.     

Blame shifting and blame obfuscation: The blame avoidance effects of delegation in the European Union

The delegation of governance tasks to third parties is generally assumed to help governments to avoid blame once policies become contested. International organizations, including the European Union (EU), are considered particularly opportune in this regard. The literature lacks assessments of the blame avoidance effects of delegation, let alone of the effects of different delegation designs. To address this gap in the literature, we study public blame attributions in the media coverage of two contested EU policies during the financial crisis and the migration crisis. We show that the blame avoidance effect of delegation depends on the delegation design: When agents are independent (dependent) of government control, we observe lower (higher) shares of public blame attributions targeting the government (blame shifting effect), and when agents are external (internal) to the government apparatus, overall public blame attributions for a contested policy will be less (more) frequent (blame obfuscation effect). Our findings yield important normative implications for how to maintain governments’ accountability once they have delegated governance tasks to third parties.     

Framing blame: toward a better understanding of the effects of populist communication on populist party preferences

Although previous research has argued that the media play a crucial role in populism’s success, we know too little about how populist messages affect preferences for populist parties. To advance this knowledge, we conducted an experiment in which the core of populist rhetoric – constructing the people as innocent in-group opposed to the establishment as culprit out-group – was manipulated in news articles. The findings indicate that when political elites are blamed for a salient national problem, people are more likely to vote for a populist party and less likely to vote for the largest party in government. Populist vote intentions are indirectly affected via blame perceptions. These findings offer important insights into the media’s role in the electoral success of populism.     

‘Going beyond the Troika’: Power and discourse in Portuguese austerity politics

This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010–2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face‐to‐face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos‐Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail‐out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets – later associated with the conditions of the bail‐out – concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.     

From Class Party to Catchall Party?: The Adaptation of the Finnish Agrarian-Center Party

This article seeks to apply Kirchheimer’s ‘catchall party thesis’ to the transformation of the Agrarian-Center Party in Finland. On at least two counts this might seem a hopeless endeavor. First, Kirchheimer excluded most parties in the smaller West European democracies like Finland from his analysis on the curious grounds that they either had effective majorities or regular access to power and, therefore, had no need of catchall strategies. Second, he expressly excluded certain parties, including significantly Agrarian parties, from his purview because they were too narrowly based to become catchall parties. Kirchheimer also asserts that in general only major parties could successfully achieve a ‘life-saving transformation.’ The Finnish Agrarian Party was certainly that. In the early 1960s, it was the largest single party, with a substantial classe gardée, and was also the pivotal party of governing coalitions. Accordingly, this article addresses three interrelated questions: a) Why did the Finnish Agrarians seek catchall status? b) What were the catchall strategies they pursued? c) Has an archetypal mass-class party, contrary to Kirchheimer’s submission, been able to extend the basis of its support to become a catchall party? It is argued that although the Center Party today exhibits the electoral attributes of the catchall party – and is the only Finnish party really to do so – it lacks the organizational characteristics of the genre as enumerated by Kirchheimer.     

Executive Authority, the Personal Vote, and Budget Discipline in Latin American and Caribbean Countries

Recent scholarship on budgeting in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. Building upon this previous research, we argue that the principal problem that must be addressed in both the government and the legislature to insure strong fiscal discipline is the common pool resource (CPR) problem. At the cabinet level, the CPR problem arises because ministers consider the implications of decisions on their ministries only. The level of the CPR problem in the legislature depends upon the electoral system. Using a data set of LAC countries for the period 1988–97, we find that executive power in the budget process is most effective in reducing budget deficits when electoral incentives for the personal vote is high in the legislature, while strengthening the president (or prime minister) in countries where the personal vote is low in the legislature has no effect .     

Parliamentary questions as a control mechanism in coalition governments

This article argues that government parties can use parliamentary questions to monitor coalition partners in order to reduce agency loss through ministerial drift. According to this control logic, government parties have particular incentives to question ministers whose jurisdictions display high policy conflict and high electoral salience and thus hold the prospect of electorally damaging ministerial drift. Multivariate regression analysis of all parliamentary questions in the German Bundestag between 1980 and 2017 supports this hypothesis, showing that cabinet parties address substantially and significantly more questions to ministries held by coalition partners on salient and ideologically divisive issues. This interactive effect does not occur for opposition parties or questions posed to own-party ministers. These findings, as well as the temporal patterns of questioning over the electoral cycle, indicate that control within coalitions is a distinct motivation for questioning ministers that cannot be reduced to existing explanations such as electorally motivated issue competition.     

The international diffusion of electoral systems: The spread of mechanisms tempering proportional representation across Europe

There is an assumption in much of the electoral engineering literature that domestic episodes of electoral system choice occur in a vacuum, isolated from international influences. Yet this assumption remains largely untested, despite the comparative focus of much of that literature. This article focuses on part of this gap by considering two electoral mechanisms that seek to limit party system fragmentation under proportional representation – low district magnitudes and high electoral thresholds – and shows that the mechanisms have spread across many European countries during the post‐1945 period. Analyses reveal that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of peer countries have made similar choices within the last two or three years. This effect is robust to various model specifications and to the inclusion of multiple controls. The article also offers some qualitative evidence from case studies and parliamentary debates.     

Clarity of responsibility and foreign policy performance voting

Do voters’ assessments of the government's foreign policy performance influence their vote intentions? Does the ‘clarity of responsibility’ in government moderate this relationship? Existing research on the United States demonstrates that the electorate's foreign policy evaluations influence voting behaviour. Whether a similar relationship exists across the advanced democracies in Europe remains understudied, as does the role of domestic political institutions that might generate responsibility diffusion and dampen the effect of foreign policy evaluations on vote choice. Using the attitudinal measures of performance from the 2011 Transatlantic Trends survey collected across 13 European countries, these questions are answered in this study through testing on incumbent vote the diffusion‐inducing effects of five key domestic factors frequently used in the foreign policy analysis literature. Multilevel regression analyses conclude that the electorate's ability to assign punishment decreases at higher levels of responsibility diffusion, allowing policy makers to circumvent the electoral costs of unpopular foreign policy. Specifically, coalition governments, semi‐presidential systems, ideological dispersion among the governing parties and the diverse allocation of the prime ministerial and foreign policy portfolios generate diffusion, dampening the negative effects of foreign policy disapproval on vote choice. This article contributes not only to the debate on the role of foreign policy in electoral politics, but also illustrates the consequential effects of domestic institutions on this relationship.     

The electoral consequences of welfare state retrenchment: Blame avoidance or credit claiming in the era of permanent austerity?

This article challenges the dominant assumptions in the literature that cutting social policy incurs voter wrath and that political parties can efficiently internalise electoral fallout with blame avoidance strategies. Drawing on the diverse literature on the role of partisanship in the period of permanent austerity, several partisan hypotheses on the relationship between social policy change and electoral outcomes are posited. The results indicate that religious and liberal parties gain votes, and thereby are able to ‘claim credit’, for retrenching social policy. None of the other coefficients for the effect of social policy cuts reach significance, raising the question of whether parties excel at blame avoidance or the public fails to place blame in the first place.     

Does Public Opinion Respond to Shifts in Party Valence? A Cross-National Analysis of Western Europe, 1976–2002

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that, in addition to policy positions, parties’ electoral support is also affected by their character-based valence attributes such as competence, integrity, and unity. Thus far, however, research into the effects of parties’ character-based valence attributes has not examined how such party attributes affect public opinion. The article examines whether changes in parties’ character-based valence attributes motivate shifts in public opinion – specifically, whether public opinion shifts leftwards when right-wing parties’ character-based valence attributes suffer relative to leftist parties, and vice versa. It presents the results of pooled time-series analyses of the relationship between parties’ valence attributes and shifts in public opinion for nine European polities. The findings suggest that changes in parties’ character-based valence attributes do motivate shifts in public opinion as hypothesised, and the effects are substantively large. These findings have implications for party strategies and for our understanding of the factors which shape public opinion.     

The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in-group is portrayed as being threatened by various out-groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti-elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right-wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in-group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti-elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.     

Crisis Accountability: Ministerial Resignations in Sweden

Accountability processes after crisis events sometimes entail harsh criticism from public and political players alike, forcing cabinet ministers to be on top of the political game and sometimes even resign. However, harsh accountability processes are just as likely to leave ministers undamaged. This article combines two existing theories that propose different factors to account for variation in outcomes: ministerial resignations as a consequence of cabinet formation and individual positions; or resignations as a result of blame management strategies involving individual actors within the cabinet and beyond. Ten crisis episodes in Sweden are analysed and compared. The findings suggest that individual political power bases and experience matter to how well blame management strategies can be employed, while the composition of the government gives structural constraints. The dynamic interplay and framing battle between incumbent decision makers, and external arenas and the skill with which individual ministers engage and frame responsibility, play a key role in determining their post‐crisis careers.     

Constructive Ambiguity: Comparing the EU’s Energy and Defence Policies

This article explores the paradox of constructive ambiguity. Based on a focused, longitudinal comparison of the European Union’s energy and defence policies, it analyses the role played by strategies of ambiguity in European integration. Ambiguity is found to be an attractive strategy for political entrepreneurs when member state preferences are heterogeneous and the EU’s legal basis is weak. It is likely to be effective, however, only if it is embedded in an institutional opportunity structure – that is, a formal-legal context – that entrepreneurs can fold into their strategic repertoire of ideas. While ambiguity can be strategic in circumstances where clarity would create strong opposition, it is not sufficient to entrench a European policy if it does not rest on an institutional basis. This suggests that European political entrepreneurs should be wary of relying on coalition building by ambiguity only.     

Economic Conditions Affect Support for Prime Minister Parties in Scandinavia

Previous research has not been able to identify a relationship between objective economic indicators and support for governing parties in the Scandinavian countries. This is potentially problematic, as it suggests that political leaders are not held electorally accountable for the economic conditions they provide for their electorates. In this article, it is suggested that this null‐finding is a result of the particularities of the Scandinavian electoral context, which makes it difficult to identify the effects of the economy on electoral support. To bolster this argument, the relationship between unemployment, economic growth and support for prime minister parties is re‐examined in two datasets. The first is a dataset of Scandinavian elections, and the second is a yearly Danish vote function, which was constructed using election polls. Across both datasets, it is found that if one simply correlates support for the prime minister's party with economic conditions, there is no relationship; however, if one specifies a statistical model, which takes the Scandinavian context into account, it is possible to identify a statistically significant effect of economic conditions on electoral support. Based on this finding, the article concludes that economic conditions do shape electoral support for prime minister parties in Scandinavia.     

Explaining Different Trajectories in Immigrant Political Integration: Moroccans and Turks in Amsterdam

This article examines why the political integration and representation of ethnic minority groups may develop along different paths. Taking Amsterdam as a case study, it compares two of the city’s most predominant immigrant groups: Turks, who have taken a group-based incorporation strategy – visible in this group’s dense organisational infrastructure – and Moroccans, who have followed a more individualist assimilation strategy. The distinct trajectories have produced a relatively high proportion of Turkish-origin elected officials, while individuals of Moroccan origin feature more prominently in executive office, exercising power over day-to-day decisions. The article proposes that whereas features of the electoral system determine which opportunities exist for immigrants to participate in the political process, it is the structure of an immigrant group that affects the ability of members to seize such opportunities. Furthermore, it shows how political parties and party elites act as gatekeepers and facilitators of immigrants’ political participation.