Feminist attitudes in times of depoliticization of women's issues

Abstract. Based on data from Denmark from the end of the 1970s and 1980s the paper analyzes the development of feminist attitudes during a period characterized, on the one hand, by a high, and still growing, integration of women into the labour market and political life, and on the other, by an organizational decline of the women's movement and a decline in the politicization of women's issues. At the end of the 1970s, feminist attitudes, especially among women, were unidimensionally structured and closely related to other political factors. The most feminist were the young, the well-educated, the politically interested, and left-wing women. At the end of the 1980s, feminist attitudes were at the same level as ten years before, but different dimensions had emerged, a social and political dispersion of feminist attitudes had taken place, and feminism no longer influenced political behaviour. In many respects, the experience of the United States in the 1970s was reversed in Denmark in the 1980s.     

Unions in politics: public opinion in the United Kingdom and Denmark

Abstract. The paper examines public opinion about the political involvement of trade unions in the UK and Denmark. Both are systems in which trade unions are linked to a political party and both have high rates of union density. However, whereas British unions have contested governments of both parties and opposed regulation of industrial relations, Danish unions have a tradition of cooperation with government and are entangled in a web of institutionalized industrial relations. Results, however, are amazingly similar. Both the public at large and union members accept unions in general and also their political involvement, but oppose contestation of political authority. Irrespective of union behaviour, beliefs in the supremacy of parliament seems to be firmly rooted in public opinion.     

Bounding the number of contributors to mixed DNA stains

We derive a simple inequality for the probability of observing a given DNA profile when assuming a fixed number of unknown persons have contributed to the mixed stain. We then show how this inequality can be used to obtain an upper bound for the number of unknown contributors needed to be considered.     

Newspapers and Budgeting: The Effects of Media Coverage on Local Expenditure Decisions

The media play an important role for the political agenda. It is less clear, however, how strong the media impact is on political decisions. This article pursues a different approach from the one commonly used in the media–policy research tradition. Instead of focusing on the relationship between the content of the media agenda and the political agenda, it is argued here that from a broader policy perspective, media pressure on the incumbents is a more relevant variable. Media pressure is measured as media competition and media coverage. Furthermore, the article investigates the effect of media variables on budgetary decisions in different spending areas, and compares the relationships between media pressure and policy under various economic, political and institutional conditions. This allows the authors to investigate which factors hinder and promote media influence on policy. The units of analysis are the Danish municipalities, which are similar political units with different newspaper coverage. Coverage by local newspapers is intense in some municipalities, but absent in others. As expected, the authors find that in municipalities with intensive coverage from local newspapers, local politicians do feel a stronger media pressure. However, when it comes to budgetary decisions, almost no observable effects of media pressure are found, either generally or in favourable political, economic or institutional settings.     

The Danes and Europe: From EC 1972 to Euro 2000 – Elections, Referendums and Attitudes

Within Europe, the Danish electorate is the one that has most often expressed its opinion about the European Union in elections and in national referendums. Votes and attitudes are analysed for the five elections to the European Parliament between 1979 and 1999 and in the six referendums – from the first on membership of the EC in 1972 to the September 2000 referendum on acceptance of the euro, the European single currency. The article gives an overview of the development of Danish public opinion in relation to the European Union from 1960 to 2000, the turnouts at referendums, and the elections and results for the European Parliament. It is shown that since Denmark joined the EU, public opinion has fluctuated greatly, although the balance among Danish European Parliament members has remained stable. The reasons for the frequent use of referendums in Denmark and a thematic outline of the six referendums are put forward. The article concludes with a comprehensive analysis of public attitudes towards the referendum on the euro in 2000. It is shown that regional electoral patterns have vanished, but underlying attitudes are manifested in the public.     

Budget Procedures and the Size of the Budget: Evidence from Danish Local Government

This paper analyzes procedural influences on budgetary outcomes in Danish local government. By analyzing local governments the study can remedy two shortcomings of most procedural budget studies. The first is that most studies analyze national budget procedures, which means that only a limited and quite heterogeneous number of cases can be analyzed. The second and more fundamental shortcoming in most studies is the lack of a distinction between political institutions and budget institutions. Although this distinction is difficult to establish for empirical analysis at the national level, it is immediately clear when dealing with local governments. The paper tests a number of hypotheses on procedural influences. It finds that budget institutions have no certain effects on budget outcomes in the preparatory phase. However, in the implementation phase budget institutions seem to matter.     

Left–right political scales

Nomination: 'Some expert judgments ' live on by Mogens N. Pedersen, p.147
Reflections: Revisiting expert judgements by Peter Mair & Francis G. Castles, p.150     

Left-right political scales

Abstract Although left-right scales are an inherent feature of much cross-national research, they have necessarily been created on a somewhat ad hoc basis, since the empirical foundation for valid cross-national scales rarely exists. This paper seeks to provide such a foundation by using judgements of party ideological position which are both explicit and non-idiosyncratic across a wide range of countries. These judgements derive from a so-called 'expert' survey of leading political scientists in Western Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. It is our hope that the scales which we derive in this way may prove useful in a wide variety of contexts of comparative research.