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.     

LOCATING THE VANGUARD IN RISING AND FALLING HOMICIDE RATES ACROSS U.S. CITIES*

This research examines trends in U.S. homicide rates at the city level during the so‐called homicide epidemic in the latter decades of the 20th century. Using spline regression techniques to locate structural breaks in city‐level time series, we model the true trends of homicide rates to identify those cities that exhibited a meaningful boom and bust cycle. We then use Tobit regressions for all cities at risk of experiencing a cycle to estimate unbiased effects of theoretically important predictors on the timing of the phase changes. Our findings reveal that larger cities were more likely to experience an epidemic‐like pattern, and that densely populated cities characterized by high levels of deprivation tended to exhibit the rise and fall in homicide rates earlier than other cities.