Immigration, Europe and the 'new' cultural dimension

Kriesi et al. announced the birth of a new cleavage in contemporary Western Europe, one dividing the winners and losers of globalisation. Their studies in 2006 and 2008 contain analyses of party positions in six countries, based on the contents of editorial sections of newspapers. This article challenges the main conclusion of Kriesi et al. by demonstrating − on the basis of two expert surveys − that party positions are mainly structured by one dimension. The structure detected by Kriesi et al. in their analysis of parties is not found, except concerning voter positions. A consequence of this article's findings is that large groups of citizens are not represented by any parties, in particular those who are left-wing on socio-economic issues and right-wing on cultural issues. The article in its conclusion discusses possible causes for the differences between these findings and those of Kriesi et al., and the implications of these findings for democratic representation.     

GOVERNMENT CALLING: PUBLIC SERVICE MOTIVATION AS AN ELEMENT IN SELECTING GOVERNMENT AS AN EMPLOYER OF CHOICE

The article assesses public service motivation as a possible influence in the attractiveness of government as an employer by embedding it into a person‐organization fit framework. First, a theoretical framework is developed and all relevant concepts are discussed. In addition, a set of hypotheses concerning the research question is developed. A sample of 1714 final year masters students demonstrates that the presence of public service motivation positively correlates with the preference for prospective public employers. For government organizations that display a high degree of publicness, the effect of public service motivation as a predictor for employer preference is stronger. Next to building a middle range theory on public service motivation, the article also reveals that public service motivation is present at a pre‐entry level.     

Unravelling the ‘devolution paradox’: Citizen preferences for self-rule and for shared rule

Recent survey research has revealed a ‘devolution paradox’: some citizens who favour stronger regional governments inconsistently desire policy uniformity across regions and state-wide intervention in policy provision. It is argued and empirically shown that preferences for regional authority can be broken down into preferences for self-rule – that is, for autonomy for the region – and for shared rule – that is, for collaboration between regional and national governments. Drawing upon the International Constitutional Values Survey, which includes 4,930 respondents from 142 regions in eight countries, it is also shown that preferences for self-rule and shared rule have different impacts. Preferences for self-rule translate into a preference for regional reform that strengthens regional autonomy, whereas preferences for shared rule drive preferences for fiscal transfers from richer to poorer regions. These results are important because they can explain why citizens who are in favour of more regional authority may support an apparently ‘paradoxical’ set of policy outcomes.     

Degrees of influence: Educational inequality in policy representation

Education plays an important role in the political, social and economic divisions that have recently characterised Western Europe. Despite the many analyses of education and its political consequences, however, previous research has not investigated whether government policy caters more to the preferences of the higher educated than to the preferences of the lower educated. We address this question using an original dataset of public opinion and government policy in the Netherlands. This data reveals that policy representation is starkly unequal. The association between support for policy change and actual change is much stronger for highly educated citizens than for low and middle educated citizens, and only the highly educated appear to have any independent influence on policy. This inequality extends to the economic and cultural dimensions of political competition. Our findings have major implications for the educational divide in Western Europe, as they reflect both a consequence and cause of this divide.     

STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT IN PHARMACEUTICAL REGULATION: CONNECTING TECHNICAL EXPERTISE AND LAY KNOWLEDGE IN RISK MONITORING

The exclusive position of scientific expertise in pharmaceutical regulation is being increasingly challenged. Several authors suggest that lay knowledge could play a role in governing risks. We use the literature to develop ideal‐typical regulatory arrangements with low and high lay stakeholder involvement: a technocratic and a democratic arrangement. We propose that a more technocratic arrangement will yield a better process and output performance while a more democratic arrangement will result in more stakeholder satisfaction. These propositions are explored through two case studies of pharmaceutical regulation in the Netherlands: in pandemic influenza and in HIV. Our study shows equivalent process and output performances but we found indications that the democratic approach results in more stakeholder satisfaction. We conclude that in pharmaceutical regulation, there is no a priori reason to limit involvement to experts: in situations of fundamental uncertainty, democratic monitoring of pharmaceutical risks can contribute to the system's robustness.     

The party road to representation: Unequal responsiveness in party platforms

This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue-areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesises that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesises that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi-country, multi-issue-area, multi-wave survey data with data on party platforms for 39 democracies.     

Multiple roots of the populist radical right: Support for the Dutch PVV in cities and the countryside

Populist radical right parties are considerably more popular in some areas (neighbourhoods, municipalities, regions) than others. They thrive in some cities, in some smaller towns, and in some rural areas, but they are unsuccessful in other cities, small towns, and rural areas. We seek to explain this regional variation by modelling at the individual level how citizens respond to local conditions. We argue that patterns of populist radical right support can be explained by anxiety in the face of social change. However, how social change manifests itself is different in rural and urban areas, so that variations in populist radical right support are rooted in different kinds of conditions. To analyse the effects of these conditions we use unique geo-referenced survey data from the Netherlands collected among a nationwide sample of 8,000 Dutch respondents. Our analyses demonstrate that the presence of immigrants (and particularly increases therein) can explain why populist radical right parties are more popular in some urban areas than in others, but that it cannot explain variation across rural areas. In these areas, local marginalization is an important predictor of support for populist radical right parties. Hence, to understand the support for the populist radical right, the heterogeneity of its electorate should be recognized.     

A LONGITUDINAL TEST OF SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY: FEEDBACK EFFECTS AMONG COHESION,SOCIAL CONTROL,AND DISORDER*

Social disorganization theory holds that neighborhoods with greater residential stability, higher socioeconomic status, and more ethnic homogeneity experience less disorder because these neighborhoods have higher social cohesion and exercise more social control. Recent extensions of the theory argue that disorder in turn affects these structural characteristics and mechanisms. Using a data set on 74 neighborhoods in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands spanning 10 years, we tested the extended theory, which to date only a few studies have been able to do because of the unavailability of neighborhood‐level longitudinal data. We also improve on previous studies by distinguishing between the potential for social control (feelings of responsibility) and the actual social control behavior. Cross‐sectional analyses replicate earlier findings, but the results of longitudinal cross‐lagged models suggest that disorder has large consequences for subsequent levels of social control and residential instability, thus leading to more disorder. This is in contrast to most previous studies, which assume disorder to be more a consequence than a cause. This study underlines the importance of longitudinal data, allowing for simultaneously testing the causes and consequences of disorder, as well as the importance of breaking down social control into the two dimensions of the potential for social control and the actual social control behavior.     

Explaining Regional and Local Government: An Empirical Test of the Decentralization Theorem

Decentralization of policy provision is omnipresent yet we are not able to sufficiently account for the extent of this phenomenon. The decentralization theorem explains the decentralization of policy provision as a trade‐off between heterogenous preferences, interjurisdictional spillovers (externalities), and economies of scale. Empirical tests of the theorem have been hampered by a measurement problem on the independent as well as on the dependent variable. This article tackles these problems by using a new data set that combines a measure of externalities and scale effects of policies obtained from an expert survey with the actual provision of policies across governmental tiers in 40 countries. The analyses provide an empirical test of the decentralization theorem by showing that decentralization of policy provision is to a large extent determined by functional characteristics of policies and heterogenous preferences but other country‐specific variables, such as democracy, economic development, and European subsidies, also matter.