Empowered and enraged: Political efficacy,anger and support for populism in Europe

This article addresses the psychological dynamics between internal political efficacy, emotions and support for populism. Contrary to the extended idea that populism is associated with low levels of political competence, it is argued that individuals’ self-competence beliefs enhance populist attitudes. Individuals who conceive themselves as able to understand and participate effectively in politics are more critical towards politicians and more prone to consider that citizens could do a better job. The article also hypothesises that internal efficacy enhances the likelihood of experiencing anger, which in turn promotes populist attitudes. Experimental and comparative observational evidence shows robust direct effects of internal efficacy over populism, as well as a smaller indirect impact via feelings of anger. These findings raise important questions regarding the nature of populism and how to fight it in our emancipated and information-intensive democratic systems.     

DETERMINANTS OF NETWORK OUTCOMES: THE IMPACT OF MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

The literature on network management is extensive. However, it generally explores network structures, neglecting the impact of management strategies. In this article we assess the effect of management strategies on network outcomes, providing empirical evidence from 119 urban revitalization networks. We go beyond current work by testing a path model for the determinants of network outcomes and considering the interactions between the constructs: management strategies, trust, complexity, and facilitative leadership. Our results suggest that management strategies have a strong effect on network outcomes and that they enhance the level of trust. We also found that facilitative leadership has a positive impact on network management as well as on trust in the network. Our findings also show that complexity has a negative impact on trust. A key finding of our research is that managers may wield more influence on network dynamics than previously theorized.     

Inside the Autonomous State: Programmatic Elites in the Reform of French Health Policy

This article combines the methods of institutionalist analysis and the sociology of elites to look inside the black box of the French state. We identify key groups of policymakers in the social policy sector and track both their policy preferences and the results of their efforts from the mid‐1980s through the late 1990s. Our conclusion is that budgetary and ideological challenges to existing policies led to the consolidation within the Ministry of Social Affairs of what we label a “programmatic elite,” whose influence derived less from the positions held by its members than from the coherence and applicability of its state‐centered policy model. The competition for legitimate authority between such programmatic elites, we conclude, is an important but often overlooked endogenous source of policy change in situations of institutional stability.     

Controlling immigration? How regulations affect migration flows

The aim of this article is to investigate whether or not and how immigration policies affect immigration flows. Such policy impacts have hardly been investigated so far as the necessary data is lacking. For the first time, two new datasets are combined to systematically measure immigration policies and bilateral migration flows for 33 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) destination countries from over 170 countries of origin over the period 1982–2010. The study finds that immigration policies have an important effect on immigration flows and thus that states are able to control their borders. To some extent the control capacities depend on other factors in attracting or deterring immigrants. The article shows that the deterrence effect of restrictive immigration policies increases when unemployment rates are high. It appears that, in these contexts, states start to care more about effectively protecting their national economy. Moreover, policies are more effective for migrant groups from former colonies or when the stock of this group is already high in a destination country. In these circumstances, information on border regulations are more easily disseminated, which in turn makes them more effective.     

FEAR,TV NEWS,AND THE REALITY OF CRIME*

Data from a 1997 survey of 2, 250 Florida residents are used to assess whether and how the reality of crime influences the relationship between watching TV news and fear of crime. Local crime rates, victim experience, and perceived realism of crime news operationalize the reality of crime and are included in ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of the TV news and fear of crime relationship. These measures of reality are also used as contexts for disaggregating the analysis. Local and national news are related to fear of crime independent of the effects of the reality of crime and other controls. Local news effects are stronger, especially for people who live in high crime places or have recent victim experience. This contextual pattern of findings is consistent with a conclusion that TV news is most influential when it resonates the experience or crime reality of respondents.     

Legislative agenda-setting in parliamentary democracies

Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real‐life politics? To answer this question, this article discusses different arguments that link institutional and policy‐related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co‐sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, it relates policy‐, office‐ and vote‐related incentives, as well as institutional and resource constraints of legislative actors, to the likelihood that these actors will take the lead in legislative agenda‐setting. These arguments are confronted with original data on the universe of all legislative bills in four parliamentary systems over one and a half decades. The article concludes that opposition and, in particular, bipartisan agenda‐setting is indeed rare. Yet, in contrast to widely held maxims, it is neither absent nor spurious, but related to the allocation of power and the intensity of ideological conflict both within and between the (coalition) government and parliament.