Are Leftist Governments More Generous Toward Public Sector Employees? Evidence From Canada, 1967–1984

This article tests the hypothesis that leftist governments concede higher wage increases to their public sector employees than right-wing governments. Leftist governments are expected to be more generous toward public sector employees because of their commitment to public sector intervention, and because of the heavy representation of the public sector among leftist party elite and clientele. The study examines all major wage settlements signed between 1967 and 1984 in the Canadian provincial public sector and finds that, everything else being equal, wage increases are 10% higher under leftist governments. The standard economic variables (labor demand, expected inflation and spillover from previous contracts) that have been shown to affect wage increases in the private sector also emerge as significant. Finally, the data indicate that the greater the public debt the more constrained governments feel to negotiate minimal wage increases. These findings establish that a proper understanding of public sector labor relations requires a consideration of political as well as economic variables.     

Why Democratic Allies Defect Prematurely: Canadian and Dutch Unilateral Pullouts from the War in Afghanistan

Why do some democratic allies prematurely withdraw from ongoing military US-led coalition operations? Why are some democratic allies more reliable than others? This article proposes a multifactorial integrated framework consisting of several causal mechanisms drawn from ideological, domestic, and alliance explanations of premature defection. It compares and contrasts two neglected case studies, namely the Canadian and Dutch withdrawal of combat troops from NATO’s counterinsurgency mission in southern Afghanistan. The comparative analysis finds that democratic institutional designs, parliamentary war powers, leadership turnover, as well alliance dependence and threat perceptions did not play a meaningful role in both cases of premature defection. It rather finds that domestic elite consensus interacted with electoral calculations to account for pullout choices. Right-wing ideological beliefs held by state executives also slowed down the decision to withdraw, and alliance pressures interacted with domestic elite consensus to account for commitment renewal into a noncombat mission. The article concludes with some implications for the theory of democratic alliance reliability.     

Public Values in Special Districts: A Survey of Managerial Commitment

Special districts are increasingly important in the landscape of public organizations and now constitute about 40 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions. Yet little is known about the public value commitments of managers in special districts. This systematic study of senior managers in large special districts finds that support for public values is strong and similar to that of senior managers in cities. This study explores the effect of concomitant commitments to “businesslike” values on public values and the impact of concomitant commitments on perceived organizational outcomes. Though a positive relationship exists between commitments to public and businesslike values among senior managers, the authors find evidence that both too much and too little commitment to businesslike values has a negative impact on perceived organizational outcomes, which are furthered by strong commitment to public values. This article demonstrates that special districts are a relevant but underresearched area of public administration.     

Human Rights as Reputation Builder: Compliance with the Convention Against Torture

A strong record of human rights protections is an important factor for a state to maintain a positive international reputation. In this article, we suggest that states will use compliance with human rights treaties as a mechanism by which to improve their reputations to help achieve their foreign policy goals. We hypothesize that international human rights compliance is a means to improve a state’s reputation in three specific situations: when the state is facing regional pressures as the result of a desire to join a regional organization; when the state is facing regional pressures not to run afoul of a court within a regional organization; or when a state seeks foreign assistance from an entity with human rights requirements for the receipt of such assistance. We examine our theory by analyzing human rights reports regarding state compliance with specific treaty obligations outlined in the Convention Against Torture (CAT). While the evidence for our hypotheses is mixed, we do find some support for our assertion that state compliance is linked to reputational concerns. In particular, states comply with the CAT when they are part of a regional organization that has a human rights court, and when they are receiving conditional aid from the European Union.     

When Will Public Officials Listen? A Vignette Experiment on the Effects of Input Legitimacy on Public Officials’ Willingness to Use Public Participation

Public officials can be reluctant to use citizens’ input in decision-making, especially when turnout is low and participants are unrepresentative of the wider population. Using Fritz Scharpf's democratic legitimacy approach, the authors conducted a survey-based vignette experiment to examine how the input legitimacy of participatory processes affects (1) public officials’ willingness to use public participation in administrative decision-making, (2) their assessment of the quality of the policy decision, and (3) their anticipation of popular support for the policy outcome. The study shows that turnout and participants’ representativeness have a positive and significant effect on public officials’ attitudes toward public participation. Specifically, participants’ representativeness influences public officials’ willingness to use citizens’ inputs more than turnout.     

Refusing to be Sidelined: The Engagement of the Finnish Eduskunta in Foreign Affairs

It is often argued that foreign and security policy is dominated by the executive, with parliaments wielding marginal influence. However, as legislative‐executive relations in the realm of foreign and security policy have attracted remarkably little scholarly attention, there is a demand for subjecting the alleged executive drift in foreign affairs to careful empirical scrutiny. There is also a need to examine whether and how parliamentary politics in foreign affairs differs from domestic or European matters, both regarding control mechanisms and party competition. The notions of ‘executive dominance’ and ‘politics stopping at the water's edge’ certainly point in the direction of less active control and casting aside public partisan differences in favour of providing domestic support for the government. A case study of the Finnish Eduskunta forces us to reconsider such arguments. This article examines the multiple instruments members of parliament (MPs) have for becoming involved in foreign affairs, from participating in the formulation of the national ‘grand strategy’ document to ministerial hearings in the committees. It also provides strong evidence of the Europeanization of national foreign policies, with matters relating to the foreign policy and external relations of the European Union (EU) in a central role in the Foreign Affairs Committee. Parliamentary culture is consensual, especially in security policy, but there is nonetheless greater room and willingness for party‐political contestation in foreign affairs.     

No news is good news? Press coverage and corporate public affairs management

• Being in the public eye puts pressure on an organization's Public Affairs (PA) function. This study finds that firms more closely covered by the press tend to be more forceful in promoting their own position on social issues (social buffering). Press coverage is not associated with greater corporate efforts to comply with societal expectation (social bridging). Overall, press coverage is weakly associated with lowered perceived corporate public affairs performance.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The politics of international redistribution: Explaining public support for fiscal transfers in the EU

As a consequence of the Eurozone crisis and the creation of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the prospect of a transfer union has become a particularly contested aspect of European integration. How should one understand the public backlash against fiscal transfers? And, what explains voter preferences for international transfers more generally? Using data from the 2014 European Elections Study (EES), this article describes the first cross-national analysis of voters’ preferences on international transfers. The analysis reveals a strong association between voters’ non-economic cultural orientations (i.e., their cosmopolitanism) and their position on transfers. At the same time, it is found that voters’ economic left-right orientations are crucial for a fuller understanding of the public conflict over transfers. This counters previous research that finds economic left-right orientations to be of little explanatory value. This study demonstrates that the association between economic left-right orientations and preferences for international transfers is conditional on a person's social class. Among citizens in a high-income class an economically left-leaning position is associated with support for transfers, whereas it is associated with opposition to transfers among citizens in a low-income class.     

Governance reforms and public acceptance of regulatory decisions: Cross-national evidence from linked survey experiments on pesticides authorization in the European Union

Do governance reforms affect public acceptance of regulatory decisions, and if so, how? We tackled this critical but under-studied question through a pair of linked survey experiments on public attitudes toward the reform of European Union (EU) pesticides regulation among a representative sample of the adult population in six EU member states. We tested the expectation that citizens are more likely to accept a regulatory decision that runs counter to their prior policy preferences if it is taken under a procedure they support. We first conducted a conjoint experiment to study whether the specific design of decision-making procedures impacts public support for EU pesticide regulation. In a second linked experiment, we asked respondents whether farmers should be allowed to use glyphosate, the best known and most controversial pesticide. We then asked respondents if they would accept an authorization decision on glyphosate contrary to their prior expressed preference if it were taken under a decision-making procedure they supported. The results demonstrate that a regulatory decision-making procedure respondents support increases their willingness to accept a hypothetical authorization decision contrary to their prior expressed preference. Contrary to the findings of previous research, our study thus provides strong evidence that governance reforms supported by citizens can enhance acceptance of controversial regulatory decisions, even on politicized issues such as pesticides authorization.     

Issue evolution in Britain: The debate on European Union integration, 1964–2010

While Carmines and Stimson's work on issue evolutions has prompted research showing the dynamics and effects of new party alignments on abortion, religion, gender and cultural issues, this research has all centred on the United States. This article examines issue evolution in Britain. Using evidence on the timing of changes in elite positions from Comparative Manifestos Group data, and survey data on public attitudes to the European Union with a longer historical sweep than heretofore, the article finds strong evidence that the European issue has followed an issue evolution path, though with distinct dynamics contingent on the pace of elite re‐positioning. Thus, this article extends the theory of issue evolution to a parliamentary political system and demonstrates the responsiveness of the public to elite cues, while also providing additional insights from a unique case in which elites have staked out distinct positions not once, but twice.     

Delivering public services to the underserved: Nonprofits and the Latino threat narrative

Some politicians employ harsh rhetoric demanding that government deny public services such as food, housing, and medical care to immigrants. While nonprofits assist immigrants in this regard, their work is sustainable only if private donors support them. Using a survey experiment, this article examines whether donors' willingness to support a charity depends on the legal status of its beneficiaries, and the region from which they have come. We find that, in relation to a charity that serves low-income families (control group), donors are less willing to support a charity serving immigrants, but the region from which beneficiaries emigrated is irrelevant. Donor willingness diminishes substantially when beneficiaries are undocumented or face deportation. While shared ethnicity between donors and beneficiaries does not increase charitable support, bilingualism does. In addition, support for the charity rises substantially among Latinx donors who were born outside the US and do not speak English at home.     

Representative Bureaucracy and the Willingness to Coproduce: An Experimental Study

Relying on the theory of representative bureaucracy—specifically, the notion of symbolic representation—this article examines whether varying the number of female public officials overseeing a local recycling program influences citizens’ (especially women's) willingness to cooperate with the government by recycling, thus coproducing important policy outcomes. Using a survey experiment in which the first names of public officials are manipulated, the authors find a clear pattern of increasing willingness on the part of women to coproduce when female names are more represented in the agency responsible for recycling, particularly with respect to the more difficult task of composting food waste. Overall, men in the experiment were less willing to coproduce across all measures and less responsive to the gender balance of names. These findings have important implications for the theory of representative bureaucracy and for efforts to promote the coproduction of public services.     

Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America

In the tradition of research on political tolerance and democratic rights in context, this study uses a national survey of Americans conducted shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack on America to investigate people's willingness to trade off civil liberties for greater personal safety and security. We find that the greater people's sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberties. This effect interacts, however, with trust in government. The lower people's trust in government, the less willing they are to trade off civil liberties for security, regardless of their level of threat. African Americans are much less willing to trade civil liberties for security than whites or Latinos, even with other factors taken into account. This may reflect their long-standing commitment to the struggle for rights. Liberals are less willing to trade off civil liberties than moderates or conservatives, but liberals converge toward the position taken by conservatives when their sense of the threat of terrorism is high. While not a forecast of the future, the results indicate that Americans' commitment to democratic values is highly contingent on other concerns and that the context of a large-scale threat to national or personal security can induce a substantial willingness to give up rights.     

Fiscal Decentralization and Economic Growth: Evidence from Spanish Regions

The degree of fiscal decentralization in Spain is similar to main federal countries and greater than unitary ones. The demand of public sector decentralization is based on a supposed efficiency gains that is far from being obvious. Using a data set for the Spanish regions, we reject the null hypothesis of a significant relationship between growth in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and expenditure distribution among fiscal administrations. Nonetheless, we find empirical support for a relationship between revenue decentralization, far less advanced than the expenditure one, and growth. In both cases we do reject the null hypothesis of a nonlinear linkage between fiscal decentralization and growth in per capita GDP.     

Bridging the Gap between Evidence and Policy Makers: A Case Study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative

Developing ways to bridge the long‐recognized gap between researchers and policy makers is increasingly important in this age of constrained public resources. As noted by recent scholarship, progress toward evidence‐informed policy making requires both improving the supply of research that is reliable, timely, and relevant to the policy process and promoting demand and support for this information among decision makers. This article presents a case study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative, which is working in a growing number of state and local governments to build systems that bring rigorous evidence on “what works” into their budget processes and to support its use in resource allocation decisions. The initiative's experience to date is promising, although creating lasting and dynamic evidence‐based policy‐making systems requires a long‐term commitment by both researchers and policy makers.     

The Neglected Power of Elite Opinion Leadership to Produce Antipathy Toward the News Media: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Today, most Americans dislike the news media as an institution. This has led to considerable debate about why people dislike the media and how their public standing could be improved. This paper contributes to this literature by using a survey experiment to test the effect of several different considerations on evaluations of the media. It finds, consistent with the broader literature on political persuasion, that elite partisan opinion leadership can powerfully shape these attitudes. Additionally, it finds that tabloid coverage creates antipathy toward the press regardless of predispositions and that horserace coverage has a negative effect on opinions among politically aware citizens on both sides of the political spectrum. Contrary to some claims in the literature, this study finds no detectable effect of news negativity.     

The ideological nationalization of partisan subconstituencies in the American States

Since the mid-twentieth century, elite political behavior in the United States has become much more nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become more one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing literature finds that citizens have only weakly and belatedly mimicked elite trends. We show, however, that a different picture emerges if we focus not on individual citizens, but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using biennial estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat and Republican in each state over the past six decades, we demonstrate a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across senators’ partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate; and (3) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress. Overall, our findings contradict the reigning consensus that polarization in Congress has proceeded much more rapidly and extensively than polarization in the mass public.     

Community not the Councillors: A Study of Commitment of Australian Senior Council Officers Working under a Politicised Employment Relationship

Council officers as public managers are expected to work for the community. Yet, it has been argued that council officers working under a politicised employment relationship are likely to be more committed to the elected councillors than to the community. This proposition has been examined through a survey of senior council officers across Australia and the results are presented in this article. This study develops an analytical approach which combines for the first time the multi-focus and the multiple bases of managerial commitment approaches, applies this to the case of Australian local government managers and finds that although most senior council officers perceive that their employment is politicised they remain committed to the community. Based upon these findings, it is argued that a conceptual framework utilising a combined multi-focus and multiple bases approach is more appropriate to the study of commitment of local government managers and to managers in the public sector in general than the use of either approach alone.     

IMF Conditionality,Government Partisanship,and the Progress of Economic Reforms

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) often seeks to influence countries' domestic public policy via varying levels of conditionality—linking financial support to borrowing governments' commitment to policy reforms. When does extensive conditionality encourage domestic economic reforms and when does it impede them? We argue that, rather than universally benefiting or harming reforms, the effects of stricter IMF conditionality depend on domestic partisan politics. More IMF conditions can pressure left‐wing governments into undertaking more ambitious reforms with little resistance from partisan rivals on the right; under right governments, however, more conditions hinder reform implementation by heightening resistance from the left while simultaneously reducing leaders' ability to win their support through concessions or compromise. Using data on post‐communist IMF programs for the period 1994–2010, we find robust evidence supporting these claims, even after addressing the endogeneity of IMF programs via instrumental variables analysis.     

Motivational Bases and Emotional Labor: Assessing the Impact of Public Service Motivation

Emotional labor has become an important topic in the study of organizational behavior, but no research has examined how it is affected in individuals’ motivational bases. Public administration scholars have started to study this concept, but empirical studies are still in their infancy. Focusing on a particular type of motivational base—public service motivation (PSM), this article assesses how PSM and its three dimensions (attraction to policy making, commitment to public interest, and compassion) affect two common emotional labor activities (surface acting and deep acting). Using data from a survey of certified public management students, the results show that PSM is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting. Among the PSM dimensions, attraction to policy making is positively associated with surface acting; compassion is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting; and commitment to public interest is not associated with surface acting or deep acting.