Who benefits from educational choice? some evidence from Europe

Evidence from Britain, France, and The Netherlands is examined to test the claim that educational choice enhances equality of opportunity by empowering parents of modest income. The European experience clearly suggests that, whatever its merits in other respects, educational choice tends to intensify class segregation through the effects of different preferences and information costs. Various means of moderating these effects are considered.     

“Living Here has Changed My Whole Perspective”: How Escaping Inner‐City Poverty Shapes Neighborhood and Housing Choice

Research on the housing choice voucher program and housing mobility interventions shows that even with assistance, it is difficult for poor minority families to relocate to, and remain in, low‐poverty neighborhoods. Scholars suggest that both structural forces and individual preferences help explain these residential patterns. However, less attention is paid to where preferences come from, and how they respond to policies and social structure to shape residential decisionmaking. In this paper, we use data from fieldwork with 110 participants in the Baltimore Mobility Program (BMP), an assisted mobility voucher program, to demonstrate how residential preferences can shift over time as a function of living in higher opportunity neighborhoods. Since 2003, BMP has helped over 2,000 low‐income African American families move from high‐poverty, highly segregated neighborhoods in Baltimore City to low‐poverty, racially mixed neighborhoods throughout the Baltimore region. Along with intensive counseling and unique program administration, these new neighborhood contexts helped many women to shift what we term residential choice frameworks: the criteria that families use to assess housing and neighborhoods. Parents who participated in the mobility program raised their expectations for what neighborhoods, homes, and schools can provide for their children and themselves. Parents report new preferences for the “quiet” of suburban locations, and strong consideration of school quality and neighborhood diversity when thinking about where to live. Our findings suggest that housing policies should employ counseling to ensure relocation to and sustained residence in low‐poverty communities. Our work also underscores how social structure, experience, and policy opportunities influence preferences, and how these preferences, in turn, affect policy outcomes.     

Democratic Values? A Racial Group-Based Analysis of Core Political Values,Partisanship, and Ideology

Research on American core political values, partisanship, and ideology often concludes that liberals and Democrats believe equality to be one of the most important values while conservatives and Republicans place greater emphasis on social order and moral traditionalism. Though these findings are valuable, it is assumed that they generalize across various groups (e.g. socioeconomic classes, religious groups, racial groups, etc.) in society. Focusing on racial groups in contemporary American politics, I challenge this assumption. More specifically, I argue that if individuals’ value preferences are formed during their pre-adult socialization years, and if the socialization process is different across racial groups, then it may be the case that members of different racial groups connect their value preferences to important political behaviors, including partisanship and ideology, in different ways as well. In the first part of this study, I fit a geometric model of value preferences to two different data sets—the first from 2010 and the second from 2002—and I show that although there is substantial value disagreement between white Democrats/liberals and Republicans/conservatives, that disagreement is smaller in Latinos and almost completely absent in African Americans. In the second part of this study, I demonstrate the political implications of these findings by estimating the effects of values on party and ideology, conditional on race. Results show that where whites’ value preferences affect their partisan and ideological group ties, the effects are smaller in Latinos and indistinguishable from zero in African Americans. I close by suggesting that scholars of values and political behavior ought to think in a more nuanced manner about how fundamental political cognitions relate to various attitudes and behaviors across different groups in society.     

Political Sophistication and Policy Reasoning: A Reconsideration

The sophistication-interaction theory of mass policy reasoning, which posits that the strength of the relationship between abstract principles and policy preferences is conditional on political sophistication, dominates the study of public opinion. This article argues that the sophistication-interaction theory does not hold to the degree the consensus claims. Specifically, it challenges the proposition that sophistication promotes the use of domain-specific beliefs and values. Analysis of 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1990 NES data yields two compelling findings. First, a series of confirmatory factor analyses indicate that beliefs about equal opportunity, self-reliance, and limited government in the social welfare domain and about militarism and anticommunism in the foreign policy domain are structured coherently and equivalently in the minds of citizens at different levels of sophistication. Second, structural equation model results demonstrate that political sophistication does not systematically enhance the impact these principles have on policy preferences .     

Value Choices and American Public Opinion

Individual preferences among core values are widely believed to be an important determinant of political attitudes. However, several theoretical perspectives suggest that people experience difficulties making choices among values. This article uses data from the 1994 Multi-Investigator Study to test for hierarchical structure in citizens' value preferences. The empirical results show that most people make transitive choices among values and that their value preferences have an impact on subsequent issue attitudes. To the extent that citizens exhibit intransitive value choices and/or apparent difficulties in the "translation process" from value preferences to issue attitudes, it is due more to low levels of political sophistication than to the existence of value conflict.     

Do fiscal rules cause budgetary outcomes?

This paper focuses on the observed empirical relationship between fiscal rules and budget deficits, and examines whether this correlation is driven by an omitted variable, namely voter preferences. We make use of two different estimation methods to capture voter preferences in a panel of Swiss sub-federal jurisdictions. First, we include a recently constructed measure of fiscal preferences. Second, we capture preferences through fixed effects with a structural break as women are enfranchised. We find that fiscal rules continue to have a significant impact on real budget balances.     

Voter‐weighted environmental preferences

This article examines the political economy of preferences with respect to the environment using a new stated preference survey that presents the first benefit values for national water quality levels. The mean valuation greatly exceeds the median value, as the distribution of valuations is highly skewed. The study couples the survey valuations with unique and extensive information on respondent voting patterns. Preferences of registered voters are similar to the preferences of the population at large, but median voters value water quality more than nonvoters. The strongest contrast related to voter‐weighted preferences is among voters for different candidates, as those who voted for Gore in the 2000 presidential election have the highest environmental values. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Do politicians’ preferences correspond to those of the voters? An investigation of political representation

This paper investigates political representation by exploring the relationship between citizens' preferences and the preferences of their elected representatives. Using Swedish survey data, the empirical analysis shows that voters and politicians have significantly different preferences for local welfare services, implying that voters do not elect representatives with the same preferences as their own. The results show that when comparing a politician of a certain age, gender, educational level and marital status, with a voter with identical characteristics, the politician still has preferences for a significantly higher level of spending on the locally provided services. Hence, our results indicate that the representation of different socio-economic groups does not necessarily lead to a larger degree of representation of these groups' agendas. Moreover, we find the observed difference to be largest for the least salient expenditure item. We do, however, not find any evidence for differences in preferences between the two groups being associated with a decline in trust for politicians among voters.     

Islam’s democracy paradox: Muslims claim to like democracy, so why do they have so little?

In this brush-clearing paper, we demonstrate that there is a deficit both of democracy and of freedom in Muslim-majority countries by comparison with the rest of the world. We further demonstrate that these deficits are not fully explained by poverty or by oil but seem to have something to do with Islam itself. We further demonstrate that the democracy and freedom deficits are larger in the Islamic heartland than elsewhere in Muslim-majority countries. We show that the democracy deficit is not driven by demands for autocracy in Muslim-majority countries, and indeed, that individual Muslims value democracy more than non-Muslims. We suggest that the lack of religious freedom in Muslim-majority countries (the supreme power concept) may be a significant variable in explaining the democracy deficit.     

Not Taking it on Faith: State and Religious Influences on European Court of Human Rights Judges in Freedom of Religion Cases

I analyze freedom of religion case law from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that the ECHR has been inconsistent and deferential to state governments. To account for this phenomenon, I consider two theoretical frameworks. First, I ask whether the religious affiliation of applicants matters when it comes to judges’ willingness to decide in their favor. Second, I consider whether ECHR judges are influenced by the preferences of the states that nominated them. Employing logistic regression analysis on an original dataset of 538 judge votes on 70 freedom of religion cases, I find that Muslim applicants are substantially less likely to receive favorable judge votes, and that judges are more likely to vote in favor of the states that nominated them. Additionally, I find that West European states are especially likely to receive favorable rulings, even when controlling for differences in state protections of religious liberty.     

The preadult origins of postmaterialism: A longitudinal sibling study

Using a research design that traces siblings' preferences for postmaterialist values in Germany over two decades, this article provides new evidence on the origins of value preferences. Focusing on Inglehart's thesis of value change, the combined socialisation and scarcity hypothesis is tested against the social learning hypothesis – a prominent rival account of preadult value preference formation. Sibling estimates show that the shared preadult environment does indeed exert lasting effects on preferences for postmaterialist policies. In addition to the weak effect of the shared experience of socioeconomic scarcity, it is found that the intergenerational transmission of postmaterialism, disregarded by Inglehart's original thesis, plays a significant role in value preference acquisition. The implications of individual-level findings for forecasts of aggregate-level trends in value change are discussed.     

The Measurement of Pure Negative Freedom

Examining the question of whether or how far freedom is measurable contributes to the analysis of the concept of freedom in two ways. First, it involves attempting to establish criteria for answering questions about 'how free' individuals or societies are. Secondly, it helps to show how far different definitions of freedom really conflict, in as much as those definitions are themselves motivated by intuitive extent-of-freedom assessments in the first place. Critics of the 'pure negative' conception of freedom (freedom as the absence of purely physical impediments to action) have argued either that freedom is unmeasurable on such a conception, or that such a conception is counterintuitive, because the measurements of freedom implied by it conflict with the intuitive comparisons which we normally make. Closer examinations of the nature of measurement and of the nature of act individuation show both ofthese criticisms to be ill founded.     

Modeling spending preferences & public policy

Understanding preferences over government spending is important for understanding electoral behavior and many other aspects of the political world. Using data on relative preferences for more or less spending across different issue areas, we estimate the general spending preferences of individuals and congressional candidates along a left-right spending dimension. Our modeling approach also allows us to estimate the location of policies on this same dimension, permitting direct comparison of people's spending preferences with where they perceive policy to be. We find that public shows very low levels of polarization on spending preferences, even across characteristics like partisanship, ideology, or income level. The distribution of candidates' spending preferences shows much more sorting by party, but candidates are significantly less polarized than is contemporary voting in Congress.     

The role of teacher quality in retention and hiring: Using applications to transfer to uncover preferences of teachers and schools

Many large urban school districts are rethinking their personnel management strategies, often giving increased control to schools in the hiring of teachers, reducing, for example, the importance of seniority. If school hiring authorities are able to make good decisions about whom to hire, these reforms have the potential to benefit schools and students. Prior research on teacher transfers uses career history data, identifying the school in which a teacher teaches in each year. When such data are used to see which teachers transfer, it is unclear the extent to which the patterns are driven by teacher preferences or school preferences, because the matching of teachers to schools is a two‐sided choice. This study uses applications‐to‐transfer data to examine separately which teachers apply for transfer and which get hired and, in so doing, differentiates teacher from school preferences. Holding all else equal, we find that teachers with better pre‐service qualifications (certification exam scores, college competitiveness) are more likely to apply for transfer, while teachers whose students demonstrate higher achievement growth are less likely. On the other hand, schools prefer to hire “higher quality” teachers across measures that signal quality. The results suggest that not only do more effective teachers prefer to stay in their schools but that schools are able to identify and hire the best candidates when given the opportunity © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Tinpots,Totalitarians (and Democrats): An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Economic Growth on Civil Liberties and Political Rights

Ronald Wintrobe (1990, 1998) has recently provided atheoretical foundation for estimating equations that attemptto explain the dependence of civil liberties and politicalrights in non-democratic regimes on the history of economicgrowth. This theory suggests that data from different kinds ofnon-democratic countries should not be pooled without allowingcoefficients to vary with regime type. It also placesinteresting restrictions on the signs of the coefficients ofeconomic growth in equations explaining freedom in the typesof regimes Wintrobe identifies. In this paper, we employ theserestrictions to test Wintrobe's theory. Some additionalhypotheses about the difference between democratic andnon-democratic regimes and about the role of education, notconsidered by Wintrobe, are also investigated.The results indicate clearly that the relationship between thedegree of freedom – as measured by the sum of the Gastilindexes of civil liberties and political rights – andeconomic growth varies significantly across all types ofregimes. Totalitarians (that attempt to maximize power) areclearly different than tinpots (that just attempt to maintainpower) in this respect, and non-democratic regimes differ fromdemocracies. Other aspects of the theory are partiallyconfirmed. In particular, in totalitarian regimes, positivegrowth reduces freedom, and negative growth increases it insome specifications. The theory predicts the opposite patternfor tinpots, and we do find that negative growth reducesfreedom in tinpot regimes. However, positive growth in tinpotsalso appears to reduce freedom in some cases, which is not inaccord with the theory. Secondary schooling has a positive effect on freedom, as inprevious empirical work, a result that is shown here to holdeven when each type of regime is considered separately. Butthe effect of primary schooling is different: in tinpot andtotalitarian regimes, but not in democracies, primaryschooling is associated with reduced freedom.     

Changing classes,changing preferences: how social class mobility affects economic preferences

Abstract

While many studies have identified an association between social class and economic preferences, we know little about the implications of changes in class location for these preferences. This article assesses how social class and intra-generational class mobility affect economic preferences drawing on longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey. In doing so, the article adopts a post-industrial perspective that considers horizontal and vertical class divisions. Even when time-invariant characteristics of individuals are kept constant (through fixed-effects estimation), it is found that both vertical and horizontal class location explain economic preferences. Thus, these estimations suggest that social class moulds preferences, even when accounting for factors that can lead to selection into classes. Moreover, people who change classes hold different economic preferences than their peers in the class of origin, but do not completely assimilate into their class of destination. This implies that growing intra-generational class mobility could undermine the class basis of political conflict.     

Who has standing in cost-benefit analysis?

The issues involved in deciding whose preferences are to be counted in cost-benefit analysis are often misunderstood or controversial. This paper attempts to resolve the issues in a number of particular cases by looking to the fundamental value assumptions underlying cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis is useful only to the extent that there exists a general consensus that the value assumptions are legitimate. Certain implications of the value assumptions prove useful in deciding what preferences have standing.     

Case Studies and EU Politics: A Reply to Miklin

A recent article in West European Politics by Eric Miklin attempted to shed light on the decision-making process in the European Union. The argument presented was that individual ministerial ideological preferences can affect a government's bargaining position in the Council of the European Union. Miklin proposes that under certain conditions national ministers may enjoy substantial freedom. This brief reply identifies three main problems with Miklin's approach: a case selection bias, ministerial autonomy, and an examination of where decisions are made.     

Direct Democracy: Protest Catalyst or Protest Alternative?

This paper presents the first investigation of whether direct democracy supplements or undermines the attendance of demonstrations as a form of protest behavior. A first approach assumes that direct democracy is associated with fewer protests, as they function as a valve that integrates voters’ opinions, preferences, and emotions into the political process. A competing hypothesis proposes a positive relationship between direct democracy and this unconventional form of political participation due to educative effects. Drawing on individual data from recent Swiss Electoral Studies, we apply multilevel analysis and estimate a hierarchical model of the effect of the presence as well as the use of direct democratic institutions on individual protest behavior. Our empirical findings suggest that the political opportunity of direct democracy is associated with a lower individual probability to attend demonstrations.     

Spending Preferences of Public Sector Officials: Survey Evidence from Finland

We examine the determinants that shape the spending preferences of public sector officials on several budgetary appropriations. Following Niskanen's budget‐maximizing theory, we test whether these officials prefer larger budgetary appropriations rather than less. We measure their preferences to increase their own bureau's appropriations and compare those against their preferences for other bureaus' appropriations. The empirical evidence is gathered via a mail survey targeting high‐level officials from different ministries in Finland. The analysis of the responses suggests that Niskanen's theory is in part supported.