Re‐electing the Culprits of the Crisis? Elections in the Aftermath of a Recession

Theories of economic voting and electoral accountability suggest that voters punish incumbent governments for poor economic conditions. Incumbents are thus expected to suffer substantially during significant economic crisis but their successor in office will face the difficult task of reviving the economy. The economic crisis may, therefore, negatively affect government parties in subsequent elections even though the economic conditions may, to a large degree, have been inherited from the previous government. It is argued in this article that economic conditions play an important role in such circumstances as they place specific issues on the agenda, which structure the strategies available to the parties. Therefore, the article studies the 2013 Icelandic parliamentary election in which the incumbent government parties suffered a big loss despite having steered the country through an economic recovery. While perceptions of competence and past performance influenced party support, three specific issues thrust on the agenda by the economic crisis – mortgage relief, Icesave and European Union accession/negotiations – help explain why the centre‐right parties were successful in returning to the cabinet.     

Do the Japanese Have a Sense of Humor?

Although the Japanese appear humorless in the eyes of the Westerners, we have a long tradition of presenting humor in various forms. This paper demonstrates one of the most famous examples of Japanese humor called “Chojyu-giga,” a set of scrolls depicting animated animals frolicking. It is a parody drawn around the 12^th century and is said to be a root of Japanese comics termed “manga.”     

Interest groups in Venezuela: lessons from the failure of a ‘Model Democracy’ and the rise of a Bolivarian democracy

This article uses the Venezuelan case to shed light on the potential role of interest-group systems in discrediting liberal democracies and to identify challenges that the region's democracies are likely to confront in constructing effective and fair interest-group systems. It first analyzes the role Venezuela's interest groups played in discrediting its 40-year two-party democracy. It argues that the discrediting of a system heralded by many as the region's ‘model democracy’ cannot be understood by merely assessing how the structure of the group system excluded certain groups. The study shows that the inclusion of certain business interests in visible positions of power also helped discredit the two-party democracy. The article then compares the above system with the new group system which has emerged since 1998 as part of a new democratic system inspired by Latin America's 19th century Liberator, Simón Bolívar. This comparison reveals that the current system inverts the former system of inclusion and exclusion, even as it has retained a number of the old system's less virtuous features. The implications of the Venezuelan case for the region's democracies are elaborated in the conclusion. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do We Want a Referendum on the Common Market?

In March 1975 Britain quarrelled about whether to hold a referendum on membership of the European Community. The Hansard Society organised an important debate about it between Enoch Powell, Geoffrey Howe, John Mackintosh and Keith Kyle. This is a report on that event drawn from a recently discovered recording. Many of the arguments deployed then are being repeated in today's debate about a ‘people's vote'—including the long‐term effects on the UK's constitution of having recourse to the referendum device.     

Is there a key to the normative budgeting lock?

This article explores how to answer the normative question: What is a good budgetary process? It proposes that a deliberative process involving practitioners and academics could identify and justify achievably ambitious standards for budgetary processes, and the best practices for attaining those standards. In hopes of beginning that deliberation, the article sets out a prototype model, and then applies the model to the federal budgetary process.     

How to Measure the Europeanisation of a National Legislature?

While there is no shortage of research on national parliaments and European integration, empirical studies on the impact of EU on domestic legislatures are lacking. This article contributes to the literature by discussing the challenges involved in measuring the Europeanisation of national parliaments and through suggesting several hypotheses and indicators – EU-related national laws, the use of control instruments (confidence votes and parliamentary questions) in EU matters, and the share of committee, plenary and party group meeting time spent on European matters – that can be used in subsequent comparative research. Evidence from Finland shows the differentiated impact of Europe: while the share of domestic laws related to EU is smaller than often argued, particularly committees are burdened to a much larger extent by European matters.     

Is the Left-Right Scale a Valid Measure of Ideology?

In order to measure ideology, political scientists heavily rely on the so-called left-right scale. Left and right are, however, abstract political concepts and may trigger different associations among respondents. If these associations vary systematically with other variables this may induce bias in the empirical study of ideology. We illustrate this problem using a unique survey that asked respondents open-ended questions regarding the meanings they attribute to the concepts “left” and “right”. We assess and categorize this textual data using topic modeling techniques. Our analysis shows that variation in respondents’ associations is systematically related to their self-placement on the left-right scale and also to variables such as education and respondents’ cultural background (East vs. West Germany). Our findings indicate that the interpersonal comparability of the left-right scale across individuals is impaired. More generally, our study suggests that we need more research on how respondents interpret various abstract concepts that we regularly use in survey questions.     

Follow the Candidates,Not the Parties? Personal Vote in a Regional De-institutionalized Party System

This article analyses how personal vote shapes electoral competition and predicts electoral results in a regional de-institutionalized party system. After having analysed the connection between unpredictable political environment and personal vote, we build an original empirical model that explores preferential vote and patterns of re-candidacies and endorsements of the most voted candidates in the Calabrian regional elections. The analysis shows that leading candidates retain a more stable and predictable support over time with respect to parties and that candidates and their system of interactions are able to predict the electoral results better than parties and their alliances.     

Are Voters Mobilized by a ‘Friend-and-Neighbor’ on the Ballot? Evidence from a Field Experiment

In his seminal work on Southern politics, V.O. Key observed that voters disproportionately support local candidates at the ballot box. While empirical analyses have confirmed “friends-and-neighbors” voting across numerous electoral contexts, no one has directly examined voter turnout as the mechanism linking place of residence to vote choice. We argue that place of residence is a social identity that incentivizes citizens to turn out to vote on behalf of the local candidate. We test this mobilization mechanism using a randomized field experiment conducted during a 2014 state legislative primary election. Our results show that county ties between candidates and voters likely boost turnout. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the importance of place identity for turnout decisions in low-information elections.     

Garcia and the Political Safeguards of Federalism: Is There a Better Solution to the Conundrum of the Tenth Amendment?

In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985),Justice Harry Blackmun held that the Tenth Amendment does notprevent the Congress from subjecting state and local governmentsto the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, concludingthat the "political safeguards offederalism" are generally adequateto protect state interests on the national scene. This articleexamines the intellectual foundations of the "political safeguardsof federalism" and finds them inadequate. It then surveys thepost-Garcia scholarship to ascertain whether an alternativetheory of the Tenth Amendment has emerged. Concluding that ithas not, the author suggests the need for afresh approach inview of the hints contained in Justice Sandra Day O'Connor'sopinion in Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991) that five justices maybe ready to reexamine the central thesis of Garcia.     

Political space in Vietnam: a view from the ‘rice-roots'

Abstract

Single-party, authoritarian states such as Vietnam are frequently characterised as having ‘closed’ political opportunity structures and ‘un-free’ socio-political systems. The validity of this observation depends, however, on the viewer's frame of reference. Seen from the perspective of active citizens, Vietnamese political structures offer increasingly greater space for collective action than a state-centred institutional analysis would predict. Episodes of contentious politics surrounding land disputes and public parks during 2007 provide evidence of the changing dynamics of participation in politics. Actors involved in these and similar campaigns are broadly optimistic about the future prospects for an opening of political space within the existing system. These findings are contrasted with international reports of violations of political rights and with the Vietnamese government's own efforts at legal reform. Although signals remain mixed, to some extent Vietnam might be becoming a ‘rice-roots democracy’ in practice, while remaining a single-party state. The voices and experiences of civil society actors will continue to shape opportunities and risks in the expansion of political space.     

Rallying in fear? Estimating the effect of the UK COVID-19 lockdown with a natural experiment

We use a natural experiment to study how the announcement of the UK COVID-19 lockdown affected citizens' attitudes towards the pandemic and the government's response to it. On the day of the lockdown announcement, YouGov ran a survey that captured responses before and after the announcement. Comparison of these responses suggests that the lockdown announcement made people more supportive of the government's response to the crisis but also (perhaps surprisingly) more concerned about the pandemic. Analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects suggests that the announcement narrowed gaps in perceptions of the crisis, increasing support for the government's response especially among those who had been least supportive and increasing concern about the pandemic especially among those who had been least concerned. Overall, the findings highlight a tension inherent in governing during times of crisis: actions that increase people's confidence in government and induce compliance with government directives may also tend to increase anxiety among the population.     

Social conflict over property rights: the end,a new beginning,or a continuing debate?

The ownership and control of private land is a core social value in the United States. Public planning can be seen as conflicting with this value. The long-standing tension between private property rights and public planning was heightened in the 1990s with the emergence of the so-called private property rights movement. This movement seeks to limit governmental authority over privately owned land through a multi-level strategy of legal, policy, political, and public relations actions. This paper explores the historical basis for this conflict, the legal framework within which it functions, and contemporary policy battles.

The paper concludes that there may be no final outcome to this debate. Property rights activists are impassioned and believe their view of history and law is correct. I argue that it may be best to see debate about land use and property rights as one of the central vehicles for a continual reframing of core values in the American experience.     

How to make a dis-entrepreneur of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur: the impact of institutional settings on growth

Fiscal and monetary institutions are conspicuously omitted in the conventional theory of long-run economic growth. Moving from the Schumpeterian entrepreneur, who adopts new technology because its value, according to Tobin’s q, dominates the economic rents of existing capital, we argue that the Schumpeterian entrepreneur’s incentives to innovate change when he is transplanted into the public economy. We analyze two alternative institutional settings denoted as “long chain” and “short chain”. Through the “long chain” model we show that the Schumpeterian entrepreneur is driven towards “destructive creation” of new capital, thus becoming a political dis-entrepreneur, while the quasi-contractual “short chain” model provides incentives to innovate.