Testing What Matters (If You Must Test at All): A Context‐Driven Approach to Substantive and Statistical Significance

For over a half century, various fields in the behavioral and social sciences have debated the appropriateness of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) in the presentation and assessment of research results. A long list of criticisms has fueled the so‐called significance testing controversy. The conventional NHST framework encourages researchers to devote excessive attention to statistical significance while underemphasizing practical (e.g., scientific, substantive, social, political) significance. I introduce a simple, intuitive approach that grounds testing in subject‐area expertise, balancing the dual concerns of detectability and importance. The proposed practical and statistical significance test allows the social scientist to test for real‐world significance, taking into account both sampling error and an assessment of what parameter values should be deemed interesting, given theory. The matter of what constitutes practical significance is left in the hands of the researchers themselves, to be debated as a natural component of inference and interpretation.     

Can Welfare States Grow in Leaps and Bounds? Non-Incremental Policymaking in the Netherlands

The rapid expansion of the Dutch welfare state in the 1960s is described as an example of non-incremental policy growth. The reasons for this include: the largeness of policy change; the willingness of policymakers to consider new programs that marked dramatic departures from older programs, the commitment of policymakers to the goal of universalizing programs rather than introducing satisfycing measures; and the disruption of the traditional mode of corporatist representation in policymaking. The possibilities for an equally rapid dismantling of the welfare state are discussed.     

Pass the Buck If You Can: How Partisan Competition Triggers Attribution Bias in Multilevel Democracies

Voters’ ability to hold politicians accountable has been shown to be limited in systems of multilevel government. The existence of multiple tiers of government blurs the lines of responsibility, making it more difficult for voters to assign credit or blame for policy performance. However, much less is known about how the vertical division of responsibility affects citizens’ propensity to rationalize responsibility attributions on the basis of group attachment. While these two processes have similar observable implications, they imply markedly different micro-mechanisms. Using experimental and observational data, this paper examines how the partisan division of power moderates the impact of voters’ partisanship and feelings of territorial attachment on attributions of responsibility for the regional economy. Our analyses show that partisan-based attribution bias varies systematically with the partisan context, such that it only emerges in regions where a party other than the national incumbent controls the regional government. We also find that responsibility judgments are rationalized on the basis of territorial identities only when a regional nationalist party is in control of the regional government. Our results contribute to explaining the contextual variations in the strength of regional economic voting and more generally to understanding one of the mechanisms through which low clarity of responsibility reduces government accountability.     

Economics and the Left Party Vote in Scandinavia: A Cross-National Analysis

While the literature on economic voting is vast, relatively little is known about how the economy affects party vote shares in Scandinavia per se. This article argues that left of center parties rather than incumbent governments per se bear the brunt of economic judgments at the voting booth. In large part this is due to these parties' preeminent role in establishing and maintaining the institutional welfare systems of these countries. We examine this hypothesis using pooled time-series data for Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 1960 to 1991.     

Mechanisms for policy (dis)integration: explaining food policy and climate change adaptation policy in the Netherlands

Policy Sciences - Recent years have witnessed increased political interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional...     

Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections

Cues and heuristics—like party, gender, and race/ethnicity—help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience—signaled through occupation—as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show—through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment—that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.

     

Electoral Reform and Party Adaptation: The Introduction of the Single Transferable Vote in Scotland

The 2007 Scottish Local Government Elections saw the first large scale use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) in a mainland election in Britain. This presented a range of challenges for Scotland's political parties, more familiar with campaigning under first-past-the-post or the Scottish parliament's semi-proportional Additional Member System (AMS). Most crucially, STV meant the parties had to come to terms with multi-member wards and the transferral of votes between parties. Following a short discussion of the results of the STV elections, this article assesses evidence on how the parties adapted to the new electoral system, focussing particularly on candidate and campaign strategies. The article argues that Scotland's parties showed some, but limited, signs of adapting to new electoral conditions. Rather than strategic adjustment, an element of 'hoping for the best' was evident in all parties.     

Electoral participation in the Netherlands: Individual and contextual influences

Research into electoral participation has produced two traditions, one focusing mainly on individual level explanations while the second concentrates primarily on aggregate level explanations. By bringing these two research approaches together, we are not only able to explain individual electoral participation more thoroughly, but we also gain additional insight into the influence of aggregate level characteristics on individual behavior. We combine eight National Election Studies held in the Netherlands between 1971 and 1994 enabling us to study variation on the individual and the contextual (aggregate) level, including interactions between these two levels. Findings show that the addition of contextual characteristics form a significant improvement to an individual level model predicting electoral participation. Findings also confirm our expectation that the influence of individual characteristics such as education or political interest is dependent upon contextual characteristics describing for instance the salience of the election.     

《寰有诠》第一卷及其哲学意义上的创造论

傅汎际与李之藻撰写的《寰有诠》(1628)主要翻译自亚里士多德《论天》的拉丁文评注,然而其第一卷加上了从哲学和圣经方面介绍的基督教创造论.在哲学论述方面,通过考证发现,《寰有诠》吸收了阿奎那在《争议问题集:论天主的德能》中的论点,把创造论放在形而上学的框架中去理解,揭示出作为第一本原的天主与万物之间最基本的关系.如此,《寰有诠》为会通创造论与宋明理学提供了非常恰当的基础.     

Electoral participation in the Netherlands: Individual and contextual influences

Abstract Research into electoral participation has produced two traditions, one focusing mainly on individual level explanations while the second concentrates primarily on aggregate level explanations. By bringing these two research approaches together, we are not only able to explain individual electoral participation more thoroughly, but we also gain additional insight into the influence of aggregate level characteristics on individual behavior. We combine eight National Election Studies held in the Netherlands between 1971 and 1994 enabling us to study variation on the individual and the contextual (aggregate) level, including interactions between these two levels. Findings show that the addition of contextual characteristics form a significant improvement to an individual level model predicting electoral participation. Findings also confirm our expectation that the influence of individual characteristics such as education or political interest is dependent upon contextual characteristics describing for instance the salience of the election.     

All spending is not equal: European Union public spending,policy feedback and citizens’ support for the EU

While public support is central to the problem‐solving capacity of the European Union, we know little about when and why the EU can increase its citizens’ support through spending. Extensive research finds that citizens living in countries that are net beneficiaries of the EU budget are more supportive of the EU, assuming that citizens care equally about all forms of spending. It is argued in this article, however, that the amount of spending is only part of the story. Understanding the effects of spending on support requires a consideration of how transfers are spent. Drawing on policy feedback theories in comparative politics, it is shown that support for the EU is a function of the fit between the spending area and economic need in individuals’ immediate living context. Results from a statistical analysis of EU spending on human capital, infrastructure, agriculture, energy and environmental protection in 127 EU regions over the period 2001–2011 corroborate this argument. As the EU and other international organisations become increasingly publicly contested, the organisations themselves may increasingly try to shore up public support through spending, but they will only be successful under specific conditions.     

Attacking the Centre: "Moderate-Induced Polarization" in Denmark and The Netherlands

In a recent study it has been argued that strong centre parties may lead to polarization, not moderation. The study showed that as the centre's share of parliamentary seats increased, this convergence of voters was off-set by two concurrent divergent party trends. As the centre parties expanded, either: (i) the extremist parties increased as well, or (ii) an outward movement of moderate parties took place. This article sets out to test these two trends in order to assess which is the more valid according to two case studies, because each pattern has a different impact on electoral competition, governmental durability and democratic stability. The two trends are appraised in Denmark and The Netherlands for all post-war elections until 1990. The results show that the centre is indeed related to systemic polarization, but that one of the two patterns is invalid. The trend that perceives the centre as a possible destructive force is not supported, while the tendency that does not jeopardize democracy is supported. In both countries the centre's potential coalition partners - the parties on the moderate left and right - attacked their centre-based party system by pulling away in an outward polarizing pattern. The goal was the creation of a bipolar system, with a vacant centre. In each case the centre parties were of a different size and adopted different tactics in order to combat the "moderate-induced" strategy of polarization. The centre's counter-strategies succeeded, but the party systems were transformed.