How stable is party identification?

This essay refines and extends our argument (Green and Palmquist, 1990) that net of the distorting effects of measurement error, Americans' partisanship tends to be highly stable over time. Three challenges to this thesis are addressed. In response to doubts about the generalizability of our earlier findings to panel studies of longer duration or from other eras, we show that nine multi-wave panel studies yield similar results. Next, we take up the question of whether our model can account for observed patterns of partisan conversion. The rate of party-switching forces some modifications in the statistical assumptions used to model party identification over time, but a revised model which can account for inter-party change reproduces earlier findings of partisan stability. Third, we grapple with the question of how our findings square with fluctuations in what has been termed macropartisanship. We suggest that aggregate shifts in party identification need not be incompatible with strong over-time correlations at the individual level. Finally, we develop a simulation of micropartisanship to illustrate that over long stretches of time very gradual changes in partisanship can accumulate to produce appreciable levels of micropartisan change.Donald Philip Green, Yale University.Bradley Palmquist, Harvard University.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 3–6, 1992.     

How responsible is 'responsive' government?

The work of John Rohr focuses primarily upon the constitutional dimension of the work of public servants, most particularly, but not exclusively, career civil servants employed in central government. In stressing public service ethics as a form of constitutional practice Rohr's aim is to help reinforce the legitimate role of career public servants in government and to remind practising public bureaucrats (and academics and politicians) of the nobility of the 'administrative vocation' of state service, a somewhat daunting task in today's political climate. In this article I examine Rohr's work to see what ethical light it might throw upon recent and ongoing political attempts to make the British public administration more 'responsive'. I do so, first, by outlining the main themes of Rohr's work and their location within the US constitutional tradition. I then proceed to discuss the extent to which they translate into other constitutional contexts. Finally, I attempt to put Rohr's work to use in discussing aspects of civil service reform in Britain under recent Conservative administrations and that of the present New Labour government.     

How Affordable Is HUD Affordable Housing?

This article assesses the affordability of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rental assistance properties from the perspective of transportation costs. HUD housing is, by definition, affordable from the standpoint of housing costs due to limits on the amounts renters are required to pay. However, there are no such limitations on transportation costs, and common sense suggests that renters in remote locations may be forced to pay more than 15% of income, a nominal affordability standard, for transportation costs. Using household travel models estimated with data from 15 diverse regions around the United States, we estimated and summed automobile capital costs, automobile operating costs, and transit fare costs for households at 8,857 HUD rental assistance properties. The mean percentage of income expended on transportation is 15% for households at the high end of the eligible income scale. However, in highly sprawling metropolitan areas, and in suburban areas of more compact metropolitan areas, much higher percentages of households exceed the 15% ceiling. This suggests that locational characteristics of properties should be considered for renewal when HUD contracts expire for these properties, based on location and hence on transportation affordability.     

How Can Deliberative Democracy Get a Grip?

One of the most exciting innovations within ‘practical democratic theory’ in recent years has been the emergence of deliberative democracy, as a theoretically refined ideal with by now some well‐honed mechanisms for its implementation on a small scale. Its greatest remaining challenge is to figure out some way to connect those highly controlled, small‐scale deliberative exercises to the ‘main game’, politically. I sketch some limited and indirect ways in which that might happen in national politics, before going on to propose a more novel way in which such deliberative events might be used literally to make international law of a certain sort.     

How Honest Do Politicians Need to Be?

This article reports findings from a recent survey of citizens' attitudes towards standards in British public life. It provides further evidence that people hold their political leaders to high standards, yet are often disappointed by the reality, and suggests that many citizens tend to blame the practice and institutions of politics for making politicians less honest and trustworthy than they would ideally like. The article argues that reforms to the political system are needed to regain the confidence of the population, but that the manner in which the most recent round of ethics reforms in the House of Commons were introduced may lower the prospects of their achieving this goal.     

How Serious is the Global Warming Threat?

Despite the media’s and politicians’ insistence that the science of global warming is “settled”, there are good reasons to distrust climate model projections of future global warming. While the supposed scientific consensus is that mankind is very likely to blame for recent global warmth, this is mostly a statement of faith made from a position of relative ignorance about natural variability in the climate system. Since we do not understand what causes decadal- to century-scale natural climate variability, it has simply been assumed to either not exist, or to be relatively small. But even if predictions of catastrophic warming are accurate, the worldwide demand for energy is so large that there is little mankind can do without radically new energy technologies. Since it is only the wealthy countries of the world that can afford the R&D efforts to develop those technologies, punishing the use of fossil fuels, and the resulting negative impact on economies, might well delay the development of cost effective carbon-free energy sources that so many people are now calling for.

How Should Governments Make Risky Policy Decisions?

Public policy-making does not follow the long-established and well-recognised principles of rational decision analysis under risk. Public views of risk are often inconsistent and seemingly irrational, and a gulf exists between risk perceptions and attitudes of the public and those of 'experts'. On the other hand, experts often claim unjustifiably high levels of confidence in their predictions of policy choice outcomes, creating a lack of public faith in their recommendations. While risky policy choices deserve more systematic decision analysis, many challenges remain to effective implementation of such analyses. Among the suggestions for improvement that we offer is the need for more effective interaction between policy-makers, decision analysts and the public.     

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.     

How does the economy shape policy preferences?

How do changes in the economy translate into shifts in aggregate preferences for a more or less activist government in the U.S.—a construct referred to as “policy mood”? Existing theories pose alternative explanations based on either a Maslow Hierarchy of Needs model, where citizens prefer an activist federal government to expand the social safety net when the economic future looks bright (Durr, 1993), or a Phillips Curve model (Erikson et al., 2002), in which the objective economic maladies of inflation and unemployment drive policy mood. We show that neither of these explanations withstands empirical scrutiny when analysis is extended beyond the time period of the original authors' work, suggest the existing wisdom tying the economy to policy mood is wrong, and offer some alternative avenues to pursue in search of an answer to the question: What moves policy mood?     

How Does Race Affect Perceptions of Police Trustworthiness?

While race is often discussed in relation to police, there is still little empirical evidence on the role of race in shaping citizens’ evaluations of government performance. Using an experimental design, this study examines how different levels of police performance affect perceptions of police trustworthiness and to which degree observed effects vary by individual race and across communities with different racial makeups. Specifically, we study the effect of different levels of performance on perceived trustworthiness in two communities—one predominantly African American and one predominantly White—and replicate across two samples: a sample consisting of primarily White participants and another consisting of only African American participants. Results indicate that the interaction between the racial composition of a community and individual race plays a critical role in shaping the effects of performance among White participants, who appeared more sensitive to community context than African American participants. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

How Can Business Share Responsibility for Disaster Resilience?

This paper contributes to knowledge of disaster resilience policy implementation in Australia and proposes measures to strengthen partnerships between government and the business sector to enhance national disaster resilience capacity. In Australia, business makes a significant contribution to disaster relief and recovery. Even so, there are unexplored opportunities to enhance the role of business in disaster resilience, particularly through partnerships with government. The extent that state, regional and local‐level disaster plans engage business in disaster relief and recovery is described and their relatively less prominent involvement in disaster resilience is discussed. Examples of disaster resilience policies and their capacity to influence business practices to support disaster resilience are introduced with suggestions for how they can be enhanced. Some potential benefits and pitfalls of public–private sector collaboration are explored and it is noted that, in disaster resilience settings, these risks can be ameliorated through appropriate implementation.     

Voting Against Your Constituents? How Lobbying Affects Representation

Citizens delegate the representation of their political preferences to members of Parliament (MPs), who are supposed to represent their interests in the legislature. However, MPs are exposed to a variety of interest groups seeking to influence their voting behavior. We argue that interest groups influence how MPs cast their vote in Parliament, but that this effect varies across groups. While lobbying by sectional groups provides incentives for MPs to defect from their constituents, we expect that cause groups in fact strengthen the link between MPs and their voters. We test our argument based on an innovative study of 118 Swiss public referenda, which allows for directly comparing voter preferences with legislative voting of 448 MPs on these issues. Drawing on a multilevel regression analysis, this study shows that interest groups considerably affect the link between MPs and their voters. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation.     

How did the euro area survive the crisis?

Six recent books differ in their explanations as to how the euro area survived the crisis. In this review it is concluded that strong supranational institutions rather than German or Franco-German leadership, shared identity or the popular legitimacy of central institutions have been the crucial condition. Popular support for the euro has remained relatively high in many member states. While the crisis led to some expansion of the intergovernmental method, survival of the euro area required a great expansion in the powers of supranational institutions.     

How Do Interest Groups Seek Access to Committees?

Concerns that interest groups use their financial resources to distort the democratic process are long‐standing. Surprisingly, though, firms spend little money on political campaigns, and roughly 95% of publicly traded firms in the United States have never contributed to a political campaign. Do interest groups seek political access through their modest contributions, or are these contributions only a minor and forgettable part of the political process? In this article, we present comprehensive evidence that interest groups are extremely sophisticated in the way they make campaign contributions. We collect a new data set on U.S. state legislative committee assignments and legislator procedural powers from 1988 to 2014, merged with campaign finance data, in order to analyze over 440,000 candidate–committee observations across 99 legislatures. Using a series of difference‐in‐differences designs based on changes in individual legislators' positions in the legislature, we not only show that interest groups seek out committee members, but we also show that they value what we call indirect access. When a legislator gains procedural powers, interest groups reallocate considerable amounts of money to her. The results reveal how interest groups in a wide range of democratic settings seek to influence the policy process not only by seeking direct access to policy makers but by seeking indirect access to legislative procedure as well.