Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables

A central question in the study of democratic polities is the extent to which elite opinion about policy shapes public opinion. Estimating the impact of elites on mass opinion is difficult because of endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement error. This article proposes an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect of elite messages on public support for European integration employing changes in political institutions as instrumental variables. We find that more negative elite messages about European integration do indeed decrease public support for Europe. Our analysis suggests that OLS estimates are biased, underestimating the magnitude of the effect of elite messages by 50%. We also find no evidence that this effect varies for more politically aware individuals, and our estimates are inconsistent with a mainstreaming effect in which political awareness increases support for Europe in those settings in which elites have a favorable consensus on the benefits of integration.     

Monarchy and Democracy: A Progressive Agenda

The Blair governments since 1997 have seen the single most significant period of constitutional reform in Britain for over a century. However, they leave the monarchy, the institution at the apex of the unwritten constitution, untouched. It is argued that neither inaction nor abolition is advisable, but that reform should be undertaken, with particular attention to the rules of succession and to the royal prerogative powers, notable examples being the powers to declare war, to dismiss parliament, to assent to legislation and to appoint the Prime Minister. Those powers now exercised by the executive should be formally and linguistically separated from the office of head of state, and put on a statutory basis. The achievement of these reforms depends, however, on political will and cannot be initiated by the monarchy itself.     

Pro- and anti-system behavior: a complementary approach to voice and silence in studies of political behavior

Theories of participation and non-participation are largely unable to capture and distinguish anti-system behavior, which ranges from deliberate silence to political violence. To better understand and measure these diverse forms of citizen participation, and to distinguish these from forms of alienation and marginalization, this article builds a new model of anti-system behavior in a way that facilitates the development of empirically observable variables and hypotheses. To do so, I draw upon sociological approaches to alienation – which examine intensities of rebellion and contestation – and combine them with the standard political scientific approach – which examines intensities of engagement based on resources. The problem, I argue, is that each approach only partially explains the motivations behind aberrant political behavior in modern democratic systems; they are in fact two sides of the same coin. I consider three cases of apparent silent citizenship: Muslims in Western Europe, Roma in Eastern Europe, and white working-class people in North America and Europe.     

Understanding varieties of populism in times of crises

Abstract

This introduction presents the conceptual and analytical framework which constitutes the background for the special issue entitled ‘Varieties of Populism in Europe in Times of Crises’. More specifically, this contribution investigates how different populist parties in the European Union have been affected by the recent economic crisis and the more long-lasting political and cultural crises. Analytically, the article disentangles the role of the Great Recession vis-à-vis other factors (such as political and party system factors, but also structural social changes or cultural opportunities) in the growing strength of populist parties in various European countries. It argues that although the economic crisis has without any doubt provided a specific ‘window of opportunity’ for the emergence of new political actors, which have capitalised on citizens’ discontent, long-lasting political factors – such as the increasing distrust toward political institutions and parties – and the more recent cultural crisis connected with migration issues have offered further fertile ground for the consolidation of populist parties in several European countries. Furthermore, as confirmed by the articles presented in the special issue, the various crises have offered differential opportunities for different types of populism – both inclusionary and exclusionary.     

Constraining Political Transformation: The Two Faces of Activist Religious Organizations in the Search for a New Constitution in Kenya

Abstract

Religious organizations are key structural components of Kenyan civil society that have played or continue to play a critical role in socio-political developments. In the last two and half decades especially, religious institutions have been among the principal actors shaping the mechanics and trajectories of Kenya's political order. But religious organizations’ political behaviour, especially in the country's search for a new constitution, was contentious and remarkably inconsistent. There were moments of progressive actions but also behaviour that imperilled progress. This article probes this ambivalence of Kenyan faith groups in the struggles for a new constitution. It is argued that their political behavioural inconsistencies largely reflect an ethnic, class and, to a lesser extent, instrumentalized doctrinal or denominational schism that is ever present in the wider Kenyan society. By analysing how religious leaders and their organizations challenged political elite domination while remaining amenable to its influence, this article illustrates the contradictions of elite pacts in these struggles and how they constrained progressive transformation.     

State sovereignty,political legitimacy and regional institutionalism in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

Regional institutions in the Asia-Pacific have been of limited efficacy. Asian members of organizations such as ASEAN and APEC have insisted that these institutions not infringe upon their sovereign rights. The basic norms, rules, structures and practices supporting these organizations have, to varying degrees, reflected this concern. A number of factors contribute to explaining this regional reluctance to create effective multilateral institutions. This paper argues that the single most important factor is the concern of most East Asian states with domestic political legitimacy. Drawing on the work of Muthiah Alagappa and Mohammed Ayoob, the paper demonstrates that a significant majority of the states of East Asia see themselves as actively engaged in the process of creating coherent nations out of the disparate ethnic, religious and political groups within the state. As a result, these states are reluctant to compromise their sovereignty to any outside actors. Indeed, the regional attitude towards multilateral institutions is that they should assist in the state-building process by enhancing the sovereignty of their members. As an exceptional case, Japan has encouraged regional institutionalism, but it has also been sensitive to the weaknesses of its neighbours, and has found non-institutional ways to promote its regional interests. The incentives to create effective regional structures increased after the Asian economic crisis, but Asian attempts to reform existing institutions or create new ones have been undermined by the issues connected to sovereignty. East Asian states recognize that they can best manage globalization and protect their sovereignty by creating and cooperating within effective regional institutions. However, their ability to create such structures is compromised by their collective uncertainty about their domestic political legitimacy. In the emerging international environment, being a legitimate sovereign state may be a necessary prerequisite to participating in successful regional organizations.     

The Role of Elite Accounts in Mitigating the Negative Effects of Repositioning

Repositioning by political elites plays a key role in a variety of political phenomena, including legislative policymaking and campaigning. While previous studies suggest that repositioning will lead to negative evaluations, these studies have not explored the role of elite communications in structuring mass responses. We argue that this omission is problematic because elite explanations for their actions may limit the costs associated with ‘flip-flopping’ by persuading some citizens to update their attitudes so that they agree with the elite’s new stance and also by molding beliefs about the motives of the elite when repositioning. We present evidence supportive of this argument obtained from two large experiments conducted on samples of American adults. Ultimately, we show that elites offering a satisfactory justification for their change can avoid most, if not all, of the evaluative costs that would otherwise occur. This study thus has important implications not just for this particular element of elite behavior, but also related questions concerning governmental accountability and representation.     

Political succession and regime change in new states in inter-war Europe: Ireland, Finland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Republics

Abstract. Problems of political succession are particularly acute when new regimes experience not merely the shock of the sudden introduction of democracy but also the challenge of consolidating a new territorial identity. The six North European states examined here, all of which became independent after the first world war, succeeded in establishing their legitimacy against threats from both left and right. The orderly political succession process was broken in three cases, however, by the appearance of authoritarian regimes in the inter-war period. The origins of this disjuncture are to be found not only in economic factors that enhanced the attractiveness of certain contemporary ideologies but also in the nature of elite political culture and the extent to which it had had the opportunity of absorbing liberal democratic norms.     

The Constitutional Economics of Autocratic Succession

The paper extends and empirically tests GordonTullock's public choice theory of the nature of autocracy. A simple model of the relationship between constitutional rules governing succession in autocratic regimes and the occurrence of coups against autocrats is sketched. The model is applied to a case study of coups against monarchs in Denmark in the period ca. 935–1849. A clear connection is found between the specific constitutional rules governing succession and the frequency of coups. Specifically, the introduction of automatic hereditary succession inan autocracy provides stability and limits the number of coups conducted by contenders.     

The early modern origins of contemporary European tax outcomes

What explains variation in tax outcomes between European states? Previous studies emphasise the role played by political institutions, but focus mostly on the input side of politics – how access to power and policy making is structured – and the institutions of relatively recent times. It is argued in this article that output‐side institutions related to the implementation of political decisions also matter and have deep institutional origins. As the classic literature has argued, the early modern period from 1450 to 1800 was formative for the development of fiscal capacity, but European states diverged in the stock of capacity they acquired. This article tests whether these differences still affect contemporary tax outcomes using a novel measure of fiscal capacity, based on the age, extent and quality of state‐administered cadastral records. The empirical analysis shows that, on average, countries with higher early modern fiscal capacity have higher tax revenue today, compared to countries with lower early modern fiscal capacity. This association is robust to different model specifications and alternative measurements. The findings have important policy implications as they indicate how deeply the current fiscal problems of the continent are entrenched, but also point to what needs to be prioritised within ongoing tax reforms.     

Rewarding Bad Behavior: How Governments Respond to Terrorism in Civil War

Although violent organizations often use terrorism as a means to achieve political aims, recent studies suggest the tactic is ineffective because it fails to help groups gain concessions. While focused exclusively on concessions, these studies overlook other important markers of success, specifically whether groups are invited to participate in negotiations as a result of their use of terrorism. Extant studies also conduct statistical analyses on overly aggregated data, masking any effect terrorism has on important bargaining outcomes. Using new monthly data on the incidence of negotiations and the number of concessions offered to groups involved in African civil wars, this paper demonstrates that rebel groups are both more likely to be granted the opportunity to participate in negotiations and offered more concessions when they execute a greater number of terror attacks during civil wars.     

Europeanisation with Many Unknowns: National Company Law Reforms after Centros

Negative integration through the expansive interpretation of European market freedoms is said to undermine domestic social regulation – by vertically imposing a strictly liberal interpretation of EU rules and by pushing EU member states into horizontal regulatory competition. This article analyses domestic policy responses to one particularly prominent instance of negative integration: the CJEU’s case law on the freedom of establishment since its first landmark ruling on Centros in 1999. The analysis shows that national company laws have only converged downwards in one particular subfield – minimum capital requirements – but they remain strikingly diverse across, and increasingly within, member states on most other issues, such as workers’ codetermination rights. Legal uncertainty about the Court’s case law, the mixed economic incentives it provides for firms and political disagreement about appropriate policy responses leave considerable space for differential Europeanisation. The crisis adds to these uncertainties and thus reinforces the trend towards differentiation rather than convergence.     

How Politics Shapes the Growth of Rules

This article examines the impact of politics on governmental rule production. Traditionally, explanations of rule dynamics have focused on nonpolitical factors such as the self‐evolvement of rules, environmental factors, and decision maker attributes. This article develops a set of hypotheses about when, why, and how political factors shape changes in the stock of rules. Furthermore, we test these hypotheses on a unique, new data set based on all Danish primary legislation and administrative rules from 1989 to 2011 categorized into 20 different policy domains. The analysis shows that the traditional Weberian “rules breed rules” explanations must be supplemented with political explanations that take party ideology and changes in the political agenda into account. Moreover, the effect of political factors is indistinguishable across changes in primary laws and changes in administrative rules, a result that challenges the depiction of the latter rule‐making process as more or less disconnected from the political domain.     

The Role of “Parallel Institutions” in China’s Growing Participation in Global Economic Governance

China is creating or co-creating new international economic institutions in areas such as trade, development finance, currency settlement and credit rating that parallel those that arose out of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 or are tied to the interests of rich, developed countries. What are its reasons for doing this? What are the characteristics of the new institutions? How do the new institutions relate to the old institutions? Will China’s initiatives lead to better global economic governance? This paper attempts to answer these questions. Its main conclusions are that China is trying to create a new international economic order in which its political power is more commensurate with its economic power, its creation of new international institutions is an important part of this strategy, the institutions that China is creating are meant to be open and inclusive and to introduce “better practices”, and it is possible – though not necessarily probable – that China can make a major contribution to global economic governance provided it can overcome operational challenges, skepticism about its intentions and too narrow a view of its national interest.     

The inconsequence of negative statehouse evaluations on ballot measures: Evidence from survey experiments

Existing scholarship about ballot measure voting and elite cuegivers suggests that the express endorsement of an unpopular legislature on a statewide ballot measure will depress voter support. Despite seven tests across two decades on both high- and low-profile measures, it did not. This null finding is in keeping with macro-level patterns of strong public support for the more than 4000 legislative referrals approved by voters in the past century. Consequently, we propose that the influence of an elite endorsement on voter behavior is more complicated than past research suggests. Specifically, in keeping with the seminal observation made by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (1995) that American political cynicism is more a matter of distaste for certain political practices than for actual political institutions, we suspect that when voters are overwhelmed by policy proposals that are both unfamiliar and complex, they may find assurance in the imprimatur of their General Assembly.     

Power to the legal professionals: Is there an Americanization of European law?

Twelve years ago, Robert Kagan asked “Should Europe worry about adversarial legalism?” He answered this question with a qualified “no,” and identified a number of sources of resistance to such a trend. More recently, he broadened the issue in this journal by asking whether European countries experience an “Americanization” of their legal systems. The articles in this Symposium on the Americanization of European Law all revisit that question. The present article introduces the topic, discusses the elements that make up adversarial legalism, and summarizes and compares the findings of the articles in the Symposium. The articles find an increase in one dimension of adversarial legalism, namely, more legalism, that is, more litigation, more formalism, and more verdicts interfering with politics, but hardly any increase in adversarialism. Tenacious pre‐existing national legal and political cultures and institutions resist a further move in the direction of American style adversarial legalism. The mix of more litigation, more legalism, and more politicization, overlaid on the pre‐existing hierarchic authority of courts and legal functionaries has, however, strengthened the societal and political power of the judiciary vis‐à‐vis other powers. A professional elite is increasingly making the political choices that in a democratic society ought to be made by democratic representatives. Perhaps Europe should worry about this.     

Is anyone listening? Mass and elite opinion cueing in the EU

The paper analyses the connections between elite and mass opinion in the European Union. It considers both the ways in which mass publics use heuristics supplied by political elites to form their EU opinions, and the ways in which political elites respond to the opinions of the mass publics they represent. The paper employs data from simultaneously-conducted elite and mass surveys carried out in sixteen European countries in 2007. The results show that masses and elites in Europe do appear to take cues from one another in forming their EU opinions. Political elites base their individual-level opinions on the average position taken by their respective (national) party supporters. Mass respondents base their opinions on the average position taken by elite members of the (national) party with which they identify.     

Institutional Perspectives on Political Institutions

This article examines some basic assumptions about the nature of political institutions, the ways in which practices and rules that comprise institutions are established, sustained, and transformed, and the ways in which those practices and rules are converted into political behavior through the mediation of interpretation and capability. We discuss an institutional approach to political life that emphasizes the endogenous nature and social construction of political institutions, identities, accounts, and capabilities.     

Institutional constraints on cabinet formation: Veto points and party system dynamics

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies has presented contradicting evidence on the role of political veto institutions and parliamentary polarization on the formation of cabinet types. Institutional rules may either provide significant leeway for political parties or seriously constrain them when forming sustainable coalitions. In contrast to previous studies we argue that the effect of political institutions is conditional on the degree of polarization in parliament. We test our hypotheses using original data on 842 cabinet formations in 33 advanced democracies between 1945–2018. In line with previous research, we find that the institutional rules have a pronounced effect on the type of cabinet formed, but that institutional rules moderate the effect of party system polarization. Thus, our findings provide important new insights on cabinet formation which are particularly relevant for today's increasingly polarized parliaments.     

Regional Identity and Support for Europe: Distinguishing Between Cultural and Political Social Identity in France

Much has been written about the “crisis of the nation state” in Europe. The shifting of state competencies to the European and regional levels is expected to generate new loyalties to these levels, possibly at the expense of national solidarity. While numerous studies show that individuals with an exclusive national identity are less likely to support integration than those with an inclusive identity, much less is known about the interaction between regional identity and European identity. Using public opinion data collected in 16 French regions, I show that exclusive regionalists are less likely to feel attached to Europe and support the EU. However, I also find that the impact of regional identity on European identity varies by the type of identity invoked—cultural versus political. While cultural regional identity lowers support for European institutions, political regional identity has the opposite effect.