Ballot Structure and Satisfaction with Democracy

This article analyses the influence of ballot structure over satisfaction with democracy. In line with previous literature, we hypothesize that some ballot structures – such as preferential ballots – generate more satisfaction with democracy than closed ones. Yet, we expect these differences to be especially relevant among the more knowledgeable electorate, since any open ballot structure requires more sophisticated voters. Using CSES surveys, our results do not show a clear and simple relation between ballot openness and satisfaction with democracy as some previous research seems to suggest. Our findings rather suggest a more limited effect. Preferential ballots and open lists are the only ballot structures that generate more satisfaction, when compared to most of the remaining ballot structures. Yet, this relation is restricted only among the more knowledgeable electorate. The liberty of choice that ballot structure offers only concerns a reduced portion of the electorate, namely the more politically sophisticated one.     

The effect of congruence in policy priorities on electoral participation

This paper proposes that voters are more likely to turn out at elections if candidates and parties address their issue concerns in the election campaign. Voters with high levels of congruence in policy priorities should perceive the campaign as more interesting and the election as more relevant. In addition, the costs associated with the vote choice should be lower if voters' policy priorities are salient. The effect should be weakened by party identification, which acts both as a mobilising force and as a heuristic to the vote choice, making information costs less detrimental to turnout. The analysis, which links voter survey data with candidate survey and media content data from the 2009 German federal election, confirms the hypotheses.     

Does Labor Migration Improve Access to Public Goods in Source Communities? Evidence from Rural China

What is the effect of out-migration on drinking water provision in rural China? Despite concerns about the ability of migrants to contribute to collective action for public goods provision, this study demonstrates that villages with higher rates of labor migration are more likely to have public drinking water than those with little migration. Temporary labor migration reduces isolation and increases connections outside the village. External funding sources including county governments favor villages where they have contacts as well as villages that need more support because most working-age adults are working outside the village. As a result, villages with high rates of out-migration are more likely have public access to drinking water. The findings are based on data from a survey of more than 50 natural villages in two townships of Southwest China.     

Administrative Justice in the Wake of I,Daniel Blake

This article argues that Ken Loach's film, I, Daniel Blake, invites deep reflection on the relationship between the individual and the state, and, more particularly, on the role of administrative justice in restoring a re‐imagined sense of citizenship. Drawing on earlier debates from the 1950s, as well as on more recent advocacy of the ‘connected society’, the article proposes that to meet such an ambition, administrative justice must be recognised as an overarching set of principles and values, rooted in a framework of human rights and with a reinvigorated public‐sector ombud‐institution at its centre. In this way, administrative justice might serve as an effective and restorative counterweight to more legalistic options for responding to public grievance, whether the result of routine encounters with the state or of a major breakdown in trust, such as that occasioned by ‘Grenfell Tower’.     

Public Employees’ Perceived Promotion Channels in Local China: Merit‐based or Guanxi‐orientated?

Do performance or personal ties (guanxi) matter more in the promotion of local public employees in China? In this paper, we examine public employees’ perceptions of the roles played by merit and guanxi in promotion. We adopt a configurational approach to classify public employees’ perceptions of the reasons for their promotion into four groups: merit‐based, guanxi‐orientated, ambidextrous (both), and fatalistic (neither). A recent survey of 886 public employees shows that around 40% see promotion as merit‐based and 20% as guanxi‐orientated, with 10% perceiving promotion to be ambidextrous and 30% fatalistic. Younger employees with higher rank are more likely to perceive promotion to be merit‐based, whilst highly educated and highly ranked employees with strong public service motivation are more prone to see promotion as ambidextrous. Those who perceive promotion to be ambidextrous are more satisfied with promotion fairness, suggesting that a subtle balance needs to be maintained between merit‐based and guanxi‐orientated promotion channels, rather than rejection of any guanxi element.     

Citizenship, Consumerism and Local Government in Sweden

Recent developments in Swedish local government and central-local government relations have been characterized by re-regulation and cut-back strategies on the one hand and decentralization and deregulation on the other. In this article these developments are analysed as a dynamic process with contradictory features. Swedish society is becoming more and more differentiated and specialized with fewer mechanisms of collective socialization, but with more economic and strategic calculations on the part of central and local authorities, interest organizations and individuals. New formal rules are developed in order to handle conflicts and enhance public sector legitimacy. In the communes we can identify an ideological shift from viewing the commune as a political institution to regarding it as a service-producing company. In addition, citizens are increasingly looked upon as individual consumers rather than political citizens. Corresponding organizational solutions such as depoliticization, privatization and freedom of choice have been developed. However, as a reaction to communal consumerism there is also a growing interest in communitarian values. There is an increasing number of examples of people participating in matters of common nature and expressing their belonging to a community. An interesting question for future research is whether the observed contradictory tendencies will increase or decrease the legitimacy of the traditional democratic institutions at the communal level.     

Do technocrats boost the acceptance of policy proposals among the citizenry? Evidence from a survey experiment in Italy

Are policies proposed by technocrats more easily accepted by citizens than those proposed by traditional partisan actors? This is a crucial question, as politicians increasingly rely on technocrats for resolving “wicked problems” such as financial, environmental, and health crises. To answer this question, we conducted a survey experiment among 5000 Italian respondents. At the time of our experiment, Italy was governed by a “grand coalition” of various technocratic and partisan actors, enabling us to realistically vary the proponents of different policy proposals. Overall, citizens are more likely to accept policies proposed by technocrats as opposed to party leaders. In particular, we find that technocratic proponents boost policy acceptance even more for economic and valence issues. Furthermore, we find that this “technocratic effect” is generally stronger among citizens who are more likely to disagree with the policy content.     

What's the Civil in Civil Society? Robert Putnam, Italy and the Republican Tradition

Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work implies a conception of civil society with claims to republican ancestry. However, in four ways, he misses the more 'political' understanding of this Enlightenment category in republican writers, including his hero, Tocqueville. Where Putnam's civic community is spontaneous and voluntaristic, republicans emphasise the creation of civil society from above by state-building and broader political associations. Where his civic spirit is local, republicans stress polity-centred citizenship identification. Where Putnam's 'social capital' is a generalised, all-purpose resource with positive effects, modern republicans such as Tocqueville stress normative ambiguities of civic space and see the associational cradles of modern trust and solidarity as more demanding. Finally, where his civil society is a harmonious, 'functioning' place, republicans often stress conflict between citizens and between citizens and the state. A reconsideration of empirical and theoretical problems in his analysis suggests that a more republican conceptualisation of civil society would have facilitated different questions and more interesting answers.     

Gravitation or discrimination? Determinants of litigation in the World Trade Organisation

The strong presence of large countries in World Trade Organisation (WTO) dispute settlement and the absence of very poor ones have raised concerns that increasing legalisation in the global trading system has not diminished discrimination against less powerful countries as much as expected. This article examines dispute initiations in all WTO member state dyads in 1995–2003 to shed more light on this issue. The analysis suggests that the main driver of dispute initiation is a gravitational one: larger economies and bigger traders are more likely to become involved in trade disputes primarily because their economies are more diversified, and also because greater market size makes them more attractive targets of litigation. While evidence is not found for discriminatory effects against countries with small legal capacity, the results of the article point to a more complex form of power bias – namely a preponderance effect. They suggest that disputes among country dyads including a much more powerful defendant than complainant or vice versa are dealt with outside the WTO. This finding is potentially worrying because it is, arguably, easier to reduce legal capacity differences than to reduce power differences.     

Who has turned the project management lights on? A comparative analysis of transportation and information technology in US state governments

We provide a comparative analysis of capital project management for major transportation and information technology (IT) acquisitions in US state governments, focusing on the use of earned value management (EVM). Results indicate that most states have adopted basic reforms, such as establishing project management offices and developing guidelines based on industry standards. However, fewer have implemented reforms with more teeth to them, such as centralized oversight and EVM. We find that states with greater spending are more likely to use EVM but that it is more commonly prescribed for IT than transportation.     

Pluralism,corporatism and perception of corruption

When people know who is influencing the elected politicians and they may ‘put the rascals out’ in case they feel that the incumbents are corrupt, ceteris paribus, their perception of the level of corruption should not be affected by lobbying. If on the other hand people are not sure which or how many actors are influencing public policy and they are not able to hold the government truly accountable as interest group influence is constant with different governments, people will be more likely to perceive the government as corrupted. The former system is a characteristic of corporatism and the latter of pluralism. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that interest groups with resources such as business groups or firms in pluralist systems are more influential than groups with few resources. Thus, people may perceive pluralist policy‐making system as more corrupt than corporatist policy‐making system where fewer visible actors have more or less equal weight in the policy‐making process. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Restoring trust in the police: Why female officers reduce suspicions of corruption

Recent studies show a clear link between women in government and reduced concerns about corruption. Until now, it remains unclear which underlying attitudes about women explain the perception that they will reduce corruption. Using a survey question about adding women to a police force, with an embedded experimental treatment, we examine three distinct stereotypes that might explain the power of women to reduce concerns about corruption: gender stereotypes of women as more ethical and honest, the perception of women as political outsiders, and beliefs that women are generally more risk averse. We find that people do perceive women as more effective at combating corruption, and these perceptions are greatly enhanced when information about women's outsider status and risk aversion is provided.     

Reconsidering individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.     

Less is more: The paradox of choice in voting behavior

How does the number of candidates competing in an election affect voting behavior? In theory, as the number of candidates running for office increase, citizens’ utility from voting also increases. With more candidates, voters are more likely to have candidates that are close to their ideal points. Practically, however, more candidates also means a higher cognitive burden for voters who must learn more during campaigns in order to find their “ideal” candidate. In this paper, we examine how choice set size affects voting behavior. Using a survey experiment, we show that subjects presented with many options learn less about candidates, are more likely to vote based on meaningless heuristics, and are more likely to commit voting errors, when compared with subjects who choose between only a few candidates.     

Dispersed communication by central bank committees and the predictability of monetary policy decisions

The paper asks whether members of central bank decision-making committees should communicate with the public in a collegial manner, by conveying the consensus or majority view of the committee, or in an individualistic way, by providing the diversity of views among the committee members. It finds that more active as well as more consistent communication by committee members improves the predictability of monetary policy decisions significantly. This effect is sizeable as communication dispersion across committee members accounts on average for one third to one half of the market’s prediction errors of FOMC policy decisions. Moreover, more active and more consistent communication are found to also reduce the degree of uncertainty about the future path of interest rates. These findings suggest that a collegial communication which stresses the consensus view on policy inclinations can enhance the effectiveness of central bank communication.     

National Intelligence University: a half century educating the next generation of U.S. Intelligence Community Leaders

Founded in 1962, the National Intelligence University has evolved over more than five decades into living up to its current vision as ‘The Center of Academic Life for the Intelligence Community.’ With the intelligence reforms post-9/11 and the development of the NIU concept, the mission has changed from a military-centric focus of instruction to educating a more diverse audience from throughout the IC, both military and civilian, full-time and part-time, active and Reserves, with an emphasis on taking higher education to an interagency clientele spread globally and desiring different learning outcomes. The result is a rapid growth in offsite academic centers and a resurgence of certificate programs geared to professionals who already have a degree but wish to enhance their credentials in intelligence specialty fields. There is also an effort to revive concentrations and programs of study. This article outlines the steps NIU is taking to make itself more flexible and marketable to a growing and demanding academic audience that is much more than the uniformed DoD students who matriculated in the past with full-time resident study as their only option.     

Logistic Regression in Rare Events Data

We study rare events data, binary dependent variables with dozensto thousands of times fewer ones (events, such as wars, vetoes,cases of political activism, or epidemiological infections)than zeros ("nonevents"). In many literatures, these variableshave proven difficult to explain and predict, a problem thatseems to have at least two sources. First, popular statisticalprocedures, such as logistic regression, can sharply underestimatethe probability of rare events. We recommend corrections thatoutperform existing methods and change the estimates of absoluteand relative risks by as much as some estimated effects reportedin the literature. Second, commonly used data collection strategiesare grossly inefficient for rare events data. The fear of collectingdata with too few events has led to data collections with hugenumbers of observations but relatively few, and poorly measured,explanatory variables, such as in international conflict datawith more than a quarter-million dyads, only a few of whichare at war. As it turns out, more efficient sampling designsexist for making valid inferences, such as sampling all availableevents (e.g., wars) and a tiny fraction of nonevents (peace).This enables scholars to save as much as 99% of their (nonfixed)data collection costs or to collect much more meaningful explanatoryvariables. We provide methods that link these two results, enablingboth types of corrections to work simultaneously, and softwarethat implements the methods developed.     

The re-occurrence of violations in occupational safety and health administration inspections

How well do firms in the United States maintain compliance with occupational safety and health administration (OSHA) standards after being cited for a violation? How and why does this vary among standards? This paper identifies serious violations of 91 frequently cited standards at manufacturing plants during 1992–2002 and tracks compliance with that standard in later inspections over 10 years. While formal measures of Repeat violations are quite low, we find considerably higher re-violation rates for some standards once we look separately at how often health standards are cited in later health inspections and safety standards cited in later safety inspections. Characteristics of the standards affect re-violation rates, but not always in the expected direction. Standards whose violations are rated as more hazardous or which received higher initial penalties tend to have more re-violations. These findings could reflect inspector behavior, with those standards getting more attention and thus being cited more frequently. When, as in the case of OSHA and other enforcement agencies, we know about violations only when inspectors cite them, we need to consider bureaucratic behavior as well as employers' incentives.