Dimensions of political conflict and party positions in multi-level democracies: evidence from the Local Manifesto Project

Partisan conflicts have been frequently analysed in comparative political science research. Yet little is known about the dimensions of political conflict at the local level in multi-level democracies. This article contributes to the literature on the estimation and analysis of party positions by first presenting a new dataset of more than 800 local party manifestos in Germany that allows for a systematic analysis of the dimensions of political conflict at the German local level. Secondly, it is demonstrated that (semi-)automatic content analysis of these texts offers a promising approach for gaining new insights into local party positions. Thirdly, the empirical analysis of German local party manifestos shows that partisan conflicts are not only structured along the left–right dimension but also along a dimension which distinguishes between parties addressing ‘local’ and ‘national’ issues to a varying degree in their manifestos, due to the different behaviour of established and populist parties.     

Welfare expansion revisited: policy routines and their mediation by party, class and crisis, 1957–1982

Abstract. Post-war welfare effort (i.e., welfare spending as a share of national income) in advanced capitalist political democracies is proposed to result from policy routines emphasized in the traditional academic literatures complemented and mediated by class-linked factors stressed in the 'new political economy' literature. Both sets of factors are integrated into a single conception of state policy-making. In this, self-interested elite and administrative state personnel respond to their environments by means of relatively discretionary and relatively automatic policy routines, respectively. Left and non-Left governments mediate these routines and do so differently in different long-term institutional (strong-union versus weak-union) and macroeconomic (expansionary versus crisis) contexts. Welfare expansion is found to be amply explained by the proposed processes, differentiated by context. Left parties and militants are found to matter primarily in contexts marked by 'Left corporatism'(or strong unions) and/or by relatively 'expansionary economic climates'. Ironically, Left-party governments in Left corporatist contexts are found to be particularly sensitive to inflation where transfer spending is concerned. Where unions are strong, policy making is generally less incremental and more flexible. After 1973, policy sensitivity to real economic growth or decline looms large, and working-class-linked politics are muted where unions are weak, most especially where they are decentralized.     

How to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters: Disaggregating data from voting advice applications versus modeling survey responses

Valid and reliable estimates of the policy preferences of political parties' supporters are essential for the study of political representation. However, such estimates are not directly available from standard surveys of public opinion, which are typically representative by design only at the national level and rarely ask questions about public support for specific policies. In this article, we explore the possibility to use data from voting advice applications (VAA) to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters. To do that, first, we identify 10 questions on preferences towards issues of public policy that were asked around the same time and with similar wording in traditional surveys of public opinion and in VAAs fielded in Germany and in the Netherlands. Then we compare the VAA data disaggregated by political affiliation of the respondents to the survey data adjusted via multilevel regression modeling with poststratification (MRP). We find strong positive correlations between the estimates derived from both methods, especially after weighting the VAA data. Yet, point estimates are not always very close, and the match is sensitive to the treatment of neutral and ‘don't know’ answers. Overall, our results bode well for the validity of using VAA data in empirical research on political representation.     

Information flow and party influence: Theory,measurement, and policy consequences

In this paper I present a theory of party influence, based on Bayesian decision theory, as a process in which the voting decisions of individual legislators are influenced by information concerning the votes or intended votes of their rank-and-file colleagues. Procedures derived from the theory are then used to estimate the magnitude of party influence relative to the influence of the president and of party leaders, committee cue givers, and constituents on roll call voting in three policy domains in the U.S. House of Representatives. The results imply that party influence has important short-run and long-run consequences for public policy.     

Demoted leaders and exiled candidates: Disentangling party and person in the voter’s mind

The debate on personalization in electoral politics is inconclusive. There is confusion about the concept of personalization. Moreover, the fact that party evaluation and person evaluation are interrelated complicates the debate. This paper focuses on the latter problem by employing counterfactual thought experiments in which voters are asked to simulate their vote with their candidate lower on the party list or nominated by another party. The results show that most voters put party above person and less than ten percent put person above party. A sizeable third category has a preference for an individual candidate as long as that candidate does not leave the party. Also, personalization is slightly more important with regard to (the leaders of) populist parties, and individual candidates are more important for voters with less education, less political knowledge and a less deeply rooted party preference.     

Expert judgements of party policy positions: Uses and limitations in political research

European Journal of Political Research -     

Bounded oligarchy: How and when factions constrain leaders in party position-taking

This work investigates the process of position-taking, focussing on the factional bargaining within the party. Exploiting two recently built datasets that estimated the policy positions of Italian parties and factions from 1946 to 2010, we investigate if and to what extent factions bind the party leader in choosing the platform. We find confirmation for the idea that party positions are linked to factional preferences. Overall, the party works as a ‘bounded oligarchy’. Furthermore, the electoral payoff of party unity increases the impact of factional constraints when general elections approach. In line with the cartel party theory, however, autonomous leaders who are directly elected by a wider selectorate can get rid of factional ties choosing more moderate and vote-maximizing platforms.     

What parties want from their leaders: How office achievement trumps electoral performance as a driver of party leader survival

Rational choice theories of political behaviour start from the premise that parties seek policy, office, and votes. In accordance with this premise, previous research has shown that electoral performance and office achievement independently affect party leader survival. However, we know little about how goal attainment interacts across these two domains. This paper proposes a novel hypothesis stating that intrinsic goals (office) dominate over purely instrumental ones (votes). As a result, the impact of electoral performance on party leader survival should be conditional on office achievement. Using data on over 500 party leaders in 14 parliamentary democracies between 1965 and 2012, we show that electoral performance and office achievement strongly affect leadership turnover. However, we also demonstrate that the electoral performance effect disappears when parties enter or exit office at the same time. These results constitute the best direct evidence to date that parties prioritise office achievement over electoral success.     

Congressional certification: How firms use former Congress members to lobby on their behalf

This paper models the effect of firm-level profitability (earnings before interest and taxes and return on sales) against certification by former members of the U.S. Congress. Although some scholars have studied certification, none have studied certification in the public policy market as is done in the current work. Likewise, although scholars have studied the effects of lobbying and political connections on firms' outcomes, none have studied lobbying through former Congress members specifically. The findings confirm that, after controlling for numerous factors, firms can use former Congress members to effectively lobby and certify their intentions. Both firm-level earnings before interest and taxes and return on sales were significantly associated with prior lobbying efforts by these former elected federal officials in several different estimation techniques employed in the study.     

Policy networks,networks and European Union policy making: A sceptical view

The policy network approach and the networks model are the most recent conceptual frameworks to be applied to the policy‐making processes of the European Union and are regarded by many as the most appropriate. This article, while acknowledging their appeal, puts forward a sceptical view about the usefulness of their application to the EU. Three contentions are advanced about these approaches: first, that the fluidity of EU processes eludes their capture; second, that they are insufficiently sensitive to the EU's institutional complexity and fail to recognise the importance of EU institutions; and third, that they underestimate the difficulty of delineating networks involving the EU.¹     

Joblessness and poverty in America's central cities: Causes and policy prescriptions

Abstract

Two paradigms pervade the policy debate on the causes of urban joblessness and poverty: (1) a structural, nonvoluntaristic perspective emphasizing the roles of urban economic change, residential segregation, and spatial and skills mismatches, and (2) a rational‐choice, voluntaristic perspective contending that the generosity and ready availability of welfare programs have removed the incentive for poor persons to accept low‐paying jobs. This article brings together propositions of each paradigm into a comprehensive theoretical model. The study measured and tested key causal operators of the model for a sample of 67 large U.S. cities, with special attention to race and gender.

Results show that structural and welfare disincentive perspectives are not in conflict but rather operate side by side to reinforce joblessness and poverty. Race and gender, especially the role of urban space for women's work, are important. The article raises pertinent policy issues derived from the two perspectives and from the analysis.     

Explaining Explanations: How Legislators Explain their Policy Positions and How Citizens React

Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators’ explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within‐subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between‐subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to their audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support—especially among people who disagree with the legislators’ roll‐call positions.     

Parties are always right: the effects of party cues and policy information on attitudes towards EU issues

Abstract

This article analyses the influence that political parties exert upon citizens’ opinions about European Union issues. By measuring at the same time the content and source effects on political attitudes, the article considers the possibility that voters pay less attention to the arguments used in a political message than to its source. Results from an online survey experiment in Spain show that partisan voters use a heuristic model of processing when taking positions on an unfamiliar EU issue, even though the prevalence of the source effect is moderated by the respondent’s political sophistication and party attachment. The results also indicate that some respondents tend to pay less attention to a message’s content when the message comes from their preferred party. Such findings raise concerns about the possibility for EU issue voting to guarantee the accountability of political elites and party–voter linkages.     

Reluctant policy innovation through profit concession and informality tolerance: A strategic relational view of policy entrepreneurship in China's urban redevelopment

This paper engages with the theoretical perspective of policy entrepreneurship to examine the pattern and process of policy change in the context of China's urban redevelopment. Drawing upon a strategic-relational reinterpretation of policy entrepreneurship, this paper identifies a distinctive form of reluctant policy innovation in the “three old renewals” scheme initiated in Guangzhou where profit concession and informality tolerance were practiced to create a small window of opportunity for the project of urban redevelopment to break ground. The motivation of policy entrepreneurship in the successful urban renewal projects in Guangzhou was heavily contingent upon the geographically important location of the project site and the historically incidence of hosting the 2010 Asian Games, which forced municipal government to become entrepreneurial and innovative in decision making and income redistribution in order to get things done as quickly as possible. The distinct fashion of policy innovation identified in the case of Guangzhou points to the polymorphous and dynamic nature of policy entrepreneurship and advocates a relational treatment of the strategies and motives of policy entrepreneurs embedded in concrete geographical and historical context.     

Voters' party preferences in multiparty systems and their coalitional and spatial implications: Germany after unification

How should party preferences of voters in a multiparty system be measured, compared and aggregated? We use city block metric of distances between the pairwise comparisons of the five German parties (1995 survey data for West and East Germany). Neither in West nor in East Germany, a party gains the absolute majority of voters' preferences. We derive coalition preferences from the party rankings; the governing coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP is not the winner, compared with other feasible coalitions of the German party system. But the party rankings of the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition leaners are more homogeneous than other groups of coalition leaners. In the second part of the article, we analyze the common structure of all consistent party rankings. Do voters apply the same criteria to evaluate the political parties? Although only a slight majority of individual rankings fit the often used ideological left-right scale, there does not exist a competing one-dimensional order of the parties that would capture more voters. The joint scale of individual party rankings is interpreted as the collective order which facilitates political orientation of voters. This collective order is more pronounced in West than in East Germany where individuals are almost as consistent in their party rankings but where the rankings fit the collective order less well than in West Germany.

     

European integration and electoral democracy: How the European Union constrains party competition in the Member States

The assignment of policy competencies to the European Union has reduced the divergence of party policy positions nationally, leaving the electorate with fewer policy options. Building upon insights from spatial proximity theories of party competition, the convergence argument predicts convergence particularly in policy domains with increasing EU competence. As the policy commitments that derive from EU membership increase, parties become more constrained in terms of the feasible policy alternative they can implement when in office. The analysis uses manifesto data at the country‐party system level for nine policy domains. It uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with country fixed effects, a lagged dependent variable and country corrected standard errors. Controlling for other factors that could plausibly explain policy convergence, the models also assess whether the convergent effect of party positions varies across different types of parties. The main finding is that in policy domains where the involvement of the EU has increased, the distance between parties' positions tends to decrease. The constraining impact of EU policy decisions differs between Member and non‐Member States. This effect is more apparent for the policy agendas of larger, mainstream and pro‐EU parties in the Member States.     

The Mormon dilemma: How old and new religious divides hurt Mormon candidates in the United States

This paper shows that attitudes towards Mormons are very divisive on two levels: many religious conservatives distrust Mormons and refuse to vote for them because they are not Christian as they claim to be, while religious and political liberals see Mormons as part of a repressive religious coalition along with evangelicals and Catholics. Mormon politicians are in an awkward position between these two sides of America's “culture war,” not fully accepted by either. Using new survey questions about attitudes towards Mormons and Mitt Romney, this paper explores the nature of the two anti-Mormonisms and their electoral consequences. I argue that feelings about Mormonism have been an important factor in respondent evaluations of Mitt Romney.     

From political conflict to partisan evaluations: How citizens assess party ideology and competence in polarized elections

Recent comparative electoral research shows that both ideological and competence voting are influenced by the degree of party system polarization. However, while the former association is uncontroversial, investigations on the latter have led to contradicting results. This study takes one step back, arguing that polarization rather affects how voters perceive party ideological positioning and competence. Building on literature linking elite polarization to mass partisanship, the study argues that party identification is a strong moderator of party evaluations in polarized elections. Hypotheses are tested with multilevel logit models on a pooled data set of European Election Studies from 1994 to 2009. Results show that partisans are more likely to view their preferred party as the most competent and ideologically close when the environment is polarized, while there is no such effect for non-partisans.