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.     

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.     

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     

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.     

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.     

Capital mobility,perspectives and central bank independence: Exchange rate policy since 1945

Hegemonic stability theory has been the traditional explanation in International Political Economy for the trend from fixed to floating exchange rates which was brought about by the collapse of Bretton Woods. This approach is found to be problematic. A more powerful explanation is the postwar rise in capital mobility, which produces a trade-off between exchange rate stability and policy autonomy. Preferences for these two policies have been a function of perspectives on economic policy and the degree of central bank independence. Independent central banks prefer domestic policy autonomy to exchange rate management, as they have no socio-political incentives to produce competitive, stable exchange rates. Their interests are predominantly in achieving low domestic inflation. In addition, current perspectives hold that the best way of securing international exchange rate stability is to pursue stable macroeconomic policies at home, resulting in the predominance of floating exchange rate policies. This trend will continue into the near future despite opportunities for international cooperation presented by the rationalization of world monetary politics into a G3 following the introduction of the euro. This may have adverse effects on the global economy for three reasons. First, there is a long-term danger that triad regionalization will result in a revival of neo-mercantilist policies, in which the exchange rate could play a part. Second, a high proportion of world trade and finance will be denominated in dollars and euros, rendering the stability of the dollar/euro exchange rate a global public good. Third, dollar/euro exchange rate misalignments which harm either the U.S. or EMU will be harmful to the global economy because of the high percentage of world GDP accounted for by these two areas.     

Labor market policy: A comparative view on the costs and benefits of labor market flexibility

I review theories and evidence on wage‐setting institutions and labor market policies in an international comparative context. These include collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection laws, unemployment insurance (UI), mandated parental leave, and active labor market policies (ALMPs). Since it is unlikely that an unregulated private sector would provide the income insurance these institutions do, these policies may enhance economic efficiency. However, to the extent that unemployment or resource misallocation results from such measures, these efficiency gains may be offset. Overall, Scandinavia and Central Europe follow distinctively more interventionist policies than the English‐speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere. Possible explanations for such differences include vulnerability to external market forces and ethnic homogeneity. I then review evidence on the impacts of these policies and institutions. While the interventionist model appears to cause lower levels of wage inequality and high levels of job security to incumbent workers, it also in some cases leads to the relegation of new entrants (disproportionately women, youth, and immigrants) as well as the less skilled to temporary jobs or unemployment. Making labor markets more flexible could bring these groups into the regular labor market to a greater extent, at the expense of higher levels of economic insecurity for incumbents and higher levels of wage inequality. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The effects of alternative power-sharing arrangements: Do “moderating” institutions moderate party strategies and government policy outputs?

Advocates of consensual political institutions, i.e. institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties, claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs. To date, however, there exists little research – either theoretical or empirical – that evaluates whether consensual institutions promote moderation in parties' policy declarations. We develop a multiparty spatial model with policy-seeking parties operating under proportional representation, in which we vary the extent to which government policies reflect power-sharing among all parties as opposed to being determined by a single party. We determine parties' optimal (Nash equilibrium) policy positions and conclude that power-sharing does not typically motivate parties to moderate their policy declarations; in fact, policy positioning under power-sharing appears to be similar to or more extreme than under single-party dominance. Consistent with previous research, however, we find that power-sharing does promote moderation in government policy outputs. Our results have implications for parties’ election strategies, for the design of political institutions, and for representative government.     

Debt,democratization, and development in Latin America: How policy can affect global warming

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis conjectures a nonlinear relationship between pollution and economic growth, such that pollution per capita initially increases as countries economically develop, but then reaches a maximum point before ultimately declining. Much of the EKC literature has focused on testing this basic hypothesis and, in studies that find evidence of an EKC, estimating the “turning point” level of development at which the per capita pollution‐growth relationship changes sign. This approach has not emphasized the policy relevance of specification issues or the potential role of policy variables. This research explores a modified EKC specification which conditions the pollution‐growth relationship on a country's level of debt and degree of democratization. These variables turn out to be significant, implying that different political and economic contexts can shift EKCs and their turning points. These findings suggest that policies to relieve debt burdens and institute political reform, in addition to their usual justifications, also could be used as a strategy to reduce carbon emissions from developing countries. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The use and non-use of policy appraisal tools in public policy making: an analysis of three European countries and the European Union

The increasing complexity of policy problems, coupled with the political desire to base new policies on the foundation of firm evidence, has accelerated the development of policy assessment tools. These range from complex computer models and cost benefit analysis through simple checklists and decision trees. In the last decade, many governments have established formal policy assessment systems to harness these tools in order to facilitate more evidence-based policy making. These tools are potentially widely available, but to what extent are they used by policy makers and what becomes of the evidence that they generate? This paper addresses these questions by studying the empirical patterns of tool use across 37 cases in three European countries and the European Commission. It uses a simple classification of tools into advanced, formal and simple types. It finds that even when tools are embedded in policy assessment systems, their use is differentiated and on the whole very limited, in particular when it comes to more advanced tools. It then explores these patterns from contrasting theoretical perspectives to shed light on why, when and how different policy assessment tools are used in the policy process.     

Aristotelian framing: logos,ethos, pathos and the use of evidence in policy frames

In this research note, we propose to complement the analytical toolbox for framing analyses with the categories of Aristotelian rhetoric. As our case, we analyse the function of the use of evidence in frame building in the context of Swiss direct-democratic campaigns preceding votes on smoking bans. Based on rhetoric, a frame can be considered to contain three interrelated elements: (1) political arguments (logos), (2) cultural symbols (ethos), and (3) emotional appeal (pathos). By comparing evidence-based arguments with arguments that do not refer to evidence, the research note illustrates that backing arguments (logos) by evidence increases their trustworthiness (ethos) but not their emotional appeal (pathos). We consider the Aristotelian categories a fruitful tool to enlarge existing framing research with regard to the use of evidence.