Balancing constituency representation and party responsiveness in the US Senate: the conditioning effect of state ideological heterogeneity

Spatial proximity theories of representation focus on the importance of the average views of constituencies in guiding legislators’ decisions. However, legislative scholars also identify political parties as central in structuring behavior. We present and test a theory of how legislators might resolve this tension. We propose that heterogeneity in constituent preferences conditions how legislators balance the (sometimes) rival pressures of constituency and party. Specifically, greater preference heterogeneity weakens the impact of the average constituency views on roll-call behavior while strengthening the impact of party. We show support with data from the US Senate and discuss the implications for democratic representation.     

Government termination in multilevel settings. How party congruence affects the survival of sub-national governments in Germany and Spain

ABSTRACT

Past studies on government survival in parliamentary democracies have been limited to national governments. However, most societies live in a multilevel polity where different policies are decided at distinct governmental layers. So far, the conditions triggering sub-national governments’ termination have remained unexplored. Our paper makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we explicitly focus our analysis on the sub-national government level. Second, we expand the analytical scope by assuming a multilevel setting, in which the survival of sub-national governments is dependent on both the party composition of the national government (vertical congruence) and their sub-national peers (horizontal congruence). We test the impact of both congruence measures on the early termination risk of regional governments. Our analysis is complemented by including “traditional” factors from national government termination literature, such as structural attributes of governments and their bargaining environment, into empirical modelling. Analysing a novel dataset on 494 regional governments in Germany and Spain we find that the risk of sub-national government termination is related to varying levels of vertical congruence. Furthermore, we find interesting explanatory variation between the two countries with regard to the effect size of economic performance, regional authority and congruence.     

Balancing Regionalism and Localism: How Institutions and Incentives Shape American Transportation Policy

Public policy decisions are increasingly made by regional governance efforts that involve diverse decision makers from multiple government units within a geographic region. These decision-making bodies face competing pressures to represent regional and local interests. We study how decision makers balance preferences for regionalism and localism within metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), the policymaking entities that are responsible for implementing U.S. federal surface transportation policy at the regional level. Our model of regional governance relates variation in regional policy outcomes to the incentives of MPO decision makers and the institutional environments in which they interact. Analyzing data from a sample of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, we find that MPOs dominated by elected officials produce more locally focused policies, holding other factors constant, while MPOs dominated by nonelected public managers produce more regionally oriented policies. Contextual factors, as well as the regional governance institutions themselves, further shape the balance between regionalism and localism.     

Re‐evaluating the relationship between electoral rules and ideological congruence

Two new studies challenge the prevailing consensus that proportional representation (PR) systems produce greater ideological congruence between governments and their citizens than majoritarian ones. This has led to what has become known as the ‘ideological congruence controversy’. G. Bingham Powell claims to resolve this controversy in favour of PR systems. Specifically, he argues that the results from the two new studies are based on an anomalous decade and that PR systems generally do produce greater government congruence. In addition, he also asserts that PR systems exhibit less variability in government congruence. In this article, the empirical evidence for these two claims is re‐evaluated using exactly the same data as employed by Powell. The analysis indicates that although PR systems produce better and more consistent representation in the legislature, they do not hold an advantage when it comes to representation at the governmental level.     

Narrative policy analysis and the integration of public involvement in decision making

Public involvement in environmental policy analysis and planning may be in some cases for the purpose of incorporating public values and preferences in decision making. Narrative policy analysis is put forward as a method, which is particularly useful to the practice of public involvement for maintaining a juxtaposition of views throughout the policy development and planning process. It is argued that this process may facilitate the consideration of public preferences in a decision-making process. This can be achieved through the joint development of a meta-narrative.     

Party knowledge and candidate knowledge: constituency campaigning and voting and the 1997 British General Election

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the electoral impact of constituency campaigns in British General Elections. Much is now known about the electoral consequences of local campaigns on parties’ constituency vote shares. Yet more remains to be discovered about the impacts of these local campaigns on voters’ knowledge of parties and candidates. Analysis of data from the 1997 British General Election demonstrates that the local campaign is associated with improved voter knowledge of who is standing for each party in a constituency, which is, in its turn, associated with an increased chance of voting for the party in the election, other things being equal. Campaign efforts at different scales, from the national to the local, have different impacts on voters’ knowledge.     

The limits and rewards of political opportunism: How electoral timing affects the outcome of currency crises

Politicians are often assumed to be opportunistic. This article examines both whether there is a limit to this opportunism and whether voters reward policy makers for opportunistic behaviour. By looking at currency crisis situations, the article presents a graphic rational opportunistic political business cycle model in which incumbents face a tradeoff between their wish to signal competence and the economic constraints imposed by the crisis. It analyses how electoral incentives affect policy makers' management of currency crises and how this management in turn affects the subsequent election outcome. The empirical results of probit models with selection using a sample of 122 crises in 48 industrial and developing countries between 1983 and 2003 confirm the model's prediction that under certain circumstances some types of policy makers do indeed have incentives to deviate from optimal policy in the run-up to elections – and that voters reward this behaviour by re-electing policy makers who follow such strategies. However, there is a limit to the readiness to manipulate: when speculative pressure is too severe, incumbents no longer manipulate policy but implement the least painful policy option instead.     

Industrialists and farmers: British interests and the European community

The ‘Europeanisation’ of domestic public policies has been among the key themes in recent reforms in EU member states. This article employs the analytical concept of ‘isomorphism’ to come to a better understanding of ‘Europeanisation’. Various mechanisms which might lead to isomorphic change are being identified and applied to the reforms in German competition and public procurement law. The application of the isomorphism framework suggests that ‘Europeanisation’ has multiple sources and cannot be understood as a uniform process nor as leading to uniform outcomes.     

Belief systems concerning the environment: The general public,attentive publics,and state legislators

This paper examines multiple characteristics of belief systems among people at different levels in the policy process using the same measures in the same time period. More specifically, it analyzes belief systems concerning the environment among the general public, several attentive publics, and state legislators in Idaho. The following belief system characteristics are probed: horizontal constraint among specific issue beliefs, and between general environmental orientations and party and ideology; vertical constraint between the general environmental orientation and specific issue beliefs; and the role of general orientations in screening incoming information. Legislators are more likely to connect their environmental beliefs to partisan and ideological orientations. However, attentive and general public respondents do exhibit substantial constraintwithin the environmental issue domain; individual self-placement on a preservationist-developmentalist dimension appears to provide a cohering force in orientations to the environment. While legislators exhibit greater belief connections with general political orientations, the results also suggest an order in the public's beliefs about the environment and in the nature of conflict over the environment.     

How electoral vulnerability affects pension politics: Introducing a concept,measure and empirical application

Are electorally vulnerable politicians really less likely to support controversial legislation, such as pension reforms? While the literature on welfare state retrenchment has increasingly pointed to the role of electoral factors in the dynamics of social policy cutbacks, there are few studies that actually measure the magnitude of electoral pressure and its consequent impact on the politics of reform. To this end, the authors have developed a quantitative measure of the electoral vulnerability of politicians and tested its impact on pension reform outcomes using an original dataset comprising 16 Western European countries from 1980 to 2003. In line with expectations, the results show that the impact of electoral vulnerability on reform depends upon the system of interest intermediation. In corporatist systems, electoral vulnerability indeed impedes reform. But in pluralist systems, increased electoral vulnerability is associated with higher levels of reform. This is because unions in corporatist (but not in pluralist) systems can exploit electoral vulnerability in pre‐legislative bargaining, and thus pressure politicians. Consequently, this study has broader implications for the differential responsiveness of democracies to redistributive issues more generally.     

The Downsian model of electoral participation: Formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect

This paper applies a game-theoretic model of participation under uncertainty to investigate the negative relationship between constituency size and voter turnout rates: theconstituency size effect. We find that this theoretical model accounts for almost all of the variation in turnout due to size in cross sectional data from school budget referenda.     

Explaining cross‐national variation in the relationship between priority congruence and satisfaction with democracy

Previous research has shown that citizens tend to be more satisfied with the functioning of democracy when their ideological positions are more proximate to representatives'. This article argues that congruence in policy priorities between citizens and political elites should have a similar effect: citizens whose concerns are shared by elites should perceive them to be more attentive and responsive to public concerns and societal needs. Yet, the relationship might vary with differences in expectations towards democracy and representation. Specifically, it should be stronger in more democratic countries and older democracies. The hypotheses are empirically tested in a multilevel regression framework, where voter survey data from the 2009 European Election Study is linked with candidate survey data. The results indicate that citizens are indeed more satisfied with democracy if elites share their concerns, and the effect increases with democratic experience.     

Voting on public spending: Differences between public employees,transfer recipients,and private workers

Politicians who support higher public spending in the hope of gaining the support of transfer recipients, such as the aged, the unemployed, and those on welfare, have no reason to believe that the strategy will succeed; according to the evidence reviewed here, transfer recipients do not vote much differently on such issues from other voters. State and local employees have shown a clear preference for higher public spending, but their numbers are limited and the relative strength of their preference weak, so that their impact on voting outcomes has been only marginal.     

Passions and interests revisited: the psychological foundations of economics and politics

Homo Politicus, Homo Oeconomicus. Can these two abstract human types meaningfully be distinguished? Is there a characteristic set of motivations that drive human beings in so far as they are political actors and a different set that drive their economic lives? What are the psychological foundations of economics and politics? The answers to these questions have significant implications both for the study and the practice of economics and politics. If homo politicus is essentially identical to homo oeconomicus, it is safe to generalize from the study of economic behavior to political phenomena. If not, such a procedure will distort our understanding of politics. Similarly, if we design political institutions and public policies assuming that people will behave as they do when they confront economic choices, we may find our intentions thwarted if we have neglected the distinctive motivations characteristic of political action.     

The paradox of the region: economic regulation and the representation of interests

This article deals with the relationship between economic regulation and interes-group representation at the regional level in advanced capitalist societies. The importance of an ‘intermediate government’ of economic development at the regional level has increased in recent years within such societies as a result of the crisis of the Keynesian wlfare state and the decline of Fordism. At the same time, however, the growing need for regional regulation does not necessarily call into being an explicit demand for and supply of efficient regional government within the existing institutional framework. This ‘paradox fo the region’ is explored int he context of the Italian case, characterized by strong local but weak regional identities organizations of business and labour for an effective intermediate government of the economy, an proposes a strategy for reinforcing such organizatons at this level through the reform of regional government administration and the supervised delegation of public powers to them.     

The relationships between public and private pension schemes: an introductory overview

Only recently have social insurance and private pensions, collectively, come to be thought of in terms of a total social security benefit package. The economic problems brought on by the 1974 oil crisis initially triggered consideration of a common, integrated role for the two systems. The second oil crisis reinforced the relative expansion in private pension programs, as a supplement to social security. Before these events, private and public pension programs interacted in only a limited number of ways, confined to relatively few countries. These interactions were largely confined to collective bargaining, whereby private pensions were gradually extended to nearly all employees in France and Sweden; mandating, or legally requiring private supplementation of social security, debated in several countries in the early 1970's, but postponed by the 1974 oil crisis; and contracting out, or covering a part of the social security benefit under a private plan, as in the United Kingdom. Overall, the tradition of private pensions was not very strong or broadbased. The current debate centers on which public/private pension mix is desirable from the point of view of an old-age income-maintenance program. A new element is the rising support for a "third pillar"--individual tax-encouraged savings--not only as a supplement, but as an alternative to social insurance.