Who gets what and why? Committee assignments in the German Bundestag

Although committee assignments have been researched in various parliaments, findings are inconclusive. This article contributes to the debate by analysing the allocations to specialised committees in the Bundestag, a legislature that establishes strong committees despite having strong parliamentary party groups. Studying assignments in this legislature can, therefore, help us to solve the present disjunction between ‘European’ and ‘American’ experiences regarding committee research. The study uses the congressional theories of legislative organisation as heuristic devices but explicitly highlights the strong involvement of parliamentary party groups. The hypotheses are tested with a multiple membership multilevel model across several legislative periods (1990?2013) and backed up with evidence from 51 interviews with German legislators. The results show that next to constituency demands and the influence of regional factions, there is strong evidence for a reassignment pattern and that a legislator’s occupational background and connections to interest groups matter in the assignment process.     

Policy entrepreneurship and institutional change: Who,how, and why?

In the past three decades, “policy entrepreneurship” has emerged as a key analytical concept helping to explain institutional and policy change. Despite this, however, the literature on policy entrepreneurship remains theoretically vexed, producing limited theoretical knowledge or explanatory models able to draw firm conclusions. Theory building on policy and institutional change, for example, how policy entrepreneurs institute and navigate change agendas, using what tools, strategies, resources, and capacities remains opaque. This is especially the case in developing country contexts, where most analytical investigation of policy entrepreneurship has addressed “first world” case examples. This special issue seeks to address this analytical gap in the literature, focusing on cases specific to developing country contexts, deepening our empirical knowledge of policy entrepreneurship in developing countries, but also exploring theoretical and conceptual debates as they relate to developing countries.     

Sorting through the garbage can: under what conditions do governments adopt policy programs?

The paper aims at explaining the adoption of policy programs. We use the garbage can model of organizational choice as our theoretical framework and complement it with the institutional setting of administrative decision-making in order to understand the complex causation of policy program adoption. Institutions distribute decision power by rules and routines and coin actor identities and their interpretations of situations. We therefore expect institutions to play a role when a policy window opens. We explore the configurative explanations for program adoption in a systematic comparison of the adoption of new alcohol policy programs in the Swiss cantons employing Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The most important conditions are the organizational elements of the administrative structure decisive for the coupling of the streams. The results imply that classic bureaucratic structures are better suited to put policies into practice than limited government.     

Transparency and mistrust: Who or what should be made transparent?

It is increasingly recognized in public administration that the relationship between trust and transparency is not straightforward. Recently, right‐wing populists have risen to power, rejecting transparency requirements based on documents while claiming that they “hide nothing.” Clearly, existing scholarly conceptualizations are insufficient for understanding how transparency operates as a value in real‐world political contestation. An analysis of state‐ and national‐level politics in Nigeria reveals that, while always retaining a core informational component, there are multiple competing conceptions of transparency. Popular demands for transparency express a belief that not only should data be made transparent, but also the social networks in which politicians are embedded. “Transparency in people” can clash with more traditional, technocratic transparency practices centered on data. By rethinking who or what should be made transparent—data, things, or people—this article offers fresh theoretical insights on the complex politics of transparency and trust.     

Transit-Induced Gentrification: Who Will Stay,and Who Will Go?

Abstract

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has been promoted by planners and policy advocates as a solution to a variety of urban problems, including automobile traffic congestion, air pollution, and urban poverty. Since the enhanced accessibility offered by transit proximity is often capitalized into land and housing prices, many express concern that new transit investments will result in the displacement of the low-income populations likely to benefit most from transit access, a phenomenon which we term transit-induced gentrification. Whereas policy advocates have proposed a variety of interventions designed to ensure that affordable housing for low-income households is produced and preserved in areas proximate to transit stations, little is known about the effectiveness of these policy proposals. This article relies on an integrated land use/transportation model to analyze how TOD-based affordable housing policies influence the intraurban location of low-income households. We find that affordability restrictions targeted to new dwellings constructed in TODs are effective tools for promoting housing affordability and improving low-income households’ access to transit while simultaneously reducing the extent of transit-induced gentrification.     

Trading policy: Constituents and party in U.S. trade policy

Studies of US trade policy legislation focus on the effect of constituents on trade policy voting and give less weight to institutions such as political parties. To demonstrate that political parties affect voting, I compare the votes of politicians who share constituency characteristics but differ in political party affiliation. This approach requires less reliance on assumptions about, or empirical measures of, constituents’ trade preferences. The results demonstrate that political parties play a significant role in legislative voting on trade policy. Theories of political economy therefore should incorporate how constituency interests and partisan pressures affect legislative voting.     

U.S. Child Safety Seat Laws: Are they Effective,and Who Complies?

This paper assesses the effectiveness of child safety seat laws in the United States. Over the past 35 years, these laws have steadily increased mandatory child safety seat restraint ages. We exploit state‐year level variation in the age until which children are required to ride in child safety seats to estimate triple difference models using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data from 1975 to 2011. Our findings show that increasing the age thresholds is effective in increasing the actual age of children in safety seats. Across the child‐age distribution, restraint rates increase by between 10 and 30 percentage points or by between 50 and 170 percent, in the long run. We also estimate the impact of the child safety seat laws on the likelihood that a child dies in a fatal accident. We find that the laws saved up to 39 children per year. Finally, we find that the laws primarily induce compliant parents to switch from traditional seatbelt use to child safety seat use, with only small effects among parents who do not restrain their children.     

Inaction and public policy: understanding why policymakers ‘do nothing’

Policy Sciences - In recent decades, the policy sciences have struggled to come to terms with the significance of inaction in public policy. Inaction refers to instances when policymakers ‘do...     

Corruption, federalism, and policy formation in the OECD: the case of energy policy

We investigate whether the effect of government corruption is conditional on a country’s institutional structure. Federal systems have an additional layer of government, making lobbying relatively more costly. We investigate whether the effect of government corruption on environmental policy (in the form of restrictions on energy use) is conditional on a federal system being in place. Using 1982–96 data from 11 industry sectors in 12 OECD economies we find that while greater government corruption reduces the stringency of environmental policy, the effect declines in federal systems.     

Strategies,tactics and the question of un lieu propre : what/where is “media theory”?

This paper uses the work of Michel de Certeau (1988 de Certeau M 1988 The practice of everyday life Berkeley: University of California Press  [Google Scholar]) to argue that it is possible to distinguish between “expert” or “authorised” approaches to media theory, construed as existing “strategically” within the “proper place” of the academy, and “tactical” appropriations of media theory operating in audience discourses. It takes media fan audiences as one case study in relation to this process, arguing that fans should be viewed as “poaching” from “official” media theory as well as from “official” media texts. It then goes on to suggest that we should not univocally celebrate or romanticise fans' uses of media theory, but should remain alert to the sociological and cultural reproductions that otherwise “tactical” media theory can participate in. This means rethinking fans' “tactics” not merely as the “arts of the weak” (de Certeau 1988 de Certeau M 1988 The practice of everyday life Berkeley: University of California Press  [Google Scholar], 37), but simultaneously as forms of appropriation that might enact forms of (sub)cultural power for fans.     

Who gets what in coalition governments? Predictors of portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies

Ministerial portfolios are the most obvious payoffs for parties entering a governing coalition in parliamentary democracies. This renders the bargaining over portfolios an important phase of the government formation process. The question of ‘who gets what, and why?’ in terms of ministerial remits has not yet received much attention by coalition or party scholars. This article focuses on this qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation and uses a new comparative dataset to evaluate a number of hypotheses that can be drawn from the literature. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their election manifestos, emphasise themes corresponding to the policy remit of specific cabinet portfolios are more likely to obtain control over these portfolios. The results show that policy saliency is indeed an important predictor of portfolio allocation in postwar Western European parliamentary democracies.     

A “review” of policy sciences: bibliometric analysis of authors,references, and topics during 1970–2017

Even as Policy Sciences celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, there is no systematic account of the research that has been published in the journal. This article reports the findings of a bibliometric analysis of 1027 publications in this journal during 1970–2017. It identifies the authors who have contributed to the journal, the works that have influenced them, and the topics they have studied.     

Public opinion and government policy in Britain: A case of congruence,amplification or dampening?

This article examines postwar government policy in Britain, as reflected in annual budget speeches. Like previous research, it aims to content‐analyse these speeches to derive estimates of actual, as opposed to intended, government policy stances. Unlike previous research, it also aims to capture and measure the gap between intentions (as represented in electoral manifestos) and actual policy. This gap cannot be assessed from the final output of the Wordscores content analysis programme (in either the original version or the Martin‐Vanberg variation), but it can be teased out of the raw output. This teasing‐out process reveals the gap to be very small: there is no evidence that British governments either moderate or amplify their left‐right stances when in office. This new measurement of government position is then used to cast further light on policy representation in Britain. The findings show that policy positions respond significantly to changes in public opinion as well as to electoral turnover, but do not exhibit or even approach the ideological congruence anticipated by the ‘median mandate’ interpretation of representative democracy.     

Who moves? Elite and mass-level depolarization in Britain, 1987–2001

Over the past two decades the British Labour and Conservative parties have depolarized on economic and social welfare policy, at both the elite and mass levels. We ask the question: Does mass-level depolarization in Britain extend throughout the electorate, or is it confined primarily to the stratum of affluent, educated, and politically engaged citizens? We report longitudinal analyses of British Election Study respondents' policy beliefs and partisan loyalties over the period 1987–2001, and find that depolarization extends across all subgroups in the electorate, as do perceptions of elite depolarization. These effects are (moderately) more pronounced among the electoral subgroups of highly educated, affluent, and politically informed citizens. The findings have important implications for elite representation of voters' policy preferences, and for differences in representation patterns between Britain and the United States.     

Who Votes for the Future? Information,Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.     

Who is responsible for what? Clarity of responsibilities in multilevel states: The case of Spain

There is a theoretical disagreement between the classical normative positive view on decentralisation, which states that the fragmentation of power shifts policy more closely into line with citizens' preferences, and a more recent critical view that states that decentralisation blurs attribution of responsibility. This disagreement can only be resolved by refining the understanding of specific institutional designs. The theoretical claim in this article is that the relation between multilevel governance and clarity of responsibilities is contingent upon the type of decentralisation in place. To test this proposition, individual data from an asymmetrically decentralised system – the Spanish State of Autonomies – are used. Results show that the relationship between decentralisation and clarity of responsibility has a u‐shape. Responsibility attribution is clearer in regions with high and low levels of decentralisation, where one level of government clearly predominates over the other, than in regions with a more intertwined distribution of powers.