The Future of Government: Mixed Economy or Minimal State?

After nearly a century of expansion, the role of government has contracted, at least in qualitative terms, over the past 20 years. The assumption that this is a natural and inevitable trend is mistaken. The success of the 'mixed economy' in the period from 1945 to 1970, and the limited benefits generated so far by reforms aimed at a contraction of the role of government, suggest that radical contraction of the role of government is unlikely to be beneficial. Some of the privatisations of the recent past will ultimately have to be reversed either through renationalisation or through the establishment of new public entrants to markets where older public enterprises have been sold off.     

The political economy of inflation: Bargaining structure or central bank independence?

The causes of inflation are commonly analyzed as the function of either the organization of wage bargaining or the independence of the central bank. Although these explanations are widely treated as competing, recent evidence suggests that there may be merit to both arguments. This paper presents a game-theoretic model of wage bargaining and monetary policy-making that shows why the two institutional causes are not only complementary, but elements of a more encompassing logic. The empirical superiority of this synthesizing model is demonstrated by reanalyzing data used in Al-Marhubi and Willett (1995) and by presenting new evidence.     

Variability or Moderation? The Effects of Ambivalence on Political Opinions

Prior research theorizes that ambivalence makes opinions about an object unreliable in the sense of being haphazard, unpredictable, or variable. As such, ambivalence is a prominent explanation for seeming nonattitudes in opinion surveys. This study proposes an alternative account of the effects of ambivalence on attitudes. It posits that people who are ambivalent about an issue split the difference between their conflicting considerations by taking a position near the middle of the bipolar opinion scale, which reflects a moderate attitude. I show how the widely-used method of modeling the supposed variability of ambivalent opinions conflates variability and moderation. This problem is addressed by modeling variability and moderation of attitudes separately, without this confound. Using this strategy in analyses involving four datasets and three policy domains, the results show that ambivalence is associated with moderate, not variable, attitudes. Ambivalence does not increase the variability of opinions but, rather, moves them quite predictably toward the middle of the response scale. The results recast our understanding of the effects of ambivalence on political opinions and raise questions about the ability of ambivalence to explain nonattitudes in surveys.     

A Bonfire of the Regulations,or Business as Usual? The UK Labour Market and the Political Economy of Brexit

Employment and labour market regulation initially appeared as one of the solid red lines in the UK's renegotiation of the country's place in the EU. The basic argument is that the UK's more deregulated labour market would sit uneasily in the more organised models, based on statutory instruments or collective bargaining, found on the continent. While there is a legitimate problem here, EU employment regulations appear manageable from the point of view of business, while unions see them as important tools for socially responsible economic restructuring. Most of UK employment case law is now deeply entangled with EU law; labour market regulations have, on the whole, become part of the way of doing business in the Single Market; and a simple cost–benefit analysis appears impossible because some costs are not quantifiable and the costs of others are reduced when taken as a bundle. Labour unions agree that transposition of European law needs to be done taking into account local sensitivities, while internationally oriented companies do not see EU regulations on the whole as detrimental to business. Importantly, though, the costs and benefits of EU employment regulations are not symmetrically distributed across different companies: large companies are better able to reap the rewards and accommodate the costs of operating in the Single Market than smaller companies.     

Are Party Activists the Party Extremists? The Structure of Opinion in Political Parties

In re-examining May's law of curvilinear disparity, this article analyzes the structure of opinion of political parties. May suggests that voters, party leaders and party activists have different incentives to participate in politics, and therefore voters and leaders have more moderate positions on issues than party activists. This article is based on the extensions of May's law made by Kitschelt, who argues that curvilinear disparities, although not general phenomena, are bound to occur in specific circumstances. We have focused on the level of cleavage conflict in the system, the variable that Kitschelt himself found to be critical for explaining party radicalism among sub-leaders. Using the Norwegian multiparty system as a test case, we propose that radicalism among party activists is conditioned by the relative saliency of different policy dimensions. The empirical analysis, which is based on surveys of MPs, party members and voters in connection with the general election of 1993, gives very little support to our proposition.     

To Revoke or Not Revoke? The Political Determinants of Executive Order Longevity

Though many scholars study the formation of policy, less attention is given to its endurance. In this article, I seek to determine what contributes to the longevity of policy by examining the case of presidential unilateralism. While scholars widely recognize presidents’ ability to unilaterally make policy with executive orders, they largely do not account for how these same orders can be easily changed by subsequent administrations. To address this deficiency, I develop a theory of executive order duration based on both time‐invariant characteristics of the order and time‐variant changes in the political climate it faces. Using survival analysis to examine all orders revoked between 1937 and 2013, I find support for the theory. This study has implications for understanding the endurance of executive orders and other policy instruments as part of the law as well as understanding the strategic actions of policy makers given the transient nature of these tools.     

U.S. Tobacco Control: Public Health,Political Economy,or Morality Policy?

Tobacco control policy usually has been framed in terms of public health and political economy, but it also has been called a morality issue. Through a systematic historical analysis, this paper examines dimensions of morality policy and evaluates tobacco control in the United States for its fit with those characteristics. Moral concerns have been a part of tobacco control policy at certain times, first in the early twentieth century, and, more recently, since the mid‐1980s with the rise of “denormalization” of tobacco as a goal of some antitobacco organizations. Drawing from recent studies of other “morality” policy issues, it argues that tobacco control is a “blended” issue, one which can take on different dimensions depending on successful interest group framing. The adoption of Healthy Public Policy as a governmental goal has coincided with a movement toward a “secular morality” in the political culture, facilitating a broader appeal to the public.     

The Making of Policy: Institutionalized or Not?

This article attempts to build bridges in the formal study of policymaking across polities of different degrees of institutional development. It explores the reasons why policymaking is fairly institutionalized in some polities but not in others. It suggests extending standard models of institutionalized policymaking to allow for a wider set of actions, including the threat of violence or of damage to the economy. It engages the discussion of institutions as rules and institutions as equilibria, delivering multiple equilibria with different degrees of institutionalization. The likelihood of institutionalized policymaking increases as the cost of alternative political actions increases, as the damage these alternatives cause decreases, and as the economy becomes wealthier. In cases in which the distribution of de jure political power is more asymmetric, it is more likely to observe use of alternative political technologies as well as low degrees of institutionalization.     

The EU’s Emissions Trading System,Part 2: A Political Economy Critique

This is part 2 of a paper that revisits the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) in an attempt to take stock of how the system has worked and evaluate it from the standpoint of radical political economy. In part 1 of the paper the basic design, the workings and the outcomes of the scheme were discussed with critical perceptiveness. In particular, the paper revealed the unsatisfactory results of the scheme (even in its own proclaimed aims), including allowances surplus, allowance trades for pure financial profit, low and volatile prices of allowances, windfall profits, extensive use of Kyoto project-based credits, and several malfunctions and instances of fraud. These findings set the ground for part 2 of the paper, which offers a critical assessment of ETS, proclaimed by mainstream analyses as the major vehicle for the transition to a low-carbon economy. In particular, the complications and instabilities created by the increasing financialization of the carbon market are exposed. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of the ETS as a catalyst for investments in clean energy technologies, especially in times of economic crisis, is substantiated. Since the deep embeddedness of the scheme in capitalism risks climate sustainability, the analysis concludes that a more radical transformation of society with an eco-socialist orientation is needed.     

The New White Flight?: The Effects of Political Appeals to Latinos on White Democrats

Political Behavior - One explanation for the post-1965 shift in the vote choice of White Americans posits that it was driven by a shift in the racial imagery of the two major parties. The growing...     

Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questionsexhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changesin questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empiricalcontributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstratethat within the course of the interview there is considerableinstability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of thisinstability is cues regarding economic performance, such asthose provided by the media. We find that respondents can bepersuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receivecontradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placementcan affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstratethat proximity to political questions can contaminate economicevaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow politicalpreference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economicresponses that are "consistent" with their political responses.Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondentsto the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered duringDecember 1997.     

Political Accountability in Hong Kong: Myth or Reality?

This article assesses the practice of political accountability in Hong Kong: whether it has largely been realised in practice, or whether it is merely a political slogan for the government to justify its executive-led governance. The analysis begins with a review of the theoretical concepts of political accountability and ministerial accountability, and then establishes an operational framework to analyse the current practice of political accountability in Hong Kong's political system. It concludes by addressing the degree of political accountability overall.     

The “Miracle” Revisited: The De-radicalization of Korean Political Culture

The radicalism that spawned the 1987 democratic revolution was a product of civic unity across class lines. Lacking the raw power of President Park, Presidents Chun and Roh had no choice but to seek a degree of democratic legitimacy. That same weakness was reflected in their relative surrender of Blue House power over Korean chaebols. Thus there were two winners in the political transformation of those years: minjung power (the Korean equivalent of Philippine “people power”) and corporatism, now largely freed from Parkian restraints. With the subsequent dissolution of minjung unity, however, corporatism emerged as the real winner of the “democratic” revolution. That victory was consummated by the neoliberal reforms mandated by the IMF in return for a mammoth bailout package after the Crash. There was little effective resistance to this IMFism, for the reform spirit of 1987 had perished long before.