Partisan Influence on the Local Tax Burden in the Netherlands

This paper analyses the role of partisan politics in determiningthe local tax burden. Property taxes are the most important revenuesource which municipalities in the Netherlands can decide uponthemselves. Using a new data set on Dutch local property taxes in1996, it is concluded that municipalities with a council dominatedby left wing parties have a higher tax burden. We also find thatlarger coalitions have lower levels of taxation. Finally, taxexporting increases tax rates.     

Partisan change in the Mountain West

During the 1980s partisanship in the Mountain West shifted dramatically toward the Republican Party. This change was the result of issue-based conversion rather than group mobilization. Specifically, we trace this surge to Reagan's transformation of the issues connected with the Republican Party. Previous discussions of issue-based conversion have assumed that this force influences all voters equally. One of the issues behind the Mountain West's changed partisanship follows this pattern: Individualism (or limiting government influence on the individual) was behind both the Mountain West surge (and decline) in Republicanism and the nationwide growth in that party. But the second issue did not follow this pattern: Abortion influenced the Mountain West selectively. We conclude that partisan change can be the result of uniform influence of issue change, but that it can also be the result of issue changes that influence different groups of voters differentially.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.     

Economists and public policy: Chicago political economy versus conventional views

Both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process — in improving the decision-making process. In sharp contrast, information and incentive problems related to voting rules, the bureaucracy, and the legislature do not arise in CPE because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups. Consequently, the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies. That is, the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so. But, as Mitchell (1989: 290) stresses, the important unanswered question in CPE remains: if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur?The analysis here suggests that the sugar program (and similar policies) may persist not because they are beneficial to the public at large but rather because information and incentive problems in the collective choice process lead to perverse results. Consequently, economic analysts can make a positive contribution to the public policy process by providing information about the responsiveness of alternative institutional arrangements to the values and choices of individual citizens (Wiseman, 1989). The Friedmans' Tide in the Affairs of Men view holds that economic analyses are important in changing public opinion, which is an important precursor to changes in public policy.     

Partisan legitimacy across generations

In this paper we argue that parties shape their supporters’ views about the political system via the messages they communicate about the desirability of the political system. Moreover, we contend that the effectiveness of such communication varies considerably across generations. Combining data from election surveys collected in 15 democracies as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project with data on the policy positions of 116 political parties collected by the Comparative Manifestos Project, we find that supporters of parties that express positive positions toward the political system report systematically higher levels of political legitimacy than supporters of parties that communicate negative views. Moreover, this communication is particularly effective among older party identifiers whose partisan identification tends to be more pronounced. Taken together, these findings suggest that political parties play an active role in shaping citizens’ views of the political system but their success in mobilizing consent among citizens in contemporary democracies may weaken with partisan de-alignment and generational change.     

The Dynamics of Partisan Conflict on Congressional Approval

Partisan divisions in American politics have been increasing since the 1970s following a period where scholars thought parties were in decline. This polarization is observed most frequently within the debates and deliberation across issues within Congress. Given that most studies of public opinion place the behavior of elites at the center of public attitudes, surprisingly little research examines the effect of partisan conflict on the mass public. This research examines quarterly congressional approval data from 1974 to 2000 to determine the consequences, if any, of party conflict on the dynamics of congressional approval. The findings indicate that over-time changes in partisan conflict within Congress have a direct and lasting effect on how citizens think about Congress.     

Partisan bias in inflation expectations

Public Choice - We examine partisan bias in inflation expectations. Our dataset includes inflation expectations of the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations over the period June 2013...     

The Limits of Partisan Loyalty

Political Behavior - While partisan cues tend to dominate political choice, prior work shows that competing information can rival the effects of partisanship if it relates to salient political...     

Partisan Development in Post-Soviet Ukraine

ABSTRACT

The development of mass partisanship and party identification in post-Soviet societies is a controversial subject of scholarly research. One prevalent view argues that post-Soviet citizens are distrustful of parties and that it will take generations for party identification to appear in these societies. Others argue that partisanship is emerging as a result of citizens perceiving meaningful differences between the parties. If party identification is forming, partisanship should be relatively stable across time at the individual level. This study takes a rare look at 1999 panel data from Ukraine to determine the degree of partisan stability. The findings demonstrate that meaningful party identification appears to be emerging for a significant proportion of the population due to political information and this partisanship is influencing election decision making among Ukrainian voters.     

Partisan Influence on Immigration: The Case of Norway

Do governments decide the size of immigration? This article analyses partisan impact on refugee immigration to Norway. The first part maps party positions on refugee immigration and demonstrates that the views of Norwegian parties are far from consensual. The second part tests whether the number of refugees admitted has been affected by changes of government by way of a panel analysis covering the period 1985–2005 and 143 sending countries. Controlling for other determinants of immigration both in receiving and sending countries, the analysis suggests that that the number of refugees admitted to Norway has been significantly lower during Conservative rule. Among parties with government experience, the Conservative Party also has adopted the most restrictive stand in its manifestoes. No significant differences between Labour Party and centre governments were found, even though the centre parties express more liberal preferences.     

Of Time and the Development of Partisan Polarization

In this article we address the topic of increasing partisan polarization in the American mass public, focusing on the twin influences of individual-level development and cohort replacement and the interaction between the two. We posit a model of individual development that consists of declining openness to change beyond young adulthood, an increase in party-issue constraint as age advances, and cohort-specific responsiveness to changes in the partisan environment. Results from a long-term panel study provide initial evidence of these dynamics. We then use simulations to generate expectations about how these developmental processes play out across cohorts, issues, and time. These expectations are evaluated through a cohort analysis of National Election Studies data from 1972 to 2004. Overall, our results provide a new perspective on the dynamics of individual political development and their implications for the timing, extent, and future trajectory of partisan polarization in the U.S. electorate.     

The Influence of Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion

Political parties play a vital role in democracies by linking citizens to their representatives. Nonetheless, a longstanding concern is that partisan identification slants decision-making. Citizens may support (oppose) policies that they would otherwise oppose (support) in the absence of an endorsement from a political party—this is due in large part to what is called partisan motivated reasoning where individuals interpret information through the lens of their party commitment. We explore partisan motivated reasoning in a survey experiment focusing on support for an energy law. We identify two politically relevant factors that condition partisan motivated reasoning: (1) an explicit inducement to form an “accurate” opinion, and (2) cross-partisan, but not consensus, bipartisan support for the law. We further provide evidence of how partisan motivated reasoning works psychologically and affects opinion strength. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for understanding opinion formation and the overall quality of citizens’ opinions.     

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.     

Partisan Differences in Swedish Macroeconomic Policy

The purpose of this paper is to trace partisan differencesamong Swedish governments during the period 1958-2000. According tothe Partisan Theory of macroeconomic policy left-wing governmentsare relatively more concerned with the performance of the realside of the economy (real output and unemployment) as compared toright-wing governments, that place a higher weight on the nominalvariables (inflation). Left-wing governments would therefore pursue moreexpansionary aggregate demand policy, and thereby be willingto risk a higher inflation, in order to improve real economicperformance. In this paper we apply the model developed in Hibbs (1994) onSwedish data. Our empirical results support the partisan theory,showing that, ceteris paribus, aggregate demand policy under left-winggovernments is relatively more expansionary than under right-wing governments, even if the expansionary policysometimes leads to higher inflation.     

When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics

Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996, 1998 ) and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999 ; Coleman 1999 ), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institutions, and parties. We overcome this deficiency by modeling conditions for gridlock as a function of preferences and institutions—incorporating bicameralism and presidential influence—and of parties. By generating equilibrium gridlock intervals for empirical testing using Poole's (1998) common space scores, and showing that gridlock intervals associated with models in which parties have no effect or an agenda-setting role do not explain policy gridlock but that those linked to models with party-unity effects and strong presidential leadership do, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for party and leadership roles in explaining legislative choices.     

Partisan issue preferences and partisan change

This paper addresses the relationship between changes in issue preferences and changes in partisanship, and examines the possibility that different types of issues may be associated with different dimensions of partisanship. A discriminant function analysis using the 1972–74–76 CPS Panel reveals that Democrats, Independents, and Republicans are very different from one another in terms of partisan issue preferences on a New Deal and a racial issue. The association between issue preferences and changes in strength among partisans is less stable, but the Democratic identification seems to be more closely aligned with the New Deal and racial issues than the Republican identification. Leaners appear to be more partisan in their issue preferences than weak identifiers are.     

Partisan technocratic cycles in Latin America

Given their powerful positions in presidential cabinets, technocrats are an important transmission mechanism for explaining economic policy choices, but have received less attention compared to other well-established channels such as elections or democratic tenure. I incorporate the role of technocratic advisors into a domestic policymaking framework. Specifically, I contend that left governments tend to appoint technocrats, or ministers with mainstream economics training, to signal their commitment to sound governance to the electorate. This partisan technocratic pattern, however, is conditioned by a country's place in its business cycle. During periods of high growth, left governments are more likely to align with their partisan preferences and appoint heterodox advisors that drift from fiscal discipline. Employing an originally constructed data index, the Index of Economic Advisors, I conduct a statistical test of 16 Latin American countries from 1960 to 2011, finding partisan shifts in technocratic appointments and fiscal governance that are conditioned by national business cycles.