Taxes,Time, and Support for Security

New technologies have been developed in response to terrorism. These present problems for local officials: implementing technologies will be expensive, and no technologies exist that can be used to gauge demand. We apply contingent valuation methodologies to determine support for additional taxes to pay for new terrorism‐related technologies and services. We present findings from a national survey about people's attitudes toward terrorism prevention and response. We find that respondents generally support new services and technologies and local tax increases to pay for them. We also find that respondents are willing to pay more if programs have everyday uses that would enhance public safety, but are less supportive as inconveniences increase.     

Federal tax reform and the financing of state and local governments

Although the Reagan Administration tax reform proposals would reduce federal income tax liabilities for most taxpayers, federal tax reform would also create strong pressures on state and local governments to cut taxes and public services. These pressures would arise primarily because itemizers would no longer be able to deduct state and local taxes in determining their federal income tax liabilities. In New York City and Boston, it is likely that the Administration's tax reform would induce cuts in spending that range from 2.5 to 7.5 percent. While the elimination of state and local tax deductibility may promote allocative efficiency in the provision of local public goods, the cost would be a decline in the degree of redistribution through the state and local public sector, and a reduction in local public services for the poor.     

Playing with Fire: The Civil Liberties Implications of September 11th

The aftermath of September 11th has seen a worrisome rise in invasive surveillance measures. Both adopted by statute and initiated by agencies, these provisions provide unprecedented powers for government agents to investigate suspects and search individuals, whether they are directly involved in terrorism or not. The prevailing wisdom has been that the American people will accept these restrictions as the natural cost of heightened security, and initial evidence suggests the public has been willing to tolerate greater limits on civil liberties. However, over time such support will erode, leaving in place permanent restrictions on civil liberties that not only will concern Americans, but also may turn them against government officials and civic participation. Thus, contrary to many interpretations of September 11th, this article argues that the policy response has only sown the seeds for greater detachment from and dissatisfaction with government as the public becomes increasingly separated from the workings and operations of public policy.     

Governance reforms and public acceptance of regulatory decisions: Cross-national evidence from linked survey experiments on pesticides authorization in the European Union

Do governance reforms affect public acceptance of regulatory decisions, and if so, how? We tackled this critical but under-studied question through a pair of linked survey experiments on public attitudes toward the reform of European Union (EU) pesticides regulation among a representative sample of the adult population in six EU member states. We tested the expectation that citizens are more likely to accept a regulatory decision that runs counter to their prior policy preferences if it is taken under a procedure they support. We first conducted a conjoint experiment to study whether the specific design of decision-making procedures impacts public support for EU pesticide regulation. In a second linked experiment, we asked respondents whether farmers should be allowed to use glyphosate, the best known and most controversial pesticide. We then asked respondents if they would accept an authorization decision on glyphosate contrary to their prior expressed preference if it were taken under a decision-making procedure they supported. The results demonstrate that a regulatory decision-making procedure respondents support increases their willingness to accept a hypothetical authorization decision contrary to their prior expressed preference. Contrary to the findings of previous research, our study thus provides strong evidence that governance reforms supported by citizens can enhance acceptance of controversial regulatory decisions, even on politicized issues such as pesticides authorization.     

Central Decisions,Decentralized Solutions: Comparing the Implications of Central Cutback Policy for the Agency Level in Estonia and Latvia

Abstract

The paper investigates the implications of governmental cutback strategies related to the recent fiscal crisis at agency level in Estonia and Latvia. For this purpose, the article applies a comparative case study approach, through a purposeful selection of five agencies – three in Estonia and two in Latvia – to map the maximum possible variation of before-and-after effects of the crisis on organizational responses and individual-level coping. The selected agencies represent a range of regulatory and social policy domains directly and severely affected by the crisis through budget cuts and increased demand for services, and therefore most affected by the crisis. The study demonstrates that the budget cuts imposed by the cabinets of both countries and widely praised internationally actually left agency-level actors in an extremely difficult situation. Centrally imposed across-the-board cuts resulted in diverse public service gaps, leading to a range of hardships for the citizens, and therefore turning out to be neither equal nor fair for the target groups. The study concludes that centrally decided cutbacks shifted the burden to street-level bureaucrats, who in turn took on the role of key policy actors by ensuring the delivery of public services during the fiscal crisis.     

Delivering public services to the underserved: Nonprofits and the Latino threat narrative

Some politicians employ harsh rhetoric demanding that government deny public services such as food, housing, and medical care to immigrants. While nonprofits assist immigrants in this regard, their work is sustainable only if private donors support them. Using a survey experiment, this article examines whether donors' willingness to support a charity depends on the legal status of its beneficiaries, and the region from which they have come. We find that, in relation to a charity that serves low-income families (control group), donors are less willing to support a charity serving immigrants, but the region from which beneficiaries emigrated is irrelevant. Donor willingness diminishes substantially when beneficiaries are undocumented or face deportation. While shared ethnicity between donors and beneficiaries does not increase charitable support, bilingualism does. In addition, support for the charity rises substantially among Latinx donors who were born outside the US and do not speak English at home.     

Electoral losers revisited – How citizens react to defeat at the ballot box

The paper seeks to reconcile insights from winner-loser gap research with mainstream understanding of election legitimacy. The paper acknowledges that winning and losing elections creates differential incentives for citizens to remain supportive of their political system, but it argues that losers nevertheless have enough reasons to remain supportive in absolute terms. Drawing on democratic theory, the paper develops a rationale for why citizens are willing to accept electoral defeat voluntarily, and suggest a new way to conceptualize citizen reactions to election outcomes. It presents findings from a sample of election studies in established democracies to show that winners typically become more supportive whereas losers at minimum retain their level of support from before the election. It concludes that elections, when reasonably well executed, as they most often are in established democracies, build system support rather than undermine it.     

Public Budget Choices and Private Willingness to Pay

Efficient allocation of public funds depends upon good information about citizens' values. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how citizens' values can be obtained by eliciting marginal willingness to tradeoff (MWTTO) ratios for public spending categories and linking these ratios to individual, private willingness to pay. The link enables estimation of the willingness to pay for an expansion to any of the budget categories based on the elicited willingness to pay and the marginal willingness to tradeoff ratios. Tradeoff ratios and willingness to pay are estimated for public budget categories in Kentucky based on a representative sample surveyed by mail and the web in 2007. Estimates show that individuals are willing to pay the most for an expansion to educational services, followed by health care.     

Taking Fact-Checks Literally But Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact-Checking on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability

Political Behavior - Are citizens willing to accept journalistic fact-checks of misleading claims from candidates they support and to update their attitudes about those candidates? Previous studies...     

Why people want something for nothing: The role of asymmetrical illusions

Abstract. This article examines if and why mechanisms exist at the individual citizen level that may contribute to public sector growth — and whether such mechanisms can be altered through provision of information about the costs of public services.We test and find empirical support for the theory of fiscal illusion according to which citizens underestimate the costs of public services and therefore demand more public spending than if they had been fully informed. We also develop and find empirical support for a theory of asymmetrical illusions. This theory claims that producers and users of public services are more spending–minded than ordinary taxpayers — and that limited rationality contributes to this difference. However, the provision of information about the unit costs of public services can weaken these mechanisms of fiscal illusion and asymmetrical illusions. The test is based on tabular, logit, and experimental analysis of survey data from Odense, a Danish city with 175,000 inhabitants.     

“What have you done for me lately?” Re-thinking local representation

Scholars have studied the influence that constituents exert on elected representatives’ action in national parliaments at length. Still, academic pundits have usually confined local representation to distributive policies and casework, and limited local legislators’ focus to a territorial perspective. In this study, I try and propose a more nuanced theory of local representation, and I use automated text analysis to capture elected representatives’ propensity to serve functional as well as territorial interests. In an effort to provide empirical backing to my theoretical argumentation, I present an analysis of Italian legislators’ behavior which shows that deputies are willing to divert public spending to their district but also to favor the interests of specific economic sectors. Scholars have already acknowledged the multidimensional character of political representation at the national level, my analysis offers theoretical justification and empirical evidence to support doing so at the local level as well.     

Cheap bribes and the corruption ban: A coordination game among rational legislators

Legislators in modern democracies (a) accept bribes that are small compared to the value of the statutes they pass and (b) allow bans against bribery to be enforced. In our model of bribery, rational legislators accept bribes smaller not only than the benefit the briber receives but than the costs the legislators incur in accepting the bribes. Rather than risk this outcome, the legislators may be willing to suppress bribery altogether. The size of legislatures, the quality of voter information, the nature of party organization, and the structure of committees will all influence the frequency and size of bribes.     

When do people accept government paternalism? Theory and experimental evidence

Under what conditions are people willing to accept paternalistic government policies? The use of libertarian paternalism (“nudges”) has gained popularity and captured the attention of scholars and policy-makers alike. A central underlying assumption in advancing governmental nudges is that the public prefers them over classic paternalistic policies, which, unlike nudges, are coercive. This paper studies the extent and circumstances under which this assumption is justified, arguing that the claim for the preeminence of nudges is overstated. I develop a theoretical framework to account for the conditions under which people prefer coercive and non-coercive paternalism, and test it experimentally among a national U.S. sample. I find that in certain theoretically predictable contexts, individuals not only tolerate, but even prefer coercive paternalism over nudges. These attitudes are systematically explained through the interaction between the coercion level and policy domain in question.     

Overspending in Public Organizations: Does Strategic Management Matter?

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the financial crash, many governments across the globe are seeking to curb expenditure in public sector organizations. To assess the extent to which public organizations can make strategic choices that might result in lower expenditure, we explore the relationship between strategic management and overspending in English local governments. The effects of strategic stances and actions on overspending are tested using multivariate statistical techniques. The empirical results show that an innovative strategic stance results in overspending as does a commitment to the development of new services, while a reactive strategic stance and decentralized decision making are associated with lower levels of overspending. Our analysis provides support for arguments that public organizations can make strategic choices that result in tighter control of their budgets.     

Winning Hearts and Minds in Civil Wars: Governance,Leadership Change,and Support for Violent Groups in Iraq

The “hearts and minds” model of combating rebellions holds that civilians are less likely to support violent opposition groups if the government provides public services and security. Building on this model, we argue that a political event that raises popular expectations of future public service and security provision increases support for the government and decreases sympathy for violent opposition groups. To test this argument, we leverage a unique research design opportunity that stems from the unforeseen announcement of the resignation of Iraq's divisive prime minister in August 2014 while an original survey was being administered across the country. We show that the leadership transition led Iraq's displeased Sunni Arab minority to shift support from the violent opposition to the government. In line with our argument, this realignment was due to rising optimism among Sunni Arabs that the new government would provide services and public goods—specifically security, electricity, and jobs.     

Unravelling Equality: The Impact of the United Kingdom's Spending Cuts on Women

This article examines a report on the likely impact of the spending cuts on women. The report, Unravelling Equality: A Human Rights and Equality Impact Assessment of the Spending Cuts on Women in Coventry, concludes that the public spending cuts will increase inequality between women and men. For some women the cuts may have serious negative effects on their human rights. The article argues that this report provides a blueprint for the kind of analysis which should be carried out all over the country to ensure that the impact of spending cuts on women is better understood and acted upon.     

Fair rules for siting a high-level nuclear waste repository

Geologic repositories are designed to resolve the ever-growing problem of high-level nuclear waste, but these facilities invite intense local opposition due to the perceived severity of the risks and the possibility of stigma effects. This analysis examines whether the perceived fairness of the siting process affects local residents' support for hosting a repository. In particular, a survey of 1001 Nevada residents is used to test the hypothesis that an individual's willingness to accept a local repository will increase if he or she is convinced that this is the safest disposal option available. A logistic analysis indicates that beliefs regarding relative suitability have an independent effect on the acceptability of a local repository (i.e., Yucca Mountain). The article then considers the question of how to implement an optimizing strategy for siting facilities, comparing an idealized strategy against the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982 and the Amendments Act of 1987. Although choosing the safest site seems as if it could enhance public acceptance of the repository program, there is currently little prospect of identifying the best option to the high-level waste problem and, as a result, little chance of gaining the public support that is necessary to promote a successful siting outcome.     

Social spending,partisan bias and vote choice. Evidence from the US

Most models in political science and political economy assume that benefiting from public spending increases the likelihood of voting for the government. However, we do not have much empirical evidence on the conditions under which recipients of public spending reward governments for their public transfers. This article studies the electoral implications of welfare spending cuts in the early years of the Reagan Presidency, when public spending changes were particularly pronounced. Using 1982 NES data, this paper demonstrates that voters who lost public benefits punished Reagan but this only occurred when they identified with the Democratic Party. By contrast, benefit recipients not affected by government cuts were more likely to support Reagan, but again this was only significant among voters identifying with the party of government. This paper thus finds that governments cannot automatically “buy” votes by using welfare spending, the influence of which is instead cushioned by party identification.     

Party debate over Europe in national election campaigns: Electoral disunity and party cohesion

Few political parties are willing to lead the public debate on how the European Union should develop and parties rarely publicly discuss issues on the EU agenda. This is probably one of the most important democratic problems in the contemporary EU. When and why parties are willing (or not willing) to discuss European cooperation is therefore an essential issue in which political science should engage. Previous research has shown that parties that are internally divided on EU issues downplay these issues in order to avoid internal disputes. At the same time, parties that have severe intraparty conflicts over the issue are unable to contain the debate. Thus, parties that are unified in their position on EU issues and parties that are heavily split speak about the EU, but others do not. Also, earlier research has shown that political parties downplay issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters. It is argued in this article that the focus should not be solely on intraparty conflict or whether or not a party's voters are hesitant or disunited, but rather on how these factors interact in order to better understand how parties act strategically regarding EU issues. Using a new dataset that relies on quantitative content analysis of quality newspapers during the national election campaigns in the period 1983–2010 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, it is found that parties that have a high degree of internal dissent on European issues, while at the same time having an equally divided electorate, are the parties that are most present in the public debate. Hence, it is the interaction between these two important factors that explains much of the variation in the amount of attention paid to European issues in national election campaigns.