Bureaucratic dilemmas: Civil servants between political responsiveness and normative constraints

The interaction between political executives and civil servants rests on a delicate balance between political responsiveness and the duty of civil servants and ministers to respect legal and other normative constraints on executive authority. In Danish central government, this balance is stressed by norms that define the correct behavior when the civil service provides ministers with political advice and assistance. Organizational factors strongly influence civil servants' behavior when they have to balance responsiveness against constraints on their role as political advisers. Moreover, civil servants working closely with ministers pay more attention to legal constraints than their peers among agency officials and specialists. Agency officials and specialists are much more prone to prioritize professional standards. We argue that this pattern can be generalized West European systems.     

Strategic postures of political marketing: an exploratory operationalization

• In contrast to most political marketing theories which imply that such concepts as ‘voter‐orientation’ or ‘voter‐centric political management’ are trivial and uni‐dimensional, this article will take its starting point from an alternative perspective.
• It draws on the concept of political marketing ‘postures’, i.e. a multi‐faceted conceptual entity, based on varied dimensions of political marketing orientations. The main duality consists of the constructs of ‘leading’ and ‘following’, with an auxiliary (and complementary) dimension of ‘relationship building’.
• This article provides an exploratory methodology to operationalize this concept, which will also be initially tested empiricially, using expert judgements as well as electorate's perceptions.
• Changing postures will be exemplified within a longitudinal application of the concept to perceptions of Tony Blair as Prime Minister.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organizing consent: The role of procedural fairness in political trust and compliance

Abstract.  Political theory often attributes democratic legitimacy to the fairness of the processes by which collective decisions are taken; empirical research by contrast has primarily investigated whether citizens' approval of democratic institutions derives from satisfaction with the substantive output of those institutions. This article examines whether assessments of decision-making processes shape public willingness to consent to authority. The role of procedural fairness in institutional legitimacy has previously only been investigated in the context of the United States, and has fallen short of demonstrating that procedural assessments actually have a causal effect on institutional legitimacy. Panel survey data of attitudes in a large-scale land use issue provide the empirical base of the analysis. The results indicate that assessments of procedural fairness have a bearing on two conceptualizations of subjective legitimacy: respondents' trust for the authority and their willingness to accept a decision outcome.     

The dilemmas of incrementalism: logical and political constraints in the design of health insurance reforms.

Health care reform became a premier issue on the U.S. policy agenda in the 1990s. While the comprehensive proposal put forth by President Clinton failed, states and the federal government successfully pursued a variety of lesser initiatives. This article focuses on a set of reforms intended to make private health insurance more accessible and affordable to individuals and workers in small firms. It outlines the key arguments made by experts to justify stronger regulation of health insurance and the options and difficult tradeoffs that must be considered in policy design. It then examines the scope and strength of legislation adopted by 45 states and the federal government from 1990 to 1996. The substantial variation in state policies demonstrates that even though insurance market reform was the one issue that commanded nearly universal support in the health care debate, few design features were universally accepted by those who crafted the reforms. The article concludes by assessing the pattern of state and federal action. The reforms represent some progress on nominal access to insurance but little progress on the affordability of insurance for individuals and small groups. Few of the reforms present a serious challenge to existing practices and interests of the insurance industry. This pattern of policy design reflects the logical and political constraints of incrementalism. In a system where insurance coverage is voluntary, changes to increase access for one group tend to increase costs and thereby decrease access for another segment of the population. In addition, because incremental reforms will not attract sustained attention and support from the general public, it is politically difficult to impose substantial new regulation on a powerful industry.     

Bases of political judgments: The role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic information

Three experiments investigated the role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic criteria in judgments of political candidates. The effects of physical attractiveness, political party, and stands on specific issues on both absolute and comparative judgments of political candidates were examined to evaluate three hypotheses about stereotype and attribute use. In the absence of other information, candidates' physical attractiveness (conveyed through photographs) had a substantial influence on subjects' global evaluations of them and inferences of both their personal qualities and their political ideology. When other information about the candidates' party membership and stands on specific issues was available, however, the candidates' attractiveness had no effect on the evaluations of them. When subjects made judgments of only one candidate, subjects relied exclusively on the candidate's voting record. When subjects were asked to make comparative judgments of two candidates, however, they based their judgments on each candidate's party membership and not on their respective voting records. Implications of these results for the processes that underlie political judgments and decisions are evaluated.     

The political role of the Japanese media

This article examines the political role of the mass media in contemporary Japan. Journalists, especially newspaper reporters, have long enjoyed privileged access to politicians through a system of kisha (reporters') clubs, a system which allows for a cosy rapport between reporters and their sources, but often works against the public interest. In recent years, however, some television journalists have adopted a more rigorous approach to political stories. Critical programming by television stations such as TV Asahi may have contributed to the end of 38 years of Liberal Democrat Party rule in 1993. Nevertheless, there is insufficient evidence to argue that the Japanese media is now acting as an effective political watchdog. Like the mass media in many other Asian countries, the Japanese media continues to enjoy an ambiguous relationship with holders of political power.     

Protest participation and economic crisis: The conditioning role of political opportunities

The economic crisis that started in 2008 has negatively affected European nations to different degrees. The sudden rise in demonstrations particularly in those countries most hard hit by the crisis suggests that grievance theories, dismissed in favour of resource‐based models since the 1970s, might have a role to play in explaining protest behaviour. While most previous studies have tested these theories at the individual or contextual levels, it is likely that mechanisms at both levels are interrelated. To fill this lacuna, this article examines the ways in which individual‐level grievances interact with macro‐level factors to impact on protest behaviour. In particular, it examines whether the impact of individual subjective feelings of deprivation is conditional on contextual macroeconomic and policy factors. It is found that while individual‐level relative deprivation has a direct effect on the propensity to have protested in the last year, this effect is greater under certain macroeconomic and political conditions. Both significant results for the cross‐level interactions are interpreted in terms of their role for opening up political opportunities for protest among those who feel they have been most deprived in the current crisis. These findings suggest that the interaction of the contextual and individual levels should continue to be explored in future studies in order to further clarify the mechanisms underlying protest behaviour.     

Individual and contextual variation in EU issue voting: The role of political information

Increasing politicization in EU member states about European issues can be expected to strengthen the impact of attitudes towards Europe on vote choice in European Parliament (EP) elections. At the same time this impact is likely to vary between voters and contexts as a function of political information. This study explores the role of political information in explaining individual and contextual heterogeneity in the degree of EU issue voting. Using a two-step hierarchical estimation procedure to explore both individual and contextual variation, we show that while EU issue voting in the 2009 EP elections is only slightly more pronounced among the politically sophisticated, it is clearly more extensive in contexts that provide higher levels of political information on European matters.     

The role of the political context in voting indecision

A substantive portion of the electorate declares in pre-electoral surveys that they are undecided. However, little has been done in trying to understand who these voters are and how they finally decide their vote. In this article, we try to advance the literature by disentangling the circumstances under which voters are more likely to be undecided. While the traditional approach to the study of electoral indecision has been to characterize which individual traits make voters more likely to be undecided, this article provides consistent evidence showing that key elements of the political context may also affect electoral indecision. Using long-term harmonized data from Spanish pre-electoral surveys over 30 years, we find that voting indecision is influenced by two different types of contextual factors. First, there are some political contexts that reduce voters' cognitive costs when deciding their vote, i.e. the level of electoral competitiveness and the number of parties competing in the elections. Second, there are other political contexts that increase voters' social or expressive costs, i.e. the level of government popularity, since costs of expressing preference for the party in government increases when its public image is undermined.     

The opinion-policy nexus in Europe and the role of political institutions

A strong link between citizen preferences and public policy is one of the key goals and criteria of democratic governance. Yet, our knowledge about the extent to which public policies on specific issues are in line with citizen preferences in Europe is limited. This article reports on the first study of the link between public opinion and public policy that covers a large and diverse sample of concrete public policy issues in 31 European democracies. The findings demonstrate a strong positive relationship and a substantial degree of congruence between public opinion and the state of public policy. Also examined is whether political institutions, including electoral systems and the horizontal and vertical division of powers, influence the opinion-policy link. The evidence for such effects is very limited, which suggests that the same institutions might affect policy representation in countervailing ways through different mechanisms.     

Social constraints in the political arena: A theoretical inquiry into their form and manner

In the past three different paradigms or, more loosely, frames of reference, have been used by students of politics to interpret various dimensions of mass political participation. Each of these, which are referred to as the political socialization, the group interests and beliefs, and the political party/organization paradigms, has received empirical support for its scheme of interpretation; yet recent political events also suggest that these frames of reference may be inadequate, and may need to be complemented, if not replaced, by other schemes. The present paper outlines one such scheme, drawing upon recent writings on social networks and social influences on political participation. It relies on the metaphor of a political arena, and proposes two simple propositions to account both for conventional and unconventional participation in this arena.An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, New York, NY, August 1976.     

The role of political partisanship during economic crises

Major economic crises may promote structural reforms, by increasing the cost of the status quo, or hinder them, by inducing more demand for protection. The ideology and political partisanship of the ruling government may be crucial in determining the prevailing course of action. In good times, conservative parties are typically pro-reform. However, do these parties try to exploit periods of crisis to carry out their reforms? Do social-democratic parties support even greater social protection? To answer these questions, this paper uses indicators of structural reforms in the labor, product, and financial markets for 25 OECD countries over the 1975–2008 period. The empirical analysis confirms the ambiguous effect of crises: product markets are liberalized, but financial markets become more regulated. Partisan politics also matters, as right parties are associated with more pro-market reforms. Yet, crises modify partisan politics: right-wing parties refrain from promoting privatizations, and oppose the introduction of greater financial market regulations. By contrast, center parties liberalize and trim unemployment benefits generosity, while left parties privatize. Furthermore, weak, fractionalized governments, which are associated with more regulated product markets, are also more likely to liberalize during a crisis.     

The role of political parties: An analysis based on transaction costs

This paper explores the proposition that political parties reduce the ‘transaction costs’ of electoral participation. Political parties provide a low cost signal of a candidate's policies and personal characteristics and, in this way, reduce voters' information costs. With reference to ‘transaction cost economics’, political parties offer an ‘implicit contract’ between voters and politicians and thereby reduce the scope for opportunism by politicians. This impact on transaction costs is important in any evaluation of public policy towards political parties.     

Christianity and political thought: Augusto Del Noce and the ideology of Christian Democracy in post-war Italy

This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the 20th century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic ‘modernity,’ bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within the larger aim of recognizing attempts within Catholic philosophy to articulate an Italian political trajectory that does not simply accept the tale of a singular path to modernity based on the Enlightenment model but instead tries to articulate an alternative vision of the modern, grounded within a transcendental perspective.     

中国改革进程中的政治逻辑

改革开放的突破在于实行社会主义市场经济,源于人类处于满足生存资料需求和发展资料需求不同阶段对于"计划"与"市场"的诉求不同。新时代社会主义市场经济条件下,政治逻辑的发展为社会主义生产方式的创新发展提供了理论支持,对于有效治国理政、推进党和人民事业发展具有重要意义。     

Citizen satisfaction under changing political leadership: The role of partisan motivated reasoning

There exists a gap in our understanding of what citizen satisfaction evaluations actually represent. While recent years have witnessed a move away from performance‐based models to cognitive‐implicit models of citizen satisfaction, the inherent political nature of government, its institutions, and services has been largely ignored. Drawing on the functional responsibility chain between political principals and governmental, public‐service‐delivering institutions, we outline a theory of citizen satisfaction that accounts for the political nature of these institutions. In the context of two consecutive general elections, we find a partisan bias in citizen satisfaction with government and the legislative branch, but not for institutions that are more clearly separated from national government. These mixed findings are suggestive of a dispersion effect of the partisan bias in citizen satisfaction, namely, that citizens are less likely to use their partisan lenses in cases where the responsibility of political principals is dispersed across multiple actors.