Democracy without choice: Citizens’ perceptions of government autonomy during the Eurozone crisis

In this article it is argued that citizens take into account the degree of a government's political autonomy to implement particular policies when expressing their views on satisfaction with democracy (SWD) but, in order to do so, they need to perceive it. When citizens directly observe the external constraints that reduce their government's autonomy, then variations in levels of regime satisfaction may no longer be exclusively about government performance – as widely argued by political economists – but also about democratic choice. The argument develops after comparing the existing scenarios in the Eurozone before and after the Great Recession. Citizens only began to perceive their own lack of choice to decide between policy alternatives when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in May 2010, the date of the first Greek bail‐out. It is then when citizens started to update their beliefs about the functioning of democracy as a system in which alternative policies can be adopted as bail‐out deals were signed between national governments from the Euro periphery and the Troika. This updating process towards the way democracy works explains the increasing gap in the levels of SWD between bailed‐out economies and the rest of the countries in the Eurozone. Empirical confirmation for this claim is found after analysing Eurobarometer surveys from 2002 to 2014 and using a two‐step difference‐in‐difference analysis that combines individual and aggregate data.     

Election Campaigns in Postwar Norway (1945–1989): From Party-Controlled to Media-Driven Campaigns

From 1945 to the end of the 1980 s, Norway's election campaigns have changed substantially. The mass media – particularly television – have grown in importance, partly structuring the election campaign. In this study the period in question is divided into three phases: (1) 1945–57, a phase characterized by a loyal party press and the breakthrough of radio; (2) 1961–69, a phase characterized by a loyal party press under pressure and the advent of television; (3) 1973–89, a phase characterized by the dissolution of the party press and the beginning of the television era. In the course of these decades, the media's coverage of election campaigns has been 'liberated' from the political parties. This move from party-controlled to media-driven election campaigns coincides with a more turbulent period among the voters, a period with a higher level of voter volatility. The changing role of the mass media has not led to dramatic shifts in activity, at least not as reflected by two indicators – voter turnout and level of informal discussion. Recent changes in the pattern of voting participation, however, may be associated with the role of the media. The gap between centre and periphery in voter turnout has gradually been bridged , and television is probably one of the bridge-builders. With television as the major arena for the election campaign, the stream of political impulses which serve as mobilizing forces has become more or less the same in both centre and periphery.     

Priorities for Preventive Action: Explaining Americans’ Divergent Reactions to 100 Public Risks

Why do Americans’ priorities for combating risks like terrorism, climate change, and violent crime often seem so uncorrelated with the dangers that those risks objectively present? Many scholars believe the answer to this question is that heuristics, biases, and ignorance cause voters to misperceive risk magnitudes. By contrast, this article argues that Americans’ risk priorities primarily reflect judgments about the extent to which some victims deserve more protection than others and the degree to which it is appropriate for government to intervene in different areas of social life. The article supports this argument with evidence drawn from a survey with 3,000 respondents, using pairwise comparisons to elicit novel measures of how respondents perceive nine dimensions of 100 life‐threatening risks. Respondents were well informed about these risks’ relative magnitudes—the correlation between perceived and actual mortality was .82—but those perceptions explained relatively little variation in policy preferences relative to judgments about the status of victims and the appropriate role of government. These findings hold regardless of political party, education, and other demographics. The article thus argues that the key to understanding Americans’ divergent reactions to risk lies more with their values than with their grasp of factual information.     

Interpreting UKIP's ‘Earthquake’ in British Politics: UK Television News Coverage of the 2009 and 2014 EU Election Campaigns

UK broadcasters came under fire for the amount of airtime UKIP and its leader Nigel Farage received after the party won the most votes in the 2014 EU election. Our content analysis of television news during the 2009 and 2014 campaigns found little bias in terms of soundbites, but in the more recent election Farage visually appeared in coverage to a greater degree than other party leaders. Moreover, two core UKIP policies—being in or out of Europe and immigration—dominated coverage in 2014. We suggest the ‘UKIP factor’ and the media's fascination with Nigel Farage help explain why the 2014 campaign was more visible on television news than was the case in 2009 and was largely reported through a Westminster prism. Although television news bulletins attempt to impartially report elections, the 2014 campaign agenda was largely contested on UKIP's ideological terrain and the party's electoral fortunes.     

Bad for Men,Better for Women: The Impact of Stereotypes During Negative Campaigns

In this paper, we examine whether the impact of negative advertising on citizens’ evaluations of candidates depends on the gender of the candidates. Given common gender stereotypes, we expect negative campaigning aimed at women candidates will affect citizens differently than negative campaigning against male candidates. The results of our study, derived from a survey experiment conducted on a nationwide sample of more than 700 citizens, demonstrate that negative commercials are less effective at depressing evaluations of woman candidates, compared to male candidates. The findings are consistent and strong, across a range of forces that people use to assess competing candidates (i.e., affect and trait evaluations, people’s beliefs about issues, anticipated vote choice). The tight control of the experimental design, including randomization of respondents into different conditions that vary in only one way, demonstrates that the gender of the candidate influences people’s reactions to different types of negative commercials.

Budget Rhetoric in Presidential Campaigns from 1952 to 2000

We offer a theory to identify the determinants of presidential campaign rhetoric related to the federal budget. The theory builds on the literature dealing with issue ownership, candidate strategy, retrospective voting, and voter preferences to generate eight hypotheses about the use of budget rhetoric. To test these hypotheses, over 800 campaign speeches from the major party presidential nominees from 1952 to 2000 are content analyzed. The content analysis generates measures of both the volume and tone of budget rhetoric. Volume is driven primarily by the objective balance of the budget and subjective importance given to it by voters and a conditional effect involving budget balance, incumbency, and partisanship. Tone is more complex, with positive rhetoric determined mostly by the budget balance and partisanship and overstated rhetoric shaped solely by the salience of the budget to the electorate. The article concludes with suggestions for future research.     

From ‘Tiger’ to ‘PIIGS’: Ireland and the use of heuristics in comparative political economy

This article analyses the consequences of the narrative construction of the group of countries that has been grouped as ‘PIIGS’ (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) for their sovereign debt risk rating. Acronyms for groups of countries can provide a useful shorthand to capture emergent similarities in economic profile and prospects. But they can also lead to misleading narratives, since the grounds for use of these terms as heuristic devices are usually not well elaborated. This article examines the process whereby the ‘PIIGS’ group came into being, traces how Ireland became a member of this grouping, and assesses the merits of classifying these countries together. The contention is that the repetition of the acronym in public debate did indeed shape the behaviour of market actors toward these countries. It is argued that this involved a co‐constituting process: similarities in market treatment drives PIIGS usage, which in turn promotes further similarities in market treatment. Evidence is found of Granger causality, such that increased media usage of the term ‘PIIGS’ is followed by increased changes in Irish bond yields. This demonstrates the constitutive role of perceptions and discourse in interpreting the significance of economic fundamentals. The use of acronyms as heuristics has potentially far‐reaching consequences in the financial markets.     

Urban Citizenship: Campaigns to Restore Immigrant Voting Rights in the US

International migration challenges traditional notions of citizenship as mobile citizens may retain or regain their right to vote in elections. This article examines the rebirth of noncitizen voting rights in US local elections during the past decades. While some campaigns provide voting rights only to authorized immigrants, other campaigns extend voting rights to all noncitizens regardless of their status. Some efforts have been led by immigrant rights organizations and other campaigns arose at the initiative of elected officials. Some measures have been passed—or were defeated—by a majority of voters in a jurisdiction (ballot proposal) while other measures have been passed—or were defeated—by elected representatives (as local statutes). Who spearheaded these campaigns for immigrant voting rights and why? What are key ingredients to the success or failure of these campaigns? What have been their impacts? Using qualitative and quantitative data gathered from field research and public records over the past decade, this article addresses these questions and their implications for advancing immigrant incorporation and democratic practice.     

Spinning Europe: Pro-European Union Propaganda Campaigns in Britain, 1962–1975

The impact of pro-European Union (EU) propaganda campaigns in Britain has been neglected within EU studies and in the recent work on the Europeanisation of political parties, trade unions and the British state. Bringing together the few sources of information that exist, this article documents the three government-organised pro-EU propaganda campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. It specifically discusses the campaigns in 1962—63 to bolster public support following Britain's first application to join the EU, in 1970—71 to prepare the public for accession, and in 1974—75 to ensure continued membership in the 1975 Referendum.     

Constituents’ Responses to Congressional Roll‐Call Voting

Do citizens hold their representatives accountable for policy decisions, as commonly assumed in theories of legislative politics? Previous research has failed to yield clear evidence on this question for two reasons: measurement error arising from noncomparable indicators of legislators’ and constituents’ preferences and potential simultaneity between constituents’ beliefs about and approval of their representatives. Two new national surveys address the measurement problem directly by asking respondents how they would vote and how they think their representatives voted on key roll‐call votes. Using the actual votes, we can, in turn, construct instrumental variables that correct for simultaneity. We find that the American electorate responds strongly to substantive representation. (1) Nearly all respondents have preferences over important bills before Congress. (2) Most constituents hold beliefs about their legislators’ roll‐call votes that reflect both the legislators’ actual behavior and the parties’ policy reputations. (3) Constituents use those beliefs to hold their legislators accountable.     

Elite Interactions and Voters’ Perceptions of Parties’ Policy Positions

Recent research documents that voters infer that governing coalition partners share similar ideologies, independently of these parties’ actual policy statements. We argue that citizens estimate party positions from more general forms of interparty cooperation and conflict, particularly near the times of national elections. We analyze tens of thousands of media reports on elite interactions from 13 Western democracies between 2001 and 2014, and show that—controlling for coalition arrangements and for the policy tones of parties’ election manifestos—voters infer greater left–right agreement between pairs of parties that have more cooperative public relationships, but that this “cooperation effect” is only evident near the times of national elections. Our findings have implications for parties’ policy images and for mass–elite linkages.     

The Power of Smears in Two American Presidential Campaigns

This article compares the two main cases of deceitful negative campaigning that characterized the American presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2008. These are, respectively, the attacks led by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against the military career and the subsequent pacifist turn of John Kerry and the smear, initially spread around the web, that claimed that Barack Obama was Muslim. This research describes the origins, developments, and outcomes of the two smear campaigns, focusing on the differences and similarities between them in terms of their content and their communication strategies. It then investigates the role played by the different media platforms employed by the negative campaigners, the importance of a prompt answer by the recipients of the accusations, and the response of public opinion. Finally, the comparison of the cases allows pointing out some conditions for the success or failure of mudslinging in contemporary American political communication.     

From ‘Judicial Mind’ to ‘Democratic Soul’: Law and Politics on the Bureaucratic Frontline

This article considers the relationship between law and democratic politics as manifest in the practice of ‘street‐level bureaucracy’. By glancing back to debates about citizenship and public administration between the two world wars, it sets contemporary concerns about the political constitution in broader context. In doing so, it discloses a fundamental division between conceptions of the state derived from Roman jurisprudence on the one hand, and ancient Athenian political practice on the other. It finds in the tragic dilemmas posed for street‐level bureaucrats—by the competing claims on their values—a test of individual moral agency and of democracy as the management of diversity. It concludes that what is at stake in our estimation of street‐level bureaucracy is not so much the purity of the ‘judicial mind’ as the complexity of the ‘democratic soul’ and the ‘connected society’.     

From ‘There is No Alternative’ to ‘Maybe There are Alternatives’: five Challenges to Economic Orthodoxy after the Crash

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, politicians famously told the public and themselves that ‘there is no alternative’ to a neoliberal economic paradigm. Fast‐forward to 2019 and there is, instead, the sense that ‘maybe there are alternatives’. However, when many observers and commentators look back to the 2008 crisis, they see a general continuity with what went before. In order to gain a better understanding of this ‘interregnum’, we map five sets of ideas and practices that challenge the policies, ideas, and conventions of pre‐crash orthodoxy. In doing so, we argue that there has been a fundamental transformation in legitimate public discourse about the economy since 2008: ideas and practices that were previously unimaginable or illegitimate in mainstream economic debate are now commonplace. Although this does not represent a ‘paradigm shift’, it represents significant political change that is important to understand and interrogate on its own terms.     

Using Creative Assignments to Help Students Integrate Their Learning in a Campaigns and Elections Class

The ability to integrate learning—to make connections across classes or even within a single class—is integral to students becoming better learners, and to growing their capacity to perform as civic actors. We discuss an upper-level Campaigns and Elections class in which the course structure and assignments were set up to encourage students to integrate their learning. As part of the class, students played the role of state party committees during the 2016 presidential election, at first making arguments to devote more national party resources to their state campaign and then reporting back to the national party on how the election went in their state, and what the party must do to maximize its future success. Through coding of student final exam essay questions, we explore the degree to which students were able to achieve the integrative learning goals we had set for them, and examine factors that might help predict which students achieved these learning goals. We conclude by generalizing from our experience to discuss best practices for achieving integrative learning in our courses.