Economics, ideology and vote: Southern Europe, 1985–2000

Abstract.  This article analyses the role of economics in voting behaviour in Greece, Portugal and Spain. First, it describes the objective economic conditions in these countries and investigates the degree to which they reflect the electorates' economic perceptions. Second, a multilevel model of voting behaviour for Greece, Portugal and Spain is tested to determine if, as expected, economics is more important than social and political cleavages. This approach allows one to assess the effects of both individual voters' economic perceptions and objective economic conditions to determine which are more important, and to compare their effects with social and political cleavages. With the exception of Greece, the economic voting model will also be tested under different political conditions (i.e., type of government in each country).     

How Information Scarcity Influences the Policy Agenda: Evidence from U.K. Immigration Policy

This article explores how patterns of information supply on policy problems influence political attention. It advances two central claims. First, different policy areas are associated with distinct practices in monitoring policy problems: Some produce abundant, ongoing, and reliable information, while others yield scarce, sporadic, and/or unreliable data. Second, these variations in information supply are likely to influence political attention, with information‐rich areas associated with a more proportionate distribution of attention, and information‐poor areas yielding punctuated attention. The article tests these claims through comparing U.K. political attention to asylum and illegal immigration. Asylum is observed on an ongoing basis through bureaucratic data, court hearings, and lay observations, producing more constant and proportiate political attention. Illegal immigration is observed sporadically through focusing events, usually police operations, eliciting more punctuated attention. These insights about political attention may also help explain why policy responses may be punctuated or incremental.     

UK Privatisation Revisited: Ideas and Policy Change, 1979–92

Privatisation in the UK was facilitated by the interplay of ideas, institutions, actors, and economic interests. The motivations of the programme were ideational and political, but the objectives were economic and administrative. Together these paved the way for the success of the policy. Although several rationales were at play in the unfolding of privatisation, the ideological predilection of the Thatcher governments underpinned this far-reaching policy reform. This explains why the Thatcher government did not reform nationalized industries within the public sector, but instead shifted them into the private sector. Privatisation succeeded because it was championed by new right policy entrepreneurs, was supported by interest groups prepared to support, or least not impede, such dramatic policy change, and when the public enterprise status quo was deemed in need of reform. Of course, ideas only act as a catalyst for policy change when an established policy agenda having withered, been worn-out or otherwise discredited, can then be successfully challenged.