Culture,Institutions and Campaign Effects: Explaining the Outcome of Malta's EU Accession Referendum

This survey examines the background to and the campaign preceding Malta's EU accession referendum. The result of the referendum, which was held on 8 March 2003, and which was the first of the EU accession referendums of 2003, was a 53.65% vote in support of membership, on a turnout of close to 91%. Explaining both the relatively low support for EU accession and the high turnout on referendum day involves weighing up the relative impact of distinctive features of Malta's political culture and institutional framework against more immediate campaign effects. While the conclusion is that the high turnout in the Maltese EU accession referendum can be traced to Malta's political culture, the relatively low but positive vote in favour of membership can only be fully understood by focusing on a range of factors, including campaign-related factors, such as the credibility of the arguments presented by the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps and the balance of resources available. The most important factor explaining the result of the Maltese referendum are, however, the cues provided by the political parties prior to and over the course of the referendum campaign.     

Improving Policy Effectiveness: Land Use Planning in a Devolved Polity

Improving public policy efficiency and effectiveness in land use planning is an established priority on the prevailing political agenda in the UK. Practical measures to enhance policy formulation in local land use development plans in Scotland offer an interesting case study of an attempt to improve policy consistency, and to secure efficiency gains in policy authorship. This article considers the specific focus on the drafting stage of public policy‐making drawing on insights provided by research into the production of model policies in Scotland. It questions the extent to which such an initiative will promote a more robust public policy‐making discipline in light of the policy cycle. The discussion of the case study illustrates a practical attempt by central government to enhance public policy‐making at the local level, while raising questions about the dangers of invoking a technocratic and instrumentalist approach to policy analysis.     

The Internal Politics of Parties: The Law of Curvilinear Disparity Revisited

One of the few efforts to link systemic and organizational determinants of party strategies is provided by what John May dubbed the 'law of curvilinear disparity'. According to this law, voters, party activists and leaders have necessarily divergent political ideologies. These systematic differences are attributable to the activists' motivations and the constraints of party competition. This paper argues that the law is empirically valid only under distinctive behavioural, organizational and institutional conditions, which are not specified in its general formulation. Thus, the law is only a special case in a broader theory reconstructing the interaction between constituencies, intra-party politics and party competition. This alternative theory is partially tested with survey data from party activists in the Belgian ecology parties Agalev and Ecolo.     

The 1990 Presidential Election in Poland

This article examines the conditions that appear to have influenced political preferences of Poles during the presidential election in November 1990. The first section offers a short introduction to the political and economic situation of Poland after the rise to power of Solidarity. A short presentation of the main candidates, Walesa, Mazowiecki and Tyminski, and their political profiles is also provided here. Then results from a survey conducted one week before the first round of the presidential elections are presented and discussed. It is concluded that there were some systematic differences in socio-economic status and values of the supporters of the main candidates. Specific features of Mazowiecki's electorate were: high social position, high level of education and high income. Typical values for this group were political and economic liberalism. Characteristic of Walesa's electorate were a low level of education, higher age, and an occupation as a small businessman. Conservative Catholic morality, anti-Semitism and pro-market attitudes were overrepresented among Walesa's supporters. Tyminski's supporters, finally, were disproportionately working class and young persons. His electorate was anti-liberal in both the political and the economic meaning of the word. His supporters were often opponents of traditional Catholic morality.     

Eliciting preferences for land use alternatives: A structured value referendum with approval voting

This article discusses an experimental application of the Structured Value Referendum (SVR) with approval voting. The decision context is selecting the best land use for an undeveloped area of publicly owned suburban land in Richmond, British Columbia. Subjects were a random sample of 200 registered voters, selected in a "mall‐intercept" format. Subjects reviewed relevant information, completed a ballot, and then completed a survey about their satisfaction with the approval voting format. The results are of substantive interest for the land use decision, and show a high preference for an approval voting format. The results show ease in understanding the task and information provided, as well as a belief that this approach could be useful in guiding public policy. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Future of the 'Radical Centre' in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement has provided a new political dispensation in Northern Ireland. Through the management of the competing aims of unionism and nationalism, the Agreement hopes to promote cross-community consensus and forge a new, moderate centre. However, the segmental autonomy evident under the consociationalism of the Agreement poses questions of the existing political centre in Northern Ireland. Traditionally, the centre, as represented by the Alliance Party, has rejected unionism and nationalism, believing either to be ideologies to be overcome, rather than accommodated. Under the post-Agreement political arrangements, Alliance has already been obliged to bolster pro-Agreement unionism, through the temporary tactical redesignation of three of its Assembly members as Unionist and through tacit support for selected unionist election candidates. Using the first ever membership survey of the existing centre party in Northern Ireland, this article examines whether its vision of a radical third tradition is sustainable in a polity in which unionist and nationalist politics are legitimised.     

Anti-partyism in the USA and support for Ross Perot

This article provides an initial exploration into the phenomenon of anti-sentiment in the USA. It explores the meaning and measurement of anti-partyism, and introduces a series of empirical measures which tap three distinct dimensions of anti-partyism - dissatisfaction with the existing political parties, a preference for third party alternatives, and a desire to diminish the role of parties in the American political process. After using survey data to establish the basic trends in citizens’ feelings about parties, we probe the current nature and level of anti-partyism in the American system. As a final step, we show how in the 1992 presidential election anti-party sentiment was associated with support for Ross Perot and his grassroots political movement.     

Comparative Journal Ratings: A Survey Report

The expert survey and bibliometric methods of assessing the quality of work in political science are complementary. This project builds on previous surveys of academic political science journals conducted among US political scientists. The current wave extends the survey to political scientists in Canada and the UK. Preliminary results suggest both similarities and differences across the three countries. These results matter for policy debate in any country that is considering channelling flows of funds to universities in proportion to the quality of their research, and in helping to supply objective evidence about the research quality of work submitted by candidates for academic appointments and promotions.     

Political interference and regulatory resilience in Brazil

Governments face a fundamental tradeoff between regulatory independence and control. Attempts of interference have the effect of reducing the system's level of commitment and credibility. On the other hand, an administration runs the risk that the autonomy delegated to regulators might be used to pursue outcomes that may harm their interests. This tradeoff is particularly relevant when there is an alternation of power with the arrival of a new political elite with different preferences. This paper uses data from a 2016 survey on regulatory governance applied to Brazilian regulatory agencies. This data is compared to a similar survey performed in 2005. The new survey results turn out to be surprisingly similar to those of a decade earlier, suggesting strong resilience of regulatory agencies despite significant attempts at political interference by powerful presidents. The factors explaining the resilience of regulatory governance in Brazil lie in its broader institutional endowment, which moderates the effects of executive interference.     

Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questionsexhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changesin questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empiricalcontributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstratethat within the course of the interview there is considerableinstability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of thisinstability is cues regarding economic performance, such asthose provided by the media. We find that respondents can bepersuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receivecontradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placementcan affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstratethat proximity to political questions can contaminate economicevaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow politicalpreference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economicresponses that are "consistent" with their political responses.Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondentsto the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered duringDecember 1997.     

Attention! The meanings of attention to politics in surveys

This research note explores the role of reported attention to politics in survey overclaiming about politics. Using recognition of real and fictitious political parties in the context of the UK's 2019 European Parliament elections, we find that people who report higher attention to politics are more likely to over-report recognition of fictitious parties, and are also more likely to recognize new real political parties - those that emerged around the issue of ‘Brexit’ in the months before the election. To resolve these patterns, we show that political attention makes little difference to the accuracy of responses for people who have high political knowledge, or if it does so, it increases accuracy. However, for those with lower political knowledge, high reported political attention is a source of potential survey error and bias. These findings are consistent with higher survey satisficing and norm compliance among those who report having greater attention to politics, particularly among those who have lower knowledge. The implications are important for understanding the meaning and consequences of ‘attention to politics’ in surveys.     

From Fistfights to Firefights: Trait Aggression and Support for State Violence

Aggression is a fundamental component of human behavior, yet is mostly absent from scholarship on mass political behavior. This study proposes and tests a theory of state violence attitudes in which citizens develop preferences from aggressive personality traits. In an original nationally-representative survey, trait aggression strongly predicts support for violent state policies, as does its subcomponent trait anger, rivaling the power of partisanship. More provocatively, the well-documented gender gap in state violence attitudes replicated here is not attributable to sex differences in aggressive personality. This work builds on recent advances in political personality research and highlights the important role of aggression in political behavior.     

Social conflict over property rights: the end,a new beginning,or a continuing debate?

The ownership and control of private land is a core social value in the United States. Public planning can be seen as conflicting with this value. The long-standing tension between private property rights and public planning was heightened in the 1990s with the emergence of the so-called private property rights movement. This movement seeks to limit governmental authority over privately owned land through a multi-level strategy of legal, policy, political, and public relations actions. This paper explores the historical basis for this conflict, the legal framework within which it functions, and contemporary policy battles.

The paper concludes that there may be no final outcome to this debate. Property rights activists are impassioned and believe their view of history and law is correct. I argue that it may be best to see debate about land use and property rights as one of the central vehicles for a continual reframing of core values in the American experience.     

Independent regulatory agencies in Turkey: are they really autonomous?

This article examines the autonomy of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) in Turkey. It explores, first, the different factors that have led to the creation of IRAs and second, the legislative basis of their formal or de jure autonomy. Thereafter, the article assesses the extent to which this formal autonomy is really put in practice and how it is perceived by board members. The enquiry was conducted through a survey comprising interviews and a questionnaire applied to the same. It concludes that although formal autonomy is satisfactorily provided for by law, government tends to limit this autonomy through secondary legislation. Consequently, there are some constraints on the actual use of autonomy. Concerning de facto autonomy, survey findings show that boards are exposed to external and internal pressures and interference in their deliberations. Thus, the assumption that ‘the greater the autonomy the more efficient the management’ is questioned. The main sources of pressure on board members are from the regulated sectors themselves. These findings have an important bearing on democracy and the political–administrative interface, as it is confronted by market forces. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Of Possibilities,Probabilities and Political Geography

This article explores the nature of intellectual engagement between feminist and political geographies. This exploration is based on two sources of information. The first is a short survey of feminist geographers that asks about their perceptions of political geography, the extent to which they rely on scholarship within political geography and their sense of the openness of political geography to feminist theory and arguments. The second source of information is an analysis of the contents of reviews of political and feminist geography that have been published in recent journals and textbooks. Based on this information, it seems that there is little engagement between the two sub-fields, even though a sizeable body of literature that might be labelled 'feminist political geography' has developed. Reasons for this paradox are considered.     

Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions correctly. Another was given extra time. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11–24%. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents' recall of political facts with variation in their motivation to exert effort during survey interviews. Our work also suggests that existing measures fail to capture relevant political search skills and, hence, provide unreliable assessments of what many citizens know when they make political decisions. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate people's capacities for informed decision making.     

Anti‐elite parties and political inequality: How challenges to the political mainstream reduce income gaps in internal efficacy

There is growing interest in political inequality across income groups. This article contributes to this debate with two arguments about political involvement: poverty depresses internal political efficacy by undermining cognitive and emotional resources; and dissent in the party system reduces the efficacy gap to higher incomes. Specifically, conflict is to be expected between anti‐elite and mainstream parties to simplify political decisions and stimulate political attention among poor voters. These arguments are supported with comparative and experimental analyses. Comparative survey data shows that the income gap in efficacy varies with a novel measure of the anti‐elite salience in the party system. The causal impact of anti‐elite rhetoric is established though a representative survey experiment. Finally, the article investigates how these mechanisms affect both electoral and other forms of political participation.     

The Impact of Social Media Political Activists on Voting Patterns

This paper investigates how social media affects general voting patterns. Unlike previous studies investigating whether citizens’ use of social media affects political participation, this paper considers the connections that social media users have with political activists on social media, and how this connectedness influences general voting patterns, using data from Ghana. With contemporary theoretical perspectives and exploratory techniques, trends from past literature are presented, from a social media-based propagated survey with 420 valid responses. Structural equation modeling was used to test the conceptual model, which demonstrates that the connectedness with political and social media activists is significant and positively influences modifications in voting patterns. Online political participation and political affect also present an effect on voting patterns. The relationship between connections with social media political activists and online political participation is significant, as indicated by a strong covariance observed in the model. The results of the multigroup analysis also indicate some cultural and social issues to shape the phenomena for further investigation.

     

THE STATES' ROLE IN LAND USE POLICY

Historically, land use had been an exclusively local function. By the early 1960s, a "quiet revolution" broke the local government monopoly over zoning and land use, with a larger state role. Those states which passed land use legislation soon were faced with substantial political opposition, especially from rural dwellers and developers. When Congress considered national land use legislation in the early 1970s. these same interests united in effective opposition.     

Polity Size and Local Political Trust: A Quasi‐experiment Using Municipal Mergers in Denmark

This article examines the relationship between polity size and political trust in local government for which two schools of thought offer opposing expectations. The theoretical disagreement has received considerable attention and this article contributes with a dynamic perspective of how changes in polity size affect changes in citizens' political trust on the input‐side of local government. The case examined is the recent municipal mergers in Denmark which were implemented on 1 January 2007. The article reports an analysis of a panel based on a repeated survey of Danish citizens using an untreated control group design with pre‐test and post‐test. A quasi‐experimental difference‐in‐difference identification strategy is used to obtain the effect of municipal size on local political trust. The results show that changes in municipal size negatively affect local political trust, which is consistent with the expectation from the political economy theory that political trust tends to decrease with the size of the polity.