The dark side of disagreement? Revisiting the effect of disagreement on political participation

Thriving democracy requires an open exchange of disagreeing viewpoints. Yet disagreement may have a dark side. Recent research claims that people who experience disagreement in their informal political discussions are less likely to vote. This paper adds to a growing group of challenges to the notion of a ‘dark side’. It addresses the conventional wisdom from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint. I argue that disagreement in itself should not depress participation. Only those atypical respondents who encounter entirely disagreeing viewpoints are less likely to vote than those who encounter completely agreeing perspectives. People with mixed networks are equally likely to vote as those who face complete agreement. This paper tests the alternative theory against the conventional wisdom by returning to the dataset that first found evidence of the ‘dark side’. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the alternative theory. As a result, this study helps to mitigate concerns about the negative effects of disagreement and supports a network-centric approach to political science.     

What's left after right-wing extremism? The effects on political orientation

Does radical right political violence favour or hinder public support for right-wing stances? Numerous existing studies have demonstrated that Islamic terrorism provokes a conservative shift, increases nationalism and induces negative sentiments towards immigration. However, little is known about the consequences of far-right terrorism, despite its incidence in Western societies. We leverage four waves of the British Election Study (BES) and use a quasi-experimental design to analyse individual political orientations shortly before and after terrorist attacks. We find that respondents distance themselves from the ideology associated with the perpetrator and shift away from ideological positions at the right end of the political spectrum. Furthermore, respondents are less likely to report nationalistic attitudes and immigration skepticism, core tenets of extremist right-wing political ideologies. Our findings suggest that the characteristics of the perpetrators and their driving goals are crucial factors shaping the impact of terrorism on public sentiments.     

Government or governance? The case of the French local political system

The structure of the local political system has completely changed since decentralisation. However, the presentation of peripheral power made by Pierre Grémion before decentralisation has not really been updated. Most academic research concentrates on either rural or urban issues. From the analysis of the current attempt of the French state to enhance co‐operation between communes, it is possible to make a general presentation of the current decentralised political system. Local authorities are increasingly part of a multi‐actor system combining many public and private institutions. However, they also are developing a specific political mode of organisation and relationship with one another. Local governments are the political cores of the multi‐actor system, in charge of local management.     

How do voters perceive ideological congruence? The effects of winning and losing under different electoral rules

The degree of ideological congruence between citizens and their elected representatives is an important feature of democratic systems of government. A long tradition of literature has examined the ideological linkages between citizens and governments, often drawing attention to the differences (or lack thereof) in congruence across different types of electoral systems. Previous research has largely relied on aggregate-level measures of ideological congruence, such as the ideological distance between the position of the median voter and the government. We turn our attention here to how congruence relationships are perceived by individual voters, and how the perceptions of congruence may vary across electoral system types. This individual-level measure of ideological congruence is important in that individual-level, rather than aggregate-level, congruence has been shown to influence other outcomes such as citizen satisfaction with democratic performance. We expect electoral “winners” – those who voted for a party that entered government – to perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government compared to electoral “losers”. We expect this effect to be stronger in majoritarian systems where political competition takes place primarily between two parties, than in proportional systems where electoral losers are more likely to receive a proportional share of representation. We test these expectations by estimating random-effects regressions of perceived individual-level congruence using data from 54 elections held in 23 democracies included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results provide consistent support for our expectations. Electoral winners in all types of electoral systems perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government, and this effect is stronger in majoritarian systems.     

Bring in the experts? Citizen preferences for independent experts in political decision-making processes

Do citizens welcome the involvement of independent experts in politics? Theoretical and empirical work so far provides conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, citizens may demand expert involvement in political decision-making processes in order to ensure efficient and effective governance solutions. On the other hand, citizens can be distrustful of experts and reject the unaccountable and non-transparent nature of expert-based governance. This note investigates citizen preferences for the involvement of experts in different stages of political processes and across ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ political issues. Results show that, in the absence of explicit output information, respondents prefer independent experts over national elected representatives in the policy design and implementation stages, across political issues. For the crucial stage of decision making, respondents show no difference in their evaluation of processes that delegate decisions to experts or to elected representatives, with the exception of environmental policy, where expert decision making is preferred. These findings are relevant for ongoing discussions on how to incorporate independent experts in political decision making in a way that citizens find legitimate and on how to address increased citizen dissatisfaction with the representative democratic functions performed by political parties, governments and politicians.     

The price of transparency: do campaign finance disclosure laws discourage political participation by?citizens�� groups?

We surveyed independent citizens?? groups who advertised in either of the Canadian federal elections of 2004 and 2006 to see whether financial reporting laws act as barriers to entry in politics. The most conservative estimates suggest that conforming imposes administrative costs of no more than 9% of group budgets. These small reporting costs and our finding that 61% of respondents believed reporting requirements discouraged independent groups from participating in elections suggest that there may be intangible but substantial costs to disclosure. Our survey indicates these costs arise from the fear of prosecution by authorities for alleged violations of reporting requirements.     

Channelling attention and choice? Examining effects of consideration sets on electoral decision-making

This article sheds light on the utility of consideration set modeling in analyzing electoral decision-making in multi-party systems against the background of the German federal election in 2013. The results show that large portions of the German electorate choose a party comprised by their consideration set over the course of the campaign. The size of consideration sets does not precipitously decline as Election Day approaches, however. The analysis also suggests that the composition of voters' consideration sets slightly affects their exposure to campaign communication and their evaluation of campaign events and gaffes. Finally, the evidence demonstrates that consideration sets virtually did not condition the impact of campaign reception and evaluations of campaign events on voting behavior. The overall results suggest that consideration set modeling deserves further exploration in future research.     

The effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on political support: Some good news for democracy?

Major crises can act as critical junctures or reinforce the political status quo, depending on how citizens view the performance of central institutions. We use an interrupted time series to study the political effect of the enforcement of a strict confinement policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we take advantage of a unique representative web-based survey that was fielded in March and April 2020 in Western Europe to compare the political support of those who took the survey right before and right after the start of the lockdown in their country. We find that lockdowns have increased vote intentions for the party of the Prime Minister/President, trust in government and satisfaction with democracy. Furthermore, we find that, while rallying individuals around current leaders and institutions, they have had no effect on traditional left–right attitudes.     

Governing concept or political buzzword? Contested perceptions of local control

This article uses a perceptions-based framework to study how local governing actors define local control, and, to identify the determinants of definition alignment among local officials. A mix of survey and administrative data from Wisconsin officials is used to test nine hypotheses. The results indicate there is wide variation in how local government leaders define local control, and that alignment on the concept's meaning is predicted by ideology, perceived erosion of local control, and positional characteristics. The study concludes that local governments should incorporate a working definition of local control in planning and on-boarding processes in order to provide governing relevance to the concept.     

Valuable legacy? The effect of inherited fiscal rules

Public Choice - The working mechanism of national fiscal rules depends strongly on whether a government must comply with its own rules or inherited ones. In the former case, a government usually...     

The politics of bailouts: Estimating the causal effects of political connections on corporate bailouts during the 2008–2009 US financial crisis

Public Choice - In 2008, as the financial crisis unfolded in the United States, the banking industry elevated its lobbying and campaign spending activities. By the end of 2008, and during 2009, the...     

Passengers or political actors? Children's participation in transport policy and the micro political geographies of the family

Transport is currently at the forefront of the political agenda. Successive government transport policies have increased the spatial mobility of the majority of the UK population, largely through encouraging car ownership and use. However, transport and children's geographers have highlighted that children are one social group that face increasing restrictions on their independent spatial mobility. These spatial restrictions are caused in part by safety fears originating from traffic generated by other people's mobility. Thus, with the exception of a few local initiatives such as ‘Safer Routes to School’, current transport policy fails to treat children as political citizens, neglecting to represent or respond to their travel needs. As a result of increasing restrictions on their mobility, children are increasingly escorted by adults in cars. Thus, the car is becoming an increasingly significant social space of childhood. However, little is known about the decision-making processes that result in car use. This paper examines, at the micro level, the everyday familial politics concerning the decision-making processes regarding car use and, more specifically, whether children, as political actors, are included in this process. The paper also discusses the possibilities for promoting children as political citizens at the macro level, by examining mechanisms for incorporating the views and transport needs of children into transport policy and planning.     

The effects of political design and organizational dynamics on structural disaggregation and integration in Norway 1947–2019

In countries with long-standing agency traditions, the creation of new agencies rarely comes as a large-scale reform but rather as one structural choice of many possible, most notably a ministerial division. In order to make sense of these choices, the article discusses the role of political design—focusing on the role of political motivations, such as ideological turnover, replacement risks and ideological stands toward administrative efficiency—and organizational dynamics—focusing on the role of administrative legacies and existing organizational palettes. The article utilizes data on organizational creations in the Norwegian central state between 1947 and 2019, in order to explore how political design and organizational dynamics help us understand the creation of agencies relative to ministry divisions over time. We find that political motives matter a great deal for the structural choices made by consecutive Norwegian governments, but that structural path dependencies may also be at play.     

The effects of political involvement and cross-pressures on multiple party identifications in multi-party systems – evidence from Germany

Despite being part of the original concept in “The American Voter”, multiple party identifications (MPID) have rarely been analyzed. Based on a 2016 survey that is representative of the German electorate, we investigate the determinants of multiple party attachments in Germany. With the help of a new measurement instrument for MPID, we can show that multiple attachments are a common phenomenon in Germany: Nearly 30% of the respondents and more than half of all party adherents identify themselves with more than one party. Political interest and education as facets of political involvement have a significant effect on the likelihood of holding multiple attachments within ideological camps. Cross-pressures lead to a higher probability of having multiple identifications between political camps.     

The political economy of inflation: Bargaining structure or central bank independence?

The causes of inflation are commonly analyzed as the function of either the organization of wage bargaining or the independence of the central bank. Although these explanations are widely treated as competing, recent evidence suggests that there may be merit to both arguments. This paper presents a game-theoretic model of wage bargaining and monetary policy-making that shows why the two institutional causes are not only complementary, but elements of a more encompassing logic. The empirical superiority of this synthesizing model is demonstrated by reanalyzing data used in Al-Marhubi and Willett (1995) and by presenting new evidence.     

Precision-guided or blunt? The effects of US economic sanctions on human rights

Public Choice - This study analyzes the consequences of economic sanctions for the target country’s human rights situation. We offer a political economy explanation for different types of...     

Does WIC work? The effects of WIC on pregnancy and birth outcomes

Support for WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is based on the belief that "WIC works." This consensus has lately been questioned by researchers who point out that most WIC research fails to properly control for selection into the program. This paper evaluates the selection problem using rich data from the national Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. We show that relative to Medicaid mothers, all of whom are eligible for WIC, WIC participants are negatively selected on a wide array of observable dimensions, and yet WIC participation is associated with improved birth outcomes, even after controlling for observables and for a full set of state-year interactions intended to capture unobservables that vary at the state-year level. The positive impacts of WIC are larger among subsets of even more disadvantaged women, such as those who received public assistance last year, single high school dropouts, and teen mothers.     

Old wine in new bottles? Reassessing the effects of globalisation on political preferences in Western Europe

In both public and scholarly debates, globalisation has recently been accredited with a massive impact on the political preferences and electoral behaviour of Western citizens. Some go as far as to declare a new cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation, driven, for example, by individuals’ exposure to international competition and their degree of national as opposed to cosmopolitan identification. Extant tests of this argument have, however, relied on class and education as proxies for these processes. In contrast, this study provides a direct test of the influence of the globalisation processes on attitudes to economic distribution, the European Union and immigration as well as on vote choice across nine West European countries. The results show that variables tapping the core aspects of globalisation have relatively little impact on attitudes and vote choice; are largely unable to account for the effects of class and education; and do not seem to lead to the establishment of new divisions between winners and losers within or across classes. Rather, the winners and losers of globalisation seem to be the traditional winners and losers with respect to material positions and political influence in modern Western societies – that is, those placed higher as opposed to lower in the class and education hierarchies. In this way, the proposed cleavage between winners and losers of globalisation may seem to be rather much like old wine in new bottles.     

Voter turnout: How much can we explain?

This paper evaluates the ability of common explanatory variables to predict who votes. Logit voting regressions are estimated with more than three dozen explanatory variables using survey and aggregate data for the 1979, 1980, 1984, and 1988 Canadian national elections. We find that the usual demographic variables such as age and education, and contextual variables such as campaign spending have significant effects on the probability of voting, but the models have low R2's and cannot predict who votes more accurately than random guessing. We also estimate regressions using past voting behavior as a predictor of current behavior, and find that although the explanatory power rises it remains low. This suggests that the difficulty in explaining turnout arises primarily from omitted time- varying variables. In some sense, then, it appears that whether or not a person votes is to a large degree random. The evidence provides support for the rational voter theory, and is problematic for psycho/sociological approaches.     

The effect of electoral outcomes on political trust: A multi–level analysis of 23 countries

Competing theoretical claims exist in the literature on the effect of proportionality on political trust. To date, empirical studies yielded mixed results. In this paper, we examine a curvilinear effect of the proportionality of election outcomes on political trust using data from the European Social Survey (2006–2009). The findings show that political trust is indeed highest in countries with very proportional as well as in countries with very disproportional election outcomes and lowest in countries that fall in between. Election outcomes that are more fully inclusive and those that provide more accountability can both lead to higher levels of political trust. Next to the proportionality of the translation of votes into seats, this study investigates a broad range of election outcomes that are associated with (dis)proportionality i.e. the effect of the number of parties in elections, parliament and government, voting for the winning or losing party under different levels of proportionality and the clarity of responsibility.