Ideas and agency in immigration policy: A discursive institutionalist approach

Political science literature tends to depict the role of ideas in policy in two distinct ways: as strategic tools mobilised by agents to achieve pre‐given preferences; or as structures imposing constraints on what is considered legitimate or feasible. Discursive institutionalism seeks to combine these insights, suggesting that while actors are indeed constrained by deeply entrenched ideas, they nonetheless enjoy some autonomy in selecting and combining ideas. This article seeks to further develop this approach in two ways. First, it identifies three discursive strategies through which policy actors can selectively mobilise ideas: they may foreground one level over others; exploit ambivalence in public philosophies; or link programme ideas over time by invoking ‘policy legacies’. Second, the article elucidates the mechanisms through which such strategic selections can in turn modify existing public philosophies and programme ideas, thereby influencing policy change. These claims are examined by comparing discourse on immigration policy liberalisation in Germany and the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2008. Evidence is found of all three discursive strategies. Moreover, the article shows how, in the German case, these discursive representations led to longer‐term adjustments in underlying programme ideas and public philosophies on immigration.     

DOES PERFORMANCE INFORMATION ABOUT PUBLIC SERVICES AFFECT CITIZENS' PERCEPTIONS,SATISFACTION, AND VOICE BEHAVIOUR? FIELD EXPERIMENTS WITH ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE PERFORMANCE INFORMATION

We evaluate a theory of the effects of publishing performance information on citizens' collective voice to local providers about public service performance and the perceptions and attitudes that influence their voice. Field experiments show that information about low absolute and relative performance of local government household waste recycling services lowers citizens' perceptions of performance, and information about high absolute and relative performance raises perceived performance. Relative information makes citizens judge local providers as being more responsible for outcomes in the case of high performance, suggesting that systems for comparative performance reporting increase local accountability for outcomes. Negativity bias is evident, with information about low absolute performance reducing citizens' satisfaction but information about high performance not raising satisfaction. Information about low performance did not trigger collective voice protest behaviour as hypothesized, suggesting that providers who need citizens' collective voice the most do not get it.     

TAMING THE ‘AWKWARD STATE’? THE CHANGING FACE OF EUROPEAN POLICY‐MAKING UNDER BLAIR

This paper analyses the important changes to the European Union (EU) policy-making process within the UK core executive introduced by the Blair government between 1997 and 2007. Employing a strategic-relational network framework, it sets out to map the changing face of policy-making within the Whitehall EU network, and to evaluate and explain the impact of adaptation. The article argues that Labour's reform strategy has been double-edged: day-to-day coordination of EU policy has become increasingly informal, ad hoc and delegated downwards to departmental players while the role of the centre has been greatly strengthened in order to provide more effective strategic direction and political leadership. Despite these seemingly coherent reforms, however, many critical features of the process have been potentially detrimental to the projection of a more constructive European policy.     

Perceptions and reality: Economic voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections

Abstract.  One of the most influential explanations of voting behaviour is based on economic factors: when the economy is doing well, voters reward the incumbent government and when the economy is doing badly, voters punish the incumbent. This reward-punishment model is thought to be particularly appropriate at second order contests such as European Parliament elections. Yet operationalising this economic voting model using citizens' perceptions of economic performance may suffer from endogeneity problems if citizens' perceptions are in fact a function of their party preferences rather than being a cause of their party preferences. Thus, this article models a 'strict' version of economic voting in which they purge citizens' economic perceptions of partisan effects and only use as a predictor of voting that portion of citizens' economic perceptions that is caused by the real world economy. Using data on voting at the 2004 European Parliament elections for 23 European Union electorates, the article finds some, but limited, evidence for economic voting that is dependent on both voter sophistication and clarity of responsibility for the economy within any country. First, only politically sophisticated voters' subjective economic assessments are in fact grounded in economic reality. Second, the portion of subjective economic assessments that is a function of the real world economy is a significant predictor of voting only in single party government contexts where there can be a clear attribution of responsibility. For coalition government contexts, the article finds essentially no impact of the real economy via economic perceptions on vote choice, at least at European Parliament elections.     

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.     

Reputational leadership and preference similarity: Explaining organisational collaboration in bank policy networks

This article contributes to our understanding of the formation of policy networks. Research suggests that organisations collaborate with those that are perceived to be influential in order to access scarce political resources. Other studies show that organisations prefer to interact with those that share core policy beliefs on the basis of trust. This article seeks to develop new analytical tools for testing these alternative hypotheses. First, it measures whether perceptions of reputational leadership affect the likelihood of an organisation being the target or instigator of collaboration with others. Second, it tests whether the degree of preference similarity between two organisations makes them more or less likely to collaborate. The article adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining exponential random graph models (ERGM) with qualitative interviews, to analyse and explain organisational collaboration around United Kingdom banking reform. It is found that reputational leadership and preference similarity exert a strong, positive and complementary effect on network formation. In particular, leadership is significant whether this is measured as an organisational attribute or as an individually held perception. Evidence is also found of closed or clique‐like network structures, and heterophily effects based on organisational type. These results offer significant new insights into the formation of policy networks in the banking sector and the drivers of collaboration between financial organisations.     

Temporal Patterns of Crime in Singapore

The authors abstracted and studied information from the Daily Crime Information for the crimes of armed robbery, sexual offenses, theft outside dwelling, theft of motor vehicles, theft of bicycles, theft in dwelling and housebreaking for the year 1975. Frequency by time of day and day of week were determined and analyzed for statistical significance. Long term trends of selected crimes were also calculated. The authors advance explanations for the observed patterns.

The limitations of classification, ambiguity in terminology, etc., made comparison with other countries difficult. Comparison could be made only with Korea and the U.S.A. in respect to the crimes of housebreaking and theft of motor vehicles.     

Securing the Future of Higher Education in England

This article reviews the IPPR commissioned report ‘Securing the Future of Higher Education in England’. It is argued that the report identifies key shortcomings in contemporary higher education policy, and develops some important recommendations for shaping the sector in the future. However, several of the proposed recommendations would create new divisions in the sector and reinforce existing ones. Moreover, the report maintains and reproduces the ideological status quo of contemporary higher education policy, which can broadly be described as the organisation and provision of higher education along ‘quasi‐market’ lines. Crucially, although the report advocates reform based on social justice, in the contemporary context of fiscal retrenchment, the majority of recommendations are underpinned by, arguably necessary, economic rationales.