Designing institutions to improve well-being: Participation,deliberation and institutionalisation

Social accountability institutions are at the forefront of democratic reformers’ efforts to improve well-being by harnessing the power of citizen participation. This article builds on recent research identifying a positive relationship between participatory budgeting (PB) and well-being. The article is the first large-N study to identify relationships between specific rules of PB programme design and well-being. A unique dataset of 114 Brazilian municipalities with PB programmes from 2009 to 2016 is constructed to evaluate whether internal mechanisms within PB explain variation in local infant mortality rates – an outcome associated with wellbeing. Hypotheses are tested that correspond to citizen participation, the scope of deliberation and embeddedness within local institutions. It is found that PB programmes are associated with lower infant mortality rates when they broaden participation, expand deliberation and embed the new institutions in ongoing policy-making venues. The results offer a framework for designing PB programmes and other social accountability institutions to maximise impact.     

The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in-group is portrayed as being threatened by various out-groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti-elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right-wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in-group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti-elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.     

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.     

‘How Do You Think I Feel? It's My Country’: Belonging,Entitlement and the Politics of Immigration

Current debates around immigration are informed by hierarchies of belonging, with some groups seen to belong more, and therefore deserve more, than others. This link between belonging and entitlement has been predominantly analysed in relation to struggles over access to key material benefits, such as jobs, housing, healthcare and so on. This paper will argue that these struggles also point to the continuing relevance of nationhood to many people's sense of self, community and place and the value that comes from being positioned, and recognised, as part of a group that lies at the heart of national life and culture. In other words, the ‘politics of immigration’ is about the anxieties and concerns of those who no longer feel ‘at home’ in what they consider to be ‘their’ country.     

Cooption and Power: Who Gets What From Formal Incorporation

This paper examines the central generalizable factors which influence the flow of power within formal or 'institutional' cooptive arrangements. It examines the key resources of four different types of societal group and explores the utility of these resources in the light of an account of basic government needs. In the light of this, it explores a range of group-government dependencies. Its aim is to set out why some groups can get more and others less from formal government cooption, other things being equal. This enables us to isolate factors of central importance to various cooptive arrangements in quite different contexts.     

Divided Government: America is Not "Exceptional"

America is thought to be an exceptional political system, and, in many of its particulars, it certainly differs from the institutional arrangements found in most of the world's democracies. Its separation-of-powers regime is thought to have spawned, in recent decades, the phenomenon of divided government in which partisan control of political institutions is divided between the major parties. By implication, it is suggested that this robust regularity in which Democrats control the legislature and Republicans the executive is a consequence of its institutional arrangements and, therefore, distinguishes America from its parliamentary counterparts elsewhere. In this article, the authors suggest that parliamentary regimes, too, experience divided government. Specifically, minority governments, in which the executive is controlled by parties that, between them, control less than a legislative majority, is the closest analogue to divided government in America. In each case, the executive needs to seek support in the legislature beyond its own partisan base. Thus, divided government per se does not distinguish parliamentary and separation-of-powers regimes. What does, however, are the constitutional roots of this phenomenon: divided governments are negotiated in parliamentary regimes whereas they are mandated electorally in separation-of-powers regimes.     

Influence without Confidence: Upper Chambers and Government Formation

In most parliamentary democracies, governments must maintain the confidence of a single legislative chamber only. But in bicameral parliaments, upper chambers can affect the fortunes of government policy proposals. Recent work shows that parliamentary governments that lack control over the upper house also tend to collapse sooner than those with upper‐house majorities. In this article, we show that coalition builders anticipate the importance of upper‐chamber status (majority or minority) in making their formation decisions. After controlling for a host of “usual suspect” variables concerning the institutional, ideological, and partisan context of coalition building, and examining 15,590 potential governments in 129 bargaining situations, we found that potential coalitions that control upper‐house majorities are significantly more likely to form than are those with upper‐house minorities. Our findings are important for students of bicameralism, government formation, institutions, and, perhaps most significantly, for those who study policymaking in parliamentary democracies.     

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR MANAGERS OVER 20 YEARS: A TEST OF THE ‘CONVERGENCE THESIS’

This paper sets out to test the ‘convergence thesis’ in respect of managers in the public and private sectors in Britain. New Public Management (NPM) initiatives have had the objective of making managerial behaviour in public sector organizations more similar to that in the private sector. Based on unique national surveys undertaken in 1980, 1990 and 2000, using quite large random samples of fellows and members of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), comparisons are made to investigate whether ‘convergence’ between public and private sector managers has actually occurred. The patterns are found to be complex and, although there are some signs of convergence, the two sectors continue to exhibit similarities, persistent differences and parallel movements evident in managerial attitudes, behaviour and experiences.     

Term Limits and Pork

We describe a model of electoral selection and legislative policy choice that explores the effects of term limits on legislative spending. In the model, self‐interested voters in a collection of districts prefer representatives who deliver pork over representatives who maximize aggregate social welfare. Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term limits reduce pork spending. On the other hand, when pork is extremely socially inefficient, representatives who want to deliver pork to their districts have incentives to refrain from doing so to reduce future pork in other districts. In this scenario, term limits actually prevent legislators from promoting future spending moderation and thus paradoxically increase pork spending.