The Impact of Public Branding: An Experimental Study on the Effects of Branding Policy on Citizen Trust

Branding has become common in the public sector as brands are increasingly used to influence citizens’ associations with public organizations and public services. Using experimental research replicated in three European countries, this article investigates the effect of using the European Union (EU) brand on trust in policies. Experiments were conducted among economics students in Belgium, Poland, and The Netherlands to test the hypothesis that adding EU brand elements to policies positively affects trust in those policies. The results show a consistent positive and significant effect of applying the EU brand to trust in the policies in all countries and for both policies included in the experiment—even in The Netherlands, a country characterized by a negative overall EU sentiment. These findings provide some of the first empirical evidence of the effectiveness of branding for public policy.     

The Value of Participation: Exploring the Role of Public Consultations from the Vantage Point of Interest Groups

Consulting interest groups is commonplace in the preparation of policies by democratic governments. It is often assumed that interest groups participate in consultations primarily for the purpose of influencing policy. This article goes beyond this simplified claim and empirically explores the role of consultations from the vantage point of interest groups. Drawing on the Swedish formalized referral process known as the ‘remiss procedure’ the article shows that interest groups not only participate in consultations in order to effectively change the policy proposal under consideration, but they also use the output of the process in other venues for policy influence, such as direct political contacts and opinion making, and to establish themselves, or maintain their status as legitimate actors in the eyes of the government. In addition, the remiss procedure appears to be intertwined with the groups’ own ‘internal life’, promoting the development and anchorage of policy positions within the organizations. These insights are important for further understanding the promises, as well as the perils, of public consultation.     

The Rich are Different: The Effect of Wealth on Partisanship

Rich voters tend to be Republicans and poor voters tend to be Democrats. Yet, in most settings it is difficult to distinguish the effects of affluence on partisanship from those of closely related variables such as education. To address these concerns I use state lottery and administrative records to examine the effect of changing economic circumstances on the partisanship of over 1,900 registered voters. Winning larger amounts in the lottery produces a small increase in the probability an individual is later a registered Republican, an effect that is larger for those who registered to vote after winning. This suggests that wealth does affect partisanship, particularly for those without preexisting attachments to a political party. Comparing estimates from the lottery to cross-sectional data suggests the latter exaggerates the relationship between wealth and partisanship, although controlling for additional variables produces largely similar estimates.     

Democracy for the youth? The impact of mock elections on voting age attitudes

Should 16-year-olds be entitled to participate in elections? We theorize that mock elections for adolescents, who are not eligible to vote, affect the short-term support among the general public for lowering the voting age. To test our theoretical expectation, we utilize variation among municipalities in the organization of mock elections during the Danish local elections in 2009. Difference-in-difference estimates with data from the subsequent local elections in 2013 demonstrate that citizens in municipalities with mock elections for adolescents were more supportive of lowering the voting age and that their support was strongly rooted in ideological differences.     

Does participation in international organizations increase cooperation?

Recent research asserts that public commitments to international institutions promote behavior that is consistent with institutional purposes. Evidence for this proposition is based almost entirely on studies that compare the behavior of states that have and have not ratified treaties. This paper evaluates instances in which some member states temporarily experience increased entanglement with an IO because they or their nationals serve in a position of authority. Unlike selection into IOs, selection into positions of authority is often governed by a common, observable, and partially exogenous process. I exploit exogenous exit, random assignment to different term lengths, and competitive elections in three contexts: the International Criminal Court (ICC), the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), and the UN Security Council (UNSC). The evidence implicates that acquiring a position of authority can make states more willing to reject U.S. advances to sign non-surrender agreements, adopt domestic legislation that changes the penal code (ICC case), ratify legally binding treaties (UNHRC case), and contribute to peacekeeping missions (UNSC case). On the other hand, there is no evidence that UN institutions successfully select more cooperative states for positions of authority. Similar research designs can gainfully be employed to identify the causal effects of other forms of institutional participation.     

The economics and political economy of going beyond the GATS

This paper addresses the economic and political economy factors explaining why countries agree upon services commitments in regional trade agreements (RTAs) going beyond the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), what we call the commitments gap. Using a unique dataset comprising of detailed schedules of services commitments disaggregated by sub-sectors and covering almost all countries that are members of a services RTA, we are able to quantify the extent to which geographical, systemic as well as economic and institutional factors correlate with a country’s pattern of RTA commitments that go further than commitments made at the WTO. Strong explanatory variables are asymmetries between negotiating partners and market size, together with endowments in mid-skilled labor and institutional governance. Whereas some of these forces are strongly positively associated with commitments made beyond GATS, others are significant determinants that correlate negatively with a country’s commitment patterns in RTAs. We also find strong differences between services industries providing evidence that not all economic and political economy factors are of equal importance for all services. For instance, financial and construction services often diverge significantly from our general pattern of explanations.     

Insincere voting under the successive procedure

Most European parliaments use the successive procedure to reach decisions. This means that a parliament votes feasible alternatives one-by-one in a pre-determined order until one of them obtains a majority of votes. The paper has two objectives. First, I sketch a simple method making it easy to uncover instances of successful insincere voting under the successive procedure. Second, by focusing on data from one national assembly consistently using this procedure, I demonstrate that insincere or strategic voting is very rare. The finding does not indicate that politicians necessarily behave in a non-strategic or unsophisticated manner. It means only that strategic maneuvers may take place at earlier stages of the decision-making process, for example, in designing the voting agenda.     

“Because I am who I am and my mother is Scottish”: neoliberal planning and entrepreneurial instincts at Trump International Golf Links Scotland

Focusing on the establishment of the first European Trump Golf development – on the Menie Estate along the Scottish North Sea coast – the paper contends that neoliberal planning, understood as state interventions to allow individual entrepreneurs to realise their visions, reshapes both planning practice and the socio-ecologies governed by planning in problematic ways. Neoliberal mindsets here cause politicians to depart from previously established practices. The paper analyses how governance becomes tied up in questions of entrepreneurial freedom and with beliefs in the capacity of an individual entrepreneur to steer the fate of the region.