Local labour market competition and radical right voting: Evidence from France

How do the economic effects of immigration affect radical right support? The evidence in support of the labour market competition theory — which posits that the economic threat posed by immigration to jobs and wages leads to radical right voting — has been mixed. On the one hand, individual-level surveys underreport economic drivers because of social desirability bias. On the other hand, contextual studies show contradictory findings due to an over-reliance on units of analysis that are too aggregated to meaningfully capture the competitive threat posed by immigrants. This paper identifies the influence of labour market competition on radical right voting at a local level in contexts where native workers are directly affected by the arrival of immigrants who have similar or higher skillsets. Using an original longitudinal dataset of fine-grained municipal electoral, demographic and economic data from France over the 2002–2017 period, the paper provides empirical evidence of local contextual influences of economic competition between natives and immigrants of any skillset. Under local conditions of material deprivation, measured by the local unemployment rate, the effect of labour market competition on municipalities’ radical right vote share is amplified. Moreover, higher radical right support is observed in municipalities with a higher share of any one of the following groups: low-skilled natives, medium-skilled immigrants or high-skilled immigrants. This supports the hypothesis that immigrants with higher qualifications are compelled to accept lower-skilled jobs, and are thus perceived as a competitive threat to low-skilled natives. By reconciling radical right contextual studies and research on the political economy of immigration policies, this paper highlights the importance of a local analysis in detecting the effect of labour market competition on radical right support. This paper also explains why some local areas are more prone to radical right support than others over time.     

Regulatory Styles,Motivational Postures and Nursing Home Compliance*

Using Kagan and Scholz (1984) typology of regulatory noncompliance, this study examined the perceptions of regulators and of regulatees toward the regulatory encounter to predict subsequent compliance with nursing home quality of care standards. Appraisals of both regulators and regulatees were not driven by motivational analyses of each other's actions, but rather by assessments of performance and social group identity. The regulators saw nursing homes in terms of one evaluative dimension ranging from responsible and not in need of intervention through to irresponsible and needing intervention. The corresponding reactions of nursing home managers involved seeing the regulators as cooperative and sympathetic through to police-like and coercive. On both sides of the regulatory encounter, criticism and reactions to criticism swamped nuanced analyses of motivational underpinnings and rational decision models in explaining compliance. The motivational complexity underlying the Kagan and Scholz typology was, however, apparent in the self-reported motivational postures of managers toward the regulatory process. The postures of managerial accommodation and capture to the regulatory culture were associated with compliance. Over time, resisters to the new regulatory regime became more compliant, particularly those whom inspectors judged as best left alone to adjust. In contrast were managers whose response to the regulatory process was disengagement. Their organizations experienced deterioration in compliance. The study fails to find that certain kinds of regulatory strategies such as deterrence, education and persuasion work better than others across the sample or with specific groups. Extant models focus excessively on how to play the regulatory game without recognizing the potential for players dropping out of the game. Understanding reasons for disengagement and processes for reengagement are fundamental to the application of behavioral decision theory models to the regulatory context.     

Regulating Risk: Implications of the Challenger Accident*

This analysis describes how the NASA organization contributed to the loss of the Challenger on January 28, 1986. The competitive environment, NASA organization characteristics (its structure, processes, and transactions), and the regulatory environment all influenced the decision to proceed with the launch. To be effective, strategies to control, change, or eliminate undesireable behavior should address the cause of that behavior. Understanding how organizations contribute to technical system accidents leads to the conclusion that efforts to reduce accidents in risky technological systems must include the organizations that produce them. Suggestions for policy aimed at curtailing organizational-technical system accidents are discussed.     

Mobilizing Information: Local News and the Formation of a Viable Political Community

This article offers a rhetorical understanding of the practices and influences of news media on democratic citizenship during an environmental conflict. I compared two newspapers' ability to foster and suppress the formation and activation potential of citizens to participate in the decision-making process of a solid waste facility siting. One newspaper used language that fostered the formation of community by overcoming apathy and encouraging residents to act collectively. In contrast, the other newspaper's coverage suppressed the formation of community by reinforcing the belief that residents were powerless against the entrenched economic and political power base. This research also establishes a rationale for why it is important to the discipline to expand the definition of mobilizing information in the news media.     

GIRL FRIENDS ARE BETTER: GENDER,FRIENDS, AND CRIME AMONG SCHOOL AND STREET YOUTH*

In recent years, popular media has drawn attention to “mean girls” and their negative treatment of others, particularly other females. But while the attention to girls' aggression and their mistreatment of their peers highlights understudied aspects of female behavior, it neglects the beneficial aspects of female friendship. We argue that compared to relationships with males, friendships with females provide more social control, fewer opportunities and less motivation for offending and may therefore discourage crime. Because an adolescent's gender likely influences the association between the gender of one's friends and crime, we anticipate that the association will be stronger for females than for males. The relationship is also likely affected by the context in which relationships originate; we expect that those that develop in less conventional contexts will have weaker effects on crime. We explore these hypotheses with a comparative analysis of effects of friendships on property crime in two samples of youth: those who live at home and attend school and those who are homeless and spend their days and nights on the street. Our findings support our hypotheses. The relationship between female‐dominated friendship networks and property crime is negative and significant; however, this association is strongest for school females, weaker for school males and females who live on the street, and nonsignificant for homeless males.     

Class voting and left voting in Scandinavia

Abstract. This article examines the effects of different definitions of the working class on the measurement of class voting and left voting in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. First, the similarities and differences in how the working class has been operationalized in the three countries are summarized. To determine the effects of different operationalizations, Swedish election survey data are recoded to conform more closely to the classification procedures used in Danish and Norwegian studies. The analysis shows that if a similar operationalization is used, the level of left voting in both the Swedish working and middle classes increases and the Alford index of class voting declines. Class voting and left voting in the younger and older generations and among women and men are also discussed. Dissimilar patterns of class voting and left voting among women in the three countries are largely a product of different classification schemes. The concluding discussion points to a number of problems in using the Alford index as a summary statistic in cross-national comparisons.