Party performance explains disagreement between politicians and their parties

Are politicians more likely to disagree with their party after an electoral defeat or during a spell in opposition? If so, are they likely to advocate a more moderate or a more radical position than their party? In order to evaluate this, the article analyses the absolute distance between candidates for parliament and their parties on the left–right dimension. The sample used consists of 5614 politicians from 11 countries (Comparative Candidate Survey). Controlling for party system differences and individual characteristics, the results demonstrate that politicians take more moderate positions than their party after an electoral defeat. Also politicians of government parties are surprisingly more likely to disagree than politicians of opposition parties. These results overlap with predictions of party position shifts and inform the discussion on how intra-party dynamics bring about changes in party position. In addition, the article finds evidence of loss aversion, and differences in the responsiveness of elite and non-elite candidates.     

Digital mediations of everyday humanitarianism: the case of Kiva.org

Abstract

The proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms that aim to facilitate social action, often connected to international development or environmental sustainability, has contributed to the ongoing popularisation of development. In this article, I argue that it has resulted in the digitally-enabled constitution of everyday humanitarians, who are everyday people supportive of poverty alleviation. Kiva.org, a US-based online microlending platform that invites everyday humanitarians to make US$25 loans to Kiva entrepreneurs around the world, is a prime site to study these processes. I show how Kiva cultivates supporters through the mediated production of affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others. This happens through the design of an affective architecture which in turn generates financial and spatial mediations. While these result in microloans and attendant sentiments of affinity, they also lead to financial clicktivism and connections that obscures the asymmetries and riskscapes resulting from Kiva’s microlending work.     

Alles eine Frage des Managements?

NPM-driven agencification thoroughly changed the face of public administrations in many modern democracies. Despite high expectations and more than a decade of experience the effects of these reforms are still widely disputed. This contribution presents a neo-institutionalist model to evaluate empirically the explanatory power of those factors commonly considered as the most relevant for executives’ discretion in decision-making. Perception-data taken from the German federal administration confirm the hypothesized correlation between the distance from government and perceived discretion of agency executives. However, in-depth analysis reveals that some of the most common instruments to achieve autonomization fail to deliver.     

Experimente in der Politikwissenschaft: Vom Mauerblümchen zum Mainstream

The use of experimental research designs is on the rise. Internationally, experiments are becoming ever more established in the field, as shown by the increasing number of journal articles, books, and conferences. In German political science, however, using experimental methods is still rather uncommon. After a (brief) discussion of the relevance of experiments for political science, we will—in general terms—introduce the logic of experimental research as well as different types of experiments. Then we shall provide a (selective) overview of experimental research in political science that has been conducted: First, we cursorily review the state of (experimental) research done in the fields of elections and public opinion, public goods and collective action, social trust and finally legislative bargaining and decision-making. Following that, we discuss in greater detail the field experimental strand of research studying voter mobilization.     

Do Poor Citizens Vote for Redistribution,Against Immigration or Against the Establishment? A Conjoint Experiment in Denmark

What is the link between socioeconomic disadvantage and vote choice? The literature on this question is fragmented and points to motivations based on welfare policy, immigration policy or anti‐establishment sentiments. To test which of these motives explains differences in voting behaviour between classes, a conjoint experiment in which fictitious candidates present randomly assigned positions was designed. The experiment evaluated the relative importance of the position on welfare, immigration and anti‐establishment as well as candidates’ occupational background. By splitting the analyses into lower, middle‐ and upper class voters, it was found that lower class voters are most distinct from other voters in their preferences for anti‐establishment candidates. Strikingly, lower class voters even support welfare retrenchment, as long as it is an anti‐establishment candidate proposing it. The experiment also found a general tendency to vote against career politicians across classes and remarkably few differences regarding immigration preferences.     

History and Institutions in the Rebuilding of Social Capital after Forced Resettlement in the Philippines and Indonesia

Resettlement results in the loss of social capital from which poor households can draw resources for sustenance, survival and wellbeing. While Putnam deems social capital formation as pre-determined by a community’s history of civic engagement, the institutional view argues that social capital is generated through the institutions’ interventions. Utilising a comparative approach involving two resettlement sites, one in the Philippines and one in Indonesia, this article presents findings on the explanatory power of these two perspectives. The Philippine case is greatly influenced by the institutional interventions while the Indonesian case testifies to the validity of the theoretical perspective of Putnam.     

Unwed mothers in the city. Illegitimate fertility in 19th-century Geneva

The rise in illegitimate fertility in the late 18th and early 19th centuries has often been related to increasing economic and social vulnerability in the urban industrializing world. Many studies using macro-level data or analyzing individual characteristics of unwed mothers have found support for the vulnerability hypothesis. In this article, we investigate illegitimate childbearing in early 19th century Geneva in a longitudinal perspective. Relating events (illegitimate births) to the population at risk (single women), our multivariate analysis shows that the segment of the female population assumed to be most vulnerable – immigrants and maids – did not have a higher risk of illegitimacy. However, the substantially increased risk among women who already gave birth to illegitimate children indicates the existence of a small but highly vulnerable group of women.