Changing Sides or Changing Minds? Party Identification and Policy Preferences in the American Electorate

Scholars have long debated the individual-level relationship between partisanship and policy preferences. We argue that partisanship and issue attitudes cause changes in each other, but the pattern of influence varies systematically. Issue-based change in party identification should occur among individuals who are aware of party differences on an issue and find that issue to be salient. Individuals who are aware of party differences, but do not attach importance to the issue, should evidence party-based issue change. Those lacking awareness of party differences on an issue should show neither effect. We test our account by examining individuals' party identifications and their attitudes on abortion, government spending and provision of services, and government help for African Americans using the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel study, finding strong support for our argument. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the microlevel study of party identification and the macrolevel analysis of partisan change.     

Voter satisfaction and electoral systems: Does preferential voting in candidate-centred systems make a difference?

Abstract.  Over the years, many scholars have examined the relationship between electoral systems and measures of voter satisfaction with democracy. The tendency in these studies has been to explore the traditional Proportional Representation/non-Proportional-Representation dichotomy, assessing whether more proportional systems produce higher levels of satisfaction. This article examines another dimension of electoral system variation – namely the degree to which the ballot structure incorporates ordinal, or preferential features. Given that proponents of such systems extol their virtues as offering voters 'greater choice', it is interesting to explore how this actually plays with the voters. The article makes use of cross-national data from the comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project to examine the relationship between preferential voting and levels of satisfaction with democracy.     

All voting is strategic

All voting is strategic because the shared outcomes are note within the choice set of any voter, the elements of which can only be strategies. Voting behavior need not re- flect the individual's ordering of outcomes, and the conventional distinction between sincere and sophisticated voting is misguided. In voting choice, the ordinal ranking of outcomes must be supplemented by intrapersonal evaluation of utility differences among these outcomes and also by predictions concerning the behavior of other participants in the nexus of interdependence.     

The Political Frame for Negotiated Capitalism: Electoral Reform and the Politics of Crisis in Japan and Sweden

This article examines the impact of political institutions on the strength of executive governments as well as the consequences of that strength for policymaking. It argues that both political changes and electoral reforms in Japan and Sweden have weakened the political frame for “negotiated” or “coordinated” decision making in these nations. In Sweden, however, the complete demolition of the old political frame has opened up opportunities and incentives for new modes of governance. In Japan, by contrast, reforms have buttressed rather than dismantled the old frame, impeding the transition to a new approach.     

Efficiency Measurement in Spanish Local Government: The Case of Municipal Water Services

In this work, we established a procedure for evaluation of the efficiency of the water supply. This procedure has allowed us to find that the proposed indicators have a discriminating capability in the analysis of the service, and to reject criticisms traditionally assigned to the sensitivity of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique in relation to degrees of freedom. The results obtained show that the population density, as a factor that defines one of the particular characteristics of the surroundings of each municipality, has a statistically significant impact on the indexes of efficiency, this affirmation not being extended to the public or private ownership of the service. The scale inefficiency is higher than the technical inefficiency. These typologies of efficiency are, principally, motivated by the supply side of the service, which is specially linked with the necessary infrastructure. The demand of the citizens is satisfied with a behavior close to optimal.     

The Rise and Fall of Power Line EMFs: The Anatomy of a Magnetic Controversy

The suggestion that power line electromagnetic fields (EMFs) cause diseases like cancer has generated dozens of popular articles and television news segments, hundreds of scientific studies, and numerous consensus reports; it has attracted the attention of epidemiologists, biologists, physicists, policymakers and lawyers. This article will examine the evolution of this controversy through a detailed analysis of the arguments that have been used for and against the hypothesis that power line EMFs have adverse health effects. This article argues that the power line EMF issue provides a classic case study for exploring the challenges citizens, scientists, and policymakers face in sorting out a complex science‐based controversy. This story not only brings together many different perspectives and—from popular notions of cancer clusters to complex epidemiological arguments, from to state‐of‐the‐art animal studies to policy instruments such as the precautionary principle—but also reveals the manner in which a heated controversy can be effectively resolved over time.     

Development of Local Government Debt Financing Markets: Application of a Market‐Based Framework

Needed is clear guidance on how to develop market‐based debt financing systems in transitional and developing countries. We propose an analytical framework useful for identifying constraints to financial development and providing recommendations to overcome constraints to develop municipal financing capacity. The proposed framework is applied to five country case studies: Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, and South Africa. The thesis of this paper is that municipal credit market development is related to improvements in the legal/regulatory framework governing local borrowing, the capacity of financial institutions to assess risk, and borrower capacity to support and manage debt.