Congressional Response to Mandate Elections

Elections from time to time are widely believed to carry a mandate, to express a message about changed policy preferences of the electorate. Whatever the accuracy of such beliefs—a matter about which we are skeptical—perceptions of a mandate should affect the behavior of actors in government. Politicians lack the scholarly luxury of waiting for careful analyses. They must act in the months following elections. We postulate that many will act as if the mandate perceptions were true, veering away from their normal voting patterns. This is driven by election results and interpretations that undermine old calculations about what voters want. As the flow of information gradually changes these perceptions, and the election becomes more distant, members of Congress return to their normal position. We first ask, how would members observe an emerging consensus of mandate? And then we model the duration of the change in behavior in an event‐history framework. That permits a depiction of important movements of the median member and, from this, inferences about policy impact.     

The politics of bureaucratic competition: The case of natural resource policy

Many concerned with how government functions consider creating competition between bureaucracies an attractive option. Others are skeptical of what impact rival agencies have when they are operating within a political context. Reflecting these discrepant viewpoints, some scholars believe that regulators will compete vigorously for resources and responsibilities; others assert that agency members will act passively as they attempt to protect their autonomy. To assess these contrasting perspectives and determine why competitive agency structures might exist, the following analysis examines one of the classic situations where agencies can serve as functional substitutes: the relationship between the United States Forest Service and the National Park Service. The results demonstrate that agencies put far more weight on autonomy than competition. The principal advantage of functional rivalry for politicians—at least where federal lands are concerned—is to expand the choice set of alternatives available to them.     

Women and sport: A lost ideal

In their analyses of capitalism and patriarchy, socialists and feminists have tended not to view sport as a legitimate area for sustained study. Socialists have often been content to view sport as a peripheral and unimportant feature of a world order dominated by capitalist social relations and economic contradictions, or have viewed sport as essentially a cultural reflection of the material sphere.Similarly, feminists have focussed their attention on the primary loci of work, family and sexuality, thereby unconsciously reinforcing the patriarchal concept of sport as masculine. In this analysis we briefly outline women's involvement in the recent Olympics and assess competing strategies for overcoming women's subordination in the arena of sport.     

Life space and social networks as political contexts

Based on data collected in the course of the September and November 1980 waves of the National Election Studies, this contextual analysis of interpersonal relations in social networks presents two major findings: First, the neighborhood as a geographical unit does not appear to be a perceptually salient environment for political behavior; and second,particular neighbors, individually linked to a voter, appear to constitute a social network that has an independent impact on partisan affect for the political parties and their candidates as well as on stability or change in vote preferences as the electoral season goes forward. Thus, although the neighborhood appears to be of minor importance as a politicalenvironment, social relations among particular neighbors result in an interpersonalcontext that has an impact on political behavior.This article is being published simultaneously as Chapter 12 in Heinz Eulau,Politics, Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress). Copyright 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.     

Opinion change and voting behaviour in referendums

Abstract. Voters in a referendum obtain information and derive voting cues from a variety of sources. Some of these, such as political parties or ideological orientations, are similar to those also found to be influential in elections. Others can be quite different. In some referendums, the issue may be entirely new and unfamiliar to many voters, initiating a 'learning' or 'cue–taking' process specific to the campaign itself. In referendum campaigns, parties may be internally divided and sometimes send conflicting signals to their electorates. As a result, voting behaviour in referendums often exhibits greater volatility than is found in elections. In the ten papers included in this Special Issue of EJPR , we focus on the process of opinion formation and change which occurred in a number of European, North American and Australia/New Zealand referendums held under a variety of different institutional and political conditions. In this essay, I argue that there are three distinctive patterns of opinion formation and reversal that tend to occur in referendum campaigns, each of which has significant consequences both for voting choice and for referendum outcomes.     

An Objective Corruption Risk Index Using Public Procurement Data

In order to address the lack of reliable indicators of corruption, this article develops a composite indicator of high-level institutionalised corruption through a novel ‘Big Data’ approach. Using publicly available electronic public procurement records in Hungary, we identify “red flags” in the public procurement process and link them to restricted competition and recurrent contract award to the same company. We use this method to create a corruption indicator at contract level that can be aggregated to the level of individual organisations, sectors, regions and countries. Because electronic public procurement data is available in virtually all developed countries from about the mid-2000s, this method can generate a corruption index based on objective data that is consistent over time and across countries. We demonstrate the validity of the corruption risk index by showing that firms with higher corruption risk score had relatively higher profitability, higher ratio of contract value to initial estimated price, greater likelihood of politicians managing or owning them and greater likelihood of registration in tax havens, than firms with lower scores on the index. In the conclusion we discuss the uses of this data for academic research, investigative journalists, civil society groups and small and medium business.