Priming Issues,Party Visibility,and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Voter volatility has become a hallmark of Western democracies in the past three decades. At the same time short-term factors—such as the media’s coverage of issues, parties, and candidates during an election campaign—have become more important for voters’ decisions. While previous research did look at how campaign news in general affects electoral volatility in general, it has omitted to explicitly test the mechanisms underlying these effects. Building on theories of agenda setting, (affective) priming, and issue ownership, the current study aims to explain why certain news aspects lead voters to switch their vote choice. We theorize it is the visibility of a party, the evaluation of a party, and the attention for issues owned by a party that primes voters to switch to a certain party. We use national panel survey data (N = 765) and link this to an extensive content analysis of campaign news on television and in newspapers in the run up to the 2012 Dutch national elections. The results show that issue news leads to vote change in the direction of the party that owns the issue. Even stronger is the effect of party visibility on vote switching. Our results, however, find the strongest support for the effect of party evaluations on vote change: More favorable news about a party increases switching to that party.     

Evaluating Administrative Modernization in German Local Governments: Success or Failure of the “New Steering Model”?

This article evaluates the results and impacts of administrative modernization in Germany after more than 10 years of New Public Management experience, concentrating on the most advanced level of public sector reform: local authorities. Drawing on a broad empirical basis, the authors pursue the following questions: Do “Weber‐ ian” administrative structures and processes continue to characterize the German public sector, or have the reforms left behind lasting traces of a managerial administration? Are local authorities performing better today, and if so, can this be attributed to the New Public Management modernization? The presented results show that no paradigm shift from the “Weberian” bureaucracy to New Public Management has occurred so far. Performance improvements notwithstanding, the new mix of steering instruments causes numerous unintended consequences, causing “Weberian” administration to reemerge.     

Participation quorums in costly meetings

Meetings of shareholders, societies, and clubs often require a minimal participation quorum. In the absence of a quorum, no valid decisions can be made; thus, decisions are postponed to a later meeting. This paper examines the effect of such quorum constraints on both individual behavior and collective outcomes in a model of costly meetings. We show that when a binding quorum constraint delivers an immediate decision, it also induces a welfare loss with respect to the outcome that prevails when no quorum applies, potentially including policy distortions. When the quorum requirement is high and causes the decision to be postponed, the number of participants in the (second) meeting may decrease with respect to the zero-quorum rule.     

Soft and hard law in times of crisis: budget monitoring,migration and cybersecurity

Abstract

European integration is associated with the idea of an ‘ever closer Union’, achieved in part through ‘integration-through-crisis’. However, while crises have led to higher regulatory pressure, responses to these crises have not always taken the form of stronger commitments and legally binding rules. Based on the study of three policy areas recently affected by crises, this article aims at analysing why in one of these policies (migration) more soft rules have been adopted, while the two other policies have evolved towards a greater use of hard law (budget monitoring, cybersecurity). Three potential explanations are analysed: the intensity of crises impacting political systems; the quality of prior norms and their (perceived) implementation; the entrepreneurship and heterogeneity of the coalition. Although all of these factors have explanatory powers, the capacity of policy entrepreneurs to build a large coalition appears to be the central explanation.     

Are there “women’s crops”? A new tool for gender and agriculture

A “Gender Control Tool” was developed to measure women’s control over decision-making for agricultural production, sales, and use of income. The tool was tested for groundnuts in Eastern Province, Zambia, where mechanisation has increased male participation in groundnut shelling, and for goats in Gwanda district, Zimbabwe, where the introduction of auctions has increased investment and sales. A mixed methods approach was used, that involved focus group discussions (FGDs) and a quantitative household survey. This article compares the results obtained from these two methods and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the tool in understanding how commercialisation affects women’s control.