High Performance Expectations: Concept and Causes

Employees contribute more when they are aware of their leaders’ high performance expectations (HPE), but how can leaders successfully convey HPE? Here it is argued that both transformational and transactional leadership behaviors involve goal-setting, which can affect employee-perceived HPE. Using a leadership training field experiment with 3,730 employees nested in 471 organizations, the findings support that training in transformational, transactional and combination leadership training significantly increased employees’ HPE relative to a control group. Furthermore, transformational leadership and pecuniary rewards seem to be important mechanisms. This implies that public leaders can affect HPE through leadership and thus potentially organizational performance.     

Trust in Scandinavia: Findings from Moving Borders between Denmark and Germany

Scandinavian societies express the world's highest levels of trust in surveys and display high levels of social capital more generally. Scholars and policy makers disagree on whether this reflects high economic equality brought about by inclusive, universalist welfare states after the Second World War or historical legacies of political stability and relative social harmony. This article utilizes a geographic regression discontinuity (GRD) natural experiment from history of moving borders between Denmark and Germany to examine the effect of belonging to a Scandinavian state on trust and cooperative behavior. Results from historical Danish rule prior to 1864 in North Germany and German rule in South Denmark from 1864 to 1920 suggest that institutional differences influenced early mass political behavior, but not social behavior. However, such early regime impacts petered out quickly. Today, there is little to no discernable difference in trust attributable to Danish state heritage in North Germany or South Denmark. This suggests that sizable differences in social trust between Germany and Denmark are instead attributable to post‐1920 factors.     

Effect of Media Environment Diversity and Advertising Tone on Information Search,Selective Exposure,and Affective Polarization

This paper examines the effects of our modern media environment on affective polarization. We conducted an experiment during the last month of the 2012 presidential election varying both the choice of media sources available about the major presidential candidates, and the tone of political advertisements presented to subjects. We posit that voters in a high-choice, ideologically-diverse media environment will exhibit greater affective polarization than those in a “mainstream” ideologically neutral environment. We also hypothesize that subjects who are exposed to negative rather than positive political advertisements will show increased affective polarization. We provide causal evidence that the combination of a high-choice ideologically diverse media environment and exposure to negative political ads, significantly increases affective polarization. We also find that both overall information search and selective exposure to information are influenced by our experimental manipulations, with the greatest amount of search, and the most biased search, conducted by Romney supporters in the Negative Ads, Diverse Media condition.     

An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting —the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the vote decision that views the quality of decision making as a joint function of individual characteristics and various higher-level campaign factors. We hypothesize that differences in cognitive capacity, political motivation, the availability of political heuristics, and macrolevel factors that affect the difficulty of the choice confronting citizens, including the nature of the political information environment, should all affect the probability of a correct vote. We find significant support for seven proposed hypotheses across three levels of analysis, which places responsibility for incorrect votes on both the individual and our electoral system.     

Economic Inequality and Intolerance: Attitudes toward Homosexuality in 35 Democracies

Using hierarchical linear models fitted to data from the World Values Survey and national statistics for 35 countries, this article builds on the postmaterialist thesis by assessing the impact of economic inequality across and within nations on attitudes toward homosexuality. It provides evidence that tolerance tends to decline as national income inequality rises. For professionals and managers, the results also support the postmaterialist argument that economic development leads to more tolerant attitudes. On the other hand, attitudes of the working class are generally less tolerant, and contrary to expectations of the postmaterialist thesis, are seemingly unaffected by economic development. In other words, economic development influences attitudes only for those who benefit most. These findings have political implications, suggesting that state policies that have the goal of economic growth but fail to consider economic inequality may contribute to intolerant social and political values, an attribute widely considered detrimental for the health of democracy.     

Modeling complexity: Using dynamic simulation to link regression and case studies

The success or failure of programs typically depends on how numerous variables interact over time. Individuals adjust their strategies continuously on the basis of prior events. Unintended consequences abound. And the very meaning of success or failure may change over time. Yet the studies that command the most influence in the policy community are typically based on multiple regression, a technique whose capacity to capture these complexities is sharply limited. Accordingly, findings based on regression studies and findings based on the study of individual cases commonly conflict. Dynamic simulation modeling can serve as a methodological bridge between case studies and regression-based studies of policy systems. The results of some early experiments along these lines indicate how the bridge can be fashioned.     

How to Improve the Outcome of State Welfare Services. Governance in A Systems-Theoretical Perspective

Much governance literature deals with the limited capacity of the state and the market to govern core state welfare services such as education, scientific research and healthcare. Rather less attention has been focused on how the outcome of these services can be improved politically. An analysis of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (Luhmann 1997a, 2000) leads to the hypothesis that self-governance, that is, a combination of professional autonomy and public peer-evaluation, is a superior strategy. Though this may seem counterintuitive at first glance, this paper shows that it corresponds to well-rooted principles of public administration and, in the sphere of education, to empirical findings on school choice and school effectiveness. This raises new perspectives for future comparative governance studies.