Voters' wrath? Policy change and government popularity

Recent research suggests that voters are bad at responding in a meaningful way to policy events when deciding for whom to vote. Voters rely on so‐called “blind retrospection”, punishing governments for events outside politicians' control. However, another core aspect of the blind retrospection perspective has not been put to the test: are voters unable to respond to policy decisions that clearly are under the politicians' control? We construct a unique large‐N dataset on legislative changes in German old age pensions and unemployment protection to see if cutbacks and expansions lead to lower/higher support for the government. Our data are exceptionally fine‐grained and allow us to track the policy‐vote link for 416 months from 1977 to 2013 with a total of 329,167 respondents. We find substantial support for the notion that voters react in a meaningful way to policy changes, but also that they can be distracted by high‐profile, extreme events.     

Social Policy in Hard Times: Crisis-Coping Strategies in Europe from 1976 to 2013

ABSTRACT

Scholarly contributions linking welfare state and crisis management literature still lack a consistent conceptualization of the central matter of interest. To remedy this shortcoming, this article provides a classification of four potential crisis-coping strategies and analyzes the policy outputs of 11 European countries from 1976 to 2013 on the basis of an innovative dataset. The analysis shows that strong deviations from the status quo ante are the rule rather than the exception in times of economic hardship. Furthermore, it reveals a clear shift from the crisis-coping strategy of “Social Protectionism” over “Muddling Through” and “Welfare State Restructuring” to “Austerity” over time.     

Neglected challenges to evidence-based policy-making: the problem of policy accumulation

Claims for evidence-based policy-making are motivated by the assumption that if practitioners and scholars want to learn about effective policy design, they also can. This paper argues that this is becoming more and more challenging with the conventional approaches due to the accumulation of national policy portfolios, characterized by (a) a growing number of different policy targets and instruments, that (b) are often interdependent and (c) reformed in an uncontrolled way. These factors undermine our ability to accurately relate outcome changes to individual components within the respective policy mix. Therefore, policy accumulation becomes an additional source of the well-known ‘attribution problem’ in evaluation research. We argue that policy accumulation poses fundamental challenges to existing approaches of evidence-based policy-making. Moreover, these challenges are very likely to create a trade-off between the need for increasing methodological sophistication on one side, and the decreasing political impact of more fine-grained and conditional findings of evaluation results on the other.     

Religious tides: The time‐variant effect of religion on morality policies

Morality policies evince a much closer relationship to religious doctrines than is the case in other policy areas and hence constitute a most likely case for the observation of religious effects on policymaking and regulatory change. Yet we still lack generally accepted answers to the questions of whether and how religion matters to morality policy. In this paper, we present a theoretical argument that helps to overcome the seemingly contradictory expectations derived from the secularization and religion matters hypotheses. We postulate a bottleneck effect of religious opposition: while religious influence matters most during early stages of the policy process when the problem definition of a moral issue is still in flux, it diminishes during later stages when the issue has made it onto the political agenda. We find evidence of the bottleneck effect in a dataset of policy permissiveness covering 26 countries and spanning 50 years for five morality policies (abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, pornography, and same‐sex marriage). The data is analyzed via a multilevel model and using Bayesian inference.     

The folly of “aid for stabilisation”

Over the last two decades, billions in aid money has been spent in highly insecure regions of conflict affected states in the hope that aid would lead to less violence and more stability. A recent wave of academic work on the impact of aid on violence has now amassed convincing empirical evidence that this hope is futile. Aid injected in highly insecure regions, where violence is a reality and insurgents retain some capacities, will increase, not dampen violence. This essay first provides a summary of the findings of the recent empirical literature. It then demonstrates that two causal mechanisms – predation and sabotage – explain why aid in highly insecure settings will likely lead to less, not more, stability. The essay then exemplifies these two causal mechanisms, using original qualitative and quantitative data from Afghanistan. It ends with a discussion of the implications for donors engaged in countries affected by conflict.     

Hypocrisy as a crisis response? Assessing changes in talk,decisions, and actions of the European Commission in EU environmental policy

In this article, we assess the changing role of the European Commission in EU environmental policy. In line with organizational theory, we expect organizational hypocrisy, namely a decoupling of talk, decisions, and actions, to characterize the Commission's behaviour in the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis. We analyse the extent to which the Commission (1) promotes environmental matters and concepts in press releases and public statements; (2) proposes new and stricter environmental policy changes; and (3) takes action against member states in cases of non-compliance between the years 2000 and 2016. Our empirical analysis reveals that the Commission has indeed moved towards a pattern of hypocritical policy entrepreneurship in the post-crisis period. We argue that the decoupling of talk, decision, and action allows the European Commission to keep up its reputation as an environmental policy entrepreneur while, at the same, satisfying member states’ preference for economic recovery and less environmental regulation.     

Winning Hearts and Minds in Civil Wars: Governance,Leadership Change,and Support for Violent Groups in Iraq

The “hearts and minds” model of combating rebellions holds that civilians are less likely to support violent opposition groups if the government provides public services and security. Building on this model, we argue that a political event that raises popular expectations of future public service and security provision increases support for the government and decreases sympathy for violent opposition groups. To test this argument, we leverage a unique research design opportunity that stems from the unforeseen announcement of the resignation of Iraq's divisive prime minister in August 2014 while an original survey was being administered across the country. We show that the leadership transition led Iraq's displeased Sunni Arab minority to shift support from the violent opposition to the government. In line with our argument, this realignment was due to rising optimism among Sunni Arabs that the new government would provide services and public goods—specifically security, electricity, and jobs.     

What are the best quorum rules? A laboratory investigation

Public Choice - Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device added most commonly to majority...