Electoral bias at the 2015 general election: reducing Labour’s electoral advantage

Electoral bias results in an asymmetrical seat distribution between parties with similar vote shares. Over recent British general elections Labour held an advantage because it efficiently converted votes into seats. Following the 2015 election result this advantage has reduced considerably, principally because Labour’s vote distribution saw it accumulate more ineffective votes, particularly where electoral support was not converted into seats. By contrast, the vote distribution of the Conservative party is now superior to that of Labour because it acquired fewer wasted votes although Labour retains a modest advantage overall because it benefits from inequalities in electorate size and differences in voter turnout. Features of the 2015 election, however, raise general methodological challenges for decomposing electoral bias. The analysis, therefore, considers the effect of substituting the Liberal Democrats as the third party with the United Kingdom Independence Party. It also examines the outcome in Scotland separately from that in England and Wales. Following this analysis it becomes clear that the method for decomposing electoral bias requires clearer guidelines for its application in specific settings.     

Weltanschauung und ihre soziale Basis im Spiegel eidgenössischer Volksabstimmungen

Dank regelmässigen Volksbefragungen sind in der Schweiz detaillierte Rückschlüsse auf die Wertkonflikte in der Gesellschaft und die diesen Wertkonflikten zu Grunde liegenden Weltanschauungen möglich. Das Aufdecken der weltanschaulichen Differenzierung und ihrer sozialen Hintergründe ist das Ziel dieses Beitrags. Der hierzu neu entwickelte induktive Ansatz besteht aus der Verbindung einer quantitativen Aggregatanalyse auf Gemeindebasis mit einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse aller 158 eidgenössischen Abstimmungsvorlagen zwischen 1981 und 1999. Die aufgedeckte Struktur der Weltanschauung setzt sich aus den drei Komponenten Links gegen Rechts, Liberal gegen Konservativ und Ökologisch gegen Technokratisch zusammen. Durch die konsequente mehrdimensionale Betrachtung sind wichtige aktuelle politische Auseinandersetzungen als Zusammenspiel dieser drei Komponenten erkennbar. Der so gebildete Raum der Weltanschauungen dient als geschlossenes Modell zur Analyse der Entwicklungen und Interdependenzen von sozialen Gräben und politischen Konflikten. Die analytische Trennung der materiellen gesellschaftlichen Ebene von der ideellen weltanschaulichen Ebene, lässt Schlüsse von politischem Wandel auf sozialen Wandel und umgekehrt von sozialem Wandel auf politischen Wandel zu.     

Controlling coalitions: Social lending at the multilateral development banks

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) dramatically increased social lending for health, education, and safety nets after 1985. Yet the great powers’ social policy preferences remained relatively static from 1980 to 2000. This contradicts the conventional view that powerful states control IOs. We argue that highly institutionalized IOs like MDBs require a complete model of possible member-state coalitions encompassing the preferences of all member states—not just major powers. We develop multiple measures of state preferences and include all member states in our coalitional model. We evaluate our model and alternatives with an analysis of more than 10,000 MDB loans from 1980 to 2000. We find that when we include all member states weighted by their voting shares, principal preferences are significantly related to lending outcomes.     

How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs

Previous methods of analyzing the substance of political attention have had to make several restrictive assumptions or been prohibitively costly when applied to large-scale political texts. Here, we describe a topic model for legislative speech, a statistical learning model that uses word choices to infer topical categories covered in a set of speeches and to identify the topic of specific speeches. Our method estimates, rather than assumes, the substance of topics, the keywords that identify topics, and the hierarchical nesting of topics. We use the topic model to examine the agenda in the U.S. Senate from 1997 to 2004. Using a new database of over 118,000 speeches (70,000,000 words) from the Congressional Record , our model reveals speech topic categories that are both distinctive and meaningfully interrelated and a richer view of democratic agenda dynamics than had previously been possible.     

A method for measuring and decomposing electoral bias for the three-party case, illustrated by the British case

The measurement of bias in election results, whereby one or more parties are advantaged in the translation of votes into seats at the expense of others, is attracting increasing attention. So far, almost all of the analytical work – aimed at both identifying the extent of bias in an election result and establishing its causes – has focused on either two-party systems or on the largest two parties in multi-party systems. Building on the firm foundations of one such approach, this paper introduces an original procedure for analysing bias in three-party systems using a readily-appreciated metric for both evaluating the degree of bias and decomposing it into the various causal factors. This is illustrated using the example of the 2005 British general election and a comparison of the results from two-party and three-party analyses of six recent elections there.     

The Voting Motivations of Conservative Parliamentarians in the Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2001

This article examines the voting motivations of Conservative parliamentarians in the final parliamentary ballot of the Conservative party leadership election of 2001. By constructing a data set of the voting behaviour of Conservative parliamentarians in the final parliamentary party ballot, this article seeks to test a series of hypotheses relating to the ideological disposition and political characteristics of the candidates vis-à-vis their electorate. The article examines how and why the eliminative parliamentary ballot ensured that the party membership was presented with a face-off between the europhile, Kenneth Clarke, and the eurosceptic, Iain Duncan Smith, and why the modernising and socially liberal Michael Portillo was rejected. It will demonstrate that while arguments based on ideological factors are valid, the political characteristics of age and career status were also significant motivational influences that contributed to the rejection of Portillo and the delaying of the modernisation of the Conservative party.     

Three Sorries and You’re In? Does the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Australian Federal Parliament Presage Federal Constitutional Recognition and Reparations?

Then newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a historic statement of “Sorry” for past injustices to Australian Indigenous peoples at the opening of the 2008 federal parliament. In the long-standing absence of a constitutional ‘foundational principle’ to shape positive federal initiatives in this context, there has been speculation that the emphatic Sorry Statement may presage formal constitutional recognition. The debate is long overdue in a nation that only overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title to lan with the High Court’s decision in Mabo in 1992. This article explores the implications of the Sorry Statement in the context of reparations for the generations removed from their families under assimilation policies (known since the Bringing Them Home Inquiry as the Stolen Generations). We draw out the utility of recent human rights statutes—such as the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT)—as a mechanism for facilitating justice, including compensation for past wrongs. Our primary concern here is whether existing legal processes in Australia hold further capacity to provide reparation for Australian Indigenous peoples or whether their potential in that regard is already exhausted. We compare common law and statutory developments in other international jurisdictions, such as Canada, as an indication of what can be achieved by the law to facilitate better legal, economic and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The year 2008 also saw Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper express his apology to residential school victims in the Canadian Parliament, providing thematic and symbolic echoes across these two former colonies, which, despite remaining under the British monarchy, both forge their own path into the future, while confronting their own unique colonial past. We suggest that the momentum provided by the recent public apology and statement of “Sorry” by the newly elected Australian Prime Minister must not be lost. This symbolic utterance as a first act of the 2008 parliamentary year stood in stark contrast to the long-standing recalcitrance of the former Prime Minister John Howard on the matter of a formal apology. Rather than a return to a law enforcement-inspired “three strikes and you’re out” approach, Australia stands poised for an overdue constitutional and human rights-inspired “three ‘sorries’ and you’re in”.     

The Evolution of the Theoretical Foundations of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory in Public Policy

Punctuated equilibrium theory in public policy replicated from biological punctuated equilibrium theory has concluded that public policies alternate between stasis and punctuation. However, recent research on Pacific Northwest forest policy, U.S. state tobacco policy, and U.S federal auto efficiency policy have found no punctuations despite an attempt to do so. What is the efficacy of using biological punctuated equilibrium theory to also explain punctuated equilibrium in public policy? Significant differences exist between biological and public policy punctuated equilibrium theory including time frames for change, what constitutes outside disturbances of equilibrium, venues of punctuated equilibrium, levels of analysis for change, and patterns of change. Most policy research on punctuation has focused on the “tone” of media coverage related to change. Some recent studies concluding no punctuation occurred have focused on government action or inaction. Proving strong inference in scientific research requires a clear and viable syllogism linked to appropriate methodology. Both of these crucial elements are now in question in punctuated equilibrium research in public policy.