Stammwähler und die opportunistische Wahl parteipolitischer Programme

This article explains political radicalism by the number of voters who are biased towards a party. With little voters biased in favor of a party, this party has to rely more heavily on its programmatic distance to other parties. Because large parties – i.e.: parties with a high number of biased voters – gain votes when they move to the center of the political spectrum, parties with a lower number of voters that are biased in their favor are forced to the edges of the policy space. We draw on a computational model of political competition between four parties in a two‐dimensional policy space to investigate this relationship. We use panel corrected OLS estimates to analyze the data generated by the computer simulation. Our results substantiate the hypothesis of a negative relationship between the number of biased voters and the inclination of a party to adopt a more extreme policy stance.     

Institutional Change in Swiss Cantons: A Contribution to Describing and Explaining Institutional Reforms

Most accounts of Swiss federal institutions are unable to explain institutional change. In this contribution the authors trace change in Cantonal reforms and then use multivariate explanation models to account for institutional reforms such as New Public Management reforms. The multivariate analyses used rely on an “event count model” to explain the frequency of institutional reforms and a “binary response model” to explain why Cantons adopt New Public Management reforms. This research demonstrates that policy research as well as innovation and diffusion theories can contribute to explaining institutional reform.     

Corruption, Reform, and Virtue Ethics

Books reviewed in this article:
Gerald E. Caiden, O.P. Dwivedi, and Joseph Jabbra (eds.), Where Corruption Lies
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform
Peter Kobrak, Cozy Politics: Political Parties, Campaign Finance, and Compromised Governance
Raymond J. Devettere, Introduction to Virtue Ethics: Insights of the Ancient Greeks     

Voting May Be Habit-Forming: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Habit is a frequently mentioned but understudied cause of political action. This article provides the first direct test of the hypothesis that casting a ballot in one election increases one's propensity to go to the polls in the future. A field experiment involving 25,200 registered voters was conducted prior to the November general election of 1998. Subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in which they were urged to vote through direct mail or face-to-face canvassing. Compared to a control group that received no contact, the treatment groups were significantly more likely to vote in 1998. The treatment groups were also significantly more likely to vote in local elections held in November of 1999. After deriving a statistical estimator to isolate the effect of habit, we find that, ceteris paribus, voting in one election substantially increases the likelihood of voting in the future. Indeed, the influence of past voting exceeds the effects of age and education reported in previous studies.     

Who's Responsible for the Economy? The Formation and Consequences of Responsibility Attributions

The concept of responsibility lies at the heart of theories of democratic accountability. This article represents the first attempt to explicitly model attributions of presidential versus congressional responsibility for the economy. The article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual-level factors influence citizens' attributions of responsibility for the economy and how, in turn, such judgments shape their political evaluations. Employing a multinomial probit model of attributional choice, I find that responsibility judgments are shaped to varying degrees by economic ideology, perceptions of institutional context, and partisanship, although the effects of partisanship are not uniform across political parties. The results demonstrate that responsibility attributions are politically consequential and moderate the effects of economic perceptions on presidential and congressional approval. Finally, the results suggest that the effects of responsibility attributions in the sanctioning process are not invariant across the target of institutional evaluation .