Partisan effects in morality policy making

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.     

Electoral infidelity: Why party members cast defecting votes

Party politics and electoral research generally assume that party members are loyal voters. This article first assesses the empirical basis for this assumption before providing individual‐level explanations for defection. It combines prominent theories from party politics and electoral behaviour research and argues that internal disagreement and external pressure can each bring about disloyal voting. The hypotheses are motivated with multi‐country European survey data and tested on two sets of party‐level national surveys. The results show, first, that, on average, 8 per cent of European party members cast a defecting vote in the last election, and second, that dissatisfaction with the leadership is the strongest predictor of defection. Additionally, internal ideological disagreement is associated with higher probabilities of defection, whereas the effects of pull factors in the form of contentious policies are rather limited. These findings emphasise the importance of testing scientific assumptions and the potential significance of party leadership contests.     

Electoral volatility and parties’ ideological responsiveness

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable. The consequences of this process of change on parties’ strategic behaviour have, however, received little attention. In this article, the impact of dealignment on parties’ strategic behaviour is examined, with the focus being on the extent to which parties are responsive to the mean voter. The expectation of dealignment allowing parties ‘to move around more freely’ leads to the hypothesis that parties are more responsive in a context of dealignment. The analyses provide evidence that is in line with this expectation. Ideological responsiveness is conditioned by the level of volatility in the electorate. The conclusion to draw from these results is that dealignment, which profoundly affects voters’ behaviour, leads parties to become more responsive to the mean voter.     

Attitudes towards highly skilled and low‐skilled immigration in Europe: A survey experiment in 15 European countries

To what extent do economic concerns drive anti‐migrant attitudes? Key theoretical arguments extract two central motives: increased labour market competition and the fiscal burden linked to the influx of migrants. This article provides new evidence regarding the impact of material self‐interest on attitudes towards immigrants. It reports the results of a survey experiment embedded in representative surveys in 15 European countries before and after the European refugee crisis in 2014. As anticipated by the fiscal burden argument, it is found that rich natives prefer highly skilled over low‐skilled migration more than low‐income respondents do. Moreover, the study shows that these tax concerns among the wealthy are stronger if fiscal exposure to migration is high. No support is found for the labour market competition argument predicting that natives will be most opposed to migrants with similar skills. The results suggest that highly skilled migrants are preferred over low‐skilled migrants irrespective of natives’ skill levels.     

Positions and saliency of immigration in party manifestos: A novel dataset using crowd coding

Immigration is one of the most widely debated issues today. It has, therefore, also become an important issue in party competition, and radical right parties are trying to exploit the issue. This opens up many pressing questions for researchers. To answer these questions, data on the self‐ascribed and unified party positions on immigration and immigrant integration issues is needed. So far, researchers have relied on expert survey data, media analysis data and ‘proxy’ categories from the Manifesto Project Dataset. However, the former two only give the mediated party position, and the latter relies on proxies that do not specifically measure immigration. The new dataset presented in this article provides researchers with party positions and saliency estimates on two issue dimensions – immigration and immigrant integration – in 14 countries and 43 elections. Deriving the data from manifestos enables the provision of parties’ unified and unfiltered immigration positions for countries and time points not covered in expert surveys and media studies, making it possible to link immigration and immigrant integration positions and saliency scores to other issue areas covered in the Manifesto Project Dataset. Well‐established criteria are used to distinguish between statements on (1) immigration control and (2) immigrant integration. This allows for a more fine‐grained analysis along these two dimensions. Furthermore, the dataset has been generated using the new method of crowd coding, which allows a relatively fast manual coding of political texts. Some of the advantages of crowd coding are that it is easily replicated and expanded, and, as such, presents the research community with the opportunity to amend and expand upon this coding scheme.     

The Investment Approach to Public Service Provision

The investment approach to public service provision is now receiving considerable attention worldwide. By promoting data‐intensive assessments of baseline conditions and how government action can improve on them, the approach holds the potential to transform policy development, service implementation, and program evaluation. Recently, variations on the investment approach have been applied in Australia to explore the effectiveness of specific programs in employment training, criminal justice, and infrastructure development. This article reviews the investment approach, presents a Public Investment Checklist to guide such work, and discusses three examples. It concludes by considering the implications of investment thinking for the work of policy designers and public managers.     

Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim,Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911 Beerbohm, Max (1964a), ‘To Reggie Turner, 3 November 1911’, in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Davis, p. 126. [Google Scholar]) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914 Shaw, George Bernard (1914), ‘Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol xxxi, (5). [Google Scholar]), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?     

The spectacle of politics: Wendy Davis,abortion, and pink shoes in the Texas ‘fillybuster’

Despite important inroads, women’s marginalization in the public sphere is still very real. From a feminist theoretical perspective, and informed by Guy Debord’s conceptualization of the society of spectacle, this study examines local and national newspaper coverage of Wendy Davis’s filibuster to block an abortion-restricting bill in the Texas State legislature in 2013. Qualitative and quantitative assessments show that gender was particularly encoded and marked in the mediated discourse, with reports focusing on Davis’ personal life and giving her celebrity status. The filibuster became a political spectacle that reified dominant gender values and norms.     

Weak states and uneven pluralism: lessons from Mali and Kyrgyzstan

We argue that certain important democratic practices and elements of pluralism are lasting features of political systems in many poor countries. Because of state weakness, such arrangements work to the benefit of both elites and citizens. The broader citizenry and civil society enjoy significant political freedoms and greater access to foreign aid. Elites tolerate these limited civil liberties and regular elections because they produce few costly consequences due to state incapacity. We evaluate this theory of ‘uneven pluralism’ in poor countries using evidence from a paired comparison of Mali and Kyrgyzstan. These two countries have experienced significant political turbulence, but on balance have shown a persistent and robust commitment to a free press, transparent elections, and respect for freedom of association. Our theory suggests that uneven pluralism is likely to continue in countries like Mali and Kyrgyzstan, even as significant limits on judicial independence, persistent corruption, and lack of government transparency make democratic consolidation unlikely.     

Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view

Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on the ground seems much gloomier, as most recent opinion surveys suggest that there is a significant degree of dissatisfaction, not only with political parties and Parliament but also with the very institution of democracy. Nevertheless, what accounts for this change? After the collapse of the long-lasting and oppressive Ben Ali regime, how, just in five years, has Tunisians’ confidence in the democratic process changed? This article accounts for this state of affairs from a party politics view, arguing that political parties, which are the main protagonists of the consolidation process, fail to fulfill their role of acquiring legitimacy for the new regime. While party–state relations seem to be stabilized due to the inclusiveness of the constitution-making process, both inter-party relationships and the relationship between parties and society suffer from numerous flaws which, in turn, hamper the democratic consolidation process.