POWER LEARNING OR PATH DEPENDENCY? INVESTIGATING THE ROOTS OF THE EUROPEAN FOOD SAFETY AUTHORITY

A key motive for establishing the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was restoring public confidence in the wake of multiplying food scares and the BSE crisis. Scholars, however, have paid little attention to the actual political and institutional logics that shaped this new organization. This article explores the dynamics underpinning the making of EFSA. We examine the way in which learning and power shaped its organizational architecture. It is demonstrated that the lessons drawn from the past and other models converged on the need to delegate authority to an external agency, but diverged on its mandate, concretely whether or not EFSA should assume risk management responsibilities. In this situation of competitive learning, power and procedural politics conditioned the mandate granted to EFSA. The European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council shared a common interest in preventing the delegation of regulatory powers to an independent EU agency in food safety policy.     

Welfare state reforms and mass media attention: Evidence from three European democracies

The mass media is conventionally assumed to play an important role in welfare state politics. So far, however, we have very little systematic theorizing or empirical evidence of when and how the mass media reports on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, we develop a set of hypotheses about mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. We argue that mass media attention is conditioned not only by the direction of reforms, with cuts getting more attention than expansions, but also by the election platform that the incumbent party ran on in the last election as well as by the policy reputation of the government. Drawing on a new dataset including about 4,800 news articles in British, Danish and German quality newspapers from 1995 to 2014, we find supporting empirical evidence of our expectations.     

Conditional contraction: Globalisation and capitalist systems

The effect of globalisation on social spending is one of the most intensely studied issues in the political economy literature. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that globalisation leads governments to expand social spending to compensate workers for increasing risk exposure. The latest research shows, however, that globalisation has become strongly associated with spending cutbacks since the late 1980s. This article adds to this research by arguing that the negative impact of globalisation is conditioned on the capitalist system in different countries. In coordinated market economies (CMEs), employers are dependent on the willingness of the workforce to invest in specific skills and therefore become supportive of extensive social spending. Not so in liberal market economies (LMEs), where employers are much less dependent on social spending because the workforce in general invests less in specific skills. Employers in LMEs are therefore likely to use increasing globalisation as a means to push through retrenchment, whereas employers in CMEs are not. This argument is tested in a time‐series cross‐section regression analysis, which clearly supports it.     

The visibility of agricultural subsidies and market illusions in the Common Agricultural Policy: Some evidence from farmers' views in Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom

Abstract.   This article demonstrates that the design and nature of agricultural support schemes has an influence on farmers' perception of their level of dependence on agricultural support. While direct aid payments inform farmers about the extent to which they are subsidised, indirect support mechanisms veil the level of subsidisation, and therefore they are not fully aware of the extent to which they are supported. To test this hypothesis, we applied data from a survey of 4,500 farmers in three countries: the United Kingdom, Germany and Portugal. It is demonstrated that indirect support, such as that provided through artificially high consumer prices, gives an illusion of free and competitive markets among farmers. This 'visibility' hypothesis is evaluated against an alternative hypothesis that assumes farmers have complete, or at least a fairly comprehensive level of, information on agricultural support schemes. Our findings show that this alternative hypothesis can be ruled out.     

Social dealignment versus political frustration: Contrasting explanations of the floating vote in Germany

Abstract. The paper contrasts two notions of the floating voter: the 'modern floating voter' and the 'frustrated floating voter'. In doing so, social modernization is contrasted with macro stimuli as explanations of volatility. The 'modern floating voter' emerges from social dealignment theories. These claim (1) an increase in volatility, (2) more frequent vote switching among the well educated and the new middle class, and (3) an instrumental view of politics among floating voters. Empirical tests on German data do not deliver any support for these dealignment hypotheses (employing log-linear models on cross-sectional and pooled-cross-sectional data and ANOVA). On the other hand, the model of the 'frustrated floating voter', which denotes vote switching that takes place in a mood of protest, receives some support in the data. Thus, the degree of political dissatisfaction of an electorate emerges as a potential predictor of volatility. In a final step, I test if the drop in political satisfaction between 1990 and 1993 can he attributed to social change, thus indicating an indirect effect of social change on volatility. The data do not support this hypothesis. The drop in satisfaction (and thus the potential increase in volatility) most likely should be attributed to macro stimuli. Thus, the results indicate that macro phenomena (which might be historic events, economic conditions, or the like) might be more fruitful in explaining volatility than social modernization.     

When and why politicians do not keep their welfare promises

Although the welfare state is a core theme in most national elections in Western democracies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the causes of welfare state pledge‐breaking. This article presents an argument that explains when governments do not do what they promised and tests it using an innovative research design with data covering four decades and 18 countries. The argument is able to account for several important but, until now, undescribed phenomena. First, nowadays, governments, on average, deliver less welfare than they promised, whereas in the 1970s they used to deliver more than promised. Second, the pledge‐breaking of governments has become highly dependent on the parliamentary opposition's position on the welfare issue. When the opposition favours fiscal and economic responsibility, governments’ tendency to deliver less welfare than promised is amplified. In contrast, when the opposition emphasises the positive benefits of generous welfare, such as equality and social justice, governments become more prone to keep their promises. Third, this conditional effect of the opposition is a recent occurrence that only emerged after the number of potential swing voters increased as class‐based voting gradually declined from the 1970s onwards.     

Issue compensation and right‐wing government social spending

It is well‐established that prolonged left‐wing incumbency has a positive long‐term effect on welfare effort in terms of high levels of social spending and reduced levels of economic inequality and poverty. Prolonged left‐wing incumbency also influences the institutional set‐up of welfare states, in particular generating strong support for existing arrangements in countries with large welfare states. The issue ownership literature furthermore shows that the public comes to distrust right‐wing parties as defenders of the welfare state. In countries that have a tradition of left‐wing incumbency it is particularly important for right‐wing governments to compensate for the distrust of the public because of the popularity of the welfare state and strong vested interests. While right‐wing governments on average are negatively associated with social spending, there is a strong positive association between right‐wing government and social spending in traditionally left‐wing countries. It is even the case that right‐wing governments in these countries spend more on social welfare than left‐wing governments. This indicates that right‐wing governments are forced to compensate for the lack of public trust by being even more generous than the left.     

The impact of candidate selection rules and electoral vulnerability on legislative behaviour in comparative perspective

Legislators are political actors whose main goal is to get re-elected. They use their legislative repertoire to help them cater to the interests of their principals. It is argued in this article that we need to move beyond treating electoral systems as monolithic entities, as if all legislators operating under the same set of macro-rules shared the same set of incentives. Rather, we need to account for within-system variation – namely, candidate selection rules and individual electoral vulnerability. Using a most different systems design, Germany, Ireland and Portugal are leveraged with both cross-system and within-system variation. An original dataset of 345,000 parliamentary questions is used. Findings show that candidate selection rules blur canonical electoral system boundaries. Electoral vulnerability has a similar effect in closed-list and mixed systems, but not in preferential voting settings.     

The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in-group is portrayed as being threatened by various out-groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti-elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right-wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in-group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti-elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.