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Do voters punish the government for welfare state retrenchment? A comparative study of electoral costs associated with social policy
Abstract
This paper studies the claim that social policy retrenchment has tremendous electoral consequences. It analyzes the electoral impact of social policy attitudes in a comparative design (20 elections in Western OECD countries between 2001 and 2006). I find that punishment is conditional on the performance of governments, indicating that people punish or reward a government for its past actions. However, empirical comparison shows this to be true not only for social policy, but for all types of issues. This study shows that social policy does not have the outstanding relevance for voters as assumed by the social policy literature; accordingly, the electoral impact is only limited and not equally strong in all contexts. The context shapes the link between social policy attitudes and vote choice, but the variance in effect strength is not explained by differences in the institutional setting or the campaign saliency of social policy.
... Während, wie auf den letzten Seiten beschrieben, nicht generell von hohen Kosten für Sozialstaatsabbau ausgegangen werden kann, ist eine solche "Bestrafung" von Seiten der Wähler unter bestimmten Bedingungen durchaus denkbar und wahrscheinlich. Insbesondere hat die Literatur bisher die drei folgenden Kontextmerkmale und ihren moderierenden Einfluss auf die Stärke der elektoralen Bestrafung betrachtet: Die Klarheit der institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen (Giger 2010Schumacher et al. 2012;Kumlin 2007a), die Regierungsdauer (Armingeon/Giger 2008) und das Medieninteresse an sozialpolitischen Reformen (Armingeon/Giger 2008, Lindbom 2010, Schumacher et al. 2012. ...
... Seit kurzen wenden verschiedene Autoren (Tavits 2007, de Vries et al. 2011, Hellwig 2008, Tilley/Hobolt 2011 dieses Argument der "Clarity of Responsibility" auch auf andere Politikfelder an. Unter anderem auf die Frage, ob Wähler Regierungen für Sparpolitik im Gebiet der sozialen Sicherung bestrafen (Giger 2010, Armingeon/Giger 2008, Kumlin 2007a. Wie auch im Bereich des ökonomischen Wählens finden sich Hinweise darauf, dass eine Bestrafung in einem institutionellen Umfeld, das eine klare Verantwortlichkeit zulässt, stärker ist (oder eben nur unter diesen Umständen überhaupt zu beobachten ist). ...
... Weiter legt Giger (2010; dar, dass sich nur die Einstellungen von Individuen, die dem Thema soziale Sicherheit eine gewisse Relevanz zusprechen, in ihrem Wahlver-halten niederschlagen werden -auch hier ist ein Rückgriff in die sozialpsychologische Literatur hilfreich (Krosnick 1988;Fournier et al. 2003). An einem Beispiel verdeutlicht, wird hoffentlich schnell klar, worum es geht: Stellen Sie sich vor, Sie sind sehr an umweltpolitischen Themen interessiert und sehen, dass sich Ihre Regierung in diesem Bereich stark engagiert und beispielsweise strengere Umweltschutzgesetze einführt. ...
Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit den Konsequenzen von Sozialstaatsabbau auf die Popularität der Regierung und deren Wiederwahlchancen. Während die Literatur gemeinhin von einer direkten Beziehung zwischen dem Abbau des Sozialstaats und elektoralen Verlusten ausgeht, zeigt dieser Aufsatz, dass ein solcher empirisch nur zu erwarten ist, wenn man eine Reihe von zusätzlichen Annahmen trifft. Diese Annahmen werden im Folgenden kritisch diskutiert. Insgesamt weist dieser Beitrag nach, dass Wähler auf Sparpolitik reagieren, die Mechanismen jedoch komplexer sind als bisher angenommen. So wird die Unzufriedenheit der Bürger nicht immer direkt im Wahlresultat sichtbar und Sozial- und Wirtschaftspolitik ist nicht per se mit besonderen elektoralen Konsequenzen verbunden.
... Recent studies interested in the public response to welfare retrenchments provide important insights to how and when the public reacts to government reforms, and a growing body of literature examines the electoral consequences of welfare retrenchments on government support (e.g. Armingeon and Giger, 2008;Giger, 2010Giger, , 2012Nelson, 2010, 2013;Schumacher et al. 2013;Elmelund-Praestekaer et al., 2015;Lee et al., 2017). Overall, the literature has provided mixed evidence on the impact of welfare reforms, and a key contribution is that people do not always punish governments for welfare retrenchments. ...
... Overall, the literature has provided mixed evidence on the impact of welfare reforms, and a key contribution is that people do not always punish governments for welfare retrenchments. Although there is some evidence that the public on average reacts to welfare retrenchments and punishes the government for such policy choices (Giger, 2010), the public does not react to welfare retrenchments in an unconditional manner (Armingeon and Giger, 2008). Recent studies show that the conditional punishment can be explained by communication strategies such as how governments pursue reforms (Elmelund-Praestekaer and Emmenegger, 2012) and individual-level characteristics such as whether voters are interested in social policies (Giger, 2012). ...
... Over the years, several studies have examined the electoral impact of welfare retrenchment reforms on government support (Armingeon and Giger, 2008;Giger, 2010, Giger and Nelson, 2010Schumacher et al., 2013;Elmelund-Praestekaer et al., 2015;Lee et al., 2017). However, these studies have one crucial aspect in common, namely, that they study how the general public reacts to policies with no or limited attention to the proximity to such policies. ...
A large body of literature has provided mixed results on the impact of welfare retrenchments on government support. This article examines whether the impact of welfare retrenchments can be explained by proximity, i.e. whether or not the retrenched policy is related to people's everyday lives. To overcome limitations in previous studies, the empirical approach utilizes a natural experiment with data from the European Social Survey collected concurrently with a salient retrenchment reform of the education grant system in Denmark. The results confirm that people proximate to a welfare policy react substantially stronger to retrenchment reforms than the general public. Robustness and placebo tests further show that the results are not caused by non-personal proximities or satisfaction levels not related to the reform and the government. In sum, the findings speak to a growing body of literature interested in the impact of government policies on mass public.
... The empirical record shows mixed evidence in studies of European countries. While Pierson (1996) found that social program cutbacks impose high electoral risks, Giger's (2010) findings point to the importance of context in shaping voter's reactions to social policy changes. Drawing on information about 20 elections in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 2001 to 2006, Giger showed that voters are more likely to punish the government in elections when they consider that social policy is a salient issue and at the same time hold a negative opinion on the government's performance on the topic. ...
... This would be consistent with Green (2006) and Imai et al. (2020) findings on the Mexican case. It is also conceivable that the negative voting bias is not empirically supported in the Ecuadorian case, which will be in agreement with Giger's (2010) work on European elections. ...
Purpose
This paper evaluates the argument that conditional cash transfer program recipients vote for the incumbent. We also test the hypothesis stating that ceasing to receive the benefit hinders support for the incumbent.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a regression discontinuity design, we assess the impact of the Bono de Desarrollo Humano cash transfer program on pro-incumbent voting of each of these four groups.
Findings
We did not find a significant impact of the transfer on pro-incumbent vote intention in any of the pairwise comparisons, which suggests that contextual factors determining retrospective voting may play an important role in shaping the relationship between pro-incumbent voting and social policy transfers.
Originality/value
Drawing on quasi-experimental evidence from Ecuador, where the eligibility criteria of the program changed exogenously, we evaluate the impacts of several treatments on pro-incumbent voting. We are able to identify four distinct groups: recipients under both eligibility criteria, nonrecipients under both criteria, new recipients and new nonrecipients.
... Clasen, 2007;Clasen and Clegg, 2011;Jensen, 2014). The basic claim that retrenchment is unpopular has also been questioned: Giger (2010Giger ( , 2011, Giger and Nelson (2013) and Schumacher et al. (2013), Policy instruments and welfare state reform among others, show that there is no, or only a very conditional, association between cuts in replacement rates and the subsequent vote share of governments. ...
... One of the most damaging critiques of the new politics perspective has been that governments appear to be able to get away with retrenchment without an electoral backlash (Giger, 2010(Giger, , 2011Giger and Nelson, 2011;Schumacher et al., 2013). One reason for this is probably that Pierson's original thinking about voters is too blunt. ...
A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called ‘invisible’ policy instruments, e.g. a change in indexation rules. Expansion should, by extension, mainly happen using ‘visible’ policy instruments, e.g. a change in nominal benefits. We have coded 1,029 legislative reforms of old-age pensions and unemployment protection in Britain, Denmark, Finland, and Germany from 1974 to 2014. With this unique data at hand, we find substantial support for this crucial new politics proposition.
... This view that social policy retrenchment is unpopular per se has been challenged recently by two strands of the literature. The first challenge has been formulated by Giger and others (Armingeon and Giger 2008;Giger 2010Giger , 2011Giger and Nelson 2013), who analyzed the electoral costs of social policy reforms in economic voting models. Giger (2010) points out that there are two ways for punishment to occur. ...
... The first challenge has been formulated by Giger and others (Armingeon and Giger 2008;Giger 2010Giger , 2011Giger and Nelson 2013), who analyzed the electoral costs of social policy reforms in economic voting models. Giger (2010) points out that there are two ways for punishment to occur. Firstly, building on Petrocik's (1996) theory of issue ownership, she demonstrates that electoral punishment only comes into effect if the social policy is an issue with a high salience to the voters. ...
Following Paul Pierson’s work on the New Politics of the welfare state, numerous
studies on welfare state reforms have shown that governments enacting welfare cuts regularly
employ blame avoidance strategies and use issue frames when they communicate welfare reform
policies. However, it remains largely unexplained to what extent these blame avoidance strategies
really impact on the attitudes of voters on the micro level. This study sets out to fill that void in the
literature. Using data on pension reforms and student grant cutbacks, the article provides experimental
evidence showing that blame avoidance and framing strategies affect individual attitudes
towards the proposed policies – in particular in the case of pension reforms. Moreover, in the case of
pensions, the impact is conditioned by individual risk exposure. These results add significantly to
the literature on blame avoidance and welfare state reform policies by indicating that successful
blame avoidance may be the reason why governments are not always punished for cutbacks to the
welfare state.
... Such findings are now being mirrored by individual level surveys: citizens that care about social welfare policies punish governments when they implement cutbacks (Giger & Nelson, 2013). More in general, empirical research indicates that citizens are more likely to support incumbent governments when satisfied with the implemented social policies at various levels of government (Giger, 2010), which also positively influences satisfaction with democracy and political trust (Lühiste, 2014). These relationships have been documented both between countries and over time within countries Kumlin & Haugsgjerd, 2017). ...
... This 'electoral punishment' thesis builds on the seminal work of Pierson (1996), which contends that welfare states inherently create supportive beneficiaries within themselves, thus deterring governments from welfare retrenchment. The empirical evidence on electoral punishment, however, is mixed: In the earlier stage of the scholarship, sometimes referring to the economic benefits of austerity (e.g., Alesina and Ardagna 2010), empirical studies emerged to cast doubt on this claim (e.g., Giger and Nelson 2011;Giger 2010;Arias and Stasavage 2019;Peltzman 1992). More recent studies, in contrast, provide empirical evidence in favour of the 'electoral punishment' thesis (e.g., Bojar et al. 2022;Jacques and Haffert 2021;Hübscher et al. 2021). ...
Fiscal austerity is a policy characteristic of governments that adhere to conservative economic ideologies. In recent decades, however, especially after the 2009 Euro-zone Crisis, leftist and left-centre coalition governments have also adopted austerity policies. While it is documented that fiscal austerity incurs electoral costs upon incumbent governments and these costs depend on their partisanship, whether and how the partisanship of the incumbent government affects the pattern of protest movements remains unknown. In this paper, I hypothesized that fiscal austerity by leftist governments, through adding a 'premium' to public grievances and demin-ing citizens' utility of electoral participation, results in a higher likelihood of protest movements than fiscal austerity implemented by right-dominant governments. I supported this hypothesis by analysing panel data for 37 developed countries between 1973 and 2015. Besides, the partisan-pronounced effects on the protest likelihood are observed particularly for non-violent protests such as demonstrations and strikes and for the post-2000 era.
... Danish policymakers, like Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, are not only paying lip service to the blessing of the welfare state, they also have to adapt their policies in ways that at least appear to be in support of it. If not, they are likely to be punished by the electorate, among which the support for the welfare state and its tax-financed public services has remained high (Giger 2010) in the face of several social policy retrenchment reforms since the 1980s (Green-Pedersen 2002). As already explained, the Danish Liberal Party's strategic decision around the late 1990s to drop its overt ideological fight for a minimal state and the celebration of the free market, was a deliberate attempt to accommodate the large group of median voters supporting the welfare state. ...
This book presents 23 in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programmes in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy’s origins, aims, design, decision-making and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects—programmatically, process-wise, politically and over time—and to what extent it can be considered a policy success. It also points towards the driving forces of success, and the challenges that have had to be overcome to achieve it. Combined, the chapters provide a resource for policy evaluation researchers, educators and students of public policy and public administration, both within and beyond the Nordic region.
... Danish policymakers, like Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, are not only paying lip service to the blessing of the welfare state, they also have to adapt their policies in ways that at least appear to be in support of it. If not, they are likely to be punished by the electorate, among which the support for the welfare state and its tax-financed public services has remained high (Giger 2010) in the face of several social policy retrenchment reforms since the 1980s (Green- Pedersen 2002). As already explained, the Danish Liberal Party's strategic decision around the late 1990s to drop its overt ideological fight for a minimal state and the celebration of the free market, was a deliberate attempt to accommodate the large group of median voters supporting the welfare state. ...
This book presents 23 in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programmes in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy’s origins, aims, design, decision-making and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects—programmatically, process-wise, politically and over time—and to what extent it can be considered a policy success. It also points towards the driving forces of success, and the challenges that have had to be overcome to achieve it. Combined, the chapters provide a resource for policy evaluation researchers, educators and students of public policy and public administration, both within and beyond the Nordic region.
... Danish policymakers, like Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, are not only paying lip service to the blessing of the welfare state, they also have to adapt their policies in ways that at least appear to be in support of it. If not, they are likely to be punished by the electorate, among which the support for the welfare state and its tax-financed public services has remained high (Giger 2010) in the face of several social policy retrenchment reforms since the 1980s (Green-Pedersen 2002). As already explained, the Danish Liberal Party's strategic decision around the late 1990s to drop its overt ideological fight for a minimal state and the celebration of the free market, was a deliberate attempt to accommodate the large group of median voters supporting the welfare state. ...
... We can take variation in the salience of economic performance across elections as evidence of this, and this variation is reflected in the strength of the economic vote (Singer 2011). Clearly, non-economic policy concerns have the potential to supersede economic performance in importance and serve as bases for sanctioning incumbents (e.g., Armingeon and Giger 2008;Fournier et al. 2003;Giger 2010;Hellwig 2015;de Vries et al. 2011). Future research should aim at a better understanding of the conditions which trigger voters to neglect, or at least give secondary importance to, the economy. ...
Article Summary: Connections between the economy and vote are commonly invoked to evaluate political accountability in representative democracies. A principal motivation for studying economic voting lies in its value as a gauge of whether democracy works or not. In recent years, however, researchers have cast doubt on the assertion that economic conditions influence voters' evaluations of political incumbents. Criticisms hail from several directions. Some, adopting a cross-national perspective, cite the instability problem as evidence against economic voting's existence. That is, variance in the economy-vote relationship across different national contexts is sufficiently large so as to undermine claims that the economy registers a systematic effect. Other critics charge that the electorate lacks sufficient knowledge to incorporate economic conditions in their decisions at the polls. Still others remind us not to mistake correlation for causation. They charge that the voters' perceptions of how well the economy is performing are viewed through pre-existing partisan lens. All told, these and other reservations cast doubt on the use of economic voting as a means to evaluate accountability and, in turn, democratic performance. In this essay, we review these charges against the fidelity of economic voting. Rather than add our voice to a growing chorus of critics alleging that the economic vote is a chimera, we argue that these recent accounts should push us to reconceive rather than discredit economic voting. We point to three fruitful directions for future research. First, given growing economic inequalities within Western democracies, we make a case for moving away from aggregate indices of economic well-being and toward multiple, parallel "economies" as experienced by different subgroups of voters. Second, we take issue with the widely-held assumption that economic conditions provide a universally optimal strategy of casting a ballot and consider recent research on the conditions which trigger rational voters to neglect, or at least give 2 secondary importance to, the economy. And third, we argue that future research should pursue the economic vote's downstream effects on public policy and performance in order to test-and if warranted, defend-its normative appeal. Each of these new paths touch on the core assumptions in the field-from operationalization to the normative grounds for the study of economic voting-and will advance our understanding by embodying deeper conceptions of the economy and of voters' decision-making capacities.
... 8) Armingeon & Giger, 2008. 9) Giger, 2010. utbudet på behörig personal generellt är mindre än utbudet på obehörig personal förväntas lönekostnaderna att öka i takt med ökade kompetenskrav. ...
... Our results have important implications for future research on party competition. Perhaps most importantly, changing the issue agenda is not sufficient for changing party popularity (see also Giger, 2010). For example, Social Democrats do not gain in popular support when unemployment is perceived as being an important problem. ...
This article analyses the effects of the issue agenda and of party competence on party popularity. Based on the salience and the issue ownership literatures, shifts in party support may be attributable to two factors: changing voter perceptions of issue salience and shifts in perceived party competence. We thus hypothesize that (1) a party's popularity increases if the public issue agenda changes in its favour such that its “best” issues become more important to voters and (2) that voters' changing perceptions of party competence account for shifting party popularity. Using annual macro data on voter perceptions of the issue agenda, party competence and popularity in Austria, we find no support for the first hypothesis. Rather, voter perceptions of party issue competence vary considerably and this variation accounts for the parties' level of popular support. This suggests that party competition plays out more by what politicians actually do and what impression they give about their deeds and competence than by exercising influence on the issue agenda.
... First, preferences for welfare state policies are not the sole determinants of vote choice. Giger (2010), for example, finds that the performance of a government on social policy has a similar influence on voters' decision to vote for the incumbent party (or parties) as the government's performance on other issues. Some issues, such as the economy, turn out to be more pertinent than performance on social policy. ...
Will voters punish the government for cutting back welfare state entitlements? The comparative literature on the welfare state suggests that the answer is yes. Unless governments are effectively employing strategies of blame avoidance, retrenchment leads to vote loss. Because a large majority of voters supports the welfare state, the usual assumption is that retrenchment backfires equally on all political parties. This study contributes to an emerging body of research that demonstrates that this assumption is incorrect. On the basis of a regression analysis of the electoral fate of the governing parties of 14 OECD countries between 1970 and 2002, we show that most parties with a positive welfare image lose after they implemented cutbacks, whereas most parties with a negative welfare image do not. In addition, we show that positive welfare image parties in opposition gain votes, at the expense of those positive welfare image parties in government that implemented welfare state retrenchment.
... Thus, several scholars report striking examples of governments taking clear public credit for welfare restructuring, including retrenchment on a large scale (Bonoli, 2012;Elmelund-Praestekaer and Emmenegger, 2013). Others report that the electoral punishment 'fear factor' postulated by Pierson is exaggerated (Giger, 2011;Giger and Nelson, 2011), or that electoral vulnerability can in some contexts produce more retrenchment, not less (Immergut and Abou-Chadi, 2014). All these observations suggest, at the very least, something more than pure blame avoidance accounts for retrenchment campaign effects in the late period. ...
Although theoretically contentious, most empirical studies contend that electoral-political factors structure the welfare state. In practice, most studies concentrate on ‘government partisanship’, that is the ideological character of the government. We agree that
politics matters
but also seek to expand our understanding of what ‘politics’ should be taken to mean. Drawing on recent comparative research on agenda-setting, we study the impact of whether welfare state issues were broadly salient in the public sphere during the election campaign that produced the government. We formulate hypotheses about how such
systemic
campaign salience and government partisanship (separately and interactively) affect welfare generosity. We also consider how such effects might have changed, taking into account challenges to standard assumptions of representative democracy coming from the ‘new politics of the welfare state’ framework. We combine well-known, but updated, data on welfare state generosity and government partisanship, with original contextual data on campaign salience from 16 West European countries for the years 1980–2008. We find that
campaigns matter
but also that their impact has changed. During the first half of the examined period (the 1980s and early 1990s), it mainly served to
facilitate
government partisanship effects on the welfare state. More recently, big-time campaign attention to welfare state issues results in some retrenchment (almost) regardless of who forms the postelection government. This raises concerns about the democratic status of the politics of welfare state reform in Europe.
Purpose
The Great Recession that began around 2008 hit hard on Greece and Italy. During a period of extreme economic distress, the two countries suffered the loss of government performance and citizen trust in government. The purpose of this study is to describe how government performance and citizen trust in government had been altered in the context of the Great Recession.
Design/methodology/approach
This study conducts a case study on France and Germany. These in-depth case studies afford a lens for diagnosing how the Great Recession affected macro and micro-performance in practice.
Findings
Comparative case studies of Greece and Italy provide evidence that government performance in Greece and Italy was diminished to a large extent as a result of the Great Recession. In addition, citizen trust in both countries was impaired during the Great Recession period.
Social implications
It is a matter of grave concern how the government responds to crises. During the crisis, some states implemented stringent austerity measures. This case brings out the careful point that austerity measures could diminish government performance as well as the state’s fundamental potential.
Originality/value
Due to its significance, the Great Recession has been widely investigated, with the explanations often concentrating on economic and political repercussions. Nonetheless, how the economic crisis transformed into public administration and policy has largely gone unheeded. The case studies of Greece and Italy newly identify and help to explain how the Great Recession contributes to governments and citizens in a multitude of aspects.
The effects of austerity in response to financial crises are widely contested and assumed to cause significant electoral backlash. Nonetheless, governments routinely adopt austerity when confronting economic downturns and swelling deficits. We explore this puzzle by distinguishing public acceptance of austerity as a general approach and support for specific austerity packages. Using original survey data from five European countries, we show that austerity is in fact the preferred response among most voters. We develop potential explanations for this surprising preference and demonstrate the empirical limitations of accounts centered on economic interests or an intuitive framing advantage. Instead, we show that the preference for austerity is highly sensitive to its political backers and precise composition of spending cuts and tax hikes. Using a novel approach to estimate support for historical austerity programs, we contend that governments’ strategic crafting of policy packages is a key factor underlying the support for austerity.
What are the political effects of fiscal consolidations? Theoretical considerations suggest that consolidations should reduce the public’s support for their governments, but empirical studies have found surprisingly small effects on government support. However, most of these studies analyze electoral outcomes, which are separated from the consolidation by a multi-link causal chain. We argue that more direct measures of government support, such as executive approval, show much stronger negative effects of consolidation, since they are less affected by the strategic timing of consolidations or the political alternatives on offer. We analyze a time series cross-sectional dataset of executive approval in 14 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1978 to 2014, using the narrative approach to measure fiscal consolidations. We find that spending cuts decrease government approval, especially during economic downturns, but tax increases’ impact on approval remains minimal. Finally, left- and right-wing governments are equally likely to lose approval after implementing austerity.
Governments have great difficulties to design politically sustainable responses to rising public debt. These difficulties are grounded in a limited understanding of the popular constraints during times of fiscal pressure. For instance, an influential view claims that fiscal austerity does not entail significant political risk. But this research potentially underestimates the impact of austerity on voters because of strategic selection bias. To address this challenge, we conduct survey experiments in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK and Germany. Contrary to the previous literature, the results show that the reelection chances of governments decrease massively when they propose austerity measures. Voters object particularly strongly to spending cuts and, to a lesser extent, to tax increases. While voters also disapprove of fiscal deficits, they weight the costs of austerity policies more than their potential benefits for the fiscal balance. These findings are inconsistent with the policy recommendations of international financial institutions.
The New Politics of the welfare state suggests that periods of welfare retrenchment present policymakers with a qualitatively different set of challenges and electoral incentives compared to periods of welfare expansion. An unresolved puzzle for this literature is the relative electoral success of retrenching governments in recent decades, as evidenced by various studies on fiscal consolidations. This article points to the importance of partisan biases as the main explanatory factor. I argue that partisan biases in the electorate create incentives for incumbent governments to depart from their representative function and push the burden of retrenchment on the very constituencies to which they owe their electoral mandate (‘Nixon-goes-to-China’). After offering a simple model on the logic of partisan biases, the article proceeds by testing the unexpected partisan hypotheses that the model generates. My findings from a cross-section time-series analysis in a set of 23 OECD countries provide corroborative evidence on this Nixon-goes-to-China logic of welfare retrenchment: governments systematically inflict pain on their core constituencies. These effects are especially pronounced in periods of severe budgetary pressure.
This paper compares welfare attitudes in Portugal before and after the June 2011 bailout, using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey (rotating module on the " welfare state ") and our own follow-up survey (spring 2013). Our findings suggest the welfare retrenchment rhetoric and agenda by both the international trio of funding bodies (the " Troika ") and the centre-right two-party coalition government elected immediately after the bailout have had significant unintended consequences. If, on the one hand, pessimism with the welfare provision in Portugal and skepticism regarding the social efficacy of social provision have grown dramatically, suggesting the internalization of the retrenchment rhetoric, on the other, this has been accompanied by a no less significant increase in the support for the welfare state among the " Troika's children " , i.e. labour market outsiders, whose numbers have increased dramatically as the result of Troika's austerity measures and the ensuing economic crisis. We further explore this impact by identifying three social groups with distinctively different sets of welfare attitudes (welfarists, hopeful welfarists, and liberal individualists), and by providing an explanation for this shift in social attitudes in terms of socio-demographic attributes (gender, etc.), social norms (citizenship norms) and cognitive practices (reflectivity, awareness).
How does the institutional context affect government responses to fiscal austerity? Despite the "institutional turn" in political science, we still possess an incomplete understanding of the relationship between a core aspect of the institutional setting of countries-namely institutional fragmentation-and the policy consequences of fiscal pressure. The article advances research on this question by integrating theories on the blame-avoidance effect of institutional fragmentation with theories on the effect of party constituencies on social policies. The result is a set of novel hypotheses about the conditional effects of institutional fragmentation that are tested empirically on quantitative time series data on unemployment protection from 17 advanced democracies. The analyses show that institutional fragmentation is an important determinant of government responses to fiscal austerity, but the effect depends on the partisan composition of the government.
Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to evaluate the impact of welfare state retrenchment on government popularity. We hypothesize that communicating retrenchment is a better strategy than obfuscating retrenchment measures. In addition, we hypothesize that the opposition’s choice between arguing against the retrenchment measure, or staying silent on the issue, affects the government’s popularity. Thus, the study presents a novel theoretical model of the popularity effects of welfare state retrenchment. In order to evaluate our propositions, we move beyond the standard measure in the literature and use monthly opinion polls to reduce the number of other factors that might affect government popularity. We demonstrate that governments can evade popular punishment by communication. They can even gain popularity if the opposition chooses not to attack. On the other hand, government popularity declines if the government obfuscates – and the decline is even larger if the opposition chooses to attack.
Welfare state spending cuts are effective fiscal consolidation tools, but some policymakers use other fiscal policy tools to address high levels of government debt. I argue that the economic incentive to cut welfare spending when government debt is high is undermined by the political incentive to stay in power when the median voter opposes retrenchment. Using survey data to measure the policy position of the median voter as well as hard figures on government debt and government social spending from 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, I estimate a series of regressions that show that government debt has a negative effect on social spending, but only when the median voter does not oppose retrenchment. This holds true for broad measures of social spending as well as for unemployment spending and old-age pension spending.
This article challenges the dominant assumptions in the literature that cutting social policy incurs voter wrath and that political parties can efficiently internalise electoral fallout with blame avoidance strategies. Drawing on the diverse literature on the role of partisanship in the period of permanent austerity, several partisan hypotheses on the relationship between social policy change and electoral outcomes are posited. The results indicate that religious and liberal parties gain votes, and thereby are able to ‘claim credit’, for retrenching social policy. None of the other coefficients for the effect of social policy cuts reach significance, raising the question of whether parties excel at blame avoidance or the public fails to place blame in the first place.
One of the most influential findings of the voting behavior literature of the past two decades was the realization that the clarity of the domestic institutional context influences the relationship between economic perceptions and incumbent vote. This article extends this "clarity of responsibility" argument beyond economics to another policy field-European integration. To what extent do national political institutions mediate the extent to which voters reward or punish government for their policies relating to the European Union (EU) or European integration, that is, EU issue voting? Using data from the 2004 European Election Study, the authors provide evidence that clarity of responsibility affects the strength of EU issue voting. Specifically, EU issue voting is accentuated when the domestic institutional environment provides clear lines of responsibility. This finding suggests that the "Europeanization" of national electoral politics depends in part on the domestic institutional context within each member state.
Issue importance mediates the impact of public policy issues on electoral decisions. Individuals who consider that an issue is important are more likely to rely on their attitudes toward that issue when evaluating candidates and deciding for whom to vote. The logic behind the link between issue importance and issue voting should translate to a link between issue importance and performance voting. Incumbent performance evaluations regarding an issue should have a stronger impact on the vote choice of individuals who find that issue important. The analysis demonstrates that there is a significant interaction between performance evaluations and issue importance. People concerned about an issue assign more weight to their evaluations of the government's performance on that issue when making up their mind.
The Comparative Political Data Set 1960-2006 is a collection of political and institutional data which have been assembled in the context of the research projects "Die Handlungs-spielräume des Nationalstaates" and "Critical junctures. An international comparison" di-rected by Klaus Armingeon and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It con-sists of (mostly) annual data for 23 democratic countries for the period of 1960 to 2006. In the cases of Greece, Spain and Portugal, political data were collected only for the democ-ratic periods 1 . The data set is suited for cross national, longitudinal and pooled time series analyses. The data set contains some additional demographic, socio-and economic variables. How-ever, these variables are not the major concern of the project, and are thus limited in scope. For a more in-depth source of these data, see the online databases of the OECD. For trade union membership, excellent data for European trade unions can be added from the CD-ROM of the Data Handbook by Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Jelle Visser (Trade Unions in Western Europe since 1945 (The Societies of Europe). New York, Basingstoke, Oxford: Grove's Dictionaries, Macmillan, 2000). A few variables have been copied from a data set collected by E. Huber, Ch. Ragin, J. Stephens, D. Brady and J. Beckfield (2004), as well as from a data set collected by D. Quinn. We are grateful for the permission to include these data. In any work using data from this data set, please quote both the data set, and where appro-priate, the original source.
In this article, we investigate whether and, if so, to what extent, people's notions of solidarity and their choices of justice principles are related to the type of welfare state regime they live under, as well as to individual socio-demographic and ideological factors. We analyse data from the International Social Survey Program 1996 and the European Values Study 1999, which together cover preferences of citizens from 20 welfare states. Hypotheses pertaining to people's notions of solidarity and preferences for justice principles in the different welfare state regimes are derived from the work of Esping-Andersen and his critics, as well as from sociological and social-psychological theories of solidarity and distributive justice. We find important, although not decisive, evidence for the thesis that the actual state of affairs with respect to the welfare state regime under which citizens live determines their views about which level of solidarity should be achieved and which justice principles should be emphasized. However, differences found are often not very pronounced, and we argue that this is a consequence of the fact that values of solidarity and justice are matters of priority to all welfare states. Taking into account the differences which exist between welfare state regimes, we also find important differences between individuals and social groups in their preferred level of solidarity and in their choice of justice principles.
Introduction
The development of the advanced welfare states has long been an issue attracting enormous scholarly attention within both political
science and sociology. For a long time, the welfare state literature was about explaining the growth of modern welfare states in general
as well as variation across OECD countries. However, since the publication of Pierson’s seminal work (1994; 1996), the welfare state
debate has increasingly shifted towards the question of welfare state retrenchment. Numerous journal articles and books about welfare state retrenchment have been published, and we believe that this literature is now so extensive that a review is warranted. Pierson argues that the politics of retrenchment is qualitatively different from the politics of expansion. We claim that the scholarship about retrenchment is also markedly different from the scholarship about the expansion of the welfare state. The expansion literature was
dominated by economic and sociological approaches focusing on the societal forces shaping the growth of the welfare state (van Kersbergen, forthcoming). Following van Kersbergen, we argue that the retrenchment literature is dominated by political science approaches. We claim that this is partly visible in the factors highlighted in investigations of retrenchment at the level of welfare states and partly in the attention paid to differences across policy sectors. This review has four sections. First, there is a brief outline of Pierson’s main argument. Then we turn to the main part of the review;
the post-Pierson debate. Here we will first look at the factors suggested as explanations for retrenchment at the level of welfare states, and subsequently we turn to the factors suggested to explain retrenchment in relation to specific policy sectors focusing on pensions and health policy. We finish with some suggestions
for a further research agenda.
In this article we evaluate two claims made in recent studies of the welfare states of advanced industrial societies: first, that welfare states have remained quite resilient in the face of demands for retrenchment; and second, that partisan politics have ceased to play a decisive role in their evolution. Addressing the first claim, we present analysis from a new data set on unemployment insurance and sickness benefit replacement rates for 18 countries for the years 1975-99. We find considerably more evidence of welfare retrenchment during the last two decades than do recent cross-national studies. Second, we examine the "end of partisanship" claim by estimating the effects of government partisanship on changes in income replacement rates in sickness and unemployment programs. Our results suggest that, contrary to claims that partisanship has little impact on welfare state commitments, traditional partisanship continues to have a considerable effect on welfare state entitlements in the era of retrenchment.
This book offers a careful examination of the politics of social policy in an era of austerity and conservative governance. Focusing on the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Pierson provides a compelling explanation for the welfare state's durability and for the few occasions where each government was able to achieve significant cutbacks. The programmes of the modern welfare state - the 'policy legacies' of previous governments - generally proved resistant to reform. Hemmed in by the political supports that have developed around mature social programmes, conservative opponents of the welfare state were successful only when they were able to divide the supporters of social programmes, compensate those negatively affected, or hide what they were doing from potential critics. The book will appeal to those interested in the politics of neo-conservatism as well as those concerned about the development of the modern welfare state. It will attract readers in the fields of comparative politics, public policy, and political economy.
In this 2002 volume, political psychologists take a hard look at political psychology. They pose and then address, the kinds of tough questions that those outside the field would be inclined to ask and those inside should be able to answer satisfactorily. Not everyone will agree with the answers the authors provide and in some cases, the best an author can do is offer well-grounded speculations. Nonetheless, the chapters raise questions that will lead to an improved political psychology and will generate further discussion and research in the field. The individual chapters are organised around four themes. Part I tries to define political psychology and provides an overview of the field. Part II raises questions about theory and empirical methods in political psychology. Part III contains arguments ranging from the position that the field is too heavily psychological to the view that it is not psychological enough. Part IV considers how political psychologists might best connect individual-level mental processes to aggregate outcomes.
In welchem Ausmaß ist die Wahlentscheidung an Sachfragen orientiert, und welche Sachfragen stehen im Mittelpunkt der Entscheidung? Die erste Frage ist vor allem unter der Perspektive der Erklärung des Wahlverhaltens bedeutsam, die zweite eher aus demokratietheoretischer Perspektive nach dem inhaltlichen Auftrag, der mit der Wahlentscheidung verbunden ist. Die Mehrzahl der zu diesen beiden Fragen vorgelegten Analysen der einzelnen Bundestagswahlen trägt dem Sachverhalt nicht Rechnung, daß zwei unterschiedliche Typen von Sachfragen existieren, die jeweils mit unterschiedlichen Implikationen hinsichtlich der Interpretation der individuellen Wahlentscheidung und des kollektiven Wahlergebnisses verknüpft sind: auf der einen Seite positionsbasierte Sachfragen, die sich auf die Bewertung unterschiedlicher politischer Handlungsalternativen beziehen, und auf der anderen Seite performanzbasierte Sachfragen, bei denen es um die unterschiedliche Bewertung der Ergebnisse politischen Handelns geht. Dominieren positionsbasierte Sachfragen die Wahlentscheidung, dann sind ideologische Motive ausschlaggebend, und es läßt sich daraus ein bestimmtes inhaltliches Mandat für die künftige Regierung ableiten; dominieren hingegen performanzbasierte Sachfragen, so sind pragmatische Motive ausschlaggebend, und es liegt — abhängig vom konkreten Wahlergebnis — eine Belohnung oder eine Bestrafung der amtierenden Regierung vor.
Die Einheit Deutschlands war ohne Zweifel das beherrschende Thema auf der politischen Agenda 1990. Für die Ostdeutschen bedeutete die Vereinigung nach Artikel 23 des Bonner Grundgesetzes die völlige Preisgabe ihres politischen, sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Systems; die Regelung des Abtreibungsrechts bildet die einzige nennenswerte Ausnahme. Infolgedessen ist im Ostteil Deutschlands jede politische Sachfrage zwangsläufig mit dem Prozeß der Vereinigung verbunden. Für die Westdeutschen hingegen blieb formal gesehen alles beim alten, die Bundesrepublik wurde lediglich ein ganzes Stück größer. Aber die Erweiterung um fünf neue Bundesländer und um 16,6 Millionen neue Mitbürger konnte nicht ohne Auswirkungen bleiben, dies war allgemeiner Konsens in der westdeutschen Öffentlichkeit. Umstritten hingegen waren das Ausmaß und die Dauer der Übergangsschwierigkeiten. So gesehen ist es eine Binsenwahrheit, daß die Vereinigung das beherrschende Thema war. Nicht trivial hingegen ist die Frage, in welchen Bezugsrahmen das Thema Vereinigung gestellt wurde, welche Aspekte die dominierenden waren und welche eher sekundär. War Vereinigung eine “neue” Streitfrage, die über etablierte Spannungslinien hinweg zumindest temporär neue Wählerkoalitionen schuf, oder sahen die Wähler Vereinigung eher in traditionellen Kategorien wie wirtschaftlichem Wohlergehen oder deutschem Prestige auf internationaler Ebene?
This book is the third in the ‘Beliefs in government’ series, and examines the effects of the post‐war arrival of the welfare state in the countries of Western Europe. The welfare state inaugurated a vast expansion in the role of government, which led to fears that the increased expectations of citizens would lead to government overload and to ‘ungovernability’. This book sheds new and surprising light on such fears. It begins by examining the expanding scope of government in the post‐war period. Drawing on a vast data set, stretching back over the past two decades and across Europe, it clarifies public attitudes towards the range and extent of government activity. It identifies changes in the public's political agenda, along with attitudes towards the size of government, taxation, and the equality and security goals of the welfare state. Attitudes towards government intervention in the economy, the environment, and the media are also examined. The book's final chapters assess the significance for governments of beliefs about the scope of the government.
This book is the fourth in the ‘Beliefs in government’ series, and focuses on phenomena indicative of widespread change in the value orientations of citizens in Western Europe during the past two decades. These include a decline in religious belief, waning class values, and rising post‐materialism – along with environmentalism, feminism, and post‐modernism. The extent of these changes, and their impact on the conduct of politics, are the dual concerns of this book. Its first few chapters present a simple model of the relationship between value orientations and political participation, and follow up with an account of how value orientations can be established empirically. Subsequent chapters draw on extensive data from across Europe, in order to track changes in three key types of value orientation – religious/secular, left/right materialism, and materialism/post‐materialism – and additionally discusses the emergence of the value orientations relating to feminism, post‐modernism, and environmentalism. The third part of the book examines the impact of the three key types on political effectiveness, political trust, interest in politics, voting behaviour, and involvement in new social movements. It concludes with an assessment of the implications of changing value orientations for the governability of advanced industrial societies.
Polarisation is the best single explanatory variable for stable versus unstable, functioning versus non-functioning, successful versus immobile, and easy versus difficulty democracy. The most significant form is usually the left-right variety, largely because the spatial imagery subsumes under its ordering the issues that acquire political salience. -after Authors
This chapter demonstrates that the European voter is also an economic voter in the sense that negative evaluations of the economy hurt the electoral fortunes of incumbent parties. For those who expected that economic voting would be on the rise, the empirical results are disappointing. Systematic trends towards an increase in economic voting were not observed. Political events and institutional factors account for some of the variations in economic voting. For instance, the weak and irregular effects in Norway can be explained by the dominance of minority governments, a weak opposition, and the EU issue which dominated over economic concerns and probably reduced Labour's ability to benefit from the first stage of the economic recovery in the 1993 election. Similarly, under a different institutional context, the British Conservative party in 1997 had less success than Labour four years later in taking advantage of an improving economy. These examples may suggest that institutions as well as embedded effects of political eventsinfluence the impact of economic evaluations on the vote.
This article discusses and reviews the growing literature on the nexus of macro-level structures and individual behaviour that some studies are a part of. It looks at the effects that macro-level institutions and contexts have on citizen behaviour, along with how political institutions and the environment where citizens form opinions and act, help in moderating the effects of individual-level factors on citizen behaviour. The modelling structures and behaviour, effects of structures on voter behaviour, and the interactions of structures and behaviour in research on economic voting are some of the topics covered in the article.
Political Choice in Britain uses data from the 1964 to 2001 British election studies (BES), 1992 to 2002 monthly Gallup polls, and numerous other national surveys conducted over the past four decades to test the explanatory power of rival sociological and individual rationality models of electoral turnout and party choice. Analyses endorse a valence politics model that challenges the long-dominant social class model. British voters make their choices by evaluating the performance of parties and party leaders in economic and other important policy areas. Although these evaluations may be largely products of events that occur long before an election campaign officially begins, parties' national and local campaign activities are also influential. Consistent with the valence politics model, partisan attachments display individual- and aggregate-level dynamics that reflect ongoing judgements about the managerial abilities of parties and their leaders. A general incentives model provides the best explanation of turnout. Calculations of the costs and influence-discounted benefits of voting and sense of civic duty are key variables in this model. Significantly, the decline in turnout in recent elections does not reflect more general negative trends in public attitudes about the political system. Voters judge the performance of British democracy in much the same way as they evaluate its parties and politicians. Support at all levels of the political system is a renewable resource, but one that must be renewed. © Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, and Paul Whiteley 2004. All rights reserved.
Just like in the case of value orientations, one might expect a gradual decrease of the power of left-right orientations to explain party choice. However, no such monotonic decline can be observed. Voters' left/right positions still are strongly related to party choice, but the strength of this association varies between countries and over time, without any particular kind of clearly discernable trend. The over-time variation in this association is strongly correlated with the degree of party polarization on the left/right continuum.
The main research question in this chapter is to what extent and how voters' perceptions of important issues affect the outcome of the election. The analyses clearly demonstrate that issue voting matters. If a voter thinks that a certain issue is salient, this has a considerable positive effect on the probability that he or she will vote for the party that is regarded as the 'owner' of the issue. Despite thelimitations of the measurements and data used, it is argued that issues do matter in modern elections. However, contrary to expectations based on modernisation theory, no secular increase in issue voting over time was found. The notion that policy preferences - or issues - have "replaced" social background as prime determinants of voting tends to overlook the fact that even the traditional models of voting behaviour were not devoid of political context. In this perspective, the analysis in this chapter confirms that election campaigns are still fought over issues that both politicians and voters perceive as important. If a party owns an issue, it has far better chances in an upcoming election, only if the voters - and the media - agree with the party that this particular issue deserves particular attention.
Theories of presidential elections (economic voting and spatial issue and ideology models), combined with the popular explanation of "angry voting," are used to account for voter choice in the 1992 presidential election. Voter choice in this three-candidate race is a function of economic perceptions, issue and ideological positions of voters and candidates, or voter anger. Multinomial probit analysis of 1992 National Election Studies data including individual-specific and alternative-specific variables. Simulations based on counterfactual scenarios of ideological positions of the candidates and of voter perceptions of the economy. The economy was the dominant factor in accounting for voter decisions in 1992, and Clinton, not Perot, was the beneficiary of economic discontent. While issues (mainly abortion) and ideology did play some role, Clinton was not perceived by the electorate as a New Democrat. We find little support for the hypothesis of angry voting. Last, Perot took more votes from Bush than from Clinton.
Theory: This paper develops and applies an issue ownership theory of voting that emphasizes the role of campaigns in setting the criteria for voters to choose between candidates. It expects candidates to emphasize issues on which they are advantaged and their opponents are less well regarded. It explains the structural factors and party system variables which lead candidates to differentially emphasize issues. It invokes theories of priming and framing to explain the electorate's response. Hypotheses: Issue emphases are specific to candidates; voters support candidates with a party and performance based reputation for greater competence on handling the issues about which the voter is concerned. Aggregate election outcomes and individual votes follow the problem agenda. Method: Content analysis of news reports, open-ended voter reports of important problems, and the vote are analyzed with graphic displays and logistic regression analysis for presidential elections between 1960 and 1992. Results: Candidates do have distinctive patterns of problem emphases in their campaigns; election outcomes do follow the problem concerns of voters; the individual vote is significantly influenced by these problem concerns above and beyond the effects of the standard predictors.
The disclosure that high officials within the Reagan administration had covertly diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras funds obtained from the secret sale of weapons to Iran provides us with a splendid opportunity to examine how the foundations of popular support shift when dramatic events occur. According to our theory of priming, the more attention media pay to a particular domain--the more the public is primed with it--the more citizens will incorporate what they know about that domain into their overall judgment of the president. Data from the 1986 National Election Study confirm that intervention in Central America loomed larger in the public's assessment of President Reagan's performance after the Iran-Contra disclosure than before. Priming was most pronounced for aspects of public opinion most directly implicated by the news coverage, more apparent in political notices' judgments than political experts', and stronger in the evaluations of Reagan's overall performance than in assessments of his character.
Evidence is provided for two different types of negativity effects in political behavior, a perceptual "figure-ground" negativity based on the greater salience of negative information in a largely positive world, and a motivational "cost orientation" negativity based on the survival value of avoiding costs rather than approaching gains. It is argued that the perception of presidential candidates is affected by both types of negativity effects, but that negativity in congressional elections is based solely on perceptual processes. The implications of these two different types of negativity effects for the future of American politics are discussed.
A large literature has demonstrated that such economic factors as growth, inflation, and unemployment affect the popularity of incumbents within many democratic countries. However, cross-national aggregate analyses of ''economic voting'' show only weak and inconsistent economic effects. We argue for the systematic incorporation of political factors that shape the electoral consequences of economic performance. Multivariate analyses of 102 elections in 19 industrialized democracies are used to estimate the cross-national impact of economic and political factors. The analyses show that considerations of the ideological image of the government, its electoral base, and the clarity of its political responsibility are essential to understanding the effects of economic conditions on voting for or against incumbents.
This article presents and discusses the state of the art in political science research on welfare state reform. While scholars first aimed at explaining the emergence and growth of the welfare state, national variation in its development, and crises of welfare state regimes, more recently the focus has shifted to the persistence and reform of the major welfare state institutions. Research in this direction has typically adopted an institutionalist perspective, stressing how institutional settings affect the feasibility and direction of reforms. These studies have shed light on important aspects of the question, in particular by demonstrating the role of path dependency and veto players in reform processes, but suffer from two main problems, namely the difficulty of defining the dependent variable in an appropriate way, and the neglect of the importance of power resources.
This article examines the change in the presidential fortunes of the US Democratic Party from 1988 to 1992. It focuses on the role of presidential candidates as the key dynamic aspect of American party politics. The analysis recognizes that candidates can influence the vote in several ways, including their personal attributes, ideological positions and policy and performance issues that are associated with them. For many American voters, the presidential candidates are the party. Contrary to the fears of many, candidate-centered politics have not led to presidential elections being determined by the personalities of the nominees. Nor has the decline of party politics led to ideological volatility, with the deciding factor being how closely candidates position themselves to the median voter. The major reason why Clinton won and Dukakis lost was that domestic issues favored Vice President Bush in 1988 but worked against President Bush in 1992.
Issue-priority models are the principal alternatives to reward–punishment or incumbency-oriented models of the political economy of party support. A focus on the political context clarifies some conceptual difficulties with issue-priority voting. We emphasize the implications of multi-party system and coalition government. A case study is presented on how economic factors have affected party popularity in the Netherlands between 1970 and 1999. Coalitions have not rendered issue-priority voting infeasible because (1) voters possess necessary basic information, (2) they have indentifiable perceptions about party issue priority, and (3) they have reasonable expectations about the relation between electoral outcomes and possible coalitions. Survey data and time-series analyses provide support for the idea that issue-priority voting is conditional on perceptions of competency and coalition structure.
The infrequency of issue voting in American presidential elections is usually attributed to a lack of policy rationality among voters. An examination of the Vietnam war issue in 1968 suggests, however, that much of the explanation may lie instead with the electoral process itself, and with the kinds of choices which are offered to citizens.
Policy preferences concerning Vietnam were only weakly related to the two-party vote. Less than 2 per cent of the variance in voting choices between Nixon and Humphrey could be accounted for by opinions on Vietnam. Yet the absence of issue voting could not be fully explained by voters' failings. Most people had strong opinions about Vietnam. The public was generally able to perceive where prenomination candidates stood on the issue. People were able and willing to take account of Vietnam in evaluating other candidates.
Voters did not bring their Vietnam preferences to bear upon the choice between Nixon and Humphrey because they saw little difference between the positions of the two, and because they were not certain precisely where either one stood. These perceptions, in turn, were rooted in reality. Humphrey's and Nixon's campaign speeches show that they did differ rather little on specific proposals about Vietnam. Further, both candidates indulged in so much ambiguity about Vietnam that public confusion over their positions was understandable.
There are theoretical reasons for believing that candidates in a two-party system often have an incentive to converge at similar policy positions, and to be vague. If they generally do so, their behavior may contribute significantly to the apparent nonrationality of voters. In addition, it may have important implications for questions of collective rationality and social choice.
Regression analysis in comparative research suffers from two distinct problems of statistical inference. First, because the data constitute all the available observations from a population, conventional inference based on the long-run behavior of a repeatable data mechanism is not appropriate. Second, the small and collinear data sets of comparative research yield imprecise estimates of the effects of explanatory variables. We describe a Bayesian approach to statistical inference that provides a unified solution to these two problems. This approach is illustrated in a comparative analysis of unionization.
The usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the “retrospective” economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience (voter as “peasant”). A second model assumes a “sophisticated” economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations (voter as “banker”). Using the components, both retrospective and prospective, of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval, we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series. With aggregate consumer expectations about long-term business conditions in the approval equation, neither the usual economic indicators not the other ICS components matter. Moreover, short-term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy. The qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome: the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen.
This article investigates the relationship between economic conditions and party support for coalition parties in Denmark and the Netherlands. The article argues that the simple reward-punishment model cannot fully account for changes in citizens' support for parties, given variable economic performance. Using aggregate public support data for political parties, the article shows that citizens differentiate between coalition partners depending on the parties' issue priorities. Instead of blaming or rewarding all coalition parties in a uniform fashion, citizens shift support from one coalition party to another, depending on the perceived competence of a party to deal with particular economic problems. The article finds that the structure of responsibility in parliamentary democracies ruled by coalition governments is more complex than is often assumed. Therefore, it is argued that students of economics and public opinion should pay particular attention to the institutional context in which citizens make choices.
This essay seeks to lay the foundation for an understanding of
welfare state retrenchment. Previous discussions have generally
relied, at least implicitly, on a reflexive application of theories
designed to explain welfare state expansion. Such an approach is
seriously flawed. Not only is the goal of retrenchment (avoiding
blame for cutting existing programs) far different from the goal of
expansion (claiming credit for new social benefits), but the welfare
state itself vastly alters the terrain on which the politics of social
policy is fought out. Only an appreciation of how mature social
programs create a new politics can allow us to make sense of the
welfare state's remarkable resilience over the past two decades of
austerity. Theoretical argument is combined with quantitative and
qualitative data from four cases (Britain, the United States,
Germany, and Sweden) to demonstrate the shortcomings of
conventional wisdom and to highlight the factors that limit or
facilitate retrenchment success.
While candidates regularly spend much time and effort campaigning on foreign and defense policies, the thrust of prevailing scholarly opinion is that voters possess little information and weak attitudes on these issues, which therefore have negligible impact on their voting behavior. We resolve this anomaly by arguing that public attitudes on foreign and defense policies are available and cognitively accessible, that the public has perceived clear differences between the candidates on these issues in recent elections, and that these issues have affected the public's vote choices. Data indicate that these conclusions are appropriate for foreign affairs issues and domestic issues
As the Reagan administration neared the end of its first full year in office, interpretations of the meaning of the 1980 presidential election were still as varied as the political positions of analysts and commentators. The politically dominant interpretation, promoted by the new administration and its supporters, was that the election provided a mandate to bring about several fundamental changes in the role of government in American social and economic life. In recommendations whose scope had not been matched since the first days of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the Reagan administration set about responding to what it understood to be popular demands for reduced government spending and taxes, expansion of the national defence establishment, limitation of environmental protection in favour of the development of energy resources, and a myriad of other tasks designed to encourage free enterprise by ‘getting government off the backs of the people’. With varying degrees of enthusiasm for the new administration's programmes, scores of Democratic politicians shared the interpretation of Reagan's victory as a new electoral mandate which rejected many of the fundamental policies of Democratic administrations from Roosevelt to Carter. This interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the 1980 election was expressed by Democratic congressmen of many political colours who decried the bankruptcy of their own leadership and affirmed the victor's sense of mandate by supporting the President's various legislative programmes.
The economy being the key to presidential popularity, what is the economic intelligence inspiring the approval judgments of American voters? According to one school of thought, the public relies on the current performance of the economy (the retrospective voter), while a rival makes the case for expectations about the future economy (the prospective voter). I conduct a time-series analysis combining consumer surveys and presidential approval polls (1960–1993). The results unequivocally reject the prospective claim and confirm the retrospective one. Depending on the measure used, economic expectations either prove too sensitive to political interventions (change in the White House, wars, and scandals) to shape presidential approval; or else, economic expectations do no more than encapsulate information about the current state of the economy. The research bears out the wisdom and the fairness of the retrospective calculus. To judge a president's performance in office is not a question about things to come but about things done.
In this article, we study the determinants of supportiveness for the welfare state as a system of institutionalised solidarity. We distinguish between two types of support; namely, 1) whether people hold the state responsible for achieving social-economic security and distributive justice, and 2) people's preference for the range of these goals that should be realised if the state is indeed held responsible. Using data from the Eurobarometer survey series, we investigate how, and to what extent, both kinds of support for the welfare state are related to position in the stratification structure, demographic characteristics, and social-political beliefs, as well as to features of European welfare state regimes. The results of a two-level hierarchical model suggest that moral commitment to the welfare state dominates at the individual level, whereas self-interest enters the picture mainly if a person is highly dependent on the provisions of the welfare state. Further, the findings give no support to the claim of a systematic variation between levels of popular support for the welfare state and its institutional set-up.
After a discussion of the role of ‘issues’ in models of voting behaviour, this article focuses on the degree of homogeneity of issue evaluations on the one hand and the match between issue evaluations and vote choice on the other. Three major conclusions emerge from cross-national comparative analyses. First, and quite generally, a large segment of the national electorates does not perceive any particular party as best able to handle any of the problems they personally feel most important. Second, when particular parties are considered as best able to handle the problems seen as most important, then uniform - or homogeneous - evaluations outnumber more varied choices by far. And third, overall vote intention matches the competence evaluation much more often than not. These results give little support for the cognitive, rational choice approach to issue voting, but, still issue competence evaluations may be more than merely a reflection of affective ties.
When the United States began its overt military conflict with Iraq in January 1991, the news media focused unceasingly on the Gulf crisis. Using national survey data, we show that this emphasis altered the ingredients of Americans' assessments of George Bush's performance. After the war, assessments were based more on beliefs about Bush's effectiveness in managing the conflict and less on confidence in his handling of other foreign relations matters or the domestic economy. Consequently, Bush's overall performance ratings increased dramatically following the war. We also show that the media's impact on political judgments was regulated by citizens' levels of political knowledge, exposure to political news, and interest in the war. Greater impact was associated with higher levels of knowledge and lower levels of exposure and interest. These findings challenge traditional views of these dimensions of political involvement and support a view derived from contemporary psychological theories of information processing.
Bayesian statistics have made great strides in recent years, developing a class of methods for estimation and inference via stochastic simulation known as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. MCMC constitutes a revolution in statistical practice with effects beginning to be felt in the social sciences: models long consigned to the "too hard" basket are now within reach of quantitative researchers. I review the statistical pedigree of MCMC and the underlying statistical concepts. I demonstrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of MCMC and offer practical suggestions for using MCMC in social-science settings. Simple, illustrative examples include a probit model of voter turnout and a linear regression for time-series data with autoregressive disturbances. I conclude with a more challenging application, a multinomial probit model, to showcase the power of MCMC methods.