Principals or puppets? Analysing variation in local political parties\u2019 social policy positions

H B Broekema,H J M Fenger,J Van Der Waal

doi:10.1057/s41269-020-00161-9

Abstract

The decentralisation of policy responsibilities from the national to the local level in the domain of social policies is meant to facilitate a better fit to local conditions, and, consequently, inspire local variation in social policy positions. This article examines two questions: (1) to what extent do Dutch local party branches’ social policy positions deviate from their national mother party and local peer parties and (2) do local conditions explain this deviation? To answer these questions, we developed a dataset including 168 local party manifestos from 27 strategically selected municipalities and 8 national party manifestos. Our analyses show limited deviation in local parties’ positions compared to their national mother party and other local branches of their national mother party. This suggests that the social policies addressed in the party manifestos of local parties seem to reflect a process of institutional isomorphism. Furthermore, the limited deviation that does exist in local parties’ social policy positions is not convincingly larger in municipalities (1) that are smaller, (2) that have higher social benefit dependency, or (3) that have high vote shares for local independent challengers. This is contrary to what can be expected based on the contingency theory.

Highlights

National governments often justify decentralisation by pointing to a tighter fit between policy measures and the problems those policies aim to address (CostaFont and Greer 2013, p. 6)
We present our findings on social policy positions in three steps
Even though we searched for maximum variation in relevant municipal conditions, we observed that topic presence and, especially, position-taking in local party branches manifestos are strongly associated with the topic presence and position-taking of the national mother party and peer local branches

Summary

Introduction

Which specific form of isomorphism is possibly in play cannot be inferred from the data available, but generally isomorphism theory tells us to expect that local branches from the same national mother party demonstrate similar social policy positions in their manifestos. We expect that deviation in social policy positions from the national mother party and local peer parties occurs more often in municipalities with a smaller population size. Following the selection process of Andeweg and Irwin (2005), Breeman et al (2015), and Van de Waart and Brouwer (2015), we selected nine small, nine medium, and nine large municipalities that showed substantial variation in social benefit dependency, political constellation at the time of the manifesto development, and the region of the Netherlands in which they are located.. We first found seven regularly occurring main topics and identified whether these were mentioned in a particular manifesto or not: (1) Decentralisation of the

The selected municipalities are as follows

29 Welfare experiments

Results

Conclusions and discussion

Compliance with ethical standards