Partisan Effects Research Articles

Partisan Politics in the Long Shadow of the Golden Age

The question if political parties matter in social policy making is traditionally answered by an analysis of social spending or replacement rates. Following this approach, parties obviously mattered in the ‘golden age’, whereas their influence dwindled or even disappeared afterwards. Starting from the insights and blind spots of the conventional approach, I will outline an innovative, more historical approach that emphasizes the mutual interaction of political parties and welfare institutions over time. On the one hand, partisan conflict patterns are shaped by existing welfare institutions. This means that different institutional designs lead to different partisan conflicts and, ultimately, to contextualized partisan effects, i.e. if and especially how parties matter differs considerably across welfare states. On the other hand, welfare institutions are themselves the product of previous partisan conflicts and the resulting policies. Thus, by shaping the institutional design of welfare programs in their favor, parties can, due to policy feedback, deliberately constrain their political opponents’ policy options. Although one has to account for unintended consequences, this mechanism points to the existence of institutionalized partisan effects. The analytical framework is applied to pension politics in Sweden and the United Kingdom since the late 1950s.

Partisan Politics, Financial Deregulation, and the New Gilded Age

This paper examines how financial deregulation and the partisan underpinnings of deregulation shaped the path of income inequality in the United States. Using time-series data from 1914 to 2010, we assess the effect of partisan politics on financial deregulation and, in turn, the effect of deregulation on income inequality. We find that financial deregulation has generally declined when Democrats attain more power in Washington and that deregulation has contributed to rising inequality. We also learn that the partisan effect on deregulation has diminished since the early 1980s, suggesting that one way partisan politics has contributed to the recent rise in inequality is related to convergence on matters of financial deregulation. We explore several potential explanations for this post–1980 partisan convergence, finding evidence supporting the idea that globalization, the increasing availability of credit, and shifts in campaign finance were contributing factors.

Complexity and the Amending Formula

Thinking boldly about Senate reform means no longer relying on claims about Canada’s constitutional amending formula as a crutch for stagnation. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, theamending formula is not responsible for stalled progress on Senate reform. To be sure, the formula is intricate, detailed, and sustains multiple reasonable interpretations. It was difficult to entrench and requires widespread support to be changed; it calls on political actors to reach some measure of consensus in order to achieve certain constitutional reforms. However, the amending formula is neither impenetrable nor incomprehensible. It is neither a Rubik’s cube nor an instruction manual. And, it should not be cast as the scapegoat for the effects of partisanship or failures of leadership in implementing reform.

Historical Dramas, Current Political Choices: Analyzing Partisan Selective Exposure With a Docudrama

This study investigates the docudrama hypothesis—the idea that fiction based on real stories can influence audience members’ perception of political reality—in the context of current debates on partisan selective exposure and reinforcement effects. It does so by analyzing the influence of an Oscar-nominated docudrama on viewers’ attitudes and behavioral intention using propensity score matching. By means of a representative survey, we find strong evidence of partisan selective exposure and avoidance. Furthermore, among respondents with a similar likelihood of film attendance, actual attendance has a strong association with positive retrospective evaluations of the political coalition glorified in the movie, and an indirect relationship—via retrospective evaluations—with voting intentions. Discussion of the findings shed light into potential real-world political effects of partisan selective exposure using content other than news.

The Partisan Effects of Voter Turnout: How Conservatives Profit from Rainy Election Days

In this short note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the social democrats generally profit from higher voter turnout at the expense of the conservatives. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using election day rain as an instrumental variable. Our particular contribution is the comparison of municipal and state elections.

Revisiting the left cabinet share: How to measure the partisan profile of governments in welfare state research

Measuring the power of the political left with the ‘share of social democratic cabinet seats’ is the gold standard in the literature on partisan effects. We argue that this measure of left power suffers from conceptual ambiguity and propose an alternative approach to measure the ideological orientation of governments based on their power in cabinets and data on party positions. We see several shortcomings of the traditional measure: the social democratic cabinet share neglects the fact that parties’ ideological profiles differ across countries and have significantly changed over recent decades. Also, specific policy measures of party preferences are often more appropriate to gauge the government’s position than relying on highly aggregated left/right measures. In addition, the social democratic cabinet share does not take into account the impact of coalition partners, cabinet decision making and the possibility of minority governments relying on parliamentary support outside the cabinet on the ability of parties to implement the social policies. After discussing the reasons for the conceptual ambiguity of existing indicators for the power of the left, we present alternative measures for the ideological orientation of the government based on the composition of cabinets and different information about party positions. We demonstrate how these measures can be combined to a single indicator that takes into account both the ideological position of governing parties in a particular policy domain and their power to affect cabinet decisions. We critically discuss the availability and merits of data on party positions and cabinet compositions and provide recommendations for constructing measures in welfare state research.

Unionization and the partisan effect on income inequality

Does partisanship matter for income inequality? The empirical evidence is notably mixed. I argue that these inconsistent findings are partly the result of scholars not (properly) modeling the relationship between unionization and the partisan composition of government. If we accept that union members favor greater government intervention to reduce economic inequalities than non-union members, politicians desire to hold elected office and be popular but also to implement particular public policies, and left party politicians share union members’ policy preferences to a greater extent than center and right party politicians, then partisan differences should be greatest at moderate levels of unionization, a condition that allows all politicians to pursue their policy preferences while maintaining electoral viability. The empirical analysis examines 16 wealthy democracies between 1970 and 2010. The results of error-correction models confirm the theoretical expectation and hold regardless of whether there is a majoritarian or proportional representation electoral system.

Opting In, Opting Out: The Politics of State Medicaid Expansion

Abstract As the list of Republican-led states participating in the Medicaid expansion grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that partisanship and ideology alone cannot fully explain states’ choices. This paper examines the political and practical dynamics influencing state Medicaid expansion decisions. Whereas resources and history have served to reinforce the effects of partisanship and ideology, several countervailing forces – including public opinion, interest group pressure, budgetary considerations, and need – are pushing even the reddest states toward expansion. The relative force of these competing pressures within a state can help explain not only whether or not the state expands Medicaid, but also the manner in which it does so, such as through a waiver or executive action. I present five case studies – Nevada, Arizona, Ohio, Arkansas, and Tennessee – to illustrate how these various dynamics are shaping states’ decisions.

Windows of opportunity: legislative fragmentation conditions the effect of partisanship on product market deregulation

AbstractPrevious research on deregulation in industrialised countries emphasises differences between left-wing and right-wing parties, but data on product market regulation (PMR) indicate that these differences have been modest. If partisan preferences on the merits of deregulation differ sharply, why such modest differences? We argue that partisan differences only become pronounced when the government is strong and rules a relatively unified legislature. Thus, legislative fragmentation should reduce the left-right difference in PMR. We test this theory against PMR data in 29 industrialised countries, 1978–2007. We find that right-wing governments only have a strong negative effect on regulation if the legislature and the government are not fragmented.

A divided branch: Legislative chambers and the varied effects of party strength on policy outcomes in the American states

State legislatures have received considerable attention as drivers of policy outcomes, but research designs typically paint this branch of government with broad strokes. Studies that investigate the influence of party control or party strength on public policy often fail to conceptualize the upper and lower legislative chambers as unique bodies. But policy enactments at the state level depend on two chambers that are not carbon copies of one another. Using pension funding, health care and immigration reform as illustrations, this study demonstrates that altering models to include party measurements for both chambers can lead to substantively different conclusions about the effect of partisanship on policy outcomes. Further differences arise when binary measures of majority control are used instead of continuous measures of party strength. If accurate inferences are to be drawn from empirical models, these findings suggest scholars must conceptualize legislative measurement with due care.

Partisan politics or public-health need?

States' policy decisions regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 have often been explained as predominantly, if not solely, partisan. Might rival explanations also apply? Using a cross-sectional 50-state regression model, we studied standard political variables coupled with public-health indicators. This work differs from existing research by employing a dependent variable of five additive measures of ACA support, examining the impact of both political and socioeconomic indicators on state policy decisions. Expanding on recent empirical studies with our more nuanced additive index of support measures, we found that same-party control of a state's executive and legislative branches was indeed by far the single best predictor of policy decisions. Public-health indicators, overwhelmed by partisan effect, did not sufficiently explain state policy choice. This result does not allay the concerns that health policy has become synonymous with health politics and that health politics now has little to do with health itself.

The partisan politics of institutional welfare state reform

ABSTRACTWe propose theoretically that the government partisan effect on institutional welfare state reforms is significantly stronger than on policy reforms. Policy reforms impose losses or gains on electoral sub-constituencies and therefore are driven by an electoral logic. Institutional reforms redistribute institutional power resources between political actors, but are inconsequential for voters in the short run. Without clear electoral repercussions, partisan governments are relatively free to seek long-term policy goals through institutional re-arrangements. We evaluate these propositions in a cross-country comparative analysis of all major policy and institutional reforms in labour market policy in Sweden, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands in the period between 1982 and 2011. We find the expected pattern of especially strong partisan effects in institutional welfare state reforms.

The politics of fiscal policy during economic downturns, 1981–2010

AbstractThis article investigates fiscal policy responses to the Great Recession in historical perspective. It explores general trends in the frequency, size and composition of fiscal stimulus as well as the impact of government partisanship on fiscal policy outputs during the four international recessions of 1980–1981, 1990–1991, 2001–2002 and 2008–2009. Encompassing 17–23 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the analysis calls into question the idea of a general retreat from fiscal policy activism since the early 1980s. The propensity of governments to respond to economic downturns by engaging in fiscal stimulus has increased over time and no secular trend in the size of stimulus measures is observed. At the same time, OECD governments have relied more on tax cuts to stimulate demand in the two recessions of the 2000s than they did in the early 1980s or early 1990s. Regarding government partisanship, no significant direct partisan effects on either the size or the composition of fiscal stimulus is found for any of the four recession episodes. However, the size of the welfare state conditioned the impact of government partisanship in the two recessions of the 2000s, with left‐leaning governments distinctly more prone to engaging in discretionary fiscal stimulus and/or spending increases in large welfare states, but not in small welfare states.

Party Politics, Governors, and Healthcare Expenditures

This study examines the impact of gubernatorial partisanship on the growth of healthcare expenditures (HCE) for a panel dataset of 50 U.S. states over the 1991–2009 period. Using the parametric regression discontinuity design, I find no partisan effect on the growth of state's per capita real total personal HCE. However, an analysis of the growth rates of the components of HCE suggests that there is a causal effect of party affiliation on the “prescription drugs” component. These findings are robust to the inclusion of additional covariates in the parametric approach as well to the use of the non‐parametric regression discontinuity approach. The results further suggest that the impact of gubernatorial partisanship does not depend on the length of the governor's term in office.

The Power of the Dark Side: Negative Partisanship and Political Behaviour in Canada

AbstractThe origins and implications of partisan identification are well-studied, but negative partisan attitudes—dislike for a particular party—have escaped such scrutiny, even as the politics of negativity enjoys sustained popularity, especially come election time. In this paper we build upon the comparatively modest negative partisanship literature to consider the effects of negative partisan attitudes on a range of political behaviours. There are reasons to suspect that negative and positive partisanship may have different effects; thus, accounting for the unique influence of negative attitudes is important for understanding the full effect of partisanship on political behaviour. Our results, based upon Canadian Election Study data from 2008 and 2011, reveal that, in addition to vote choice, negative partisanship influences voter turnout and a range of political activities, both related and unrelated to parties. These findings provide evidence of the power of the “dark side” of partisanship.

The Policy of Strategic Demobilisation: The Social Policy of the Christian Democratic–Liberal Coalition, 2009–13

This article addresses two research questions: which course did the CDU, CSU–FDP coalition government choose to follow in social policy from 2009 to 2013? And what relationships exist between social policy in this period and the Bundestag election in 2013? The analysis of primary and secondary data reveals both continuity and discontinuity in social policy in the 17th legislative period of the Bundestag. The decisions and non-decisions on social protection and labour market regulation in this period mirror a wide variety of determinants. These include partisan effects, electoral cycles, co-governing judges and anonymous social policy of market forces. The data also suggest that the CDU/CSU has been relatively successful in its strategy of ‘asymmetric demobilisation’, the strategy of changing its social policy profile to one more similar to that of its social democratic opponent, in order to demobilise the SPD's voters rather than mobilising them. More ambivalent has been the electoral outcome of the FDP's role in social policy. The FDP's first foray into leading a large welfare state ministry, the Federal Ministry of Health, in 2009 to 2013 did not prove to be a winning proposition for the Liberals electorally. Social policy in general and welfare state recalibration in particular thus seem to be an electorally especially risky project for a liberal party such as the FDP.

The Effect of Partisanship, Sophistication, and Political Contexts on Belief in Democracy Promotion

This article examines the questions of who believes in democracy promotion, what makes individuals change their belief in this ideal, and how that change occurs. I propose an interaction model where both political contexts and individuals' characteristics (partisanship and sophistication) work together in accounting for individuals' acceptance of democracy promotion. To explore the question, I use the surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs from 1998 to 2008. The results show that partisanship moderates the effect of political events on individuals' acceptance of the ideal. Furthermore, sophistication‐level conditions the effect of the interaction between partisanship and events in accounting for acceptance of democracy promotion. Specifically, compared with less‐sophisticated Democrats and Republicans, the more‐sophisticated partisans interpret the Iraq war differently and, in turn, their belief in democracy promotion is significantly influenced by this event.Related ArticlesCollins, Stephen D. 2010. “.” Politics & Policy 38 (): 737‐764. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00256.x/abstractQuinn, Adam. 2007. “.” Politics & Policy 35 (): 522‐547. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00071.x/abstractDolan, Chris J. 2008. “.” Politics & Policy 36 (): 542‐585. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00121.x/abstractRelated MediaDiamond, Larry. 2010. “.” . http://www.newsweek.com/doing‐democracy‐promotion‐right‐82937Drake, Bruce. 2013. “.” http://www.pewresearch.org/fact‐tank/2013/12/04/americans‐put‐low‐priority‐on‐promoting‐democracy‐abroad/Bakerfeb, Peter. 2014. “.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/world/europe/wary‐stance‐from‐obama.html?_r=0

The Effects of Automated Redistricting and Partisan Strategic Interaction on Representation: The Case of Mexico

In the U.S. redistricting is deeply politicized and often synonymous with gerrymandering -- the manipulation of boundaries to promote the goals of parties, incumbents, and racial groups. In contrast, Mexico’s federal redistricting has been implemented nationwide since 1996 through automated algorithms devised by the electoral management body (EMB) in consultation with political parties. In this setting, parties interact strategically and generate counterproposals to the algorithmically generated plans in a closed-door process that is not revealed outside the bureaucracy. Applying geospatial statistics and large-scale optimization to a novel dataset that has never been available outside of the EMB, we analyze the effects of automated redistricting and partisan strategic interaction on representation. Our dataset comprises the entire set of plans generated by the automated algorithm, as well as all the counterproposals made by each political party during the 2013 redistricting process. Additionally, we inspect the 2006 map with new data and two proposals to replace it towards 2015 in search for partisan effects and political distortions. Our analysis offers a unique insight into the internal workings of a purportedly autonomous EMB and the partisan effects of automated redistricting on representation.

Partisan Effects of Legislative Term Limits

Term limits remain a popular policy reform and have generated a great deal of scholarship as a result. Although many predicted that term limits would benefit the Republican party, the literature finds no marked partisan effects, possibly because termed‐out legislators have largely been replaced by copartisans. This article demonstrates that term limits have indeed had partisan effects—just not on electoral outcomes. Term limits have caused a significant reallocation of institutional power from Democrats to Republicans (as measured by contributions from access‐oriented interest groups), in large part because they have removed more senior Democrats than Republicans. The partisan effects of term limits therefore point to the institutional value of seniority.

Partisan Alignment Effects on Total Factor Productivity

Aray H. Partisan alignment effects on total factor productivity, Regional Studies. Unlike the literature on political effects on real economy that suggests that partisan effects accrue through aggregate demand, it is hypothesized that such effects could also accrue through aggregate supply. Using panel data for the Spanish regions over the 1986–2010 period, the main results are: (1) partisan alignment effects only arise when central government enjoys a majority; (2) there exist a positive contemporaneous effect and negative lagged effects; and (3) in absolute value, such effects vanish over time. Results are robust to different specifications and measures of total factor productivity (TFP) and methods of estimation.