Partisan Effects Research Articles

Does local public corruption generate partisan effects on polls?

During the recent years of economic boom in Spain, political corruption at the local level boomed as well. In fact, it increased from 7 publicly denounced cases from 1999 to 2003 to at least 180 in the legislative period (2007–2011). In this paper, we explore this phenomenon in two related ways: how it has affected voting results and political participation, and whether the wrongdoing of local politicians has undermined the voters’ trust in them. We constructed a socioeconomic municipality database that matched polling results and corruption cases and then estimated a voting-share equation by difference-in-difference and matching techniques. Our results confirm that the voters’ attitude towards corruption is significantly different with respect to parties on the right or the left. In fact, after a prosecution in a local corruption case, abstention increases by an average 1.8 percentage points, left-parties’ voting share is reduced by approximately 2 percentage points, while right-parties’ share increases approximately 2 points.

Chasing Elbridge's Ghost: The Digital Gerrymander

Gerrymandering has been with us for centuries, but now it's digital and out of control. Elbridge Gerry's most lasting legacy may be the electoral abuse that bears his name: gerrymandering. A gerrymander is the manipulation of voting district boundaries for partisan effect. Although the term originated with Gerry's bid for the Massachusetts governor's office in the early 1800s to favor his Democratic-Republican party, the tactic it describes dates back at least as far as 1701.1 Gerry's gerrymander failed to get him reelected, but its potential for manipulating election results was immediately recognized by the electoral-victory-at-any-cost partisans as a boon to oligarchy, and it's been used to great effect ever since. The article considers computer programs that can either make gerrymandering worse or mitigate against its harmful effects.

Social Mobility and Support for Redistribution: Separating the American Dream from Policy Preferences

This study examines the extent to which upward social mobility impacts beliefs about inequality and preferences for redistribution and taxation. A novel survey experiment and analysis of two national surveys (1993-2012) establish that there is little to no relationship between perceived or actual rates of social mobility and an individual's preferences for redistribution, taxation of the rich, or a variety of other policies examined, like educational spending. Despite this, local social mobility has a significant relationship with preferences for the Republican party in a county-level analysis of Presidential electoral results from 1980 to 2016, where the strong relationship between social mobility and Republican party preference surpasses that of income and income inequality and is robust to numerous specifications including population weighting, state fixed effects and an extensive battery of control variables. The connection with partisanship rather than policy is confirmed in the national survey data and the survey experiment. Importantly, this partisan effect does not interact with income: regardless of their own income, individuals are more Republican wherever low-income children do well. Finally, rather than universal overestimation, new survey evidence suggests that Americans possess relatively accurate perceptions of local rates of economic mobility. Together, these results provide an empirical rebuttal to conventional models of the Meltzer-Richard voting framework and its prospect of upward mobility (POUM) variant, which argues that preferences for redistribution depend on beliefs about future gains or losses from taxation. Instead, this evidence suggests that attitudes toward redistribution and related policies are not strongly impacted by beliefs in upward economic mobility, which implies that resistance to greater redistribution may not be driven by unmerited belief in the ‘American dream.'

Strange Bedfellows: Informal Relationships and Political Preference Formation within Boardinghouses, 1825–1841

This article presents a dynamic view of how institutions external to the state foster informal relationships that influence the voting preferences of elected officials. Institutions external to the state can activate different identities, potentially leading to outcomes at odds with predictions based on party identification and political ideology. This theoretical perspective is applied to a period of increasing partisanship and polarization—the birth of the second party system in America—when congressmen lived together in boardinghouses chosen independently of preexisting political preferences. Common residency is found to mute the effect of partisanship while reinforcing the North-South divide; this effect was strongest during the period of most acute polarization. This finding sheds light on the interaction between state and nonstate institutions and their differential impact on the political process. It also suggests a cause of current high levels of political polarization: the lack of time congressme...

High turnout in the Low Countries: Partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands

We use a quasi-experimental framework to test the conventional wisdom that left-of-center parties benefit from higher turnout by analyzing the partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands. Fixed effects, multilevel, and matching models of party family vote shares in the Netherlands before and after the reform–and in reference to a control group of Belgian party families–show consistent evidence the voting reform led to an increase in the vote share of Dutch social democratic parties and a decrease in the vote share won by minor and extreme parties. We find some evidence that Christian democratic and liberal parties also benefited from the voting reform, but argue this finding is not causally related to the reform itself.

German Voters in Times of Crisis: The Impact of Perceptions and Economic Context on Electoral Behavior

This paper analyzes the connection between economic context, voters’ individual assessment of the economy, and party identification, taking the German national elections of 2009 as an example. Based on the results of multinomial and multilevel regression models, we show that partisanship moderates how the economy affects the vote. In case of increasing unemployment in the constituency, voters are less likely to vote for the social democrats instead of the CDU and the opposition. This effect is particularly strong amongst voters who report that they identify with the social democrats. Regarding the effect of voters’ assessment of the national economy, the results are different. In this case, a better evaluation of the regional economy increases the probability to vote for right parties – notably amongst voters without partisanship. These findings suggest that we should not overestimate the moderating effect of partisanship on the economy’s impact on voting behavior. What is more, this analysis implies that research on economic voting should always account for contextual factors and voters’ personal assessment of the economy together as these measures reveal different dimensions of economic voting.

Putting an End to Ghent? The Politics of Disempowering the Unions

One of the most discussed topics in contemporary political science concerns the question if political parties still make a substantial difference in the neoliberal era. Focusing on direct partisan effects on policy outcomes like public and social spending, most recent studies arrive at a negative answer. In this article, I challenge this view by shifting the focus to parties’ impact on the strength of organized labor, a crucial factor concerning the distribution of social power in capitalist democracies. In contrast to social democratic parties, whose ties to unions remain stronger than often acknowledged, right-wing parties with strong market-liberal convictions have an interest in accelerating union decline to further their long-term policy goals. Since labor’s organizational strength rests strongly upon its institutional power resources, those constitute a prime target for right-wing attacks on union power. The theoretical argument is tested on the basis of the Ghent system, the crown jewel among labor’s institutional power resources. The empirical analysis includes all ‘Ghent countries’ but, in order to trace the supposed causal processes, special attention is given to the Swedish case.

Partisanship, Sophistication, and Public Attitudes about Majority Rule and Minority Rights in Congress

The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central issue in the design and operation of democratic institutions and remains a contested issue in debates of policy‐making processes. Remarkably, public attitudes about this balance are not subjected to scholarly investigation. In this article, we report the findings of the first survey experiment in which the American public's attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in legislative bodies are explored. We find robust support for both majority rule and minority rights, discover that only a few Americans distinguish between the US House of Representatives and Senate in the application of these principles, and demonstrate that views of majority rule and minority rights can be moved once we introduce respondents to the partisan implications of procedural rules. Moreover, with conflicting theoretical expectations about the effect of political sophistication on attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, we find that higher levels of political sophistication are associated with stronger partisan effects on attitudes about the balance between majority rule and minority rights in Congress.

Partisanship, Dysfunction, and Racial Fears: The New Normal in Health Care Policy?

Partisan politics snarled both the passage and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This essay examines partisanship's effects on health policy and asks whether the ACA experience was an exception or the new political normal. Partisanship itself has been essential for American democracy, but American institutions were not designed to handle its current form-ideologically pure, racially sorted, closely matched parties playing by "Gingrich rules" before a partisan media. The new partisanship injects three far-reaching changes into national health policy: an unprecedented lack of closure, a decline in the traditional political arts of compromise and bargaining, and a failure to define and debate alternative health policies. We can get a better sense of how far partisanship reaches by turning to state health policies. The highly charged national debate has migrated into some of the states; others retain the traditional politics of compromise and problem solving. There are preliminary indications that the difference lies in the dynamics of race and ethnicity.

Coming Together or Drifting Apart? Income Maintenance in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom

There is a long‐standing debate in the comparative welfare state literature as to whether social policy regimes come to look more alike over time (“converge”) or else retain their distinctiveness. In this article, we explore this question through a detailed interrogation of the social policy record since 1996 of three states widely classified as “liberal:” Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Overall, we find that the social/economic pressures faced by all three countries are more similar now than they were two decades ago and that each has sought to legitimize its policy response to the global financial crisis (GFC) in similar ways. In terms of the three policy areas we explore, we find convergence is much more substantial in “welfare‐to‐work” than in either child‐contingent support or pensions. But we also find that any straightforward convergence story is unsustainable, despite the GFC and accelerating globalization, and partisan effects remain important.Related Articles Angelaki, Marina, and Carrera, Leandro N. 2015. “.” Politics & Policy 43 (): 378‐400. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12117/abstract Wagle, Udaya R. 2014. “.” Politics & Policy 41 (): 947‐984. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12053/abstract König, Pascal D. 2015. “.” Policy & Politics 43 (): 647‐678. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12130/abstract Related Media Blyth, Mark. 2010. Mark Blyth on Austerity. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go2bVGi0ReE . 2011. British MP Advocates Welfare. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuH4IsYqxGI

Partisan Politics and Stock Market Capitalization

당파성 정치에 대한 전통적인 연구들은 노동 친화적인 좌파정당이 투자자들의 투자 의욕을 저해한다고 가정한다. 반면 근래의 연구들은 좌파정당 또한 노동자 복지증진을 위해서 고용을 늘려야 하므로 노동친화적인 정부가 투자를 촉진시킨다고 보았다. 본 연구는 집권당의 당파성이 주식시장에 미치는 영향은 경제 상황에 따라 조건부로 나타난다고 주장한다. 1988년부터 2007년까지 선진 산업국가의 주식시장 데이터를 활용하여 경험적으로 검증한 결과 실물투자가 부진할 경우 좌파정당이 우파정당에 비해 투자를 촉진시키지만 실물투자가 활발한 경우는 좌-우파 정당의 차이가 사라지는 것으로 나타났다.

Political Competition, Partisanship and Interpersonal Trust in Electoral Democracies

How does democratic politics inform the interdisciplinary debate on the evolution of human co-operation and the social preferences (for example, trust, altruism and reciprocity) that support it? This article advances a theory of partisan trust discrimination in electoral democracies based on social identity, cognitive heuristics and interparty competition. Evidence from behavioral experiments in eight democracies show ‘trust gaps’ between co- and rival partisans are ubiquitous, and larger than trust gaps based on the social identities that undergird the party system. A natural experiment found that partisan trust gaps in the United States disappeared immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But observational data indicate that partisan trust gaps track with perceptions of party polarization in all eight cases. Finally, the effects of partisanship on trust outstrip minimal group treatments, yet minimal-group effects are on par with the effects of most treatments for ascriptive characteristics in the literature. In sum, these findings suggest political competition dramatically shapes the salience of partisanship in interpersonal trust, the foundation of co-operation.

Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey

We combine fine-grained data on voters’ personal financial records with a representative election survey to examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic views, and voter myopia. First, these data show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but fine-grained financial data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments, and aggregate historical data, voters appear focused on recent economic conditions when choosing how to vote, we find no evidence of myopia when examining actual personal economic data. Collectively, the results show our understanding of economic voting depends crucially on the quality of available data.

Effect of Political Orientation on Judgment of Agency, Competence, Morality, and Sociability

Abstract. This study tested the effect of voter’s political orientation on the importance they placed on agency, competence, morality, and sociability as qualities required for being President of the French Republic. It furthermore assessed the participants’ judgments of the five main candidates of the French Presidential Election of 2012 on those dimensions. The results showed that, compared to left-wing voters, right-wing voters placed greater importance on agency and less importance on morality and sociability as qualities required for being president. Right-wing voters differentiated between candidates with respect to agency more than competence, whereas the reverse pattern was observed for left-wing voters. Voters differentiated between candidates with respect to morality as much as sociability. Finally, the participants’ ratings of candidates showed a partisan effect: Left-wing voters rated left-wing candidates as being more competent, moral, and sociable, the same being true of right-wing candidates by right-wing voters. Ratings of candidates’ agentic qualities were less dependent on the voter’s political orientation. These data provide support for how people perceived qualities necessary for being President in France.

Do Political Parties Foster Business Cycles? An Examination of Developed Economies

This paper explores different possible factors that have impacted business cycle synchronization across industrialized countries in the past quarter century. We employ a comprehensive model that includes as the main determinants of output co-movements not only trade and financial integration, but also similarities of economic policies and political preferences across countries. Focusing on 14 developed countries from 1980 to 2010, our main finding is that economic policies and the political environment have strong influences on business cycles in each country and their correlations across countries. In particular, we find that having differing political parties between two countries lowers business cycles correlations, but only when we allow for partisan effects to dissipate several quarters after political elections. Our results hold while also controlling for economic determinants of business cycle correlations, including trade, finance, geography and measures of policy convergence. Our findings therefore demonstrate a more comprehensive link between these factors and business cycle synchronization than prior studies.

Numeracy and the Persuasive Effect of Policy Information and Party Cues.

Numeric political appeals represent a prevalent but overlooked domain of public opinion research. When can quantitative information change political attitudes, and is this change trumped by partisan effects? We analyze how numeracy-or individual differences in citizens' ability to process and apply numeric policy information-moderates the effectiveness of numeric political appeals on a moderately salient policy issue. Results show that those low in numeracy exhibit a strong party-cue effect, treating numeric information in a superficial and heuristic fashion. Conversely, those high in numeracy are persuaded by numeric information, even when it is sponsored by the opposing party, overcoming the party-cue effect. Our results make clear that overlooking numeric ability when analyzing quantitative political appeals can mask significant persuasion effects, and we build on recent work advancing the understanding of individual differences in public opinion.

Community Attachment and Voting for School Vouchers*

ObjectiveThe analysis of public support for school voucher programs has focused on economic self‐interest and has paid little attention to the role of community. We propose a model of support for school vouchers that focuses on community attachment. We theorize that areas with growing residential populations will have less community attachment and be more supportive of school voucher programs while areas with long‐established residents will have stronger attachments to their community institutions and be less supportive of voucher programs.MethodWe test this community attachment model using data from a 2007 Utah referendum on school vouchers combined with demographic data.ResultThe data show support for the community attachment model after controlling for the effects of partisanship and socioeconomic factors.ConclusionOur analysis suggests that the nature of community life is an important consideration for understanding the appeal of public school voucher programs.

Do parties matter? Estimating the effect of political power in multi-party systems

When there are more than two parties, policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process. We investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest: voting power. In order to isolate close elections in a proportional election system, we develop a new simulation algorithm. Using data from German municipalities in the state of Bavaria, our estimation results suggest that political power does matter for policies. Somewhat surprisingly, the center-left party SPD is found to lower all three locally controlled taxes, whereas The Greens increase both property taxes considerably. These results remain robust across a range of specifications. Our partisan effect for the SPD is also confirmed by a simple regression discontinuity estimation using mayoral elections.

Election campaign agendas, government partisanship, and the welfare state

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 thatpolitics mattersbut 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 suchsystemiccampaign 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 thatcampaigns matterbut also that their impact has changed. During the first half of the examined period (the 1980s and early 1990s), it mainly served tofacilitategovernment 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.

Panel data analysis and partisan variables: how periodization does influence partisan effects

ABSTRACTOne central result of macro-quantitative studies in comparative public policy is that the importance of partisan politics on policy outputs has strongly decreased in recent decades. This finding may well be a methodological artefact. I argue that ad hoc standards in panel data analysis, especially using country-years as periodization, create estimation problems which potentially influence results against partisan variables. Therefore, I propose a simple and straightforward, as well as theoretically suitable, alternative to test the influence of partisan politics on policies and use cabinets instead of country-years. Using comparative welfare state research as an example, I show that partisan effects are strong and stable when using a cabinet-based periodization and fragile and weak within the standard procedure based on annual data. This article aims at suggesting that annual periods do not need to be the best simplification of time in empirical analyses.