Partisan Ideology Research Articles

A global trend toward law and order harshness?

A popular claim made by criminologists argues that globalization has created a general punitive turn in Western industrialized countries and led to much harsher law and order policies. The present paper challenges this view and adds to the literature in two respects as follows: first, it presents empirical evidence that substantial differences in law and order policies remain between Western industrialized countries even when law and order policy is measured in a much more finely grained manner than previously. Second, the paper provides empirical evidence for a persisting influence of the partisan ideology of governments and the party system characteristics of a country on its law and order policies: whereas the general trend of increasing economic globalization may well set the overall tone, this impact is conditioned by national political and institutional settings – and the ideology of the government as well as the party system in particular.

Government ideology and the natural disasters: a global investigation

This article examines whether natural disaster losses vary under the tenure of a government with a different ideology. Using panel data for 123 countries over the period of 1975–2013, we find that right-wing governments experience fewer natural disaster losses (measured by people’s deaths, those affected, and economic damages) in the case of the full sample. We hence account for possible heterogeneity in our sample and re-estimate the empirical model between 30 OECD countries and 93 non-OECD countries. In summary, we again discover that right-wing governments suffer less natural disaster damages in non-OECD countries, but this effect is statistically insignificant at conventional levels in OECD countries. We believe that the results herein have important implications for the policies of disaster prevention. In addition, voters will be able to choose a responsible government via the voting booth in accordance with our findings. Overall, our results suggest that a more partisan ideology could more precisely capture policy attitudes, especially in developing countries.

Reassessing the Assumptions behind the Evolution of Popular Presidential Communication

Most scholars agree that the presidency underwent an important evolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, the causes of these changes continue to be subject to rigorous debate. Using a multimethod approach, I find that the political opportunities and incentives that presented themselves in the nineteenth and early twentieth century shaped presidential rhetorical behavior rather than the president's personal or partisan ideology.

“Our Mother-Tongue”: The Politics of Elizabeth Elstob’s Antiquarian Scholarship

This essay examines the heretofore neglected political context of Elizabeth Elstob’s published defenses of Anglo-Saxon antiquities, evaluating her High Church Tory allegiances and uncovering the relationship between her own motives as a feminist antiquary and contemporary political debates that mixed partisan ideology with emergent cultural standards of patriotism and politeness. The essay’s comparative investigation of Elstob’s prefaces to her English-Saxon Homily (1709) and her Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715) shows Elstob shifting away from conventional antiquarian rhetoric and objects of study toward the polite discourse of literary criticism where she posits the patriotic instrumentality of the English monosyllable.

Efficiency and Justice and Fairness: An Empirical Analysis of Criminal Appeals in Hunan Province, China

Criminal appeal is an important step in any criminal justice system, as it guarantees criminal defendants’ right to appeal and serves a critical function in correcting potential errors from the trial courts. Though decisions of national and/or state supreme courts draw more media and public attention given their preeminent status, decisions by appellate courts at lower levels are far more numerous and are often the last resort for the vast majority of litigants and for the vast majority of contested legal issues (Cross 2003; Williams 1991). As a unique component of the criminal justice system, the practice of criminal appeals varies greatly from one jurisdiction to another. The majority of studies on criminal appeals reflected such diversity. For instance, many studies debated over the review power and scope of criminal appeals (e.g., the feasibility and practicality of factual review, modification of trial court sentences) (Burr 1971; Orfield 1936; Rickey 1978; Shapiro 1939), while others turned to empirical data to examine the nature of appellate judges’ work and explore how different factors (e.g., partisan ideology) may have affected their daily work (Broscheid 2011; Cross 2003; Davies 1982; Wold and Caldeira 1980). For the latter, in particular, scholars focused on how appellate judges make final decisions in criminal appeals and whether both legal and nonlegal factors (e.g., one’s race) may have influenced their decision-making (Foley 1999; Neubauer 1991; Williams 1991, 1995), and how certain policy changes (e.g., the adoption of sentencing guidelines) may have affected criminal appeals overtime based on longitudinal data (Meeker 1984; White 1975; Williams 1992). Eur J Crim Policy Res (2015) 21:565–590 DOI 10.1007/s10610-014-9266-2

Gender Equality Architecture: The Intergovernmental Level in Federal Systems

This article provides a first overall account of the intergovernmental components of Australia's gender equality architecture in the period 1978–2014. From the 1990s this is largely a story of institutional fragility. In explaining this, factors identified by scholars of state feminism, such as lack of political will, partisan ideologies and discursive shifts, particularly the increased influence of neoliberal approaches to governance, are taken into account. The new factor introduced is that of executive federalism, characterised by decision‐making behind closed doors. When women's intergovernmental bodies attempted to open doors to community input this proved fruitless, particularly in the area of economic decision‐making. Repeated attempts to introduce gender‐disaggregated reporting on the outcomes of Commonwealth‐State agreements were also largely unsuccessful. The article concludes that the democratic deficits associated with executive federalism – lack of parliamentary oversight or accountability and lack of community consultation – are closely related to the deficits in gender mainstreaming.

Path Dependence, Political Competition, and Renewable Energy Policy: A Dynamic Model

Climate change mitigation requires sustainable energy transitions, but the political dynamics of these transitions are poorly understood. This article presents a general dynamic model of energy policy with long time horizons, endogenous electoral competition, and techno-political path dependence. Calibrating the model with data on the economics of contemporary renewable energy technologies, we show that partisan ideology produces large effects on energy policy if the competing parties disagree on the importance of energy policy in general. Endogenous electoral competition further strengthens these effects, provided the electorate considers energy policy an important issue. In addition, our model displays path dependence in the specific sense that the outcome depends on the historical order of elections. The results demonstrate that political dynamics could have large effects on the development of renewable energy and carbon dioxide emissions over time.

From voter ID to party ID: How political parties affect perceptions of election fraud in the U.S.

This paper uses a survey experiment to assess what individuals understand about election fraud and under what circumstances they see it as a problem. I argue that political parties are central to answering both these questions. Results from the 2011 CCES survey suggest respondents are able to differentiate between the relative incentives of Democrats and Republicans where fraud tactics are concerned, but whether voters see these tactics as problematic is heavily influenced by partisan bias. The results show little support for the notion that partisan ideology drives fraud assessments, and suggest support for the idea that individual concerns for fraud are shaped a desire for their preferred candidate to win. These results offer insights that might be applied more broadly to questions of perceptions of electoral integrity and procedural fairness in democracies.

Parties, Institutions and the Politics of Law and Order: How Political Institutions and Partisan Ideologies Shape Law-and-Order Spending in Twenty Western Industrialized Countries

Although the politics of law and order are currently a major issue of debate among criminologists, comparative public policy research has largely neglected it. This article fills that gap by bringing together criminological and public policy theories, and by examining law-and-order policies in twenty Western industrialized countries. It adds to the existing literature in two important ways: it provides a straightforward quantitative test of the existing criminological explanations of law-and-order policies using public spending as the dependent variable; and it shows that governments’ partisan ideology matters for law-and-order policies. Government ideology influences how much countries spend on public order and safety, but the effect depends on the budgetary room for manœuvre and the strength of institutional barriers.

Public administration and the promise of evidence-based policy: experience in and beyond Australia

This article examines the uncertain growth and future prospects of “evidence-based” policy-making, with a focus on Australia and some other states in which public leaders and officials have claimed to value and promote the use of evidence in policy decision-making. There are many obstacles to developing evidence-informed policy systems, including the availability of investment for data analysis, entrenched political elites and traditional cultural values. The gaps between rhetoric and reality are substantial, even in the more “advanced” states, mainly owing to political considerations such as partisan ideologies and the power of economic and socio-cultural interests. Evidence-based approaches are shown to operate most clearly in those policy areas concerned with technical efficiency, and are less evident in contested areas of social policy. Brief comparisons are drawn between Singapore, Hong Kong and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Cross-cutting issues, intraparty dissent and party strategy: The issue of European integration in the House of Commons

When do legislative opposition parties use wedge issues to attack the government? In this article, I focus on the issue of European integration and its impact on party strategy in the 1992–1997 British House of Commons. Utilizing both voting and rhetorical data, the analysis reveals that both government and opposition were split on the issue, and thus the opposition was not able to use it. This, I argue, stems from the complexity of the issue, i.e. the fact that it combines redistributive cleavages with pre- and post-material ones, which cannot be suppressed by party leaders. The results demonstrate the importance of taking into consideration both the government’s and the opposition’s cohesion in modeling party strategies. Further, the combination of voting and rhetorical data adds to our understanding of the dimensionality and structure of partisan ideologies in Europe. We have won more elections than any party in Britain because we are the most united and the most determined party in Britain. Over the same period Labour has been the most divided and the most undisciplined party. That is why they have lost, and lost, and lost, and lost again. Sir Norman Fowler, Conservative Party Chairman, 1992 Party Conference.

Antipodean Social Policy Responses to Economic Crises

AbstractIn this article, I analyze the social policy reactions to economic crises in Australia and New Zealand. After the financial crisis of 2008, Australia built its crisis management strategy around a large fiscal stimulus with a significant social policy component, whereas New Zealand did not. While the government enacted fiscal stimulus measures, the social policy component was small and the government soon returned to welfare retrenchment and workfare policy. Based on a detailed account of recent crisis policies as well as a condensed overview of previous crisis responses (to the 1970s oil shocks, the early 1990s recession and the Asian financial crisis), I discuss the contribution of a number of factors to explaining this difference between Australia and New Zealand. These factors include: idiosyncratic causes such as the Australian mining boom and the Christchurch earthquakes, partisan politics, interest group structures, political institutions and policy legacies. The analysis shows that the recent differences cannot fully be explained through idiosyncratic factors, as partisan ideology was already crucial in strategic policy decisions during the first months of the crisis. The historical pattern further supports this conclusion.

Taking Social Policy Personally: Personality Traits and Welfare Attitudes Across Contexts of Social Need and Regime Socialization

Previous political research on personality has largely focused on voting and partisan attitudes. This article explores the direct and the conditional relationship between the Big Five personality traits and welfare state attitudes in the context of five different areas or needs contexts for welfare provision. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 2002, we obtain robust evidence that neuroticism is associated with stronger support for the state’s financial responsibility when unemployed, when sick, and for the family. The substantive effect of personality traits in predicting welfare attitudes is often as large as that of education, employment status, or partisan ideology. Moreover, unlike traits such as conscientiousness, openness and extraversion, the relationship between neuroticism and welfare attitudes is not conditioned by communist regime socialization. We conclude that personality in general and neuroticism in particular are unjustly neglected factors shaping individuals’ preferences towards welfare provision, which deserve closer attention in future research.

HEALTH CARE AND IDEOLOGY: A RECONSIDERATION OF POLITICAL DETERMINANTS OF PUBLIC HEALTHCARE FUNDING IN THE OECD

In this article, we examined if partisan ideology and electoral motives influence public healthcare expenditure (HCE) in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. We distinguished between the effects on the growth of the expenditures and its adjustment to violations of a long-run equilibrium linking HCE with macroeconomic and demographic trends. Regarding the influence of partisan ideology, we found that if governments are sufficiently long in power, right-wing governments spend less on public health than their left-wing counterparts. Furthermore, if a right-wing party governs without coalition partners, it responds more strongly to deviations from the long-run HCE equilibrium than left-wing governments. With regard to electoral motives, we found that health expenditure increases in years of elections. Independent of their partisan ideology, single-party (minority) governments induce higher (lower) growth of public HCE. Each of these political factors by its own may increase (decrease) HCE growth by approximately one percentage point. Given an average annual growth of HCE of approximately 4.1%, political factors turn out to be important determinants of trends in public HCE.

Party Affiliation Rather than Former Occupation: The Background of Central Bank Governors and its Effect on Monetary Policy

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between certain characteristics of incumbent central bank governors and their interest-rate-setting behavior. We focus on (i) occupational backgrounds, (ii) party affiliation, and (iii) experience in office and estimate augmented Taylor rules for 20 OECD countries and the period 1974-2008. Our findings are as follows. First, the tenures of central bank governors who are affiliated with a political party are characterized by a relatively dovish monetary policy stance, irrespective of their partisan ideology. Second, party affiliation appears to be more important than occupational background, i.e., all bankers with(out) a party affiliation behave very similarly to each regardless of their specific occupational background. Third, party members react significantly less to inflation and more to output the longer they stay in office.

The Politics of Paradox: Metaphysics Beyond "Political Ontology"

Introduction Much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy proclaimed the end the metaphysics and the death of God. The German, French, and English strands of the Enlightenment were united in their suspicion of metaphysical theism. Figures as diverse as Comte, Marx, Spencer, Nietzsche, and Russell defended the absolute autonomy of atheist reason against religious faith. Following the rise of partisan ideologies that terrorized the West from 1789 to 1989, the downfall of the Soviet empire appeared to herald the “end of history” and a global convergence toward liberal market democracy. Ideas of freedom and justice would henceforth…

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.

Chicago in the age of capital: class, politics, and democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction

In this sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov boldly trace the evolution of a modern social order. Combining a mastery of historical and political detail with a sophisticated theoretical frame, Jentz and Schneirov examine the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. Jentz and Schneirov demonstrate how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The city's leading business interests were unable to stabilize their new system without the participation of the new working class, a German and Irish ethnic mix that included radical ideas transplanted from Europe. Jentz and Schneirov examine how debates over slave labor were transformed into debates over free labor as the city's wage-earning working class developed a distinctive culture and politics. The new social movements that arose in this era--labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism--constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and '70s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, Chicago in the Age of Capital vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.

Experts versus politicians: The role of partisan ideology in European Union employment policy

This study examines the role of partisanship in the effectiveness of the Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs. As a soft governance approach, Lisbon aims to disseminate best practices on labour market policy across EU member states. The policy learning view, as the underlying philosophy of Lisbon, holds that national governments can learn new and better policy practices through interaction with alternative ideas. In contrast, the partisanship approach suggests that governments choose only the components of the Lisbon strategy fitting the ideological preferences of the political parties in government. In this article, I analyse the labour market policies of Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden in two separate years to trace the effects of the Lisbon strategy in varying political environments. The study reveals that the governments of these countries do not give equal attention to all recommendations and guidelines; they address in particular those recommendations and guidelines that fit the ideological preferences of the incumbent parties.

Individual policy preferences for vocational versus academic education: Microlevel evidence for the case of Switzerland

This paper uses an original dataset from a survey conducted in Switzerland in 2007 to explore the dynamics of education policy preferences. This issue has largely been neglected in that most studies on welfare state attitudes do not look at preferences for education. We argue that education policy preferences vary along two dimensions: the distribution of resources across different sectors of the education system (that is, vocational training versus academic education) and the level of investment in education both from public and private sources. With regard to the former, the findings suggest that individual educational experience matters most, that is, individuals prefer to concentrate resources on those educational sectors that are closest to their own educational background. With regard to the latter, we find that affiliation to partisan ideologies matters much more than other variables. Proponents of the left demand more investment both from the state as well as from the private sector and oppose individual tuition fees.