Policy Beliefs Research Articles

‘Civic’ vs. ‘non-civic’: a comparison of individual-level support for the UK’s pro-Brexit and Scotland’s pro-independence nationalism

ABSTRACT This article challenges the prima facie differences between the Scottish independence and pro-Brexit movements, drawing similarities based on shared promotion of nationalism, incorporation of populism, and policy radicalism challenging consensuses over austerity/immigration. The analysis tests four hypotheses: first, their respective supporters hold nationalist beliefs; second, their supporters adhere to different but relatively radical policy preferences (tested on three dimensions: economic, cultural, immigration); third, their supporters adhere with populism; and fourth, their supporters are cynical towards perceived experts. The article finds the expected nationalist support, as well as supporters of independence/Brexit holding more radical policy beliefs compared to anti-independence/anti-Brexit voters. Furthermore, the analysis reveals a clearer picture of anti-expert and anti-elite populism support for Brexit, with little evidence showing these being features of Scottish independence support. This leaves the conclusion of some voter-level similarities between supporters of both movements, but also differences in the levels of populism among their respective voters.

Theorizing Far-Right Foreign Policy: Insights From Germany

What is the far-right’s foreign policy outlook? Although International Relations scholarship has provided important insights into the foreign policy preferences of far-right actors, it has predominantly analysed these political actors under the label of populism and focused on the effects of populism on foreign policy positions. Consequently, we lack a clear understanding of the impact of far-right ideology on foreign policy beliefs and preferences. This article provides a theorization of far-right foreign policy by deriving its key characteristics from far-right ideology. It tests this theoretical framework through a comparative analysis of the foreign policy preferences of the populist radical-right Alternative for Germany and the extreme-right, Neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany. The comparative analysis of primary textual data reveals a shared far-right foreign policy outlook characterized by (1) ultra-nationalism, (2) group-based enmity, (3) authoritarianism, (4) revisionism and reactionism and (5) producerist-nationalistic economic positions, but also some important variations in the pursuit of these positions.

Özgür ÖZDAMAR and Sercan CANBOLAT, Leaders in the Middle East and North Africa: How Ideology Shapes Foreign Policy

It is almost always the case that any Introduction to International Relations course teaches the contributions of Kenneth Waltz to the field, firstly through his grandiose formulation of a theory: it should be simple, parsimonious, abstract, and accordingly, one needs to move away from reality as much as possible to increase the theory’s explanatory and predictive capacity. Moving the individual and state level of analyses aside, Waltz simplifies his theory of international politics at the system/structural level and, with his neorealist theory becoming the dominant approach for a large part of the twentieth century, it put the state in a sort of black box, purposefully ignored individual actors, and targeted the maximum degree of abstraction as possible. In Leaders in the Middle East and North Africa: How Ideology Shapes Foreign Policy, which consists of seven chapters (one introduction chapter, four empirical chapters, one theoretical conclusions chapter and one policy implications chapter), Özdamar and Canbolat aim to shed light on foreign policy belief patterns of leaders in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), highlighting divergences across them and comparing them to the average world leadership. In the process, and in total opposition to Waltz’s claim, the authors argue that advancing “the actor-specific empirical studies zeroing in on agent behaviors and decisions in the future” is “the only way for IR to establish itself as a scientific discipline” (p. 148). In other words, as opposed to the structural approaches, the authors propound that less abstraction and a more actor-specific, nuanced, and tailored approach would provide significant opportunities for the IR discipline to be scientific.

Are municipal politicians ideological moderates?

For more than a century, many practitioners and researchers have argued that municipal politicians are more ideologically moderate – that is, closer to the centre of a unidimensional left-right ideological scale – than their national counterparts. Testing this claim requires direct comparison of politicians who represent similar constituents but who are elected at different levels of government, but comparative data of this sort are rarely available. Here, I use new data from surveys of Canadian municipal, provincial, and federal politicians to rigorously test the “municipal moderation” thesis. Comparing politicians' symbolic ideological self-understandings N≈3,000 and their latent policy ideologies N≈775, I find strong evidence that municipal politicians think of themselves as more ideologically moderate, but are not more moderate in their policy beliefs. Further, I leverage variation in the partisan identities of Canadian municipal politicians to show that differences in ideological moderation across levels of government disappear when we remove municipal non-partisans from the analysis. My results reinforce the view that municipal politicians hold non-ideological cultural norms but are embedded in an ideological electoral and policymaking context. My analysis also illustrates the analytical potential for “vertical” rather than “horizontal” comparative research designs.

Partisans process policy-based and identity-based messages using dissociable neural systems.

Political partisanship is often conceived as a lens through which people view politics. Behavioral research has distinguished two types of "partisan lenses"-policy-based and identity-based-that may influence peoples' perception of political events. Little is known, however, about the mechanisms through which partisan discourse appealing to policy beliefs or targeting partisan identities operate within individuals. We addressed this question by collecting neuroimaging data while participants watched videos of speakers expressing partisan views. A "partisan lens effect" was identified as the difference in neural synchrony between each participant's brain response and that of their partisan ingroup vs. outgroup. When processing policy-based messaging, a partisan lens effect was observed in socio-political reasoning and affective responding brain regions. When processing negative identity-based attacks, a partisan lens effect was observed in mentalizing and affective responding brain regions. These data suggest that the processing of political discourse that appeals to different forms of partisanship is supported by related but distinguishable neural-and therefore psychological-mechanisms, which may have implications for how we characterize partisanship and ameliorate its deleterious impacts.

Speaking of reform: Experimental insights into influencing police executives' perspectives on civilian oversight

AbstractResearch summaryThis study investigates how information about public opinion and peer practices influences police executives' views on civilian review boards. We applied structural topic modeling in an experimental paradigm, a novel approach diverging from traditional experimental survey methods, to the open‐ended responses of 1331 police executives collected in an original survey experiment. This technique enables the capture of subtle shifts in belief directly from the executives' own words. The experiment systematically varied the information provided to police executives, including state‐level public opinion data from a representative sample of 16,840 U.S. residents, and peer practices in major city police agencies. Our findings reveal that police executives, although generally aligned in their views, demonstrate a readiness to update their beliefs when presented with cohesive local public opinion and information about peer practices in policing.Policy implicationsIn a democratic society, the core policy beliefs of police executives critically shape the existence and efficacy of civilian oversight mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate the adaptability of police executives in updating their policy positions, reflecting their commitment to informed decision making in response to the dynamic nature of police governance. We find that police executives are willing to update their beliefs related to the public's ability to oversee policing in an unbiased and qualified manner when presented with information about reforms adopted by peer agencies. In contrast, information about public demand for more aggressive forms of oversight can lead to a backlash, increasing the likelihood of police executives to favor existing oversight mechanisms and to doubt the public's qualification. For executives, reformers, and scholars, these findings highlight the limitations of public opinion and benefits of peer influence as mechanisms for policy learning in policing.

Perceived carbon pricing effectiveness impacts its perceived fairness – Applying and extending a theoretical framework

Based on a theoretical framework inspired by the Greed-Efficiency-Fairness-Hypothesis (GEF), it is argued that perceived effectiveness of climate policies, in addition to other policy beliefs (i.e. perceived personal and distributional consequences), influences perceived overall policy fairness and acceptance. However, links between these policy beliefs and perceived overall fairness as well as whether perceived overall fairness might mediate effects of these beliefs on acceptance remains understudied. This study addresses these gaps and extends the GEF-inspired framework: We add procedural fairness to the list of fairness-relevant beliefs and analyze whether perceived overall carbon pricing fairness integrates and mediates their effect on acceptance, using survey data representative of Germany (n = 4646). Additionally, we test whether adherence to the polluter-pays principle (a general fairness principle) moderates the effects of perceived distributional consequences and effectiveness on perceived overall fairness. Results showed that perceived personal consequences, distributional consequences, procedural fairness, as well as perceived effectiveness, all impact perceived overall fairness, and that the latter (partially) mediates their effects on carbon pricing acceptance. We also find weak evidence that the impact of perceived effectiveness and negative distributional consequences on perceived overall fairness is greater for polluter-pays adherents than for non-adherents. These results suggest that, additionally to perceived personal and distributional consequences as well as fair procedures, perceiving a policy to be effective increases its perceived overall fairness.

Cognitive map analysis of policy makers’ economic policy beliefs: Focusing on the 19th President Moon Jae-in

Cognitive map analysis of policy makers’ economic policy beliefs: Focusing on the 19th President Moon Jae-in

Risk Taking Under Limited Liability and Moral Hazard: Quantifying the Role of Motivated Beliefs

This paper investigates whether limited liability and moral hazard affect risk taking through motivated beliefs. On the one hand, limited liability encourages investors to take excessive risks. On the other, excessive risk taking makes it hard for investors to maintain a positive self-image when moral hazard is present. Using a novel experimental design, we show that subjects form motivated beliefs to self-justify their excessive risk taking. For the same investment opportunity, subjects invest more and are significantly more optimistic about the success of the investment if its failure can harm others. We show that more than one third of the investment increases under limited liability, and moral hazard can be explained through motivated beliefs. Moreover, through a treatment with limited liability but no moral hazard, we show that motivated beliefs are formed subconsciously and can lead to the paradoxical result of investors taking larger risks when their investment can harm a third party compared with when it cannot. These results underscore the importance of motivated beliefs in regulatory policy, emphasizing that policymakers must not only address bad incentives, but also address the role of bad beliefs. This paper was accepted by Bruno Biais, finance. Funding: Financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant CRC TRR 190, project number 280092119] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03947 .

Tackling Unintended Consequences of EU Sanctions: NGOs' Advocacy for Humanitarian Exceptions

AbstractSanctions are increasingly prominent foreign policy tools, but research on the policy process that leads to specific sanction design is limited. Sanctions can have unintended effects on the provision of humanitarian aid in sanctioned countries, which has led to calls for humanitarian exceptions in sanction design. This study focuses on non‐governmental organizations' (NGOs) advocacy for a humanitarian perspective on European Union (EU) sanctions in the period 2020–2021. Building on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the triangulation of qualitative data sources including interviews and document analysis, this study describes an advocacy coalition of humanitarian NGOs in Brussels, their advocacy strategies and the effectiveness of these strategies. The analysis highlights the coalition's common policy beliefs and documents three advocacy strategies: coalition building, knowledge leadership and lobbying. The analysis then traces the link between these strategies and recent policy changes, namely, clearer European Commission guidelines on the implementation of humanitarian derogations. This policy change was further facilitated by policy brokers and an external shock, the Covid‐19 pandemic. The findings shed light on an understudied design feature of sanctions, i.e., humanitarian exceptions, and on the role of non‐governmental actors in shaping sanction designs.

The Pillars of Power and Policy of Social Policymaking in Authoritarian Regimes

This article addresses the puzzle of the politics of social policy formation by two post-communist authoritarian regimes in China and Russia. It argues that two interrelated dimensions—which we term the pillars of power and policy—shape social policymaking and change in authoritarian regimes and support authoritarian regime stability. The pillar of power involves autocrats’ bargains with the public and elites, while the policy pillar includes bureaucratic and ideational processes. The latter are understood as the way policy actors perceive problems, choose solutions, and frame their policy choices. To demonstrate this empirically, the article analyzes and compares Chinese and Russian housing policies between 1990 and 2020. We find that despite bureaucratic competition within the policy pillar, neoliberal policy beliefs have guided policy while statist measures served to support—in China—and deepen—in Russia—the neoliberal approach focused on private homeownership. Yet, neoliberal measures have been channeled in ways that underpinned and adjusted the authoritarian regime bargains with different segments of the public and the elite within the pillar of power. Policy framing to match social cultural ideas was used in both countries to support public acceptance of the neoliberal measures while underlining the state’s care for people’s housing needs.

Divergent beliefs about food safety and affordability in Nigeria

Access to safe, affordable diets is paramount for improved nutritional outcomes. Yet, how do stakeholders perceive the binding constraints and requisite policy actions to increase food safety and affordability? Focusing on Nigeria, this paper uses best-worst scaling techniques applied to a survey of 200 government and agrifood system stakeholders to examine their policy beliefs on safety and affordability vis-à-vis the vegetable and fish value chains. We find that divergence among stakeholders is greater for food safety than affordability. While antibiotics overuse and toxin exposure, lack of knowledge, and weak legislation were identified by different stakeholders as the binding constraints for food safety, high costs of inputs and infrastructure, as well as security threats, were seen as common challenges for affordability across most, though not all, stakeholders for both value chains. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of beliefs in the agrifood system policymaking process and emphasizes the need to explore not only the existence but also the source of divergent beliefs among policy actors in greater depth.

The ‘Euphoria’ effect: A popular HBO show, Gen Z, and drug policy beliefs

AbstractObjectiveCan a fictional show affect its audience's perspectives on the issue of drug use and addiction in society? This article aims to answer that question.MethodsWe use a survey with an embedded experiment to assess the relationship between the popular HBO show Euphoria and attitudes of Gen Z on the issue of drugs, including: feelings toward drug users and those caught up in drug addiction; beliefs regarding the causes of drug addiction; and, attitudes toward harm reduction, treatment, and punitive drug policies. Subjects were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk.ResultsWe found that reevoking the show by showing photos of two of the main characters led to drug attitudes consistent with the messages about drugs found in Euphoria. We also found that self‐reported exposure to the show was associated with perspectives on drugs consistent with the content of the show for respondents who scored higher on individual transportability—results that conform closely to theoretical expectations. The fact that these results were found in a study 8 months after the final episode of Euphoria was aired hints at the durability of the show's effects.ConclusionsThe results add to the growing body of research on the political effects of entertainment media and provide additional validation of new and important measures of the propensity of individuals to be transported by narratives and eudaimonic motivation in entertainment media choice.

Policy opinions regarding the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has recently been positioned as a serious problem requiring urgent policy response among partisan media outlets. Making a case for pressing policy demands, several policy makers have proposed federal, state, and local level legislation and other measures to restrict how race, racism, or American history in general can be taught in K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and state agencies. Anti-CRT rhetoric in media and policy proposals have also propagated the notion of CRT as being divisive as well as ubiquitous in public education. Given this, it is critical to examine whether policy opinions regarding reactionary legislation is based on a real understanding of CRT. We conduct a conceptual and theoretical inquiry into anti-CRT rhetoric relying on the sociological concepts of moral panics and folk devils. Then, we examine familiarity, knowledge, ideology, policy beliefs, and policy opinions regarding CRT in education using nationally representative survey data. The analysis showed that most parents are not familiar with CRT, and the average parent neither opposes nor supports teaching of CRT. The opposition to teaching of CRT is largely driven by political affiliation and related ideological beliefs and positions.

The EU's vulnerability to gas price and supply shocks: The role of mismatches between policy beliefs and changing international gas markets

Agencies and researchers have attributed the unprecedented surge in EU gas prices to a temporary convergence of exogenous shocks, especially the post-Covid economic recovery and the war in Ukraine. This paper argues that deeper issues are also in play, which go beyond the current conjuncture: the “policy beliefs” underlying its energy policy have made the EU unable to swiftly change policy approach in the face of rapid structural changes in international gas markets. By adopting the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, the paper extracts thematic information from EU legislation and executive acts and shows evidence that domestic market competition still dominates the EU energy policy agenda over energy security, making the EU unable to address the recent phase of shortage in international gas markets. The paper shows how EU gas markets have changed in recent years, also as a result of EU liberalization policies, and how international markets have changed. It emerges that European markets have lost their previous advantages in terms of security of supply and stability of price, while other international importers are now able to secure greater gas volumes, making the EU increasingly vulnerable to price and supply shocks. This vulnerability is interpreted as deriving from the contractual and infrastructure flexibility that was introduced by liberalization policies to increase market competition, which proved beneficial for EU importers in the previous phase of abundance (2014–2020), but that is contributing to destabilize EU gas markets in the current phase of scarcity (2021−2023).

Policy beliefs, belief uncertainty, and policy learning through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework

Within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), policy-oriented learning is understood as a change in policy beliefs. Additional work has noted that belief reinforcement, not just belief change, is also a potential policy learning outcome. Yet, little work has attempted to reconcile how learning could involve both belief change and belief reinforcement. In this article, I propose a policy-oriented learning model where policy beliefs – deep core, policy core, or secondary aspects – are understood as having a distribution with a central tendency (that is, the belief) as well as variance (that is, certainty associated with the belief). With policy beliefs considered as distributions, learning can be understood as changes in beliefs (that is, a change in the central tendency) as well as changes in certainty (that is, variance), and conversely, a decrease in belief uncertainty would constitute belief reinforcement. Using data from a deliberative forum that brought together various stakeholders including experts, natural resource managers, and the public to discuss environmental issues impacting coastal communities, I explore policy-oriented learning as changes in concern regarding several key issues before and after the forum. Additionally, I examine the association between concern following the forum and self-reported learning. I find support for the proposed policy-oriented learning model as shown by significant changes in average concern as well as average variance among participants across several of the issues discussed. In this way, the article makes a theoretical contribution to the ACF literature by testing the use of distributions to assess policy learning.

Do Campaign Speeches Predict Foreign Policy? An Operational Code and Leadership Trait Analysis of Donald Trump’s MENA Policies

This article investigates whether campaign speeches during the US presidential elections can help predict foreign policy behavior. We use speeches made by Donald J. Trump during his bid for president in 2016. We compare the analysis from 2016 with his actual foreign policy decisions during his tenure, 2017-2020. Operational code analysis and leadership traits analysis approaches are used to analyze candidate Trump’s foreign policy beliefs and strategies associated with them. We use Profiler Plus software to conduct content analysis which produces OCA and LTA results. We use three separate datasets to analyze Trump’s beliefs and traits focusing on his general foreign policy speeches, the MENA region, and a third one only about Islamic State and Syria. Our results show that Trump’s profile indicates a foreign policy orientation that avoids involvement in affairs that are perceived as beyond immediate interests. The consistency between his beliefs and traits during the 2016 campaign and his actual foreign policy behavior leads us to conclude that individual level analysis, and specifically OCA and LTA approaches, are useful tools to analyze, explain and predict foreign policy.

Exploring public support for extraterritorial jurisdiction over natural resource extraction: Survey insights from the United States

Over the past two decades, a number of national policies have been implemented with the aim of holding companies accountable for their actions abroad. While previous studies have examined the political processes leading to the formulation of these policies, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of public support for such measures. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the extent to which domestic audiences endorse the concept of extraterritorial jurisdiction concerning the conditions under which natural resources are extracted abroad. The analysis presented in this paper is grounded in a representative online survey conducted in the United States, encompassing a sample size of 660 respondents.Overall, the survey findings reveal widespread public endorsement for the notion that U.S. companies should be held answerable under domestic regulations for their activities conducted overseas. When presented with the specific case of conflict minerals and various policy options, approximately half of the respondents identified the governments of end markets as one of the top three responsible actors for addressing this issue. While individuals' political ideologies exhibited a certain degree of correlation with their likelihood of supporting these policies, the link with their broader foreign policy beliefs was stronger. Those individuals who espoused a more cosmopolitan outlook and exhibited less isolationist tendencies were found to be more inclined to support extraterritorial jurisdiction policies.In conclusion, the study's results underscore the fact that the promotion of policies designed to hold domestic companies accountable for their overseas actions enjoys substantial public backing, transcending partisan lines. Furthermore, these findings emphasize the significant role played by broader conceptions of a country's role in international affairs in shaping public opinion on this matter.

Hurt on Both Sides: Political Differences in Health and Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Republicans and conservatives report better self-rated health and well-being compared to Democrats and liberals, yet they are more likely to reside in geographic areas with heavy COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. This harmed health on "both sides" of political divides, occurring in a time of rapid sociopolitical upheaval, warrants the revisiting of psychosocial mechanisms linked to political health differences. Drawing on national Gallup data (early 2021), we find that predicted differences in health or well-being vary substantially by ideology, party, voting behavior, and policy beliefs, with model fit depending on how politics are measured. Differences in self-rated health, psychological distress, happiness, trouble sleeping, and delayed health care tend to reveal worse outcomes for Democrats or liberals. Such differences often are reduced to insignificance by some combination of mastery, meritocratic beliefs, perceived social support, and COVID-19-related exposures and attitudes. Policy beliefs predict health differences most robustly across outcomes and mechanism adjustments.

Biodiversity conservation, advocacy coalitions, and science-focused disputes: the case of Caymanian coral reef conservation and the proposed port expansion project

An environmental dispute arose in the Cayman Islands where politicians and multinational cruise companies sought an infrastructure upgrade that would destroy 15 acres of coral reef habitat. A competing coalition emerged to contest this project resulting in important policy change: the first ever people’s-initiated referendum. Our research uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to study how policy change is enacted in a biodiversity conservation policy system. We find differences between two coalitions in members, policy beliefs, resources, and strategy. Policy beliefs of both coalitions reveal two competing realities, especially on the subject of science needed to inform a sustainable tourism economy, with scientific misinformation becoming increasingly impactful in policy making. Second, we find that one coalition leveraged the interests of powerful politicians and international corporations to advocate for the infrastructure project, even though the destruction of coral reefs was in defiance of laws. To contest this, the second coalition leveraged volunteers and small donations to enact policy change, successfully triggering the referendum. Our research is significant because in places where volunteering and small donations are less possible, such as in emerging market economies, it is easy to see how well-resourced interests could degrade biodiversity even with domestic laws protecting species and habitats.