Unpopular Policies Research Articles

On the Feasibility of Unpopular Policies under Re‐Election Concerns

A common concern about political decision making is that re‐election concerns compel incumbent politicians to select policies that, although popular among the electorate, are inferior to available, less popular alternatives. Through studying a series of models, 1 find that, as long as politicians differ solely in the utility derived from holding office, there always exists an equilibrium where incumbents with strong re‐election concerns still make efficient policy choices. However, when other aspects of heterogeneity among politicians are present, incumbents with strong re‐election concerns may have the incentive to condition their decisions according to policy popularity. Suppose, for instance, some politicians are dumb in the sense that they are even more ignorant about policy efficacy than the public. To avoid being viewed as dumb, nondumb politicians (especially those with strong reelection concerns) may accept popular but inefficient policies or reject unpopular but efficient policies.

Taming `wild' capitalism

As a fundamental premise in the rhetoric of free trade, the equation of free markets and democracy was particularly evident in Russia's transformation from a centralized economy to a market economy. During the battle over the new constitution in 1993, Boris Yeltsin and his supporters associated economic liberalization and democracy in successfully maintaining public support for their otherwise unpopular policies. However, that transition ultimately resulted in the takeover of the natural and financial wealth of the country by a criminal business elite and the widespread impoverishment of average Russian citizens. The Russian case exemplifies how the oversimplified discursive equation of free markets and democracy underemphasizes the crucial social role state institutions must play in order for peaceful market democracies to thrive.

Privatization and Democracy

What is the effect of regime type on privatization of state-owned enterprises? The authors investigate the relationship between regime type and privatization through a panel data set for 76 developing countries from 1987 to 1994. The results show that, contrary to most studies that claim that authoritarian regimes are better able to ignore societal interests opposed to economic measures that impose austerity, democracies privatize more than authoritarian regimes. Moreover, challenging conventional interpretations that claim that economic difficulties contribute to state sell-offs, the authors find that privatization is most likely in wealthier developing democracies whose budgets operate with current account surpluses. Hence authoritarian regimes provide neither the right nor the correct model for countries wishing to pursue unpopular economic policies.

Leadership and Pandering: A Theory of Executive Policymaking

We develop an informational theory that analyzes conditions under which a reelection-seeking executive will act in the public interest. The theory considers factors such as executive competence, challenger quality, and the likelihood that voters will learn the consequences of policy decisions before an upcoming election. We ...nd that an executive who has information suggesting that a popular policy is contrary to voters’ interests may or may not pander to voters by choosing it; under certain conditions, the executive can actually increase his probability of reelection by choosing an unpopular policy that is in the public interest. However, we also show that an executive will sometimes face electoral incentives to enact a policy that is both unpopular and contrary to voters’ interests. We illustrate our model with examples involving President Abraham Lincoln, California Governor Earl Warren, and President Gerald Ford. ¤For helpful comments we thank Steve Ansolabehere, David Austen-Smith, Dan Carpenter, Cary Covington, Patricia Conley, Daniel Diermeier, Tim Fedderson, Fred Greenstein, Keith Krehbiel, Dan Kryder, Jim Snyder, Craig Volden, and seminar participants at Berkeley, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, NYU Law School, Princeton, Stanford, and SUNY Stony Brook. yAssistant Professor of Political Science, MIT. zAssistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University. xCorresponding author. Assistant Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston IL 60208-1006. Email: k-shotts@nwu.edu. Phone: (847) 491-2628. Fax: (847) 491-8985. “There are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the Executive to a prevailing current...as its best recommendation. But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted...When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests.” Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper 71

New Labour and the Politics of Depoliticisation

A number of commentators in the 1980s sought to explain the character of the Thatcher administration. By contrast, relatively little work has been produced that seeks to analyse the principles and governing strategies of the Blair government. Focusing primarily on economic management, this article offers a characterisation of statecraft under Blair in terms of the politics of depoliticisation. In summary, it argues that the Blair government has fused aspects of traditional economic management with new initiatives to create a powerful tool of governing organised on the basis of the principle of depoliticisation. Depoliticisation as a governing strategy is the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making. State managers retain arm's-length control over crucial economic and social processes whilst simultaneously benefiting from the distancing effects of depoliticisation. As a form of politics it seeks to change market expectations regarding the effectiveness and credibility of policy-making in addition to shielding the government from the consequences of unpopular policies.

Will ending debt bondage lead to democratic and economic self‐determination for the people of Africa?*

The African debt burden has recently dominated the debate about Africa's growth tragedy and has provoked widespread popular outrage against the policies of the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs). This article outlines the making of the African debt crisis: it takes western governments to task for piling debts on African states in the pursuit of pernicious foreign and trade policies. Despite high profile BWI debt relief initiatives, Africa is still shackled by debt as debtor states continue to transfer more capital to the rich nations than they receive from them. The author argues that the secrecy surrounding debt negotiations and the great leverage unaccountable BWI bureaucrats exercise on African leaders to adopt unpopular policies has undermined democratic governance. In conclusion, the article advances strategies for debt relief that would foster democracy and policy‐making capacity.

Eating or drinking during labor: Is it time to change the rules?

M OST PRACTICING anesthetists have never . managed or even observed acid pulmonary aspiration (Mendelson's Syndrome) 1 in a parturient. In the most recent Report on the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths in the United Kingdom (1994-1996), 2 no mother died as a consequence of pulmonary aspiration. In the last four Confidential Enquiries (1985 to 1996), 3 in which 12-year period there were approximately 9 million births, four mothers died from pulmonary aspiration. However, in two of these mothers there were other complicating factors. Three of the mothers had received parenteral opioids during labor; in the fourth case the use of opioids was not recorded. This is in sharp contrast to the very first Confidential Enquiry (1952-1954), 4 which reported 29 maternal deaths from aspiration (Fig 1). This remarkable improvement can in part be attributed to the greater use of regional anaesthesia, the introduction of the H 2 antagonists, the improved training of obstetric anesthetists, and the policy of fasting women during labor. It could therefore be argued that gastric aspiration is no longer an important clinical issue in obstetric anesthesia and that in the very rare event of a mother aspirating, it is likely that treatment in a modern intensive care unit will ensure her complete recovery. It is not surprising then that midwives, obstetricians, and even mothers themselves are demanding that the unpopular policy of starving women during labor be reviewed.

Genetic testing of the general population: ethical and informatic concerns.

Whether we like it or not, genetic testing will almost certainly become routine medical practice within the next 25 years. Integrated circuit chips already exist that can perform 400 genetic tests simultaneously, thus greatly reducing the costs. At least one company is already working on a prototype for a handheld genetic tester that would allow primary care physicians to perform hundreds or thousands of genetic tests on a simple blood smear in just a few minutes. "Genetic report cards" for children are not very far off at all. The use of such widespread testing poses a variety of ethical dilemmas. One problem that has not been appreciated sufficiently, however, is the question of how to interpret the test results. Because of the ways the genes implicated in diseases are discovered and marketed, quantitative analysis of the tests can be extremely misleading. The difficulty is that we simply do not have sufficient information about variance in genetic and other factors in the general population to make accurate projections of a patient's risk, given the presence of a gene. This uncertainty is obscured, however, when we provide the patient with a numerical analysis of risk because it is well established that people tend to overestimate the information content of numerical projections. This situation is made far worse by the fact that we do not have enough adequately trained genetic counselors to handle the load that will soon be placed on them (and studies have shown that physicians are generally very poorly prepared to act as accurate sources of information on complex genetic issues). For these reasons, I argue that access to genetic testing should be treated the same way as access to new medical procedures and medications--namely, withheld from the general public until proven safe and effective in large-scale trials. This is certain to be an unpopular policy, but it seems the only way to prevent a great deal of abuse of genetic tests.

Public Opinion, Unpopular Policy and Congressional Activism: Exploring the “Mann Thesis” of U.S. Foreign Policy‐Making

Most analysts agree that Congress has been more assertive on foreign policy since the Vietnam War. A general implication has been that analyses of foreign policy‐making increasingly address questions of the links between Congress and other, non‐governmental, domestic sources of foreign policy and when, how, and why members of Congress become involved. This article focuses on one possible explanation of congressional activism, which holds that members defer to presidential policy when it is popular with the public, and conversely, challenge presidential foreign policy initiatives when public opinion does not support the policy. To test this hypothesis, this article examines a sample of foreign policy initiatives, public opinion data, and congressional activism from the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations to determine the relationship, or lack thereof, between public opinion toward those policies and the level of congressional activism. The article concludes by assessing the implications of the results for American foreign policy‐making.

The Swedish Election 1998: A Protest Vote and the Birth of a New Political Landscape?

The 1998 Swedish general election was a protest election primarily against the Social Democratic Party. The party was hit by a debate on deceit when the unpopular financial restructuring policy was implemented. Disappointed social democratic voters from the 1994 election flocked to the Left Party. Others did not vote at all. The electoral turnout dropped to 81.4 percent; the lowest level in a parliamentary election since the election of 1958. A turnout of 81.4 percent is not particularly low from an international perspective, but it has received a great deal of attention in the political debate. Certain signs do indicate that there has been a general devaluation of voting as a means of exercising political influence among large groups of voters. Other forms of influence are perceived as being more meaningful. A sense of meaninglessness, of individual and institutional powerlessness, also seems to be spreading to social groups that have traditionally had a fundamental trust in the political system.

Leftist Parties, Neoliberal Policies, and Reelection Strategies

How do leftist parties in government abandon their traditional economic development programs, adopt neoliberal policies, and still win reelection? This article examines the case of the leftist National Liberation Party (PLN) in Costa Rica to explain this unexpected outcome. The author argues that the explanation lies on two separate but related levels, those of institutional rules and policy implementation strategies. Institutional rules constrain the behavior of political actors in multiple ways and structure political interaction. However, governments also employ specific policy implementation strategies (e.g., obfuscation, compensation, division, and incrementalism) to adopt unpopular policies while reducing electoral costs. As a result, opposition to the reforms is more difficult to organize and potential negative consequences are difficult to identify for voters. The institutional rules and the strategies that governments employ can account for the seeming paradox of a leftist party repeatedly abandoning its electoral promises, adopting neoliberal policies, and still winning reelection.

When Morality and Economics Collide (or Not) in a Texas Community

In 1993, citizens in conservative Williamson County, Texas, debated whether to grant tax breaks to attract Apple Computer Company, even though Apple maintained an unpopular policy of extending health care benefits to the unmarried domestic partners of employees. We visited Williamson County to speak with local citizens and the main participants about how they resolved their dilemma. The analysis in this paper rests on these interviews, county survey data, and correspondence sent to politicians during the controversy. We analyze why some people are more prepared than others to sacrifice material gain in order to preserve their social and moral values. And we explore whether actions aimed at preserving a community consensus around particular moral beliefs and lifestyles can be construed as rational and, if so, in what sense. We conclude from the Apple case that the development and maintenance of a value system is imbued with interests. Cultural values coordinate political coalitions and social activities, counsel people on how to live, and constitute a simple folk theory that lends conherence to their lives. People do the best they can within the biases and constraints of their value system.

Petcoke, The Public and Power: The Case of Drax

In mid-1997 National Power, a major British electricity generator, received permission from the national environmental regulator, the Environment Agency, to test-burn petroleum coke blended with local coal at their Drax power station in North Yorkshire. Late in 1997 these tests were completed successfully, from the perspective of Drax, and the application for the full-scale burn of the blended fuel is expected to be made in 1998. The imported by-product of oil refining is considerably cheaper than local coal, but allegedly richer in several environmental pollutants. In spite of flourishing green rhetoric, New Labour has not reversed the dominance of commercial over all other considerations in UK electricity generation, which in turn left NP with little choice but to reduce fuel costs and utilise its expensive FGD facilities. This paper analyses documents, interviews and questionnaires with participants in the controversy and discusses findings with reference to various decision making theories, asking who is 'really' to blame for unpopular energy policy decisions.

State resettlement policies in post‐colonial rural Mozambique: the impact of the communal village programme on Tete province, 1977–1982

This article considers the impact of the villagisation policy implemented by the new Frelimo government in Tete province between 1977 and 1982. It traces continuities with the unpopular policy of colonial era aldeamentos, the concentrated settlements which served counter‐insurgency purposes during the war for independence, and which had been a subject of guerrilla attack. The article focuses on the economic basis of the new villages, exploring the introduction of collective production, interventions in marketing, and the ecological implications of concentrated settlement. A discussion of the early years of Renamo's war in Tete, and its interaction with the state's rural policies, forms the final section of the article.

Can Africa develop?

Can Africa Develop? Michael Chege (bio) Development and Democracy in Africa. By Claude Ake. Brookings Institution, 1996. 173 pp. This is the last book of renowned African political scientist Claude Ake, who died in a plane crash in Nigeria in November 1996. It is also one of his finest, the closing act to a spectacular academic career that began at Columbia University in New York (his alma mater) in 1969 and later took him to other campuses in the United States, Canada, Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria, as well as to the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Ake was also past president of the pan-African Council for the Development of Social and Economic Research in Dakar, Senegal. Though it inspired high hopes at independence in the 1960s, the continent that Ake traversed so often has since produced one of the most disappointing overall records of economic development and political stability of all the regions in the developing world. World Bank data indicate that real average personal incomes in Africa are lower today than they were in 1960. International news coverage of the region in February 1997 dwelt on civil war in Zaire, Burundi, and Sudan, and on the continuing strife in Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Even allowing for the inevitable hyperbole and anti-African bias, there is genuine cause for concern. Development and Democracy in Africa constitutes a valiant effort to address this abysmal situation. In it, Ake makes an eloquent plea for combining democratic governance with new community-based development initiatives that emphasize self-reliance and are designed to build Africans’ self-esteem by giving individual communities the opportunity to set and work toward their own economic goals. Ake, then, does not bemoan the “marginalization” to which Africa has allegedly been subject in the post-Cold War era. On the contrary, international neglect is [End Page 174] portrayed as a blessing in disguise that can spur community action and advance the region along the path to self-reliance. Development, Ake says, is both a process and an end. For too long, according to this book, Africa’s development policies have been determined from without—by bilateral donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and its European counterparts as well as by multilateral development organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the United Nations Development Programme. This has prevented African development projects from acquiring the domestic legitimacy that they need in order to take root, a situation aggravated by the authoritarian ways of African despots, whether civilian or military. Again and again Ake reminds us that “the problem is not so much that development has failed as that it was never really on the agenda in the first place.” The new citizen-based and community-based alternative that the book advocates has already acquired a wide following, especially among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), local and external voluntary associations, and various churches. Some of these groups, working in the trenches with “the people,” have adopted a stridently populist line. So strong is the trend described here, however, that the World Bank and bilateral donors are now consulting with and funding such organizations, all in the name of reaching the people by bypassing government. The derailment of African nation-building initiatives can be traced to the authoritarian tradition established by the colonial authorities. Colonial rule, writes Ake, was based on force; it was arbitrary and inclined to compel obedience to unpopular policies like taxation, land acquisition, changes in indigenous laws, and abolition of participatory local authorities. Independence brought some change in the personnel managing the state but not in its policies; government “continued to be totalistic in scope, constituting a statist economy.” Worse, after self-rule came, the African political class nurtured a culture of unbridled competition for raw power, thereby marginalizing economic development, which increasingly became the concern of external organizations. Ake does not explain exactly how this particular political culture came about. He repeatedly proclaims that the premium placed on wielding power and exploiting it for personal gain is unusually high in the region; yet he neither attacks nor endorses the growing culture-based literature centered on...

Britain and the international panel on climate change: The impacts of scientific advice on global warming part II: The domestic story of the British response to climate change

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme to advise governments and the UN General Assembly on climate change, the underlying science, likely impacts and realistic responses. The Climate Convention entered into force in March 1994 and codifies the largest global research and data collection effort ever undertaken. Why and how did Britain seek leadership in this effort? Leadership was enabled by a mature national research lobby which recognised and assisted in the development of opportunities that arose in the political context of the mid‐1980s. It captured the IPCC scientific advisory process and incorporated this successfully into domestic and foreign policies. Politicians found the threat of global warming useful as a greenwash for unpopular energy and taxation policies. Attention and resources were shifted from current national environmental matters to speculative, research‐intensive gl...

Britain and the International Panel on climate change: The impacts of scientific advice on global warming part 1: Integrated policy analysis and the global dimension

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme to advise governments and the UN General Assembly on climate change: the underlying science, likely impacts and realistic responses. The Climate Convention entered into force in March 1994 and codifies the largest global research and data collection effort ever undertaken. Why and how did Britain seek leadership in this effort? It can be argued that this leadership was enabled by a mature national research lobby which recognised and assisted in the development of opportunities that arose in the political context of the mid‐1980s. It captured the IPCC scientific advisory process and incorporated this successfully into domestic and foreign policies. Politicians found the threat of global warming useful as greenwash for unpopular energy and taxation policies. Attention and resources were shifted from current national environmental matters to speculative, re...

A Return to Stability

A Return to Stability Alexander Tsipko (bio) Strictly speaking, one could not call the poor showing of the electoral coalition formed by DemRossiya and Russia's Choice in last December's parliamentary elections unexpected or very surprising. On the contrary, the truly surprising, even incomprehensible, thing would have been a massive show of popular support for Yegor Gaidar and his team after all that had happened since August 1991, especially their abortive "cavalry assault" on the Soviet economy and their call for an assault on the Russian White House last autumn in order to dislodge the parliamentarians who refused to abandon that building. After all, [End Page 19] President Yeltsin dissolved the parliament out of fear: he felt that this locus of opposition to his government's policies was gaining strength, especially in the provinces. The 15 percent of the vote that Russia's Choice wound up getting seems generous in light of the group's close identification with the assault on the parliament and the enormously unpopular policy of economic "shock therapy." In the category of the unexpected one must also include the electoral performance of the Communists. who gained an aura of martyrdom after their futile defense of the White House. yet did even more poorly than Russia's Choice and ceded the title of "defender of Russia" to Zhirinovsky's LDP. But then again, it seemed clear even before the election that whoever exploited patriotism most effectively would win. It was not just Gaidar and Russia's Choice that lost, but the so-called democratic revolution of August 1991. The tragedy of Gaidar and his party lies in their assumption of the burden of responsibility for this primordially doomed business. They believed that the idea of the market and of democratic reform would lend their movement legitimacy and mobilize society powerfully behind it, but they were badly mistaken. The anticommunist, anti-Soviet revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe succeeded in bringing together the notions of democracy, national independence, and the recovery of national history. This fusion of the concept of democracy and the idea of national revival held within itself—if only for a single incandescent moment—an awesome mobilizing strength. Whether in Warsaw. Prague, or Budapest, it conveyed a sense of national victory and brought together huge numbers of people, practically whole nations, to push for the recouping of national identity and the overthrow of the communist nomenklatura. Russia's democrats took an opposite tack from the one chosen by their counterparts in Eastern Europe. From the beginning, they linked the idea of democracy with the themes of defeat and deterioration: the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War. the discrediting of the October Revolution, the decay of the Great Russian empire, and so on. Behind this preoccupation with failure and self-reproach lay a sincere and even healthy impulse: the desire to uncover and confront the truth. To many Russians, however, the democrats came to seem like the high priests of a cult of shame and defeatism. Their honesty was too withering. People could not bear to face the truth about Soviet and Russian history—the truth about themselves. To make matters worse, our new democrats mechanically and counterproductively tried to stretch the notion of breaking with communism to cover a similar break with the traditions of Russian [End Page 20] statehood and Russian geopolitical interests. Ironically, DemRossiya and Russia's Choice were aping the Bolsheviks of 1917 in their attempt to break completely with the Russian past. The only difference was that Lenin and his commissars at least had the advantage of being able to offer the bait of communist utopianism and the prophesied advent of the "new Soviet man." Communism, for all its scientific pretensions, exalted the irrational and sacral over the rational. Bereft of a messianic ideology, the new Russian democrats did not even bother to offer the people a clear explanation of why the old Soviet economy had to be destroyed or why the old Soviet ways had to be done away with. Appeals to "turn to the market" or "return to civilization" meant virtually nothing to millions of Russians. To them, talk of reform seemed abstract, unviable, and in...

Legitimizing unpopular public policies: Does procedure matter?

Zusammenfassung Am Beispiel der Akzeptanz von Entscheidungen des Supreme Courts der USA über Abtreibungen untersucht Tyler, ob Legitimität die Akzeptanz moralisch umstrittener Entscheidungen und ob Verfahrensgerechtigkeit Legitimität beeinflußt. Die Legitimität des Gerichts erweist sich als stärkster Einflußfaktor für die Entscheidungsakzeptanz. Die persönlichen Moralvorstellungen stehen dahinter zurück. Legitimität selbst wird durch die wahrgenommene Verfahrensgerechtigkeit am stärksten bestimmt. Für die Verfahrensgerechtigkeit sind Neutralität, Vertrauen und die Respektierung der Bürgerrechte entscheidend.

The Validity and Electoral Impact of Media Estimations of "Best" or "Worst" State Legislators

Many news organizations have ranked or rated state legislators in their state as or most effective and or effective, sometimes using several groups of informants, such as legislators, lobbyists, agency heads, and capital correspondents. Other organizations merely give the impressions of reporters. Obviously those rated worst are displeased with this evaluation and at least somewhat anxious as to what it will mean when they next face an election. This study assesses the validity of these rankings and their impact at the polls. The media rankings cannot be dismissed as invalid, and legislators cannot dismiss their impact at the polls. It helps to be ranked as among the best and it hurts to be among the worst, although the effects are small. Elected officials, the mass media, and the public interact in a very complex manner, of which we have only limited knowledge. We suspect that the availability of expensive media advertisements and the free coverage of incumbents in the media underlie the advantage that legislators have in winning public office. Incumbents overwhelmingly outspend their challengers. Nevertheless there is good reason to believe that the media exaggerates its influence on the electorate and that officials are unduly confident that they can buy elections through the media (Erikson, Luttbeg, and Tedin 1991, chap. 8). This paper focuses on a limited aspect of potential media influence on politics. Media owners and correspondents tend to see their roles as vital to an informed vote by the electorate. Reports on foibles, corruption, irresponsibility, and unpopular policies might threaten the reelection chances of officials. However, the worldwide pattern of incumbency advantage in seeking reelection limits the media's potential influence in this regard. Between 1968 and 1986, U.S. state legislative incumbents won 91% of the time (Grau 1981; Jewell and Breaux 1988). Obviously, the mass media can have an effect only at the margins, given this high reelection rate. This paper will consider a fairly