towards a new approach of the elections-to-policy nexus

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Emiliano Grossman ◽  
Isabelle Guinaudeau

This introduction briefly presents the central debates, challenges and puzzles addressed in the book. The focus is on the policy relevance of election campaigns, approached through the lens of two core requirements, i.e. differentiation in the electoral supply and mandate responsiveness. The chapter describes the climate of scepticism that prevails as to how contemporary democracies meet these principles. It points to current approaches limitations’ in conceptual and empirical terms. It then delineates the main arguments of the book’s alternative approach. Based on an agenda-setting perspective, our theoretical framework bridges studies of policy and issue competition, relying on unique empirical evidence covering five West European countries since the 1980s. Finally, the chapter provides an outline of the remaining chapters.

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swen Hutter ◽  
Rens Vliegenthart

This article addresses the questions of whether and why political parties respond to media-covered street protests. To do so, it adopts an agenda-setting approach and traces issue attention in protest politics and parliament over several years in four West European countries (France, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The article innovates in two ways. First, it does not treat the parties in parliament as a unitary actor but focuses on the responses of single parties. Second, partisan characteristics are introduced that might condition the effect of protest on parliamentary activity. More precisely, it assesses the explanatory power of ideological factors (left-right orientation and radicalism) and other factors related to issue competition between parties (opposition status, issue ownership and contagion). The results show that parties do respond to street protests in the news, and they are more likely to respond if they are in opposition and if their competitors have reacted to the issue.


Author(s):  
Georg Wenzelburger

Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of law and order policies from a partisan politics perspective. It argues that understanding law and order policy making involves two main steps that can be conceptually distinguished: agenda-setting and decision-making. For the agenda-setting phase, the chapter builds on the assumption that issues related to law and order are valence-loaden and generate issue competition between political parties. Therefore, issue owners are particularly likely to get tough on law and order. For decision-making, the theoretical argument relates to theories of comparative public policy analysis, according to which the preferences do translate into public policies, but only if the institutional context allows. Finally, this theoretical chapter discusses how law and order turns may shape the future policy path through positive policy feedback. All expectations are summarized in seven hypotheses to guide the empirical analysis.


Author(s):  
Carlos Santiago-Caballero

ABSTRACT This paper sheds light on a crucial period of Spanish economic history, analysing changes in intergenerational occupational mobility. We use newly collected empirical evidence from Valencia, a region that followed a path of growth based on agrarian capitalism focused on international markets. We show that occupational mobility improved between 1841 and 1850, but that this situation reversed during the following decades. The opportunities offered to individuals from poorer families quickly disappeared. Put in international perspective, occupational mobility in Valencia was far lower than in other European countries, where both downward and especially upward mobility were considerably higher. By 1870, Valencia had become a polarised society, where the lowest part of the income distribution suffered increasing pauperisation and downward mobility.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gubara Hassan

The Western originators of the multi-disciplinary social sciences and their successors, including most major Western social intellectuals, excluded religion as an explanation for the world and its affairs. They held that religion had no role to play in modern society or in rational elucidations for the way world politics or/and relations work. Expectedly, they also focused most of their studies on the West, where religion’s effect was least apparent and argued that its influence in the non-West was a primitive residue that would vanish with its modernization, the Muslim world in particular. Paradoxically, modernity has caused a resurgence or a revival of religion, including Islam. As an alternative approach to this Western-centric stance and while focusing on Islam, the paper argues that religion is not a thing of the past and that Islam has its visions of international relations between Muslim and non-Muslim states or abodes: peace, war, truce or treaty, and preaching (da’wah).


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Bauhr ◽  
Nicholas Charron

While democratic accountability is widely expected to reduce corruption, citizens to a surprisingly large extent opt to forgo their right to protest and voice complaints, and refrain from using their electoral right to punish corrupt politicians. This article examines how grand corruption and elite collusion influence electoral accountability, in particular citizens’ willingness to punish corrupt incumbents. Using new regional-level data across 21 European countries, we provide clear empirical evidence that the level of societal grand corruption in which a voter finds herself systematically affects how she responds to a political corruption scandal. Grand corruption increases loyalty to corrupt politicians, demobilizes the citizenry, and crafts a deep divide between insiders, or potential beneficiaries of the system, and outsiders, left on the sidelines of the distribution of benefits. This explains why outsiders fail to channel their discontent into effective electoral punishment, and thereby how corruption undermines democratic accountability.


PCD Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Irit Talmor ◽  
Osnat Osnat Akirav

During pre-election campaigns, parties make great efforts to persuade constituents to vote for them. Usually, new parties have smaller budgets and fewer resources than veteran parties. Generally, the more heterogeneous the party’s electorate, the more critical the issue of resource allocation. This paper presents a method for new parties to efficiently allocate campaign advertising resources and maximise voters. The model developed uses the Pareto principle and multi-criteria approach, integrating the party’s confidential data together with official open-to-all data. We implemented the model on a specific new party during the intensive political period before the April 2019 elections in Israel, finding that the model produced clear and unbiased results, and this made it effective and user-friendly for strategy teams and campaign managers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAMUEL BAGG

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the “wisdom of the multitude.” As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracycanbe defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability of average voters, I observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense ofelectoraldemocracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception ofdemocracy, writ large.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-115
Author(s):  
Ľuboš GAJDOŠ

The paper deals with corpus analysis of negation in Chinese, namely the negatives bù 不 and méi/ méiyǒu没/没有. The adverbs BU and MEI are two of the most frequent negatives in Chinese. The aim of this study is to present statistical data together with linguistics analysis. The results provide empirical evidence of discrepancy between “authentic” language data versus linguistic prescription with practical implications for second-language acquisition. The findings inter alia suggest a new approach to verb categorisation.  


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document