Thermostatic Voting: Presidential Elections in Light of New Policy Data

Existing studies imply a model of "thermostatic voting”—a phenomenon characterized by negative feedback from government policy to election outcomes, suggesting that a party's success in setting policy diminishes its electoral prospects. This phenomenon could give politicians an incentive to constrain the fulfillment of public demands, which would conflict with the notion of electoral accountability, which also forms part of the theoretical framework in question. This article addresses this paradox and provides new data that expand an existing time series of American policy liberalism. Employing the new data, the article identifies thermostatic voting in American presidential elections, but in light of the analysis, certain empirical features are also identified that reduce the possible incentive to withhold promised policy change

Making EU decisions more visible to the public: how transparency in the Council has developed since 2001

A common criticism of the EU’s legislative process is that decisions are often made behind closed doors, particularly when government ministers negotiate agreements in the Council of the European Union. Jørgen Bølstad and James P Cross present findings from a study on how transparency in the Council has developed since 2001, when formal rules were agreed to regulate the release of legislative records to the public. They note that while the transparency of Council decisions has clearly increased during this period, there is still ample room for improvement

The evidence shows that EU politicians have historically responded to the public’s mood: but this now may be coming to an end

Over recent years, many commentators have portrayed the EU as undemocratic and elitist, but is this really the case? Looking at 30 years’ worth of legislative output and the public’s support for the EU, Jørgen Bølstad argues that politicians have tried to please their electorates on the European level. However, in the wake of the European economic and financial crisis, pleasing electorates is harder than ever

Capturing Rationalization Bias and Differential Item Functioning: A Unified Bayesian Scaling Approach

Information about the ideological positions of different political actors is crucial in answering questions regarding political representation, polarization, and voting behavior. One way to obtain such information is to ask survey respondents to place actors on a common ideological scale, but, unfortunately, respondents typically display a set of biases when performing such placements. Key among these are rationalization bias and differential item functioning (DIF). While Aldrich–McKelvey (AM) scaling offers a useful solution to DIF, it ignores the issue of rationalization bias, and this study presents Monte Carlo simulations demonstrating that AM-type models thus can give inaccurate results. As a response to this challenge, this study develops an alternative Bayesian scaling approach, which simultaneously estimates DIF and rationalization bias, and therefore performs better when the latter bias is present.acceptedVersio

Principles, interests and beliefs : public opinion on international aid

Defence date: 15 July 2011Examining Board: Professor Mark N. Franklin, European University Institute (Supervisor) Professor Stein Kuhnle, Hertie School of Governance and University of Bergen Professor Alain Noël, Université de Montréal Professor Sven Steinmo, European University InstituteFirst made available online on 5 May 2015.Why do some individuals show more support for international aid than others? And are people in donor countries less supportive of the idea of aid than those in recipient countries? These are the primary questions motivating this thesis, and the results can be summarized by four main findings. One is that the level of economic development, which determines a country’s status as a potential aid donor, has a strong influence on support for aid, as citizens of more developed countries are considerably less in favor of increasing aid than others are. The second finding is that, among donor countries, the level of development is positively related to several forms of opposition to the donation of aid. This appears partly due to the fact that more developed countries have donated more aid, for a longer period. Respondents in countries that donate more are more likely to find current levels of international aid sufficient, and this may explain part of the between-country differences. In other words, people in donor countries may find the extent of international aid satisfactory at lower levels than those in other countries. Most notably, however, people in more developed countries are more likely to state disinterest as a reason for not supporting aid, and this reason is the only one that has a clear impact on aggregate levels of support. There is also some evidence that greater donations increase skepticism regarding the impact of aid, but it is not clear that this affects aggregate support. Furthermore, the third finding is that individual beliefs regarding the impact of aid are endogenous to support for aid. While such beliefs appear to influence the support for aid at the individual level, there is also a significant effect of support on the beliefs themselves. The fourth finding is that the negative relationship between economic development and support holds for all but the very least developed countries of the world. It appears that respondents in the latter countries are living under such conditions they lack the critical opinions typically found in more developed countries, making it hard to compare them to those from more developed countries

Is there a rational public?

Popular notions of democracy assume that citizens have policy preferences that can and should be reflected in public policy. Elections provide citizens with the opportunity to select representatives with whom they agree, and opinion polls track the mood of the public, providing additional information for those who are elected. This system thus demands quite a lot on the part of the citizens, who are ultimately supposed to be in charge. If the average citizen were completely uninformed and uninterested in politics and public policy, a fundamental condition for democracy as a form of government would appear to be missing. Justifying the privileged status of public opinion as a guide for public policy would indeed be hard under such circumstances. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behaviorand Public Opinion, Sep 2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/978131571239

Thermostatic Voting: Presidential elections in light of new policy data

Existing studies imply a model of "thermostatic voting'" - a phenomenon characterized by negative feedback from government policy to election outcomes, suggesting that a party's success in setting policy diminishes its electoral prospects. This phenomenon could give politicians an incentive to constrain the fulfillment of public demands, which would conflict with the notion of electoral accountability, which also forms part of the theoretical framework in question. This article addresses this paradox and provides new data that expand an existing time series of American policy liberalism. Employing the new data, the article identifies thermostatic voting in American presidential elections, but in light of the analysis, certain empirical features are also identified that reduce the possible incentive to withhold promised policy changes

Capacity, Willingness, and Sovereign Default Risk: Reassuring the Market in Times of Crisis

Preserving the trust of bond markets is crucial for the world's many indebted countries, but it is still unclear when and how national or international actors can contribute to this goal. We present a set of arguments addressing this question and test them on the case of the eurozone debt crisis. Distinguishing between actors' capacity and willingness to avoid defaults, we argue that the crisis was marked by a lack of capacity at the national level, and limited or uncertain willingness at the European level. Accordingly, we find that European-level efforts to reassure markets had considerably stronger effects than similar efforts at the national level. Furthermore, national efforts appear to have mattered the least in countries with the least capacity. These findings are based on a comprehensive new dataset of political events and relevant news, and they hold across a number of robustness checks and placebo tests. The final version of this research has been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies. © 2017 Wile

Replication Materials for: Capturing Rationalization Bias and Differential Item Functioning: A Unified Bayesian Scaling Approach

This folder contains complete replication materials for 'Capturing Rationalization Bias and Differential Item Functioning: A Unified Bayesian Scaling Approach' in Political Analysis. It also includes a brief guide on how to fit the models. See 'readme.txt' for details