Political Trust and Job Insecurity in 18 European Polities

Several decades of trust research has confirmed that difficult national economic conditions help explain citizens’ low levels of political trust. But research points to a much less important role for personal economic factors. The latter finding, it is argued here, is a result of flawed survey questions and model misspecification. We actually know very little about the precise economic concerns that may generate low levels of trust and about the mechanisms via which they do so, resulting in a rather thin causal story. This paper seeks to address this lacuna, focusing on an issue of increasing importance in advanced economies: job insecurity. Using individual-level data from 18 European polities at two different time points, the paper finds that job insecurity generates lower levels of trust in politicians, political parties and political institutions and lower levels of satisfaction with democratic performance. Importantly, job insecurity’s effect does not diminish as one moves from specific to more diffuse objects of political trust, as previous research suggests it should. The paper also finds that the effect of job insecurity is exacerbated if citizens have negative perceptions of the performance of the wider economy. Finally, and drawing on the occupational psychology literature, the paper proposes a novel causal mechanism to link job insecurity to political trust. The intuition is that job insecurity violates a ‘psychologicaldemocratic’ trust contract between workers and the state. The mechanism is consistent with the observed results. The paper thus contributes to both the empirical and theoretical debates on the linkages between political trust and economic performance

Tony Blair and John Howard: comparative predominance and 'Institution Stretch' in the UK and Australia

It has recently been argued that the UK premier enjoys a level of executive power unavailable to US presidents, but how does he or she compare to another prime minister operating within a broadly similar system? Commonalities of intra-executive influence and capacity exist under the premierships in the UK and Australia. Discrete institutional constraints and deviations are evident, but trends and similarities in resource capacity can be clearly identified. These include: the growth of the leaders' office; broadening and centralising of policy advice and media operations; and strengthening of the role and function of ministerial advisers. I contend that this amounts to 'institution stretch', with new structures, processes and practices becoming embedded in the political system by the incumbents. © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Political Studies Association

Looking for the women in Baron and Taylor's (1969) Educational administration and the social sciences

A search for women in Baron and Taylor's (1969) Educational administration and the social sciences [London: The Athlone Press] using feminist poststructural discourse analysis (FPDA) has revealed a changing discourse about gendered educational administration over the course of 50 years. Whilst few women are featured in the text itself, citations of women's writing surface the historical contributions of women as headmistresses and public servants. Women who have cited the text since its publication have challenged gendered theory and academic writing conventions. FPDA is used to explore the gendered educational administration discourse through the intertextuality of academic writing. Fluctuations between powerfulness and powerlessness are revealed depending on the socio-political context and women's circumstances

On optimal control and macroeconomic policy

Control theory has important contributions to make to the theory of macro-economic policy. These include a unified view of estimation, forecasting and control and a consequently clearer focus in identifying performance criteria. Further, the methods of control theory imply objectivity and a need for assumptions to be made explicit. By contrast, the UK lacks a research body for forecasting and policy evaluation detached from doctrinal or methodological commitment. Engineering control methods, however, diverge from those wholly acceptable to economic systems in that, in the latter, the controller is himself part of the system he controls and some of his controls operate only indirectly. A further difference is that economics cannot as yet furnish the controller with reliable models of system behaviour linking policy instruments to set targets.