Protecting Rights in the Policy Process: Integrating Legal Proportionality and Policy Analysis

This paper provides an integrative analysis of legal proportionality and policy analysis, and identifies the inherent potential of integrating the proportionality principle in policy analysis for enhancing the protection of rights in the policy process. Our analysis entails three key recommendations: (1) Mandating the inclusion of a rights-impact criterion in policy analysis in order to increase the likelihood that the three proportionality tests will be addressed; (2) The professional norm of considering several distinct alternatives serves the normative requirement of the necessity test and facilitates the mitigation of rights restrictions through the comparison and modification of the alternatives; (3) Requiring policymakers to present the factual basis for the undesirable phenomenon in the course of judicial review of the policy goal. Such integration of policy analysis and proportionality can streamline the consideration of fundamental rights in the policy-making process and consequently increase their protection. Adopting these practical measures may substantially assist courts in identifying ways to implement judicial review, while respecting the discretion of policymakers. Finally, these proposed practices are expected to fine-tune the incentive structure of policy-makers for conducting quality policy analysis while protecting human and civil rights

Blame avoidance and the politics of public inquiries in the UK, 1984-2003

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Social distancing: Identity, perceived reality and policy preferences under pandemic threat

Extreme crises hold the potential to unite societies, but also to deepen sociopolitical divisions. The ability of societies to choose unity over divide depends on political leadership, pre-crisis inter-group relations, and on the behavior – real and perceived – of these groups during the crisis. This paper asks how does social identity affect the perception of an outgroup’s situation under a common threat. We utilize the fact that the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has hit Israel’s regions and social groups unevenly, and thus has created differences in groups’ morbidity rates – for studying perceptions of ingroup and outgroup morbidity. We find that minority groups tend to overestimate outgroup morbidity and underestimate ingroup morbidity, especially when they themselves are characterized by high morbidity rates. These perceptions are partly debiased when people are asked to reflect on their situation. In addition, we find that people support harsher policy toward implied non-compliers, but also that biased perceptions do not translate into biased policy preferences. The importance of our findings lies in suggesting that perceptions of outgroup’s situation can reflect intergroup relations, but may also trigger further deterioration in social divide at times of extreme crises

Replication Data for: Policy and Blame Attribution: Citizens' Preferences, Policy Reputations, and Policy Surprises

Negativity bias suggests that the attribution of blame to governments, for alleged or actual policy failures, is disproportionately pertinent for their popularity. However, when citizens attribute blame for adverse consequences of a policy, does it make a difference which policy was it, and who was the political agent that adopted the policy? We posit that the level of blame citizens attribute to political agents for policy failures depends on three policy-oriented considerations: (1) the distance between a citizen's ideal policy and the agent's established policy position; (2) the distance between a citizen's ideal policy and the agent's concrete policy choice; and (3) the distance between the agent's established policy position and her concrete policy choice. The inherent relationship between these three policy-oriented considerations renders their integration in one model a theoretical and methodological imperative. The model provides novel observable predictions regarding the conditions under which each of the three policy-oriented factors will produce either pronounced or subtle observable effects on blame attribution. We test the model's predictions in two survey experiments, in Israel and in Germany. The results of both experiments are highly consistent with the model's predictions. These finding offer an important contribution by specifying the ways in which individual-level preferences interact with politicians’ policy reputations and policy choices to shape blame attribution. Our model entails unintuitive revisions to several strands of the literature, and in the discussion section we provide tentative support for the applicability of this model to other political judgments beyond blame attribution

When do we care about political neutrality? The hypocritical nature of reaction to political bias

<div><p>Claims and accusations of political bias are common in many countries. The essence of such claims is a denunciation of alleged violations of political neutrality in the context of media coverage, legal and bureaucratic decisions, academic teaching etc. Yet the acts and messages that give rise to such claims are also embedded within a context of intergroup competition. Thus, in evaluating the seriousness of, and the need for taking a corrective action in reaction to a purported politically biased act people may consider both the alleged normative violation and the political implications of the act/message for the evaluator’s ingroup. The question thus arises whether partisans react similarly to <i>ingroup-aiding</i> and <i>ingroup-harming</i> actions or messages which they perceive as politically biased. In three separate studies, conducted in two countries, we show that political considerations strongly affect partisans’ reactions to actions and messages that they perceive as politically biased. Namely, ingroup-harming biased messages/acts are considered more serious and are more likely to warrant corrective action in comparison to ingroup-aiding biased messages/acts. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the implementations of measures intended for correcting and preventing biases, and for the nature of conflict and competition between rival political groups.</p></div

Study 1 –Determinants of Demand for Correction.

<p>Study 1 –Determinants of Demand for Correction.</p

Study 3 –Second-stage estimates from the IV regression.

<p>Study 3 –Second-stage estimates from the IV regression.</p