Multi-dimensional policy preferences in the 2015 British general election: a conjoint analysis

This research explores voter preferences in the multi-dimensional policy space of the 2015 UK general election, as well as the influence of those preferences on vote choice. In our original pre-election survey, we apply a conjoint experimental design where we use actual party manifestos to examine voters' policy preferences across five main policy domains. This design allows us to both identify voters' sincere preferences, as estimated by their responses to hypothetical policy packages, and to reveal the influence of these preferences on voter support in the actual election. Our analysis reveals a considerable level of congruence between voters' underlying policy preferences and their vote choice in the 2015 election. Our results also speak to the previous literature on policy preferences and vote choice by demonstrating that voters not only weigh the importance of particular policy domains differently, but also have clear preferences regarding specific policy positions in a given domain, which eventually influence their support for a party in the election

Decomposing political knowledge: What is confidence in knowledge and why it matters

While political knowledge has been conceptually defined with two constructs – accuracy and confidence in factual information – conventional measurement of political knowledge has relied heavily on retrieval accuracy. Without measuring confidence-in-knowledge, it is not possible to rigorously identify different types of political informedness, such as misinformedness and uninformedness. This article theoretically explores the two constructs of knowledge and argues that each construct has unique antecedents and behavioral consequences. We suggest a survey instrument for confidence-in-knowledge and introduce a method to estimate latent traits of retrieval accuracy and confidence separately. Using our original survey that includes the measure of confidence-in-knowledge, we find that misinformed citizens are as engaged in politics as the well-informed, but their active involvement does not guarantee informed political choices. Our findings warrant further theoretical and empirical exploration of confidence in political knowledge

Risky business? Welfare state reforms and government support in Britain and Denmark

Are welfare state reforms electorally dangerous for governments? Political scientists have only recently begun to study this seemingly simple question, and existing work still suffers from two shortcomings. First, it has never tested the reform–vote link with data on actual legislative decisions for enough points in time to allow robust statistical tests. Secondly, it has failed to take into account the many expansionary reforms that have occurred in recent decades. Expansions often happen in the same years as cutbacks. By focusing only on cutbacks, estimates of the effects of reforms on government popularity become biased. This article addresses both shortcomings. The results show that voters punish governments for cutbacks, but also reward them for expansions, making so-called compensation, a viable blame-avoidance strategy. The study also finds that the size of punishments and rewards is roughly the same, suggesting that voters’ well-documented negativity bias does not directly translate into electoral behavior

Anchoring vignettes as a diagnostic tool for cross-national (in)comparability of survey measures: The case of voters’ left-right self-placement

There are potentially multiple sources that make it difficult to compare the typical survey measure of the left-right self-placement cross-nationally. Among others, we focus on differential item functioning (DIF) due to the different use of response scales when the left-right is framed as an aggregate dimension of policies, and we examine whether and to what extent the way ordinary citizens make use of the scale is cross-nationally comparable. Our goal is twofold. First, we assess the cross-national comparability of the left-right self-placement scale using the anchoring vignette method in nine European countries. Second, we propose a measure that quantifies the extent of DIF at the country level. The analyses of our original survey and other benchmark studies suggest that the size of cross-national DIF (CN-DIF) in the citizens’ use of left-right scale is relatively small when the left-right concept is considered in policy terms and the comparison is made among Western European countries

Hvordan reagerer vælgerne på velfærdsreformer?

I velfærdsstatslitteraturen diskuteres det, om reformer påvirker opbakningen til den siddende regering. Vi har indsamlet årligt data på velfærdsreformer af pensions- og arbejdsløshedsområderne og meningsmålinger i Storbritannien helt tilbage til 1946. Det giver os mulighed for at teste statistisk, hvorvidt velfærdsreformer påvirker regeringens folkelige opbakning. Det viser sig, at det gør de. Nedskæringer fører til lavere støtte, men ekspansion fører til højere støtte. Ikke mindst det sidste er interessant, fordi man i litteraturen ofte fokuserer på nedskæringer. Vores analyse tyder på, at der er et næsten symmetrisk forhold, således at effekten af nedskæringer og ekspansion er nogenlunde lige stor, men altså i forskellige retninger

How governments strategically time welfare state reform legislation: empirical evidence from five European countries

Building on studies on the political business cycle, the literature on welfare state retrenchment has argued that governments which cut the welfare state try to avoid blame by implementing painful measures in the beginning of the mandate and expanding benefits as elections approach. In contrast to this linear relationship, we argue that governments often feel pressured to fulfill (mostly expansionary) campaign promises during the first months in office. Consequently, cutting right away is not what should be expected. Instead, a more nuanced, u-shaped timing trajectory is probable with a period in the beginning characterized by both cuts and fulfillment of expansionary pledges, followed by a period of cutbacks, and finally an expansive phase toward the end of a mandate. We test this argument on a new original dataset of legislative changes in five European countries – Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, and Germany – during the last four decades

Policy instruments and welfare state reform

A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called ‘invisible’ policy instruments, for example, a change in indexation rules. Expansion should, by implication, mainly happen using ‘visible’ policy instruments, for example, a change in nominal benefits. We have coded 1030 legislative reforms of old-age pensions and unemployment protection in Britain, Denmark, Finland and Germany from 1974 to 2014. With this unique data at hand, we find substantial support for this crucial new politics proposition

Mass media attention to welfare state reforms: evidence from Britain, 1996–2014

One of the core questions facing political scientists is how politicians are able to implement cutbacks without suffering electoral backlash. A possible explanation might be that the mass media refrain from reporting on welfare state reforms in a consistent way. In order to explore this, two unique datasets have been collected: one contains information on all policy reforms of British old age pensions and unemployment protection from 1996 to 2014, and the other contains hand-coded media articles that allow the tracking on a monthly basis of what reforms are picked up. It is found that the mass media report on cutbacks, but not on expansions, and that they prioritise easy-to-understand cutbacks over cutbacks that are more technical in nature

Projection in the Face of Centrism: Voter Inferences about Candidates’ Party Affiliation in Low-information Contexts

When are voters more likely to project their own political position onto a candidate for office? We investigate this question by examining the assumed partisanship of a (self-declared) centrist politician, using data from an original survey experiment fielded in Canada, the UK, and the US. In doing so, we build on the Social Categorization Model as well as recent US-focussed political science research on projection and in-group/out-group racial divides – extending our analysis to incorporate racial and class similarities/differences across three countries where these divides likely vary in salience. We thus seek to: (1) contribute to research on the inferences citizens draw in nonpartisan elections and low-information contexts generally; and (2) highlight some potential methodological complications of using partisanship-less candidates in vignette experiments. Results suggest that even in the face of a self-declared centrist, voters from across the political spectrum tended to assume shared partisanship in Canada, the UK, and the US. Examining projection by in-group/out-group divisions indicated that class appears to shape projection across all three countries, but that the racial divide only mattered in the US. Finally, we also find evidence of counter- projection toward out-group members – but once again only in the American context