Dynamic Political Rhetoric: Electoral, Economic, and Partisan Determinants of Speech-Making in the UK Parliament

Parliamentary debate is one major outlet for Members of Parliament (MPs), who spend lots of time preparing for and participating in such discussions. In this paper, we investigate in how far the focus MPs choose in their speeches varies as the economic, partisan and electoral context changes. We choose to study the dynamics nature of speech content in the UK House of Commons, as British MPs enjoy broad discretion regarding the content of their speeches. This paper analyses the constituency, national or partisan focus of all speeches held in the House of Commons between January 1996 and September 2004. We find that government and opposition MPs react differently to contextual changes. Government MPs generally have a higher district focus, which is increased further when the local economy declines and when the governing party becomes more popular

When Experts Disagree: Response Aggregation and Its Consequences in Expert Surveys

Political scientists use expert surveys to assess latent features of political actors. Experts, though, are unlikely to be equally informed and assess all actors equally well. The literature acknowledges variance in measurement quality, but pays little attention to the implications of uncertainty for aggregating responses. We discuss the nature of the measurement problem in expert surveys. We then propose methods to assess the ability of experts to judge where actors stand and to aggregate expert responses. We examine the effects of aggregation for a prominent survey in the literature on party politics and EU integration. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we demonstrate that it is better to aggregate expert responses using the median or modal response, rather than the mean

Assessing the Measurement of Policy Positions in Expert Surveys

Expert surveys provide a common means for assessing parties' policy positions on latent dimensions. These surveys often cover a wide variety of parties and issues, and it is unlikely that experts are able to assess all parties equally well across all issues. While the existing literature using expert surveys acknowledges this fact, insufficient attention has been paid to the variance in the quality of measurement across issues and parties. In this paper, we first discuss the nature of the measurement problem with respect to expert surveys and then propose methods borrowed from the organizational psychology and medical fields to assess the ability of experts to assess where parties stand on particular dimensions. While we apply our technique to one particular study, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the method can be applied to any expert survey. Finally, we propose a simple non-parametric bootstrapping procedure that allows researchers to assess the effects of expert survey measurement error in analyses that use them

The rhyme and reason of rebel support: exploring European voters’ attitudes toward dissident MPs

Citizens often support politicians who vote against their parties in parliament. They view rebels as offering better representation, appreciate expressive acts, take rebellion as a signal of standing up for constituents, or see rebels as defending their moral convictions. Each explanation has different implications for representation, but they have not yet been tested systematically against one another. We implement survey experiments on nationally representative samples in the UK, Germany, France, and Italy to assess whether voters treat rebellion as a cue for better representation or infer positive character traits implying a valence advantage. Policy congruence does not drive voters’ preference for rebels. However, voters do associate positive traits with rebel MPs, even if they do not feel better represented by them

Ideological Clarity in Multiparty Competition: A New Measure and Test Using Election Manifestos

Parties in advanced democracies take ideological positions as part of electoral competition, but some parties communicate their position more clearly than others. Existing research on democratic party competition has paid much attention to assessing partisan position taking in electoral manifestos, but it has largely overlooked how manifestos reflect the clarity of these positions. This article presents a scaling procedure that better reflects the data-generating process of party manifestos. This new estimator allows us to recover not only positional estimates, but also estimates for the ideological clarity or ambiguity of parties. The study validates its results using Monte Carlo tests, a manifesto-drafting simulation and a human coding exercise. Finally, the article applies the estimator to party manifestos in four multiparty democracies and demonstrates that ambiguity can enhance the appeal of parties with platforms that become more moderate, and lessen the appeal of parties with platforms that become more extreme

Ideology and the Politics of Constitution Making: The Institutional Organization of the European Convention

This study investigates the politics of constitution making through an analysis of the institutional organization of the European Union (EU) constitutional convention. Constitutional conventions resemble parliamentary bodies in terms of their institutional arrangements, and need to be studied with the same sensitivity that has been given to the study of legislatures. This study focuses on the role of committees in the EU Convention and their impact on the drafting process. Using new data on delegate positions in the Convention, I test two competing committee composition hypotheses, the outlier and representative committee hypothesis, with a Monte Carlo simulation technique. The four main results of this study are (1) that the political leadership of the European convention controlled to a large extent its institutional organization, (2) that committees were influential in the drafting process, (3) that there is stronger evidence for committee outliers than for representative committees, and (4) that the outlying committees were slanted to the left

Improving the Measurement of Policy Preferences in Surveys: Bringing the Status-Quo back in

One of the fundamental uses of surveys is the measurement of policy preferences. We can ask voters how they locate themselves on policy dimensions of substantive interests, and we can ask them how they perceive the positions of political parties. Likewise, we can use surveys to get political elite to reveal their policy positions or experts to judge the positions of parties on a set of salient policy dimensions. Increasingly, such surveys present respondents with issue scales defined as trade-offs between different policy goals. Surprisingly, scholars have not paid much attention to the fact that such scales are directional and include an implicit reference point: the status quo. We examine the effects of indicating an explicit status quo midpoint in trade-off issue questions using an experimental setup in an online survey that was part of the German National Election Study in 2009. We show that status quo labeling has three major effects. First, the indication of the status quo significantly reduces item non-response. Second, issue scales with status quo indication change respondents' self-placement and the perception of political parties due to the provision of an explicit reference point. Third, individually perceived ideological distances between a voter and her preferred party are smaller when a status quo is indicated. This leads to a slightly stronger predictor of ideological distance in a conditional logit model of vote choice. The findings have implications for designers and users of voter and expert surveys

Caracterisation et etude de l'expression des nouveaux genes de la region HLA

SIGLEAvailable from INIST (FR), Document Supply Service, under shelf-number : T 80675 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc