In his most recent article “Bringing agency back into the study of partisan politics: A note on recent developments in the literature on party politics“ Reimut Zohlnhöfer and Georg Wenzelburger present some new ideas about recent developments in the literature on partisan effects on policy-making.

The authors start from the observation that several recent studies have called for an “electoral turn” in partisan theory. These studies suggest that scholars should strive for establishing a party–voter link on the micro-level depending on the policy area at stake, because the traditionally stable relationships between parties and certain groups of voters are decreasing.

In their contribution, Zohlnhöfer and Wenzelburger add to this literature by claiming that the “electoral turn”-literature seems to downplay other sources that may be responsible for partisan effects on public policies. While they acknowledge that vote seeking motives are still important, the authors argue that political actors and their preferences should not be considered mere agents of voter preferences. Regarding the effect of partisan ideology on public policies from an “agency-based” approach, party positions and the policies parties adopt in government can also be developed on the level of party members or policy-makers themselves.

The article suggests that future research on the role of parties in policy-making should focus on a systematic assessment of the empirical implications of the model and define the conditions under which this approach works best.

Louisa Prien

Are voters unable to respond to policy changes or do they respond by rewarding or punishing the government?

In a recent paper, published in Governance, Georg Wenzelburger and his Co-authors Christoph Arndt and Carsten Jensen test the policy-vote link under circumstances where policymakers are clearly responsible for the events to happen, in this case changes to welfare legislation. The welfare state is an ideal area for testing this claim, as social policy issues affect life chances of many citizens. Thus, the article relates to a core aspect of the “blind retrospection perspective” that has not been put to test before.

Empirically, the study integrates existing survey data from the German Politbarometer with a unique, new dataset on legislative policy decisions regulating the generosity of old age pensions and unemployment protection (from the WSCEP project). This setup allows tracking the policy-vote link for 329,167 respondents from 1977 to 2013.

The results clearly indicate that voters react to policy changes in a meaningful way, but also that they can be distracted by high-profile, extreme events. On average, expanding generosity of old age pensions and unemployment protection leads to higher government popularity, while cutbacks have the opposite effect. Moreover, the study shows that most voters respond to policy changes within the first month or two (see Figure below).

In sum, the paper does not find support for the rather blunt notion of blind retrospection according to which voters are unable to react meaningfully to policy decisions as they lack information. Instead, voters do respond to very visible policy changes that affect their lives, but extreme events can overshadow these reactions at times. This is good news for anybody concerned with the state of modern democracy!

Louisa Prien

On 17 January, our former colleague Helge Staff visited the TU Kaiserslautern political science department. Helge, who is now working in the project “Administration and Science” (“Verwaltung und Wissenschaft”) at the University of Hannover, made his way to Kaiserslautern to complete his dissertation with the oral exam (disputatio).
We congratulate him to taking this big step and to the excellent result he achieved!

As for the work that Helge defended in the exam: His doctoral thesis deals with the political economy of private security in a way that makes both a theoretical and empirical contribution to the literature. The thesis combines policy analysis and specifically the multiple streams framework with criminological work in an innovative fashion. With its multi-method approach that integrates quantitative analysis and the qualitative method of process tracing, the study probes what determines policy choices for the privatization of security as well as which factors condition relevant policy outcomes. The results from the analyses point to the importance of government composition – which party is in government? – and to a central role played by policy entrepreneurs.

So, policy scholars and criminologists may want to look out for a significant addition to the literature on law and order policy being published in the next time.

Pascal König

For the January meeting of the Volkswagen-Stiftung-funded project “Deciding about, by, and together with algorithmic decision making systems”, the project groups met at Birmingham University. After reflecting on the previous achievements in the project, the meeting served to place a stronger emphasis on the law perspective and to focus more on the criminal justice dimension of the project.

We took some time to discuss scenarios that the Birmingham group had prepared with great effort. They were modeled after real cases in which ADM systems are used in the British criminal justice system and underscored the importance of dealing with the ways in which ADM systems may intervene in social practices, including in very sensitive areas. These scenarios as well as presentations by Professors Karen Yeung and Wolfgang Schulz helped to sharpen our understanding of what is at stake when using ADM systems in the criminal justice process and which decisions at the various stages need to be explicitly considered. Based on this input, we talked about the next steps and action points to be tackled in the second year of the project.

Besides having a very productive meeting, we also had the chance to experience the Indian cuisine of Birmingham and we learned about Old Joe, the university’s clock tower, apparently habing been an inspiration for the work of J.R. Tolkien.

Pascal König

Looking for a Christmas gift? Maybe you are happy to hear that the new book on welfare state reforms is out now and might be a gift idea for your family and friends (probably not…), but perhaps for yourself (who knows?).

At any rate, I am happy to see this joint work with Carsten Jensen (Aarhus University) finally in print. The book draws heavily on the work done by the WSCEP project team (Carsten, myself, Christoph Arndt and Seonghui Lee), but centers mostly on the policy side – that is the complicated world of social policy legislation. It introduces our new dataset on welfare state reforms in the UK, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany from 1974 to 2014, which is now also available online on Harvard Dataverse.

In the book, we have systematically investigated core questions that have preoccupied the welfare state literature at least since the 1990s. These include the extent of path dependency in mature welfare states, the usage of so-called “invisible” policy instruments for hiding cutbacks, and the role of partisanship – on whether the ideological color of the incumbent affects policy – which have been analysed in depth by examining the new dataset presented in this book.

Georg Wenzelburger

This article considers at the impact of appearance on the US House of Representatives 2016 elections. The authors expect the perceived attractiveness, competence, or sympathy to predict the electoral success of House of Representatives candidates. Furthermore, the article raises the question of whether the effects on appearance are conditioned by the status of detention, sex and age of the candidates. If one regards the difference between the winner’s and the runner’s first votes as a dependent variable, one finds that only the attractiveness has a positive effect on the share of votes. Perceived sympathy and competence show no significant effects. These results support the work of Berggren and colleagues (2010), who also recognize attractiveness as a relevant factor. Furthermore, the results of the current article show that attractiveness plays a role especially for those candidates who have the advantage of tenure. In addition, the studies show that gender-specific differences in appearance are observed. Being sympathetic to one’s own appearance helps a candidate to compete with another woman.

For more information click here.

Daniel Meyer

In a recent paper, published in West European Politics, I have analyzed – together with Carsten Jensen, Seonghui Lee and Christoph Arndt – how governments strategically time welfare state legislation. Our main theoretical argument boils down to the observation that governments may not simply “electioneer” welfare state expansions and cutbacks at their discretion over the electoral term with cutbacks in the beginning of a mandate and expansions at the end, as the literature on political business cycles expects. This is because governments are bound by their election manifesto and these manifestos mostly involve pledges to expand social policies. Hence, whereas it seems reasonable from a political economy perspective to indeed expect that governments expand the welfare state toward the end of their mandate in order to reap electoral gains, governmemnts have to weigh possible cutbacks in the beginning of a mandate against the need to fulfill – mostly expansive – electoral pledges.

Building on our new dataset on welfare state reform legislation (Welfare State Reform Dataset, WSRD), we test these claims and find empirical evidence that support our theoretical expectations. Indeed, welfare state legislation seems to follow a u-shaped trajectory over the course of a governments mandate with a mixed (or slightly expansive) period in the first months, followed by a cutback period, and a clearly expansionist stance toward the end. The exception from the rule are governments made up of parties that have pledged to cut the welfare state in the first place. Here the u-shaped relationship is less pronounced and a linear positive trajectory fits the data better (i.e. cutbacks in the beginning, expansions in the end) (see Figure below).

We hope that these findings contribute to the debate about the strategic timing of welfare state cutbacks, the political business cycle, and public policies, in general.

Georg Wenzelburger

When I joined the inaugural lecture of the EuroCrim 2019 in Ghent (Belgium) – the opening of this year’s large conference of the European Society of Criminology – it felt a bit like being a Ph.D.-student again and participating at the first big scientific conference. As a political scientist, I clearly was the odd one out only knowing one or two criminologists from the rare events of interdisciplinary research I participated in over the last years (e.g. thanks to my joint project on the penal-welfare nexus).

However, political science was actually all over the place during these days at the conference. In his inaugural speech, Tapio Lappi-Seppälä, winner of the lifetime criminology award, talked about patterns of penal policy, linking imprisonment rates up to concepts borrowed from political science, such as Lijphart’s theory of democracies or Esping-Andersen’s welfare regimes – couldn’t it be more political sciency? And in a panel on fear of crime, political dynamics were mentioned as main reason of why everybody is concerned with fear of crime nowadays (while actual crime rates are decreasing). Finally, the panel I participated in was even termed “politics and insecurity” – so I felt quickly at home.

In my talk, I presented the key theoretical claims and main empirical findings of the quantitative analyses that will be published as part of my book “The partisan politics of law and order” – the final output of my research project on law and order policies forthcoming in Spring 2020 at Oxford University Press. My main findings come in two steps: First of all, it seems safe to say that parties emphasize law and order issues in their manifestos to a much stronger extent, if voters find security-related issues to be important and if the configuration of party competition includes strong right-wing populist parties. However, parties do not only talk about law and order policies, but they actually put them into law, once they enter office. Based on analysis of public spending and law and order legislation, I also find that parties which emphasize law and order heavily in the election campaign translate this emphasis into more spending and tougher legislation when they are part of the government. However, judicial review by powerful constitutional courts may push back such developments to a certain extent. Nevertheless, my findings show that party politics is key if we want to understand why some countries did engage on tough-on-crime policies whether others don’t.

I am very grateful to the conveners of the panel, Emily Gray and Steve Farrell (Derby University, UK) for having invited me to present my findings at the EuroCrim 2019 – not only because it I received good feedback and learned a lot attending an interesting conference, but also because I got to know the very cozy city of Ghent. Clearly, next time I will stop by, I need to reserve more time to do sight-seeing in what seems to be a very attractive city to live (see photos).

Georg Wenzelburger