Government partisanship in Western democracies, 1945–1998

Kim, Heemin; Fording, Richard C.

doi:10.1111/1475-6765.00009

Cited by 94 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…It does contain a pair of items for manifesto statements that are positive or negative about the EU; I supplement this with manifesto items about liberalization of trade versus protectionism. Although other problems of comparability or salience of certain issues may arise by using party manifestos, they at least have the property of attaching at the same relative time to the same relative parties that make up governments (Budge 2000;Budge et al 2001;Kim and Fording 2002), as may be the case with surveys.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do ECJ judges all speak with the same voice? Evidence of divergent preferences from the judgments of chambers

Malecki¹

2012

Journal of European Public Policy

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A considerable body of scholarly work has asserted that the ECJ's institutional independence has implied behavioural independence: in short, that the ECJ has pursued a pro-integration agenda perhaps at odds with national governments' preferences. But, inside the black box of the court's collective decisions, do judges share a common preference for expanding the authority of the Court and EU generally? While individual behaviour is not directly observable, the ECJ's system of chambers provides a potentially valuable window on the impact of individual decisions by subsets of the judges. I develop a statistical model, extending the item-response model to account for selective participation in decisions, to find evidence of individual behaviour in the collective judgments. Results for ECJ cases show that judges do not share uniform preferences, suggesting that institutional independence has provided cover for the court, and that judges' preferences lie on a continuum from Europhilia to Euroscepticism.

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Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I expect that this relationship holds in the judges they would appoint to the ECJ. As a measure of the Left-Right orientation of the government at the time of first appointment, I use cabinet-share weighted manifesto scores from Kim and Fording (2002).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Do ECJ judges all speak with the same voice? Evidence of divergent preferences from the judgments of chambers

Malecki¹

2012

Journal of European Public Policy

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“…This is potentially problematic to the extent that parties have repositioned themselves on the Left -Right continuum over the time period covered by our analysis. The alternative approach of relying on election manifestos to classify parties (Gabel and Huber, 2000;Kim and Fording, 2002) does not strike us as an entirely satisfactory solution to this problem. Using a manifesto-based classification, the question becomes whether government by parties that promise to expand the welfare state tends to be associated with more rapid growth of welfare spending.…”

Section: The Core Explanatory Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, labour power and partisan politics revisited

Kwon

Pontusson

2010

Socio-Economic Review

106

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This paper explores temporal variation in partisan effects on social spending growth in OECD countries over the period . We argue that partisan effects are jointly conditioned by globalization and the mobilizational capacity of organized labour. We present three main empirical findings. First, we show that partisan effects increased from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s and then disappeared in the 1990s. Second, we show that partisan effects rose with globalization in the 1970s and early 1980s, a period characterized by rising labour strength in many OECD countries, but this is not true for the post-1990 period, characterized by declining labour strength. Third, we show that globalization was associated with declining partisan effects in countries that experienced union decline in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was associated with rising partisan effects in countries in which unions remained strong.Keywords: political economy, welfare state, globalization, trade unions JEL classification: I38 government policy, provision and effects of welfare programsThe idea that parties of the Left and the Right cater to the distributive interests of their core constituencies and therefore pursue different macroeconomic and social policies has inspired a great deal of research in comparative political economy. As Keech (1995, p. 66) noted some time ago, the literature on partisanship and macroeconomic policy in the USA typically assumes that 'party differences regarding goals have remained fixed or constant' . This assumption characterizes much of the comparative literature as well, but a number of scholars, notably Pierson (1996Pierson ( , 2001a and Huber and Stephens (2001a, b), have argued that government partisanship became less salient to social policy in the course of the 1980s and the 1990s. Against the decline-of-partisanship thesis, Korpi and Palme (2003) and Allan and Scruggs (2004) remained an important determinant of the benefits provided by social insurance schemes in the 1980s and 1990s. We seek to contribute to this debate about inter-temporal variation in the effects of government partisanship in the realm of social policy and, in so doing, to advance the broader agenda suggested by Keech, i.e. to explore the conditions that affect the goals pursued by parties.The question of changes in the salience of government partisanship must not be conflated with the question of shifts in the centre of political gravity. For our purposes, the critical question is not whether Left-leaning governments are less prone to engage in welfare-state expansion today than they were 20 or 30 years ago, but rather whether the policies of Left-leaning and Right-leaning governments have converged or diverged. There is lots of evidence to suggest that the centre of political gravity moved to the Right in most OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. To the extent that Right parties moved farther in a rightward direction than Left parties, however, we would observe an increase in partisan differences as well as a rightward shift of all partie...

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“…It also makes it possible to attribute a non-significant or unexpected test result either to the absence of partisanship in policymaking, or simply to a change in party preference. The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) database offers a valuable source in order to operationalize party positions over time: this data has been used, in particular, for computing party positions along a left-right scale (Klingemann et al, 1994;Kim and Fording, 1998), which can then be weighted according to each party's number of ministerial portfolios in order to get a measure of government partisanship (Kim and Fording, 2002). Although sophisticated, this kind of measure still presents the drawback of a high degree of aggregation, which may be more problematic for studying the party-policy link than for accounts of party competition strategies.…”

Section: Do Parties Matter? Contrasted Results At the Macro-levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a conditional model of partisanship in policymaking

Guinaudeau

2014

Fr Polit

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Do parties matter for policies? Despite the vast number of contributions to this old question, empirical findings remain highly contrasted and fail to demonstrate a substantial partisan influence. Nevertheless, this article argues that we should not conclude that parties are irrelevant for understanding policies. After an overview of the available empirical findings, it emphasizes that studies of legislative and governmental politics provide solid reasons for expecting a partisan influence and that we could make sense of the contradictory results by exploring the conditions under which parties matter. The final section identifies potential institutional, political, contextual and issue-specific determinants of partisanship in policymaking.

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Government partisanship in Western democracies, 1945–1998

Cited by 94 publications

References 57 publications

Do ECJ judges all speak with the same voice? Evidence of divergent preferences from the judgments of chambers

Do ECJ judges all speak with the same voice? Evidence of divergent preferences from the judgments of chambers

Globalization, labour power and partisan politics revisited

Toward a conditional model of partisanship in policymaking

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