Parallel lines? Policy mood in a plurinational democracy

Abstract

We usually think of democratic accountability in national terms-the people do not approve of a government, they can replace it. However, in a plurinational democracy it is not obvious that such a single national public exists. We consider this problem in the case of Scotland, providing the first application of the macro-polity approach to a plurinational democracy. We provide a systematic study of how public opinion in Scotland changes over time compared to that in the rest of Great Britain, using recently developed Bayesian IRT scaling techniques, and ask whether Scottish and British public opinion move in parallel. To the extent that there is a separate Scottish public opinion with a separate party system, this forces us to rethink the way that democracy and accountability work in plurinational political systems.

Two temperatures for one thermostat: The evolution of policy attitudes and support for independence in Catalonia (1991–2018)

“…It has been applied to several European countries such as the United Kingdom (Bartle et al, 2011), France (Stimson et al, 2012), Germany (Weiss, 2012), and Spain (Bartle et al, 2014). Only recently, this approach has been applied to a subnational setting (McGann et al, 2019), opening new avenues of research that will help us to understand the existence of subnational distinct public opinions and accordingly, party systems.…”

“…The thermostatic model illustrates nicely how preferences and policy interact. Even in a decentralized context such as the United Kingdom, the Scottish public reacts to the U.K. government policy in a very similar way to the overall British public (McGann, Dellepiane‐Avellaneda, & Bartle, 2019). Yet, control over taxation and spending has remained relatively concentrated in the United Kingdom, whereas in the increasingly common multilevel systems of governance, the public is generally exposed to two (if not more) simultaneous streams of substantial policy output, namely, the national and regional governments.…”

Measuring public support for European integration from population-level data using a Bayesian IRT model

“…These individual-level models have been applied in political science to the estimation of legislators' ideal points (e.g., Clinton et al 2004) or mass-opinion data (Levendusky and Pope, 2010). The IRT approach has recently been adapted to deal with population-level data and can be used to estimate latent public preferences from the percentages of responses to certain survey items (McGann, 2014;McGann et al, 2019), which is precisely the kind of information required by the DR algorithm as well.…”

“…For each observation, the percentage of responses showing positive attitudestowards Europe is used as input for the Bayesian IRT model. When a neutral response option is present, the percentage of respondents giving at least a neutral response is also used as input(McGann et al, 2019). Percentages of refusal and "don't know" answers are excluded.…”

The policy mood in Spain: the thermostat in a warm climate, 1978–2017

“…The two methods produce very similar results. 2 There is also some research relating to the Netherlands, and some subnational territories (seeMcGann et al, 2019;Romero-Vidal, 2019). 3 It is not necessary that the whole electorate shift their political preferences in order to click the thermostat: the shift of centrists may tip the balance left or right.4 Soroka and Wlezien (2010) examine responsiveness in the US, UK and Canada in relation to specific policy domains.…”