Responsibility Attribution for Collective Decision Makers

Duch, Raymond M.; Przepiorka, Wojtek; Stevenson, Randolph T.

doi:10.1111/ajps.12140

Cited by 84 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…It is much less clear, though, who they should hold responsible when there is a coalition government (Powell and Whitten, 1993;Duch, Przepiorka and Stevenson, 2015). That the prime minister is the most visible member of the government and is widely recognized as the agenda setter (Norpoth and Gschwend, 2010; suggests that voters will hold the prime ministerial party more responsible than its coalition partners.…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

Crabtree¹,

Golder²,

Gschwend³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspective on campaigns that focuses on the strategic use of emotive language. We argue that the level of positive sentiment parties adopt in their campaigns depends on their incumbency status, their policy position, and objective economic conditions. We test these claims with a novel dataset that captures the emotive language used in over 400 party manifestos across eight European countries. As predicted, we find that incumbent parties, particularly incumbent prime ministerial parties, use more positive sentiment than opposition parties. We find that ideologically moderate parties employ higher levels of positive sentiment than extremist parties. And we find that all parties exhibit lower levels of positive sentiment when the economy is performing poorly but that this negative effect is weaker for incumbents. Our analysis has important implications for research on campaign strategies and retrospective voting. (Downs, 1957;Ansolabehere and Snyder, 2000; Schofield, 2003;Adams, 2001;Adams, Merrill and Grofman, 2005;Adams, Scheiner and Kawasumi, 2016). The second dimension captures campaign focus -whether parties adopt campaign messages that focus on themselves or their opponents (Skaperdas and Grofman, 1995;Lau and Pomper, 2002;Geer, 2006;Elmelund-Praestekaer, 2008Hansen and Pedersen, 2008). One aspect of campaigns that is ignored in this two-dimensional framework is campaign sentiment, which refers to the emotive content of campaigns. Whereas campaign content and campaign focus address what parties say and who they say it about, campaign sentiment addresses how they say it.Scholars are increasingly looking at how the emotive content of campaign messages affects voter behavior Roseman, Abelson and Ewing, 1986;Weber, Searles and Ridout, 2011;Utych, 2018). The common thread in this literature is that voters are not merely influenced by the substantive content of campaigns but also by their emotive content. Studies have repeatedly shown that electoral campaigns can be manipulated to trigger emotional responses that, in turn, produce predictable changes in voter behavior. This raises a natural question. If campaign sentiment influences voter behavior, political actors should be strategic about its use. Are they? To date, there has been little research that explicitly looks at the strategic use of emotion in election campaigns. What research there is tends to focus on the historically majoritarian systems in the United States and the United Kingdom (Ridout and Searles, 2011; Kosmidis et al., Forthcoming). 1 In this article, we examine the strategic use of emotive language in European election campaigns.Studies that look at emotion in campaigns often focus on the use of images and music . However, language can also engender different types of sentiment, such as fear, anxiety, sadness, or optimism (Roseman, Abelson and Ewing, 1986;Pennebaker, 1993;Pennebaker and Francis, 1996). We build on a long tradition that emphasizes...

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Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

Crabtree¹,

Golder²,

Gschwend³

et al. 2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The surprising result of the experiment is that even though voters can observe delegation and they understand the incentives, when the decision is delegated the decision-maker is punished substantially less on average following unfair allocations (Bartling & Fischbacher, 2012). A similar reduction in punishment can be observed when power is more dispersed in a collective decisionmaking body (Duch et al, 2014).…”

Section: Discretion and Political Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 86%

“…In contrast, I argue that the simple act of delegating more responsibility to implementing bureaucrats separates politicians from policy outcomes enough to reduce the amount of blame voters assign them for outcomes. This is the finding at the center of a growing body of experimental evidence demonstrating that alienating decision-making power can redirect blame for undesirable outcomes (Bartling & Fischbacher, 2012;Coffman, 2011;Duch, Przepiorka, & Stevenson, 2014;Fershtman & Gneezy, 2001;Hamman, Loewenstein, & Weber, 2010). …”

Section: Discretion and Political Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 90%

Deliberate Indiscretion? How Political Corruption Encourages Discretionary Policy Making

Loftis

2014

Comparative Political Studies

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This article reports the first empirical evidence that politicians delegate to trusted bureaucrats to diminish political responsibility for policy. Political science has been perennially concerned with why political leaders delegate authority to bureaucrats, but this work's focus on advanced democracies has overlooked how corruption and political influence over bureaucrats can turn delegation into a means of obfuscating responsibility. Using a measure that differentiates political corruption from corruption at lower levels of government and a new data set of policy making on more than 600 European Commission directives in the 10 former communist European Union (EU) member states, I show that political-level corruption is associated with increased delegation to bureaucrats. This relationship between political corruption and bureaucratic discretion is conditional upon the political independence of the bureaucracy, such that politicians engaged in corruption delegate more to reduce clarity of responsibility only when they possess informal means to influence bureaucrats.

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“…We interact the growth rate with the chancellor's party dummy because a responsibility for the state of the economy is primarily attributed to the head of government's party (Duch, Przepiorka and Stevenson, 2015).…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Länder-based Forecast of the 2017 German Bundestag Election

Kayser¹,

Leininger²

2017

APSC

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When elections are distant, polls are poor predictors. Too few voters are paying attention and too much can change before election day. Structural models can establish baseline expectations but suffer from high uncertainty and underspecification imposed by small samples. We present an early forecast of the 2017 Bundestag election results for individual parties that leverages economic and political data as well as state parliament (Landtag) election results in the German states (Länder ) to sidestep these shortcomings. A linear random coefficients model provides our estimates. Länder elections are dispersed over the calendar and offer the advantage of capturing both actual voter preferences and new political issues. We argue that this approach offers a promising method for early forecasts when polls are not informative.words: 3735 *

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Responsibility Attribution for Collective Decision Makers

Cited by 84 publications

References 33 publications

It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

Deliberate Indiscretion? How Political Corruption Encourages Discretionary Policy Making

A Länder-based Forecast of the 2017 German Bundestag Election

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