Political Choice in Britain uses data from the 1964 to 2001 British election studies (BES), 1992 to 2002 monthly Gallup polls, and numerous other national surveys conducted over the past four decades ...to test the explanatory power of rival sociological and individual rationality models of electoral turnout and party choice. Analyses endorse a valence politics model that challenges the long-dominant social class model. British voters make their choices by evaluating the performance of parties and party leaders in economic and other important policy areas. Although these evaluations may be largely products of events that occur long before an election campaign officially begins, parties’ national and local campaign activities are also influential. Consistent with the valence politics model, partisan attachments display individual- and aggregate-level dynamics that reflect ongoing judgements about the managerial abilities of parties and their leaders. A general incentives model provides the best explanation of turnout. Calculations of the costs and influence-discounted benefits of voting and sense of civic duty are key variables in this model. Significantly, the decline in turnout in recent elections does not reflect more general negative trends in public attitudes about the political system. Voters judge the performance of British democracy in much the same way as they evaluate its parties and politicians. Support at all levels of the political system is a renewable resource, but one that must be renewed.
What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well ...competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in contemporary Britain.
In his seminal book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Hirschman suggests that loyal members are less likely to exit when dissatisfied with the performance of the organization. In the context of a political ...regime, however, we argue that loyalty may actually encourage exit because loyal members are more sensitive to the performance decline of the regime. Using an original survey conducted in Hong Kong, we show that survey respondents with a stronger local identity have greater migration intentions. We also find that the heterogeneity of perceived political changes plays a significant role as a mediator. We discuss the political implications for Hong Kong.
A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. ...The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice. However, spatial effects still have sizeable indirect effects on the vote via their influence on valence judgements. The results of exogeneity tests bolster claims about the flow of influence from spatial calculations to valence judgments to electoral choice.
Although political scientists have begun to investigate the properties of Internet surveys, much remains to be learned about the utility of the Internet mode for conducting major survey research ...projects such as national election studies. This paper addresses this topic by presenting the results of an extensive survey comparison experiment conducted as part of the 2005 British Election Study. Analyses show statistically significant, but generally small, differences in distributions of key explanatory variables in models of turnout and party choice. Estimating model parameters reveals that there are few statistically significant differences between coefficients generated using the in-person and Internet data, and the relative explanatory power of rival models is virtually identical for the two types of data. In general, the in-person and Internet data tell very similar stories about what matters for turnout and party preference in Britain. Determining if similar findings obtain in other countries should have high priority on the research agenda for national election studies.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publicizes comparative performance data on Hospital Compare, a website maintained to support consumer decision making. Given the agency’s goal, this study ...investigates the relationship between public reporting and hospital choices of hip replacement patients in Texas. Estimating individual-level valuations of provider characteristics allowing for heterogeneity across patients, we find consumer selections and hospitals’ displayed performance vary together in time. Comparing associations involving public reporting with those associated with more readily observable hospital attributes, we conclude relationships coinciding with release of comparative performance data are modest, but not inconsequential. Our use of an empirical strategy novel for evaluation of public reporting has methodological implications, while the study’s affirmative result is of potential interest to policy makers and administrators.
The New Politics of Class by Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley is a new and noteworthy contribution to the huge literature on the impact of social class on voting and elections in Great Britain. For ...anyone interested in British party politics, the book makes interesting reading. The New Politics of Class (hereafter NPC) presents a challenging argument about the evolution of class politics in Britain over the past half-century. Evans and Tilley’s analyses and interpretations raise a large number of controversial issues that deserve careful consideration by experts in the field. Well organised and clearly written, the book will appeal to a broad audience of social scientists, journalists, students and interested laypersons. Relying heavily on simple graphs to present supporting quantitative evidence, NPC is readily accessible to anyone lacking technical training in sophisticated statistical methods.
The political socialization literature attributes the formation of public political attitudes in mature democracies to varying mixtures of life-cycle processes, generational experiences and period ...effects. In the absence of long-term, individual-level panel data, delineating these effects has been a longstanding problem. Building on path-breaking work by Yang and Land, recent research has utilized multi-level analyses of repeated cross-sectional survey data sets to estimate life-cycle, generational and period effects in several Western countries. Employing data from national election surveys conducted over the past decade by the TEDS project, this paper uses the Yang–Land methodology to conduct illustrative analyses of age cohort and period effects on political attitudes and behavior in a new Asian democracy, Taiwan. Analyses of KMT partisanship show a significant generational component, and analyses of political efficacy, political interest and electoral turnout suggest that inferences about age cohort and period effects can depend on how individual-level age effects are specified.
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