A large body of aggregate-level work shows that government policies do indeed respond to citizen preferences. But whether citizens recognize that government is responsive is another question ...entirely. Indeed, a prior question is whether or not citizens value responsiveness in the way that academic research assumes they should in the first place. Using comparative data from the European Social Survey, this article examines how citizens see government responsiveness. We show that several key assumptions of the aggregate-level literature are met at the individual level. But we also present results that show that attitudes toward representation and responsiveness are colored, sometimes in quite surprising ways, by winner–loser effects. In a finding that stands in some contrast to the normative literature on the topic, we show that these sorts of short-term attitudes help shape preferences for models of representation. In particular, we show that the distinction between delegates and trustees is a conceptual distinction that has limits in helping us to understand citizen preferences for representation.
Referenda on important public policy questions have come to play a central role in policy making in many states. Referenda, or ballot propositions, have resulted in limits on taxation and limits on ...the number of terms of elected officials, and have dealt with bilingual education, campaign finances, and affirmative action, in states all over the country.
Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan present a searching and original examination of how voters make decisions in direct referenda. The authors ask if voters have some information about the issue easily at their disposal and if they make choices that seem sensible given their interests and the information they have. Looking at the way voters respond to different kinds of questions, the authors suggest that while direct democracy has its failings, the flaws do not necessarily lie with citizens being "duped," nor with voters approving propositions they do not want or do not understand at some basic level.
As cynicism about government has increased many have sought to take policy questions out of the hands of elected officials and put the questions directly before the voters for decision. And yet many are skeptical about the ability of voters to make intelligent decisions about complex policy issues. This important book demonstrates that voters are capable of responding thoughtfully to referenda questions.
This book will appeal to students of contemporary American politics and electoral politics.
Shaun Bowler is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California at Irvine. Todd Donovan is Associate Professor of Political Science, Western Washington University.
We examine the gap between perceptions of seeing referendums as an important democratic principle, versus perceiving how referendums are used in practice. We term this the “referendum disappointment” ...gap. We find support for referendums as a democratic principle is strongest among those most disaffected from the political system, and that the disaffected are more likely to perceive they are not given a say via referendums. We also find context-specific effects. Disappointment was greater in countries with higher corruption and income inequality. We also find higher disappointment among right-populist voters, those who distrusted politicians, and among people who viewed themselves at the bottom of society. Overall, these patterns reflect disappointment with democracy among sections of society who have a sense of not being heard that conflicts with how they expect democracy should work in principle.
The Single Transferable Vote, or STV, is often seen in very positive terms by electoral reformers, yet relatively little is known about its actual workings beyond one or two specific settings. This ...book gathers leading experts on STV from around the world to discuss the examples they know best, and represents the first systematic cross-national study of STV. Furthermore, the contributors collectively build an understanding of electoral systems as institutions embedded within a wider social and political context, and begins to explain the gap between analytical models and the actual practice of elections in Australia, Ireland, and Malta. Rather than seeing electoral institutions in purely mechanical terms, the collection of essays in this volume shows that the effects of electoral system may be contingent rather than automatic. On the basis of solid empirical evidence, the volume argues that the same political system can, in fact, have quite different effects under different conditions.
Contributors to the volume are Shaun Bowler, David Farrell, Michael Gallagher, Bernard Grofman, Wolfgang Hirczy, Colin Hughes, J. Paul Johnston, Michael Laver, Malcom Mackerras, Michael Maley, Michael Marsh, Ian McAllister, and Ben Reilly.
Shaun Bowler is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Riverside. Bernard Grofman is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine.
Widespread approval of direct democracy has been attributed to politically engaged citizens who seek more opportunities to participate in politics. Others suggest that people prefer a limited role in ...politics, but cynicism with representation leads them to embrace direct democracy. The authors analyze opinion in sixteen affluent democracies to test these explanations. The authors find expectations of "more participation" were motivated by distrust of government and the belief that a citizen had a duty to keep a watch on government. Distrust, however, had an inverse relationship with approval of referendums in several nations. Support for referendums was greater among people who expect more opportunities to participate in public decisions and from people who were interested in politics, trusted government, and were satisfied with how democracy was working. Enthusiasm for direct democracy may reflect what people find lacking in representative democracy as much as it reflects interest in a more participatory version of democracy.
This paper examines how individual-level partisanship and state-level factors affect perceptions of electoral integrity in the United States. We find that evaluations of the integrity of the 2020 US ...presidential election national outcome were only modestly conditioned by the quality of election administration in a person’s state. Perceptions of electoral legitimacy were much more substantially conditioned by motivated reasoning associated with a person’s partisanship, the partisan context Republicans resided in, and Republican partisans’ residence in a swing-state where final results from 2020 were delayed due to late-counted ballots. Overall, estimated effects of the quality of election administration on confidence in elections are null or modest. Partisan factors associated with Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 US presidential election were the strongest forces predicting lack of confidence in US elections and perceptions that election officials were altering results. These factors were not evident in 2016. We discuss how these findings may reflect a fundamental alteration of attitudes among Republican voters and elites about the legitimacy of democratic elections in the US, rather than reflecting cyclical variation in partisan confidence associated with which party won the past election.
A long tradition within political science examines the impact of party canvassing on voter participation. Very little of this work, however, is comparative in scope. This essay examines how ...system-level characteristics shape the nature and impact of party canvassing and how voters respond to those efforts. Parties are found to target the same types of potential voters everywhere – those who are likely to participate. However, one important difference is that overall levels of party contact are far greater in candidate-based systems than in proportional representation (PR) systems. Party mobilization, therefore, cannot explain the higher rates of turnout observed in PR systems.
This article examines how electoral competition, in the form of district-level campaign expenditures, affects voters' opinions about elections. We direct our attention at how voters perceive ...competition, and at how electoral competition affects how people perceive elections. Although people generally overestimate the competitiveness of U. S. House races, we demonstrate that perceptions of competition are connected to actual levels of campaign activity. We also find that electoral competition may have contradictory democratic effects. District-level spending is associated with greater attention to news about the local campaign, but also with greater dissatisfaction with election choices.
Who Wants to Raise Taxes? Donovan, Todd; Bowler, Shaun
Political research quarterly,
03/2022, Letnik:
75, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We test hypotheses about individual-level (partisanship and self-interest) and state-level (tax policy) factors that may shape public attitudes about raising taxes. Respondents were given a scenario ...where a state budget needed to be balanced with spending cuts or tax increases, and a scenario where either state sales or state income taxes would be increased. We find partisanship, ideology, and self-interest had substantial relationships with how people responded. Democrats, liberals, and those with fewer resources preferred tax increases over spending cuts, and preferred income tax increases over sales tax increases. Republicans (particularly wealthy Republicans), conservatives, and those with more resources preferred spending cuts to tax increases, and preferred sales tax increases over income tax increases. We also find income tax increases and higher tax burdens may correspond with preferences for cutting spending rather than raising taxes, but variation in the rates of a particular tax was not associated with attitudes about raising that tax. Our results suggest an electorate that may be somewhat more sophisticated about fiscal policy than what has been portrayed in several influential studies.
By now we are familiar with studies which tie being ‘left behind’ to voter support for populist or other extreme views. In the UK case, this is seen in support for Brexit but can also apply to ...support of parties such as UKIP (e.g. Bolet, 2021; Ford and Goodwin, 2014). Comparative studies show that electoral support for populist parties in part reflects lowered trust in mainstream politics (e.g. Geurkink et al., 2020; Keefer et al., 2021; Mauk, 2020), which is seen as a behavioural indicator of slipping legitimacy. Political support for populist movements is interpreted as declining legitimacy of existing governments, and that decline is seen as being tied to economic stress and the ‘left behind’ areas. In this article, we ask whether economics stresses also have impact upon another and possibly more direct measure of government legitimacy – tax morale.
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