Regulation by independent agencies, rather than ministries, is believed to result in better policy outcomes. Yet this belief requires one to accept a complex causal chain leading from formal ...independence to actual independence from politics, to policy decisions, and, ultimately, to policy outcomes. In this study, we analyze the link between the formal and actual independence of regulatory agencies in Western Europe. New data on the appointment of chief executives of these agencies is used to create a proxy for the actual independence of agencies from politics. The analysis demonstrates that formal independence is an important determinant of actual independence, but the rule of law and the number of veto players matter as well.
One important characteristic of justice, and thus of our judicial system, is impartiality. One type of judicial impartiality is impartiality between litigants who command status and material ...resources (‘haves‘) and those who do not (‘have-nots’). I investigate the success of ‘haves’ in appeals to the House of Lords between 1969 and 2003. I investigate two separate paths by which ‘haves’ might succeed more: relative status advantage over other litigants, and being able to hire more experienced and more successful counsel. My innovative operationalisation of relative status advantage shows that while relative status advantage does exist, it is largely a matter of governmental actors having significant advantages over all others; businesses and associations have no advantages over individual litigants. Instructing more experienced counsel also increases the chances of a litigant succeeding. This effect holds when accounting for the relative number of counsel and their relative win rates in previous cases.
I investigate the non-unanimous decisions of judges on the Estonian Supreme Court. I argue that since judges on the court enjoy high de jure independence, dissent frequently, and are integrated in ...the normal judicial hierarchy, the Estonian Supreme Court is a crucial case for the presumption that judicial disagreement reveals policy preferences. I analyse dissenting opinions using an ideal point response model. Examining the characteristics of cases which discriminated with respect to the recovered dimension, I show that this dimension cannot be interpreted as a meaningful policy dimension, but instead reflects disagreement about the proper scope of constitutional redress.
Although not the most prolific of courts, the Bulgarian Constitutional Court (BCC) has now made enough decisions for us to begin characterising its decision making. Generally, decision making on the ...BCC is characterised by a low caseload dominated by referrals from parliament, by a high level of dissent, and by dissent that in turn is characterised by a disagreement between left- and right-wing judges. I make these claims on the basis of an analysis of BCC decisions over the period 1991 to 2010, and in particular on the basis of an analysis of judges’ dissenting votes as the expression of an underlying latent trait. I argue that this latent trait should be interpreted as a left–right dimension, both because the positions on this latent dimension match descriptions of judges’ politics and the politics of those who appointed, and because court majorities from the right end of the recovered dimension are often found when ruling in favour of right-wing opposition groups. On the basis of these findings, I argue for an interpretation of the BCC as an additional legislative chamber, comparable in this respect to the French Conseil Constitutionnel.
Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new ...survey-experimental, choice-based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (a) direct questions eliciting respondents' positions on different issues with (b) a conjoint experiment asking respondents to trade off departures from their preferred positions on those issues. Applying this method to study the relative importance of 34 issues in the United Kingdom, we show that British voters attach significant importance to issues like the death penalty that are not presently the subject of political debate and attach more importance to those issues associated with social liberal-conservative rather than economic left-right divisions.
I investigate appointment to the Court of Appeal and House of Lords between 1880 and 2005. Exploiting the fact that appointment is almost invariably from within the ranks of existing High Court ...judges and using a conditional logit model, I test for effects of legal, professional, and political factors on appointment prospects. Although there is no advantage to having the same political affiliation as the appointing lord chancellor, judges are more likely to be promoted if they were previously appointed by the incumbent party.
Do local political party members reflect the views of voters in their constituencies? Since candidate selection by local party members is the most common form of candidate selection in the United ...Kingdom, it is important to understand local party members’ views, and how those views relate to views in the local area. We investigate the degree to which individual members’ views match local opinion by combining the results of a large-scale survey of party members in the United Kingdom with estimates of local opinion created using multilevel regression and post-stratification. We find that individual party members’ views are moderately to strongly associated with local opinion on both left-right and liberty-authority dimensions. Even so, party members are not entirely congruent with opinion in the local area, having opinions which are either to the left or right of voters in their local area, and which are uniformly more liberal than party supporters.
I investigate appointment to the Court of Appeal and House of Lords between 1880 and 2005. Exploiting the fact that appointment is almost invariably from within the ranks of existing High Court ...judges and using a conditional logit model, I test for effects of legal, professional, and political factors on appointment prospects. Although there is no advantage to having the same political affiliation as the appointing lord chancellor, judges are more likely to be promoted if they were previously appointed by the incumbent party.
We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion ...research. We find that, averaging across a set of high-profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the remaining 3/7. These shares vary substantially across issue types, and the average share attributable to ideology doubles when a second ideological dimension is permitted. We also find that (unidimensional) ideology accounts for almost twice as much response variation (and response instability is substantially lower) among respondents with high, rather than low, political knowledge. Our estimation strategy is based on an ordinal probit model with random effects and is applicable to other data sets that include repeated measurements of ordinal issue position data.
This paper investigates whether five English political parties are differentiating themselves based on the brand personality they are communicating through their websites. The relative brand ...positions of five English political parties are analyzed using Aaker's brand personality scale. The text from each party website is analyzed using content analysis and a dictionary-based tool. The results are plotted in relation to one another on a correspondence analysis map. We find that the two main dimensions on which parties' brand personalities differ relate to the trade-offs between communicating competence and communicating sincerity and between communicating sophistication and communicating ruggedness. We find that parties' brand personalities are distinctive, with the exception of the Green Party, and that the position of one party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, is particularly distinctive. Our research uses Aaker's existing framework for thinking about brand personalities, rather than creating a new framework for politics. By using an existing framework, we are able to use tools developed in other disciplines and show their usefulness for the study of political marketing.
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