Institutions operating beyond direct control of government, such as central banks, constitutional courts and public broadcasters, enjoy guarantees of de jure independence, but de jure independence is ...no guarantee of de facto independence. This is especially so for public broadcasting, where cultural variables are often assumed to be decisive. In this article, the de jure and de facto independence of thirty-six public service broadcasters world-wide are operationalized, and de jure independence is found to explain a high degree of de facto independence when account is taken of the size of the market for news. Other variables considered in previous literature – such as bureaucratic partisanship and the polarization of the party system – are not found to be significant.
I investigate the success of litigants in tax cases in England and Wales between 1996 and 2010. I explore the effect upon success of having better-ranked legal representation, according to rankings ...of barristers published by Chambers. I find that, for a variety of model specifications, there is no significant positive effect of having better-ranked legal representation. After conducting a sensitivity analysis, I conclude that better-ranked legal representation might have a positive effect on litigation outcomes, but only if better-ranked lawyers receive cases that are substantially more difficult to win. However, if better-ranked lawyers receive substantially more difficult cases, this suggests consumers of legal representation are sophisticated enough to dispense with legal rankings.
Is policy representation in contemporary Westminster systems solely a function of programmatic national parties, or does the election of legislators via single-member districts result in MPs whose ...policy positions are individually responsive to public opinion in their constituencies? We generate new measures of constituency opinion in Britain and show that, in three different policy domains and controlling for MP party, the observed legislative behavior of MPs is indeed responsive to constituency opinion. The level of responsiveness is moderate, but our results do suggest a constituency-MP policy bond that operates in addition to the well-known bond between voters and parties.
The Pork Barrel Politics of the Towns Fund Hanretty, Chris
The Political quarterly (London. 1930),
January–March 2021, 2021-01-00, 20210101, Volume:
92, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The article reviews the selection of towns in England under the Town Deals scheme, a funding scheme set up in the summer of 2019. Under the scheme, 101 towns in England were selected from a long‐list ...of 541 towns to bid for funding to improve local infrastructure. The findings show that Conservative‐held areas (and in particular marginal Conservative‐held areas) were much more likely to be selected for the scheme, and that this association remains—even when controlling for the ranks that civil servants awarded towns on the basis of qualitative and quantitative criteria. The findings call into question ministers’ commitment, under to the Nolan principle, to take decisions ‘impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias’.
By-elections, or special elections, play an important role in many democracies – but whilst there are multiple forecasting models for national elections, there are no such models for multiparty ...by-elections. Multiparty by-elections present particular analytic problems related to the compositional character of the data and structural zeros where parties fail to stand. I model party vote shares using Dirichlet regression, a technique suited for compositional data analysis. After identifying predictor variables from a broader set of candidate variables, I estimate a Dirichlet regression model using data from all post-war by-elections in the UK (n=468). The cross-validated error of the model is comparable to the error of costly and infrequent by-election polls (MAE: 4.0 compared to 3.6 for polls). The steps taken in the analysis are in principle applicable to any system that uses by-elections to fill legislative vacancies.
Polarization is a key characteristic of party systems, but scholars disagree about how polarization relates to the number of parties in a system. Different authors find positive, negative, or null ...relationships. I claim that when polarization is measured using the weighted standard deviation of standardized party positions, seat-level polarization is equal to NS−112+NS−1, where NS is the effective number of seat-winning parties. This relationship is what one would expect if parties were drawn randomly from a super-population with an effective sample size somewhere between the effective and raw number of parties. I test this claim using multiple datasets which report party positions and seat shares, before extending my analysis to consider vote-level polarization, the range of positions, and polarization in presidential and parliamentary regimes. My work extends the Taageperaan research agenda of building interlocking networks of equations relating key quantities of electoral and party systems.
In this article, the non‐unanimous decisions of the Portuguese and Spanish Constitutional Tribunals for the periods 1989–2009 and 2000–2009 are analysed. It is shown that judicial dissent can be ...predicted moderately well on the basis of judicial ideal points along a single dimension. This dimension is equivalent to the left–right cleavage in both Portugal and Spain. The characteristics of the recovered dimension are demonstrated by analysing both the properties of the cases and the properties of the justices who decided them.
This article provides an overview of multilevel regression and post-stratification. It reviews the stages in estimating opinion for small areas, identifies circumstances in which multilevel ...regression and post-stratification can go wrong, or go right, and provides a worked example for the UK using publicly available data sources and a previously published post-stratification frame.
Recent decades have seen a considerable increase in delegation to independent regulatory agencies, which has been justified by reference to the superior performance of these bodies relative to ...government departments. Yet, the hypothesis that more independent regulators do better work has hardly been tested. We examine the link using a comprehensive measure of the quality of work carried out by competition authorities in 30 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries, and new data on the design of these organizations. We find that formal independence has a positive and significant effect on quality. Contrary to expectations, though, formal political accountability does not boost regulatory quality, and there is no evidence that it increases the effect of independence by reducing the risk of slacking. The quality of work is also enhanced by increased staffing, more extensive regulatory powers, and spillover effects of a more capable bureaucratic system.
I challenge Strong’s findings that student employment is not related to attendance. I argue that the original analysis is guilty of controlling for a post-treatment variable. As a result, the ...coefficients in the regression model do not show how employment causes changes in attendance. I show that employment likely has a negative effect on attendance even given severe confounding. Academics should, if asked, tell students that their attendance will likely suffer the more paid work they do.
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