Suchergebnisse

Peter Hall, Wade Jacoby, Jonah Levy og Sophie Meunier (red.), The Politics of Representation in the Global Age: Identification, Mobilization, and Adjudication. Cambridge University Press, 2014 (anmeldt af Martin Bækgaard).

Administrative burdens in citizen-state interactions are increasingly gaining attention in both research and practice. However, being a relatively young research field, there is still considerable disagreement about how to conceptualize and measure administrative burdens. In particular, burdens are sometimes equated with what the state does, and other times with what target group members experience. We argue that such disagreement is a barrier for further theoretical development and has removed focus from studying the process in which state actions are converted into individual outcomes. We provide advice on how to conceptually bridge the gap between different conceptualizations of administrative burden and lay out a research agenda covering the next important theoretical and empirical steps based on such a shared understanding. We propose that developing the conceptual and empirical foundation of administrative burden research will help asking new and important research questions and building cumulative knowledge. To illustrate these points, we present a series of new research questions for future research to engage with. ; Administrative burdens in citizen-state interactions are increasingly gaining attention in both research and practice. However, being a relatively young research field, there is still considerable disagreement about how to conceptualize and measure administrative burdens. In particular, burdens are sometimes equated with what the state does, and other times with what target group members experience. We argue that such disagreement is a barrier for further theoretical development and has removed focus from studying the process in which state actions are converted into individual outcomes. We provide advice on how to conceptually bridge the gap between different conceptualizations of administrative burden and lay out a research agenda covering the next important theoretical and empirical steps based on such a shared understanding. We propose that developing the conceptual and empirical foundation of administrative burden research will help asking new and important research questions and building cumulative knowledge. To illustrate these points, we present a series of new research questions for future research to engage with.

ABSTRACT: Performance information has been suggested as a means to inform citizens about—and shape their reactions to—public sector performance. However, individuals' ability to process information varies considerably. This implies that the same item of performance information may be understood differently by different citizens. Drawing on cognitive psychology research, we argue that cognitive differences affect citizens' ability to interpret performance information and moderate the extent to which performance information affects citizen satisfaction with public services. The argument is tested in a large-scale survey experiment. Our findings provide evidence of a performance information paradox: Those who are better able to interpret performance information do not adjust their satisfaction levels in response to the information. Conversely, those with lesser abilities to interpret and understand performance information are more responsive to it, but their responses are often based on invalid interpretations.

The provision of public services is a key responsibility of elected politicians. Research suggests that citizens' satisfaction evaluations of public services are incomplete representations of service quality and performance. However, little attention has been given to the political nature of service evaluations. Based on the theory of (partisan) motivated reasoning and the literature on responsibility attribution, we argue that citizens provide more favorable evaluations of municipal services when the responsibility for these services is vested in political principals with matching partisanship. Drawing on original data from a two-wave pre-post panel survey of Danish voters in the 2017 municipal elections, we employ a difference-in-differences estimator to identify the effect of a partisan match between voters and elected municipal leaders on citizen satisfaction with municipal services. We furthermore nest a survey experiment in the panel survey to test whether partisan bias in citizen satisfaction emerges when the line of functional responsibility between political principals and public services is clear and not dispersed across multiple actors. Our findings provide support for the hypothesis of partisan bias in satisfaction evaluations. We further demonstrate the importance of clarity of responsibility; partisan bias seems to come into being when the functional responsibility of municipal leaders for public services is clear and not dispersed across multiple actors, pointing toward a possible mechanism of partisan bias in citizen satisfaction.

The relationship between intergovernmental grants and public expenditures is one of the most studied phenomena in the local public finance literature. However, little is known about whether the impact of unconditional grants is fundamentally different from that of other sources of municipal revenue. We study this question by means of a large-scale randomized survey experiment among Danish local politicians, which allows for a comparison of the impact of changes in various sources of municipal revenue. Our findings challenge the conventional conception in the public finance literature that money works differently depending on which sector they are generated in. Instead, ideology plays an important role in explaining how local politicians want to allocate resources when faced with changes in local government revenue.

We present an argument concerning the temporal dynamics of the policy positions of the main opposition parties in a legislative body; what we label competitor parties. In the article we ask how competitor parties react when losing an election, and what happens if they continue to lose election upon election. It is argued that competitor parties from the outset are trying to maximise both policy- and office-seeking preferences. We posit that this is best achieved by moving away from the median towards the party base. Yet in the event that electoral success continues to elude the competitor party a process of self-reflection, or learning, will set in within the party because the policy position of the competitor party is clearly unacceptable to pivotal voter groups. In this event, the competitor party will move strongly towards the policy position of the incumbent party, thereby neutralising any advantage the incumbent party may previously have had in terms of policy position. By giving up on its policy preferences, the competitor party maximises total utility because then, if nothing else, it becomes more likely to win office. If the competitor party continues to lose, a new cycle of divergence and convergence will set in, generating a wave-like pattern. The argument is illuminated using two well-known examples from the United States and the United Kingdom and tested employing a unique large-N data set from Danish municipalities. We show that the temporal dynamics of competitor parties are as expected.