Suchergebnisse

The 2 polls-based measures of government popularity are related differently to a range of economic and political variables on the one hand and to by-election outcomes on the other. Highlights the need for researchers to justify their choice of dependent variable before embarking on the modelling of popularity functions. (JPR)

Under the influence of the consociational model, conflict management in deeply divided societies like Belgium is usually viewed in terms of purposive accommodative behaviour on the part of established élites. This paper argues, however, that this perspective in fact misrepresents the nature of élite efforts to manage the linguistic conflict that has dominated Belgian national political life since the mid-1960s. Eschewing accommodation, the leaders of the country's three traditional parties have, instead, pursued a minimalist 'defusionist' management strategy because their aim has been not to institutionalize this conflict, but to make it 'go away' and, thereby, restore political stability and effective governance, under their well-tried collective political hegemony, to the country.

The question of party identification's cross-national validity revolves around the issue of whether or not it can be meaningfully distinguished from immediate voting preference in European national contexts. Comparing this relationship in the American and British party systems, however, this article demonstrates that the two forms of party support are behaviourally similar not in the case of national contexts, but of parties that are linked to the host society's cleavage structure. Moreover, it suggests that their behavioural similarity in the case of this type of party is a function of the ideological distance separating one from the other rather than of the two forms of party support tapping the same dimension of party loyalty. But, whatever the reason for the similarity, the conclusion cannot be avoided that party identification cannot serve the same range of powerful theoretical functions in Europe that it does in the United States because the former's party systems all reflect one or more long-standing, sometimes bitter, social divisions in the electorate.

AbstractBy altering the distribution of fine and fee revenues, municipal courts provide a mechanism through which cash‐strapped city governments can increase revenues flowing into city budgets. Using a unique municipal court data set combined with city‐level financial information, this paper exploits state‐level differences in laws enabling municipal courts and differences in property tax effort across states to explore the relationship between local courts, fine and fee revenues, and municipal finances. I find that cities with municipal courts raise more fine and fee revenue than cities without a court; in cities with a court, reliance on these revenues decreases as per capita property tax yields increase; and these effects are more pronounced in cities in the bottom quartile of the population distribution. Taken together, results suggest that cities use municipal courts to fund the general operations of government and smaller cities and those with low property tax collections are more likely to do so.

AbstractHigher levels of government motivate municipal consolidations as a tool to increase efficiency in the local government sector, yet research shows that consolidations typically fail to deliver the promised spending reductions. Since mergers often require significant changes to institutional structures, one explanation is that local decision makers can substantially influence the outcomes of the consolidation process. To explore this possibility, this article contrasts "encouraged but voluntary" mergers with those that were "forced" on local governments in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Results show that voluntary mergers resulted in a 10 percent decline in total per capita expenditures, but forced consolidations failed to reduce spending across the board. The policy conclusion is that decision makers considering structural reform should invest in obtaining the support and participation of local government decision makers.

Attention in the study of leader effects in parliamentary elections has shifted from the question of whether party leaders do indeed have an electoral impact to that of the conditions under which their impact is greater or lesser in magnitude. Criticizing existing scholarship in this area for its assumption that the traditional notion of party identification captures the full range of electorally relevant party attachments in democratic electorates, this article demonstrates that parliamentary party leaders have their strongest impact not when, as is usually the case, they are conceptualized as electoral forces in their own right, but when evaluations of them as individuals are moderated by voters' matching evaluations of the parties contesting the election. Comparing (aligned) Australia and (dealigned) Britain, it is shown that election-time party evaluations condition the magnitude of leader effects independently of the strength of party identification in the electorate. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]