The Case of the Vanishing Marginals: The Bureaucracy Did It

Several authors have addressed the postwar decline of electoral competition on the congressional level. Some have attributed the decline to institutional change such as the redistrictings of the 1960s. Others have remarked on the growing use of the growing resources of incumbency. Still others, like Ferejohn, have focused on behavioral change in the larger electoral system, such as the erosion of party identification. In this comment I suggest that while electoral behavior has changed, the change is at least in part a response to changing congressional behavior, which in turn is a reaction to institutional change for which Congress is partly responsible. Specifically, over time congressmen have placed increasing emphasis on district services: more and more they operate as and are perceived as ombudsmen rather than as national policymakers. This behavioral change is an understandable response to an expanding federal role and an increasing involvement of the federal bureaucracy in the lives of ordinary citizens, an institutional change Congress has helped to bring about.

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Limits to Dominance?

10.1093/oso/9780198783848.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Keyword(s):

Communication Skills ◽

Electoral System ◽

Tony Blair ◽

Prime Ministers ◽

Margaret Thatcher ◽

Capital Building ◽

Low Levels ◽

Very High ◽

Over Time ◽

Policy Vision

This chapter compares the leadership capital of two long-serving UK prime ministers: Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, treble election winners who held office for a decade. Mapping their capital over time reveals two very different patterns. Thatcher began with low levels of capital, building to a mid-term high and final fragile dominance, though her capital fell between elections. Blair possessed very high levels from the outset that gradually declined in a more conventional pattern. Both benefited from electoral dominance and a divided opposition, Thatcher’s strength lay in her policy vision while Blair’s stemmed from his popularity and communication skills. The LCI reveals that both prime ministers were successful without being popular, sustained in office by the electoral system. Towards the end of their tenures, both leaders’ continued dominance masked fragility, ousted when unrest in their parties and policy unpopularity eroded their capital.

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198782797.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Telesca Giuseppe

Keyword(s):

Structural Analysis ◽

Institutional Change ◽

Cultural Context ◽

The Past ◽

Final Goal ◽

Social Structural ◽

Country Analysis ◽

Cross Country ◽

Over Time

The ambition of this book is to combine different bodies of scholarship that in the past have been interested in (1) providing social/structural analysis of financial elites, (2) measuring their influence, or (3) exploring their degree of persistence/circulation. The final goal of the volume is to investigate the adjustment of financial elites to institutional change, and to assess financial elites’ contribution to institutional change. To reach this goal, the nine chapters of the book introduced here look at financial elites’ role in different European societies and markets over time, and provide historical comparisons and country and cross-country analysis of their adaptation and contribution to the transformation of the national and international regulatory/cultural context in the wake of a crisis or in a longer term perspective.

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Indigenous higher education sector: the evolution of recognised Indigenous Leaders within Australian Universities

The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education ◽

10.1017/jie.2019.30 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-7 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Stacey Kim Coates ◽

Michelle Trudgett ◽

Susan Page

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

Indigenous Education ◽

Indigenous Australians ◽

Access To Higher Education ◽

Public Schooling ◽

Indigenous Students ◽

Early Experiences ◽

Commonwealth Government ◽

The 1960S ◽

Over Time

Abstract There is clear evidence that Indigenous education has changed considerably over time. Indigenous Australians' early experiences of ‘colonialised education’ included missionary schools, segregated and mixed public schooling, total exclusion and ‘modified curriculum’ specifically for Indigenous students which focused on teaching manual labour skills (as opposed to literacy and numeracy skills). The historical inequalities left a legacy of educational disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Following activist movements in the 1960s, the Commonwealth Government initiated a number of reviews and forged new policy directions with the aim of achieving parity of participation and outcomes in higher education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Further reviews in the 1980s through to the new millennium produced recommendations specifically calling for Indigenous Australians to be given equality of access to higher education; for Indigenous Australians to be employed in higher education settings; and to be included in decisions regarding higher education. This paper aims to examine the evolution of Indigenous leaders in higher education from the period when we entered the space through to now. In doing so, it will examine the key documents to explore how the landscape has changed over time, eventually leading to a number of formal reviews, culminating in the Universities Australia 2017–2020 Indigenous Strategy (Universities Australia, 2017).

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Effective but fragile? Responses to repeated nudge-based messages for preventing the spread of COVID-19 infection

Japanese Economic Review ◽

10.1007/s42973-021-00076-w ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Shusaku Sasaki ◽

Hirofumi Kurokawa ◽

Fumio Ohtake

Keyword(s):

Behavioral Change ◽

Infection Prevention ◽

Online Survey ◽

Behavioral Changes ◽

Survey Experiment ◽

The Third ◽

Compliance Level ◽

Change Effect ◽

Loss Frame ◽

Over Time

AbstractNudge-based messages have been employed in various countries to encourage voluntary contact-avoidance and infection-prevention behaviors to control the spread of COVID-19. People have been repeatedly exposed to such messages; however, whether the messages keep exerting a significant impact over time remains unclear. From April to August 2020, we conducted a four-wave online survey experiment to examine how five types of nudge-based messages influence Japanese people’s self-reported preventive behaviors. In particular, we investigate how their behaviors are affected by repeated displays over time. The analysis with 4241 participants finds that only a gain-framed altruistic message, emphasizing their behavioral adherence would protect the lives of people close to them, reduces their frequency of going out and contacting others. We do not find similar behavioral changes in messages that contain an altruistic element but emphasize it in a loss-frame or describe their behavioral adherence as protecting both one’s own and others’ lives. Furthermore, the behavioral change effect of the gain-framed altruistic message disappears in the third and fourth waves, although its impact of reinforcing intentions remains. This message has even an adverse effect of worsening the compliance level of infection-prevention behaviors for the subgroup who went out less frequently before the experiment. The study’s results imply that when using nudge-based messages as a countermeasure for COVID-19, policymakers and practitioners need to carefully scrutinize the message elements and wording and examine to whom and how the messages should be delivered while considering their potential adverse and side effects.

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The 2016 Electoral Reform in Mongolia: From Mixed System and Multiparty Competition to FPTP and One-Party Dominance

Journal of Asian and African Studies ◽

10.1177/0021909617698841 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 53 (4) ◽

pp. 511-531 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Pavel Maškarinec

Keyword(s):

Electoral Competition ◽

Electoral System ◽

Electoral Reform ◽

District Level ◽

Mixed System ◽

Constitutional Court ◽

Party Dominance ◽

Duverger's Law

This article tests the effects of a new electoral system that was introduced in Mongolia for the June 2016 elections. The decision to implement a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system instead of a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system, which was first and last used in the previous elections of 2012, was due to the April 2016 ruling of the Mongolian Constitutional Court on unconstitutionality of the list tier as one of the mechanisms for distributing seats within MMM. Through an analysis of national- and district-level results, this article addresses the question whether electoral competition at the district level was consistent with Duverger’s law and resulted in the restoration of bipartism, which had been disrupted in 2012 due to the use of MMM.

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Social Class Origin and Assortative Mating in Britain, 1949–2010

Sociology ◽

10.1177/0038038517726479 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 52 (6) ◽

pp. 1217-1236 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Ursula Henz ◽

Colin Mills

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Assortative Mating ◽

Class Mobility ◽

The Social ◽

Class Origin ◽

To Come ◽

Similar Class ◽

The 1960S ◽

Level Aspect ◽

Over Time

This article examines trends in assortative mating in Britain over the last 60 years. Assortative mating is the tendency for like to form a conjugal partnership with like. Our focus is on the association between the social class origins of the partners. The propensity towards assortative mating is taken as an index of the openness of society which we regard as a macro level aspect of social inequality. There is some evidence that the propensity for partners to come from similar class backgrounds declined during the 1960s. Thereafter, there was a period of 40 years of remarkable stability during which the propensity towards assortative mating fluctuated trendlessly within quite narrow limits. This picture of stability over time in social openness parallels the well-established facts about intergenerational social class mobility in Britain.

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