If not party mandates, then what? The determinants of legislative agendas

2021 ◽  
pp. 72-91
Author(s):  
Emiliano Grossman ◽  
Isabelle Guinaudeau

What determines changes in the focus of laws over time? Before turning to the impact of democratic mandates, this chapter examines alternative explanations focusing on globalization, the rise of regulatory politics and its effects on redistribution; social change and the emergence of post-materialism; friction and cognitive constraints resulting in punctuated equilibrium patterns of attention; and the hypothesis of a broadening of policy agendas leading governments to deal with a growing number of issues. Panel negative binomial regressions of data collected by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) on legislative priorities in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, confirm that further explanations are needed. Among the different explanations that we explore, only globalization seems to have some impact on legislative agendas in terms of the relative weight of regulatory and redistributive policies. These first tests set the landscape and provide guidance as to potential covariates to take into account when analysing the role of parties and party competition in the subsequent chapters.

Author(s):  
Emiliano Grossman ◽  
Isabelle Guinaudeau

This book sheds new light on this central democratic concern based on an ambitious study of democratic mandates through the lens of agenda-setting in five West European countries since the 1980s. The authors develop and test a new model bridging studies of party competition, pledge fulfilment, and policymaking. The core argument is that electoral priorities are a major factor shaping policy agendas, but mandates should not be mistaken as partisan. Parties are like ‘snakes in tunnels’: they have distinctive priorities but they need to respond to emerging problems and their competitors’ priorities, resulting in considerable cross-partisan overlap. The ‘tunnel of attention’ remains constraining in the policymaking arena, especially when opposition parties have resources to press governing parties to act on the campaign priorities. This key aspect of mandate responsiveness has been neglected so far because in traditional models of mandate representation, party platforms are conceived as a set of distinctive priorities, whose agenda-setting impact ultimately depends on the institutional capacity of the parties in office. Rather differently, this book suggests that counter-majoritarian institutions and windows for opposition parties generate key incentives to stick to the mandate. It shows that these findings hold across five very different democracies: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. The results contribute to a renewal of mandate theories of representation and lead to question the idea underlying much of the comparative politics literature that majoritarian systems are more responsive than consensual ones.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolò Conti ◽  
Swen Hutter ◽  
Kyriaki Nanou

The aim of the special issue is to investigate through a comparative lens the impact of the recent economic crisis and consequent austerity measures on party competition and political representation in Europe. All six contributions focus on the substance of political conflict and provide new insights about the impact of the crisis on (a) the policy agendas of political parties, (b) the relationship between government and opposition parties, and (c) how citizens’ preferences are represented by political parties. Theoretically, the contributions link the literatures on party competition, responsiveness, agenda-setting, and social movements. Empirically, they provide new empirical material, in particular on the countries in Southern Europe which were hard hit by the crisis. The introduction presents the rationale of the special issue and summarizes the focus and findings of the six contributions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Gimma ◽  
James D Munday ◽  
Kerry LM Wong ◽  
Pietro Coletti ◽  
Kevin van Zandvoort ◽  
...  

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government imposed public health policies in England to reduce social contacts in hopes of curbing virus transmission. We measured contact patterns weekly from March 2020 to March 2021 to estimate the impact of these policies, covering three national lockdowns interspersed by periods of lower restrictions. Methods: Data were collected using online surveys of representative samples of the UK population by age and gender. We calculated the mean daily contacts reported using a (clustered) bootstrap and fitted a censored negative binomial model to estimate age-stratified contact matrices and estimate proportional changes to the basic reproduction number under controlled conditions using the change in contacts as a scaling factor. Results: The survey recorded 101,350 observations from 19,914 participants who reported 466,710 contacts over 53 weeks. Contact patterns changed over time and by participants' age, personal risk factors, and perception of risk. The mean of reported contacts among adults have reduced compared to previous surveys with adults aged 18 to 59 reporting a mean of 2.39 (95% CI 2.20 - 2.60) contacts to 4.93 (95% CI 4.65 - 5.19) contacts, and the mean contacts for school-age children was 3.07 (95% CI 2.89 - 3.27) to 15.11 (95% CI 13.87 - 16.41). The use of face coverings outside the home has remained high since the government mandated use in some settings in July 2020. Conclusions: The CoMix survey provides a unique longitudinal data set for a full year since the first lockdown for use in statistical analyses and mathematical modelling of COVID-19 and other diseases. Recorded contacts reduced dramatically compared to pre-pandemic levels, with changes correlated to government interventions throughout the pandemic. Despite easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, mean reported contacts only returned to about half of that observed pre-pandemic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Damiano C Weitowitz ◽  
Chris Panter ◽  
Rachel Hoskin ◽  
Durwyn Liley

Abstract New housing development can result in impacts on nearby protected nature conservation sites, even if development is outside the site boundary. High levels of housing may be associated with adverse impacts on ecological features in protected sites from increased recreation pressure. However, few studies have investigated the spatial link between housing and visitor numbers. An understanding of the impact of housing on visitor use, especially the distances at which housing relates to recreation levels and the importance of other factors (e.g. parking provision) is essential to inform the assessment of new housing and is relevant to strategic planning of development within the UK. We use a long-term visitor dataset (2003–8) to disentangle the housing–visitor association at foot-only and parking locations on important nature conservation sites. We conclude with negative binomial regressions that model the effect of housing on visitor numbers, while controlling for habitat, parking provision and season. Our results demonstrate that more housing consistently means more visitors to protected sites, across most habitats. This is particularly the case for on-foot visitors that originate from housing within 1.5 km, highlighting that additional housing development in proximity to protected sites is likely to significantly increase recreation pressure. For visitor numbers at parking locations, levels of housing within 15 km of protected sites were also a significant predictor, but depended on habitat type. These results demonstrate that housing allocations closer to protected sites are likely to have a greater impact in terms of visitor numbers and may help underpin future assessments of strategic plans.


2021 ◽  
pp. 113-141
Author(s):  
Emiliano Grossman ◽  
Isabelle Guinaudeau

This chapter explores the implications of mandate theories of democracy through the lens of agenda-setting, looking at the impact of priorities emphasized in party manifestos on the legislative agenda. It examines the respective impact of the priorities in the manifesto of the party of the prime minister, the parties in the government coalition (where applicable), and all parliamentary parties (systemic attention). Using panel negative binomial regressions of legislative and electoral priorities, the conclusion is that mandate priorities do affect government policies to a greater extent than scholarship has so far acknowledged. And this does not seem to have changed over time. The agenda-setting impact of mandates is supported by qualitative observations on promises and policy in France and Germany. The only exception to this effect is the UK, which is surprising in view of arguments on institutional capacity, clarity of responsibility, and enhanced accountability in majoritarian systems—a paradox examined in Chapter 7.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Evans ◽  
Jonathan Mellon

This article presents a case study of the emergence of the issue-linkage necessary for a cross-cutting European Union cleavage to become electorally salient. We argue that a key political decision on immigration in 2004 facilitated the emergence of a new dimension of party competition and growth in popular support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leading eventually to the 2016 EU Referendum. To examine this thesis, we trace the impact of the UK government’s immigration policy on (i) rising immigration, (ii) the political salience of immigration, (iii) the increasing association between concern about immigration and Euroscepticism, and (iv) the emergence of a cross-cutting dimension of party competition coalescing around support for UKIP. The analysis combines information from official immigration rates, media reporting on immigration, Mori polls, continuous monitoring surveys, and the British Election Study.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Abbott ◽  
Hannah Christensen ◽  
Nicky Welton ◽  
Ellen Brooks-Pollock

ABSTRACTBackgroundIn 2005, England changed from universal Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccination of school-age children to targeted BCG vaccination of high-risk children at birth.MethodsWe combined notification data from the Enhanced Tuberculosis Surveillance system, with demographic data from the Labour Force Survey to construct retrospective cohorts of individuals in England relevant to both the universal, and targeted vaccination programmes between Jan 1, 2000 and Dec 31, 2010. For each cohort, we estimated incidence rates over a 5 year follow-up period and used Poisson and Negative Binomial regression models in order to estimate the impact of the change in policy on TB.ResultsIn the non-UK born, we found evidence for an association between a reduction in incidence rates and the change in BCG policy (school-age IRR: 0.74 (95%CI 0.61, 0.88), neonatal IRR: 0.62 (95%CI 0.44, 0.88)). We found some evidence that the change in BCG policy was associated with a increase in incidence rates in the UK born school-age population (IRR: 1.08 (95%CI 0.97, 1.19)) and weaker evidence of an association with a reduction in incidence rates in UK born neonates (IRR: 0.96 (95%CI 0.82, 1.14)). Overall, we found that the change in BCG policy was associated with directly preventing 385 (95% CI −105, 881) TB cases.ConclusionsWithdrawing universal vaccination at school-age and targeting BCG vaccination towards high-risk neonates was associated with reduced incidence of TB in England. This was largely driven by reductions in the non-UK born. There was a slight increase in UK born school-age cases.Key MessagesThere is little existing literature on the impact of withdrawing universal school-age BCG vaccination and introducing high-risk neonatal BCG vaccination on TB incidence rates in the populations directly affected by the vaccination programmes.There was strong evidence that the change in policy was associated with a decrease in TB incidence rates in non-UK born neonates and school-age children. In the UK born individuals, there was some evidence that the change in policy was associated with an increase in TB incidence rates in those relevant to the universal school-age scheme, with little evidence of a decrease in incidence rates in those relevant to the high-risk neonatal vaccination scheme.Overall the change in vaccination policy was associated with preventing TB cases, mainly in the non-UK born.These results provide an important evaluation of the direct effects of both withdrawing and implementing a BCG vaccination programme in a low incidence, high income, country and are relevant to several other countries that have made similar changes to their vaccination programmes.


Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

This chapter traces the early history of state-sponsored informational filmmaking in Denmark, emphasising its organisation as a ‘cooperative’ of organisations and government agencies. After an account of the establishment and early development of the agency Dansk Kulturfilm in the 1930s, the chapter considers two of its earliest productions, both process films documenting the manufacture of bricks and meat products. The broader context of documentary in Denmark is fleshed out with an account of the production and reception of Poul Henningsen’s seminal film Danmark (1935), and the international context is accounted for with an overview of the development of state-supported filmmaking in the UK, Italy and Germany. Developments in the funding and output of Dansk Kulturfilm up to World War II are outlined, followed by an account of the impact of the German Occupation of Denmark on domestic informational film. The establishment of the Danish Government Film Committee or Ministeriernes Filmudvalg kick-started aprofessionalisation of state-sponsored filmmaking, and two wartime public information films are briefly analysed as examples of its early output. The chapter concludes with an account of the relations between the Danish Resistance and an emerging generation of documentarists.


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