Circumventing coalition oversight in multiparty governments: Bill referral to parliamentary committees in the Finnish Eduskunta

Existing research largely agrees that to minimize ministerial drift, political parties in multiparty governments tend to use parliamentary committees to monitor each other. Particularly, they strive to chair parliamentary committees corresponding to ministerial departments to keep tabs on their ruling partners. Yet, policing ministerial activities through a chair-based monitoring system requires perfect correspondence of jurisdictions between ministries and committees. We suggest that when perfect correspondence is absent, ministerial parties may strategically circumvent committee oversight. Specifically, motivated by policy preference divergence with the coalition partner, ministers can draft proposals to make their referral to a friendlier committee more likely than referral to a hostile watchdog committee chaired by the partner. Our analysis of committee referrals of over 2800 ministerial proposals from the Finnish Eduskunta (2001–2015) confirms this expectation. The results, therefore, bring important new insights to our understanding of parliamentary scrutiny and partner oversight under coalition governments.

How COVID-19 has Impacted American Attitudes Toward China: A Study on Twitter

Past research has studied social determinants of attitudes toward foreign countries. Confounded by potential endogeneity biases due to unobserved factors or reverse causality, the causal impact of these factors on public opinion is usually difficult to establish. Using social media data, we leverage the suddenness of the COVID-19 pandemic to examine whether a major global event has causally changed American views of another country. We collate a database of more than 297 million posts on the social media platform Twitter about China or COVID-19 up to June 2020, and we treat tweeting about COVID-19 as a proxy for individual awareness of COVID-19. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference estimation, we find that awareness of COVID-19 causes a sharp rise in anti-China attitudes. Our work has implications for understanding how self-interest affects policy preference and how Americans view migrant communities.

Loyalty and Dissent: Improvement and Clearance in Strathspey after 1853

Although Strathspey experienced many of the same trends – agricultural ‘improvement’, enclosure of commons, creation of deer forests, emigration – present elsewhere in Northern Scotland during the nineteenth century, the region was not a flashpoint for unrest. Careful management on behalf of the ruling family, the earls of Seafield, who were the hereditary chiefs of Grant, the local clan; a consistent policy preference to work with existing farming tenants, and a traditional paternalism, all contributed to social stability. The region was not exempt from protest against the impact of the considerable programme of ‘improvement’ pursued from 1853. There were accusations of ‘depopulation’ and ‘clearance’ in Strathspey, but the influence of those who benefitted from the changes, together with the intrinsic and pervasive authority of the Seafield estate, confined discontent to the constitutional channels opening up as the century progressed. Strong expressions of loyalty to the Seafield proprietors were also a feature of the times. Aspects of this narrative of mutual loyalty are examined, and then the spectrum of reaction to improvement and clearance, the growing lobby for land reform, and the experience of depopulation. Although the influence of the Strathspey factor, John Smith, was important in channelling public discourse, a dilution of estate authority as the century progressed is recognised. The article seeks to broaden perceptions of the history of the Highlands by considering a region of the Gaidhealtachd outwith the far North and the North-West.

Predicting Policy Domains from Party Manifestos with BERT and Convolutional Neural Networks

Hand-labeled political texts are often required in empirical studies on party systems, coalition building, agenda setting, and many other areas in political science research. While hand-labeling remains the standard procedure for analyzing political texts, it can be slow and expensive, and subject to human error and disagreement. Recent studies in the field have leveraged supervised machine learning techniques to automate the labeling process of electoral programs, debate motions, and other relevant documents. We build on current approaches to label shorter texts and phrases in party manifestos using a pre-existing coding scheme developed by political scientists for classifying texts by policy domain and policy preference. Using labels and data compiled by the Manifesto Project, we make use of the state-of-the-art Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in conjunction with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to seek out the best model architecture for policy domain and policy preference classification. We find that our proposed BERT-CNN model outperforms other approaches for the task of classifying statements from English language party manifestos by major policy domain.

Government is unlikely to overhaul Poland’s tax regime

Significance This continues the policy preference -- out of line with Poland’s peers -- for indirect taxes on goods and services, including a relatively high value-added tax (VAT) rate. The government says the sugar tax aims to curb rising obesity, but critics suspect it is a new way of raising revenue. Impacts Corporate taxes could be raised as an alternative source of revenue. Left unaddressed, the regressive trend in taxes and rising inequality may create an opening for the leftist Spring and Together parties. If UK taxes rise post-pandemic, the relative fall in disposable income could encourage Polish immigrants to return to Poland.