Pippa Norris's Weblog

The electoral politics of the Liberal-Conservative Coalition Government

Coalition politics is a familiar process in most European countries. There are no guarantees of the final results, as polling day can bring many unexpected outcomes, sometimes generating month-long negotiations requiring grand coalitions of parties drawn from across the political spectrum in order to cobble together a government. Nevertheless during the election campaign, European parties often signal their willingness to collaborate with potential coalition partners, and which parties are outside this process, providing voters with clues about the eventual outcome.

In the United Kingdom, however, the British government coalition joining the fate of the Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties, announced yesterday in the Rose Garden of No 10, seems to have been utterly serendipitous for all concerned, even to commentators, pundits and the party leaders involved at the heart of this process. The outcome, the first governing coalition in Britain since the end of World War II, and the first ever Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition in history, was unexpected despite the long series of public opinion polls predicting a hung parliament. It was agreed by the party leaders only during the five days of negotiations following the election, after it became apparent that the Conservatives were the largest party at Westminster but without an overall parliamentary majority.

Why the surprise?

In terms of ideological and policy positions, for a decade the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party have always been closer; indeed in the 2001 and 2005 elections, the Comparative Manifesto Project estimated that the Liberal Democrat manifesto was more progressive and slightly to the left of the Labour party platform, especially on issues of taxation and proposed levels of social welfare spending. By contrast, although the Conservatives have moved closer to the center of the British political spectrum under the leadership of David Cameron, nevertheless they remained further to the right of their other main rivals. And on certain issues, notably Europe, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives remain miles apart.

But how are the parties placed by voters? Did the coalition, and the decision by Nick Clegg to join with the Conservatives rather than Labour, reflect the outcome that the British public wanted? During election night, Paddy Ashdown famously said that the people have spoken, but we still don't know what they have said. One problem was that the main exit polls, commissioned by all the major media organizations, failed to ask any questions beyond voting. So the coalition has generated a mountain of speculations offered by all sides but no systematic evidence. Those reading the tea-leaves often claimed that the British public 'wanted' a hung parliament but, in fact, this cannot be deduced from the outcome. Each citizen cast a particular vote in their specific constituency, but the final outcome was the collective result of millions of independent decisions.

One way we can throw light on this question is to turn to the 2010 British Election Study (BES) which has just been released. The BES data provides some revealing clues about what the electorate actually preferred. And in particular the results tell us something important about the second choice of Liberal Democrat voters. If the decision about entering a coalition with either Labour or the Conservatives were in the hands of Liberal Democrat voters, what would they have wanted?

The table below, drawn from the BES campaign panel survey among 1,355 respondents, reports how people voted on May 6^th and also reveals their second choice preference among those who voted but who really preferred another party. Among those in this group who cast a ballot for the Liberal Democrats, only 12% opted for the Conservative party as their second choice preference. By contrast, almost half the Liberal Democrat voters (48%) chose Labour as their second preference. Likewise, the Liberal Democrats were the 2^nd choice preference of four out of ten Labour voters.

In other words, it is not simply that the Labour and the Liberal Democrats parties are far closer in their manifesto policies and ideological values, but Liberal Democrat and Labour voters also recognized the close affinity in their willingness to switch votes. The Conservative party was in a far different position, where UKIP (to the right of the party) were their largest 2^nd choice party.

Thus the new coalition governing British politics has clearly shaken up the old pattern of British party politics. Whether the decision of the leaders will cause Liberal Democrat voters to move gradually closer towards the Conservatives in their electoral sympathies, or whether instead the Liberal Democratic party will eventually be punished by their supporters for entering this alliance, remains a fascinating question which only time will tell.

	How people voted on May 6th 2010
Among those who preferred another party	Conservative voter	Labour voter	Lib-Dem voter
Con 2nd choice	13	2	12
Lab 2nd choice	4	22	48
Lib-Dem 2nd choice	21	43	15
SNP 2nd choice	1	4	3
PC 2nd choice	0	2	1
UKIP 2nd choice	41	8	4
BNP 2nd choice	10	6	1
Green 2nd choice	2	9	11
Other 2nd choice	10	6	6
	100	100	100

Source: British Election Study 2010 Campaign Panel. F/w YouGov. N. 1,355

A watershed break in UK politics and prospects for electoral reform

It is now official; after the May 6^th 2010 general election, and five days of detailed negotiations, the UK now has a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government. The key aspects of the deal include the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, as Deputy Prime Minister, four more Liberal Democrat MPs with Ministerial posts in the new Cabinet, and broad agreement on a range of policy areas. This is the first coalition government in Britain in sixty-five years.

Does this represent a historic water-shed transformation of the British political system? Clearly the sign of two leaders standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the first press conference in the No 10 Rose Garden symbolizes a change in how things are usually done in British government. The leadership love-fest all looks very kumbaya. Skeptics point out, however, that there are serious challenges facing the new arrangement, not least the difficulties facing the British economy, with record levels of unemployment and a massive deficit which needs addressing. In foreign policy, there is Afghanistan. The parties are unexpected bedfellows, not least because the Lib Dems are far more progressive than the Labour party, and on numerous issues their election platform was diametrically opposed to Conservative policies, not least on the EU. It is unclear whether the coalition can last, even for the five years of government.

But will the new politics be a temporary arrangement, a short-term marriage of convenience arising unexpectedly from the close election result, or a longer-term decisive break with one-party majoritarian government?

The key issue determining this issue will be the pledge on electoral reform. The agreement between the parties is a pledge for a referendum on the Alternative Vote, where the MPs will be free to campaign for or against this issue. Now the real tragedy here is that the referendum should have been called for whether there should be any electoral reform. Period. As in New Zealand. Deciding in advance that there can only be one system on the table for debate will divide the reform camp, will limit the options which should be under debate, and which, if passed, will still not produce a more proportional electoral system. The fact is that the Alternative Vote is a majoritarian system; it maintains single member districts and requires any candidate to achieve a majority of votes to be elected. Voters express preferential votes, ranking parties in priority. If no candidates achieve 50% of the vote in the constituency, then the 2^nd choice preferences from the candidate with the smallest share of the vote are redistributed until one candidate does achieve a simple majority. This is equivalent to the 2^nd Ballot or runoff election, but without the need for two successive elections. Will this benefit small parties? Those in the center, such as the Lib Dems, are often the 2^nd choice party for many supporters of the major party. As such the LibDems will probably benefit from 2^nd choice redistributions. BUT they will still discriminate against smaller parties with geographically dispersed support, such as the Greens and the BNP.

It is unclear whether the public would vote 'yes' in favor of abandoning First-Past-the-Post (Single Member Plurality) system. The polls cannot be trusted since British public opinion currently remains soft on this issue and the answers are highly dependent upon the way that the question is framed. But the public has become more familiar with many other types of electoral system in the UK – whether the AMS system in Scotland and Wales, PR list in European elections, and other systems used in Northern Ireland and London contests. There may be enough of a plurality to favor getting rid of the transparent unfairness of the old system. Does this mean that the British public would favor AV? That is far less clear indeed. Breaking up the referendum question into two (do we want to change? If so, which system do you favor) would have been far wiser.

Nevertheless if passed – and this is a big if – AV would institutionalize coalition power-sharing agreements at Westminster. We would be back to the form of politics which was more characteristic of the inter-war era. Its been a long time coming. The British electorate has been shifting away from two party politics since the early 1970s. Despite this, British institutions and FPTP have frozen the old Labour and Conservative oligarchy in place at Westminster for decades. Now, at last, it appears as though party politics at Westminster may -- at last -- be catching up with the public.

UK British general election 6th May 2010: Summary of results

UK General Election 6^th May 2010

 

 

 

The following provides a brief summary of the results of the UK general election held on 6th May 2010. Access to the 2010 constituency results data in Excel and PASW/SPSS formats is now available for downloading from my website wwwpippanorris.com under 'data'.

 

Contents

 

Table 1: UK scoreboard    2

Table 2: % Share of the popular vote (UK)    3

Figure 1: % Share of the popular vote (UK)    4

Table 3: % Share of seats (UK)    5

Figure 2: % Share of seats (UK) 1900-2010    6

Figure 3: Government Votes: Seats Ratio 1945-2010    7

Table 4: Government overall majority, 1900-2010    8

Figure 4: UK Electoral Turnout 1832-2010    9

Figure 5: Electoral system effects    10

Figure 6: May 6^th 2010 UK Election map    11

 

 

Table 1: UK scoreboard

Party	Seats	Gain	Loss	Net	Votes	%	+/-%
Conservative	306	100	3	+97	10,706,647	36.1	+3.8
Labour	258	3	94	-91	8,604,358	29.0	-6.2
Liberal Democrat	57	8	13	-5	6,827,938	23.0	+1.0
Democratic Unionist Party	8	0	1	-1	168,216	0.6	-0.3
Scottish National Party	6	0	0	0	491,386	1.7	+0.1
Sinn Fein	5	0	0	0	171,942	0.6	-0.1
Plaid Cymru	3	1	0	+1	165,394	0.6	-0.1
Social Democratic & Labour Party	3	0	0	0	110,970	0.4	-0.1
Green	1	1	0	+1	285,616	1.0	-0.1
Alliance Party	1	1	0	+1	42,762	0.1	+0.0
UK Independence Party	0	0	0	0	917,832	3.1	+0.9
British National Party	0	0	0	0	563,743	1.9	+1.2
Ulster Conservatives and Unionists - New Force	0	0	1	-1	102,361	0.3	-0.1
English Democrats	0	0	0	0	64,826	0.2	+0.2
Respect-Unity Coalition	0	0	1	-1	33,251	0.1	-0.1
Traditional Unionist Voice	0	0	0	0	26,300	0.1
Christian Party	0	0	0	0	18,623	0.1
Independent Community and Health Concern	0	0	1	-1	16,150	0.1	+0.0
Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition	0	0	0	0	12,275	0.0
Scottish Socialist Party	0	0	0	0	3,157	0.0	-0.1
Others	1	1	1	0	319,891	1.1	0.0
Turnout					29,653,638	65.1	4.0

Note: After 649 of 650 seats declared.

Source: news.BBC.co.uk

 

Table 2: % Share of the popular vote (UK)

	Con	Lab	LD	Other
1900	50.3	1.3	45.0	2.5
1906	43.4	4.8	49.4
1910	46.8	7.0	43.5
1910	46.6	6.4	44.2
1918	38.7	20.8	25.6
1922	38.5	29.7	28.8
1923	38.0	30.7	29.7
1924	46.8	33.3	17.8
1929	38.1	37.1	23.5
1931	60.7	30.9	7.0
1935	53.3	38.0	6.7
1945	39.6	48.0	9.0	2.6
1950	43.4	46.1	9.1	1.0
1951	48.0	48.8	2.6	0.3
1955	49.7	46.4	2.7	0.7
1959	49.4	43.8	5.9	0.7
1964	43.4	44.1	11.2	0.9
1966	41.9	48.0	8.6	1.3
1970	46.4	43.1	7.5	2.3
1974	37.9	37.2	19.3	3.5
1974	35.8	39.2	18.3	4.4
1979	43.9	36.9	13.8	3.3
1983	42.4	27.6	25.4	2.2
1987	42.3	30.8	22.5	2.2
1992	41.9	34.4	17.8	3.7
1997	30.7	43.3	16.8	7.1
2001	31.7	40.7	18.3	9.3
2005	32.3	35.2	22.0	10.5
2010	36.1	29.0	23.0	11.9
Change 2005-10	+3.8	-6.2	+1.0	+1.4

Source: Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. 2000. British Electoral Facts 1832-1999 Ashgate; updated

Figure 1: % Share of the popular vote (UK)

Source: Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. 2000. British Electoral Facts 1832-1999 Ashgate; updated.

Table 3: % Share of seats (UK)

	Con	Lab	LD	Other	Total
1900	402	2	183	83	670
1906	156	29	399	86	670
1910	272	40	274	84	670
1910	271	42	272	85	670
1918	382	57	163	105	707
1922	344	142	115	14	615
1923	258	191	158	8	615
1924	412	151	40	12	615
1929	260	287	59	9	615
1931	522	52	36	5	615
1935	429	154	21	11	615
1945	210	393	12	25	640
1950	298	315	9	3	625
1951	321	295	6	3	625
1955	345	277	6	2	630
1959	365	258	6	1	630
1964	304	317	9	0	630
1966	253	364	12	1	630
1970	330	288	6	6	630
1974	297	301	14	23	635
1974	277	319	13	26	635
1979	339	269	11	16	635
1983	397	209	23	21	650
1987	376	229	22	23	650
1992	336	271	20	24	651
1997	165	418	46	30	659
2001	166	412	52	29	659
2005	197	355	62	32	646
2010	306	258	57	28	649
Change	97	-91	-5	-4

Source: Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. 2000. British Electoral Facts 1832-1999 Ashgate; updated.

 

Figure 2: % Share of seats (UK) 1900-2010

 

 

Source: Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. 2000. British Electoral Facts 1832-1999 Ashgate; updated.

 

Figure 3: Government Votes: Seats Ratio 1945-2010

 

 

Note: Calculated by % votes/% seats for the governing party. 2010 is estimated based on the assumption of a Conservative government

Table 4: Government overall majority, 1900-2010

	Overall Maj	Govnt
1900	135	Con	Salisbury/Balfour
1906	129	Lib	Campbell Bannerman
1910		None	Asquith
1910		None	Asquith
1918	283	Coalition	Lloyd George
1922	74	Con	Bonar Law
1923		None	Baldwin
1924	210	Con	MacDonald
1929		None	MacDonald
1931	492	Nat	MacDonald
1935	242	Nat	Baldwin/Chamberlain/Churchill
1945	147	Lab	Attlee
1950	6	Lab	Attlee
1951	16	Con	Churchill
1955	59	Con	Eden/Macmillan
1959	99	Con	Macmillan/Douglas-Home
1964	5	Lab	Wilson
1966	97	Lab	Wilson
1970	31	Con	Heath
1974	0	Lab	Wilson
1974	4	Lab	Wilson/Callaghan
1979	44	Con	Thatcher
1983	144	Con	Thatcher
1987	101	Con	Thatcher
1992	21	Con	Major
1997	178	Lab	Blair
2001	167	Lab	Blair
2005	66	Lab	Blair/Brown
2010		None	Cameron?

 

Source: Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. 2000. British Electoral Facts 1832-1999 Ashgate; updated.

Figure 4: UK Electoral Turnout 1832-2010

Source: Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. 2000. British Electoral Facts 1832-1999 Ashgate; updated.

 

Figure 5: Electoral system effects

 

	Con	Lab	LD	Other
FPTP	306	258	57	28
STV	246	207	162	35
AV	281	262	79	28
PR List	234	188	150	78

 

Note: Estimated number of seats seats under the 6^th May 2010 share of vote, assuming no change in the distribution of votes and no legal electoral threshold.

Source: Estimates for AV and STV (with 3-5 MPs). Electoral Reform Society. May 10^th 2010. "STV & the parliament that might have been.."

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/news.php?ex=0&nid=469

Figure 6: May 6^th 2010 UK Election map

Media and Democratic Governance

Is the news media part of the solution to promoting transparent and accountable democratic governance? Or are they part of the problem? On Tuesday 1^st December 2009, the release of a new World Bank study, Public Sentinel, debated this issue at the World Bank in Washington DC. The event brought together Sanjay Pradhan, Vice President, World Bank Institute, Philip Keefer, Lead Research Economist, Development Research Group, and the book's editor, Pippa Norris, Harvard University.

Within the broad context of the major issues facing the international development community, Public Sentinel: News Media & Governance Reform focuses on the performance of the news media as an institution in addressing the challenges of governance. The book seeks to consider three related issues: What ideal roles should media systems play to strengthen democratic governance and thus bolster human development? Under what conditions do media systems actually succeed or fail to fulfill these objectives? What policy interventions work most effectively to close the substantial gap which exists between the democratic promise and performance of the news media as an institution?

The panel discussed the evidence from the book concluding that the next steps would be to produce a practical toolkit which could help World Bank colleagues in country offices, as well as those working in the broader international community, identify the opportunities for effective intervention to strengthen the roles of the news media.

Copies of the new book can be ordered from The World Bank.

Publication Date: November, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8213-8200-4. SKU: 18200. US$40.

To order, please click here 

To read the policy brief, click here (PDF)

More details are available from CommGAP, The World Bank.

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTDEVCOMMENG/EXTGOVACC/0,,contentMDK:22343085~pagePK:64168445~piPK:64168309~theSitePK:3252001,00.html

Changing media, changing statistics

It is a cliché to acknowledge the rapidly changing world of the mass media, from a static form of transmission from wireless and television sets in the living room, to communications arriving via a plethora of multimedia platforms, where my cable TV comes to me over WiFi to watch on my smart phone, radio is delivered on my IPod, and headlines from the news media are updated 24/7 online. All these developments complicate but also enrich the media environment. What is less often acknowledged is how far behind we are in monitoring use of news and information from these channels through internationally-standardized communication statistics.

UNESCO is the primary agency worldwide with the responsibility to standardize, gather and disseminate communication statistics. For decades national statistical offices counted newspaper circulation figures, and the distribution of television and radio sets, and related data, and UNESCO disseminated the information through their annual yearbook. But the limitations of this traditional approach have rapidly become apparent. At the same time, the international community has rediscovered the important economic and cultural role of 'creative industries', covering everything from music, dance and crafts through fashion, architecture and ceramics to movies, television, and the online world. Moreover the role of the media for development has also attracted new attention, with international agreement in March 2008 to adopt the UNESCO Media Development Indicators .

To catch up with developments, the UNESCO Institute of Statistics in Montreal is in the process of developing and piloting new surveys monitoring newspapers, broadcasting (television and radio), and movies. This week, UNESCO organized an Experts Workgroup meeting from 17^th-19^th November 2009 in San Jose, Costa Rica. The aim was to review the draft questionnaire, along with the accompanying technical notes for the survey completion and the eventual analysis of the data. After pilot tests, the survey is planned for roll out in 2010, with data available the following year.

Once finalized, the survey instrument will be distributed to national statistical offices for the annual collection of statistics. This may sound dry as dust. But in fact this ambitious initiative opens exciting new opportunities for the policy and research communities to understand the diffusion of the new media environment worldwide and the persistence of some old problems facing the role of the media for development. The UNESCO Media Development Indicators emphasize that media development needs to meet certain normative standards:

1. A system of legal regulations conducive to freedom of expression, pluralism and diversity;
2. Plurality and diversity of media ownership;
3. Media should serve as a platform for democratic discourse, reflecting the diversity of views and interests in society;
4. Professional capacity building and civic society institutions underpinning freedom of expression, pluralism and diversity;
5. Infrastructure capacity sufficient to support an independent and pluralistic media.

The planned new UNESCO surveys on newspapers and broadcasting will not provide indicators capable of monitoring and comparing all these standards, but they will go a lot further than is possible at present, especially in terms of assessing the balance of private v. public sectors in broadcasting and newspapers. For the first time, the surveys will also facilitate a global comparison of number of hours devoted to certain types of broadcasting programs (such as news, education, sports, and drama) shown in different countries, as well as the gender diversity of the media workforce, the proportion of domestic and foreign ownership, and the availability of linguistic broadcasting, amongst other aspects.

The workgroup considered the proposed survey instruments and focused attention upon the technical notes which accompany it, grappling with many complex and detailed issues about how best to relate the new data to broader notions of media pluralism and diversity, reflected in the Media Development Indicators. The new media environment is so complicated today that any 'top down' approach to assess its structure can often only grasp at aspects which are inevitably partial. Hence we can measure the number of terrestrial TV channels broadcasting in a country, for example, but does that actually tell us anything in a world where national TV is supplemented by Hulu, You Tube and similar broadband streamlining sources, along with cable and satellite channels. We can measure the number of national daily newspapers with mainly (51%+) public, private or foreign ownership – but does this provide important insights about the primary sources of information available in any country where surfing the New York Times or listening to my local NPR station every morning is as easy in Boston as it is in San Jose or Shanghai? Only a 'bottom-up' approach --where representative sample surveys assess what information people use as their regular sources of information --can start to evaluate the diversity and pluralism of media access in any country with any accuracy. Individual-level data on media uses is increasingly collected for many nations worldwide in surveys such as the Gallup World Poll (covering 140 nations) and The World Values Survey (covering 90+). Expanding upon these sources, by matching them with the structural national data, would be very worthwhile for future research.

UNESCO will work with national statistical offices to develop the capacity to generate the new data. If this initiative succeeds, so that a comprehensive and accurate picture of the media environment can be assembled, the international data will be widely welcomed. What remains to be done, however, for a richer understanding of pluralism and diversity, is to match the new national-level data on the media ownership and structure more closely with additional datasets. This would allow analysts to compare systematically the typical contents of the newspapers and broadcast media, as well as individual-level patterns of usage. If this approach remains outside of UNESCO's role and capacities, it is hoped that other non-profit agencies and independent researchers concerned with media for development will utilize the new data. We urgently need to develop robust and comparable international indicators which combine the analysis of the media environment with an understanding of the media contents and audience.

Measuring democratic governance

Last weekend (30-31^st October 2009), the American Political Science Association (APSA) organized a conference on Democratic Audits and Governmental Indicators, hosted by the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. This meeting was held at the initiative of Professor Henry Brady, President-elect of APSA and Dean of the Goldman School, and it is the start of developing a year-long APSA taskforce on this topic. The meeting generated lively debate among leading scholars, experts, and representatives from some of the major multilateral organizations and advocacy groups engaged in generating and using governance indicators.

The focus of the APSA initiative is timely since the third wave era of democratization has seen a burgeoning array of diagnostic tools designed to monitor the quality of democratic governance. Political indicators are now widely used by the international community, by national governments and by advocacy groups to evaluate needs and determine policy priorities, to highlight problems and identify benchmark practices, and to evaluate the effectiveness of programmatic interventions.

The most commonly-used indicators focus on issues such as the existence of democracy, civil liberties and political rights, the extent of 'good governance', respect for human rights, perceptions of corruption, the degree of women's empowerment, levels of civic engagement, the extent of conflict, the distribution of social capital, and many other related topics.

The expansion of indicators has been accompanied by important gains in the level of conceptual sophistication, methodological transparency, scope, and geographic coverage of all these measures. Nevertheless there remain considerable concern that the proliferation of indices has not been accompanied by sufficient quality checks, for example through the transparent publications of technical notes about how each of these measures are constructed, the degree of measurement error, and the sources of funding and accountability.

Types of indicators

Four types of indicators have become common:

1. Elite-level perceptual judgments are an important source of information. Organizations commonly use standardized questionnaires distributed to 'expert' sources, typically including scholars and researchers, country analysts, journalists, lawyers, business executives, independent consultants, human rights observers, and NGO staff. This approach is exemplified by Freedom House's process employing teams of researchers to assess the state of civil liberties and political rights worldwide, by Transparency International use of experts to construct the Corruption Perceptions Index, and by Reporters without Borders survey used to generate its annual Press Freedom index.
2. Many indicators are also compiled from official data based on administrative records collected by public officials, national statistical offices, and multinational organizations, for example concerning levels of voter turnout in national elections (collated by International IDEA), public access to the news media and new ICTs (UNESCO/ITU), and the proportion of women in national parliaments (IPU).
3. Recent decades have also witnessed a substantial growth in the range and scope of cross-national public opinion surveys. Major cross-national and time-series surveys of public opinion include the Euro-barometer and related EU surveys (which started in 1970), the European Election Study (1979), the European Values Survey and the World Values Survey (1981), the International Social Survey Programme (1985), the Global Barometers (1990 and various), the Comparative National Elections Project (1990), the European Voter and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (1995), the European Social Survey (2002), the Transatlantic Trends survey (2002), the Pew Global Attitudes project (2002), and the Gallup World Poll (2005). These surveys allow a representative sample of the general public to express their views about the quality of democracy in their own country, as well as to assess the performance of their government leaders, institutions, and policies, confidence in government institutions and satisfaction with democracy, patterns of political behavior and civic engagement, and social and political values.
4. Lastly, qualitative audits have also become increasingly popular, whether concerning the state of democracy in a country or more narrowly focused upon specific sectors, such as media audits.

The use of different data sources, and their combination in certain indicators, raises many important and complex questions. In particular, do indicators based on mass or elite surveys coincide or do they diverge? Where perceptions differ, which source provides the most legitimate, useful, valid, and reliable benchmarks for both scholars and practitioners? Elite evaluations are commonly assumed, usually implicitly, to provide the factually 'correct' and more reliable assessment. By contrast the public is often usually believed to be mistaken, unaware, ill-informed, or simply misguided in their judgments.

Clearly public evaluations can be flawed – as can expert perceptions – for multiple reasons. Instead of assuming that expert perceptual indicators always provide the most valid and reliable measurement, it is more appropriate to conclude, more agnostically, that no single best measure or indicator of democratic governance exists for all purposes; instead, as Collier and Adcock suggest, specific choices are best justified pragmatically by the theoretical framework and analytical goals used in any study.

The most prudent strategy is to compare the results of alternative indicators at both mass and elite levels, including those available from cross-national public opinion surveys, to see if the findings remain robust and consistent irrespective of the specific measures employed for analysis. If so, then this generates greater confidence in the reliability of the results, since the main generalizations hold irrespective of the particular measures which are used. If not, then we need to consider how far any differences in the results can be attributed to the underlying concepts and methodologies which differ among these measures.

Moreover the available elite-level perceptual indicators are relatively blunt instruments, whether for assessing the quality of democracy, for program performance evaluation, or for diagnosing specific problems of concern within any particular state. For policymakers, in some circumstances, the legitimacy derived from professionally-conducted public opinion polls may also make these preferable indicators of democratic governance.

Therefore, social surveys can play an important role when seeking to diagnose, monitor, and strengthen the quality of democratic governance across and within many states worldwide. Representative and professional surveys of public opinion are likely to generate results which prove more politically legitimate, disaggregated, and useful for policymakers, practitioners and research analysts than reliance upon expert perceptions alone.

Next steps

In thinking about how APSA could take this work forward, many fruitful ideas were suggested by participants. The following six-step strategy represents some of the ways that APSA can contribute to strengthening the quality of democratic governance indicators.

Strategic Options	(i) Stimulate scholarly debate & collaboration	(ii) Develop consultancy directory	(iii) Recommend authoritative scientific standards	(iv) One stop data shop	(v) Train users	(vi) Develop innovative indices
Activities	Commission meta-analysis thematic articles	Online directory of expert consultants available for practitioners	Establish authoritative standards/code for methods, data collection, validity, reliability, transparency	Develop integrated annual x-sectional and time-series datasets	Pre-APSA workshops for practitioners and younger scholars	Incentivize APSA sections to develop innovative indices; use membership networks for expert surveys
Pros	Useful scholarly reviews	Service for members and practitioners	Improve practices; voluntary code; rating of standards	Facilitate indicator comparisons and simplify for users	Draws on APSA skills and expertise ; capacity development	Generate unique data; already used for ideological party scales
Costs/ limits	Minimal costs; rarely reaches practitioners	Minimal costs; needs public evaluation feedback to be useful	Fund report workgroup meetings	Fund RAs; Reinvent wheel? QoG Institute	Minimal costs	Fund 2-3 section-organized annual workshops awards
Products	Special issue PS	Online directory	Publish and disseminate APSA Report and guidelines	Online annual datasets	Workshops; training guidelines; video?	New disaggregated indices of democratic governance

 

More information

For more details about the meeting, including the full list of participants, slide presentations, bibliographies, and further resources, see

http://sites.google.com/site/democracyaudit/

Innovations in media and development

The world of traditional journalism is in the process of radical dislocation. Some old communication organizations are innovating and responding successfully by transforming themselves to the new challenges in news and technology; others are going under.

To consider how best to respond to these challenges and opportunities, the Salzburg Global Seminar has been meeting from 7-10^th October 2009 in the Schloss Leopoldkron, Salzburg to bring together some of the major donor organizations – multilateral agencies including the World Bank, European Commission, and UNDP, bilateral donors such as USAid and the Swedish International Development Agency, and a range of non-profit foundations such as the BBC World Service Trust, the Open Society Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Knight Foundation.

One of the central debates at the meeting concerns the issue of the role of the media in governance and development. Many speakers emphasized the impact of the news media and new ICTs on government transparency and accountability. Speakers highlighted the way that journalists, NGOs, and citizens can throw new light on the public sector delivery of goods and services, or decision-making processes, to strengthen the accountability of elected and appointed public officials. This issue is of particular concern in the attempt to stamp out corruption, and to monitor the effectiveness of development investments. Many organizations are investing in innovative projects which seek to generate more open government, such as the Sunlight Foundation,

One of the sessions at the meeting presented the conclusions of a new book, Public Sentinel, which I edited and which is forthcoming with the CommGAP program of The World Bank. The study argues that strengthening government transparency is an important function, especially in democratic states. But the news media and civic organizations can play other vital roles as well, including agenda-setting, through highlighting social needs and priorities, including news about natural disasters, international conflict, and humanitarian crisis, as well as providing a balanced public platform for deliberation about public affairs among diverse interests, groups, and sectors.

Numerous examples of relevant initiatives seeking to achieve these objectives were presented at the seminar. One comes from the Media Development Load Fund which has been investing in independent news outlets in countries with a history of media oppression. In Indonesia, for example, until 1998 radio journalism was strictly controlled and obliged to broadcast government news. After liberalization, a new radio news agency KBR68H successfully developed to provides a wide range of independent news, including investigative journalism, strengthening professional journalism ethics. Another example comes from the Open Society Foundation which has sought to provide resources for organizations seeking to protect press freedom and funds to strengthen the legal defense of independent journalism, to promote civic engagement, and to support minority media, such as communication initiatives among the Roma community. Other initiatives were presented by the Knight Foundation which provides funds for digital innovations, new media programs, and open source software which can strengthen news.

The meeting will seek to expand collaboration among donors and to encourage further innovation and debate.

Does public opinion drive electoral reform?

Why do electoral systems change? A new Harvard research paper, to be discussed in mid-April in the Lisbon ECPR workshops, provides fresh insights into this issue.

 

Cultural accounts, based on many case studies, suggest that political legitimacy plays a critical role. During the early 1990s, for example, Italian electoral reform was widely regarded as a reaction to the Tangentopoli scandal, while public anger about government corruption was also seen as one of the main triggers for Japanese reforms. Where the public sees the regime as legitimate, this provides little pressure for change to the status quo. Where citizens are dissatisfied, especially when performance is evaluated against democratic aspirations, this heightens demands for institutional reform on the policy agenda.

 

Although many scholars have often suggested this connection, systematic cross-national evidence establishing this relationship has not been examined. Moreover this assumption is challenged by rational choice accounts which regard electoral reform as an elite-level issue, where the public plays only a marginal role. These accounts have emphasized the paramount importance of the calculation of partisan interests in a two-stage game, where parties have preferences for alternative institutions based on expectations about the payoffs these rules will have for them in future.

 

Understanding the policy cycle model of electoral reform

The rational choice and the cultural approaches are often regarded as offering competing perspectives but of course these are not necessarily either/or explanations; if understood more comprehensively as a cyclical process, public disaffection and lack of political legitimacy could plausibly serve as the long-term context generating political pressures for change, getting the issue of reform onto the policy agenda, while elite-level bargaining among parties could determine the formulation of policy proposals and the negotiated outcome of the decision-making process.

 

A policy cycle model helps to explain how this process works, identifying multiple actors as players in a sequential policymaking process, with four distinct steps:

 

(i) The agenda-setting stage in the public sphere (at t¹), engaging the public, political parties, the media and NGOs, which heightens the salience of institutional reform as a key problem to be addressed on the policy agenda;

(ii) The policy-making stage in the state, where policy options are formulated, coalitions are built, and regulatory policies are adopted to address these perceived problems, directly engaging decisions by political parties in the legislature and the executive, as well as, indirectly, the influence of public referendums and international diffusion;

(iii) The implementation stage (at t²), where the revised regulatory framework is put into practice in subsequent elections, involving election management bodies and the courts; and finally,

(iv) The feedback evaluation loop (at t³), when learning about the consequences of the new regulatory framework shapes either satisfaction with the status quo or further demands for subsequent revisions.

 

All this activity occurs within a broader environment in each country, including the role of historical traditions, the type of regime, and the socio-economic structure. This cycle regards the policymaking process as a series of activities – involving problem identification, agenda-setting, formulation, legitimation, implementation, evaluation and feedback. The cyclical model is sufficiently flexible to apply to any major dimension of public policymaking, rather than generating sui generis explanations of electoral reform, while recognizing significant factors common to diverse reform efforts in a wide variety of contexts. It also has the advantage of identifying a more comprehensive range of actors and a broader series of stages than rational choice accounts, which focus only upon the role of partisan interests within the legislature. The model remains agnostic, however, about the precise impact of each type of actor in the policy process.

 

Does the public set the electoral reform agenda?

What evidence helps us to understand the first step, and how far the public sets the agenda concerning electoral reform? The most effective comparative research design ideally requires evidence about public opinion at t¹ across a broad range of independent nation states, as well as subsequent patterns of electoral reform at t^2, and any subsequent changes in public attitudes at t³.

 

The broadest comparative analysis of public opinion is available from the World Values Survey (WVS), a global investigation of socio-cultural and political change carried out from 1981 to 2007. We can use this survey to compare democratic aspirations, measured by support for democratic ideals; democratic performance, measured by the public's perception of the performance of democracy in each country; and institutional confidence, especially trust in parties and parliaments. Attitudes are measured in fifty countries using the 2^nd and 3^rd waves of the survey conducted in the early to mid-1990s.

 

Institutional changes are monitored according to changes to the electoral system which occurred in the following decade, from 1993 to 2004, in all countries worldwide, based on classifications contained in successive editions of the International IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design. This comparison identifies almost four dozen cases of major changes to electoral systems during this period, for example from First-Past-the-Post (Single Member Plurality) to Party List Proportional Representation, mostly occurring in developing countries and in transitional regimes and electoral democracies. Among these, almost half (21 cases) are in countries contained in the WVS survey.

 

The key conclusion of the new research is that among all cultural factors, democratic aspirations are the strongest and most significant predictors of the subsequent adoption of electoral reforms. In a series of multivariate regression models, democracy aspirations proved stronger predictors of reform than levels of economic or human development, the historical record of democracy in each country, as well as cultural indictors such as satisfaction with democratic performance and institutional confidence. In particular, where democratic aspirations among the public were high, but the country had a poor record of democratic performance, this combination proved strongly to predict subsequent electoral reforms.

The research shows that the public does indeed play an important role in electoral reform, as cultural theories suggest. In particular, democratic aspirations help to drive institutional changes, even in transitional regimes with a poor record of civil liberties and political rights. The news is encouraging for reform movements and democratic forces around the globe.

 

For more details, see Pippa Norris. 'Public disaffection and electoral reform: Pressures from below?' Paper for the European Consortium of Political Research Joint Workshops, Lisbon, 14-19 April 2009. Available for download from: www.pippanorris.com under 'What's New?'

Muslim migrants and cultural integration into Western societies

One of the most striking developments in the modern era of globalization is the rapid flow of people across national borders. The United Nations estimates that, in 2005, 191 million migrants lived outside their country of birth (roughly 3% of the global population). This figure has doubled since 1960 and continues to rise; today the estimate is close to 200 million. Most move to Western societies; according to OECD statistics, just over two dozen countries of destination, mainly in Europe, North America and Asia, absorb almost three-quarters of all migrants around the world. In 2005, among all world regions, Europe hosted the largest number of international migrants (70.5 million), who represented almost one tenth of Europe's total population. Europe was followed by North America (45.1 million) and Asia (25.3 million). At the dawn of the twenty-first century, about one in four or five residents in countries such as Australia (24%), Switzerland (24%), New Zealand (19%), and Canada (18%) were foreign-born, as were one in eight in Germany (13%), the United States (13%), and Sweden (12%).

The rapid settlement of Muslim migrants into European societies, in particular, has raised important challenges for how policymakers manage cultural diversity, maintain social cohesion, and accommodate minorities. Recent events have intensified concerns about the integration of Muslim populations: (1) sharp ethnic tensions arose in The Netherlands after the murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh by Islamic extremists in November 2004; (2) heated protests broke out in many countries, following the September 2005 publication of the 'Muhammad' cartoons in Denmark: the cartoons were seen as blasphemous in Islamic countries, while demands for their suppression raised concerns about freedom of expression in Western countries; and (3) violent riots occurred a few months later in suburban Paris housing projects involving disaffected Franco-Maghrebi communities. These concerns were heightened by a series of extreme terrorist events, particularly by 9/11 in the United States, the bombings directed against civilian targets in Madrid (2004), London (2005), and, most recently, Mumbai (2008). The UK was particularly shocked that British-born second-generation Muslim youths of Pakistani and Jamaican descent, with good education and job prospects, were the perpetrators. These events raise fears that second-generation Muslims living in isolated urban communities are becoming alienated from democratic societies and may be developing closer sympathies with extremist Islamic movements. For some observers, disaffected Muslims in France, the UK or the Netherlands are seeking to create a society entirely separate from the mainstream.

Do migrants carry their cultural values with them, or do they acquire the values of their host society?

This raises the broader question: to what extent do migrants carry their culture with them, and to what extent do they acquire the culture of their new setting? The answer not only has important political implications; it also helps us understand the extent to which basic cultural values are enduring or malleable; and whether cultural values are traits of individuals or attributes of a given society.

A new Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris demonstrates that Muslim migrants do not simply reflect the traditional cultural attitudes and conservative social values which are commonly found in their countries of origin; instead the basic values of Muslims living in Western societies fall roughly half-way between the dominant culture prevailing within their countries of destination and origin.

Evidence is based on examining all five pooled waves of the World Values Survey and European Values Study, a global investigation of socio-cultural and political change carried out from 1981 to 2007. This project has conducted representative national surveys of the basic values and beliefs of the publics in more than 90 independent countries, containing over 88 of the world's population and covering all six inhabited continents. The survey covers 20 Islamic nations, defined as those where the Muslim population is the largest plurality (which may also contain substantial minorities of other faiths). It is important to compare a wide variety of societies to examine the variety of attitudes and values found among Muslim nations around the globe. The World Values Survey also includes 22 countries of destination, as shown in the appendix Table. This allows us to compare the attitudes of Muslims living in countries of origin, Western populations living in countries of destination, and Muslims living in Western societies.

We compared four types of values, those concerning religiosity, attitudes towards issues of sexual liberalization such as homosexuality, abortion and divorce, attitudes towards gender equality, and democratic values. Factors analysis was used to construct value scales, all standardized to 100-points. The mean position of the publics is shown in Figure 1, suggesting two main findings.

First, as expected, across all the scales there is a sizeable and significant gap between the publics living in Islamic societies of origin and Western societies of destination; Muslims living in Islamic societies proved far more religious, and far more traditional in tolerance of gays, women and sexual issues, as well as slightly less supportive of democratic values. By contrast, Western societies were far more secular in orientation as well as liberal on the social value scales.

But, equally importantly, Western Muslims were not as conservative as their compatriots in their countries of origin; instead Western Muslims were consistently located roughly half-way between their countries of origin and destination. These patterns persisted in multilevel regressions models (not reproduced here) controlling for many factors expected to shape social values and the backgrounds of migrant populations, including age, gender, education, income, marital status, 2^nd generation, labor force participation, religiosity and world region (Middle East).

Figure 1: Cultural values by type of society and religious identity

Source: pooled World Values Survey 1981-2007.

Cultural integration

In interpreting these results, we suspect that in the short-term, one reason why Muslim migrants express values located between their countries of origin and destination may be self-selection: people already sympathetic towards Western cultures, as well as those with the higher skills and status which facilitate mobility, are more likely to relocate to live in affluent post-industrial societies. Nevertheless in the long-term, there is probably a reciprocal process at work, especially for the second and third generations of migrant families. Our overall view of these findings is that Muslim migrants do not come to Western countries with rigidly fixed attitudes; instead, they gradually absorb the values prevalent in their host society, as assimilation theories suggest.

Appendix table: Countries under comparison

 

Further resources:

A copy of the HKS Working Paper: Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris. 2009 "Muslim integration into Western cultures: Between origins and destinations" can be downloaded from http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/index.htm

UN DESA. 2006. Trends in the Total Migrant Stock 2005. New York: United Nations Economic and Social Affairs: Population Division. http://www0.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration2005.htm

IOM. 2008. International Organization for Migration. World Migration 2008: Managing Labour Mobility in the Evolving Global Economy. www.iom.int

R. Coolsaet. 2008. Jihadi terrorism and the radicalisation challenge in Europe. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate

Mansoor Moaddel . (Ed). 2007. Values and Perceptions of the Islamic and Middle Eastern Publics. New York: Palgrave McMillan.

Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse. 2006. Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.

The search for bipartisan center ground in American party politics

How do we explain the utter failure of President Obama's attempts to forge a bipartisan solution to the stimulus plan?

The theory suggested by Stimson (1991) assumes that we can identify distinct 'policy moods' representing powerful tides rippling and surging through the body politic that are capable of leading national sentiment in a consistent direction. Small shifts in public opinion may represent nothing more than random and capricious fluctuations in the polls. Other shifts, however, may gradually transform the policy mood, or the common bundling of policy preferences over time. The depth and breadth of the current economic crisis appears to be one such event which has shifted American public opinion in a more Keynesian direction, demanding that government intervenes in the face of dramatic market failures. The American public increasingly favors public services, not private-sector tax cuts, to lift us out of the recession. Policy moods become evident as a consistent aggregate pattern linking attitudes towards issues. If the distribution of public opinion is imagined as a Downsian left-right continuum (Figure 1), some policy options may be located too far left or right for the public's acceptance, and the asymetrical zone of acquiescence between them can be understood as the range of policy choices acceptable to the public. It is rational for the public to be fairly uninformed about policies located in the center zone, given the minor differences between options, as the costs of paying attention exceed its expected benefit. The public becomes more aware of the issues if policymakers seek to implement policies outside the zone of acquiescence.

Figure 1: The Theoretical Model of Party Competition

 

The concept of a policy mood is not particularly novel. But Stimson's account goes one step further in assuming that changes in policy moods may display three distinct patterns: they may be the product of meandering fluctuations back and forth, like a drunken walk, or they may be consistent trends flowing in one direction over time, or alternatively they may be the result of systemic cycles in response to what government is currently doing. The distribution of policy preferences and the zone of acquiescence at mass level is not static since, although there is some time lag, public opinion moves relative to the actions of policymakers. The public gains experience of the impact of policy changes gradually, as they become aware of the costs and other trade-offs produced by particular government decisions that move policy towards the left or right. The existence of cycles in the public mood, responding to government actions, has been supported by much of the empirical evidence in the United States.

Following Stimson, we can theorize that in democratic societies with competitive party systems, elected representatives respond fairly sensitively to policy cycles. Rational vote-seeking politicians seek to maintain popular support (and hence office) by remaining within the 'zone of acquiescence', where the public is in accord with policy proposals, rather than moving too far across the ideological spectrum to the left or right. Rational vote-seeking politicians therefore implement policy changes in terms of their perceptions of what the public wants. At a certain stage of the cycle, the theory suggests, public preferences shift in a contrary direction in response to government actions. Policy changes continue to overshoot the new public consensus, until policymakers become aware of the shift in the public's mood and move back into line with the zone of acquiescence. If politicians fail to perceive the change in public sentiment, or fail to respond to the shift, they face the threat of electoral defeat. In general, if seriously lagging or leading public opinion on important issues, politicians face the threat of a serious electoral penalty. It is rational for politicians to pay little attention to public opinion for much of the time, because the zone of acquiescence allows politicians considerable lassitude, especially for governing parties with comfortable majorities in the mid-term period. Minor parties facing almost certain electoral defeat in the electoral system may also rationally prioritize ideological purity over electoral expediency. But there is a substantial incentive (the ambition for government office) for politicians in the major opposition parties to pay the closest attention to public opinion when crafting their policy program, choosing their party leadership, and marketing their party image.

This argument suggests that where rational vote-seeking politicians are sensitive to the public mood; once leaders perceive any switch in national sentiment, they will eventually tack across the political spectrum to maintain popular support. This incentive is strongest for major opposition parties. But this strategy depends upon how accurately politicians understand the shifting tides of public opinion. Multiple barriers may prevent political parties from rationally adapting to the public mood in pursuit of office, including the blinders of partisan ideology.

Politicians may not perceive the need to change if they believe that they are already in tune with public opinion, even though in fact they may be lagging behind or running ahead of the zone of acquiescence. Social psychological theories of selective perception hold that people's interpretations of events are slanted toward their previously held convictions. Evidence for this phenomenon is drawn from a variety of sources. Early work on selective perception emphasized the cognitive costs of holding inconsistent views (Festinger 1957). By this account, an individual is motivated by a desire to maintain harmony among his or her beliefs. In Lord et al's (1979) classic experiment, opponents of the death penalty were more likely to find fault with a study suggesting that it deters serious crime; death penalty supporters were similarly resistant to a study that drew the opposite conclusion. In fact, exposure to discordant evidence only made people more set in their ways. The most influential statement of selective perception concerns the role of partisan attachments functioning as a 'perceptual screen' for information in the electorate (Campbell et al 1960:133). Zaller extends this argument, proposing that "partisan resistance" causes voters to filter out information when it does not conform to their existing political predispositions. (Zaller 1992: 241).

There are many ways in which selective perception could operate among political elites. Successive election victories could be expected to reinforce the perception that the party in government was in tune with the electorate, even if the policy mood had been gradually shifting over the years in reaction to government policy. Any electoral defeat can always be attributed to multiple scapegoats rather than to the unpopularity of the party's basic principles and programmatic policies. Of course multiple opinion polls are published in modern campaigns, as well as focus groups used by campaign professionals. But this evidence can always be discarded ('the only poll that matters is the one on the night'). In interpreting the public mood, Herbst (1995) suggests that politicians commonly follow many different cues, such as communications with activists, conversations with local constituents, and debates in the news media, as much as more scientific techniques of opinion polls and focus groups.

The recent obdurate behavior of the GOP over the stimulus bill is extremely similar to that of the British Conservative party when it experienced a resounding defeat, following Tony Blair's landslide victory in 1997. Blair, like President Obama's search for bipartisan solutions, sought to govern by straddling the middle ground. The Conservatives had been in power for eighteen years, and they had become increasingly out of touch with public opinion, which progressively shifted away from a Thatcherite philosophy of ever more tax cuts towards favoring management of better public services. Moreover the 1997 and 2001 elections led to the loss of the more moderate Conservatives, holding marginal seats, reducing the party to a rump of ideological true believers.

Downsian theory assumes that major opposition parties with ambitions for government will move towards the median voter in the pursuit of votes and therefore office. But any successful strategy of casting for votes requires that politicians can identify where these are located. The Conservatives thought that they were articulating popular polices against Blair, but they were stranded far from reality due to errors of selective perception. It took the experience of several resounding election defeats to bring new blood into the opposition party, moving the Conservatives in a more moderate direction under fresh leadership, and bringing a restoration in their viability in the opinion polls.

The GOP currently remain the ideological rump party, out of touch with the median voter. Too many years trumpeting dogma when in power, and isolated from reality, means that they have lost touch when the public mood shifted back towards believing that right now, for many issues, in the current crisis, government is the solution, not the problem. President Obama's best efforts at cocktail bipartisanship will not be able to move them. It will probably take the shock of successive election defeats to bring them back to more moderate ground closer to the center ground of American public opinion.

 

For more details: see

Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski. Why parties fail to learn - Electoral defeat, selective perception and British party politics 
Source: PARTY POLITICS   Volume: 10   Issue: 1   Pages: 85-104   Published: JAN 2004 

References

Festinger L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Herbst, Susan. 1999. Public Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stimson, James A. 1991. Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles and Swings. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Zaller John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press