Attitudes towards social spending and the welfare state have been characterised by one of the longest standing and widest gender gaps. Past research suggests that parenthood deepens this divide further. Yet, the exact relationship between parenthood and support for social policies – and the gendered nature of this process – has been difficult to establish because it can vary across welfare policy areas and the age of the children, which past studies, relying on cross‐sectional data, has found difficult to unravel. Using panel data from the Swiss Household Panel, we examine individual level changes in fathers’ and mothers’ views towards specific welfare state policies. We find that individuals’ support for social spending fluctuates at different stages of parenthood, and that mothers’ demands differ from fathers’ in relation to care related but not in terms of educational spending. This implies that parents are not a homogeneous group that parties could target with uniform electoral pledges. As a result, building widespread electoral support for expanding a broad range of social investment policies is likely to be challenging in a context where, first and foremost, self‐interest appears to drive (or depress) individuals’ support for specific welfare state policies.
a b s t r a c tThis paper examines the impact of good governance in elections compared to the role of the economy. The latter is considered the key factor in electoral survival, while governance issues are rarely included in politicians' discourse or campaigning strategies. Using the ParlGov data and the ICRG indicators for 160 elections, the analysis shows that good governance matters, but mainly for developing countries. Economic growth is an important electoral topic in most of the elections, but its effect varies systematically across contexts. The impact of each good governance and the economy get weaker as the other worsens, and these conditional effects are moderated by the level of economic development.
Why do governments recognize rights? In this article, we rely on natural experiments and an innovative matching technique to identify a new causal mechanism of policy feedback, which we refer to as the "recognition" effect. We rely on the "hard case" of health care to demonstrate that attitudes towards the health system change in response to government policy change and, indeed, even to rightsbased initiatives. During the time when public opinion surveys on public satisfaction with the health system were in the field, governments in both Germany and Sweden introduced a new right: the right to a maximum waiting time for health services. This serendipity allowed us to compare respondents' attitudes both before (control) and after the implementation of the waiting time guarantee (treatment), using coarsened exact matching to account for the imbalances in the treatment and control groups. We find that respondents interviewed after implementation of the new waiting time guarantees (in contrast to those interviewed before the introduction of the guarantees) express higher levels of satisfaction with the health system in general, but do not evaluate their specific medical treatment (including waiting times) more positively. We interpret this finding as evidence that citizens respond to governmental recognition of their rights as a good per se, independent of their personal experience with the particular public service at hand. Thus, we argue that theories of policy feedback need to move beyond their focus on direct material experience with the policies at hand, and to incorporate mechanisms of symbolic action and normative valuations into their causal models.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article examines the effect of corruption on ideological voting. Linking previous studies of political corruption with theories of ideological voting, it argues that when corruption is high, voters place less importance on ideology when voting than they otherwise would. The reason for this effect is related to voters’ reduced ability to accurately perceive parties’ positions and to their low political efficacy in these contexts. Using data from ninety-seven elections from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the study shows that in countries with high levels of corruption, voters consider ideology less in their voting decisions, partially because they face difficulties identifying parties’ ideological positions and/or they do not believe parties can implement their electoral programmes. These relationships hold even after controlling for socio-economic and political confounders and for voters’ increased likelihood of abstaining when corruption is high.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.