Revisiting the left cabinet share: How to measure the partisan profile of governments in welfare state research

Döring, Holger; Schwander, Hanna

doi:10.1177/0958928715573481

Cited by 31 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 53 publications

(88 reference statements)

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“…Overall, the stronger results obtained when the dataset is collapsed to the cabinet level suggest that cabinets, rather than country-years, are the more suitable unit of analysis for studying the influence of parties on (morality) policy output. This supports the point raised by scholars about the questionability of annual data as the most suitable basis for inquiries into the party effect (Döring & Schwander 2015;Garritzmann & Seng 2016;Schmitt 2016). As observed by Schmitt (2016Schmitt ( : 1443: 'Parties often need time to develop and implement substantive policies according to their preferences after being elected.…”

Section: Analysis and Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Budde¹,

Heichel²,

Hurka³

et al. 2017

European J Political Res

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Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.

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Section: Analysis and Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Budde¹,

Heichel²,

Hurka³

et al. 2017

European J Political Res

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“…It is among the most popular data sets for the study of political parties, but its construct validity, broadly defined as 'the faithfulness of a research design to the theory' (Gerring, 2012: 95), is often questioned (see Budge, 2013 for a summary and discussion of criticisms). Against the background of mounting criticisms of the use of party labels (Döring and Schwander, 2015), increasingly sophisticated applications of the data permeate substantive research in political economy and comparative welfare state studies (e.g. Finseraas and Vernby, 2011;Gingrich and Häusermann, 2015;Horn and Jensen, 2016;Jensen and Seeberg, 2015;Nygård, 2006;Schumacher, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peeping at the corpus – What is really going on behind the equality and welfare items of the Manifesto project?

Horn

Kevins

Jensen

et al. 2017

Journal of European Social Policy

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The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data set quantifies how much parties emphasize certain topics and positions and is very popular in the study of political parties. The data set is also increasingly applied in comparative political economy and welfare state studies that use the welfare-specific items rather than the CMP's left-right scale to test hypotheses on the impact of political parties on social policies, (in)equality and the welfare state. But do these items provide a valid basis for descriptive and causal inferences? What do the items precisely capture? To answer these questions on concept validity, we use the new manifesto corpus data for German parties 2002-2013 and, to provide a further test, for US parties 2004-2012. Corpus data are the digitalized, originally hand-annotated and coded texts of electoral programmes. We assess the validity of the codings directly at the level of quasi-sentences by re-categorizing and subcategorizing the originally coded statements on equality, social justice and welfare state expansion. Although concept validity concerns about the data seem exaggerated, we find that theoretically relevant and meaningful variation is 'hidden' behind the original categories. Hence, our approach allows researchers to assess the substantive meaning of the CMP data directly, and we offer an efficient new strategy for testing more specific hypotheses on the impact of political parties on policy.

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“…In response to the mixed results on party government and policy outcomes, this article embraces the party-politics perspectives and contributes to the existing literature by maintaining that such inconsistencies do not originate from a poor theoretical understandingan option that is denied by the rich body of literature summarized so farbut from limitations in the operationalization of the main dependent and independent variables (Bevan and Greene, 2018;Döring and Schwander, 2015). The next section discusses at length such limitations and suggests how to move forward.…”

Section: Partisan Influence On Social and Labor Market Policies: Statmentioning

confidence: 94%

Partisan influence on social and labor market policies in the Silver Age of welfare state retrenchment: evidences from 19 OECD countries

Negri

2020

Acta Polit

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Revisiting the left cabinet share: How to measure the partisan profile of governments in welfare state research

Cited by 31 publications

References 53 publications

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Peeping at the corpus – What is really going on behind the equality and welfare items of the Manifesto project?

Partisan influence on social and labor market policies in the Silver Age of welfare state retrenchment: evidences from 19 OECD countries

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