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"Vis, Barbara"
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Comparative welfare state politics : development, opportunities, and reform
\"Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis explain the political opportunities and constraints of welfare state reform in advanced democracies\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Why Do Parties Change Position? Party Organization and Environmental Incentives
What motivates parties to change their positions? Earlier studies demonstrate that parties change their position in response to environmental incentives, such as voter shifts. Yet, this work also suggests that parties differ in their responses. What accounts for this variation? We argue and empirically substantiate that differences in party organization explain the divergent responses of parties to environmental incentives. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of 55 parties in 10 European democracies between 1977 and 2003, this study demonstrates how the party organizational balance-of-power between party activists and party leaders conditions the extent to which environmental incentives (mean voter change, party voter change, and office exclusion) drive party-position change. The study’s findings have important implications for our understanding of parties’ electoral strategies as well as for models of representation.
Journal Article
Politics of risk-taking
How much and in which direction have the welfare states among the Western democracies changed over the past decades? Moreover, under which conditions have governments enacted these changes? Based on insights from prospect theory, a psychological theory of choice under risk, Vis demonstrates ably that the context in which governments find themselves (losses or gains) affects their attitude towards risk and thereby the degree and type of reform they pursue.
eBook
Do Politicians Take Risks Like the Rest of Us? An Experimental Test of Prospect Theory Under MPs
Political psychologists have been quick to use prospect theory in their work, realizing its potential for explaining decisions under risk. Applying prospect theory to political decision-making is not without problems, though, and here we address two of these: (1) Does prospect theory actually apply to political decision-makers, or are politicians unlike the rest of us? (2) Which dimension do politicians use as their reference point when there are multiple dimensions (e.g., votes and policy)? We address both problems in an experiment with a unique sample of Dutch members of parliament as participants. We use well-known (incentivized) decision situations and newly developed hypothetical political decision-making scenarios. Our results indicate that politicians1 deviate from expected utility theory in the direction predicted by prospect theory but that these deviations are somewhat smaller than those of other people. Votes appear to be a more important determinant of politicians' reference point than is policy.
Journal Article
Do Public Consultations Reduce Blame Attribution? The Impact of Consultation Characteristics, Gender, and Gender Attitudes
Can public consultations—gatherings organised to solicit constituent opinions—reduce the blame attributed to elected representatives whose decisions end up backfiring? Using two pre-registered survey experiments conducted on nationally representative samples of US respondents, we examine whether the effectiveness of consultations as a blame avoidance tool may be shaped by: (1) consultation characteristics, especially regarding whether or not representatives align their policies, either actively or passively, with constituent opinion; and (2) elected representative and constituent characteristics, especially regarding a representative’s gender and constituents’ gender attitudes. Results suggest that public consultations are indeed liable to decrease blame attribution, just so long as constituent opinion is not explicitly opposed to the representative’s decision. Active alignment with constituent opinion, however, does not appear to be a requirement for decreased blame attribution—and effects related to gender and gender attitudes are also largely absent. These findings are important for scholars seeking to better understand blame attribution, clarifying how public consultations might help politicians to pre-empt blame by reducing clarity of responsibility.
Journal Article
Three strategies to track configurations over time with Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) – a configurational research approach – has become often-used in political science. In its original form, QCA is relatively static and does not analyze configurations over time. Since many key questions in political science – and other social sciences – have a temporal dimension, this is a major drawback of QCA. Therefore, we discuss and compare three QCA-related strategies that enable researchers to track configurations over time: (1) Multiple Time Periods, Single QCA; (2) Multiple QCAs, Different Time Periods; and (3) Fuzzy-Set Ideal Type Analysis. We use existing datasets to empirically demonstrate and visualize the strategies. By comparing the strategies, we also contribute to existing overviews on how to address time in QCA. We conclude by formulating an agenda for the further development of the three strategies in applied research, in political science and beyond.
Journal Article
Heuristics and policy responsiveness: a research agenda
Theories of policy responsiveness assume that political decision-makers can rationally interpret information about voters’ likely reactions, but can we be sure of this? Political decision-makers face considerable time and information constraints, which are the optimal conditions for displaying decision-making biases—deviations from comprehensive rationality. Recent research has shown that when evaluating policies, political decision-makers display biases related to heuristics—cognitive rules of thumb that facilitate judgments and decision-making—when evaluating policies. It is thus likely that they also rely on heuristics in other situations, such as when forming judgments of voters’ likely reactions. But what types of heuristics do political decision-makers use in such judgments, and do these heuristics contribute to misjudgements of voters’ reactions? Existing research does not answer these crucial questions. To address this lacuna, we first present illustrative evidence of how biases related to heuristics contributed to misjudgements about voters’ reactions in two policy decisions by UK governments. Then, we use this evidence to develop a research agenda that aims to further our understanding of when political decision-makers rely on heuristics and the effects thereof. Such an agenda will contribute to the literature on policy responsiveness.
Journal Article
The “qualitative” in qualitative comparative analysis (QCA): research moves, case-intimacy and face-to-face interviews
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) includes two main components: QCA “as a research approach” and QCA “as a method”. In this study, we focus on the former and, by means of the “interpretive spiral”, we critically look at the research process of QCA. We show how QCA as a research approach is composed of (1) an “analytical move”, where cases, conditions and outcome(s) are conceptualised in terms of sets, and (2) a “membership move”, where set membership values are qualitatively assigned by the researcher (i.e. calibration). Moreover, we show that QCA scholars have not sufficiently acknowledged the data generation process as a constituent research phase (or “move”) for the performance of QCA. This is particularly relevant when qualitative data–e.g. interviews, focus groups, documents–are used for subsequent analysis and calibration (i.e. analytical and membership moves). We call the qualitative data collection process “relational move” because, for data gathering, researchers establish the social relation “interview” with the study participants. By using examples from our own research, we show how a dialogical interviewing style can help researchers gain the in-depth knowledge necessary to meaningfully represent qualitative data into set membership values for QCA, hence improving our ability to account for the “qualitative” in QCA.
Journal Article
Conducting quantitative studies with the participation of political elites: best practices for designing the study and soliciting the participation of political elites
Conducting quantitative research (e.g., surveys, a large number of interviews, experiments) with the participation of political elites is typically challenging. Given that a population of political elites is typically small by definition, a particular challenge is obtaining a sufficiently high number of observations and, thus, a certain response rate. This paper focuses on two questions related to this challenge: (1) What are best practices for designing the study? And (2) what are best practices for soliciting the participation of political elites? To arrive at these best practices, we (a) examine which factors explain the variation in response rates across surveys within and between large-scale, multi-wave survey projects by statistically analyzing a newly compiled dataset of 342 political elite surveys from eight projects, spanning 30 years and 58 countries, (b) integrate the typically scattered findings from the existing literature and (c) discuss results from an original expert survey among researchers with experience with such research (n = 23). By compiling a comprehensive list of best practices, systematically testing some widely held believes about response rates and by providing benchmarks for response rates depending on country, survey mode and elite type, we aim to facilitate future studies where participation of political elites is required. This will contribute to our knowledge and understanding of political elites’ opinions, information processing and decision making and thereby of the functioning of representative democracies.
Journal Article
Politicians, the Representativeness Heuristic and Decision-Making Biases
Do politicians use the representativeness heuristic when making judgements, that is, when they appraise the likelihood or frequency of an outcome that is unknown or unknowable? Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that facilitate judgements and decision making. Oftentimes, heuristics are useful, but they may also lead to systematic biases that can be detrimental for decision making in a representative democracy. Thus far, we lack experimental evidence on whether politicians use the representativeness heuristic. To contribute to and extend the existing literature, we develop and conduct a survey experiment with as main participants Dutch elected local politicians from the larger municipalities (n = 211). This survey experiment examines whether politician participants display two decision-making biases related to the representativeness heuristic: the conjunction error and scope neglect. We also run the experiment with a student sample (n = 260), mainly to validate the experimental design. Our findings show that politician participants neglect scope in one scenario and that they display the conjunction error in two of three scenarios. These results suggest that politician participants use the representativeness heuristic. Conversely, our third conjunction error scenario does not find evidence for politician participants displaying this bias. As we discuss in the article, the latter may be an artifact of our experimental design. Overall, our findings contribute fundamentally to our understanding of how politicians process information and how this influences their judgements and decision making.
Journal Article