Keith Dowding

The development of capability indicators

This paper is motivated by sustained interest in the capabilities approach to welfare economics combined with the paucity of economic statistics that measure capabilities at the individual level. Specifically, it takes a much discussed account of the normatively desirable capabilities constitutive of a good life, argued to be comprehensive at a high level of abstraction, and uses it to operationalize the capabilities approach by developing a survey instrument to elicit information about capabilities at the individual level. The paper explores the extent to which these capabilities are covariates of a life satisfaction measure of utility and investigates aspects of robustness and subgroup differences using standard socio‐demographic variables as well as a relatively novel control for personality. In substantial terms, we find there is some evidence of quantitative, but no qualitative, gender and age differences in the capabilities–life satisfaction relationship. Furthermore, we find that indicators from a wide range of life domains are linked to life satisfaction, a finding that supports multi‐dimensional approaches to poverty and the non‐materialist view that people do not just value financial income per se. Our most important contribution, however, is primarily methodological and derives from the demonstration that, within the conventions of household and social surveys, human capabilities can be measured with the aid of suitably designed statistical indicators.

Institutionalist Research on the European Union A Critical Review

This article critically examines the recent wealth of institutionalist rational choice literature on the EU. It appraises the major fault lines and debates. It argues that non-cooperative game theory provides a thorough set of tools to examine the effects of different sorts of institutions upon the powers and limitations of different institutional actors. In certain areas scholars have not fully utilized the models applied to other political systems, but EU scholarship has taken a great leap forward in the past few years. Fully specified models with proper predictions are now being developed, though there is a tendency for modellers to introduce too many new assumptions that make empirical comparison with earlier models problematic, as it is sometimes hard to see which new assumptions are of most import. But we are into a new phase of normal science rational choice institutionalist explanation of the EU.

Is it rational to Vote? Five Types of Answer and a Suggestion

If rational choice theory is pathological (Green and Shapiro 1994), then nowhere has it displayed this trait more than in trying to explain why people vote. We know why people vote, or at least we know why people think they vote, because in surveys they have told us. The problem for rational choice theory is that the answer is boring, and it is not clear that it makes people instrumentally rational. People vote in order to express their preference for their preferred candidate, increase his or her chances of winning and because they feel they ought to. Not everyone gives all three reasons but all three reasons are present in any voting population. There might be other reasons too, but most can be reduced to one of these three. The problem for rational choice is whether people are rational when they vote for these reasons, and its attempt to show they are constitutes the pathology that Donald Green and Ian Shapiro identify. In this article I will examine the reasons rational choice writers have given for the rationality of voting. I suggest that they ignore the answers staring them in the face and need to switch the focus of their attention if they wish to provide deeper answers to the question than those given in survey responses. I will be suggesting, however, that despite its pathological quest for the holy grail of individually rational turnout, rational choice theory has turned up some interesting results.

The Three Exit, Three Voice and Loyalty Framework: A Test with Survey Data on Local Services

The article presents a modified Hirschman framework with three types of exit: moving location; moving from the public to a private sector provider; and moving between public sector providers; and three types of voice: private voice (complaining about private goods); voting; and collective action. Seven hypotheses are generated from this framework. The article then presents evidence from the first round of an online survey examining citizen satisfaction with public services and the relationship between exit and voice opportunities. We find dissatisfied people are more likely to complain privately, vote and engage in other forms of collective participation; but only a weak relationship exists between dissatisfaction and geographical exit. We find some evidence that the exit–voice trade-off might exist as more alert consumers are more likely to move from the public to the private sector and those ‘locked in’ are more likely to complain than those who have outside options. Overall the results tend to corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the modified Hirschman framework.

The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the United Kingdom, 1945–97

We analyse the determinants of ministerial hazard rates in Britain from 1945 to 1997. We focus on three sets of attributes (i) personal characteristics of the minister; (ii) political characteristics of the minister; and (iii) characteristics pertaining to the government in which the minister serves. We find that educational background increases ministers’ capacity to survive, that female ministers have lower hazard rates and older ministers have higher hazard rates. Experienced ministers have higher hazard rates than newly appointed ministers. Ministerial rank increases a minister’s capacity to survive, with full cabinet members having the lowest hazard rates in our sample. We use different strategies to control for the characteristics of the government the minister serves in. Our results are robust to any of these controls. In the British political system, where policy making is the primary function of departments, rising to ministerial office represents the height of ambition for most backbenchers. Yet we know little about what determines which ministers are successful. James Alt begins his essay on continuity and turnover in the British cabinet with the words: ‘It is perhaps more difficult to place this study in the context of the academic literature than to show that it covers a topic of some importance.’ 1 Over a quarter of a century later, with the exception of the study by Alt, the literature on ministers in the British cabinet still lacks systematic analysis. Blondel’s comment a decade later remains pertinent: the ‘study of ministers and ministerial careers is in its infancy’. 2

Regime Politics in London Local Government

The authors provide an encompassing eight-point characterization of regimes designed to cover all cases of this complex multicriteria concept, arguing that not all eight characteristics need be present for a regime to exist but that the larger the subset, the more a governing coalition constitutes a regime. The regime concept is then applied to six London boroughs during the early to mid-1990s. They demonstrate the utility and limits of the regime concept in identifying and explaining the politics of these boroughs at this time, suggesting that three of the cases constitute different types of regimes, and the other three constitute failed regimes.

The Construction of Rights

This paper examines the sense in which rights can be said to exist. We examine various approaches to the definition and analysis of rights, focusing in particular on the compossibility of rights. Concentrating on three existing approaches to rights—social choice-theoretic, game-theoretic, and Steiners approach—we suggest that rights are noncompossible in any interesting sense, that is, that the rights people have are nonexistent or vanishingly small. We develop an alternative account of rights—which we claim is more in tune with moral intuitions—where compossibility is not important and rights cannot form the exclusive basis of morality or a theory of justice. Rights are constructed on the basis of more fundamental moral values. We demonstrate how they are constructed and the sense in which they exist even though they might not always be exercised, while acknowledging that rights that may never be exercised are hardly worth the name.We would like to thank Cecile Fabre, Ruth Kinna, Matt Kramer, Anna Pilatova, three anonymous referees, and participants at the Analysis of Measurement of Freedom conference in Palermo, Italy, September 2001, the 2002 meeting of the Dutch Political Science Association, and the Economic Decisions Conference in Pamplona, Spain, June 2002, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Choice: Its Increase and its Value

Much has been made in recent years of increasing the choice of the citizen-consumer. This article argues that the concept of ‘increasing choice’ is far more problematic than at first appears and has little intrinsic value in itself. Choice is only to be valued in itself in the sense that the process of choice or decision-making plays a part in our discovery of our own preferences. To justify the introduction of the market process on the grounds of increasing choice is doubly wrong; first, increasing choice is not in itself valuable and, secondly, what is valuable about the market has little to do with choice.

Ministerial Resignations 1945-97

This article reports on data collected on ministerial resignations and non-resignations 1945–1997. It analyses the reasons why ministers resign and patterns that emerge in terms of the types of issues that are more likely to lead to resignation, and variances between different Prime Ministers, parties and over time. It provides the first fully quantified analysis of ministerial resignations in Britain in the post-war period to enhance the impressionistic analyses which have been offered before.

The Impact of Individual and Collective Performance on Ministerial Tenure

Government ministers in Parliamentary democracies are career politicians for whom public service is an important source of motivation. The length of their tenure is controlled by the Prime Minister. We test a simple Principal-Agent model of parliamentary government in which the Prime Minister evaluates her ministers according to information available to her that is related to their performance. We study the effects of individual and collective ministerial performance on the length of time a minister serves in British government over the period 1945–97. We use the number of resignation calls for a minister as an individual performance indicator and the cumulative number of such calls as an indicator of government performance. A minister’s hazard rate increases sharply after the first individual call for resignation and is decreasing in the cumulative number of resignation calls. These results are consistent with the Principal-Agent model and with the use of relative performance evaluation by the Prime Minister.