Nils D. Steiner

Economic Integration, Party Polarisation and Electoral Turnout

Recent research provides evidence that economic integration has a negative effect on electoral turnout. Taking up these recent findings, this article explores the causal chain in more detail. Specifically, it argues that one way by which economic integration affects the calculus of voting is through the positioning of political parties. The expectation is that the polarisation between parties on an economic left–right scale is lower the more integrated an economy is. Consequently, electoral turnout should be lower with less polarisation in the party system. The article employs aggregate-level data from legislative elections in 24 developed democracies. Using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project, evidence is found not only that economic integration has a negative effect on party polarisation as measured on an economic left–right dimension, but also that this in turn exerts a negative effect on electoral turnout.

What explains 'generosity' in the public financing of high-tech drugs? An empirical investigation of 25 OECD countries and 11 controversial drugs

In times of increasing cost pressures, public healthcare systems in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries face the question of whether and to which extent new high-tech drugs are to be financed within their public healthcare systems. Systematic empirical research that explains across-country variation in these decisions is, however, almost non-existent. We analyse an original dataset that contains coverage decisions for 11 controversial drugs in 25 OECD countries using multilevel modelling. Our results indicate that the ‘generosity’ with which controversial new drugs are publicly financed is unrelated to a country’s wealth and general expenditure levels for healthcare. However, healthcare systems financed through social insurance contributions tend to be more generous than tax-financed ones. Moreover, we uncover evidence suggesting that the institutional characteristics of the decision-making process matter systematically for decisions on whether to finance controversial drugs.

Comparing Freedom House Democracy Scores to Alternative Indices and Testing for Political Bias: Are US Allies Rated as More Democratic by Freedom House?

Abstract Several scholars have criticized the Freedom House democracy ratings as being politically biased. Do countries indeed incorrectly receive better ratings that have stronger political ties with the United States? This article tests whether differences between a number of alternative indices of democracy and the FH ratings can be explained in a systematic manner by variables that record relationships between the US and the countries under investigation. Differentiating between the periods before 1988 and after 1989, strong and consistent evidence of a substantial bias in the FH ratings is obtained for the former period. For the latter period, the estimates are less consistent, but still hint at the presence of a political bias in the FH scores.

Public Spending and Trade Liberalization: The Compensation Hypothesis Revisited

Despite a widespread fascination with the so called compensation hypothesis – i.e. the proposition that governments have to provide insurance against the risks of open markets to make integration into the international economy politically feasible – there appears to exist a complete lack of research where a rather straightforward implication of this theoretical mechanism is concerned, namely that liberalization of the trade regime should become more likely with a larger public sector and more social spending already in place. In this paper, we test this hypothesis that can be regard as a complement to existing research on the compensation hypothesis. We draw on a theoretical model that links an individuals (uncertain) assessment of her future position in a liberalized economy to her support for government liberalization policies. By reducing uncertainty, diffusing gains among a larger set of individuals and rendering compensation promises more credible ex ante developed institutions of redistribution and economic insurance are argued to increase support for reforms towards free trade and thereby make liberalization more likely. We test the proposition that trade liberalization is facilitated by higher public spending empirically (a) on data on the evolution of average tariff rates in 20 post-World War II OECD democracies from 1951 to 1993 and (b) by leveraging data on major liberalization episodes from 1950 onwards in a global sample of democratic countries through event history analysis. Overall, we find no support for the hypothesis suggested by the compensation logic that public spending facilitates reforms towards free trade.

Attitudes towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in the European Union: The treaty partner heuristic and issue attention

Why has the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partisanship met with strong public resistance among some Europeans and in some European Union member states, but not in others? This article argues that one important perspective to explain the pattern of support for TTIP is the role of heuristic opinion formation and issue attention. Analysing multiple waves of Eurobarometer data, I find that views of the two treaty partners, the US and the European Union, shape attitudes towards TTIP and that the largely post-materialist concerns over TTIP resonated specifically in those European countries whose citizens’ attention was less focused on economic issues. In showing how opinions towards concrete real-world trade policy proposals are shaped by the political context, these findings complement previous research on citizens’ general stances towards trade.

Where Democrats Disagree: Citizens’ Normative Conceptions of Democracy:

While support for the essential norms of liberal electoral democracy is high in almost all developed democracies, there is arguably also a gap between democratic aspirations and democratic practice, leading to dissatisfaction among citizens. We argue that citizens may hold very different normative conceptions of democracy which are equally compatible with support for liberal democracy, but lead to different expectations where institutional design and democratic practice are concerned. Satisfaction with democracy may thus depend on congruence between such normative conceptions and institutionally entrenched norms. Drawing on survey data from Germany with a comprehensive item battery on attitudes towards democratic decision-making, we identify four distinct factors leading to disagreements over democratic decision-making. We explore how these are related to personality, styles of cognition and political attitudes, and show that different expectations arise from them, such that regime support is affected by the normative conception(s) of democratic decision-making individuals subscribe to.

Intra-party heterogeneity in policy preferences and its effect on issue salience: Developing and applying a measure based on elite survey data

Quantitative research on party politics often has to assume that parties are unitary actors with homogeneous policy preferences simply because intra-party heterogeneity is difficult to measure. This article proposes a measure of preference heterogeneity based on surveys of party elites. We draw on Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) data from 28 elections in 21 developed democracies to quantify intra-party heterogeneity and validate this measure. The usefulness of the measure is demonstrated by studying the effects of intra-party heterogeneity on issue salience. We find support for the hypothesis that heterogeneity regarding a policy issue tends to be negatively associated with the emphasis a party places on that issue by regressing measures of issue salience from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Manifesto Project on our CCS measure of heterogeneity. Problems of elite surveys notwithstanding, drawing on this data source seems a promising way to overcome the unitary party assumption.

Public Support for TTIP in EU Countries: The Correlates of Trade Policy Preferences in a Salient Case

Attitudes towards international economic integration are usually measured via survey questions on preferences for free trade in general, arguably in contexts of low salience of international economic integration in the public mind. Drawing on three recent rounds of Eurobarometer surveys that contain information on citizens’ attitudes towards a free trade and investment agreement between the EU and the USA, this paper seizes the opportunity to re-examine individual-level preferences towards international economic integration with regard to a specific real-world case of relatively high political salience, i.e. TTIP. While past research has explained preferences towards trade primarily via models of economic self-interest and/or socio-cultural attitudes towards internationalization, my findings point to a more complex picture. In line with an economic perspective, perceptions of the economic benefits of economic globalization in general strongly predict support for TTIP. Yet, differences at the country-level in support for TTIP are hard to account for with economic explanations. Looking beyond the two familiar sets of explanations, I find that political orientations towards the European Union and the functioning of national democracy are strong and consistent predictors of individuals’ stances towards TTIP. Moreover, my findings suggest that TTIP divides individuals and societies with different issue and value priorities and that general attitudes towards the US in a country play a role.

How Electoral Institutions Change the Influence of World Trade Integration on Trade Policies

World integration levels influence opportunity costs of maintaining restrictive national trade policies. In an integrated world, restrictive trade policies are more costly than in a context of low overall levels of world market integration. We argue that policy makers can be expected to react to these varying incentives to liberalize the trade regimes of their countries, yet do so not in a uniform fashion across countries. Rather, the responsiveness to changes in levels of world trade integration is conditional upon the electoral system the country in question employs. This is due to the fact that opportunity cost considerations increase in importance with a) the degree to which policy makers are isolated from the influence of protectionist interest groups; and b) the credibility with which losers of integration can be promised compensation. Both aspects weigh more strongly in countries that employ proportional representation as opposed to majority voting. We test this hypothesis using a model of conditional trade policy diffusion where world levels of integration are treated as diffusion influence that is interacted with a measure of the proportionality of a country’s electoral system. Empirical results support the hypothesis. Moreover, it is shown that it is district magnitude as a measure of proportionality rather than the higher number of parties associated with more proportional voting rules that drives the results.

The Electoral Effects of Offshoring-Induced Mass-Layoffs: Germany in Comparative Perspective

How does globalization’s impact on the labor market affect political preferences? This study takes up the strategy of a recent contribution (Margalit 2011a) and studies the local electoral effects of regional job losses due to offshoring. By applying the analytical strategy to German national elections in 2005 and 2009, it studies whether and how the finding on U.S. presidential elections travels to other contexts. Theoretically, the contribution adds a perspective suggested by previous research on the individual level political consequences of the globalization-labor market link that addresses the likely social policy preferences of globalization’s losers. Preliminary empirical results indicate no support for the notion that incumbent parties are electorally hurt by offshoring. There is also only very weak evidence for a policy-based effect with left parties locally gaining from offshoring.