Staffan Kumlin

Scandal Fatigue: Scandal Elections and Satisfaction with Democracy in Western Europe 1977-2007

Elections involving a major scandal were unusual in the late 1970s, but today nearly half are so affected. Multilevel analyses of Eurobarometer data reveal that scandal elections once had negative net effects on satisfaction with democracy. However, as scandals have become more common, the negative effect has withered away. This ‘scandal fatigue’ process appears driven by changes in scandal material, rather than by changes in citizens’ reactions to a given type of material. Scandals involving several politicians and parties still really matter, but these have not become markedly more common. The possibility that the increasing incidence of scandals has created a more critical approach to scandal material is discussed. As scandals accumulate, citizens may become more prone to ponder the relevance of a story and the motives of the messenger.

Questioning the New Liberal Dilemma: Immigrants, Social Networks, and Institutional Fairness

Previous research concludes that immigrants and minority members, as well as all residents of more diverse contexts, display less generalized trust. Such findings suggest a harsh trade-off between diversity on the one hand and social capital on the other. In contrast, we gauge the relationship between minority status and trust while considering three interaction variables. First, informal neighbour interaction cushions the negative impact of minority status. Second, a similar role is played by fair treatment by public authorities responsible for social and welfare state policies. Third, consistent with expectations we did not find a similar cushioning interaction of participation in organized settings. All in all, the empirical results encourage a more contingent stance about diversity and social capital than that found in recent research. The minority culture of mistrust is not cut in stone but has a potential to wither away as a consequence of positive experiences of social interaction and institutional fairness. Because these have a particularly positive impact on trust among minorities, the trust gap between immigrants and may—under the right circumstances—be closed at high levels of these variables.

Blaming Europe? Exploring the variable impact of national public service dissatisfaction on EU trust

European Social Survey data suggest that dissatisfaction with national public services has direct negative effects on EU trust in most EU15 countries, but also that there is significant country variation in their actual magnitude. Two-thirds of this variation can be explained jointly by two macro factors: the effect is stronger in larger welfare states where elites and citizens may perceive EU-induced obstacles for welfare state expansion. Likewise, it is stronger in political systems where the most Eurosceptic parties have tended to be the most welfare state-supporting ones. Under such conditions, it is more probable that citizens receive political cues conducive to a negative effect of dissatisfaction on EU trust.

Ideology-driven opinion formation in Europe: The case of attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden

This paper uses attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden to test general assumptions about how citizens in West European political systems apply ideological schemas as shortcuts to political preferences. Attitudes towards the third sector are found to be affected by all ideological schemas reflected in the Swedish party system (state-market, Christian traditionalism, and growth-ecology). Contrary to what is implied by findings from America, these effects are very stable across socio-economic groups (especially those of the dominant state-market schema). Similarly, no interaction effects of political sophistication could be traced, and the relative impact of the schemas remains the same regardless of whether or not the third sector is presented as an alternative to the welfare state. The implications of these findings for the nature of public opinion formation in ideologically clear and structured political systems are discussed.

Learning from Politics? The Causal Interplay between Government Performance and Political Ideology

Most models of public opinion assign a fundamental role to ideological predispositions. Moreover, the literature usually portrays ideology as a stable phenomenon at the individual-level, one that is mainly shaped by socio-economic class experiences and pre-adult socialisation, and that is likely to grow stronger in intensity – rather than change – over the life-course. However, less is known about the scope of, or reasons for, ideological change in adult life. This paper uses Swedish panel data to investigate the interrelation between evaluations of government performance and ideological left-right related orientations. There is some support for “the socialisation school,” in that ideological positions and values display considerable short-term stability (though less stability over a four-year period).Moreover, there is evidence of short-run selective perception, with those close to the government at t1 being more likely than others to form more positive performance perceptions between t1 and t2. Interestingly however, over a four-year period this tendency was not statistically significant. Moreover, there is also clear support for a “revisionist” interpretation of left-right ideology. Such orientations do change at the individual level, change which is systematically affected by how people perceive incumbent government performance, an impact which does not depend on political sophistication.

Political Trust and Ideology

In chapters 1–3, we thought mainly about the explanatory side of our research problem—how personal welfare state experiences affect political orientations.We have discussed potentially influential aspects of welfare state experiences, and how different sorts of welfare state institutions may systematically affect these aspects. However, while chapter 1 gave away the basic information that the dependent variables will be political trust and ideology, little has actually been said about these political orientations and the processes through which they may be affected by personal welfare state experiences.

Election campaign agendas, government partisanship, and the welfare state

Although theoretically contentious, most empirical studies contend that electoral-political factors structure the welfare state. In practice, most studies concentrate on ‘government partisanship’, that is the ideological character of the government. We agree that politics matters but also seek to expand our understanding of what ‘politics’ should be taken to mean. Drawing on recent comparative research on agenda-setting, we study the impact of whether welfare state issues were broadly salient in the public sphere during the election campaign that produced the government. We formulate hypotheses about how such systemic campaign salience and government partisanship (separately and interactively) affect welfare generosity. We also consider how such effects might have changed, taking into account challenges to standard assumptions of representative democracy coming from the ‘new politics of the welfare state’ framework. We combine well-known, but updated, data on welfare state generosity and government partisanship, with original contextual data on campaign salience from 16 West European countries for the years 1980–2008. We find that campaigns matter but also that their impact has changed. During the first half of the examined period (the 1980s and early 1990s), it mainly served to facilitate government partisanship effects on the welfare state. More recently, big-time campaign attention to welfare state issues results in some retrenchment (almost) regardless of who forms the postelection government. This raises concerns about the democratic status of the politics of welfare state reform in Europe.

The Welfare State and Political Trust: Bringing Performance Back In

We still lack full answers to questions about how welfare state policies and policy change, and evaluations thereof, affect political trust. However, relevant findings are beginning to materialize and this chapter discusses in turn four reasonably distinct accumulations of studies. The first one has to do with the impact of evaluations of the performance and protection offered by services and income replacement schemes. A second and related literature focuses on the nature of citizens’ personal experiences of welfare state schemes. The third topic is the impact of big economic crises and the austerity policies they often, but not always, act as catalysts for. A fourth set of findings concerns the impact of welfare state related contextual variables ‘in normal times’, such as the impact of welfare state generosity and income inequality on political trust.

Reform Pressures and Perceived Welfare State Sustainability: A Comparative Survey Experiment

Influential theories of the welfare state long predicted much policy stability also in the face of mounting reform pressures and associated cost problems. Recent developments, however, suggest significant reforms and even retrenchment have occurred Scholars are now increasing efforts to understand the “reform strategies” that make policy change politically feasible and acceptable to the public. We contribute by analyzing effects of reform pressure framing Do citizens perceptions of welfare state sustainability change when they are exposed to information about various cost-inducing pressures on the welfare state? Using an experimental design, we examine whether views on the financial viability of the welfare state are susceptible to an argumentative emphasis on reform pressures, including population ageing, low employment rates, immigration, and international economic crisis (separately as well as interactively). The analysis is sensitive to whether effects are contingent on prior attitudes and interests. Additionally, the three-country comparative design makes it possible to investigate if it more difficult to influence perceptions of welfare state sustainability in oil rich Norway than in the more pressured contexts of Germany and Sweden.

Book Review: Anirudh Krishna (ed.) Poverty, Participation, and Democracy: A Global Perspective Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 189 pp

analyses of the events that enabled the emergence of the National Front in France as well as other radical right parties in Europe. If we top the thorough empirical analyses with an innovative approach to the topic, a clear logic and superb writing skills, it is obvious that we have a book that is well worth reading. However, no book is without problems and a couple need to be mentioned here. One is the problem with choosing the actual events to analyse. It is easy to construct the empirical cases as they have already taken place, but the question is: would the National Front still have been such a success story if the analysed events had never taken place? This question cannot be answered, but when Berezin highlights the importance of the emergence of the European supra-state it is possible that the events could be replaced by any other signifying event and the result would still be the same, i.e. the success of the National Front, as long as it is back-dropped against vertical shifts in the political decision-making process that in the long run threatens the nation-state and peoples’ possibilities for national identification. If the latter is the case, then the conclusions may not be that novel, as Berezin is not the first to make these claims. Moreover, it is not shown beyond doubt that the conclusion provided actually is generally applicable across countries, which means that Berezin is open to the same criticism as the alternative approaches that she criticizes; namely, that they cannot explain everything. Still, she provides a methodological framework that is new to the research field and she shows how it can be used systematically to enable interesting analyses and answers to questions that have long remained unanswered. This is recommended reading, and I look forward to seeing more analyses of other radical right parties in Europe and elsewhere utilizing the Berezian approach, not to mention Berezin’s next book. Mikael Hjerm Umeå University, Sweden