The forthcoming AJPS article, “A Bottom-Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy”, by Joshua Kertzer and Thomas Zeitzoff is now available for Early View and is summarized here by its authors: 

In July 2014, a wave of violence erupted in the Middle East, as Israel responded to a barrage of rockets from Gaza by launching airstrikes, and eventually, a ground incursion intent on degrading Hamas’s military capabilities. In Washington, both Democrats and Republicans firmly sided with Israel: the Senate passed a unanimous resolution blaming Hamas for the conflict, and both prominent Democrats and Republicans gave staunch defenses of Israel’s right to defend itself.

Although both Democrats and Republicans in Washington were united in their support for Israel, a series of polls found that Democrats and Republicans in the public were divided: in a Pew poll from July 24-27, for example, 60% of Republicans blamed Hamas for the violence, while Democrats were split, with 29% blaming Hamas, and 26% blaming Israel. A Gallup poll from July 22-23 detected a similar pattern: 65% of Republicans thought Israel’s actions were justified, but Democrats were divided, as 31% backed the Israeli response, and 47% called it unjustified.

This pattern—where political elites are united but the public is not—is particularly interesting for political scientists because it raises questions about a widely held set of assumptions in the social sciences about public opinion, which holds that the public knows relatively little about politics (especially foreign affairs), and thus structures its beliefs by taking cues from trusted, partisan elites. But if the mass public knows so little, and can only regurgitate carefully pureed talking points, why does it often disagree with what elites have to say?

In our new paper in the American Journal of Political Science, we argue that these partisan “elite cue” models are unnecessarily restrictive. The public may often lack information, but it doesn’t lack principles, and because cues are the most persuasive when they come from cue-givers you trust, information need not only cascade from the top down. In an era when more Americans are turning away from traditional party politics, trust in government is abysmally low, and many of the major political events of the past year—Brexit, Donald Trump steamrolling his way to the Presidency over the objections of elites in both parties, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour party leader in Great Britain, and so on — consist of political movements disconnected from and disenchanted with the political establishment (“I think people in this country have had enough of experts”, as Brexiteer Michael Gove put it), it seems plausible that people might take cues from actors other than partisan political elites.

Drawing on five survey experiments fielded between 2014-2016, we test and find evidence for a “bottom-up” theory of public opinion, in which ordinary citizens anchor on their core belief systems, and look not just to politicians in Washington, but also to each other to help determine their opinions on foreign policy. People aren’t blank slates; the public has minds of its own. Political scientists thus need to take into account what the authors call the “meso-foundations” of public opinion: the social context and broader network in which citizens are embedded.

In suggesting that public opinion can be shaped by social forces from below, rather than just cues from above, the results suggest a number of broader implications. The extent to which people care about what other members of the public think (even about relatively technical policy issues) raises interesting questions about the effects of the growing media coverage of public opinion polls in lieu of substantive policy discussion. Horserace political coverage may have more problematic consequences for democracy than many might think. It is also especially interesting in the age of new media, where both search engines like Google and social networks like Facebook rely on complex algorithms to show users what they think they want to see, producing alternative and often self-segregating information environments whose implications for public opinion in foreign affairs are not yet fully appreciated. In the current balkanized information environment, replete with the rise of “fake news” and disinformation campaigns led by state-sponsored “troll armies” with fake online identities, the results imply that concerns about opinion manipulation shouldn’t just focus on propaganda from above, but also on disinformation from below.

A Bottom-Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy is now available for Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

The AJPS article The Fulfillment of Parties’ Election Pledges: A Comparative Study on the Impact of Power Sharing by Robert Thomson, Terry Royed, Elin Naurin, Joaquín Artés, Rory Costello, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Mark Ferguson, Petia Kostadinova, Catherine Moury, François Pétry and Katrin Praprotnik was published in AJPS 61:3 is summarized here by its authors:

To what extent do parties keep their campaign promises or election pledges if they enter government and hold executive power after elections? This understudied question is of great importance to the theory and practice of democracy. The idea of promissory representation is that parties should make clear policy commitments to voters during election campaigns and take action on those commitments if they hold government office after elections. In this article, which is the first major publication of our comparative project, we ask whether parties are more likely to fulfill their pledges if they hold executive office alone rather than in coalitions, if they control legislative majorities rather than minorities, and if they are unconstrained by a range of other institutions. Our research systematically compares what parties promised during election campaigns with what governments did after elections. In a series of carefully coordinated case studies using common definitions of pledges and fulfillment, we study the fulfillment of over 20,000 pledges made by parties in 12 countries during 57 election campaigns.

Our main findings challenge the common view of parties as promise-breakers. We find that a clear majority of pledges made by parties that hold executive office after elections were at least partially fulfilled, and in some cases well above 80 percent of pledges were redeemed. We find significant variation in pledge fulfillment by government type, with parties that govern alone rather than in coalitions being most likely to fulfill their pledges. The highest rates of pledge fulfillment are found in Canada, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK, where single-party governments are common, and lower rates in Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands, where coalitions are the norm. In the United States, on average over 60 percent of the pledges made by the party of the president were fulfilled at least partially, which is comparable to levels found for some governing parties in coalitions. While the evidence shows that parties generally take their pledges seriously, whether they are able to follow through on their promises depends to a large extent on whether they share power with other parties.

This article is part of a larger research project in which we examine pledge making, breaking and fulfillment from a comparative perspective. At the time of writing, we are completing a book project, which is under contract with the University of Michigan Press. The book has extensive analyses of the conditions under which parties make and keep election pledges, including a series of country-focused chapters and integrated comparative analyses. In the years to come we intend to develop our project further with both new theories and evidence, including a broader range of countries. We are also expanding the project to include the study of how citizens perceive the fulfillment of pledges. The results show that while most citizens are skeptical about whether parties fulfill their election pledges, people are often able to assess accurately whether specific promises were broken or kept. We have also found considerable interest from the media and general public in our main research findings.

The Fulfillment of Parties’ Election Pledges: A Comparative Study on the Impact of Power Sharing was published in the July 2017 issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

By Dimitri Landa and Scott A. Tyson

In the following blog post, the authors summarize the forthcoming American Journal of Political Science article titled “Coercive Leadership”: 

How does a leader’s coercive capacity – her ability to impose costs on followers – affect her style of leadership and how she influences her followers/agents? We develop a theory of leadership in contexts in which (1) agents value the information that, inter alia, allows them to coordinate better with each other, (2) the leader’s choice shapes the actions of individual agents, and (3) the leader values how agents coordinate.

The substantive implications of our theory are applicable across many different set- tings. One such setting is authoritarian regimes. Our theory provides a novel account of policy-making in such settings and suggests a distinctive perspective on the rationale for, and relationship between, repression and censorship. Another setting is organizational politics within democracies, for which our theory provides an account of what may be called the autocratic mode of leadership. A stark example is the “boss” style of governance of “party machines”: by Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall in late nineteenth century New York, or by Mayor Daley of the Chicago machine in 1950s-70s, or in present-day major parties in India, Argentina, Russia, among others. When adopting policies with implicit or explicit punishments for dissent and rewards for compliance, machine bosses provide information and coordinate party members – two channels of influence at the heart of our theory.

In the game-theoretic model we present, coordination among agents is frustrated by two factors: heterogeneous preferences and dispersed information. We isolate two channels by which the leader influences the effects of these factors. The first, the information channel, operates because the leader’s policy choice can be informative to agents by partially revealing what the leader knows about the state of the world. The second, the coercion channel, manifests the leader’s non-informational influence: her coercive power counters the obstacles to coordination among agents, regardless of the source of the co- ordination friction. In the presence of coercive policy enforcement, an agent weights her idiosyncratic aspects less, making her action easier to anticipate for other agents. Agents are thus pulled toward the leader’s policy, common to them all, as a “focal point” regard- less of whether that policy is actually informative about the state of the world.

While the information and the coercion channels are distinct, they interact in important ways. We show that the leader’s policy choice communicates more information about the state of the world (i.e., becomes a better signal of the state), the greater the leader’s coercive enforcement power. We also show that even with a minimal level of coercion, leaders’ policy choices (via coercive and informational effects) allow them to manipulate agents’ actions so as to achieve their own preferred average action. In so doing, leaders neutralize welfare distortions (highlighted, for example, by Morris and Shin 2002) resulting from previous public information in the presence of coordination incentives. Yet, even when ignoring the direct disutility to agents from the leaders coercion, leadership as an institution may not be a welfare-enhancing for agents if the policy bias of the leader is sufficiently hard to predict. Finally, we show that the leader strictly prefers increasing her coercive capacity/repression (because she prefers that agents coordinate on her preferred outcome), but does not want to censor previous public information (because she is able to control its effects through policy choice).

About the Authors: Dimitri Landa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University and Scott A. Tyson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at The University of Michigan. Their paper “Coercive Leadership” is now available for Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.