AJPS Author Summary of “Territorial Representation and the Opinion-Policy Linkage” by Christopher Wratil 

A central promise of democracy is that government will follow the wishes and opinions of the people. A large body of literature in American and comparative politics has demonstrated that in many situations governments react to shifts in mean public opinion and enact policies that are supported by the majority of citizens across the country. However, the idea that policy-makers follow country-wide mean opinion to get re-elected is most straightforward in political systems where policy-makers are elected by ‘the people’ as a whole. But many political systems elect policy-makers in sub-national constituencies: from U.S. Senators elected only by the citizens in each of the 50 constituent states to national governments in the European Union elected only by the citizens of each of the 28 member states. How do these arrangements of ‘territorial representation’ influence whose preferences will be reflected in policy output in case citizens in different states or territories disagree over policy change?

To answer this question my research uses the case of the EU, where national governments are major policy-makers accountable only to their national publics which have varying opinions on EU policies. I argue that governments will focus on achieving policy change on those issues their national citizens at home care intensely about and have a uniform view on, and potentially make concessions to other governments on issues their citizens’ opinion is ambivalent and less salient. The analyses show that measures weighting opinion across member states by how much national citizens care about an issue rather than by population sizes better explain EU-level policy change than mean opinion across the EU. Moreover, when a national public views an issue as particularly salient, the probability that EU policy on this issue will be in line with majority opinion in this member state increases the more clear-cut public opinion on the matter.

The results do not only highlight that political systems that elect key policy-makers territorially, such as the EU or federal systems, may reallocate influence to citizens in certain parts of the political system depending on how much they care about an issue and how malapportioned the legislative power of policy-makers is compared to voter populations. But they also provide the first quantitative assessment of the responsiveness and congruence of EU-level policy outputs with public opinion on specific issues. The findings challenge the widely-held belief that the EU system is largely insulated from public opinion. Instead, they pose the question of how exactly we should normatively assess the quality of democracy in systems that may not react most strongly to mean opinion but to opinion in different territories depending on the distributions of salience, opinion, and power.

About the author: Christopher Wratil is a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. His research, “Territorial Representation and the Opinion-Policy Linkage: Evidence from the European Union (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12403)” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

AJPS Author Summary of “Building Cooperation among Groups in Conflict: An Experiment on Intersectarian Cooperation in Lebanon” by Han Il Chang and Leonid Peisakhin

Across much of the Middle East, relations between Shiites and Sunnis are strained.  In some cases, the two Muslim sects have a long history of grievances, and they cohabit in the region’s hotspots (e.g., Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain).  In this paper, we test several interventions designed to improve cooperation across sectarian lines.

The study – a laboratory in the field experiment – took place in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, where we asked a representative sample of Beirut’s residents to engage in a series of tasks designed to measure conditional and unconditional cooperation.  Conditional cooperation – a type of cooperation that entails strategic considerations about reciprocity – was measured by observing contributions in a public goods game.  Unconditional cooperation – a type that implies selfless other-regarding behavior – was observed in a standard other-other allocation game and also in a series of simulated elections.

The aim of the study was to test the effectiveness of a pro-cooperation appeal by experts and, separately, of a cross-sectarian group discussion on improving cooperation levels by comparison to a baseline.  The expert appeal followed the format of a short televised debate where prominent Shia and Sunni journalists discussed the problems associated with sectarianism and encouraged the shedding of sectarian identities in favor of a national Lebanese identity.  Group discussions centered around participants’ experiences with sectarianism and possible remedies to the problem.  To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to test the effectiveness of expert appeals on cooperation in a conflict setting.

We found that the expert appeal increased unconditional cooperation across sectarian lines as expressed.  Levels of conditional cooperation remained unchanged, and observational evidence suggests that lack of an effect was due to the fact that the expert appeal intervention failed to increase cross-sectarian trust.  Contrary to expectations, we found that group discussions had no sizeable effect on cooperation levels, although there was suggestive evidence that highly substantive discussions might, in fact, lead to greater cooperation.  We also established that when participants were offered money to support a member of their own sect – a proxy for clientelism in our study – the positive effects of the expert appeal intervention on unconditional cooperation were canceled out.

All in all, this study suggests that certain types of cross-group cooperation can be improved even in settings as divided as contemporary Lebanon.  Surprisingly, it is the top-down intervention (expert appeal) that, on average, appears to be more effective than a bottom-up one (group discussion).  What is unfortunate is that clientelism seems to negate the effects even of top-down appeals by experts.

About the Authors: Han Il Chang is a Research Associate at New York University–Abu Dhabi and Leonid Peisakhin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University–Abu Dhabi. Their research “Building Cooperation among Groups in Conflict: An Experiment on Intersectarian Cooperation in Lebanon (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12397)” is now available online in Early View and will be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.

AJPS Author Summary by Agustina S. Paglayan

Liberals and conservatives in the U.S. seem to agree on at least one thing: collective bargaining with public-sector unions leads to increases in public spending—which liberals think is good, and conservatives bad. This article challenges the widespread conventional wisdom about collective bargaining. It shows that the introduction of collective bargaining rights for teachers in the 1960s and 70s led to higher public spending on education only in states where teachers could credibly threaten to go on strike; but it shows also that, in most states where teachers were given the legal right to engage in collective bargaining, these rights came bundled with provisions that made it more difficult for teachers to resort to strikes as a weapon during collective negotiations. As a result, on average, the introduction of mandatory collective bargaining with teachers did not lead to increases in the level of resources devoted to education. When collective bargaining did increase education spending, the magnitude of the effect was small and cannot explain the bulk of the differences in education spending levels that exist across states today. In fact, most of these differences in spending precede the formation of modern teacher unions.

The findings of this study are at odds with the conventional wisdom because of two major improvements over prior research. First, this study pays attention to the political history behind the emergence of collective bargaining rights for public employees, showing that these rights were not introduced by an unambiguously pro-labor coalition, and that they were often accompanied by anti-labor provisions. In the U.S., public employees gained the right to engage in collective bargaining in the 1960s and 70s. By 1990, 33 states had ended long-standing prohibitions on teachers’ collective bargaining, instead establishing that school districts had an obligation to bargain with teacher unions. The introduction of these mandatory collective bargaining state laws led to a rapid increase in teacher unionization rates, which climbed from 6% in the late 1950s to 60% in the early 80s. It is common to assume that these were pro-labor laws introduced by pro-labor politicians, but a look at history shows these assumptions are wrong. The laws were shaped by counterbalancing interests with ample support from both Democrats and Republicans, and represented a mixed change in unions’ power. Yes, they gave unions collective bargaining rights, but they also introduced costly strike penalties designed deliberately to deter striking. Lawmakers realized that threatening to dismiss striking teachers was not effective to dissuade them from striking, because teachers knew that no politician wanting to ensure the smooth provision of public education would dare fire everyone who went on strike. Instead, to prevent strikes, most mandatory collective bargaining laws established strike penalties that could be enforced. If they went on strike, union members could lose two days of pay for every day on strike, the union could be heavily fined, decertified, and/or no longer enjoy automatic deduction of union dues from districts’ payroll. With striking capacity curtailed, collective bargaining did not have the bite to increase resources for education.

The second feature that sets this study apart from previous research is the data and methods it uses to quantify the effect of mandatory collective bargaining laws on the size of government. The study uses a new and publicly-available dataset that tracks the evolution of teacher salaries, student-teacher ratios, per-pupil education spending, and per-pupil non-wage education spending (including employer contributions to pensions, administrative costs, etc.) in all 50 states in the U.S. from 1919 on. This unprecedented breadth of data on public education in the U.S. confirms, as lay observers often note, that governments that engage in collective bargaining tend to pay higher salaries and spend more than those that don’t; but it also shows that collective bargaining is not the reason why they spend more. In 1919, when there was no collective bargaining with teachers anywhere, the states that would later introduce collective bargaining rights for teachers were already devoting considerably more resources to education than states that would not. On average, these historical differences in spending did not become wider after collective bargaining rights were introduced by some states but not others.

The evidence presented in this article revises our understanding of what public-sector unions do and where their power stems from. It highlights that, in most U.S. states, public-sector unions remain considerably constrained in their ability to exert pressure through collective bargaining, either because they don’t have the right to bargain to begin with, or because they have collective bargaining rights but not the ability to strike.

Liberals and conservatives may still have thoughts about public-sector collective bargaining. But the article sets the record straight: whether they support it or oppose it, their position cannot be based on the belief that collective bargaining rights per se lead to higher public spending.

About the Author: Agustina S. Paglayan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California San Diego. Paglayan’s article “Public‐Sector Unions and the Size of Government (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12388)” is now available online in Early View and will be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.