Journal ArticleDOI
The Politics of Blame Avoidance
TLDR
The authors argue that voters' tendency to be more sensitive to real or potential losses than they are to gains results from their negative bias, which leads politicians to adopt a distinctive set of political strategies, including agenda limitation, scapegoating, passing the buck and defection, that are different from those they would follow if they were primarily interested in pursuing good policy or maximizing credit-claiming opportunities.Abstract:
Politicians are motivated primarily by the desire to avoid blame for unpopular actions rather than by seeking to claim credit for popular ones. This results from voters' ‘negativity bias’: their tendency to be more sensitive to real or potential losses than they are to gains. Incentives to avoid blame lead politicians to adopt a distinctive set of political strategies, including agenda limitation, scapegoating, ‘passing the buck’ and defection (‘jumping on the bandwagon’) that are different than those they would follow if they were primarily interested in pursuing good policy or maximizing credit-claiming opportunities. These strategies in turn lead to important policy effects, including a surrender of discretion even when it offers important credit-claiming opportunities.read more
Citations
More filters
Book
The New Politics of the Welfare State
TL;DR: In this article, the authors lay the foundation for an understanding of welfare state retrenchment and highlight the factors that limit or facilitate the success of such a strategy, using quantitative and qualitative data from four cases (Britain, United States, Germany, and Sweden).
Book
The sources of social power
TL;DR: The sources of social power trace their interrelations throughout human history as discussed by the authors, from neolithic times, through ancient Near Eastern civilizations, the classical Mediterranean age and medieval Europe up to just before the Industrial Revolution in England.
Journal ArticleDOI
When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change
TL;DR: The authors suggest that policies generate resources and incentives for political actors, and they provide those actors with information and cues that encourage particular interpretations of the political world, and that these mechanisms operate in a variety of ways, but have significant effects on government elites, interest groups, and mass public.
On the european union
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the patterns and effects of departmental oversight across 28 ministries in Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia in relation to transposition planning, legal review and monitoring of deadlines.
Journal ArticleDOI
Coping with Permanent Austerity: Welfare State Restructuring in Affluent Democracies
TL;DR: In this article, Pierson et al. discuss reformpolitiken mussen einerseits the Widerstandsfahigkeit der Sozialeinrichtungen, and anotherseits die permanente Ausgabendisziplin des Umfeldes berucksichtigen and richten daher allgemein ihre Bemuhungen auf die Erstellung von weitgreifenden Koalitionen aus, with dem Zweck, den ausgereiften Wohlf
References
More filters
Book
An Economic Theory of Democracy
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.
Sidney C. Sufrin,Mancur Olson +1 more
Book
Choices, Values, and Frames
Daniel Kahneman,Amos Tversky +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the cognitive and psychophysical determinants of choice in risky and risk- less contexts are discussed, and the relation between decision values and experience values is discussed, as well as an approach to risky choice that sketches an approach for decision making that can be seen as the acceptance of a gamble that can yield various outcomes with different probabilities.
Book
Congress: The Electoral Connection
TL;DR: Mayhew argues that the principal motivation of legislators is reelection and that the pursuit of this goal affects the way they behave and the way that they make public policy as mentioned in this paper, and he argues that this is the case in many cases.