Democracy Under Siege? by Timothy Hellwig & Yesola Kweon & Jack Vowles

Author:Timothy Hellwig & Yesola Kweon & Jack Vowles [Hellwig, Timothy & Kweon, Yesola & Vowles, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192585134
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

5.1. Globalization, Policy Constraint, and Electoral Participation: Insights from the Literature

Our starting point is the theory of electoral competitiveness (Franklin 2004). Assigning a central role to political parties, competitiveness here is not just defined in terms of the closeness of the race: it is also a question of how much the outcome of an election matters to those considering their vote, and how much difference they perceive between the options, a focus directly relevant to the matters under scrutiny here. Consistent with the rational choice theory of electoral turnout, the benefits that a person might expect from her preferred party’s victory are offset by the costs. This calculation, weighted by the individual’s perception of their vote’s influence, might matter given the expected closeness among parties competing in the election. If the race is close, the result is uncertain. In this scenario, a person will be more likely to vote even if she realizes that the odds that the election outcome turns on her single vote are low. But the insight most central to our argument is that, when potential voters consider the benefits, they also weigh up the policy promises of the contending parties (see Figure 1.6). If the range of policy offerings is wide, and if those difference are salient to the potential voter in question, she will again be more likely to vote, believing that those in power have the opportunity to make a difference.

Critics of representative democracy make a compelling argument that over the past half-century, governments in advanced post-industrial democracies have become less responsive to their citizens than in the past. While socio-economic changes underlie these developments, parties themselves have changed. They have become professionalized and in many countries, although not all, their memberships have shrunk. Legislators are increasingly drawn predominantly from higher status occupational groups, and are failing to represent those whose jobs and circumstances have lower status and who own fewer assets than the norm (Heath 2013).

Compounding these effects is the ideological shift to the right since the 1970s. Governments have deregulated their economies, privatized previously publicly owned assets, granted autonomy to central banks in their oversight of monetary policy, and in many cases reconstructed social policy in an effort to incentivize labour force participation and reduce the extent of long-term receipt of income maintenance for those otherwise finding it difficult to support themselves. Governments are perceived to be doing less, taking less responsibility for the well-being of their citizens, and presenting narrower policy alternatives and choices.

Globalization provides a third component to the set of structural factors contributing to government constraint. Many argue that, since the 1990s, the liberalization of trade and capital flows across borders has limited governments’ abilities to represent their citizens’ preferences (cf. Hellwig 2014). Following on this reasoning, a growing number of studies report a relationship between globalization and turnout. In an early contribution, Steiner (2010) examined the effects of trade dependence, measures of capital market integration, and a measure of overall integration on aggregate turnout across parliamentary elections in twenty-three OECD countries between 1965 and 2006.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.