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Polihot

Scrutiny and Recall: Rousseau on Controlling the Executive

·580 字·2 分钟
Polihot 政治理论 Rousseau Executive Accountability Recall Sortition Deliberative Scrutiny
APSR — pp. 1-16 2026-03-03 Original Scrutiny and Recall: Rousseau on Controlling the Executive ARTHUR GHINS Abstract In recent decades, political theorists have drawn on historical thinkers to explore how political elites can be held accountable. Rousseau, however, is often dismissed as reducing accountability to elections and participation to occasional ratification referenda. This article challenges that view. While Rousseau expected an elective aristocracy to execute laws ratified by the people, he also identified two mechanisms—scrutiny and recall—through which citizens could control these representatives. After reconstructing Rousseau’s account, I consider how these mechanisms could be adapted to contemporary democracies. Focused on executive accountability, the model is particularly suited to presidential systems with directly elected presidents. It combines a national jury—a citizens’ assembly chosen by lot and tasked with examining presidential actions—with the possibility of a recall referendum. By uniting deliberative scrutiny with the power to remove the head of state, this approach offers an underexplored complement to recent anti-oligarchic institutional innovations based on sortition.

Partisan Expressive Responding: Lessons from Two Decades of Research

·620 字·2 分钟
Polihot 政治行为 研究方法 Partisan Expressive Responding Survey Experiments Meta-Analysis Public Opinion Partisan Bias
APSR — pp. 1-19 2026-03-03 Original Partisan Expressive Responding: Lessons from Two Decades of Research MATTHEW H. GRAHAM Abstract Research on partisan expressive responding suggests that the beliefs people express in surveys are more partisan than their underlying perceptions. This article examines the scope and importance of expressive responding through a meta-reanalysis of 44 studies from 25 articles. On average, treatments designed to reduce expressive responding shrink measured partisan bias by about 25%. Across the 242 survey questions in the data, treatments increase the correlation between the average Democrat’s and Republican’s beliefs from 0.81 to 0.86. Contrary to expectations derived from the two leading theories of expressive responding, misreporting (“cheerleading”) and congenial inference, there is no evidence that expressive responding increases in partisan identity strength or educational attainment. As research on expressive responding enters its third decade, greater emphasis on design-based tests of mechanisms may help build a firmer understanding of the nature and substantive importance of expressive responding—namely, whether the forces that produce expressive responding in surveys also shape real-world political judgments.

Initiate and Elevate! How Political Parties Can Set an Agenda

·543 字·2 分钟
Polihot 比较政治 Political Parties Agenda-Setting Issue Attention Social Media Comparative Politics
APSR — pp. 1-19 2026-03-03 Original Initiate and Elevate! How Political Parties Can Set an Agenda DANIEL SANDVEJ ERIKSEN Abstract The study of political agenda setting is a cornerstone in political science. Within this literature, political parties are implicitly portrayed as being capable of proactively initiating discussions. However, this fundamental notion of party agency deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. In response, this article crafts a new model (the Issue Initiation Model) that opens the window into parties’ efforts to set an agenda and traces how they initiate and elevate their agenda. The model is tested on an original dataset covering more than 5.5-million tweets by political parties and MPs, coupled with over 750,000 news articles and 419,000 parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and Denmark from 2015 to 2022. Results show how parties and their MPs can proactively redirect the attention of other actors through strategic planning and orchestrated actions. By theorizing and empirically testing the implicit notion that parties can proactively initiate discussions, this article has important implications for political agenda setting.

Do Government Interventions Improve Local Public Service Performance? Evidence From a Synthetic Control Approach

·636 字·2 分钟
Polihot 公共行政 公共政策 Local Government Public Service Performance Education Services Synthetic Control Wales
PA — 2026-03-02 Original Do Government Interventions Improve Local Public Service Performance? Evidence From a Synthetic Control Approach Rhys Andrews Abstract ABSTRACT Governments in many democratic countries have the mandate to require local authorities to address failures in the management and performance of the public services that they provide. Such policies often involve the takeover of authorities to implement improvements assumed to result in organizational turnaround. However, critics argue that locally‐directed change remains a more reliable means for achieving service transformation. To cast light on these issues, this paper applies a quasi‐experimental synthetic difference‐in‐differences approach to investigate whether partial takeovers of poorly‐performing education services in four Welsh local authorities in 2013 were effective in turning them around. The findings suggest that the establishment of independent recovery boards to oversee local education policy helped some of them to improve educational outcomes, but that local authorities were not always able to sustain improvements after the recovery boards were decommissioned. The study highlights that government interventions to improve local public service performance need to be focused on supporting long‐term organizational change.

Bureaucratic Incentives and Government Responsiveness in China

·524 字·2 分钟
Polihot 公共行政 比较政治 中国研究 Bureaucratic Incentives Government Responsiveness Citizen Complaints Authoritarian Accountability China
GOV 39/2 2026-03-02 Original Bureaucratic Incentives and Government Responsiveness in China Haemin Jee Abstract ABSTRACT Citizen complaints have long been considered an important channel of communication between citizens and officials in authoritarian regimes. Existing explanations for responsiveness to citizen complaints in China, however, do not adequately consider the role of local bureaucratic incentives as a driver of responsiveness. This paper seeks to explain local government responsiveness to citizen demands through this lens. Original data of citizen complaints and government responses from a Chinese prefecture and its subordinate counties demonstrate that lower level officials are more likely to respond to citizen complaints when monitored by their superiors. On the other hand, they are less responsive on unmonitored forums. Thus, oversight by higher level officials may be important in increasing actual government responsiveness; citizen complaints alone may not be enough to spur government action. While recent studies emphasize authoritarian accountability arising through quasi‐democratic institutions, this paper suggests incentives of local political actors may condition the effectiveness of these institutions.