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This introductory chapter is about citizen competence in political participation. In politics, the prevailing opinion is that citizens fail minimally challenging tests of knowledge of public affairs and institutions. And in the face of such skepticism are counterarguments opposing this judgment of the average citizen's capacity for political participation. The chapter argues that such differences both amount to the same thing—the capacity of citizens to make politically coherent choices. To gain a better perspective on the situation, the chapter argues, one must first attempt to understand as deeply as possible the properties of political preferences of ordinary citizens. In this vein, the chapter tackles a number of issues related to this topic, and provides an overview of the following chapters.

This chapter seeks to introduce a substance-oriented research program based on policy issues for studying Congress from multiple vantage points. In doing so, it makes serious progress on systematically understanding Theodore Lowi's provocative claim that “policy determines politics,” which, while important, has never been satisfactorily understood, either empirically or theoretically. In advancing a substance-oriented approach to studying policymaking and lawmaking in Congress, the chapter sheds light on several important new tools and ideas to use in determining how policy issue substance matters for lawmaking. These include new data, such as an immense data set on U.S. lawmaking between 1877 to 1994; new and massive measures of political preferences broken down by policy issue areas for U.S. lawmakers spanning the period 1877 to 2010; and fresh approaches to analyzing these new data sets.

This chapter examines how policy issue substance matters for studying political preferences at the micro level, while reconsidering Poole and Rosenthal's analysis of the 95th Congress (1977–78). In their analysis of the 95th Congress, they find evidence that they interpret to mean that issue scales do not vary. The chapter suggests that it is possible to agree wholeheartedly with the low-dimensionality findings of Poole and Rosenthal, but at the same time, members of Congress have distinct preferences across policy issue areas. Measuring the preferences of members of Congress correctly is absolutely vital for empirical testing of theories and hypotheses as well as for inductive-based work on lawmaking. The remainder of the chapter presents five case studies of lawmaking, which show in a more fine-grained manner the impact of policy preferences across time and issues.

This chapter discusses how policy issue substance matters for studying political preferences. Fully exploring how policy issue substance matters for studying political polarization in Congress, the chapter begins by introducing a new large data set that comprises the estimated induced preferences of members of the House of Representatives and U.S. senators by policy issue area over a very long time horizon: 1877 to 2010. It also explores the literature on elite polarization in Congress by policy issue area and studies polarization across a 124-year period (1877 to 2010) by the policy issue areas defined as “tier 1.” The chapter shows that issue content is extremely important for understanding political polarization and that many of the empirical facts about polarization depend on not disaggregating policy by issue areas.

This chapter provides a detailed account of how ordinary citizens rationalize their political preferences. First, it documents the causal logics citizens employ when supporting the monarchy in Jordan. It illustrates how people who believe that the current regime has privileged and important relations with the United States may come to support a regime even when it is otherwise not in their apparent interest. This is so because they fear the role anti-American Islamists may play in harming the relationship if they come to power. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that this is not the case in Kuwait, because the Islamist opposition is pro-American. Second, it examines the ways citizens who oppose the regime in Jordan cling to an elastic definition of Sharia, one that seeks to challenge the geopolitical status quo altogether. This chapter relies on a series of open-ended interviews conducted by two research teams in Jordan and Kuwait.

This chapter deals with the process of Westernization during the 1960s, which transformed political preferences in the direction of the Western alliance and cultural practices towards American popular culture.

This introductory chapter offers a new agenda for research in political economy centered on the transformation of advanced capitalist democracies from industrial to services-based economies. It introduces the research questions which form the core of this agenda and the central themes of the volume; explains what the existing political economy literature can and cannot tell us about these questions; and outlines (based on the analysis in the volume) the principal economic and political characteristics of a set of alternative models of service sector development, which can provide a framework for future analyses of the political economy of service societies. In particular, it outlines a set of arguments about the ways in which the institutional configurations of existing socioeconomic regimes (or “varieties of capitalism”) influence their service sector development trajectories, and examines some of the economic, distributional, and political implications of the pursuit of alternative paths to service sector development (e.g., the rate of service employment creation, and the types of service sector jobs which are created, patterns of inequality, rates of labor force participation, the distribution of political preferences over policy among different labor market groups, patterns of political coalition formation, and partisan electoral outcomes). It concludes by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of alternative service sector development models (some of which have been highlighted by the recent financial crisis), which have implications for the long-term economic and political sustainability of these regimes.

In this chapter, Wren and Rehm show that, in tandem with the process of deindustrialization itself, one of the most striking demographic changes which has occurred in the labor markets of the economically advanced democracies since the 1970s has been the movement of large numbers of highly skilled workers from sheltered professional jobs in “welfare” sectors (such as government, education, and health) to highly paid positions in private and internationally traded service sectors (like business services and finance). The political significance of this change cannot be underestimated. In the past, highly skilled public sector workers have formed an important part of the cross-class coalition in support of Left-wing parties: public sector workers at all skill levels are predisposed both to vote for Left governments and to favor relatively high levels of welfare state provision. Making use of public opinion data from a set of thirteen OECD countries, Wren and Rehm show, however, that when highly skilled workers instead occupy jobs where they are exposed to international competition, their concerns for economic competitiveness are more likely to cause them to vote for lower levels of welfare state spending (and lower taxes) and redistribution, and to switch their partisan allegiances toward Right-wing parties. The authors conclude that as more and more highly skilled workers make the transition into exposed sectors (as a result of the expansion in trade and employment in high-end services), the cross-class coalition in support of redistribution, welfare state spending, and Left-wing parties may be increasingly undermined in many countries.

The transition to service-based economies has been accompanied by large shifts in the distribution of work within the populations of the advanced democracies. This includes a rise of part-time employment, as well as changes in working time for those in full-time employment: an end to the secular decline in working time, or increases in working time. As Barnes describes in this chapter, the extent of change on both of these dimensions varies across countries. Furthermore, she argues that working time is an important factor influencing preferences over economic policy in general and redistributive policies in particular, suggesting that this variation is likely to be politically significant. This chapter complements Iversen and Rosenbluth’s analysis of part-time workers (Chapter 10) by examining the second, less studied, trend of rising long-hours work. She argues that many workers in today’s post-industrial economies faced with consumption costs which are difficult to adjust, work more hours (and sacrifice more leisure) than they would choose to in a more flexible environment. Among these workers she predicts (and finds) a predisposition to oppose redistribution, because of the costs, in terms of further forgone leisure, implied by taxation. Her analysis uses cross-national public opinion data from eleven OECD countries and finds evidence of variation in the size of the effect of working hours on political preferences across countries, linked to institutional features of the tax system, that amplifies or offsets this individual calculus.

The service sector is beginning to transform the political landscape by giving working women a new and distinct set of preferences over policy. The growth of services has increased the demand for female labor in tandem with the disappearance of the “brawn premium” in the workplace. But until social norms about caregiving create a more equal burden for family work, women are more likely to work the “second shift” at home, reducing their leisure time and their satisfaction with levels of public services for children and the elderly. A striking result of the growth of the service sector, therefore, illustrated in this chapter, is a gender voting gap in which women are more likely to support parties and platforms that pledge an increase in government spending on education and social services. Ironically, the gender voting gap tends to be larger in countries with greater gender equality, however measured, because the gap tracks female labor force participation. How parties respond to the new configuration of women’s political preferences depends on how electoral rules aggregate interests and on other factors, but the gender voting gap is here to stay unless and until societies share family burdens more equally.

This chapter shows how community changes impact residents’ political reasoning and develops a new typology of contemporary American voters. The chapter characterizes the book’s findings as indicative of a shift from partisan politics embedded in community governance (organizational overlap between community and party leaders) to partisan politics disembedded from community governance (separation and antagonism between community and party leaders). The chapter then reprises arguments about peoples’ tendency to use community institutions as a heuristic for understanding partisan politics and draws on a panel of interviews with 104 people in both cities to illustrate that people respond to changes in their community’s public sphere in one of three ideal-typical ways: as traditional voters, partners, and partisans. Traditional voters are effectively living in the past, see community life as a labor-business struggle, and identify with one community side and a party by extension. Partners perceive a community-politics tension and disaffiliate from politics, which they see as excessively divisive and devoid of partnership. Partisans criticize changes in their community and look to politics as panacea, often embracing populist, fringy, and hyper-partisan movements like the Tea Party.

This chapter shows how traditional community leaders’ political engagement resulted in politics embedded in community governance: organizational and ideological overlap between community institutions and grassroots parties. Political historians argue that American political parties’ lack of sub-national infrastructure has historically made political elites dependent on community activists, which political scientists characterize as party bosses during the mid-20th Century. The chapter employs urban histories, archival records, and social network analysis to argue that party machines were only one type of a general type—the community leadership party—characterized by three features: most community elites were involved in parties, most party leaders were community notables, and leaders oriented party priorities towards salient community issues—notably distributional labor-business struggles and away from hot button political issues. The chapter concludes with informant interviews, which show how the embedding of politics within community governance blurred the lines between local and national politics in older people’s minds. Older residents used nonpolitical local distinctions—mode of employment, lifestyle, even neighborhood of residence—to situated themselves within pre-1980s labor-business struggles, thereby establishing a partisan preference by extension, even when they knew and cared little about public policies.

This chapter is the first of three that examine the link between voters' preferences and their party choices in elections. It shows how citizens' political preferences and policy choices can be summarized by their positions on the Left-Right dimension. It begins by discussing the concept of policy voting and the use of the Left-Right framework to capture this process. It then examines whether most voters can position themselves on the Left-Right scale, and how they are distributed along this continuum in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) nations. Next, it considers the bases of these orientations in terms of social structure, political issues, and partisanship. The results provide a foundation for using Left-Right congruence to measure the workings of the party linkage model through the electoral process.