The Problem of Governing: Essays for Richard Rose (Executive Politics and Governance) 3031408160, 9783031408168

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EXECUTIVE POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE

The Problem of Governing Essays for Richard Rose Edited by Michael Keating · Ian McAllister Edward C. Page · B. Guy Peters

Executive Politics and Governance Series Editors

Martin Lodge London School of Economics and Political Science London, UK Kai Wegrich Hertie School of Governance Berlin, Germany

The Executive Politics and Governance series focuses on central government, its organisation and its instruments. It is particularly concerned with how the changing conditions of contemporary governing affect perennial questions in political science and public administration. Executive Politics and Governance is therefore centrally interested in questions such as how politics interacts with bureaucracies, how issues rise and fall on political agendas, and how public organisations and services are designed and operated. This book series encourages a closer engagement with the role of politics in shaping executive structures, and how administration shapes politics and policy-making. In addition, this series also wishes to engage with the scholarship that focuses on the organisational aspects of politics, such as government formation and legislative institutions. The series welcomes high quality research-led monographs with comparative appeal. Edited volumes that provide in-depth analysis and critical insights into the field of Executive Politics and Governance are also encouraged. Editorial Board Philippe Bezes, CNRS-CERSA, Paris, France Jennifer N. Brass, Indiana University Bloomington, USA Sharon Gilad, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel Will Jennings, University of Southampton, UK David E. Lewis, Vanderbilt University, USA Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling, University of Nottingham, UK Salvador Parrado, UNED, Madrid, Spain Nick Sitter, Central European University, Hungary Kutsal Yesilkagit, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands

Michael Keating  •  Ian McAllister Edward C. Page  •  B. Guy Peters Editors

The Problem of Governing Essays for Richard Rose

Editors Michael Keating School of Social Science University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, UK Edward C. Page Department of Government London School of Economics and Political Science London, UK

Ian McAllister School of Politics Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia B. Guy Peters Department of Political Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Executive Politics and Governance ISBN 978-3-031-40816-8    ISBN 978-3-031-40817-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

Over a career spanning eight decades, Richard Rose has made a remarkable contribution to the academic study of politics. His first book—with David Butler on the 1959 British general election, part of the famous Nuffield election series—appeared in 1960. Since then, he has produced no fewer than 48 authored or co-authored books, 26 edited books or special issues of journals, and nearly 400 journal articles and book chapters. Even more impressive is the geographical range from Japan and Russia to the United Kingdom and the United States, and the range of topics, from problems of governance and public policy, comparative politics, elections and voting, and democracy and post-communism. Rose’s intellectual motivations are well described in his memoir Learning About Politics in Time and Space (Rose, 2014). This current book adds a different perspective to Rose’s career by examining how his work has informed the study of governing. Each of his books, and the articles and chapters that have accompanied them, has followed a common theme by asking fundamental questions about the nature of politics and the problems of governing in modern societies. These questions have covered political legitimacy and authority, political representation and accountability, as well as how politicians, political elites and the mass public arrive at the decisions that affect how modern societies operate. Each of the chapters that follow takes forward issues, debates and lines of research stimulated in Rose’s work over nearly 70 years. While the chapters in the book take their cues from particular books or articles, the chapters are less appreciations of the works in question and even less a detailed v

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discussion of them as texts. Instead, the chapters reflect the authors’ own original research and thinking in areas covered by Richard Rose’s wide-­ ranging and pioneering work across the field. In each case, authors trace how Rose’s approach has influenced later academic work and thinking in the field. A distinctive feature of Rose’s work has been the ability to identify political changes in their early stages and to highlight and develop their significance. This has included the ‘input’ side (parties and elections) and the ‘outputs’ (public policies) as well as the decision-making process that takes place in between. These are not merely mechanical systems but work in an environment where the complex and normatively charged concepts of legitimacy and consent are central. This makes this Festschrift for Richard Rose less a collection of papers on diverse aspects of his work than an extended examination of the key political issues of our times. Politics cannot be reduced to economics or to the sum of the actions of individuals, to predictive science or to functional determinism but has its own logic and modes of justification and is rooted in specific societies. We could argue that this is highly topical but, as Rose reminds us, they are universal and timeless. Few scholars, however, have been able to encompass this so comprehensively in so many different contexts. The papers in the book are organized thematically under five headings that broadly cover the major areas of Rose’s work, but the common concerns highlighted above recur throughout. The first section examines governing at multiple levels. If one book sums up Rose’s early career, it is Politics in England, which was published in five editions between 1964 and 1989, each one substantially revised and updated from its predecessor. Keating, McAllister, Page and Peters argue that the book represented a fundamental break with previous interpretations of British politics by adopting new methods and analysis and by placing British institutions in a comparative context. The central theme in Politics in England is to understand why Britain has experienced long-­ term political stability, and how the institutions and culture have combined to resist radical change while at the same time ensuring an adequate degree of reform. As the century progressed, many of the themes that Rose highlighted in the 1964 edition of Politics in England—such as ‘one crown, many nations’—have become central issues in British politics. Rose’s interest in the territorial dimension to UK politics, first given form in Politics in England, stemmed from his early experiences hitchhiking around Britain and Ireland. He observed that the component parts of

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the United Kingdom—England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland— represented very different histories, institutions, identities and cultures. As Michael Keating points out in his chapter, Rose was the first political scientist to challenge the then dominant homogeneity thesis which viewed the modern state as undergoing a process of territorial integration which would see these differences gradually erode and eventually disappear. Understanding how these territorial differences could be managed became what Rose called ‘an intellectual puzzle’. As Keating argues, these insights produced a several decades-long project which examined territorial management across the United Kingdom as a whole, but encompassing particularly Scotland and Northern Ireland. The second section takes up the theme of parties and elections in Rose’s work. His career started at a time of apparent stability in UK and US politics and party systems, but he was always sensitive to the longue durée and to the shifting sociological basis of party strength. Geoffrey Evans picks up this theme by examining the influence of Rose’s second book, Must Labour Lose?, co-authored with Mark Abrams. The research was conducted following the 1959 British general election when the Conservatives increased their vote and Labour lost many key working-class seats. It appeared that core voters were abandoning Labour as the party found it difficult to adjust to rising affluence. Evans argues that Must Labour Lose? was innovative, influential and agenda-setting and started a theme of research which continues to the present day about how social democracy can adapt to late industrialism. Rose’s work on electoral behaviour has approached the subject from many dimensions. He pioneered the comparative empirical analysis of party competition, the historical analysis of democratic election results across two centuries and comparative studies of the influence on voting behaviour of religion and ethnicity as well as class. Mark Franklin’s chapter explores the mechanism tying party choice at the individual level to election-­level turnout rates. His analysis employs CSES surveys from 31 countries to build on past findings that have used error correction models to confirm the role of negative feedback in maintaining equilibrium rates of party support. The analysis also elaborates on a parallel mechanism that helps to maintain an equilibrium level of turnout, through voter reactions to evolving levels of electoral competition. The third section covers political institutions, including Rose’s pioneering work on presidents and prime ministers. In the early 1970s, he raised a characteristically Rosean issue, the ‘problem of party government’:

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parties are necessary for representative government to exist, but they are necessarily imperfect institutions. One part of this problem is giving direction to government, and prime ministers are, more than ever, key players in domestic and international politics. The rise to increased prominence and power has, however, not marked the only element shaping recent developments at the level of political chief executives. In his chapter, Ludger Helms identifies several major features that separate the ‘new breed’ of contemporary presidents and prime ministers in Western Europe and the United States from their predecessors of the early post-war decades, and how this has come to shape the politics of executive leadership. As an exercise in transatlantic comparative politics, Helms uses Rose’s work as a starting point for a comparative assessment of the nature of political leaders and leadership at the close of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Rose was one of the first scholars to conduct a comparative examination of the problem of ‘big government’ and to analyse its causes and consequences for politics. In his 1984 book Understanding Big Government, Rose broadened the analysis beyond the United States and the United Kingdom to use a ‘program approach’ to examine western mixed-­economy states. In the second chapter in this section, Donley Studlar examines the implications of this approach for later scholarly research, and how it has clarified the components of big government. Studlar points out that Rose was one of the first to highlight the requirement of public consent for big government to operate effectively, and to identify this as a particular problem for the European Union. The fourth section covers Rose’s work on the political drivers of public policy: the role of parties, the political decisions that shaped government growth and the ways in which politicians interact with officials. In his chapter examining Rose’s work on lesson-drawing, Mauricio Dussauge-Laguna argues that he made a major contribution to the field by shifting the emphasis in public policy research from policy ‘diffusion’ to policy ‘learning’. This ignited a much-needed discussion about the role that policymakers play in the travel of policy ideas across space. Dussauge-­ Laguna cites a rich vein of research which has benefitted from these ideas, in addition to practical examples of policy transfer, from economic policy in the 1980s to health policy during the COVID pandemic. Dussauge-­ Laguna concludes that Rose’s pioneering discussion on lesson-drawing remains as relevant and thought-provoking today as it originally was three

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decades ago and provides an important analytical perspective for the study of cross-jurisdictional policy processes. One underlying theme across Rose’s work in the area of public policy is the notion of ‘inheritance before choice’. The range of existing policies constrains political choices in ways that go beyond ‘path dependence’, thus constraining governments in their policy choices. When governments enter office, they inherit laws, institutions and policies from their predecessors, many put in place years or decades earlier. In his chapter on the topic, Edward C. Page discusses what constitutes a policy and what a change in policy is likely to look like. By examining several case studies, he finds that policies do live on, in line with Rose’s argument, but that the structural features of the legislative process also survive long after their originators have left office. Much work in public policy focuses on the consequences and processes of policy, and on those who design, implement and evaluate it. One of Rose’s insights was to examine how ordinary people are impacted by and engage with policy processes. This approach was developed in a trilogy of books, starting with a conceptual framework applied to Japan as well as Western countries, and then to the transformation of formerly communist societies and the experience of ordinary people with grass-roots corruption in developing countries. In evaluating this work, Caryn Peiffer sees the distinctive contribution as developing an understanding of how people use a range of resources and tactics to maintain their well-being. She argues that this draws on state and public policy outputs as well as on their social networks to achieve this goal. Peiffer argues that Rose’s work on corruption, especially, provides a fertile ground for testing some of these propositions. A major concern of Richard Rose’s work on public policy has been the question of good governance. As governments take on ever more responsibilities, how can public expectations of what governments can deliver be satisfied? The risk that citizens lose confidence in their governments’ ability to manage the policy agenda is a loss of legitimacy. In some interpretations, the populist upsurge in the early 2000s reflects a popular reaction against ineffective governance. In his chapter, B.  Guy Peters examines these issues, outlining his joint work with Rose and Rose’s own work on ‘overloaded government’ and ungovernability. So far, challenges such as climate change and the ageing of the population have defeated governments around the world. Peters uses Rose’s work to point to solutions

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such as re-engaging citizens in the processes of government or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, depoliticizing decision-making on difficult policy issues. The fifth section takes up the themes of legitimacy, consent and efficacity. This covers challenges to democracy, especially in eastern and central Europe and governing without consent, a notion introduced by Rose in his early studies of Northern Ireland. Few subjects have generated as much interest as the conditions under which democracy can thrive or wither. Thomas Remington evaluates Rose’s contribution to this debate by examining his work on the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Rose sees the best conditions for democratization as a modern state operating under impersonal rules and an advanced economy. From these assumptions, Rose sees the ‘third wave’ democracies of the 1990s as going about democratization backwards, that is creating electoral institutions in the absence of the other key elements of the modern states—an independent judiciary, a professional state bureaucracy and a vibrant civil society. Remington argues that Rose’s insights ran counter to most other academic and policy thinking at the time, which saw political elites as the key to a stable, successful democracy. This was the central flaw in the west’s approach to Russia under Putin. In his chapter, Remington traces how Rose’s work has highlighted the dynamic nature of the interaction between political elites and the populace, each side shaping the other’s behaviour and expectations through a process of continuous mutual adaptation. The problem of governing in Northern Ireland first came to Rose’s attention following a 1954 hitchhiking tour around Ireland. Why would one part of the United Kingdom—Northern Ireland—be partially legitimate, while the rest of the United Kingdom enjoyed high legitimacy? Rose tackled this problem in his 1971 book Governing Without Consensus: An Irish Perspective, which was based on a 1968 opinion survey conducted on the very eve of the Troubles. Hayes and McAllister examine how Governing Without Consensus represented a fundamental break with prior scholarship and trace its subsequent influence on academic thinking about the Northern Ireland problem. Rose advocated the un-British solution of power-sharing between the Catholic and Protestant communities and involving the Irish government in Northern Ireland affairs. These ideas eventually formed the basis for the 1998 Northern Ireland Agreement. The authors outline why it took three decades for Rose’s idea to be encapsulated in policies which effectively ended the violence.

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A single book could never do justice to the breadth and depth of Richard Rose’s contribution to the study of politics. The chapters we present here cannot be definitive, but we hope that, in the spirit of Rose’s own work, they will provoke more questions, discussions and research. Aberdeen, UK Canberra, ACT, Australia  London, UK  Pittsburgh, PA, USA 

Michael Keating Ian McAllister Edward C. Page B. Guy Peters

Contents

1 Richard  Rose: Connections Over 60 Years  1 Dennis Kavanagh Part I Governing at Multiple Levels  19 2 Politics in England 21 Michael Keating, Ian McAllister, Edward C. Page, and B. Guy Peters 3 The  United Kingdom as an Intellectual Puzzle 39 Michael Keating Part II Parties and Elections  57 4 Must  Labour Lose? A Reconsideration 59 Geoffrey Evans 5 Studying  the Interplay of Party Support and Turnout 75 Mark Franklin

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Part III Institutions and Governing  95 6 Presidents  and Prime Ministers: Then and Now 97 Ludger Helms 7 Understanding Big Government117 Donley Studlar Part IV Public Policy 139 8 Learning  Across Time and Space: Richard Rose’s Work on Lesson-Drawing141 Mauricio I. Dussauge-Laguna 9 Inheritance,  Choice and Change163 Edward C. Page 10 The  Ordinary People Perspective: Coping at the GrassRoots183 Caryn Peiffer 11 Governments  and Citizens Under Stress203 B. Guy Peters Part V Trust and Legitimacy 219 12 Democracy  and Its Alternatives221 Thomas F. Remington 13 Northern  Ireland: Searching for Consensus237 Bernadette C. Hayes and Ian McAllister 14 Reflections  of a Comparative Social Scientist255 Richard Rose Index275

Notes on Contributors

Mauricio  I.  Dussauge-Laguna  is a professor-researcher at the Public Administration Division, Center for Teaching and Research in Economics (CIDE), in Mexico City, and a visiting research fellow, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS), Seikei University. A graduate of El Colegio de México, the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, he has written extensively on policy transfer and administrative reforms. His research topics include the study of regulatory developments in Mexico, the effects of populism on public policy and administration, and the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on state capacities. Geoffrey  Evans  is Official Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, and Professor of the Sociology of Politics, Oxford University. Since 2013, he has been a co-director of the British Election Study (BES). His areas of interest include social and political cleavages, perceptions, values and political choices. In addition to the BES, he has directed several large-scale survey projects in Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. His most recent books are The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class (with James Tilley, 2017), Brexit and British Politics (with Anand Menon, 2017) and Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World (with the BES team, 2020). Mark  Franklin  is the Reitemeyer Professor Emeritus of International Politics at Trinity College Connecticut, USA. He has also held chairs at

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the European University Institute and University of Houston, and a readership at the University of Strathclyde. He is a founding member of the Steering Committee (now Board of Directors) of the Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) Infrastructure project. Bernadette C. Hayes  is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. She has published extensively in the areas of gender, social stratification, religious and ethnonational identity, politics and victims’ issues. She has also held academic appointments at the Australian National University, the University of Surrey and Queen’s University of Belfast. She is the author of Conflict to Peace: Politics and Society in Northern Ireland over Half a Century (with Ian McAllister, 2013). Ludger Helms  is Professor of Political Science and Chair of Comparative Politics at the University of Innsbruck. His research interests focus on issues of executive politics, political elites and leadership, party and parliamentary government, as well as democratization and autocratization. He has published widely in those fields. Dennis  Kavanagh is Emeritus Professor at University of Liverpool. Before then, he held posts at Nottingham and Manchester universities and visiting professorships at Stanford and the European University Institute. He has co-authored every one of the Nuffield studies of British general elections between February 1974 and 2017. He took his degrees at Manchester University where he was a student of Richard Rose, who supervised his master’s thesis and taught him as an undergraduate. Michael  Keating  is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Aberdeen. He graduated from the University of Oxford in PPE and in 1975 was the first PhD graduate from what is now Glasgow Caledonian University. He taught at the University of Strathclyde, University of Western Ontario and European University Institute and at universities in France and Spain and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the British Academy, the Academy of Social Sciences and the European Academy. His  main interests are territorial politics and public policy. Recent books include Rescaling the European State (2013), State and Nation in the United Kingdom (2021) and (edited) The Oxford Handbook of Scottish Politics (2020). Ian  McAllister  is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. His most recent books are Voting and

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Elections (2022), Public Opinion and Australian Defence and Foreign Policy (with Danielle Chubb) (Palgrave, 2021) and Conflict to Peace: Society and Politics in Northern Ireland over Half a Century (with Bernadette Hayes; 2013). He has been director of the Australian Election Study since 1987. His research covers Australian politics, comparative political behaviour and post-communist politics. He is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His PhD, from Strathclyde University, was supervised by Richard Rose. Edward C. Page  has been Sidney and Beatrice Webb Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics since 2001, before that he was a lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor at the University of Hull. He has written articles on British and comparative public policy issues as well as several books including Political Authority and Bureaucratic Power (1985), Localism and Centralism in Europe (1991), Governing by Numbers (2001), Policy Bureaucracy (2005, with W. I. Jenkins), Policy Without Politicians (2012) and Weber’s Scorecard (2024). His PhD, from Strathclyde University, was supervised by Richard Rose. Caryn  Peiffer  is Senior Lecturer in International Public Policy and Governance at the University of Bristol and formerly a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde. She researches patterns and consequences of corruption as well as the (unintended) impacts of anti-corruption policies. She has conducted research in Papua New Guinea, Zambia, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, Indonesia, India, South Africa and Albania and regularly advises on anticorruption policies. B. Guy Peters  is Maurice Falk Professor of Government at the University of Pittsburgh. He was also the founding president of the International Public Policy Association and founding editor of Governance, the European Political Science Review and the International Review of Public Policy. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, he taught at Emory University, the University of Delaware and Tulane University, where he was Director of the Center for Public Policy. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including Oxford, Sciences Po (Paris), KU Leuven, El Colegio de Mexico, FLACSO (Quito), Australian

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National University and the University of Hong Kong. Guy Peters has written or edited over 70 books and 400 articles and book chapters. These include studies in public administration, public policy, comparative politics, American politics and methodology. Thomas F. Remington  is Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University and Goodrich C.  White Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science at Emory University. He is the author of many books and articles, including  The Returns to Power: A Political Theory of Economic Inequality  (2023),  Presidential Decrees in Russia: A Comparative Perspective  (2014) and  The Politics of Inequality in Russia  (2011). His research concerns the political sources of economic inequality in the United States, Russia, China and Germany, as well as issues related to education, skill formation and workforce development. Donley Studlar  is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at West Virginia University and Adjunct Faculty of Health Services Management and Policy at East Tennessee State University. He has published widely on comparative politics and public policy. He first met Richard Rose when he was a graduate student at Indiana University in the spring of 1972. Subsequently, he benefited from Rose’s counsel, especially in residences at the University of Strathclyde in 1972–1973 and 2013–2016, respectively.

Abbreviations

CDU CSPP CSES ECM ECP EU GATT IMF IRA MMT NRB OECD WHO WTO

Christian Democratic Union Centre for the Study of Public Policy Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Error Correction Models Error Correction Parameter European Union General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs International Monetary Fund Irish Republican Army Modern Monetary Theory New Democracies Barometer Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development World Health Organization World Trade Organization

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Share of the vote by party in UK general elections, 1918–2019. Source: Lukas Audickas, Richard Cracknell, and Philip Loft. 2020. UK Election Statistics: 1918–2019: A Century of Elections. London: House of Commons Library. Briefing paper, Number CBP7529, p. 6. Note: Liberal vote share includes votes for Liberal/SDP alliance (1983–1987) and Liberal Democrats from 1992. Figures for 1918 include all Ireland Fig. 5.1 Schema for a feedback loop ‘correcting’ voter–party congruence and turnout

65 77

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2

Party and birthyear level (fixed effects) error correction models of party support and turnout 83 Change in left-right proximity due to change in respondent versus party left-right location (party and birthyear cohort analyses)87

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CHAPTER 1

Richard Rose: Connections Over 60 Years Dennis Kavanagh

From E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, Richard Rose borrowed the epigram ‘Only Connect’ for at least two of his books, including his first major one, Politics in England. His use of the epigram suggests the primacy of research which joins the worlds of political ideas and of political practice. It might also apply to his concern to connect with his readers and with those he engages in conversations and interviews. It is difficult to think of any political scientist in Britain who has achieved as much as he has in both endeavours. Rose is not only a prolific scholar—one could still be regarded as such with only a fraction of his output. Equally impressive is the range and quality of the work, much of it ground breaking and continuing over more than 60 years. As of 2019, his writings, including books written or coauthored, and articles, spanned 34 pages on his website. Such a list invites

I am grateful for comments from Sir Ivor Crewe on an earlier draft of this chapter.

D. Kavanagh (*) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_1

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various reactions, ranging from admiration and inspiration to depression and jealousy. The output has called not only for talent at writing, ability to generate ideas for research and mastery of relevant literature but also discipline to complete a project. Perhaps inevitably, Richard could not have had such a positive impact on political science without at times rubbing some people up the wrong way. In some respects, his strengths are seen by some as shortcomings. Some find the speed of his thought and speech intimidating; the same might be said of his dynamism and enthusiasm. And some may think he too readily assumes others have a level of energy and commitment to match his own. Yet, these reservations do not count for much when considered in the larger picture. In this introduction, I will outline what I regard as key features of Rose’s life and career over more than 60 years. I will also discuss some of his remarkable research output; his work is so vast that I must emphasise the word ‘some’. Much of his published work contains relevant comments on his life and experiences, but he has written at some length about both in his memoir Learning About Politics in Time and Space (2014). I also draw on my memories about him which start when I was an undergraduate at Manchester in the early 1960s.

Early Years Richard was born in St Louis Missouri in 1933. At school, he was what today would be called ‘advanced’; the chief challenge at primary school was to remember to take a book to read because the assignments were done in no time. As a child, he was an omnivorous reader. At the age of eight, he taught himself to type in order to write up baseball history. In the 1960s, when he was a junior lecturer at Manchester University, I recall that the only offices that contained typewriters were those occupied by the secretaries and by Richard Rose. The political theorist Brian Barry once told me that he felt uneasy if a day passed and he had not written something reasonably substantial. I cannot imagine Rose had similar cause to feel uneasy. Under ‘Recreations’ in his Who’s Who entry, he lists ‘writing’. After more than half a century of publishing books, he concluded an essay about writing with the word ‘I still write books to suit myself’. Rose attended Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, because it was so oriented towards the PhD that students could take their BA whenever they could pass the requisite examinations. His wide reading enabled him

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to secure a degree in comparative literature and drama in two years. With time in hand, he sailed for England believing, as he later said, that he was going to Europe and could speak English. To complement his undergraduate degree in the humanities, he enrolled as a postgraduate student in international relations at the London School of Economics. He found the lunchtime meetings with politicians and activists more interesting than the lectures and travelled in war-ravaged Italy, Germany, France and Ireland in long vacations. At the LSE, he met a fellow student, Rosemary Kenny of Whitstable, Kent, who later became his wife of 65 years. After a year of learning to speak English and what Europe was like, he returned to St Louis without a degree. In 1955, Rose finally achieved his youthful ambition to be a reporter on the St Louis Post-Dispatch. The paper was founded by Joseph Pulitzer, and senior reporters were ex-FBI men who won national prizes to dig out facts that could result in politicians going to jail. His first story made the front page and was about the uproar caused when a pig being taken to market escaped and roamed the city streets. As a reporter, he learned the essentials of research that were later to stand him in good stead: to figure out where relevant information was about a story, to go straight to sources and to write news with verifiable and precise facts. After two years as a reporter, Rose decided that he had had too much education to be satisfied with writing stories about runaway pigs and not enough education to become a scholar, like the professors he admired at Johns Hopkins. He decided to go for a PhD and looked at the syllabuses for Harvard and Oxford. The former required several years of course work in topics that did not interest him before starting to write a thesis, whereas Oxford simply required a student to write a doctoral thesis. He wrote a letter of enquiry to heads of several colleges and promptly received back letters of acceptance with a request to complete an application form.

Becoming an Academic In autumn 1957, Richard entered Oxford, thinking he was leaving journalism and entering a university like Johns Hopkins. Having been accustomed to working a 40-hour week on a daily newspaper, he devoted the British equivalent, then a 44-hour working week, to researching his thesis, and carefully noted the hours work in his daily account book. Over three years, he experienced much that advanced his academic career but was very different from the training in political science that he

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would have received in an American graduate school. In his first year, he was attached to an undergraduate college, Lincoln, more like a small American liberal arts college, than a university institution. He won a studentship to Nuffield College where graduate students could either pursue a second degree by writing essays and examination or register to write a thesis that some completed. Rose’s doctoral thesis was on the conflict between socialist principles of foreign policy and the practice of the post-war Labour government. In response to the Soviet Union’s imposition of communist regimes on half of Europe, the government worked with the United States to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. His supervisor, Dr Saul Rose at St Antony’s College, had been international secretary of the Labour Party and gave him introductions to former Cabinet ministers. Richard may have left the Post-Despatch, but he had not left his newspaper training behind. To determine party principles, he systematically read Labour Party and Trade Union conference reports and documents on foreign policy from 1900 onwards and became the first Oxford politics student to interview MPs and cabinet ministers from retired prime minister Clement Attlee to expelled fellow-traveller MP Konni Zilliacus. When Attlee asked him how he got his address, Rose pointed out that it was in the telephone book. He took shorthand notes and compared what they told him with what they had done in office. That gave a familiarity with the tea rooms and the bars of the House of Commons and contacts with Labour MPs who subsequently became cabinet ministers and prime ministers. The only publication from the thesis was a topical Op-ed piece in The Guardian; the potential London publisher could not get a buyer for the American rights. After finishing his doctorate in 21 months, Rose had a year left on his studentship and, when the 1959 general election was called, David Butler, the Oxford don, welcomed his company in undertaking constituency interviews for Butler’s third book on a general election. The introduction of American-style political advertising by the Conservatives and lively telecasts by Labour gave Rose an opportunity to write an appendix for the election book. When it became apparent that the new techniques were a major theme, Butler generously invited him to be co-author. Rose not only dealt with the practices of political television and advertising, he also found out how much the Conservative Party spent on its then new election tools of opinion polls and public relations. The results were debated in the House of Commons and received headline attention in the press. 60

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years later, Butler looked back on the 1959 book that Rose co-authored as marking not only the arrival of the Nuffield brand but also the one that had the most impact of the 15 general election studies that Butler authored or co-authored. Another offshoot of the election book was collaboration with Mark Abrams to write an influential Penguin Special book, Must Labour Lose? (Abrams and Rose 1960), prompted by Labour’s third successive general election defeat in 1959. It drew on survey research by Abrams, with Rose providing a political science perspective on how elections are won and lost drawing on American voting studies. The short book fed into the debate about whether the arrival of the affluent society and fall in working class support for Labour heralded the party’s inevitable decline. Rose’s view was that Labour would need to change its approach if it was to avoid another election defeat, a strategy that Harold Wilson, coached by Abrams, followed to become Labour prime minister in 1964. The public interest in Rose’s two co-authored books made him at the age of 27 a well-known figure in Westminster and Fleet Street. The terms ‘Butler and Rose’ and ‘Abrams and Rose’ quickly became familiar in the political world. Talking to senior politicians, party officials, journalists and pollsters gave the young Rose a grasp of real-world British politics, something that could not be gained from, but be added to, what he learnt in a library. He introduced the regular interviewing of politicians to the Nuffield series, and work with Abrams taught him about designing surveys. Having talked with key people in the industry, he later wrote about the newer techniques of electioneering in Influencing Voters (1967). With a DPhil, two books published and a wife pregnant with their second child, Rose found himself unemployed when his Nuffield studentship ended in September 1960. David Butler cautioned him against hoping to gain a university post in England and urged a return to the United States. With Butler’s support, Rose wrote to almost two dozen American universities applying for a job as well as watching British newspapers for very occasional advertisements of research fellowships. He was shortlisted but turned down for posts at Oxford, the LSE and the University of Michigan. However, in autumn 1960, he received an unsolicited job offer from Professor W.  J. M. Mackenzie, head of the government department at Manchester University. Appointment of an American citizen to a job in Britain required Home Office approval. Mackenzie, a Scot, had no difficulty in declaring that there was no English person competent to take the job of teaching British government.

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Manchester Made Him a Political Scientist In 1961, Rose became a junior member of a small government department with colleagues very different in their backgrounds, intellectual inquisitiveness and orientation towards research than the dons he had known at Oxford. Mackenzie put Rose in charge of the departmental seminar. Instead of inviting politicians as guest speakers, as was done at Nuffield, Rose gave priority to inviting papers from American political scientists spending a year on research leave in the south of England, such as Richard Neustadt and Angus Campbell. The great majority of high calibre US academics have preferred to remain in their own elite institutions rather than settle overseas. Rose has been one of the outstanding exceptions. Rose has spent a good part of his career analysing and explaining British politics to people in his host country and abroad. The young Rose soon realised that for many people in the United Kingdom, the first interesting feature about him is that he was an American. Not resenting being perceived by some as an outsider, he has pointed to what he regards as the benefits of his Anglo-American perspective in a sentence, ‘The grass is greener in England but the mechanical devices to care for grass are superior in America’. Shortly after his arrival at Manchester, Gabriel Almond invited him to write a textbook on politics in England using the new framework that Almond had developed for comparing political systems in developing as well as developed countries (Almond and Coleman 1960). After Politics in England was published in the United States in 1964 and the following year, with minor amendments to cater to the English obsession with class politics, it sold upwards of 200,000 copies over 40 years. It was different from other textbooks on British politics, containing chapters on such topics as political culture and political socialisation. Significantly, it was about England not Britain, noting that to get ahead in British politics one had to adapt to the ways of London SW1. Anglo-centric texts of the time saw England and Britain as the same thing. With devolution, the title was eventually changed to Politics in Britain. The sub-title of the book changed over editions between ‘Persistence and Change’ and ‘Change and Persistence’. Rose has always happily acknowledged his intellectual debt to the Manchester University department and to W. J. M. Mackenzie as his real doktorvater (doctor father), because his response to many issues often cut to the heart of the matter in an unexpected way. In reading a rough first

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draft of Politics in England, Mackenzie responded: ‘I never thought I would know anyone who could write English, American and German-­ American (i.e. the language of political sociology). For God’s sake, choose one and stick to it’. Writing Politics in England made him aware that Northern Ireland raised questions about political legitimacy (taken for granted among writers on British politics) and that Westminster rule was only partly legitimate; generalisations about British rule had to be qualified ‘except for Ireland’. Catholic versus Protestant divisions and conflicting loyalties to Westminster or Dublin made politics in the province so different from that on the mainland. It was identity politics with a vengeance. To be ‘green’ in the province had little to do with concerns about the environment in that time and place. Northern Ireland was so different from the rest of the United Kingdom that it was virtually ignored as a subject of study by academics. As a research student, I recall a conversation in 1965 with Richard being cut short as he said he had to take a taxi to Manchester airport to catch a flight to Belfast. I only learnt later that he had embarked on an ambitious project. He launched his surveys and interviews with key figures on both sides of the divide before the bombs went off and civil rights protesters were marching. His classic Governing Without Consensus (1971) was the result of his research. Later he wrote Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice (1976). The province fired his interest in conditions affecting political legitimacy and political stability. The research project was inspired by what was happening on the ground, a regular feature of his career. Entering academe did not mean that he abandoned journalism; he was too much the writer to do that. Journalism could be a side activity, and it gave him both name recognition among politicians and an incentive for them to influence what he wrote by giving him what they considered the ‘true facts’. He wrote regularly for New Society from its foundation as a weekly in 1962, and his profile was raised when he became the election expert writing for The Times. He became an on-camera election commentator for ITN, and subsequently Scottish Television. I accompanied him on some his work during the 1966 general election campaign and was impressed at his ready access to key figures and their interest in his views. I was in the student body of some 400 first-year students in early 1961 when Rose gave his first lectures on British government. With his dark curly hair, ready smile, youthfulness, American accent and obvious enjoyment in talking about politics, he charmed many of the students. I recall

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his first lecture on American politics when he introduced himself as ‘a border state Democrat’. No doubt some students wrote down ‘democrat’, and he left it up to us to find out what the phrase meant. The Rose lecturing style was apparent from the start—a rich mix of information, ideas, anecdotes, interesting asides and an air of spontaneity. His succinct typed notes were hardly looked at. Did we know how lucky we students were to have our lectures on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from Mackenzie and Rose? Rose created the first class on political behaviour at a British university. It covered topics as wide-ranging as Walter Bagehot and Almond and Verba on political culture, Harold Lasswell on the motivations of political elites, the sociological analysis of party identification of Lipset and Rokkan and the social psychological approach of the University of Michigan. When Rose realised that Manchester undergraduates, unlike Oxford students, lacked the opportunities to hear politicians speak and question them, he created a Friday evening series of talks that not only offered food for political thinking but also a buffet supper for hungry undergraduates. Third year political behaviour students were expected to learn how to analyse surveys of public opinion using a counter-sorter, the forerunner of a computer. Students learnt about what ordinary people thought by designing a questionnaire, drawing a sample and conducting interviews in a marginal constituency. The results of the survey were subsequently incorporated in a jointly authored article with a Manchester student and reprinted multiple times (Rose and Mossawir 1967). Already familiar with London and Oxford, Rose found life in the north of England more like America in its emphasis on money and achievement. He would regularly address student and Manchester societies on political topics, taking careful account of their reactions. He was a distinctive presence, radiating physical and intellectual energy. Walking, usually at speed, along Dover Street where the social science faculty was based, he would sometimes accost a passing student to ask about their background and interests. It was questioning with a purpose, as he wanted to learn about what made different people tick and anything else they might say. A good listener, he would establish rapport quickly but sometimes take people aback with his direct questions. I was among a group of first-year students he surprised by asking for their reactions to the prosecutor’s question to the jury in the trial over the proposed banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1961, ‘Is this a book that that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ Some

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students thought the question raised issues of free speech, and others suggested it raised questions about attitudes to social class. The one form of politics that Rose did not care for was university politics; he regarded university committees as a distraction from academic work. He preferred talking to students and politicians at any time of day or night rather than sitting silently in university committees while academics from different departments and faculties played university politics. Students and colleagues have traded stories of the unexpected circumstances in which Richard, keen not to waste time, has offered advice or arranged meetings. If he can combine a walk, a visit to a café, a late night in his office or a taxi ride or a meeting at the Reform Club in London, with a graduate student or colleague, he would do so. While Rose was reluctant to leave Manchester in those days, the British practice was that universities had only one politics professor, who was also head of department. He realised that if he became a professor elsewhere, he could create a political science department with a contemporary political science syllabus in place of the focus on descriptive and historical studies of political institutions that then dominated British universities. By 1966, university expansion had created many new departments offering professorial posts.

Scotland and Beyond Rose ignored openings in England to apply to become head of department at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. There were two attractions. It had previously been the Royal College of Science and Technology and was therefore congenial to quantitative research. And the department had become the first university outside the United States to join the newly founded Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan. Rose reckoned that it was a good place to build a department to promote his idea of political science, based on the best of Manchester and Michigan. In 1966, Strathclyde appointed Rose its politics professor at the age of 33. The youthful staff he recruited included Mark Franklin, subsequently Stein Rokkan professor at the European University Institute, and William Miller, a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition of the innovative nature of his surveys. He arranged for two Strathclyde lecturers to receive Ford Foundation fellowships to spend a year in the United States at Yale and Michigan, respectively, and for myself at Stanford. Rose subsequently

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funded the Political Studies Association to award a Richard Rose prize to a junior political scientist who has made a distinctive contribution to the study of British politics. It has boosted their early promotion to a professorship and, in the case of Matthew Flinders, becoming president of the PSA. The novel Strathclyde MSc in politics combined the European historical and institutional approach of Max Weber and Stein Rokkan, with what was then alien to Britain, the study of political behaviour as it was developing in the United States. The first term had three required classes covering the conduct of surveys, research design and methods and statistical techniques. Rose taught a fourth class: Methods to Reality. While in favour of the importance of using statistics and abstract models, he endorsed the view of Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize in economics without being an economist: ‘The real world in fact is perhaps the most fertile of all sources of good research questions calling for basic scientific inquiry’. In the second term, students concentrated on mini-research projects. They applied what they had learned in the first two terms to doing an original piece of research. The undergraduate syllabus included comparisons between politics in England with politics in Scotland, Europe, the United States and Canada. As the external examiner on the course in the 1970s, I was impressed with the wide range of research topics students tackled. A good number of the master’s dissertation became journal articles including one in the American Political Science Review and the British Journal of Political Science. Some MSc graduates then did a doctorate and went on to have successful academic careers. The Principal of Strathclyde expressed to Rose the goal of making the Strathclyde department one of the four best politics departments in Britain. Rose said his goal was to make it a leading international department. In this, he succeeded. Strathclyde benefited not only from Rose’s personal reputation, which by this time was established in the United States and in Europe, but also by his willingness to devote time and energy to advancing the department and the careers of others. The departmental seminar hosted an array of speakers from continental Europe, such as Giovanni Sartori and Hans Daalder, as well as from the United States, such as Aaron Wildavsky, Robert Putnam and Mancur Olson. When the European Consortium for Political Research was founded in 1970, Strathclyde was one of the eight founder departments. Reflecting his multiple interests, in 1976, Rose established the Centre for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP) to analyse major problems of public

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policy with social science concepts techniques relevant to the problem at hand, a process he described as conducting disciplined research about undisciplined problems. The CSPP’s distance from London, the home of think tanks, was regarded as a justification for giving priority to basic research. He saw that as the most appropriate role for universities. To disseminate research widely, Rose created Studies in Public Policy, a series of 24- to 96-page papers, some in the style of journal articles and some useful yet unsuited for journals, such as lengthy tabulations of surveys in post-­ communist Europe. The CSPP also established the Journal of Public Policy, published by Cambridge University Press, and he edited it for a quarter-century. The demands of being both Head of the Politics Department and Director of the CSPP were increasingly time-consuming. When Rose received what was then the largest politics grant made by the Economic and Social Research Council to conduct research on the growth of government, this bought him out of teaching, and he left the politics department and became the first full-time Professor of Public Policy in a European university. He now had more time to write and travel to conduct and disseminate research. His early writing about parties and elections in England broadened with the editing of Electoral Behaviour (Rose 1974a), which combined chapters on countries across three continents revisiting the work of Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan on cleavages—class, religion, urban/ rural and geographical location. The path-breaking work showed that communal divisions not class posed the greatest threat to the stability of the state. And with his Strathclyde colleague Tom Mackie, Rose produced three editions of The International Almanac of Electoral Behaviour, which gave the definitive text of elections in 25 countries since they first held nationwide competitive elections in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Their editing of archival materials produced a definitive text that paid dividends: payment for breach of copyright by three other authors who casually copied their work. In his books on public policy, Rose emerged as a sceptical voice about British government. But his was less a contribution to the library of ‘what’s wrong’ with Britain books and more a research-driven analysis of the claims made for and against British political institutions and practices. For example, in The Problem of Party Government (1974b), he argued that the parties were too weak and ill-equipped to achieve their stated goals of social change—as opposed to just passing legislation or spending money.

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His later Do Parties Make a Difference? (1984b) claimed that since the mid-1950s the economic records of governments showed that the parties made little differences to outcomes. Something stronger than parties was at work. He returned to British politics in 2021 in his How Sick is British Democracy? His verdict was a mixed one. Rose pioneered comparative research within the United Kingdom, which he was the first to analyse as a multi-national state. His expertise on Northern Ireland gave him a unique standpoint to appreciate the varied politics of the United Kingdom. An early outcome was Understanding the United Kingdom (1982). Further publications came with the work of his study group on the territorial dimension of UK politics. He observed that there were few if any English-based academics attending. Rose’s approach to public policy has likewise been comparative. In the mid-1970s, he embarked on a pioneering study of ‘overloaded government’, particularly the strains on governments resulting from the rate of growth of public spending exceeding that of the national product. The group of multi-national scholars he assembled demonstrated another characteristic—the ability to convene and stimulate colleagues of varied interests and temperaments to work together. A result was Can Government Go Bankrupt? (1978), co-authored with Guy Peters. This interest led to a series of studies on the growth of public spending, taxes, laws and public employment, as he asked himself the question, ‘what grows when government gets big?’ His Understanding Big Government (1985) sets out a conceptual framework for analysing what grows when government grows. It emphasised laws authorising policies, tax revenue to fund policies and public employees to deliver policies. Each of these topics was then examined in separate books plus a final book showing the extent to which public policies are not the product of choices of voters and the government of the day, but the cumulative inheritance modified over many generations (Rose and Davies 1994). In The Welfare State East and West, edited by Rose and the Japanese political scientist Rei Shiratori (1986), he combined concepts from sociology, economics and political science because the state is only one of the major institutions contributing to the welfare of individuals, along with the market and the family. His research across so many states made him aware of how similarly named programmes could operate differently and how similar problems could produce different policy responses and outcomes. Hence, his interest in lesson-drawing.

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While historians and journalists concentrate on writing studies of individual national leaders, Rose introduced the comparative study of presidents and prime ministers. This was followed by a study that charted the change in the American president’s role from a traditional focus on domestic politics to a study of what happens when the post-modern president meets a world in which other national leaders do not go along with what the White House wants. The book, written in the triumphalist time of Ronald Reagan, anticipated some of the problems that subsequent international developments have brought to the Oval Office. A counterpart British study was entitled The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (2001), dealing with changes in Downing Street, Britain and the world since Rose began studying British politics and Winston Churchill was prime minister. The emphasis of both studies is about the constraints that ostensibly powerful leaders and states have in an interdependent world. Challenging the notion that the prime minister is the first among cabinet equals, Rose argued that he/she may have become the first without equal, but is only one among many beyond the United Kingdom. He may have been the first to coin the term ‘intermestic’ to describe the issues facing the prime minister today—a mix of domestic politics and international concerns. Drawing on his contacts with real world politics, the first chapter is titled ‘Looking After Number One at Number Ten’, others included ‘Managing Colleagues and Bastards’ and ‘Glendower in a Shrinking World’. Some of the tables stand out, not least by presenting data on topics such as the growth of the prime minister’s patronage, prominence in election broadcasts and participation in divisions in the House of Commons. In keeping with the CSPP’s motto—connect the world of ideas with the world of practice—Rose introduced the study of lesson-drawing as an applied science like engineering, his father’s postgraduate subject of study. Lesson-Drawing in Time and Space (1993) sets out a vocabulary and grammar for the analysis of situations in which one country seeks to learn from the experience of another. Learning from Comparative Public Policy: a Practical Guide (2005, 118) is masterly and succinct guide to what might work and what might not contain a short table of the six ‘conditions increasing success in applying lessons’. In response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Rose created the New Democracy Barometer survey to collect evidence about how ordinary people responded to the transformation of no longer communist societies. He wrote a questionnaire that collected unique data about how people

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were coping with the costs of transition and how they compared their nascent democratic regime and market economy with their previous experience of undemocratic rule in a non-market command economy. Between 1991 and 2012, more than 100 nationwide surveys were conducted in 17 countries including all 11 Central and East European countries now member states of the European Union, Belarus and Ukraine and 20 nationwide surveys in Russia. Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach (2009) gives a full list of articles and books analysing the survey data. The fall of the Berlin Wall prompted Rose to write a book-length answer to the question in its title, What Is Europe? His answer is that modern Europe has evolved from being undemocratic multi-national empires to undemocratic nation-states, then split by the Cold War, and now a continent of democratic nation-states (1996). He continued his study of EU enlargement and its effects on democracy in member states with Representing Europeans: A Pragmatic Approach (2013). The study contrasts the opportunities which citizens of member states have to influence their national government with the limited opportunities they have vis-a-­ vis EU institutions. A Christmas greeting card to friends in 2016 reported on his presentations in different countries and his reflection, ‘All of this makes me aware how European I am, that is cosmopolitan in outlook, and how introverted British political discussion has become’. He took on board the impact of Brexit in his How Referendums Challenge European Democracy (2020). To undertake research across so wide and varied a canvass has required both collaborators and money. Rose has demonstrated throughout his career a remarkable ability to find both. The ability to work and interact with different people is seen in the large number of his co-authored books and articles and in his membership of many research teams, often cross-­ national. At the start, it was writing a book with David Butler and articles with students at Manchester. It then broadened to talking to lobby journalists, interviewing politicians, officials and academics in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Russia and other East European states. Research has been funded by grants from academic and public policy foundations in 13 countries and international institutions. Recognition of the high quality of his work has taken many forms, too numerous to recount here. The number of awards conferred on him exceeds that which a large and outstanding department might gain for all its members. They include the Harold Lasswell Lifetime Achievement

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Award (1999), the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize (2009) from the Political Studies Association and the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize for work in European Political Sociology (2009). Awards have been named after him, and he has received several honorary doctorates.1 Rose regards it as a duty to convey and explain his research finding to a wider public. When the Berlin Wall fell, he gave priority to disseminating NDB results to the people most affected from Moscow to Prague and to World Bank economists whose official data, based on a market economy, was not as well suited for understanding an economy in transformation as Rose’s unofficial surveys. He has been a pro bono consultant for Transparency International, designing key survey questions for its Global Corruption Barometer about paying bribes at the grassroots. A spin-off was a book on Bad Governance and Corruption (Rose and Peiffer 2018) analysing survey data from 125 countries. When President George Bush asked his staff in 2007 to convene an Oval Office meeting about failed states with special reference to Iraq, Rose was one of a handful of invited international experts. Rose turned his Northern Ireland research into a short parable with the moral that outside governments could not impose democratic institutions in the midst of a country disrupted by civil war. He described the event as less a case of speaking truth to power than of truth speaking to weakness. For many years, the scholar Rose has followed rules he absorbed as a teenager. First, write an outline, as detailed as possible, and spend as much time on it as necessary. Second, have a clear idea of how you will conclude your piece. It is advice he has passed on to students and colleagues. He also manages his time carefully. As a professor, he set aside days for the university and dealing with students and days for writing at home. His home since 1967 has been in Helensburgh. He has also offered advice of getting the most from interviews. One should be sympathetic and ask open-ended questions. He adds: ‘Self-­ effacement is also required; to learn, one must listen rather than provide gratuitous information about your own problems and country’ (Rose 2005, 67). Richard often brings into his writings material gathered in conversations or interviews and still carries a pencil and paper, to jot down ideas that occur to him or interesting remarks made by others. The search for data is consistent regardless of the location or context. He has outstanding achievements as a teacher and institution builder. A large number of students and junior colleagues have been mentored and, guided by him, then gone on to have successful careers. Many students

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and scholars have paid tribute to his encouragement, and some have done so by contributing chapters to this book. His ability to identify with a writer has always made him a constructive reader of a manuscript, whether by a student of established scholar. One of his guidelines is that if he can’t say something constructive as a reader or discussant in a panel, then he won’t say anything. If one did not know Richard, apart from his publications, it would be easy to assume that a man so dedicated to research and writing has little time for anything else. But one has only to be in his company or in his house and meeting his late wife to realise that he has a life outside of his work.2 As a young Johns Hopkins student, he had already developed a wide cultural hinterland which was reinforced by travels in Europe since 1953. He has long been a keen follower of music in many forms from jazz to opera and something of an expert on architecture, ancient and modern. A careful reader of his work will be struck by appropriate references cropping up drawn from this well-stocked hinterland. The essays in this volume in honour of Richard cannot be a final word. He is still a part-time research professor at the University of Strathclyde and holds appointments as a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. When this book is published, he will have celebrated his 90th birthday and corrected proofs of his latest book, Welfare Goes Global: Making Progress and Catching Up. He is also writing a monthly blog interpreting the implications for party government of the outcome of the 2024 based on a probabilistic model that converts survey data into constituency results and seats in the House of Commons.3 Given such activity, a second festschrift should not be ruled out!

Notes 1. See https://www.profrose.eu for a full list. 2. See https://www.profrose.eu. 3. See https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk.

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References Abrams, M., and R. Rose. 1960. Must Labour Lose? Harmondsworth: Penguin. Almond, G., and J.  Coleman. 1960. The Politics of Developing Areas. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Rose, R. 1967. Influencing Voters: A Study in Campaign Rationality. London: Faber. ———. 1971. Governing Without Consensus: An Irish Perspective. London: Faber. ———., ed. 1974a. Electoral Behaviour: A Comparative Handbook. New  York: Free Press. ———. 1974b. The Problem of Party Government. London: Macmillan. ———. 1976. Northern Ireland. A Time of Choice. London: Macmillan. ———. 1982. Understanding the United Kingdom: The Territorial Dimension in Government. London: Faber. ———. 1984b. Do Parties Make a Difference? Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. ———. 1993. Lesson-Drawing in Public Policy: A Guide to Learning Across Time and Space. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. ———. 1996. What is Europe? A Dynamic Analysis. London: Longman. ———. 2001. The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World. Oxford: Polity Press. ———. 2005. Learning from Comparative Public Policy: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge. ———. 2009. Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Representing Europeans: A Pragmatic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. How Referendums Challenge European Democracy: Brexit and Beyond. London: Palgrave. Rose, R., and P. Davies. 1994. Inheritance in Public Policy: Change Without Choice in Britain. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. Rose, R., and H. Mossawir. 1967. Voting and Elections: A Functional Analysis. Political Studies 15 (2): 173–201. Rose, R., and C. Peiffer. 2018. Bad Governance and Corruption. London: Palgrave. Rose, R., and G.  Peters. 1978. Can Government Go Bankrupt? New  York: Basic Books. Rose, R., and R. Shiratori, eds. 1986. The Welfare State East and West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART I

Governing at Multiple Levels

CHAPTER 2

Politics in England Michael Keating, Ian McAllister, Edward C. Page, and B. Guy Peters

Richard Rose’s Politics in England was not just a textbook. Its origins mark it out from the range of other texts that students of British politics could look to in the mid-1960s, most of which adopted a legal and/or historical approach to the study of British politics. Politics in England was part of a series of books—the ‘Little, Brown’ series—that reflected the M. Keating (*) School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] I. McAllister School of Politics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] E. C. Page Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. G. Peters Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_2

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vision of comparative politics associated with a ‘structural-functional’ approach that gained greatest popularity after the late 1950s, and above all with the ideas and active promotion of Gabriel Almond who, along with Lucien Pye, edited the series each volume with the simple title Politics in …. The basic idea behind the ‘Little Brown’ series was to use the ‘structural-­ functional’ approach to develop a series of books that encouraged genuine comparative analysis. This was an especially ambitious aim for student texts (see Loewenberg 2006, 602). Previous texts had been based on the institutions of government—parliament, the civil service, parties, interest groups and so on—which differ from one case to another so that often ‘comparative politics’ meant no more than studying countries other than one’s own. The new approach would focus on common functions inputs (aggregation and articulation of interests) and outputs (making rules and policies) and then see how these work in different cases (Almond and Powell 1966). In this chapter, we first examine how Politics in England represented a break with the established interpretations of British politics. We then outline how it approached the constitution, territoriality, and long-term stability. The third section examines how the book approached party choice and its use of opinion surveys and data, novel for the time. The fourth section, on public policy, focuses on how it asked simple questions about the impact of policy which had largely been ignored by previous scholars.

A New Approach to British Politics Politics in England did not apply a narrowly structural-functional framework. It wore its theoretical underpinnings lightly, and the perspective adopted both overlapped with Gabriel Almond’s vision and developed a distinctly Rosean analytical approach and style. This approach had four distinctive characteristics. First, it was comparative. Perhaps the most conventional form of comparative political studies follows the logic of the matrix in which several polities are considered in parallel, and while Rose himself used this approach in later work, Politics in England was what he later termed an ‘extroverted case study’ which he also suggested was the most common form of comparative analysis: ‘a study of a single country [employing] concepts that make it possible to derive generalizations that can be tested elsewhere. Even though the study is not explicitly comparative, it is comparable’ (Rose and Mackenzie 1991, 454). One sign of this is that the first British edition has index listings covering ‘America’,

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‘France’ and ‘Germany’ that are similar in length to the entries for the main British political parties or executive organisations. The book’s second distinct characteristic was that it employed concepts that could be equally applied in different countries and contexts—the basic idea behind Almond’s approach too. The organisation of the chapters, as well as the development of ideas in the chapters, reflects the central concern with concepts and applying them. Some are directly related to structural-functional ideas (political culture, socialisation and ‘the political system and the social system’), others were developed for the purpose (‘party competition and integration’ and ‘policy processes’). Yet, the conceptual focus remains distinctive throughout. Third, Politics in England reflected a concern with exposition and explanation based on evidence and data, survey data as well as data produced by political parties or royal commissions. This was new for the time, especially in a textbook. There were only 13 tables presented in the first edition, but the discussion throughout is based on empirical evidence— for example, when developing an understanding of status and prestige hierarchies, he compares Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley, the Queen and Tommy Steele using a 1959 Gallup survey. The use of empirical data and the insights it delivered derives from the fourth characteristic of Politics in England and his later work: engagement with a wide audience through clear and striking exposition of evidence. While the spirit of the ‘behavioural revolution’ in political science meant it was prone to jargon and the technical presentation of statistics, Rose throughout his work manages to develop measures and techniques for presenting sometimes complex empirical evidence to a diverse audience of academics, civil servants, politicians and the general public. His use of apposite turns of phrase was noted by an American reviewer who cited his phrase: ‘If the melting pot is the symbol of American education, then the cream separator is appropriate for England’ (see Gwyn 1965, 413). At the time, Rose’s approach was completely at odds with the concentration on institutions that dominate student texts (see Rothman 1971). Along with the general suspicion with which British academics viewed what Crick (1959) understood as the American Science of Politics (see also Kenny 2006), there were some critical reviews from established British academics. While American reviews appreciated the significance of a fresh approach to understanding politics (Gwyn 1965), the reception in Britain was less enthusiastic. Tom Nossiter (1966), an Oxford DPhil at Leeds University, described it as ‘advanced’—in the sense of reflecting the latest

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trends in political science—and this was not intended as a compliment. Max Beloff (1966), an Oxford professor, described Politics in England as based upon ‘a particular American approach to the subject which subordinates the study of institutions to the study of individuals and groups’ and recommends that ‘Mr Rose’ should ‘[read] fewer surveys and more biographies’. The advantages of a systematic approach to understanding UK politics (the relationship between the England of the title and the United Kingdom is explored below) were less apparent in 1964 than they became a decade later, with the second edition of the book. The first edition uses the four distinctive components of Rose’s analysis to explore what explained England’s ‘deviance’ in a European setting as a large country with a ‘stable representative government’ (Rose 1965, 16). This gave new insights into the features creating and sustaining stability, but the overall ‘major theme of the book is the necessary gradualness of political change’ (Rose 1965, 14). Rose’s approach comes into its own when it is used to understand the nature of political change; this became apparent in the ten years between the first and second editions. The first edition manuscript was completed six weeks after the Labour Party’s victory in the 1964 election, and an understanding of its consequences was clearly not possible. A range of other developments served to create the impression that stability was weakening. These included the civil rights movement and armed conflict in Northern Ireland; the growth in electoral support for Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties in 1970; the 1969–1973 Kilbrandon Commission on the Constitution; the 1973 membership of the European Economic Community; and an increasing questioning of the role of traditional institutions such as the civil service (following the 1968 Fulton Report) and local government (following the 1969 Redcliffe-Maud Report); as well as changing nature of political allegiances based on class. These and other broader society-wide changes—such as the growth of race and ethnicity as a political issue and the changing class structure— informed Rose’s approach to the second edition. In the intervening period, he had also refined his approach through the publication of 32 articles and 5 books. The result was that Politics in England was almost entirely rewritten, with the second edition expanding from 247 pages to 410.

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The Constitution and the ‘Mechanisms of Legitimation’ In 1965, the United Kingdom appeared to enjoy political stability within a consensus around the constitution. The ‘Westminster’ vision of the absolute sovereignty and supremacy of the Crown-in-Parliament held sway, obviating the need for a written and codified constitution. Effectively power was concentrated in the House of Commons and, within it, the Cabinet, assisted by the majoritarian electoral system. Yet, the temptation or capacity for governments to misuse this power was constrained by conventions and the regular alternations of power between the two large parties (in 1945, 1951 and 1964). The ‘rule of law’ meant that governments were obliged to operate within rules but, paradoxically, Parliament itself was not bound by any higher rule. In theory, the monarch retained extensive prerogative powers, but in practice, these were in the hands of responsible ministers. The apparently settled state of British politics led to much self-­ congratulation about the British habit of moderation and the genius of its institutions, inspired by the ‘Whig’ theory of history as a story of progress towards integration, liberty and democracy. The study of the constitution was largely left to legal scholars, although in the absence of a codified constitution, constitutional law did not occupy the central place it did in other European states. Rose (1965) departed from this tradition with his more behavioural and political approach, incorporating modern political analysis in place of the ‘old’ institutionalism that had prevailed until then: as the subtitle of one of his 1965 chapters puts it, he was investigating the ‘mechanisms of legitimation’ (Rose 1965, 10). In this way, he was able to trace the connections between political institutions and the underlying society. Rose’s new approach in the first edition of Politics in England did not offer a strong challenge to this picture of stability. However, in conceptualising and tracing these connections, he developed the tools that allowed him to analyse the fundamental changes in, and debates about, the constitution, as well as often frenetic changes in institutions in the following six decades. This is strikingly illustrated by the deliberate choice of the title, Politics in England. Whig historians and many constitutional analysts had casually elided England with Britain and with the United Kingdom. By contrast, Rose insisted that the peripheral nations were distinct societies so that a sociological approach to politics could not assume that matters

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there were the same as in England. Yet, if England and the United Kingdom were not the same, ‘Politicians and representatives of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland must work within a political system dominated by Englishmen and assimilate many of their attitudes in order to prosper. Because the central government rules over all four parts of the United Kingdom in varying degrees, it is still customary and correct to speak of British government in conjunction with English society’ (Rose 1965, 26). By the second edition of the book, the importance of this distinction he drew nine years before had become fundamental to understanding UK politics; his discussion ‘one crown, many nations’ (Rose 1974a, 32ff) reflected an already developing intellectual agenda shaped by his work on Northern Ireland and his move from Manchester to Strathclyde in 1966.1 The experience of the non-English parts of the United Kingdom is related to a wider concern with understanding the contingency of legitimacy. One of the central purposes of the behavioural and structural-­ functional approaches was to challenge an uncritical acceptance that there was a natural tendency for some nations to produce stable democracies. The most powerful answer to the question of what sustained such democracies was the notion of a ‘civic culture’ (Almond and Verba 1963) which involved a set of values primarily acquired through childhood socialisation that promoted a balanced approach to democracy that was neither too sceptical of leaders nor too deferential towards them. In Politics in England, Rose accepted the importance of a basic reservoir of beliefs that facilitated ‘the peaceful compromise of political difference’ (Rose 1965, 57). However, he also identified a range of features that shaped what flowed in and out of this reservoir. These included judgments on economic performance, conflicts over economic policy (including curbs on trade unions) and the fact that a rising standard of living could not be taken for granted shaped importantly beliefs in whether the institutions of government could successfully mediate between diverse interests in the United Kingdom (Rose 1974a, 397). Yet, as in his discussion of voting behaviour, he consistently and firmly rejected anything approaching economic determinism. In developing this approach, much of the first two editions of Politics in England is concerned with exploring the historical, cultural and political reasons for the central puzzle he identifies: that despite the competing and often sharp conflicts between political forces that seek radical change and those that oppose it, ‘the product, in spite of these differences, has usually

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been harmony. Accounting for this harmony is a major problem of historical sociology’ (Rose 1965, 57). The 1974 edition gives serious thought to what happens if this broad belief in the legitimacy of government disappears: ‘a government at Westminster need only look to the Northern Ireland portion of its domain’ (Rose 1974a, 397). He developed these thoughts about what it is like to govern with lower levels of legitimacy in his contributions to the broad intellectual debate in Britain and elsewhere of the alleged ‘ungovernability’ of modern democracies (see Rose 1979) and above all in Can Government Go Bankrupt? (Rose and Peters 1978).2 Responses to declining legitimacy did not necessarily lead to violence, Rose argued, but could produce another reaction altogether: citizen indifference to government. In later work, Rose developed these insights into regime legitimacy in post-Soviet Russia, Central and Eastern Europe as well as a range of developing countries through his Barometer work.3 One dominant conclusion from the 1974 edition of Politics in England is ‘the inevitability of change’ in the constitution (Rose 1974a, 388). He identified Europe as the biggest potential change through the ‘merger of British sovereignty in a supra-national European institution’. This was, he identified, likely to have very wide implications for other institutions of government including interest groups, the judiciary and the civil service. Other changes included the ‘declining emotional power’ of traditional symbols of unity and authority such as the monarchy and parliament as well as the authority of leadership in ‘extra political spheres of English life’ such as the mass media, unions and business (Rose 1974a, 396ff). Popular reactions to the growth of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s as well as those of some politicians had ‘proved wrong’ the assumption that ‘Englishmen were intrinsically incapable of racial animosity’. The ‘narrow nationalism’ of Enoch Powell as well as the victory of a ‘racialist parliamentary candidate at Smethwick [in the 1964 general election] shattered the illusion that race could be kept out of politics’; the way in which England would progress from a ‘monoracial to a multiracial society’ was deeply uncertain (Rose 1974a, 38–41). By the fifth edition (1989), Rose was able to look back on the 1960s as ‘a period of disillusionment with British government. Continuities with the past were attacked as evidence of the dead hand of tradition’ (Rose 1989, 25). ‘A series of Royal Commissions and inquiries proposed reforms of the civil service, local government, Parliament, the mass media, industrial relations, and the Constitution. New titles were given to Whitehall offices to signify the desire for change for its own sake’ (Rose 1989, 25).

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Yet ‘behind their entrance doors, the same people went through the same administrative routines as before’ (Rose 1989, 25). This contrast between the persisting features of the apparently ‘stable’ political institutions and the pressures for change had been recognised in the last sentences of the first edition with the statement that the ‘major problems of public policy that have faced England … have usually not been solved promptly and efficiently, notwithstanding the existence of stable representative political institutions and widespread agreement within society upon the fundamentals of political culture’ (Rose 1965, 239). Even the Thatcher Government, while reducing the power of trade unions and rejecting ‘corporatist’ bargaining, failed in its central ambition to roll back the size of the state. By this stage, Rose had developed the concept of the ‘mace’ (strong centralised institutions) and the ‘maze’ (the complex of territorial and functional institutions that effectively limit power). Brexit, with its rhetoric of ‘taking back control’, is the latest manifestation of this paradox. The experience of change in the face of long-standing constraints on change, including the sluggishness of UK political institutions, became a central theme in Richard Rose’s exceptionally long list of analyses of the institutions of the executive, judiciary and legislative branches in the United Kingdom in the half century since the second edition was published. The central theme of ‘persistence and change’ was incorporated in the subtitle of the later editions of the book (see Rose 1989) and remains central in his most recent work How Sick Is British Democracy? (Rose 2021).

The Choice of Parties As already noted, Politics in England’s most striking contribution to a new form of political science in the United Kingdom was in the use of opinion surveys and data analysis to provide evidence to support the discussions of how voters become socialised into politics and what motivated their voting choice. While opinion surveys had been used before in Britain, going back as far as the early 1950s, what made Rose’s approach in Politics in England so novel was the integration of these methods into a general interpretation of British politics. This approach was refined continuously in later editions of the book. For example, the second edition of the book included 15 tables and figures distributed across 9 of the 12 chapters (Rose 1974a); by the fifth and final edition, there were a total of 47 tables and figures covering 13 of the 14 chapters (Rose 1989).

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The popularity and intellectual impact of the book, and its treatment of voting and public opinion specifically, were greatly assisted by its appearance just after the 1964 general election. The election was pivotal for several reasons. It resulted in the first Labour government for 13 years, with expectations that it would be as reforming as the 1945–1951 Attlee government. Television coverage of the election campaign was more advanced than ever before, and the new medium was used extensively by the major parties and leaders. It was also one of the first elections in which extensive use was made of party political broadcasts—in practice free airtime given to the parties by the government (McAllister 1985, 492–493). Not least, it was the first general election in which a national academic survey was fielded.4 The analysis of the survey data by David Butler and Donald Stokes in the first edition of Political Change in Britain, published in 1969, confirmed the view of many that while the patterns of voting characteristic of the old aligned electorate of the 1940s and 1950s were clearly visible in 1964, there was also evidence of a new era of generational change (Denver and Garnett 2014). Rose’s perspective on political behaviour was all the more innovative because of its break with the past. Earlier works on political behaviour had generally been of two kinds. First, there were works describing political institutions and largely ignoring the mass public. Characteristic of this approach was Sir Ivor Jennings’ volumes on the workings of the cabinet and the parliament which outlined the legal framework. In reviewing this work, Rose (1962, 754) described the book as having ‘sufficient ideas to sustain a reasonable essay’ and little else.5 Second, some limited quantitative studies existed, such as Benney et al.’s (1956) book on political behaviour in the Greenwich parliamentary constituency during the 1951 general election, or Milne and Mackenzie’s (1954, 1958) studies of the Bristol Southeast constituency in the same period. In addition to the inability to extrapolate broader patterns of political behaviour from these studies, they did not examine how mass political behaviour interacted with the operation of political institutions. Much of the early work on voting and elections in Britain was conducted by sociologists, who assumed a socially determined vote choice. Following the US research of the time, Rose emphasised the importance of political socialisation, education and class in shaping vote choice. These themes were also later stressed by Butler and Stokes. Class had long been considered the basis of British voting behaviour (Alford 1963; Butler 1955)—Pulzer (1967), for example, famously considered the discussion

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of anything other than class as ‘embellishment and detail’. By contrast, Rose emphasised the importance of vote choice as a lifelong learning process, interspersed with notable experiences along the way: ‘while political socialization is a continuing process, what is newly learned often reinforces what was learned previously’ (1974a, 145). Rose thus replaced social determinism with lifelong experience. The lifelong learning model of politics, first advanced in the second edition of Politics in England Today (Rose 1974a, 172–173), became hugely influential and was further developed in subsequent works (Rose and McAllister 1986, 1990). The model neatly incorporated not just class dealignment, which had emerged as an important voting influence in the 1970s, but also used a sophisticated multivariate model to demonstrate that the most important influences on voting choice were parents’ partisanship, education and current class position. The lifelong voting model also presaged much later research which saw a person’s current party identification as a constant and lifetime re-evaluation of party (and increasingly candidate) performance (e.g. Lodge and Taber 2013). Another notable contribution of Politics in England was to introduce politics back into the study of political behaviour. Who a person voted for depended not just on their socialisation or socioeconomic position, Rose argued, but also on the political choices on offer. The collapse of the Liberal Party and the rise of Labour early in the twentieth century radically altered the choices open to voters. At least as important were changes to the voting rules. As Rose noted (1974a, 174) in the 1970 election, more than one quarter of women had become politically aware before they had the right to vote. Similarly, the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18 years only occurred just before 1970 election. This perspective on voting also complemented aggregate voting studies which already had a strong research tradition in Britain (e.g. Steed 1965; Curtice and Steed 1982) but was developed more extensively later (e.g. McAllister and Rose 1984). Finally, if the party choices that are on offer to voters matter, so also do the images that the parties present to the electorate. Rose emphasised the extent to which voters felt the parties to be united or divided, how feasible their policies were and how far party elites and party voters shared the same policy goals. While this theme is similar to the 1950 Greenwich study by Milne and Mackenzie, Politics in England considered it in the context of the broader political system. This also underscores the general point that it is not just sociological or psychological explanations that drive vote choice, but also their interaction with political explanations (Curtice

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1994). This is also a point made in subsequent work (e.g. Rose and McAllister 1990). If Rose’s approach to political behaviour in Politics in England can be neatly summarised, it is that politics as well as society matters.

Public Policy At the time of the first edition of Politics in England, political science, and especially comparative politics, was only beginning to become actively engaged in the study of public policy. Even the structural-functional discussions that generated the book series of which Politics in England is part (cf Almond 1960), which pointed to the importance of understanding the ‘outputs’ of government, said very little about public policy. To the extent that it did, the discussion was in a rather abstract manner based on their structural-functionalist model. For example, taxation was discussed as the ‘extractive capability’ of political systems, and ‘distribution’ is one of the output challenges faced by political systems (Almond 1965).6 Politics in England undertook to expand the discussion of public policy in at least three ways. This was true relative to the structural-functional model and to political science in the United Kingdom at the time. The first way was to present politics and governing as fundamentally about making policy. The political process, from political socialisation through to the actions taken by parliaments, ministers and bureaucrats, was described in conventional terms, but it was clear that all of this activity was about making policy. In the structural-functional approach, the policymaking process was largely hidden within the mysterious ‘black box’ containing ‘conversion functions’, and the concentration was on the political inputs into the system; the outputs received little attention. By the time the second edition of Politics in England was published, there was a good deal more discussion within the discipline about the policymaking process. Rose (1969) himself had published Policymaking in Britain, a reader containing a number of articles illustrating how policy was made and implemented within the United Kingdom, as well as several articles on governing that had a strong policy focus. In addition, other scholars such as Charles O. Jones (1970) had begun to analyse the policy process in a more theoretically abstract manner, using terms such as policy formulation to describe the process and (like structural-functionalism) making the analysis applicable to any government.7 The preface to Hugh Heclo’s seminal Modern Social Policies (1974 xi) offers a brief account of

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the move of policy studies away from its neglected state in the few years since he started work on his book in 1967. He cites for special mention three mentors: Joseph LaPalombara, Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Rose. Rose’s most distinctive contribution was to perform ‘perhaps the most surprising feat by first making political science seem as interesting as politics’. The discussions of policymaking in Politics in England addressed a number of conventional subjects in political science, but did so with a focus on governing and making policy. For example, what is the distribution of power among the actors involved in governing, and how do they utilise that power? What capacities do ministers have to make policy, and especially high-quality and innovative policy? And how do those ministers interact with their civil servants in the process of making policy? These questions were not new, but their direct linkage to a process of making policy was. The discussion of making public policy in Politics in England foreshadowed several other major contributions to the study of policy by Richard Rose. For example, the basic ideas for his important books on The Problem of Party Government (Rose 1974b) and Do Parties Make a Difference? (Rose 1984) can be seen clearly in Politics in England. In addition, some of his ideas for his later work on governing and governance show up in this earlier book. Thus, Politics in England can be seen as innovative, not only in how it dealt with politics and the policy process within the United Kingdom, but also in how it raised several points that would be important for the development of policy studies more generally. The second way in which Politics in England helped to advance the study of public policy was in discussing real policies and their impacts on citizens. The chapter on policymaking in the second edition discussed several important social policies such as education and housing, and how they were evolving at the time. In so doing, Rose made the study of policymaking not just a generalised account of the process, but pointed out that the comparison of policies should not just be across political systems but also should across policies (see Freeman 1985). Assessing the impacts of public policies on citizens has been one of the strengths of Richard Rose’s published work on policy. First, he has asked questions, which may appear obvious but was missed by many scholars at the time, about what happens to citizens when governments make choices. Evaluation researchers might have asked those questions, but scholars in comparative politics rarely did. Rose was writing the first and second

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editions of Politics in England at a time at which some of the early work on comparative policy was emerging (Heclo 1974), and his insights were important for that movement within policy studies and political science. The penultimate chapter of Politics in England is a precursor to several other aspects of Richard Rose’s contributions in public policy. It discussed ways in which policies impacted ordinary citizens, as well as on the society as a whole. This chapter also made the linkage between citizens as voters for the policy priorities presented to them in partisan manifestoes. Rose’s analysis of policy linked public opinion and policy to demonstrate that what citizens thought about policy and its effects on them was important for political parties, and for the advocacy of policy by the parties. Whereas the study of public policy and the study of political behaviour have now drifted apart in political science, Politics in England demonstrated very early why they should be linked. Citizens not only are the consumers of public policies, they also have some hand in the production of those policies. The third way in which Politics in England advanced the study of public policy was to initiate discussion of the explanations for policy choices. Again, these explanations for policy would appear in several parts of his subsequent work, but they were pioneered here. Perhaps most important of these was the discussion of the persistence of policy choices—what came to be the argument for ‘inheritance before choice’ (see Page’s Chapter in this volume). Long before historical institutionalism and path dependency (Steinmo et al. 1992) became popular explanations for policy choice, Rose had identified just how important historical choices were for understanding contemporary policies. He also identified the constraints that policymakers face when attempting to alter those long-standing policy regimens. Related to the concept of inheritance before choice, Rose also identified incrementalism as an important characteristic of the policy process in the United Kingdom, and an important explanation of how policies change. Although he did not use the term per se, the descriptions of policymaking were very much in the style of incrementalism. Given the strength of inherited policies and the interests that surround them, any synoptic change in policy would be difficult, so policies tend to change by small steps, and ‘successive limited comparisons’ (see Bendor 2015). While the ideas of incrementalism and bounded rationality were well-­ known among public policy scholars, this book helped to make those ideas more commonly known among comparativists.

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Conclusion Politics in England was a remarkable book that went through five editions covering a quarter of a century—perhaps one of the longest-lasting politics textbooks in the world. One reason for its durability was that it came at a pivotal time for political science in general and UK political science in general. The publication of the first edition coincided with the pivotal 1964 election and the rise of the permissive society. As we have outlined, later editions had to incorporate major changes, such as the conflict in Northern Ireland, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and devolution, membership of the European Union and much else. Each edition represented a major revision to adequately take into account these changes. As the various subtitles of the book illustrated, these were almost new books in themselves. Politics in England offered an accessible and intellectually adventurous application of methods of analysis of a form of political science that had already emerged in the United States but travelled internationally only slowly—with its emphasis on conceptual rigour, comparative analysis and, where useful, quantitative analysis. It advanced the study of British politics by its insistence that its institutions could not be adequately understood without reference to the comparative context. Similarly, these references could not be sustained without clear and explicit conceptualisation of the broader functions that these institutions filled and how they went about filling them. It highlighted the advances in the study of politics Richard Rose had started to make in several discrete areas—we have here highlighted the contribution that he has made to the study of constitutional change, electoral behaviour and public policy—not only in the United Kingdom but for comparative politics more generally.

Notes 1. This is further discussed in the chapters by Keating and by Hayes and McAllister in this volume. 2. See Guy Peters’ chapter in this volume. 3. See Thomas Remington’s chapter in this volume. 4. There was a national survey conducted in 1963 by Butler and Stokes, but it was prior to the 1964 general election (Butler and Stokes 1969, 1974). 5. ‘Buried within mountains of obiter dicta and quotes from pre-1939 secondary sources are sufficient ideas to sustain a reasonable essay on the ­persistence

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through the centuries of a common political culture in England’ (Rose 1962, 754). 6. One of the present authors spent a good portion of his first year in graduate school in long, abstruse discussions of the meanings of the abstract terms used to describe the political process. 7. This process, or ‘stages’, model to some extent picked up ideas from the policy sciences, especially those of Harold Lasswell (1956).

References Alford, R. 1963. Party and Society: The Anglo-American Democracies. Chicago: Rand McNally. Almond, G.A. 1960. A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics. In The Politics of the Developing Areas, ed. G.A. Almond and J.S. Coleman. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1965. A Developmental Approach to Political Systems. World Politics 17 (2): 183–214. Almond, G.A., and G.B.  Powell. 1966. Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach. Boston: Little, Brown. Almond, G.A., and S.  Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Beloff, M. 1966. Book Review: Politics in England. Public Administration 44 (1): 107–109. Bendor, J. 2015. Incrementalism: Dead Yet Flourishing. Public Administration Review 75 (1): 194–205. Benney, M., A. Gray, and R. Pear. 1956. How People Vote. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Butler, D.E. 1955. Voting Behaviour and Its Study in Britain. British Journal of Sociology 6 (2): 93–103. Butler, D.E., and D. Stokes. 1969. Political Change in Britain. 1st ed. London: Macmillan. ———. 1974. Political Change in Britain. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Crick, B. 1959. The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Curtice, J. 1994. Great Britain: Imported Ideas in a Changing Political Landscape. European Journal of Political Research 25 (2): 267–286. Curtice, J., and M.  Steed. 1982. Electoral Choice and the Production of Government: The Changing Operation of the Electoral System in the United Kingdom Since 1955. British Journal of Political Science 12 (1): 249–298. Denver, D., and M.  Garnett. 2014. Introduction. In British General Elections Since 1964: Diversity, Dealignment, and Disillusion, ed. D.  Denver and M. Garnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Freeman, G.P. 1985. National Styles and Policy Sectors: Explaining Structured Variation. Journal of Public Policy 5 (4): 467–496. Fulton Report. 1968. The Civil Service. Vol 1, Report of the Committee 1966–68 (Chairman: Lord Fulton), Cmnd. 3638. London: HMSO. Gwyn, W.B. 1965. Book Review: Politics in England. Journal of Politics 27 (2): 413–414. Heclo, H. 1974. Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to Income Maintenance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jones, C.O. 1970. An Introduction to the Study of Public Policy. Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole. Kenny, M. 2006. History and Dissent: Bernard Crick’s The American Science of Politics. American Political Science Review 100 (4): 547–553. Lasswell, H.D. 1956. The Decision Process: Seven Categories of Functional Analysis. College Park, MD: University of Maryland. Lodge, M., and C. Taber. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loewenberg, G. 2006. The Influence of European Émigré Scholars on Comparative Politics, 1925–1965. American Political Science Review 100 (4): 597–604. McAllister, I. 1985. Campaign Activity and Electoral Outcomes in Britain, 1979 and 1983. Public Opinion Quarterly 49 (4): 300–315. McAllister, I., and R.  Rose. 1984. The Nation-Wide Competition for Votes: The British General Election of 1983. London: Frances Pinter. Milne, R.S., and H.C.  Mackenzie. 1954. Straight Fight 1951. London: Hansard Society. ———. 1958. Marginal Seat 1955. London: Hansard Society. Nossiter, T.J. 1966. Book Review: Politics in England. Political Studies 14 (3): 380. Pulzer, P. 1967. Political Representation and Elections in Britain. London: Allen and Unwin. Rose, R. 1962. Review: Party Politics (Volume III): The Stuff of Politics. Sir Ivor Jennings. American Political Science Review 56 (3): 753–754. ———. 1965. Politics in England London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1969. Policymaking in Britain. London: Macmillan. ———. 1974a. Politics in England Today. 2nd ed. London: Faber. ———. 1974b. The Problem of Party Government. London: Macmillan. ———. 1979. Ungovernability: Is There Fire Behind the Smoke? Political Studies 27 (3): 351–370. ———. 1984. Do Parties Make a Difference? London: Macmillan. ———. 1989. Politics in England: Change and Persistence. 5th ed. London: Scott, Foresman. ———. 2021. How Sick Is British Democracy? A Clinical Analysis. London: Palgrave. Rose, R., and W.J.M.  Mackenzie. 1991. Comparing Forms of Comparative Analysis. Political Studies 39 (3): 446–462.

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Rose, R., and I. McAllister. 1986. Voters Begin to Choose: From Closed Class to Open Elections in Britain. London: Sage. ———. 1990. The Loyalties of Voters: A Lifetime Learning Model. London: Sage. Rose, R., and B.G. Peters. 1978. Can Government Go Bankrupt? New York: Basic Books. Rothman, S. 1971. Comparative Government. Political Studies 19 (1): 92–94. Steed, M. 1965. An Analysis of the Results. In The British General Election of 1964, ed. D.E. Butler and A. King. London: Macmillan. Steinmo, S., F. Longstreth, and K.A. Thelen. 1992. Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The United Kingdom as an Intellectual Puzzle Michael Keating

The Homogeneity Thesis Challenged In the 1960s and early 1970s, the study of politics in the United Kingdom was marked by the ‘homogeneity thesis’. Blondel (1974, 20) wrote that ‘Britain is probably the most homogeneous of all industrial countries’ if only on the grounds that the non-English parts were too small to matter. Finer (1974, 137) claimed that ‘Britain, too, has had its “nationalities” problem, its “language” problem, its “religious” problem. These are problems no more.’ Like Blondel, he admitted that there were non-­ English parts, ‘But for all this [the administrative arrangements for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales] the “Constitution”… is not British at all. It is English’ (Finer 1974, 134). Foreign observers (and some English ones) could happily use the terms ‘England’, ‘United Kingdom’ and ‘Great Britain’ interchangeably. The fact that the United Kingdom was one of only two western European countries that had experienced a

M. Keating (*) School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_3

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secession (as opposed to a change in borders) in the twentieth century received scarce notice. The homogeneity thesis was part of a wider set of assumptions in modernist sociology, seen as a process of territorial integration and functional differentiation (Durkheim 1964; Deutsch 1972; Finer 1997). This, it was generally assumed, included both the underlying economic and social structures and the political superstructure. Another wider trend was the heritage of ‘national’ histories originating in the nineteenth century as teleological accounts of progress towards inevitable fulfilment in nation-­ states. The British version of this was the ‘Whig history’ of national progress marked by milestones including Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the welfare state after the Second World War. Histories of ‘England’ presented continuous narratives from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, with the Anglo-Scottish (1707) and British-Irish (1801) unions as mere incidents which in no way interrupted or altered the track of progress. Another element is the myth of exceptionalism, ironically one thing that all national stories have in common. For the United Kingdom, this was about a political consensus so deep that the country could dispense altogether with a codified constitution. Richard Rose was one of the first modern political scientists to challenge these assumptions.1 As he explained: ‘The questions raised in this paper have been puzzling the author ever since the author noticed, while hitchhiking around these islands [in 1954], that there were enormous differences within and between them’ (Rose 1970 preface). Politics in England (Rose 1965) was not, as some critics have suggested, another failure by an American (and England-based) commentator to get the name of the state right. On the contrary, in the first edition, he explained the choice of title: Because the history and contemporary social conditions of the four national groups are not identical, in some cases it would be misleading to generalize about ‘British’ society as regards such basic social characteristics as education and religion. Thus, English society is the centre of focus of this book and statements about England are not in every instance to be regarded as applicable to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Rose 1965, 25)

He continued: ‘the extent to which social and political attitudes within the United Kingdom vary independently of socio-economic differences is a fascinating field as yet hardly explored by researchers’ (Rose 1965, 25).

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He also noted that the unimportance of those differences was demonstrated by the failure of the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties at that time to gain representation in parliament, but the potential was recognised. By the fifth edition, when it was no longer necessary to explain that England was not Britain, he briefly noted the territorial scope of the book and added: ‘This complex of identities cannot be dealt with here. Non-­ English parts of the United Kingdom are treated fully in The Territorial Dimension in Government: Understanding the United Kingdom and four other books I have authored or edited on the subject’ (Rose 1989, vi). Rose’s (1971) work on Northern Ireland, diagnosing the fatal weaknesses of the Orange state before the outbreak of the Troubles, was another early questioning of the homogeneity thesis and Whiggish ideas about consensus and integration (see Hayes and McAllister in this volume). It also provoked a questioning of the nature of the UK state itself. One fallback for the defenders of the homogeneity thesis had been that it was valid except for Northern Ireland (and perhaps for Scotland). This was, in effect, to say that the United Kingdom was homogeneous except where it was not. For Rose, this merely begged a deeper question about the geographical extent and national identity of the state. The inspiration for The United Kingdom as a Multinational State (Rose 1970, preface) ‘came from the need to place Northern Ireland in a larger context, as part of a book on the authority of the regime there.… It then became clear that the United Kingdom is a much more complex entity that is customarily admitted.’ The United Kingdom as an Intellectual Puzzle (Rose 1970, preface) was an early effort to work out just what kind of a polity the United Kingdom was, if it was neither a unitary state nor a federation.2 Elsewhere, instead of treating Northern Ireland as an exception to the homogeneity rule, he argues that the presence of Northern Ireland may indicate that the United Kingdom is not actually a state at all (Rose 1982b). The late 1970s to the 1990s saw a flourishing of work on the United Kingdom as a multinational order under the auspices of the UK Politics Group led by Richard Rose and Peter Madgwick, upending the homogeneity thesis. Just as important were the criticisms of the counter-­teleologies of the United Kingdom’s inevitable break up into its constituent parts (Nairn 1977) or the substitution of internal colonialism for the benign Whig histories (Hechter 1975). Thus emerged ‘territorial politics’ as a distinct field. This was not be confused with the old study of local government (linked to public administration) or the more recent field of urban politics, although there are connections. Territorial politics, rather,

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concerns the territorial form and articulation of the state itself, not just things that happen within it. The homogeneity thesis was never completely wrong, as Rose (1970) himself had shown in an early Strathclyde paper. In an analysis inspired by the work of Stein Rokkan, he examined four key cleavages: centre-­ periphery; religion; urban-rural; and class. There were some differences across the UK nations, although differences in class structures were small. The most striking differences were attitudinal, based on religious and national identities. Work by various authors in the subsequent decades has shown that social and economic structures have continued to converge with the decline of agricultural and the industrial employment (e.g. McCrone 2017). Nor is there any evidence of divergence on values or social attitudes, quite the contrary (Keating 2021). Yet, political behaviour and voting patterns have diverged markedly, with powerful forces pulling the United Kingdom apart. Scottish, Welsh, Irish and even (in its own way) English nationalisms have not faded away as modernists had predicted. This paradox can only be explained through a Rosean analysis that gives due weight to politics as a distinct realm, not reducible to economics or individual choice, and to institutions. It also requires a historical approach that, ignoring the old teleologies, looks at the persistence of territorial politics even in the heyday of the homogeneity thesis. For example, the apparent homogeneity of voting behaviour and the two-party duopoly in Great Britain may have ignored the fact the parties themselves are territorial coalitions. So the Scottish Unionist Party (as it was called until 1965) was not the same social coalition as the Conservative Party in England, while the Labour Party in Wales was the inheritor of a distinct Welsh Radical tradition. The territorial management perspective seeks to explain not only why territorial states came into being but why they stay together. Rose’s (1970) earlier work followed the contemporary thinking that, while economic cleavages could be managed by compromise, those based on identity could not. In a more simplistic way, that idea has come back recently into political science, in works that contrast material incentives with identities and try to work out the contribution of each to political behaviour and system stability. We know too much about identity nowadays to buy into such formulations. Identities are constructed, negotiated and linked in complex ways. They are a category of practice as shown by the work of Todd (2018) in Ireland and McCrone and Bechhofer (2015) in Scotland.

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It is upon these ontological foundations that territorial management works or fails. Rose’s work is important in locating this in the realm of politics as an autonomous realm, not reducible to anything else, hence the importance of territorial politics. In The Nationwide Competition for Votes, McAllister and Rose (1984) showed how a territorial perspective can help understand what had hitherto been presented as a uniform pattern of electoral behaviour. It is extraordinary, in retrospect, how much opposition there was to very idea that territory could in itself be a factor both in political behaviour and in statecraft (Keating 1988, 2013).

The Maze and the Mace The United Kingdom constitutes an ‘intellectual puzzle’ (Rose 1977) because it does not seem to conform to the usual categories of state. It is not a nation-state in which state and nation coincide. There is a high degree of institutional differentiation, some it inherited from pre-Union structures and bargains, other parts more recent. On the other hand, it is neither a federation nor a confederation but a formally unitary state based on the sovereignty and supremacy of the Westminster parliament. This combination of recognition of the multinational nature of the state with insistence on political unity is the historical central point of UK unionism, the insistence that nationality and political power should not coincide. Decentralisation, whether in administration or through municipal government, is one matter and can be accommodated in the parliamentary state. Legislative devolution is another matter altogether. This is what Rose (1977, 1982a) calls the maze and the mace. The maze represents the complexity of territorial administration and differentiation. The mace is the ultimate location of sovereignty in the institution of the Crown-in-­ Parliament meaning, these days the House of Commons. The union cannot be explained by a single, parsimonious theory but by the interplay of three factors: history, the working of contemporary political institutions and the values that give consent to these institutions (Rose 1982b, 5). There is no teleology and ‘the stability of the Union is contingent, not inevitable: it reflects an equilibrium of disparate forces within nations as well as between national parts’ (Rose 1982b, 7). In Understanding the United Kingdom, Rose (1982a) integrates these into a novel account of UK government rather than, as was more commonly the case at the time, citing them in footnotes as exceptions to the norm. He notes the almost complete absence in the United Kingdom of the

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continental European idea of the ‘state’ and the importance of the Crown. This symbol of unity allows for a differentiation in institutions that might be impossible in a republican nation-state. It even allows for an ambiguity on the territorial dimensions of the polity because ‘The Crown is an idea, not a territory…without an identifying place name’ (Rose 1982b, 49). Around the same time, Rokkan and Urwin (1983) came up with the concept of the ‘union state’, in which the component parts retain some pre-union institutions and rights. Historians and legal scholars have touched on similar themes across Europe, including ‘fragments of state’ (Jellinek 1981), ‘composite states’ (Elliott 1992) and ‘historic rights’ (Herrero de Miñon 1998). While political scientists cite Rokkan and Urwin, however, there have been few efforts to operationalise the concept and apply it on a comparative basis. More recently, I myself had a go, distinguishing unions from nation-states on the basis of demos (the nation or people), telos (accounts of past and present and future purpose), ethos (shared values) and sovereignty (Keating 2021). In the ideal-type nation state (whether unitary of federal), these are defined and shared, while in unions, they are left open and are frequently contested. This does not mean the unions are doomed to fail, just that they cannot work in the same way as nation-states. As Rose shows in his writings, UK governments have adopted various means for keeping the union together, with greater or lesser success. During the Stormont regime in Northern Ireland, they entrusted the maintenance of the Union to local political elites, disengaging from detailed intervention and turning a blind eye to discriminatory practices that would have not been tolerated in Great Britain. This might be seen as an extension of early practices of ‘exceptionalism’ in respect of Ireland, denounced by arch unionist A. V. Dicey (1973). The result was a failure of regime legitimacy among the minority population. When the UK Government did intervene in the 1960s, it made the fatal decision to leave the Stormont institutions intact (Rose 1982b). After the collapse of Stormont in 1973, successive governments continued to treat Northern Ireland as a place apart. Scotland was managed by a combination of administrative devolution and favourable treatment in public spending on the assumption that discontent was due to economic or social grievances, which could be addressed within the existing system. From the 1960s, the same strategy was extended to Wales, with the addition of some inexpensive concessions on the language question. In both Scotland and Wales, the British

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two-party system dominated electoral competition, providing a strong integrative force, especially as the Labour Party was more interested in exercising power at the centre than in decentralising to the peripheral territories in which its electoral strength was growing. So, while there were always Home Rule traditions in Scotland and Wales, especially in the Labour and Liberal parties (Jones and Keating 1982), these were contained. While neither of these parties called itself ‘unionist’ (partly because of the Northern Ireland connotations), this was entirely consistent with the spirit of British unionism as differentiation in government (the maze) but unity of authority (the mace). Labour, in particular, was constitutionally conservative (Jones and Keating 1985). The generation following the Second World War represented a high tide of unionism. The common experience of war had created a strong sense of national solidarity. The welfare state represented a social citizenship that was common to the whole United Kingdom including even Northern Ireland, where Unionist governments accepted the ‘parity’ principle of equal welfare provision with Great Britain, on the understanding that the UK government would foot the bill. Decolonisation left the United Kingdom with recognisable borders, contested only on the island of Ireland. For Rose (1978), while the Crown was still indefinite in its territorial scope, the mace (defined by the scope Parliamentary authority) had precise boundaries (Ward 2023). There was a recognisable national economy, a developmental state and commitment to some form of territorial equity (Edgerton 2018). As territorial management came under strain from the 1960s, with the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and sporadic electoral successes by Scottish and Welsh nationalists, there was, in some quarters, a reversal of the integrationist teleology. Now the United Kingdom was seen as an ‘artificial’ creation bound to break up. Tom Nairn (1977) compared the United Kingdom (‘Ukania’) with the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy. Linda Colley (1992) claimed that Britain had been forged by Protestantism and war with France.3 It followed that the disappearance of these factors meant that the state needed to be reinvented (Colley 2003). This is to ignore the multiple other factors that allowed the union to be reinvented and managed over the centuries. While such reductionist accounts were misleading, there is no doubt that the Union came under sustained pressure in the last quarter of the twentieth century, as the old strategies of territorial management proved less effective. The response of the British parties was to pick up the historic

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Home Rule formula, under the label of ‘devolution’. The first effort was by Conservative leader Edward Heath, who in 1968 unsuccessfully urged a measure of devolution on his Scottish party. In the mid-1970s, Labour adopted devolution for Scotland and, more half-heartedly, for Wales but faced strong opposition from within the party. Opponents argued that devolution was a distraction from class politics and feared that that it posed a threat to the union, would weaken the presence of Scotland and Wales in Westminster and put Scottish and Welsh spending at risk. Efforts to push through devolution in the 1970s failed due to divisions within the Labour Party, lack of government majorities and referendum requirements inserted by opponents. The Welsh referendum was defeated by four to one, while in Scotland, devolution gained majority support but failed to meet the threshold requirement in the legislation. Northern Ireland was treated as a case apart. Governments of both parties sought to restore devolution there (even when opposing it for Scotland), with the condition that there should be consociational power-­ sharing and a recognition of the broader Irish dimension. From the mid-­1980s, this extended to including the Republic of Ireland as a partner in resolving the question, while stopping short of ideas about joint sovereignty. For Rose (1978), devolution 1970s-style was less than a radical change in the constitution. Certainly, it altered relationships among territorial institutions and shared administrative responsibilities (the maze), but it left the central principle of parliamentary supremacy and sovereignty (the mace) intact. A serious response to ‘demands for more power for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will necessarily involve fundamental changes in Westminster government as we have known it’ (Rose 1977, 2). Yet, the 1970s devolution proposals contained numerous supremacy and over-ride provisions. This was, and remains, the fundamental problem of the Home Rule or devolution formula. Without a change at the centre, it remains a strategy of territorial differentiation and management consistent with traditional unionist assumptions.

The Millennium Settlement Devolution (Home Rule) was finally achieved at the end of the twentieth century. In Northern Ireland, it was the culmination of a peace process embodied in the Good Friday Agreement (1998). In Scotland, it was the fulfilment of a manifesto commitment secured by the Labour Party in

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Scotland after the experience of 18 years of Conservative Westminster rule and endorsed by a large referendum majority. Welsh devolution was included to pre-empt pressure from there and was accepted by the narrowest of majorities in the referendum. Devolution was another attempt to square the circle of sovereignty or reconcile maze and mace. All three settlements were endorsed by local referendums, which suggested an element of self-determination. The model is the ‘reserved powers’ one in which everything not explicitly reserved to the centre is devolved, suggesting a federal relationship.4 Yet, it was clear that the Westminster parliament remained sovereign and supreme, with explicit authority to legislate in devolved matters. These were reconciled by the Sewel Convention, under which Westminster will not ‘normally’ legislate in devolved matters without the consent of the relevant devolved legislature. This was later put into statute in the Scotland Act (2016) and the Wales Act (2017) without altering its nature as a non-­ binding convention. Sewel works, as UK conventions usually do, when it was not explicitly evoked. Most consent motions are passed as a matter of convenience, where there is agreement on the policy concerned. As a mechanism to entrench the powers of the devolved bodies, it worked as long as nobody was prepared to test it and discover the political consequences. The Northern Ireland institutions have had a chequered history, being suspended some 40 per cent of the time since 1999. On the other hand, the settlement long commanded a plurality of support in both communities. With Labour-dominated governments in power in the United Kingdom, Scotland and Wales until 2007, there was little tension over those settlements. Polls showed a consistent plurality in favour of more devolved powers within the United Kingdom in both countries. The millennium settlement can be seen as another example of exceptionalism for the periphery, which had almost no effect whatever on government of the centre (or the mace), as Rose had noted of the earlier efforts in the 1970s. Most remarkable, perhaps, was the way that unionism adapted rapidly to the new dispensation. Previously defined largely by opposition to Home Rule as incompatible with parliamentary sovereignty, unionism now embraced the Home Rule tradition and redefined itself against secession, now a real challenge in Scotland. In Northern Ireland, matters were less clear since the unionist parties in London had all agreed to the right of Northern Ireland to decide whether to join the Republic and, effectively,

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to have no preference on the matter. This posed the question as to how far Northern Ireland was accepted as part of the union at all. Devolution could work as long as the creative ambiguity underpinning it could be sustained. Rather than postulating a single demos, the Good Friday Agreement permitted the expression of competing national loyalties and their institutional expression. Rather than seeking a single telos, it gave both unionist and nationalist visions legitimacy and a means of advancing themselves. As nationalism (along with the Republic of Ireland) secularised, there is less difference in ethos, although there remains an element of social conservatism in Northern Irish unionism which marks it out from both kin states. Sovereignty officially remains at Westminster, but a ‘foreign’ state, the Republic of Ireland, is given a formal role in the constitutional future of the province, and there is statutory provision for secession. Less starkly, there is similar ambiguity in Scotland. In the 1980s, all but one Scottish Labour MPs had signed the Claim of Right (Dudley Edwards 1988), which asserted the sovereignty of the Scottish people. Yet under the Scotland Act, sovereignty remains at Westminster. Tony Blair, in a Diceyan moment, even claimed that ‘sovereignty remains with me as an English MP’ (Brogan 1997). In a series of debates and resolutions at Holyrood and Westminster, the unionist parties have sought to square that circle by arguing variously that self-determination was achieved by devolution, or that the only right was to leave the United Kingdom, not negotiate Scotland’s place within it, or that the 2014 independence referendum satisfied the sovereignty demand (Keating 2021). After a decade, the Millennium settlement came under serious pressure again. As Rose had noted in an earlier period, this could not be attributed to ‘objective’ features such as economic differences, changes in social structure or even divergence in social attitudes (ethos). Nor was it a matter of changes in national identities, which have remained rather stable. The explanation, rather, lies in the political realm and the way in which identities and constitutional preferences have interacted in specific contexts. There is also a complex relationship between demands for constitutional change and their supply. To echo Rose again, there is no single theory to provide a parsimonious, or reductionist, explanation.

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The Mace Challenged In the twenty-first century, the United Kingdom faces secessionist challenges that, apart from Ireland between 1916 and 1922, are unprecedented. These must also be seen as a response both to the demand for, and the supply of, constitutional options. A crucial moment came in Scotland in 2007, when the Scottish National Party (SNP) narrowly achieved a plurality in the Scottish Parliament, giving it a platform to gain an absolute majority (in a proportional electoral system) in 2011. David Cameron’s Conservative government took a gamble and allowed an independence referendum in 2014. While the ‘no’ side won by 55 to 45 per cent, the independence vote had increased from the low 30s in the course of the campaign. For the first time, the independence option was presented as a viable proposition, and subsequently, the winners behaved like losers and the losers like winners. Support for independence has never fallen below that level. In 2015, the SNP won almost all the Scottish seats in Westminster and then won Scottish elections in 2016 and 2021. Scottish identity, historically ubiquitous, began to align (in its strong form) with support for independence, and this became the principal cleavage in electoral competition. On the other hand, deeper probing suggested that support was focused on what came to be known as ‘independence-lite’, keeping close relations with the rest of the United Kingdom than with sovereign statehood in the classic sense (Liñeira et al. 2017; McCrone and Keating 2023). In Northern Ireland, reunification started to look less like a theoretical proposition as Sinn Féin became the predominant representative of nationalism and the demographic imbalance between unionists and nationalists diminished. This did not mean that reunification was imminent. There was a growing view that it could only be achieved by consent and the loss of unionist support was due to Protestant voters ceasing to define themselves as unionists rather than becoming nationalists. In the south of Ireland, there was growing appreciation that reunification could not mean takeover by the existing Republic but would require changes in the very conception of state and nation. In Wales, where devolution had been accepted by the smallest of margins, it rapidly became entrenched in public opinion. By 2020, there was even a movement to ‘indy-curious’ (Trystan 2019) that is support, in a rather ill-defined way, for independence. Once again, the supply of options seems to have stimulated the demand.

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There were also some stirrings in England, left out of the Millennium settlement. Yet, although there is now an ‘English question’, there is much less consensus on what the question is, let alone on the answer (Kenny 2014). Surveys do not show an increase in English identity, but it is more clearly distinguished from being British, so undermining the ambiguity which had allowed the English to think of themselves as living in a unitary state when the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish thought otherwise. There was some feeling of political disempowerment when English people looked at the institutions of Scotland and Wales but little demand for similar institutions of their own, either for England or for its regions. Mostly, the attitude seemed to be that the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish were welcome to their own institutions, as long as they did not impinge on the unitary Westminster Parliament, as federal-type arrangements would. The biggest blow to the Millennium settlement was dealt by the Brexit referendum of 2016 in which England and Wales voted to leave by a margin of 52 to 48 per cent, while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain by 62 and 56 per cent, respectively. To an extent hardly appreciated in Westminster, membership of the European Union had underpinned the devolution settlements. Taking the ‘Westminster’ view of the constitution, Brexiters insisted that EU membership was incompatible with the unitary state based on parliamentary supremacy. If we regard the United Kingdom as a union in which demos telos, ethos and sovereignty are contested and never resolved, however, it is a very good fit with the EU, which is precisely such a polity. The combination of devolution and EU membership allowed academic writers and even judges (speaking obiter and in their academic writings) to question the received Westminster doctrine of sovereignty (Arden 2015; MacCormick 1999; Steyn 2005). The idea that we must go somewhere else and negotiate policy decisions is not at all strange to political actors in the devolved nations. The combination of the Good Friday Agreement, desecuritisation and the European Single Market allowed the Irish border to be opened and its physical manifestation to be removed. The European Single Market also dispensed for the need for a Single (Internal) Market provision within the United Kingdom, so allowing for a more extensive devolution settlement, in which the devolved governments had, within matters of devolved competence, the same degree of discretion in applying EU policies as did member states. At the same time, the entrenchment of the European Convention of Human Rights (of the Council of Europe) into the devolution settlement allowed judges to strike down devolved laws, whereas in relation to

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Westminster laws they could only issue a declaration of incompatibility and invite Westminster to use an accelerated procedure to come into conformity. While this has become a toxic issue in English politics, with repeated efforts to replace it with a British bill of rights, it has been embraced in Scotland. In Northern Ireland, it has filled in during the failure to agree on a Northern Ireland charter of rights, free, as it is, of either British or Irish nationalising language. Brexit has had a profoundly destabilising effect on the union. Scottish and Irish nationalists demanded secession referendums to allow them to remain in the EU. In Northern Ireland, a majority of unionists had voted to leave the EU, while nationalists were almost unanimous in voting to remain (Keating 2021). Following the referendum, there was a move among nationalists towards Irish unity and against the existing power-­ sharing system (Keating 2021). In Scotland, both nationalists and unionists backed remain (Prosser and Fieldhouse 2017), but in the following years, there was shift towards independence among those who had voted against independence in 2014 but for remain in 2016 (Curtice 2019). There was a smaller shift in the other direction so that support for independence and being in the EU, and for the union and for Brexit, began to align clearly. Perhaps, the most striking finding is that a majority of English Leave voters would accept the secession of both Northern Ireland and Scotland if that were the price of achieving Brexit (Ashcroft 2019; (Future of England Survey 2019). This reflects a growing association between Englishness and Euroscepticism (Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021). While the UK government, slipping for a while from parliamentary to popular sovereignty, insisted that the ‘British people’ had voted for Brexit, Scottish and Northern Irish nationalists claimed a separate mandate, which would legitimate their leaving the UK union to remain within the European one. Brexit has also been the occasion for a reassertion of parliamentary sovereignty and supremacy in its internal dimension. With the endorsement of the Supreme Court, the UK government insisted that Brexit did not require legislative consent from the devolved bodies; the Court, for good measure, added that the Sewel Convention was only ‘political’ and therefore in no way binding. A series of Brexit-related laws was pushed through Westminster in spite of being denied legislative consent. A UK Internal Market Act replaces the EU Single Market with a new regime which lacks the safeguards of the European one. There are no principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, and the rules are set unilaterally by the centre. The same act gives UK ministers new powers to spend in devolved matters.

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The European structural funds, for which the devolved governments were managing agents, are being replaced by funds administered directly from London. The mace is back in business as Westminster has double down on parliamentary sovereignty and supremacy and the Supreme Court has backed it up.

Where Stands the Union Now? Events since the Millennium have amply confirmed Rose’s argument about the United Kingdom as an institutional maze held together by statecraft and territorial management and the concentration of authority (the mace). The territorial dimension in politics can no longer plausibly be denied. The main UK parties are torn between a strategy of winning back support by presence in the devolved territories and selective spending and one of ‘muscular unionism’ (wielding the mace). Centrifugal pressures are altogether more powerful than they were back in the 1970s, when the issue came back onto the agenda. Yet, a break-up of the United Kingdom into its constituent parts appears as difficult as its continued survival. There are, as yet, no majorities for secession in any of the constituent parts, although the support for, or at least indifference to, Scottish and Northern Ireland secession in England is striking in international comparison. Brexit has made the case for Irish unity and Scottish independence stronger and given nationalists fresh arguments. Yet, secession has become more difficult, as it would impose new hard borders with both Scotland and Ireland in the EU and the remaining United Kingdom outside. Strong interdependencies would remain across ‘these islands’, and the evidence shows that supporters of Scottish sovereignty are not supporters of sovereignty in the hard Brexiter sense but believe in interdependence (McCrone and Keating 2023). The maze has become ever denser, while the post-Brexit governments have fought ever harder to restore the mace. The dilemma identified so long ago by Rose has become ever more acute.

Notes 1. There had been discussions about this in an earlier literature (see Bryce 1901). As Rose (1970) notes, however, Walter Bagehot’s classic The English Constitution, published the same year as the Fenian rising, ignored the matter.

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2. My first direct encounter with Richard Rose came in 1976, when a paper based on the core of my doctoral thesis (Keating 1975) was rejected by a leading British journal, the referee having said, in effect, that it was palpable nonsense to suggest that Scotland was different. Richard, having read another paper, which had been published, asked if there was any more where that came from. With his characteristic interest in younger scholars and what they have to say, he published the rejected paper in the Studies in Public Policy (‘yellow paper’) series. Suddenly, I found myself on television and radio, and the paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal that Richard had recommended. 3. Colley’s leaving Ireland out of the account was another example of leaving out the bits that do not fit the argument. 4. Initially, the National Assembly for Wales had only secondary legislative powers over listed competences. The Welsh Parliament/Senedd now works on the reserved powers model.

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findings/a-­t ale-­o f-­t wo-­r eferendums-­t he-­2 017-­e lection-­i n-­s cotland/#. WeoCaDb9O7M. Rokkan, S., and D.  Urwin. 1983. Economy, Territory, Identity. Politics of West European Peripheries. London: Sage. Rose, R. 1965. Politics in England. London: Faber. ———. 1970. The United Kingdom as a Multinational State. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde. Occasional Paper No 6. ———. 1971. Governing Without Consensus. An Irish Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1977. ‘The United Kingdom as an Intellectual Puzzle’, Studies in Public Policy, no.7, Centre for the Study of Public Policy, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde. ———. 1978. ‘From Steady State to Fluid State: The Unity of the Kingdom Today’, Studies in Public Policy, no.26, Centre for the Study of Public Policy, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde. ———. 1982a. Understanding the United Kingdom. The Territorial Dimension in Government. London: Longman. ———. 1982b. Is the United Kingdom a State? Northern Ireland as a Test Case. In The Territorial Dimension in United Kingdom Politics, ed. P. Madgwick and R. Rose. London: Macmillan. ———. 1989. Politics in England. Change and Persistence. 5th ed. London: Macmillan. Steyn, Lord. 2005. House of Lords Judgments – Jackson and Others (Appellants) v Her Majesty’s Attorney General (respondent). UKHL 56. Todd, J. 2018. Identity Change After Conflict. Ethnicity, Boundaries and Belonging in the Two Irelands. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Trystan, D. 2019. Indycurious and Curiouser: New Poll Shows Support for Welsh Independence on the Rise. Nation Cymru. https://nation.cymru/opinion/ indycurious-­and-­curiouser-­new-­poll-­shows-­support-­for-­welsh-­independence-­ on-­the-­rise/. Ward, S. 2023. United Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART II

Parties and Elections

CHAPTER 4

Must Labour Lose? A Reconsideration Geoffrey Evans

The Conservative Party won the 1959 General Election with an increased number of seats and a majority of a hundred. This was Labour’s third electoral defeat in a row. The party also lost supposedly safe constituencies such as Keighley, Newcastle upon Tyne West and ‘the Hartlepools’, as the seat representing Hartlepool and West Hartlepool was then known. In this latter case, the result was echoed half-a-century later in the 2021 by-­ election where, following on from the 2019 general election defeat—the fourth in a row on this occasion—Labour were again on the ropes and a common response was to see Labour’s cause as lost. As in 1959, the commentariat were quick to catastrophise the outcome: ‘Without total change Labour will die’ voiced Tony Blair in The New Statesman, while The Daily Express opined that ‘We are witnessing the death throes of the Labour Party’. The focus on Labour’s derailed relationship with the working class likewise intensified: ‘Labour’s lost working class voters have gone for good’ observed The Guardian, while for The New Statesman: ‘The loss of Hartlepool is the final death rattle of a movement that has abandoned its heartlands’.

G. Evans (*) Nuffield College, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_4

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Clearly, the question of ‘Must Labour Lose?’ continues to generate headlines and quite often despair. And not only it must be said in the current era: Heath et al. (1994) and Margetts and Smyth (1994), for example, echoed the theme following the 1992 election. But it is the eponymous book by Richard Rose, in collaboration with Mark Abrams and Rita Hinden, that provides the academic starting point for much of this continuing fixation.

The Book Must Labour Lose? (hereinafter MLL) was a precursor of many later post-­ mortems on the party’s ostensibly dire predicament.1 Unlike some of these, however it was a serious piece of research. Limited, it must be said by the relative paucity of rigorous survey research in 1959–1960, but none the less one of the first significant works analysing the dilemma facing social democracy in late industrialism. The book itself is a modestly sized paperback, published in 1960 by Penguin, in which Mark Abrams, Richard Rose and Rita Hinden conducted a national survey intended to throw light on the implications the election might have for the Labour Party. For Richard Rose, this followed on from co-authoring The British General Election of 1959 with David Butler, whilst working on a DPhil. Mark Abrams was the president of the World Association for Public Opinion Research, while Rita Hinden edited the Socialist Commentary, the magazine that commissioned the research. In its preface: MLL stated that changes in ‘The voter’s mind, the “affluent society”, and class in politics’ were all to be assessed. This was undertaken with a questionnaire consisting of ‘twelve pages of foolscap’ which were used to interview 724 respondents drawn from 50 randomly selected constituencies, in January and February 1960. These provided a representative picture of the country in terms of standard demographics. Interestingly, respondents were 18 or over, rather than the voting age of 21, reflecting the authors’ interest in future voters. The three authors then appeared to write three more or less separate sections: Abrams reported the survey findings. Rose elaborated a theory of party competition and the complexities underlying voters’ preferences, identifying several types of Conservative and Labour voters, but without much direct reference to the survey apart from some quotations from open-ended responses, a table on class (p. 76) and what Labour voters wanted from a good party (p. 80). Much of this insightful discussion focused on themes of party image and

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deference, amongst others. Though it was accompanied by the observation that class divisions in voting were muted because ‘all parties court both the working and the middle classes’ (p. 80), a theme developed more fully much later by various authors (including this one). In the final section, Hinden summarised the answer to the question of whether Labour must lose: ‘on a first reading of the survey, the answer must appear to be “Yes, it must—at least in the near future”…. Its class appeal is being undermined … manual workers are gradually moving over into the white-­ collar category, which does not identify itself with unskilled or semi-skilled labourers; and many, particularly amongst the young, are now crossing the class frontiers in the middle class’ (p.  119). This combination of ‘new opportunities for individual advancement’ and the experience of public ownership which ‘has been insufficiently successful or inspiring to arouse a desire for more’2 served to undermine key aspects of Labour’s appeal. Overall, the book echoes and deepens some of the themes in Richard Rose’s contemporaneous book with David Butler on the 1959 election, which argued that the election result and the reports from the constituencies which accompanied it ‘make it plain that the swing to the Conservatives cannot be dismissed as an ephemeral veering of the electoral breeze. Long term factors were also involved. Traditional working class attitudes had been eroded by the steady growth of prosperity …’. As a result, many manual workers were at least ‘on the threshold of the middle class’ (Butler and Rose 1960, 2, 15). It was also in tune with other Labour thinking at the time: in believing that people ‘objectively classified as working class in terms of occupation or family background have acquired a middle class income and pattern of consumption, and sometimes a middle class psychology’ (Crosland 1960, 4). The themes of prosperity, mobility and identity are central to the book’s message, with the impact of affluence famously picked out by various critics of the ‘embourgeoisement thesis’. The political attitudes volume (Goldthorpe et al. 1968) in Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechhofer and Platt’s trilogy on the affluent worker was a direct response to the thesis in MLL. As it was, affluence per se did not feature that strongly in the empirical evidence presented in MLL. The impact of home ownership for example was not really developed to any marked extent: pages 43–45  in the chapter on prosperity contained three tables on aspects of prosperity which, although indicating that home owners were more likely to be Conservatives, did not point to any particular conclusion. Indeed, the authors conclude the chapter by raising, but not answering, the obvious

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question: ‘Does buying one’s house turn one into a Conservative, or are Conservatives the sort of people who want to own the house they live in?’ (p. 46). The impact of home ownership was returned to with greater emphasis in Rose and McAllister’s (1986) Voters Begin to Choose, which was very much a development of themes seen in MLL but with more and better data and analysis. As well as establishing that three-quarters of voters ‘are no longer anchored by a stable party loyalty determined by family and class’ (p.  1), Rose and McAllister found a relatively strong association between council-house renting and Labour voting and between owner-­ occupation and Conservative voting. Again, however, the thorny problem of direction of influence was not resolved. Heath et al. (1989) addressed this issue using a longitudinal panel and found that the evidence did not support the argument that council house purchase leads to vote switching. The political implications of class identity feature more fully in MLL. Much of this rested on the empirical link observed between class identity and vote and the evidence that some occupationally working-class respondents reported a middle-class identity. However, the lack of established overtime evidence on the empirical relationship between class and political preferences meant these patterns of association between class and political attitudes were contrasted with, in effect, an idealised class-divided notion of politics that may never have existed. Many years later, David Weakliem delved into long-neglected Roper Center Gallop surveys and found that class voting increased in the post-war era compared with before the war and then subsided in the 1950s, but not to the pre-war level (Weakliem and Heath 1999). Researchers examining class identification from Centers (1949) onwards have also shown that the number of options and wording of options shape response distributions and therefore associations with occupational class: the use of the term ‘the labouring working class’ in the response options to the class identity question in MLL may have been particularly unfortunate in this respect, given its focus on a particularly physical form of occupational activity that may not have connected closely with the lived experience of, for example, working-class women. Ultimately, as Butler and Stokes would remark a few years later: ‘If the conservative gains of the 1950s were really the result of prosperous workers coming to think of themselves as middle class, these gains should surely not have been abruptly swept away’ (Butler and Stokes 1969, 102). Moreover, and intriguingly, despite continued improvements in living standards in the

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latter part of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, levels of working-class identification Britain have remained largely unchanged in 60 years: in both the BES and BSA series, 60 per cent of people identify as working class, not middle class (or any other), when prompted. The emphasis on class identification as a lever of disillusion was probably not well-founded.3

Ahead of the Curve or on the Wrong Road? None the less, there is no doubt that Richard Rose was at the forefront of research into Labour’s ‘working class problem’. In other work in the 1960s, he concludes that the disjunction between ‘the recruitment of political leaders, of working-class electors and material and symbolic policies’ was even then longstanding: with ‘no consistent association between class and party on these three dimension …. nor is there trend toward or from convergence’ (Rose 1968). MLL itself long preceded the flurry of debate about the electoral dilemma of socialism associated with Przeworski and Sprague’s (1986) Paper Stones. MLL written in the era of the ‘big working class’, post-war Britain had seen the adoption of the welfare state and a form of corporatism by both Conservative and Labour governments. Working-class interests were at last being represented politically, as the ‘forward march of labour’ engaged in Williams’ (1961) ‘long revolution’. Indeed, only a few years before MLL, a thorough empirical study of the middle class referred to it as ‘the class without a party’ (Bonham 1954, 30). The question still focusing social scientific minds in this period was why Labour were not dominating electoral politics, given the preponderance of the working-class electorate. Without working-class defectors, there could be no competitive democracy. Thus, Mckenzie and Silver (1968) wrote of the ‘Angels in Marble’ who prevented a Labour whitewash at every election, which for Nordlinger (1967) was a result of status-­ based deference. The puzzle for these authors was how the Conservatives could continue to win elections in a democracy dominated numerically by the working class. MLL broke away from that concern by focusing attention on the links between social and political change and, in particular, on how upward social mobility might weaken the grip of class position on politics. MLL differed from later work that was primarily concerned with the political impact of the result of this mobility, that is, the changing sizes of the classes, which has been the primary interest of authors such as

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Przeworski and Sprague (1986), Heath et al. (1991) and Evans and Tilley (2017). Ultimately, however, these analyses of the political impact of a change from a large working class to a small working class point to similar conclusions to those in MLL and Rose and McAllister’s Voters Begin to Choose. Published in 1986, the latter linked the signs of the demise of the duopoly of Conservative and Labour parties to the decline in the ‘closed-­ class’ model of voting. The popularity of the short-lived Alliance Party at that time indicated the possibility of appealing across class lines, but the authors also suggested, somewhat more presciently, that the Labour Party would also need to do so to win the support of decreasingly class-­ tied voters. The same conclusion emerged from the analyses of the growth of the new middle classes during this era. Thus, Evans and Tilley (2017) provide copious evidence that the working class have continued to endure economic disadvantage and insecurity throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Despite substantial upward mobility, class differences in political preferences did not dissipate nor were the upwardly mobile immune to the influences of their social origins, whether expressed via identity or political preference. Yet, the reduced size of the post-industrial working class meant that Labour needed to break out of its close association with the working class and attract middle-class votes. Although the strength of the link between class and vote was to be a focus of extended dispute, the political impact for Labour of changes in the sizes of classes was effectively the same as that implied by the declining association between class and vote, which formed the core of the argument in MLL and Voters Begin to Choose. The two sides came to similar conclusions regarding Labour’s electoral dilemma, and how it might be addressed.

How Have Things Worked Out? A detailed narrative is not possible given space constraints, but we can briefly summarise Labour’s electoral fate up until the present day. The fluctuations in Labour’s electoral performance over the decades before and since the publication of MLL and Voters Begin to Choose are shown in Fig. 4.1. These simple vote percentages over time clearly refute the notion that Labour were/are in any sense doomed. Labour and the Conservative support levels have inter-twined rather closely since 1945. The 2019 election was a possible dip, but we know since then that Labour have swept into a (currently) 15-point lead. In

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Fig. 4.1  Share of the vote by party in UK general elections, 1918–2019. Source: Lukas Audickas, Richard Cracknell, and Philip Loft. 2020. UK Election Statistics: 1918–2019: A Century of Elections. London: House of Commons Library. Briefing paper, Number CBP7529, p.  6. Note: Liberal vote share includes votes for Liberal/SDP alliance (1983–1987) and Liberal Democrats from 1992. Figures for 1918 include all Ireland

contrast, the Liberals/Liberal Democrats have seen far greater levels of aggregate volatility. Certainly, there is no evidence here of Pasokification— the decimation of a once powerful social democratic party—referring to the fate of Greece’s Pasok, which fell from 43.9 per cent of the vote in 2009 to 4.7 per cent in 2015.4 Labour has generally tended to fare somewhat better than the majority of the European social democratic parties. Though trends in social democratic support in Western Europe do not show the monotonic decline that some scholars have inferred.5 The reasons for this close link in levels of support between the two main parties presumably lie in their ability to react, with some lag, to structural changes and each other’s strategies. Thus following the problems in the 1980s that set the context for Voters Begin to Choose, the 1990s and early 2000s saw Labour’s ‘dilemma of electoral socialism’, the seeming trade-off between appealing to a loyal but declining group of blue-­ collar workers or risk alienating them through appeals to the ascendant

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middle class, resolved in favour of the latter. Policies that had hitherto repelled educated middle-class voters—such as income tax rises, the nationalisation of industry and withdrawal from the European Union— were largely abandoned, explicit appeals to trade unions, socialism and class interests were downplayed, and university-educated professionals became dominant in the party’s parliamentary cohort (Evans and Tilley 2017; O’Grady 2019). The long-term trendless fluctuation noted by Richard Rose in his earlier analysis of working-class representation by Labour (Rose 1968) was superseded by a transformation into a party matching the experience and values of the rising new middle class of degree educated, professionals typically in the public sector. Brexit did, of course, disrupt this pattern of party evolution though mainly to accentuate it, as Labour adopted a remainer position at odds with what was left of its working-class base and further realigned its support along educational and generational lines (Fieldhouse et  al. 2020; Sobolewska and Ford 2020). None the less, in the snap election of 2017, the Conservatives expected to be returned with a landslide, but via a remarkable transformation in the election campaign itself (Mellon et al. 2018), Labour received its biggest increase in the share of the vote since 1945, returning 262 MPs. The 2019 Conservative election victory was achieved in part because the Conservatives appealed successfully to the radical right, pro-Brexit and, to some degree, working-class voters who had defected first to UKIP then to the Brexit Party but were won back by Boris Johnson. Brexit-related and cultural aspects of politics had far greater sway on Labour’s loss in 2019 than in 1959, as did the personalisation of politics: Corbyn had become a liability not an asset, Boris became an asset, and only much later a liability (Evans et al. 2021). The 2019 General Election was Labour’s worst performance in terms of seats since 1935. At the same time, Labour’s 32.2 per cent of the vote was higher than in any election (apart from 2017) since Blair’s last victory in 2005. If the increased turnout in 2019 compared to 2005 is taken into account, 2019 and 2005 displayed almost identical levels of support for Labour, but with disastrously fewer seats in the latter election. This appears to be at least in part a result of the Conservatives winning seats that had previously been comfortably Labour, though not by massive majorities and the disappearance of much Liberal Democrat support when compared with 2005. Labour votes in contrast were now over-concentrated in densely-populated, urban constituencies (Jennings and Stoker 2017; Thompson et al. 2021).

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A New Dilemma of Electoral Socialism? The Conservative government’s ineptitude, divisions and bad luck of being the incumbent during at least partly exogenous negative circumstances (Covid-19, Ukraine, the fuel crisis, inflation) leave Labour with the difficult task of not winning the next election. Valence politics and the politics of blame, whether problems are the fault of the government or not, probably trump all for now. Looking ahead, however, there remains a potential new electoral dilemma for Labour: keeping the newish rainbow coalition of the working class, ethnic minorities and higher educated liberals from splintering.6 ‘Two-dimensional politics’ gives Labour both opportunities and costs that were not apparent in 1960. Contemporary discussions of Labour’s electoral fortunes, like those surrounding many other European social democratic parties, have claimed that the party struggles to hold together its twenty-first-century coalition of the old industrial working class and low-skilled service sector workers and the increasingly large cohort of university graduates (Gingrich 2017). However, it is plausible to think of Labour’s core support as having changed over the past four decades from a strong base in a reasonably large working class to being a fairly even three-way coalition between the white working class, white graduates and ethnic minorities of whatever class. Though this coalition provides a potentially large (and growing) source of Labour support, it also poses difficulties for the party, given underlying divisions between these groups in terms of values and the perceived compatibility of their interests. In this respect, autopsies of the 2019 campaign revealed disproportionate losses among manual workers and those with low incomes (Fieldhouse et  al. 2023; Goodwin and Heath 2020), the very groups the party was founded to represent (Thorpe 2015, 8–35). For some commentators, Labour had simply alienated their working-class base once too often in recent decades, with equivocation over ‘Brexit’ being something of a final straw (Bickerton 2019; Goodwin and Heath 2020). But the narrative of yet another working-class exodus from Labour oversimplified matters. Amongst UK parliamentary constituencies in the top quintile of deprivation, Labour did indeed lose traditional, underprivileged strongholds like Stoke-on-Trent North and Bishop Auckland; however, it held others such as Bradford West and Bethnal Green with increased majorities. The key difference between these four working-class constituencies is that the first two are over 90 per cent white, the latter are over 50 per cent black and

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Asian (Barton 2020). More generally, analysis of the British Election Study Internet Panel reveals that among lower technical, routine and semi-­ routine employees—in effect, the working class—Labour support was around 59 per cent amongst ethnic minorities, but only 29 per cent amongst whites (Grant and Evans 2023). Labour failed to connect with the white working class specifically. How might this intra-class division have been generated? During the 1980s, roughly two-fifths of the adult British population could be classified as members of the white working class, a group three times larger than the white graduate population during this era. Since then, the white working class have roughly halved in size, and the number of white graduates has doubled. These two groups are now of roughly similar size, accounting for around one-fifth of the adult population each. The growth of the non-white group has been even more dramatic. Fewer than 1 in 20 adults was of an ethnic minority population background during the 1980s; by the end of the 2010s, about 1 in 7 was. Consequently, the nature of the electorate that today’s parties must appeal to is very different to that facing their twentieth-century predecessors. At the 1987 general election, Labour canvassed a potential electorate that was around 38 per cent white working class, 11 per cent white graduate and just 3 per cent non-white. In contrast, the potential electorate at the time of the 2019 general election was much more evenly balanced, being 20 per cent white working class, 22 per cent white graduate and 14 per cent ethnic minority. While it may have been theoretically possible to win a general election (in a plurality electoral system) with white working-class support alone in the 1980s, this is clearly no longer the case. This shifting balance of power within the electorate has coincided with wholescale revisions of the Labour Party strategy during this era. This can be seen in substantive policy terms—for instance, the safeguards provided by the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act. The party also greatly expanded their stock of non-white MPs. In 2019, a record 41 ethnic minority Labour MPs were elected, meaning that 20 per cent of Labour’s current parliamentary cohort are of black and Asian descent (as opposed to 0 per cent prior to 1987). In 2007, a position was established on Labour’s governing national executive committee explicitly for the representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BME) supporters. Executive committee representation was granted to an affiliated society (‘Labour BAME’) for all non-white members, and the party made increasingly explicit appeals to the challenges facing non-white Britons, including vocal

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support for the Black Lives Matter campaign (Gregory 2020; Labour Party 2021). The difficulty with these pro-minority moves by Labour is that shifts in the priorities of social democratic parties from addressing class-based economic issues, to mobilising a range of sociocultural grievances associated with historically marginalised, social groups, most notably ethnic minorities, have the potential to erode attachment to the centre-left among ‘traditional’ supporters, who view efforts to represent such groups as, at best, competition for attention and, at worst, actually harmful to their own interests (e.g. Berman and Snegovaya 2019). Thus perceptions of Labour as ‘a party for the working class’ were widespread in the mid-twentieth century (Butler and Stokes 1969). However, they declined substantially during the 1990s and 2000s (Evans and Tilley 2017, 43; 130–35). Even by 2010, only 63 per cent of white British people believed that Labour looked after working-class interests ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ well, whereas 80 per cent thought this was the case with respect to the party’s representation of black and Asian people (Heath et al. 2013, 93–94). It has therefore been argued that Labour’s focus on ethnic minority interests (and other ‘new’ social movements) has harmed its standing among white working-class voters (Ford and Goodwin 2017; O’Neill 2021). Working-class perceptions of lack of representation may also have been influenced by the fact that minority representation in parliament accelerated at the same time as the number of white working-class MPs declined precipitously (Campbell and Heath 2021, 1710–11). Overtime, therefore, we have seen a re-balancing of Labour’s support base that even outstrips the demographic changes described above. In 1987, over half of Labour’s votes came from the white working class, despite this group making up less than two-fifths of the overall electorate. Graduates and non-whites—despite the latter being heavily pro-Labour— collectively contributed just 17 per cent of the party’s votes due to their small numbers. In 2019, after three decades of post-industrialisation, educational expansion, rising diversity and shifting Labour Party strategy, this had changed substantially. While these three groups collectively contributed over two-thirds of the party’s support, just as in 1987, the relative contribution of each had shifted dramatically. Due to dwindling numbers, rising abstention and increased support for rival parties, only 18 per cent of Labour supporters were from the white working class. In contrast, the enlarged white graduate and minority voter blocs were now overrepresented, making up 26 per cent and 13 per cent of the electorate, but 38

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per cent and 20 per cent of Labour voters. Labour had moved from dependency on a single constituency to reliance on a very diverse, ‘tripolar’ coalition where the traditional working class were a small minority. Having previously alienated sections of its working-class electorate by appearing too closely linked with middle-class aspirations and interests, might Labour now be in danger of losing the remainder over its appeals to identity politics? Of course, the diversification of the party’s appeals and embrace of non-class-based identity movements may well have increased the party’s standing among the growing ethnic minority and socially liberal graduate populations (Sobolewska and Ford 2020). However, the first-past-the-post electoral system undermines the effectiveness of increasing support only within these groups, given their relative concentration in the minority of densely-populated, urban constituencies where Labour already over-performs (Jennings and Stoker 2017; Thompson et al. 2021). As we saw in Fig. 4.1, the extent of the Conservative majority in 2019 was probably more a result of their superior vote-seat ratio than the percentage of the electorate who voted for them instead of Labour.

Conclusion The best predictor of Labour’s electoral success is an analysis of the party’s impending doom: 1959 was followed by 1964 and, more significantly, 1966; 1992 was followed by 1997; and 2019 by a likely Labour victory in 2024. The reasons are diverse: after being excluded from power for long enough, Labour learn new tricks, or having been in power for a long, long time, the Conservatives accrue a litany of errors and make a mess of things. And of course, there are ‘events’, or what might now be termed ‘electoral shocks’, which disrupt party attachments and alignments. Britain is arguably also different from PR systems where social democratic parties are constrained to be less procrustean and are thus more open to being outmanoeuvred by parties mobilising new sources of support. In this respect, Labour might be fortunate in not being tied to a declining demographic group. The party survives and even prospers by changing its appeals and its raison d’etre. Thus it evolves. The ‘third way’ solution to the electoral dilemma of the left achieved by Labour in the 1990s and 2000s has in turn given way to fiscal crisis and Brexit-related turbulence culminating in four more electoral defeats and the apparent nadir of 2019. The negative over-reaction to Corbyn’s era— despite the opprobrium heaped upon him, he pulled more votes into

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Labour between 2015 and 2017 than Blair did between 1994 and 1997; even in his defeat in 2019, Labour actually received more votes than they did in 2005 when Blair last won—has in turn given way to an expectation of victory, even if one inherited rather than achieved. Going forward, Labour’s white working-class problem has the potential to be a ‘new’ dilemma of electoral socialism. Having previously alienated sections of its working-class electorate by appearing too closely linked with middle-class aspirations and interests (Evans and Tilley 2017), Labour might now be losing some of the remainder (partly) because of appeals to liberal graduates and ethnic minorities that make up its tripolar coalition of support. In this constantly evolving electoral calculus, the insights of MLL and Richard Rose’s other works are probably mainly that Labour needs to constantly evolve to shift with social change and not remain fixed in its group adherences. In sum, Must Labour Lose? was innovative, influential and agenda setting. It led to Voter’s’ Begin to Choose where the same themes were subject to more extensive empirical analysis. Like all science, and social science, it would eventually fail to explain some outcomes that could not have been predicted when it was written. And like other analyses of Labour’s demise since, it was followed by Labour electoral victories. Whether this reflected the lessons learned from MLL and its prodigy is hard to know. But what can be discerned is that MLL has a sound place in the analysis of British political history and helped generate a powerful tradition of British electoral analysis.

Notes 1. Though it was not alone at the time in seeing Labour as in electoral peril: see, for example, Crosland (1960). 2. Despite this, Labour voters approved of public ownership by an average of two to one and even Conservatives and Liberals were evenly split, which given the sheer amount of public ownership and its dramatic growth in the period leading up to this time is quite impressive by today’s standards. 3. This may have in part been due to Hinden’s wrapping up of the book, which drew bold, short-term inferences that were perhaps not fully justified by the findings of the study. They were matters that concerned her in her role as editor of the Socialist Commentary, which despite its title was very much associated with the right wing of the Labour Party. 4. It was not unique in this trajectory as French and Dutch social democratic parties followed similar, though not quite as extreme, trajectories.

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5. Recent elections in Norway and Germany saw social democrats moving left on the economy (the German SPD’s most leftist position for many years), and both parties returned to power. In late 2021, the SPD recorded their best result since 2005, and emerged as the largest party for the first time since 2002. In Denmark, the social democratic party maintained substantial support by taking a tougher line on immigration (Stubager et  al. 2021). There is the likelihood that Sweden’s social democrats will do the same as these parties react to the migration and populism that have threatened social democratic support since the start of the millennium. 6. Though a similar dilemma faces a Conservative Party trying to appeal to both classic ‘radical right’ (red wall) and traditional centre-right (blue wall) voters.

References Abrams, M. and Rose, R. with Hinden, R. 1960. Must Labour Lose? Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barton, C. 2020. GE2019: How Did Demographics Affect the Result? House of Commons Library. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/ ge2019-­how-­did-­demographics-­affect-­the-­result. Berman, Sheri, and Maria Snegovaya. 2019. Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy. Journal of Democracy 30 (3): 5–19. Bickerton, Chris. 2019. Labour’s Lost Working-Class Voters Have Gone for Good. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ dec/19/labour-­working-­class-­voters-­brexit. Bonham, John. 1954. The Middle Class Vote. London: Faber. Butler, D., and R.  Rose. 1960. The British General Election of 1959. London: Macmillan. Butler, D., and D.E.  Stokes. 1969. Political Change in Britain. London: Macmillan. Campbell, R. and O.  Heath. 2021. Fueling the Populist Divide: Nativist and Cosmopolitan Preferences for Representation at the Elite and Mass Level. Political Behavior 43: 1707–1729. Centers, Richard. 1949. The Psychology of Social Classes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crosland, A. 1960. Can Labour Win? Fabian Tract 324. Evans, G., R. Geus, and J. Green. 2021. Boris Johnson to the Rescue? How the Conservatives won the Radical Right Vote in the 2019 General Election. Political Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211051191. Evans, G., ed. 1999. The End of Class Politics? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, G., and J.  Tilley. 2017. The New Politics of Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Fieldhouse, E., et  al. 2020. Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2023. Volatility, Realignment and Electoral Shocks: Brexit and the UK General Election of 2019. PS: Political Science, forthcoming. Ford, R., and M. Goodwin. 2017. Britain after Brexit: A Nation Divided. Journal of Democracy 28 (1): 17–30. Gingrich, J. 2017. A New Progressive Coalition? The European Left in a Time of Change. Political Quarterly 88 (1): 39–51. Goldthorpe, J.H., et  al. 1968. The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, M.J., and O. Heath. 2020. Low-Income Voters, the 2019 General Election and the Future of British Politics. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Grant, Z., and G. Evans. 2023. A New Dilemma of Social Democracy? The British Labour Party, the White Working Class and Ethnic Minority Representation. British Journal of Political Science, FirstView. Gregory, A. 2020. Black Lives Matter: Keir Starmer Takes the Knee in Solidarity with ‘All Those Opposing Anti-Black Racism’. The Independent. https://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/black-­lives-­matter-­keir-­starmer-­labour-­ take-­knee-­george-­floyd-­funeral-­a9557166.html. Heath, A., et  al. 1991. Understanding Political Change: The British Voter 1964–1987. Oxford: Pergamon. Heath, A.F., R. Jowell, and J. Curtice, eds. 1994. Labour's Last Chance? Aldershot: Dartmouth. Heath, A.F., R. Jowell, J. Curtice, and G. Evans. 1989. The Extension of Popular Capitalism. Glasgow: Strathclyde Papers on Government and Politics no. 60. Heath, A.F., et al. 2013. The Political Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jennings, W., and G.  Stoker. 2017. Tilting Towards the Cosmopolitan Axis? Political Change in England and the 2017 General Election. Political Quarterly 88 (3): 359–369. Labour Party. 2021. Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Communities and the Labour Movement. Labour.org.uk. https://labour.org.uk/members/take-­ part/bame-­communities. Margetts, H., and G. Smyth. 1994. Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government. London: Laurence and Wishart. McKenzie, R., and A. Silver. 1968. Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mellon, J., et  al. 2018. Brexit or Corbyn? Campaign and Inter-Election Vote Switching in the 2017 UK General Election. Parliamentary Affairs 71 (4): 719–737. Nordlinger, E.A. 1967. The Working-Class Tories: Authority, Deference and Stable Democracy. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

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O’Grady, T. 2019. Careerists Versus Coal-Miners: Welfare Reforms and the Substantive Representation of Social Groups in the British Labour Party. Comparative Political Studies 52 (3): 544–578. O’Neill, B. 2021. The Working-Class Revolt Against Labour. Spiked Online. https://www.spiked-­online.com/2021/05/07/the-­working-­class-­r evolt-­ against-­labour/. Przeworski, A., and J. Sprague. 1986. Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, R. 1968. Class and Party Divisions: Britain as a Test Case. Sociology 2 (2): 129–162. Rose, R., and I. McAllister. 1986. Voters Begin to Choose: From Closed Class to Open Elections in Britain. London: Sage. Sobolewska, M., and R.  Ford. 2020. Brexitland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stubager, Rune, Kasper M. Hansen, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, and Richard Nadeau. 2021. The Danish Voter: Democratic Ideals and Challenges. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Thompson, Paul, et  al. 2021. Class Composition, Labour’s Strategy and the Politics of Work. Political Quarterly 93 (1): 142–149. Thorpe, A. 2015. A History of the British Labour Party. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weakliem, D., and A.F.  Heath. 1999. The Secret Life of Class Voting: Britain, France, and the United States since the 1930s. In The End of Class Politics? Class Voting in Comparative Context, ed. G.  Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. 1961. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

CHAPTER 5

Studying the Interplay of Party Support and Turnout Mark Franklin

The foundational study of voting behaviour by Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes (The American Voter [1960]) treated turnout as an integral aspect of the voting act. Those authors considered the origins and effects of turnout fluctuations using the same concepts as guided their study of party choice and partisanship. But in the 14 years that separated that study from Rose’s (edited, 1974) seminal handbook, Electoral Behavior, there was little attention to the connection between turnout and party choice. In those years, most scholarly attention given to voting studies focused on choice rather than on turnout, and Rose’s volume did not break with this focus; although I should not omit to mention that six years later, Rose published an edited volume on Political Participation (1980).

Online appendices for this chapter are at https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/ facpub/386

M. Franklin (*) Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_5

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Indeed, in the almost half-century that has elapsed since these two publications, there continued to be almost no attempts to integrate the study of party choice with the study of turnout, and none that has had long-term impact on how research on political behaviour is conducted today, still following in the footsteps of Rose’s volumes. I was a member of Rose’s department at the University of Strathclyde during the years when Rose was pulling together the Electoral Behaviour handbook, and I well remember the excitement occasioned by visits from famous authors of that book’s chapters and the intellectual opportunities provided by those visits. I do not recall voter turnout ever being a subject for discussion. In the years since then, I remember occasional casual conversations with other scholars in which the lack of theoretical development on the link between turnout and party choice was mentioned, often with a degree of wonder or frustration. Of course, this is not to say that attempts to address this important question in mainstream political science publications have not been shot down by increasingly picky reviewers (perhaps Ming Li 2010; Myatt 2015). Yet, one of the most sterling qualities of Richard Rose as a scholar was his complete disregard for such hurdles when addressing new topics with contributions that almost invariably became staples of the academic literature. So, it occurred to me that it would be wholly appropriate to take this opportunity to follow his example in this regard. The approach I will take is time-serial. It has been mentioned repeatedly that turnout stands at an equilibrium maintained by a balance of forces—an equilibrium that is itself in constant motion as turnout rises or (more generally) falls (e.g. Franklin 2004; Ming Li 2010). So turnout has often been seen (or suggestions have been made that turnout should be seen—Norris 2004, 261) through a lens that compares the level of turnout at any given point in time with turnout at an earlier or later time-­ point, an approach that is much less common with party support. Indeed, the paucity of studies regarding possible equilibrium levels of party support (but see Weber and Franklin 2018) may well be one reason for past failures to link party support and turnout within a single theoretical framework. In a chapter I co-authored with Georg Lutz on partisanship in the process of party choice (Franklin and Lutz 2020), we used time-series analysis to investigate the way in which variations in policy congruence between voters and parties govern fluctuations in party support around a central

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tendency established by partisanship (cf. Fiorina 1981; Rose and McAllister 1990). In this festschrift chapter, I revisit and build on the Franklin–Lutz findings to theorize a connection between party choice and turnout such that voter–party policy congruence contributes to the maintenance of an equilibrium rate not just for party support but for turnout as well.

The Model The balance of forces that maintains an equilibrium rate of party support involves a feedback loop that ‘corrects’ political parties’ policy positions when those positions drift away from supporter preferences (Franklin and Lutz 2020). These forces are  here illustrated in the schema shown in Fig. 5.1. The story told there starts with a successful party drifting away from supporter preferences (arrow 1), often due to party activists’ successful efforts to ‘purify’ the party’s message, resulting in declining congruence between that party’s policies and the preferences of more moderate supporters. In response, voter support for that party is reduced (arrow 2). All of this happens during the approach to an election whose outcome becomes known at the time-point labelled t1 (bottom left). Party leaders use this signal to warn their activists of dire electoral consequences if more moderate policy positions are not adopted. But modifying party policy in this way can take time, leading to those policies being adjusted only after some delay, at time-point t3 (top centre). Often such adjustment only happens

Fig. 5.1  Schema for a feedback loop ‘correcting’ voter–party congruence and turnout

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following a second bad election outcome, somewhere along arrow 3, at a time-point not shown on the schema. However, when it comes, that adjustment often restores voter–party congruence (arrow 4) in the eyes of erstwhile supporters and, at the next election (still at time-point t3, bottom centre) those supporters reward the party for what they see as its improved policy stances, restoring party support (arrow 5). But this favourable adjustment makes it harder for party leaders to make the argument that had previously brought discipline to their activist base (arrow 6), restoring the situation ex-ante, before the policy evolution suggested top right.1 Turnout implications (boldfaced in parentheses at the foot of the schema) will be detailed in due course. There is no theoretical or empirical requirement for arrow 6 to be traversed immediately following arrow 5. The position reached at the end of arrow 5 is an equilibrium position (reason for a ‘+’ sign after the t3 indicator at the end of arrow 5, bottom right). Successful party leadership might be able to delay the (arrow 6) development for a considerable time, perhaps indefinitely. The process shown in Fig. 5.1 has statistical features that make its causal nature readily identifiable. In the first place, it involves the passage of time. There is a palpable delay before parties respond to the signal of voter disquiet, meaning that we do not rely on the weak standard of ‘constant conjunction’ (that actions occurring together may be causally connected) but the higher ‘Granger causality’ standard (that causes must precede their consequences). In the second place, existing empirical findings reinforce the idea (Deutsch 1963) that attention to consequences, when making government policy, results in negative feedback as policymakers ‘correct’ their policies in light of public responses (e.g. Wlezien 1995; Jennings and John 2009;  Jennings 2013; for a survey, see Wlezien 2018). Negative feedback distinguishes the responses of policymakers from voter signals, since the coefficients concerned have different signs, with policymakers reacting negatively (reducing the level of policy provision) if voters judge the policy level to be too high. Franklin and Lutz (2020) followed Dalton et al. (2011), and others, in using party left-right locations as summary measures of policy positions. We studied whether parties ‘corrected’ those positions by moving closer to supporter left-right positions in response to falling electoral support. That is also what I do in this chapter, relying on respondent judgements when coding party positions and using votes cast as the measure of party support most relevant to party leaders and activists (an online appendix

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addresses methodological concerns and  provides robustness checks at https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/facpub/386). The present chapter also builds on a more recent suggestion (Franklin 2022) that a related feedback loop connects party support with voter turnout. The intuition is that, when supporters ‘punish’ their party by withdrawing electoral support, those erstwhile supporters do not necessarily switch their vote to a different party. Many will fail to vote at all. So, when parties’ policy stances drift away from supporters’ preferences, this does not just cost those parties votes but also reduces the overall turnout rate (at t1, bottom left of Fig. 5.1).2 This link is not a logical necessity; but its presence appears to produce the findings reported here. Democratic elections are very public events and public enthusiasm can be contagious, presumably working to synchronize voter turnout across a party system taken as a whole. The chapter just referenced (Franklin 2022) took an indirect approach to evaluating the equilibrium it suggested, exploring individual-level processes by which equilibrium turnout rates might be restored after any loss. Building on findings by Plutzer (2002), it suggested a route involving the acquisition of voter–party policy congruence as a by-product of partisanship. Partisanship is often omitted from individual-level turnout models because it ‘explains away’ effects on turnout for which it serves as an intervening variable; and the appearance of voter–party congruence in such a model is even more unusual. In this chapter, I build on my (2022) individual-­level findings to investigate an equilibrium turnout model at the party level—one that includes both partisanship and congruence in a time-series cross-section analysis described in a later section of this chapter. There I detail an equilibrating mechanism involving changes in the composition of a country’s electorate that would happen between t1 and t3, bottom-left  to top-centre of Fig.  5.1. This involves what Plutzer (2002) characterized as  a ‘developmental process’ during which all citizens newly adult at t1 will have evolved from impressionable young adults into habitual voters (or non-voters) by t3. This two-election period is a period of learning for newly adult voters—learning shaped by electoral experiences. If those ‘formative’ elections were hard-fought, more young adults will have become strong partisans than if the campaigns were lacklustre. In that way, the position occupied by individual young voters in the party-support feedback loop described earlier will have come to define the level of partisanship manifested by those voters in terms of party support. Resulting fluctuations in partisanship/party support then govern turnout

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fluctuations (cf. Heath 2007), establishing the nature of the turnout ‘footprint’ left by formative elections in the age structure of an electorate (cf. Franklin 2004: 43).

Data and Methods The study conducted in this chapter is made possible by the Integrated Module Dataset (IMD) of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES 2018). The integration referred to in the module’s title involved, among other things, providing standard party codes across the four five-­ year periods during which individual modules of CSES questions were fielded, between 1996 and 2016.3 Those standard codes permit aggregation of individual-level survey data to a level at which the unit to be analysed becomes the same from election to election. In this way, I was able to create a party-level time-series cross-section (TSCS) dataset for between three and five elections and up to nine parties in each of 28 countries.4 This party-level dataset was supplemented by a similar dataset at the birthyear cohort level, aggregated from the same survey data. The party-level data is used to study evolving left-right party policy positions over time; the birthyear cohort data is used to study the evolving left-right policy preferences of party supporters. Aggregation is a straightforward means for  obtaining time-series cross-section data from individual-level survey data; and these two aggregations (to the party and birthyear cohort levels) also make sense substantively—the party level because parties are the units for which votes are cast and also the sources of party policy; the birthyear level because my theorizing regarding party support focuses not on the behaviour of individual voters but on the behaviour of cohorts of voters who enter their electorates together at the time of specific elections.5 Earlier I suggested that equilibrium turnout levels can shift over time due to evolving party competition (cf. Franklin 2004). An appropriate statistical approach to representing the resulting dynamics involves ‘error correction’ models (ECMs). That approach has long been used by political scientists for modelling linkages between voter preferences and government policies (for a survey, see Wlezien 2018). The major difference here, echoing my work with Lutz (Franklin and Lutz 2020), is to view policies and preferences in left-right terms (cf. Harkvardien 2010; Dalton et al. 2011, 83–91). ECMs diagnose the character of a time-series of observations according to whether the series maintains an equilibrium that is repeatedly disturbed

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and, if so, what is the contribution of each input (independent variable) to (a) disturbing the equilibrium—a short-term effect—and (b) establishing the relative level (higher or lower than before) at which equilibrium is restored—a long-term effect. So an ECM estimates two coefficients for each input (independent variable). ECMs have the great advantage of being extremely flexible, making no assumptions about the nature of dynamic processes under study—provided the error correction parameter (ECP, described next) is negative and statistically significant (Kennedy 2008, 300). The ECP diagnoses the length of time needed for an equilibrium level of turnout to be restored, scaled as a proportion of the gap between time-points (in this case, the average number of years between elections). A negative ECP of −1.0 will indicate a time-series in which equilibrium is restored after exactly the average period between elections. An ECP closer to 0 than −1 will diagnose a time-series that takes more than one time-period to return to equilibrium; an ECP further from 0 (more highly negative than −1) will diagnose a series with a shorter average delay before equilibrium is restored. As with other autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) models, of which the ECM is a variant, the lag structure of the process can be discovered empirically by trying different lags and discarding any that prove not significant or otherwise implausible. In this research, I was not able to go very far in evaluating different possibilities because of the short series of time-points available in the IMD.  However, the third lag never proved statistically significant, suggesting later lags would not either. ECMs, used in this way, supposedly minimize problems that beset many other approaches to time-series modelling (problems of non-­ stationarity, unit roots and the like) because these possible ‘nuisance factors’ are explicitly estimated rather than being assumed absent (De Boef and Keele 2008). However, I have been unable to find any examples of ECMs employing data with as small a number of time-points as are available to me here. But neither have I found any cautions against using datasets such as the IMD that get their power in statistical analysis from the number of panels (in this research, countries) rather than from the number of time-points. Babones (2014, 163) stresses that the same statistical techniques can be used with datasets that get their power in either manner; and, in related work, Wlezien and Soroka (2012) studied a series of four time-points across 15 countries using a different but closely related type of distributed lag model.

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Because the corrections expected in this model, both for party support and for turnout, are due to individual-level processes (not to external disturbances), there is reason to expect short-term ECM contributions to be small or even absent (see online Appendix C). This expectation provides an incidental test for whether the processes observed empirically conform to theoretical expectations.

A Statistical Model of Turnout and Party Choice Operationalizing the story illustrated by Fig. 5.1, presented earlier, two equations govern the equilibrium level of party support. These define a balance of forces that push party support in opposite directions. Here, I propose that a third equation governs a corresponding equilibrium level of turnout (an equation that I will divide between two models for analysis purposes), having terms taken from the first two. These equations focus on differences found (in support and turnout) between one election and the next (Yt2 − Yt; Xt2 − Xt); in this research tradition, such measures are referred to as ‘differenced’ variables identified by using the Greek letter delta (‘∆’) as a prefix. First, voters give increased support to parties that move closer to them in policy terms (Eq. 5.1: party support):

Support t  Support t 1  Proximity t  Proximity t 1

(5.1)

Second, parties adjust their policy offerings in reaction to any loss of support (Eq. 5.2: feedback):6

Proximity t  Proximity t 1  Support t 1  Support t 2

(5.2)

Third, turnout (a multi-party view of party support) reflects the first two processes (Eq. 5.3: turnout):



Turnout t  Turnout t 1  Proximity t  Proximity t 1  Proximity t 1  Proximity t  2

(5.3)

The roles of the different terms in these equations will now be described in light of the empirical findings they produce.

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Table 5.1  Party and birthyear level (fixed effects) error correction models of party support and turnout Level of analysis:

Party-level analyses

Birthyear cohort analyses

Concept:

Model A Representation (party support)

Model B Model C Feedback (policy Competition adjustment) (concomitant of Model Aa

Model D Feedback (generational replacement)

Outcome:

Δ.Voted for party

Δ.Turnout

Δ.Turnout

Input: (1) Lagged outcome (ECP) (2) Δ. left-right proximity t (3) Left-right proximityt−1 (4) Δ. voted for partyt−1 (5) Voted for partyt−2 (6) Δ. left-right proximityt−1 (7) Left-right proximityt−2 Intercept R-squared Observations Number of party elections Number of country birthyears

Coeff. (s.e.) −1.07 (0.06)

Δ.Proximity to party Coeff. (s.e.) −1.55 (0.14)

Coeff. (s.e.) −1.34 (0.02)

Coeff. (s.e.) −1.34 (0.02)

0.23 (0.08)

−0.26 (0.04)

0.33 (0.12)

−0.40 (0.07) −0.19 (0.14) ns −0.49 (0.21) 0.03 (0.05) ns 0.27 (0.11)

−0.07 (0.07)ns 0.64 354 168

1.05 (0.09) 0.65 188 116

1.29 (0.05) 0.66 4,544

0.87 (0.11) 0.66 2,659

1,971

1,729

Notes: IMD data; Greek letter Δ labels each differenced variable: Xt − Xt−1. All coefficients significant at p < 0.01, one-tailed unless marked ns (not significant) Model C is viewed as a negative concomitant of Model A (see accompanying text)

a

In Table 5.1, the first two models (A and B) use data that aggregated to the party level the proportions of votes received by each party and similarly recasted proximity as a party attribute, averaging across supporters of each party their reported proximities to that party. Models C and D instead focus on proportions voting among birthyear cohorts, treating as a single

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unit all respondents born in the same year in a particular country—respondents who will have been exposed to the same electoral socializing experiences, as mentioned earlier. All four models display coefficients that estimate how past values of each input (independent variable) affect current outcomes (dependent variable values); but, importantly, the lag structure for these effects differs between models. In models A and C the focus is on effects coming from the previous election (at t−1) whereas, in models B and D, the focus is on effects coming from a yet earlier election (at t−2). In model A, the outcome (∆supportt) is change in party support between the current and previous elections. The first input is a lagged but not differenced version of the same outcome variable (supportt−1). Known as the ‘error correction parameter’ (ECP), its value reflects how long it takes for deviations from an equilibrium outcome to decay, as already explained. Models in Table 5.1 all have ECP values of greater magnitude than, but within about half-a-point of, −1. These findings suggest that equilibrium would be restored within the final two years of each four-year (average) inter-election period (or, in other words, that short-term deviations from equilibrium are ephemeral). The other inputs to each model come in pairs, differenced inputs being paired with lagged inputs. For each pair, the differenced input tells us the short-term effect of the variable in question—the disequilibrating effect that will dissipate over the period governed by the ECM—whereas the lagged input tells us the long-­ term effect. So, in model A, the short-term effect (0.23, in row 2) will have dissipated by the time the next election is due, leaving a somewhat larger effect of 0.33 (row 3) to carry over into the longer term.7 Of course, I do not suppose that survey respondents necessarily see this process in left-right terms, but the ways in which voters’ support for relevant parties react to changes in those parties’ left-right policy stances evidently involve (and apparently provide good stand-ins for) voters’ cognitive processes, whatever those may be (for an extended discussion, see Dalton et al. 2011, 91–102). The results tell us (unsurprisingly) that voters reward their parties (with additional votes) as proximity improves and punish them (by withdrawing electoral support) as proximity declines.8 Model B changes the outcome of interest from support to proximity, assessing to what extent parties respond to changes in voter support by adjusting their policy positions relative to supporter preferences. Here, we expect negative feedback (Deutsch 1963; Easton 1965; Franklin et  al. 2014), with parties responding to reduced support by trying to improve the fit of their policies to voter preferences and responding to increased

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support by permitting those policies to stray from voter preferences (cf. Harkvardien 2010). However, we do not expect this feedback to be immediate. It takes time for parties to alter their policy stances and yet more time for them to communicate those changes to voters. So in model B, we look for effects from party support at the election before last, with a short-­ term (differenced) measure from t−1 (row 4) and a long-term (lagged) measure from t−2 (row 5). The short-term effect is small and not statistically significant (suggesting the possibility of no disturbance from this source to the equilibrium level of party support), but the long-term effect (-0.49 in row 5) balances (to within margin of error) the disequilibriating effect (+0.33) in row 3 of model A. In models C and D, we shift our attention to turnout. Here, the outcome is the proportion casting a ballot among different cohorts of respondents, the groupings of respondents that should evince the consequences of different socializing influences. Again, the two models show effects with different signs at different lags, but for these two models, the outcome (dependent) variable is the same. And, importantly, we see the negative long-term effect (−0.40, row 3) in the first model of the pair being once again effectively corrected (to within margin-of-error) by a positive long-term effect (+0.27, row 7) in the second model. In the turnout models, as in the party support models, we see the re-­ equilibrating correction being a largely long-term phenomenon—in neither case  is  there any significant short-term component. This provides strong support for the expectation, mentioned earlier, regarding corrections due to internal party/voter processes rather than to external disturbances. It may be surprising that turnout is reduced just when parties receive highest support (in rows 2 and 3 of Table 5.1) but bear in mind that turnout seemingly responds to electoral competition (Franklin 2004; Johnston et al. 2007; Ming Li 2010). In light of those past findings, it should not come as a surprise that competition is lower when parties enjoy higher support and vice versa.  This topic receives more attention in online Appendix B. At the same time, there is no necessary delay inherent in decisions whether to vote or not.9 So the delay we see following the negative effect (in model C) before its reversal (in model D) is telling. It corresponds with the time delay underlying the transformation of malleable younger individuals into older members of the electorate with established habits of voting (or not)—a delay that was a principal concern of Franklin’s (2022) Table  22.1. So what we see in this chapter’s Table  5.1 are

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short-­term turnout variations apparently responding to variations in competitiveness at the party level—turnout responses that are subject to later corrections due to generational replacement at the individual level. These findings must be treated as tentative. The connection between high voter–party proximity and low levels of electoral competition is still speculative (though it is consistent with past research findings). Moreover, these findings require careful model specification, involving thoughtful measurement choices for which there are no established protocols (see  online Appendix B). More importantly, the findings shown in Table  5.1 ignore the possibility of projection effects (in which voters ascribe, to the party they support, policy positions that are their own) and assimilation(/persuasion) effects in which voters (are persuaded to) accept, as their own, policy positions that are actually those of the party they support. Projection and assimilation effects are unlikely (effects of such mechanisms should be evident immediately, and my research finds no significant contemporaneous effects of change in party location on respondent-party left-right proximity;  see Appendix B). However, persuasion is a definite possibility—indeed, such effects are required for learning to take place, the topic of the next section.

Persuasion and Learning Effects How are changes in proximity between voters and parties brought about? Is it through parties changing their positions (as hypothesized for feedback effects) or through their success in persuading voters to adopt the policies espoused by their parties (the phenomenon we call a ‘persuasion effect’)? Critically, we expect different answers regarding turnout than regarding party choice. For party choice, the critical actor in my theorizing is the party, which should move significantly closer to the position of its voters when confronting loss of voter support. For turnout, by contrast, the critical actor is the voter (specifically the newly adult voter) who should move closer to a preferred party with the passage of time during a formative period in the acquisition of voting habits. The question is addressed using two models, one for party support and one for turnout, each of which estimates change in left-right proximity in multivariate analysis that employs both left-right party position and left-­ right voter position as independent variables. So the models predict proximity from its two components using two different datasets. As shown in

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Table 5.2  Change in left-right proximity due to change in respondent versus party left-right location (party and birthyear cohort analyses) Model A (party level)

Model B (birthyear cohort level)

Outcome:

Δ.Proximity to party

.Turnout

Inputs (1) Lagged outcome (error correction parameter) (2) Differenced party left-right locationt (3) Party left-right locationt−1 (4) Differenced supporter left-right locationt−1 (5) Supporter left-right locationt−2

Coeff. (s.e.) −1.20 (0.06)

Coeff. (s.e.) –1.23 (0.02)

0.60 (0.17)

0.23 (0.03)

0.72 (0.17) 0.00 (0.05) ns

0.33 (0.05) -0.07 (0.01)

0.07 (0.07) ns

-0.05 (0.02) ns

Constant R-squared Observations Number of country parties Number of country birthyear cohorts

0.36 (0.12) 0.73 354 165

0.68 (0.02) 0.66 4,375 1,961

Notes: All coefficients significant at the p < 0.01 level, two-tailed, except where marked ‘ns’.

Table 5.2, changes in those components do account for most change in left-right proximity—accounting for between two-thirds and three-quarters of the variance in voter–party left-right proximity (higher R2 for the party support measures than for the turnout measures). For party support (model A), we see that parties do indeed dominate the picture, moving decisively (rows 2 and 3) in left-right terms towards their voters who, tellingly, make no significant contribution to the resulting change in proximity between them and their parties.10 For turnout (model B), the party contribution is less than what it was in model A and, more importantly, the voter contribution is in the correct direction (even though showing only borderline statistical significance for the long-term effect). Though small, these effects of supporter left-right location provide critical support for my theorizing. The reason for their small size is that the estimated effects are effects seen over the electorate as a whole, even though the hypothesized effects were just for voters newly adult at their

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first election. Such voters make up a small proportion of the entire electorate, such that their influence on the overall election result might have been entirely washed out by the behaviour of older, less responsive individuals.11 It is noteworthy that this did not happen. In model B, the dominant role still appears to be played by parties; but this is not inconsistent with my theorizing. Indeed, active learning by new cohorts of voters is central to my theorizing at the individual level; and learning does not show up only as change in individual behaviour. Learning is the corollary of persuasion, and so we are bound to see persuasion effects if learning is taking place—persuasion effects that would show up precisely in terms of the party-level contribution to improved proximity that is evident in Model B.  So a portion of those relatively large effects of party policy change, perhaps virtually all of them,12 should in reality be attributed to the voter socialization processes that have been my focus when it comes to turnout, magnifying the credit due to socializing effects for changes in voter–party proximity.

Discussion It has long been thought that turnout and party choice were intertwined. Scholars and pundits have known well that parties need to turn out their electoral base if they want electoral success. Equally well-known is that, while voters unhappy with policies of the party they support may switch support to a different party, many of those voters will instead choose to abstain, with obvious effects on turnout. So finding a model that can evaluate in statistical terms the balance of forces governing shifts in party support, while showing how that balance involves turnout, has been something of an unacknowledged ‘holy grail’ of electoral research. Apparently, it has also been something of a ‘third rail’ that researchers have been reluctant to touch for fear of electrocution. In such circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that it would be a scholar nearing the end of his research career who would address such a question, if only in tentative fashion. In this, I seek to emulate Richard Rose who never (to the best of my knowledge) hesitated to address a new topic for fear of electrocution or anything else. This chapter is not the only product of new scholarly interest in unifying the study of turnout and party choice (see, e.g., Angelucci et  al. forthcoming). Its objective has been to explore in what ways the intuitions of scholars and commentators work out in practice.

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The proposed mechanism linking turnout and party choice is straightforward, once discovered, but quite obscure. It is based on different dynamic processes at different levels of aggregation, confirmed by means of diagnostic tools coming from different research traditions. At the individual level, the relevant process was uncovered more than two decades ago (Plutzer 2002), and its relevance to turnout was elaborated in my (2004) Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945. That title perhaps claimed too much for the findings reported in the volume concerned but has proved prescient of the findings set out in this chapter. The (2004) findings focused on turnout shifts due to generational replacement. Dynamics reported there now appear to have been only walking ‘shadows’ or, perhaps, poor ‘replays’ (Franklin 2022) of dynamics that could come into focus only at the party level of analysis, as first described by Franklin and Lutz (2020) and extended to incorporate turnout dynamics in Franklin (2022); as elaborated in this chapter’s Fig. 5.1. The findings reported here are preliminary and somewhat speculative. I can show the presence of a dynamic equilibrium for turnout, seemingly as a by-product of the factors that yield a dynamic equilibrium for party choice. But there are steps in the logic that lead from a support equilibrium to a turnout equilibrium that are still in need of clarification and empirical testing. The most that can be said for now is that the logic is plausible and that such tests as can be conducted with existing data are supportive of that logic. The tests consist not only of those presented in this chapter and its accompanying appendices—tests conducted at the individual, party and birthyear cohort levels of analysis. Numerous cognate tests were also conducted at the individual level of analysis in my chapter that was published in the Handbook of Political Participation (Franklin 2022). Those too showed findings consistent with the theory elaborated in this chapter. However, more research is certainly needed. My hope, in writing this chapter, is that it will not only memorialize a great scholar, who made innumerable contributions to the early development of voting studies, but also stimulate future research that will extend and support the theoretical framework that I have put forward here—or establish in what way(s) the framework falls short. If supported, the findings I report could dispel many misconceptions about both turnout and party support; and serve as a stimulus to important future research involving the confluence of generational replacement and electoral dynamics.

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Notes 1. Voter and party motivations in this model are rather different from those proposed by Anthony Downs (1957), and later theorizing in the Downs tradition that sees parties as competing for the centre ground. A critical difference lies in the role played, in my model, by party activists who move parties away from the centre ground even while more centrist voters motivate ‘corrections’ to these centrifugal tendencies. But the same sort of equilibrium could as well result from political forces that were reversed, following a Downsean logic (regarding equilibration in such a model, see Hortala-­Vallve and Esteve-Volart 2011). Here, I focus on what I see as a more plausible equilibrating process, often implicit in political commentary. 2. At the party level of analysis, there is no empirical difference between a measure of turnout and a measure of party choice. One can interpret party support both ways. The ambiguous nature of the party support variable in a party-level analysis signals a disconnect between the turnout and party choice literatures. Bear in mind that turning out to vote requires choosing a party to vote for (Campbell et al. 1960, 96–7). In this chapter I bring the two literature strands together for possibly the first time since that seminal study. 3. Franklin and Lutz (2020) got their data from the same source. Several of the included countries did not conduct free and fair elections continuously since 1945; but at the party level, we do not need continuity in generational cohorts, such as was required in earlier work with survey data (Franklin 2004). The number of parties available for analysis is a more pressing concern. This dataset differs from the one used for my work with Lutz (Franklin and Lutz 2020) in that it includes additional surveys that became available only in December 2020 with Release 2 of the IMD. Surveys for CSES module 5, released more recently, cannot be added to these data because party codes in Module 5 are not yet standardized with those of the IMD. 4. I deleted Hong Kong (not a country) and countries contributing insufficient  contiguous time-points. 28 countries remained for varying periods between 1996 and 2016: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Korea, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States. 5. Birthyear cohorts, of course, fit within electoral cohorts, but electoral cohorts can differ greatly in size due to different time gaps between elections in many countries. Birthyear cohorts are more comparable in size. More importantly, several birthyear cohorts enter an electorate together at

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each election, reducing possible aggregation artefacts by permitting the ­different numbers of birthyear cohorts contained within each electoral cohort  to  be reflected in the significance level found in statistical tests. Appendix B investigates such artifacts and  provides individual-level evidence suggesting that, when effects are theoretically expected at the birthyear level, the artifacts to be feared apply rather to findings at the individual level than to findings at the birthyear level. 6. This equation implicitly assumes reciprocal adjustments in response to any gains/losses in support. However, my theorizing in the earlier “Data and Methods” section supposes that increasing support will free parties to move away from supporter preferences (a very different adjustment process but no less potent). I already pointed out (in my comments regarding Fig. 5.1) that party leaders may extend an equilibrium period. This would presumably involve an ability to ‘manage’ activist responses to increased support, along lines implied in  the “Data and Methods” section  of this chapter. 7. Initially, the short- and long-term effects are felt in conjunction, but only the long-term effect persists. That effect also helps to account for any move in the series towards a new equilibrium (see discussion towards the end of the earlier “A Statistical Model of Turnout and Party Choice” section). 8. Actually, we cannot tell from these data whether parties move closer to their voters by changing their policy stances or whether they succeed in persuading their voters to accept the positions that they (the parties) espouse. See the following section for more on this point. 9. In my (2022) turnout chapter, I argue that younger, more malleable, voters can respond immediately to novel features of an electoral situation while for older voters, already set in habits of voting or non-voting, change can come only with generational replacement. In models C and D of Table 5.1, we see both types of change occurring: change due to voter malleability in model C and change due to generational replacement in model D.  The distinction makes it clear that individual-level short-term effects can have (at the birthyear cohort level) what, in ECM terminology, are seen as long-term effects. As stressed in Franklin (2022), these concepts (while broadly consistent across modelling strategies) are not the same and can overlap. 10. The direction of change for party left-right locations should be opposite to the direction of change for voter left-right locations if proximity is to be increased, although the specific direction of change for each of those actors is arbitrary and determined by estimation processes. Estimating a constructed measure from its components can create multicollinearity issues. Choice of estimation models and issues of model specification more generally are discussed in online Appendix B.

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11. Although my data distinguishes the target groups, their distinctiveness only shows up in error variance, not in estimated coefficients. 12. In Appendix B, I show that if we change the measurement strategy used to derive left-right party position so as to rule out ‘contamination’ by persuasion effects, the Model B effects in rows 2 and 3 of Table 5.2 are vastly reduced, with long-term effects (the effects of primary interest losing statistical significance: powerful evidence that the party contribution to changes in party–voter proximity in turnout models should be ascribed to voter socialization processes.

References Angelucci, D., L. De Sio, M. Franklin, and T. Weber. forthcoming. Optimizing Electoral Success: How Parties can Leverage their Issue Strengths to Promote Favorable Vote Shifts Across Multiple Pathways. Babones, S.J. 2014. Methods for Quantitative Macro-Comparative Research. London: Sage Publications. Campbell, A., P. Converse, W. Miller, and D. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. New York: John Wiley. CSES. 2018. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Integrated Module Dataset (IMD). 4 December 2018 version. https://doi.org/10.7804/cses. imd.2018-­12-­04. Dalton, R., D. Farrell, and I. McAllister. 2011. Political Parties and Democratic Linkage: How Parties Organize Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Boef, S., and L.  Keele. 2008. Taking Time Seriously. American Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 184–200. Deutsch, K. 1963. The Nerves of Government; Models of Political Communication and Control. New York: The Free Press. Downs, A. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper. Easton, D. 1965. The Political System. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Fiorina, M. 1981. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Franklin, M. 2004. Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2022. Linking Electoral and Partisan Participation. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation, ed. M.  Giugni and M.  Grasso. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franklin, M., and G. Lutz. 2020. Partisanship in the Process of Party Choice. In Research Handbook on Political Partisanship, ed. H. Oscarsson and S. Holmberg. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Franklin, M., S. Soroka, and C. Wlezien. 2014. Elections and Accountability. In The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability, ed. M. Bovens, R. Goodin, and T. Schillemans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Harkvardien, A. 2010. Political Representation and its Mechanisms: A Dynamic Left–Right Approach for the United Kingdom, 1976–2006. British Journal of Political Science 40 (4): 835–856. Heath, O. 2007. Explaining Turnout Decline in Britain, 1964–2005: Party Identification and the Political Context. Political Behavior 29 (3): 493–516. Hortala-Vallve, R., and B.  Esteve-Volart. 2011. Voter Turnout and Electoral Competition in a Multidimensional Policy Space. European Journal of Political Economy 27 (2): 376–384. Jennings, W. 2013. Error Correction as a Concept and as a Method: Time Series Analysis of Policy-Opinion Responsiveness. In Political Science Research Methods in Action, ed. M. Bruter and M. Lodge. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jennings, W. and P. John 2009. The Dynamics of Political Attention: Public Opinion and the Queen’s Speech in the United Kingdom. American Journal of Political Science 53 (4): 838–854. Johnston, R., S. Matthew, and A. Bittner. 2007. Turnout and the Party System in Canada, 1988–2004. Electoral Studies 26 (4): 735–745. Kennedy, P. 2008. A Guide to Econometrics. Ming Li, D.M. 2010. A Psychologically-Based Model of Voter Turnout. Journal of Public Economic Theory 12 (5): 979–1002. Myatt, D.P. 2015. A Theory of Voter Turnout. London Business School manuscript. http://dpmyatt.org/uploads/turnout-­2015.pdf. Norris, P. 2004. Electoral Engineering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plutzer, E. 2002. Becoming a Habitual Voter: Inertia, Resources, and Growth in Young Adulthood. American Political Science Review 96 (1): 41–56. Rose, R., ed. 1974. Electoral Behavior: A Comparative Handbook. New  York: Free Press. ———., ed. 1980. Political Participation: A Comparative Analysis. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage. Rose, R., and I.  McAllister. 1990. The Loyalties of Voters: A Lifetime Learning Model. Newbury Park: Sage. Weber, T., and M.  Franklin. 2018. A Behavioral Theory of Electoral Structure. Political Behavior 40 (4): 831–856. Wlezien, C. 1995. Dynamics of representation: The case of US spending on defence. American Journal of Political Science 39 (4): 981–1000. Wlezien, C. 2018. The thermostatic model: the public, policy and politics. In J. Fisher, E. Fieldhouse, M. Franklin, et al., The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion. New York: Routledge. Wlezien, C., and S. Soroka. 2012. Political Institutions and the Opinion-Policy Link. In Assessing Political Representation in Europe, ed. M.  Franklin and C. Arnold. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART III

Institutions and Governing

CHAPTER 6

Presidents and Prime Ministers: Then and Now Ludger Helms

Introduction When Richard Rose published his major co-edited volume on Presidents and Prime Ministers (Rose and Suleiman 1980), from which the title of this chapter is borrowed, the comparative assessment of political chief executives across fundamentally different democratic regimes was a rare and precious commodity.1 At least if one looks for a substantive transatlantic  perspective, an area in which the work by Richard Rose has set the standards for more than a generation of scholars, it still is.2 More generally,

I am grateful to Michelangelo Vercesi and the co-editors of this volume, in particular B. Guy Peters and Edward C. Page, for their most useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Very special thanks are due to Richard Rose for providing me with inspiration, encouragement and generous advice throughout my academic career.

L. Helms (*) University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_6

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however, presidents and prime ministers have come to secure a prominent place on the agenda of comparative political studies. There is no denying that those actors, placed at the very heart of the political executive, do matter, and in many parts of the world increasingly so. Over the past decades, different factors have combined to increase the status and visibility of presidents and prime ministers across political regimes. Mediatization and personalization are particularly prominent drivers of this trend (see e.g. McAllister 2007), but in many countries, these factors have been accompanied by a significant expansion of institutional resources within the executive branch (see Peters et  al. 2000; Dahlström et al. 2011; Inácio and Llanos 2016; Kolltveit and Shaw 2022). While the evolution of executive-legislative power relations since the 1970s displays ambivalent dynamics and patterns (see Chaisty and Power 2023), the larger historical developments have clearly pointed towards a rise, or in many cases a re-rise, of executive power, and of presidential and prime ministerial power more specifically (see Andeweg et al. 2020a). This chapter investigates the evolutionary changes at the level of presidents and prime ministers, and presidential and prime ministerial leadership for that matter, over the past two to three quarters of a century. The focus of this inquiry will be on real-world developments rather than on evaluating recent political research in detail.3 Further, to keep this chapter’s agenda to manageable proportions, the regional focus of this investigation will be mainly on Western Europe and the United States.4 To put this inquiry in context, two preliminary notes are in order. To begin, the study of presidents and prime ministers, and presidential and prime ministerial leadership, is located right at the centre of the century-­ old debate about structure and agency (see Elgie 2015b, ch. 1). Most scholars of comparative politics have conceptualized leadership as ‘structured agency’ and focused on the institutional arrangements that shape presidential and prime ministerial behaviour and performance with the aim of identifying patterns across different countries, and not just between individual administrations (see Helms 2014). The particular importance of different types of government as explanatory factors of different manifestations of executive leadership has been established in comparative empirical assessments of presidential and prime ministerial leadership (Rose 1991, 2001, 2005; Rockman 2003; Helms 2005). Those assessments strongly suggest that the international trends towards personalization, mediatization and an increase in the institutional resources of presidents and prime ministers just mentioned have not

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levelled out the major differences between individual parliamentary systems, and the fundamental differences between parliamentary and presidential systems or semi-presidential systems. That said, the same authors have readily acknowledged that, under certain conditions, individual incumbents may make much of a difference. The institutional resources attached to an office tend to materialize only to the extent that leaders can use them, which may be dependent on the command of certain personal resources (see Heffernan 2003; Helms 2019). Furthermore, even individual incumbents, and their leadership performance, may change over time (see Rose 2000; Helms et al. 2019). Second, it is important to note that a focus on the features and traits of office-holders and their agency, which informs most of this chapter, marks a particular conceptual and analytical approach to studying executive leadership (Krcmaric et al. 2020). Specifically, it is not to be confused with the suggestion that presidents and prime ministers are the only actors that matter in terms of decision-making and leadership within the executive branch. Depending on a regime’s institutional and political nature, other individual and collective actors, such as in particular ministers and cabinets as well as classic bureaucrats and political advisers, tend to matter a lot (see e.g. Peters and Helms 2012). Even in countries with a singular political executive, such as the United States, political chief executives do not govern alone. As Rose contended powerfully, ‘the idea of one person constituting, let alone directing the whole of the executive branch of American government is not difficult: it is merely impossible’ (Rose 1980a, 327–328). Similar warnings are due for some parliamentary systems, and even many autocratic regimes, that have cultivated the myth of ‘strong’ leaders (see Rose 1980b, 49; Brown 2014). The next sections seek to capture some of the most striking features separating Western presidents and prime ministers of the advanced twenty-­ first century from those of the early post-war decades, which have continued to shape public expectations of contemporary public and political leadership in many countries.

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The Changing Features of Past and Contemporary Presidents and Prime Ministers Age, Experience and Physical Fitness Being president or prime minister has obviously never been a nine-to-five job. This has been true even of the period before 1945. However, until the close of the early post-war decades, there were publicly respected times off, with presidents and prime ministers going into extended summer holidays for several months rather than weeks—or at least unless exceptional developments prompted them to reappear on the scene well before their schedule. This implied that political chief executives were, after all, human beings in need of occasional relaxation and recovery. If at all, the advanced age of a political leader, in particular when accompanied by a certain amount of physical frailty, added to his status as a genuinely senior figure that created deference among both his supporters and adversaries. In an era that valued experience, it was even possible for some leaders, such as Winston Churchill or Harold Wilson, to re-win the premiership after years in opposition. The international hype surrounding the election of John F. Kennedy as the 35th US president in 1961, and his short-lived tenure in office, only underscored the widely perceived validity of a regime firmly girded towards longstanding experience and seniority (though obviously, Kennedy himself, while coming over as exceptionally youthful and ‘unconventional’, had 12 years of legislative experience in the House and Senate). All this has changed a lot. In most countries, being political chief executive has long turned into a 24/7 job—with a job description attached implying that, if at all, only energetic personalities at the very height of both their mental and physical fitness are possibly up to the job. Being 43 on assuming presidential office, Kennedy would nowadays spectacularly fail to be considered a strikingly, let alone uniquely, young Western political leader. Indeed, in many West European countries, the past decade has witnessed the rise of a new class of political leaders that share with each other the feature of being their country’s youngest political chief executives ever. This is true from Finland (Sanna Marin), Estland (Jüri Ratas) and Ireland (Leo Varadkar) through Austria (Sebastian Kurz) and Italy (Matteo Renzi) to New Zealand (Jacinda Adern) and Chile (Gabriel Boric). The United Kingdom joined that club with the appointment of Rishi Sunak as prime minister in late 2022, who was the country’s youngest prime minister in 200 years. However, arguably no one became more

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of a symbol of Europe’s new breed of youthful political leaders than French President Manuel Macron, elected president in 2017 at the age of 39. While each case had its own history, these developments still gave rise to a larger pattern: In 2018, about a quarter of all West European prime ministers were aged under 40.5 But the difference about past and present political leaders is not only about age but also experience, or more specifically the nature of experience—two features that tend to be related without being identical. There has been a general shift from classic party-based careers to much more diverse backgrounds of political leaders. This is obviously not to say that parties no longer matter. However, over the past decades, many European prime ministers have turned from ‘party agents’ to ‘party principals’ (Müller-Rommel et  al. 2022) dominating rather than merely chairing their party’s activities. It remains an empirical question if or to what extent these career and intra-party changes have increased the leverage of political chief executives within the government and beyond. Other things being equal, prime ministers can be considered to fare best in terms of authority and control if they chair a single-party or a stable majority coalition government, in which their party is clearly the dominant part. In many countries across Western Europe, the recent rise of ‘party principal’-type leaders has been accompanied by important changes in the government format. Specifically, there has been a remarkable increase in the overall number of so-called ‘grand coalitions’, involving the two largest parties (Morini and Loveless 2021) and, if to a lesser extent, of minority governments (Field and Martin 2022), both of which have been considered to constrain the power of the prime minister. The role of extended parliamentary careers for winning the premiership has also gradually diminished; partly owed to the lower age of prime ministers, the decreasing parliamentary experience of many recent prime ministers is still worth noting. Even in the United Kingdom, hosting the ‘mother of parliaments’, three of the five most recent prime ministers (Cameron to Sunak) had less than 10 years of parliamentary experience on assuming the premiership (Cameron, Johnson and Sunak). One of the transatlantic ironies at this level relates to the fact that both Donald Trump and in particular Joe Biden have been among the oldest political leaders from our sample of contemporary Western political chief executives. What is hardly less worth noting is that, while many contemporary prime ministers have considerably less parliamentary experience than their

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historical predecessors, there have been several recent US presidents with very considerable experience in the legislative arena. George Bush Sr. and Joe Biden had longstanding experience as legislative leaders that dwarfed that of many of Europe’s new breed of prime ministers.6 Alongside the rise of new-type political entrepreneurs, including such flamboyant figures as Silvio Berlusconi, the past three decades have seen the emergence of genuine technocrats in the office of prime minister. Italy, which has historically been marked by striking forms and levels of party rule (‘partitocrazia’), has experienced the most extended spells of non-­ partisan and/or technocrat rule. There have been no less than four different non-partisan prime ministers in Italy since the end of the so-called First Republic (Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, 1993/1994; Lamberto Dini 1995/1996; Mario Monti, 2011–2013; and Mario Draghi, 2021/2022). The United States has always been prone to more unconventional pathways to the Oval Office and tended to hail this supposedly greater openness as a major competitive advantage. The ‘Trump phenomenon’—both Trump’s way into office and his performance in office—clearly remains exceptional even by US standards (Lieberman et  al. 2019). It is worth noting, however, that the politics of presidential campaigning and the political nature of presidential candidates have undergone significant changes long before the rise of Trumpism. The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 seemed to mark the start of a new pattern, with candidates advancing to the presidency from a state governorship, yet this has not continued into the twenty-first century. While of the five presidents from Carter through Bush Jr, all but one had former experience as state governor, none of the past three presidents (Obama through Biden) did. Gender Another element of change that has come to mark the profiles of contemporary West European prime ministers, if not of American presidents, is the increasing number of women political leaders. That said, the rise of women prime ministers has evolved differently than many would have expected. The showcases of longstanding and powerful women chief executives—including Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel—relate to leaders of conservative, rather than progressive, parties. Also, very much opposite to what could be expected considering the overall gender-related performance of Westminster and consensus democracies (Lijphart 2012), and the inherently limited opportunities for ‘Westminster women’ more

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specifically (Lovenduski and Norris 2003), the United Kingdom has had no less than three women prime ministers since the close of the 1970s (Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss)—all affiliated with the Conservative Party. By late 2022, the United Kingdom and Poland were the only countries in the world that had had three conservative women prime ministers.7 In the same period, only three other countries had three women prime ministers (with mixed party affiliations) as well: Finland, Moldova and New Zealand. The continued absence of women from the Oval Office is perfectly in line with what comparative research on gender and political elites tells us about the exclusionary dynamics of certain political institutions. Other things being equal, women face the worst chances of becoming president in presidential systems, where executive power is undivided and concentrated in the hands of a single person (Jalalzai 2008). In this regard, female presidents in Latin America can be considered an exception, if one that can be largely explained by peculiar dynastic structures that gave rise to ‘inherited’ presidencies. Also, some Latin American women presidencies, such as that of Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff who was ousted from office following an impeachment trial in 2016, became prominent examples of how latent double standards still can easily break women’s presidential careers even if they made it to the top. (see Jalalzai et al. 2022). In contrast to the biological sex of political officeholders, ‘gender’ is ultimately a socially construed category. More recent developments at this level concern the changing perceptions of individual leaders. While Margaret Thatcher continues to be perceived as an extremely masculine prime minister who tended to ‘feminize’ many of her male colleagues by virtue of her own extreme masculinity (Sykes 2016, 179), Barack Obama was greeted by some observers as America’s first female president (Milbank 2012). Moreover, there have been male heads of government explicitly presenting themselves as ‘feminists’, such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz). Thus, even in contexts with no woman prime minister around, the ‘gender issue’ has come to shape the perception of political chief executives and their actual behaviour. Status and Public Exposure Some leaders of the past tend to enjoy a status of public appreciation that seems out of reach for present leaders. To some extent, this is owed to the

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human inclination to glorify the past. But in some cases, glorification is bred by a particular importance and actual greatness of a past leader. ‘Founding leaders’ of a regime—such as de Gaulle in France, Adenauer in Germany or Nehru in India—are usually remembered as monumental figures (Blondel 1987, ch.3).8 The early successors to such towering figures are often perceived as major failures, not least (if perhaps not only) because they are largely being assessed on the criteria established by their predecessors, in particular by present observers. Especially many ‘heirs apparent’, inheriting the office after a long period of waiting in the role of ‘natural successor’ to an incumbent, have been perceived as strikingly disappointing (Helms 2020a). Psychological factors shaping the perceptions of political leaders and their performance apart, many contemporary prime ministers enjoy an exposed status that sets them apart from their historical predecessors. One of the key driving factors is the dramatically increased importance of international summitry, which has become a defining feature of internationalized governance in the twenty-first century. Some of the most fascinating dynamics concern the evolution of executive power in the European Union (Johansson and Tallberg 2010). In a transnational political order demanding unanimous decisions in the most important areas, traditionally weak prime ministers (such as from the Netherlands or Austria) have arguably made the greatest net gains in terms of power, both at the international stage and with regard to the related domestic reverberations (van Dorp and Rhodes 2022). At the same time, though, especially those leaders used to having their way at home, had to learn the art of negotiation, and how to live with the veto power of smaller players participating in transnational European governance. Media-driven dynamics of personalization have further added to public perceptions of prime ministers calling the shots, largely unfettered by other actors (McAllister 2007; Musella 2022). While this may often be an illusion, illusions of power can still create real power (see also Dowding 2013). Altered forms of media coverage and media-based perceptions of politics and political leaders tend to have major repercussions on the status and, if often to a lesser extent, the leverage of the latter. The advanced leader-centredness of the commercial mass media, and the increasing willingness of leaders to take on the role of ‘personal leaders’, has been highlighted as the one major similarity of the leadership environment of contemporary US presidents and British prime ministers in what otherwise appears as ‘an ocean of difference’ (Rose 2001, 236–242). Of course,

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much of what is relatively new at this level in many European countries has marked presidential leadership in the United States at least since the Kennedy years. It is thus no coincidence that the evolutionary changes in terms of mediatization and personalization, as well as with regard to chief executive/party relations observed in many parliamentary democracies, have been referred to as key features of an ongoing ‘presidentialization of politics’ (see e.g. Poguntke and Webb 2005; Elgie and Passarelli 2020). With Donald Trump, it was also a US president who went to the extremes in using new social media, in particular Twitter, as an instrument of political communication and leadership. While this has not been continued under President Biden, few if any political leaders worldwide have been able or willing to keep away completely from using new channels of communication. Specifically, Twitter is being used by no means only by populist leaders, and it can be applied highly strategically to complement other approaches and strategies of leadership communication (Ie 2020). While these developments have been made possible by a technological revolution, it is important to see that new technological opportunities have also met altered conditions and expectations of public leadership. Comparative research reveals that increased political pressure from social unrest correlates with the likelihood that leaders adopt social media platforms (Barberá and Zeitzoff 2018). The COVID-19 pandemic, and the global inflation crisis of the early 2020s, have provided a fruitful breeding ground for the increasing use of social media by political leaders across different regions and types of regime. However, the invention of new media channels and outlets and their adoption also by many leaders that would not seem to have a natural affinity with them have not compensated present leaders for the gradual loss of the unmatched outreach capacity enjoyed by many leaders of the past. Indeed, one of the defining features of the social media age is that it has led to a massive increase in potential co- and anti-leaders and a levelling out of established standards of deference towards elected officeholders. Vulnerability, ‘Lame Ducks’ and the Emergence of Post-executive Careers Unlike presidents in presidential systems, who enjoy fixed-term tenures, prime ministers can, by definition, be ousted any time. There have obviously always been longer and shorter tenures of prime ministers. Some of the most extended, such as that of Mark Rutte in the Netherlands or

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Angela Merkel in Germany, are quite recent. Yet, the international trend across Western Europe would seem to be towards shorter tenures, with some spectacular cases shaping the larger picture. For example, such fundamentally different countries as Austria and the United Kingdom both experienced five or even six different heads of government each during Angela Merkel’s 16-year-long tenure—a historical record of volatility. Some recent prime ministers, such as Liz Truss in the United Kingdom (2022), have enjoyed no honeymoon at all and had to leave after just a few weeks in office. More particular circumstances apart, contemporary prime ministers are significantly more exposed than prime ministers of the past. This can provide them with more power, yet at the same time, the personalization or ‘presidentialization’ of politics has tended to make them much more vulnerable (see Poguntke and Webb 2018).9 There is a growing mismatch between the levels of public exposure, and sometimes popularity of prime ministers, on the one hand, and their structurally limited capacity to deliver effective policies on the other (see also Garnett 2021). Even in contexts lacking the personalization levels typical of many Westminster democracies, the gains in status and visibility have to be ‘repaid’ in terms of leaders being increasingly held to account for any possible development, or failure. There is also evidence that, other things being equal, unfulfilled pledges and negative developments weigh heavier in leader assessments than positive results (see Naurin et  al. 2019; see also Helms 2020b). The dynamics highlighted above have not simply let to shorter tenures but at the same time induced some prime ministers to cling to their office at any cost. Boris Johnson’s loss of the premiership in the summer of 2022, and his desperate fight to keep it (followed by somewhat half-­ hearted attempts to regain it after Truss’s resignation announcement in October 2022), is a recent case in point. No contemporary West European prime minister refused to conceit defeat, as Donald Trump did after the 2020 presidential election,10 but in many countries, the going has got tougher, with many prime ministers fighting back for their political survival with bewildering gestures of self-confidence. Some prime ministers have also tried to prolong their stay in office for a certain period in exchange for pledging to retreat at the end of the legislative term (or on any other particular date). Such prime ministers ruling out any re-election while seeking to continue in office could be referred to as ‘lame duck prime ministers’—in analogy to lame duck presidents in

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presidential systems with fixed tenures. To be sure, the logic of parliamentary and party government leaves very little room for such manoeuvres. Still, a few instances can be identified. The best-known recent case relates to German chancellor Angela Merkel (2005–2021), who resigned as CDU party leader in late 2018 and announced to step down as chancellor too after the next regular federal election in 2021. In Merkel’s case, this arrangement worked surprisingly well. In fact, Merkel’s resignation announcement gave her personal popularity score a temporary boost, and her government actually continued until late 2021. However, while the split between the offices of party leader and head of government is a well-­ known practice in several European countries, Merkel’s ‘two-stage resignation’, and the beneficial effects it carried for her, was clearly exceptional and remained far from establishing any kind of role model. In some countries, such a manoeuvre would not even have been possible constitutionally. Nowadays, many of those who eventually fall from power face a notably comfortable and attractive future. In fact, the emergence of post-prime ministerial and post-presidential careers has turned into a major defining feature of the changing features of presidents and prime ministers back then and now (see e.g. Theakston and de De Vries 2012; Musella 2020). The dramatically increased importance of post-executive careers is obviously owed not least to the much younger age of many contemporary political chief executives, providing them with a life expectancy of several decades after leaving office. Yet, that apart, even for many medium-aged and some older former leaders, writing political memoirs is no longer enough; they seek other careers in civil society organizations or, more often, in big business (see Edwards 2021). Depending on their concrete features, those secondary careers are now being both more publicly accepted and monitored more closely. The Legacies of Political Chief Executives Leaving a political legacy is a privilege enjoyed by only some top officeholders in the executive branch, and most of them seem to care a lot about their legacy while still being in office . Fong et al. (2017) introduced the valuable distinction between hard and soft legacies. The former relate to concrete and enduring policy achievements, while the latter denote the memories enshrined in the public’s consciousness. It seems reasonable to assume that hard legacies tend to shape soft legacies, but the concrete

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relations between these two dimensions are immensely complex and have remained strikingly understudied. Specifically, some leaders that were perceived as particularly eminent while in office can look less important from a distance; others have been considered more important than in the first place as time goes by. Leadership is context-dependent, and changing contexts may not only shape leaders’ actual performance but also what people make of it after a leader has gone. This marks another crucial dimension of thinking about presidents and prime ministers in terms of ‘then and now’. As Fong et  al. (2017) argue, it is usually representatives of the past leader’s party who have a vested interest in exploiting that former leader’s legacy. To the extent they succeed, they can benefit from presenting themselves as the legitimate heirs of this leadership experience. These assumptions have recently been tested and empirically confirmed in a Latin American case study (Andrews-Lee and Liu 2021), which suggests that similar patterns can be identified in other contexts too. Obviously, the nature of a leader him- or herself is a major factor. Personalized and populist leaders, which have gained prominence in many Western countries (and beyond), very often leave their parties in a desperate state of affairs upon departing (Alexiadou and O’Malley 2022). Therefore, it is much less likely that the party or individual party representatives will publicly hail the legacy of that leader. This implies that the highly personalized and populist political leaders of the present age, while appearing utterly dominant and ubiquitous while in office, could well leave a considerably lighter legacy than widely believed—at least in terms of leadership and governance, if arguably less so with regard to the long-term negative effects of their unsustainable policies. A politics of largely banishing once dominant figures from the public memory of their parties is more likely to prevail in parliamentary systems, where prime ministers usually lose office by suffering a fatal defeat—be it at the polls, within their party or, less often, in parliament. Specifically, a new party leader seeking to regain power while his or her party is in opposition is much less likely to refer to the glory of the former leader that the party or the voters abandoned just a short while ago. ‘Takeover prime ministers’ (Worthy 2016), who have won office by replacing their successor from the same party, are even less likely to praise their predecessor’s achievements (unless he or she stepped down completely voluntarily, which tends to happen very rarely). By contrast, it is much more likely that both the party and its lead candidate in presidential systems relate their campaign to the achievements of a successful two-term president or an

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undefeated one-term president. Institutional differences between countries shape not just the performance of presidents and prime ministers, but also the ways others manage their succession and legacies.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to capture some of the features that distinguish contemporary presidents and prime ministers from those of the early post-­ war decades. There is obviously a simplistic dimension to such an endeavour. Not all political leaders share the features of their respective contemporaries. Some have been ‘ahead of their times’, while others seemed to represent a past age11, or even seeking to ‘turn back the clock’, if not always voluntarily but in recognition of the prevailing circumstances and demands.12 At a higher level of abstraction, political leaders can also be considered to be located differently in ‘political time’ (Skowronek 1997, 2008; Laing and McCaffrie 2013; Byrne et al. 2020). On the other hand, it is easy to underestimate the overall amount of continuity at the career patterns of political chief executives in many countries. If one applies a broader historical perspective, as offered by Vercesi who looked into the profiles of all US presidents from Washington through Biden, it becomes manifest that there is a strong element of path dependency and continuity at the level of executive elites within countries (Vercesi 2022). This pattern is not confined to American or other countries’ presidents; regarding the holders of the premiership, the established Oxbridge dominance in British politics is as alive as ever. Also, patterns at the level of elite profiles do not neatly translate into particular features of executive leadership. Political chief executives are strategic actors, after all. Some women leaders have acted masculine, while some male leaders tended to act feminine. Some of the youngest political leaders have been firmly committed to coming over as particularly sober and mature statesmen or stateswomen (seeking to make good for their limited experience), whereas some ageing leaders went out of their way to leave no doubt that they are more agile and ‘young at heart’ than could be reasonably expected. Just remember President Biden jogging out onto the podium on many occasions, in particular after having been caught apparently falling asleep at several international gatherings. Doomed to operate in a post-deferential and cynical age, contemporary leaders are understandably careful not to put themselves on the spot.

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One, perhaps the, defining feature of the present era is an unprecedented level of stupefying complexity and interdependency, which has generated a wealth of ‘wicked problems’ (see e.g. McConnell 2018) that no government could ever hope to control completely. And yet, politics is still politics. Indeed, even political leaders of the distant past could be trusted to have a fair idea of what most present-day leaders are struggling with. If to differing degrees, executive leadership has always been, and will continue to be, about giving direction to government, building coalitions and taking tough decisions in the face of constant uncertainty.

Notes 1. I note that Rose has always been sceptical about referring to the US president as a political ‘chief executive’ (Rose 1980a, 339; see also Rose 1977). However, I still take the liberty here to use the widespread and increasingly common term ‘political chief executive’ here when referring to both prime ministers and presidents. 2. Nowadays, in comparative politics, the topos ‘presidents and prime ministers’ tends to be mainly associated with the politics of intra-executive relations in semi-presidential regimes (see e.g. Shugart and Carey 1992; Elgie 1999; Protsyk 2006; Yan 2021). However, Anglo-American comparisons as well as European perspectives on Washington more broadly have remained of major importance (see e.g. Sykes 2000; Fabbrini 2005; Hargrove 2001; Heffernan 2005; Helms 2005, 2015). There is now even a handbook specifically devoted to the personal relations between different pairs of (American) presidents and (British) prime ministers in international politics (Cullinane and Farr 2022). 3. For a full-scale state-of-the-art review of the field of executive politics, see Andeweg et al. (2020b). 4. While there are presidents in quite a few West European countries, I include here only what Robert Elgie has referred to as ‘executive presidents’ (Elgie 2015a), that is, those presidents that can convincingly claim to be their country’s political chief executive, even though there is a prime minister as well. The most prominent example of this type of president is obviously the president of the Fifth French Republic. 5. Some leaders, such as Austria’s Sebastian Kurz (aged 31  in 2017), were significantly younger than that. 6. The emergence of ‘going public’ as a distinct political strategy has been explained with the changing background of modern presidents (lacking legislative experience, and therefore being more willing to avoid having to deal with legislators directly; see Mans 1995, 850). To the extent that dif-

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ferent experiences are considered to shape political leaders’ strategies and styles more generally, the decreasing parliamentary experience of some recent, and arguably many future, prime ministers should be expected to become a major factor in transforming leadership patterns in many parliamentary democracies as well. 7. Conservative parties also have hosted more women leaders of the opposition (see Dingler and Helms 2023), which, according to the constitutional myths of Westminster democracy, are ‘prime ministers in waiting’. That said, only a fraction of women leaders of the opposition from the major Westminster democracies have won the office of prime minister; in fact, most of them were temporary leaders that were denied the opportunity to lead their party into a national election campaign (Helms 2023). 8. Indeed, in France, all presidents since the late 1960s have prompted comparisons with General de Gaulle, giving rise to more (Macron) or less (Sarkozy) favourable assessments; see e.g. Flandrin (2021). 9. The significantly increased vulnerability of (unpopular) prime ministers is notable especially in countries with until recently low levels of personalization, such as Japan (see Uchiyama 2022). 10. However, Berlusconi’s continued questioning of the result of the Italian 2006 election, which evicted him from office based on a tiny 24,000 votes lead for the centre-left, displayed a mindset similar to Trump’s. 11. President Kennedy after his first meeting with Chancellor Adenauer, more than 40 years his senior, reportedly noted that he had a feeling of not talking to someone from a different generation but from a different age. 12. For example, in the United Kingdom, the temporary return of more collective forms of cabinet government during the Cameron years was largely owed to the unexpected turmoil of the party system and the formation of a coalition government, rather than any personal preferences of the prime minister (Bennister and Heffernan 2015).

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Flandrin, A. 2021. Le Général de Gaulle, Grand Inspirateur d’Emmanuel Macron, Le Monde, 8 January 2021. https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2021/01/08/le-­g eneral-­d e-­g aulle-­g rand-­i nspirateur-­d -­e mmanuel-­ macron_6065561_3232.html Fong, C., N.A.  Malhotra, and Y.  Margalit. 2017. Political Legacies. Stanford University Graduate School of Business Research Paper No. 17-57. https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3028390 Garnett, M. 2021. The Role of the Prime Minister has Presidential-Style Prominence but far less Capacity to Deliver Constructive Policies. LSE British Politics and Policy, 26 April 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ the-­british-­prime-­minister-­in-­an-­age-­of-­upheaval/ Hargrove, E.C. 2001. The Presidency and the Prime Ministership as Institutions: An American Perspective. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (1): 49–70. Heffernan, R. 2003. Prime Ministerial Predominance? Core Executive Politics in the UK. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5 (3): 347–372. ———. 2005. Why the Prime Minister cannot be a president: Comparing Institutional Imperatives in Britain and America. Parliamentary Affairs 58 (1): 53–70. Helms, L. 2005. Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors: Executive Leadership in Western Democracies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. Institutional Analysis. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership, ed. P. ‘t Hart and R.A.W. Rhodes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. Is There a Presidentialization of US Presidential Leadership? A European Perspective on Washington. Acta Politica 50 (1): 1–19. ———. 2019. When Less is More: ‘Negative Resources’ and the Performance of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Politics 39 (3): 269–283. ———. 2020a. Heir Apparent Prime Ministers in Westminster Democracies: Promise and Performance. Government and Opposition 55 (2): 260–282. ———. 2020b. Performance and Evaluation of Political Executives. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives, ed. R.B.  Andeweg et  al. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2023. Prime ministers in waiting? Women leaders of the opposition in Westminster systems. Party Politics, published online 11 April, https://doi. org/10.1177/13540688231166873 Helms, L., F. van Esch, and B.  Crawford. 2019. Merkel III: From Committed Pragmatist to ‘Conviction Leader’? German Politics 28 (3): 350–370. Ie, K.W. 2020. Tweeting Power: The Communication of Leadership Roles on Prime Ministers’ Twitter. Politics and Governance 8 (1): 158–170. Inácio, M., and M. Llanos. 2016. The Institutional Presidency in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis. Presidential Studies Quarterly 46 (3): 531–549.

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CHAPTER 7

Understanding Big Government Donley Studlar

Big Government is a fact of life. (Rose 1984b) The era of Big Government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves. (Clinton 1996) The scene is set, then, for bigger and bigger government. (Economist 2021a)

Introduction: Big Government as a Problem Focus In Understanding Big Government: The Programme Approach (1984b), Richard Rose addresses the causes and consequences of the growth of government, a fundamental question in governing modern societies in the twentieth century. What this chapter will do is to present the major points of Rose’s argument within the context of the time in which it was written, show how the findings here relate to other pursuits within Rose’s long career, and, with the hindsight of an almost additional length of time (40 years) since the book was written, make some suggestions about how well its contentions hold up. After all, in 1984, there was a Soviet Union, but

D. Studlar (*) West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_7

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no European Union with a unified fiscal framework, and no devolution in the United Kingdom, to name only a few major institutional changes. Do these and other changes lead to different outcomes within the concept of Big Government? Rose briefly offers multiple explanations for Big Government, including economic (industrialization, increasing GDP), demographic/social structure (population growth, education, urbanization, age structure, social inequality, labor force participation), and political choices based on the values and interests of elites and masses, especially responses to widely experienced shock events such as major wars as well as longer-term changes in expectations through democratization. Lesson drawing from other jurisdictions also is a factor. More recently, the Economist (2021a) cites three main driving forces: the relative incentives for inertia, innovation, and improvement that bureaucrats and politicians face, the rising cost of services provided by the government, and the demands of voters. Empirically Rose moves beyond the usual limited focus on the United States and United Kingdom to examine Big Government from the perspective of several major Western mixed-economy welfare states over an extended post-World War II period, 1950–1980, although the exact referents depend on available data. Particular attention is given to six major countries: United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Germany, and Italy. This was a period of ‘treble affluence’—a growing national product, growing public sector, and growing private sector. But at the time he wrote the earlier confidence in this trend had shifted to concerns about fiscal stress and overloaded government. Growth in spending can be measured in three different ways, namely, (1) more money in current value terms; (2) more money in real terms; or (3) a bigger share of GDP, whichever way GDP is moving. That means public spending may increase in an economic slowdown because the overall economy is shrinking. Since we are looking at longer-term trends, the preferred measure here is the third one, the relationship between public spending and the overall economy. Rose’s work stands astride the interface between practical political problems and academic research. In this book, he integrates the study of public policy (what government does) through what he calls the Program Approach, focusing on more measurable concepts (personnel, finance, and laws) rather than employing a more abstract, theoretical approach (Rose 1985b). This approach results in multiple measures of Big Government according to these three dimensions, unlike economist

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approaches that rely only on financial indicators. Even the recent Economist (2021a)  survey of the current state of Big Government employs Rose’s three-pronged formulation. Rose rejects the term ‘policy’ as too multifaceted and vague, confusing goals with government outputs and their impact (outcomes). Rose prefers ‘programs’ as being more concrete manifestations of what governments do, a range of activities in a particular substantive area. He employs a model of government activity (programs) consisting of five elements—the three resources of laws, tax revenues, and public employees, mobilized by government organizations, and converted into outputs. A program refers to a range of activities in a given policy area, using the combined resources of laws, money, and public officials. Nonetheless, in other work, Rose has been more willing to employ the usual language of policy studies without completely abandoning the language of programs. Programs are measured across three dimensions—time, space, and issues. Rose argues that Big Government, as with all political phenomena, presents opportunities as well as costs. An empirical examination of this phenomenon needs to measure its scope, effectiveness (achieving goals), and consent (popular acceptance of its actions). Of course, government is complex and diverse, and there is plenty of room for debate about causes and consequences, both of particular programs and government as a whole. Although it is both comprehensive and dynamic, the Program Approach has received little attention in comparative policy texts (Cairney 2012; Dodds 2013). But its scope has informed later work on Big Government and has proven to be extremely useful for Rose’s further research, for instance on political parties (1984a), policy inheritance (Rose and Davies 1994), lesson drawing (Rose 1993, 2005), and comparative welfare provision (Rose 2023). After a flurry of scholarship on Big Government from the 1950s to the 1980s (Rose 1989a), subsequently few other analysts objectively have investigated the topic as a general phenomenon. Rose does not find a few parsimonious influences for the general growth of government programs cross-nationally. Therefore, he suggests examining different groupings of programs comparatively, as he recently has done with the ‘welfare mix’ composed not only of broad ‘social insurance’ but also privately and publicly provided resources in employment, education, health, and gender equity (Rose 2023). Other disaggregated approaches include ‘worlds of welfare’ (Esping-Andersen 1990) and, more generally, ‘families of nations’ (Castles 1993, 1998; Obinger and Wagschal 2001) as

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well as those investigating conditions for lesson drawing (Rose 1993, 2005; Studlar 1993). Within a generally identified program, there can still be considerable variations. For instance, until the late 1990s, some Western countries, especially the United Kingdom, lacked a general state-mandated minimum wage (Economist 2021a; Waltman 2008). There is always some amount of competition and crowding out both among and within programs in the same jurisdiction. For instance, the United States is the only western country where public spending on defense is the largest segment while welfare spending (health, education, employment security) is relatively low in percentage terms (Rose 1989a). Rose contends that as individual programs grow, there is more resemblance among them in different countries than among different programs within the same country. Furthermore, the quality and quantity of a program are not necessarily contradictory; both can rise together, as with health policies. Big Government, then, can be disaggregated into several different programs. These specific sectors have tended to attract more attention from researchers over the subsequent decades, as they can apply their expertise in depth to a limited area, usually for an extended period of research. Government responsibility for programs, however, can be spread across several different departments with varying names, rather than policies being specific to certain ministries. For instance, depending on the countries involved, interior departments may be responsible for different programs. Thus, even as he is disaggregating, Rose retains more of a ‘whole of government’ approach than most other analysts.

The Growth of Government in the Twentieth Century At the beginning of the twentieth century, the nightwatchman concept of the state prevailed. Basic state functions such as the provision of domestic order and international security were paramount concerns, with some minimal infrastructure spending. Despite its origins in autocratic Germany in the 1880s, what generally came to be called ‘the welfare state’, the major domestic source of government growth, grew disproportionately in capitalist democracies. This involved public spending for benefits that were personally consumable by individual citizens who qualified for them. Major spending on education, health, and income security through

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employment insurance and dependent assistance (wives, children, elderly, and disabled) grew, appealed to wide groups in the population, and were believed to enhance public order and voting support for governments providing them. Some of these programs, especially education and health, were personnel intensive as well as being financially intensive. Rose concentrates the empirical focus of this book on the rise of Big Government across western democracies in the mid-twentieth century. It was in this period of increasing relative affluence (despite the dislocations of the Great Depression and World War II), not previous general scarcity, that overall government activity in the domestic sphere rose. Private affluence and inflation allowed governments to tax a broader share of the population to pay for public benefits, which meant that in some countries a majority paid income taxes for the first time. Tax resistance and other compliance problems arose in the late 1970s and 1980s, although in some continental European countries, this was a longer standing phenomenon, resulting in less reliance on income taxes and more on social security taxes and user fees. Rose examines several different hypotheses based on this literature, looking for empirical indicators to help answer questions in what remains a highly contested political realm. While individual state tax regimes are highly variable in their mix of sources, once established the inertia of taxation and spending priorities exercises considerable continuing influence. Taxation can be a visible and sensitive topic for the direction and even the stability of governments, as several major historical events demonstrate, including historical tax revolts leading to more power for elected parliaments in the United Kingdom and the 1970s property tax revolt in California. Hence, there is a search for ways to generate taxes less visibly or borrow against an indefinite future. In that respect, the increased influence of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT or heterodoxy), arguing that countries controlling their own currencies have broader scope for deficits, has proven to be a boon for advocates of borrowing, at least until the recent return of inflation in Western countries (Mitchell et al. 2019; Krugman 2019; Kelton 2020). Rose’s work in this area arose from his scholarly involvement in a major comparative, especially British, controversy of the 1970s, namely overloaded government/fiscal stress. The economic stagflation of the 1970s, previously considered to be almost impossible by the popular Keynesian economic models of the time, led to increasingly critical reassessments. But there were also episodes of political stress in the United Kingdom, including close elections, labor  union-government power struggles, an

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unprecedented loan from the International Monetary Fund, uncertainty over joining the European Economic Community, the rise of conflict in Northern Ireland, minority governments, and, eventually in 1979, the first loss of confidence vote in a British government for over a half century. Political commentators began to question accepted models of politics as well, especially those emphasizing the United Kingdom as a stable parliamentary regime. ‘Overloaded government’ became a popular concept, especially in Britain (Rose 1975; King 1975). Rose and Peters (1978) introduced the term ‘political stress’ as an equivalent to ‘fiscal stress’ in economics. Political stress grows when real take home pay falls as a combination of inflation, slow GDP growth, and slower wage growth. Just how stable was British government under fiscal and political stress? How did other countries cope with similar problems? Related to both of these, the older argument about the desirable size of government was revived. Did the ever-increasing size of government lead to better governance or only to more difficult problems? How much government was too much government, and how did this relate to both fiscal and political stress? Rose’s contribution to this discussion was to treat these questions as worthy of empirical research and to reach some preliminary conclusions. In this book, he examines various dimensions of Big Government and its consequences for human welfare and political stability. As Rose (2014) later indicated, it was nevertheless impossible in public discussion completely to separate empirical findings from the normative ideological implications, and the latter have continued to dominate popular discussions of the topic. He summarizes the implications of his findings: the right is correct that government cannot grow without limit; resources are always constrained; the left is correct that the welfare state programs making government big will not readily be abandoned in a democracy (Rose 1984b).

Rose’s Big Government and His Other Research In this book, Rose focuses primarily on expenditure-intensive and personnel-­intensive programs. While law-intensive policies get some attention, they became the central topic of a separate, later book (Rose and Davies 1994), as did public employment (Rose 1985a). Law-intensive programs often involve issues of social regulation (morality), now sometimes referred to as ‘cultural conflict’. Based on his earlier

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research on Northern Ireland (Rose 1971), Rose recognizes that ‘priceless values’ such as religion, national identity, and language are more likely to be zero-sum and therefore lead to difficult bargaining and even the withdrawal of consent. But there are no attempts at more abstract theoretical recategorizations of law-intensive policies (Lowi 1964; Smith 1975; Smith and Tatalovich 2003). Rose does indicate that, in this era of relatively permissive morality (Studlar and Burns 2015), political values may be more important than technical limits on policy. Some of Rose’s findings on lawmaking confirm conventional wisdom and some alter it. He finds that Big Government largely rests on a mountain of inherited laws. Relatively few are repealed, or new ones proposed, as both carry risk. Most lawmaking is incremental, consolidative, and consensual (often involving administration). Laws are more likely to be norm-­ intensive rather than revenue-intensive, and bureaucratic technical expertise through executive regulation is surpassing parliamentary lawmaking in Western democracies (van Mechelen and Rose 1986). The most common process for all programs is policy succession rather than policy initiation or termination (Peters and Hogwood 1982). Once established over a number of years, effective and consensual programs such as income maintenance, education, and health tend to scale up. In summary, Rose finds British politics to be more consensual than generally recognized, a position he later more emphatically endorsed during the ‘adversary politics’ controversy in the United Kingdom (Finer 1975; Rose 1984a; Rose and Davies 1994). The lifespan of programs leads to tracing policy inheritance in organizations such as the National Health Service in the United Kingdom (Rose and Davies 1994). Although some new elements were proposed, overall, this was not so much an innovation of the post-World War II Labour government as a scaling up of previous health policies. Similarly, as Rose points out, old-age support and education policies have evolved to meet changing circumstances. Thus, a few large programs have come to constitute the bulk of what has come to be called Big Government. The bigger the program, the harder it is to make major alterations. Constituencies are created, often through eligibility for benefits being mandatory rather than discretionary. Inherited programs have a discernible effect on tax levels but less on public employment, which is subject to more variation. Taxation and public employees increase more than the number of government organizations,

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but the latter can also increase their weight through changes in laws and policy succession. Deregulation and regulatory reform have been actively discussed and sometimes implemented since the 1970s, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. But such policies are selective as well as controversial. In some cases, especially in financial policy, they have led to ‘buyers’ remorse’. As with other attempts to reduce Big Government, it may be difficult to sustain deregulation over the long run. This book includes an early use of the concept of ‘household income’, meaning unpaid, largely family-related endeavors as well as exchange through barter, in contrast to benefits provided by the public (state) and private market. Rose subsequently applied this idea in his studies of Japan, a country with a high level of welfare but lacking a big state (Rose and Shiratori 1986) and his studies of how people lived in under communism and postcommunism (Rose 1994). In his most recent work, Rose (2023) develops a worldwide perspective on all of these sources of ‘welfare’ (health, education, and income security, plus gender equality), including the ‘shadow market’, economic activity in which transactions occur without any official record, and the opportunities for corruption these interactions represent. An individual or a country’s total welfare is the sum of the interactions of these streams. The state’s significance involves a political debate about the welfare it should offer, at what cost, and what it should leave to other sources. As Rose contends, one would think that there would be political limits to what a nontotalitarian state can do to influence individual welfare. The response of citizens to public policy initiatives is measured in two dimensions, effectiveness and consent, a perspective more fully developed in Ordinary People in Public Policy (Rose 1989b). Rose was one of the first scholars to try to explain the role of ordinary citizens in public policy beyond public opinion surveys of contemporary controversies. This contrasted with the usual ‘top-down’ perspective in policy studies that focused on the role of elite actors, especially politicians and civil servants, in policymaking. This perspective led Rose to investigate further both legitimate and corrupt implementation of government policies, the latter relying on bribes from citizens rather than a neutral bureaucracy. This is public but corrupt administration for private ends, which has implications for both effectiveness and consent Rose and Peiffer 2018). Pursuing this model led to Rose receiving several international consultancies with the World Bank, other UN agencies, and Transparency

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International to investigate how people all over the world were using official and unofficial resources to meet their welfare needs, legitimately or illegitimately. In his latest book, Rose (2023) examines how the welfare of people around the world has changed after an era of globalization, how broadly, and at what rates. US exceptionalism is generally reaffirmed although Rose does not extensively explore this complicated topic until later, where he finds that the United States is one of a category of rich countries with ‘not so big’ governments (Rose 1989a). Two particular problems in including the United States in comparisons of democracies are that (1) the United States is much larger, in both population and economy, than the others; and (2) the United States has an unusually large national security sector, in spending and personnel. Overall, the United States has one of the smallest governments on a per capita basis as well as a relatively low share of federal public employees outside national security but nonetheless a large public sector in absolute terms (DiIulio 2017). As Rose notes, the size of the US population means that when new programs are adopted, they are likely to cover many people. The sheer numbers, plus the learning curve for new programs and the prevalence of a longstanding individualist ideology, leads to more complaints about the services provided as well as persistent debates over the effects of government growth. The United States also has an unusually large number of institutional ‘veto points’, which can slow down policy change (Stepan and Linz 2011)

Big Government in the Twenty-First Century As Rose points out, in the past economic or national security shocks have led to increases in public expenditures beyond the immediate circumstances of the shock. In recent years, there have been a plethora of shocks, including the Great Recession, COVID-19, the climate emergency, Brexit, the Ukraine war, and, more gradually, the rise of social media and robotization. The effects of these issues continue, but there is uncertainty about the longer-term effects on government growth of specific developments. Will the institutional response of societies and states in ‘mature’ neo-­ liberalism be similar or different than it was during ‘ascending’ neo-­ liberalism? For instance, although Rose thought that the prospects of an Orwellian state had been reduced in the 1980s, now the rise of social monitoring technology has shown what is possible, and at what cost.

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Rose (2023) recently has returned to some of these topics. In the early twentieth century, when public expenditure averaged only about 10 percent of GDP, almost all of it was devoted to administering the law, public safety, and defense (Flora et al. 1983). By the mid-twentieth century, after World War II, public expenditures for education, health, and income security had grown enormously in all Western democracies, ranging from a third of gross domestic product to a half (Ortiz-Ospina and Roser 2016). In 2020 among European Union member states, general government expenditure averaged 53.1 percent of GDP. Welfare in the form of health, education, and income security amounted to two-thirds of total public expenditure (Rose 2023). The formation of the European Union through the Maastricht Treaty of 1993 occurred subsequently to Rose’s book. For its continuing members, regulation, especially on economic and financial matters, has moved to the European level while some other policies have been devolved. One prominent feature of this international bonding of 27 (formerly 28 before the United Kingdom’s withdrawal) is the Stability and Growth Pact of 2003, which provides a fiscal framework to control the public spending of its members. However, there has been controversy over the unequal burdens of enforcement of these rules upon the members.1 The locus of government economic involvement has shifted in another way. Direct government control of the economy through ownership of assets (nationalization) has been replaced by redistribution through taxation and public programs for recipients. Furthermore, it has become more difficult to distinguish between public and private expenditures because of the growth of privatization and contracting out of central government services to other levels of government as well as to for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Although such schemes have existed for a long time, as in the nineteenth-century building of major infrastructure such as railroads through government grants, recently they have proliferated (DiIulio 2017; Reich 2022). This is an intertwining of public and private authority, with government providing subsidies and incentives through grants or tax preferences for private actors to act in ways the government prefers rather than through the legal coercion of government ownership or regulation. Such functions as delivering the mail, collecting taxes, health care, education, and other social protection services have become subjects for public-private partnerships rather than exclusively one or the other. Rose argues that privatization is a ‘placebo policy’ when it simply alters the delivery of public

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programs without altering responsibility for funding, which suggests that finance is more important than personnel in analyzing Big Government. Nonetheless, despite the fact that classification of specific positions differs across countries, estimates of public employment across countries can be made. Some countries rely on a public health system while others deliver publicly funded services through private providers. In the United States, much national security policy, for instance weapons development, is carried out by private enterprise on government contracts while in Europe some countries have public offices performing such work. Nonetheless, approximately half of US federal government workers, civilian and military, are employed in national security and defense, broadly considered (USA Facts 2021). While privatization can seemingly reduce the number of government workers, demographic factors, such as an aging population leading to the demand for more health care workers or birthrate fluctuations that influence educational employment, may counteract this. There is considerable variation in public employment across countries although the relative rankings have remained similar over the years. Overall, European countries have larger public employment than those in North America or Australasia. The Nordic countries and France continue to have the most while the United States has only about 15 percent in total at all levels of government. The United Kingdom and Germany had significant reductions in government employees in the wake of the Great Recession but it remains to be seen what the post-COVID situation will yield (World Atlas 2022). Changes other than democratization in global society can also lead to changes in government programs, possibly on a lagged basis, through processes of individual state lesson drawing and more collective globalization. The process of globalization has been variously described, but it usually includes such areas as multilateral standards for trade, investment, human capital, business networks, transfer of ideas, intellectual capital in commodities and services, technology transfer, human rights, and financial services. The generally recognized increase in globalization since World War II, founded on a rules-based order of liberal, regulated capitalism and incorporated into the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), has coincided with the largest and most widespread rise in living standards in human history (Rose 2023). Nonetheless, analysts such as Posen (2022) and Krugman (2022) argue

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that recent years have seen a slight decline in globalization, with countries becoming less open, perhaps associated with some of the shock events mentioned previously. The question is, for how long and how deep will such a decline persist? Does it portend the decline of neoliberalism (market preference) policies as a governing approach? As Rose (2023) argues, globalization raises aspirations for an improved standard of living through worldwide technological advances. It may also increase market and state resources to meet these aspirations. But performance in delivering welfare also may lag aspirations. Yet, welfare is especially significant to the billions of people who have yet to achieve a high standard of health, education, and work. Whatever a government’s level of spending, much of its budget is spent on welfare services such as the salaries of teachers and nurses, maintaining hospitals and schools, supporting employment, and other subsidies. Rose (2023) contends that the recessions of 1975, 2008, and 2020 generated some temporary contraction in Western economies and public spending, but these trends did not persist. Much of public spending on welfare services is through legal entitlements for citizens rather than discretionary means; thus, even anti-public spending governments in the United States and the United Kingdom have been only able to retard the onward march of state-supported welfare for limited time periods. Sometimes, however, governments may delay the starting date of government welfare programs and/or set time limits on them to generate more political support. Ironically, many wartime measures are time limited, but governments are still larger after major wars than before them. Some mainly rightwing, libertarian politicians have even proposed regular, sweeping reviews and even eliminations (sunset laws) of programs. Few of these have yet been successful, however, except in attenuated form in some US states. The United Kingdom has even found it difficult to ‘sunset’ EU-derived laws once it withdrew from that organization; in 2022 the government proposed controversial measures to eliminate some 4000 still standing EU-based laws (Horton 2022). On the opposite side, some analysts have proposed a more inclusive welfare state to meet changing work force and dependency developments (Esping-Andersen et al. 2022). In recent years, the shock events and some trends mentioned previously have added to pressures for more spending, but will such programs be sustained? Recently the Economist (2021b) commented: ‘Now President Joe Biden is building on what started as emergency pandemic related

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policy, expanding the child-tax credit, creating a universal federally funded child-care system, subsidizing paid family leave and expanding Obamacare’. But none of these programs, with the partial exception of Obamacare (state-mandated federal health care coverage through a public-private partnership), were legislated into policy in the near term, although they may be resurrected. In fact, the 2022 large-scale spending package predominantly was directed at improving energy supplies, both sustainable and unsustainable, and Medicare enhancement. Aside from environmental issues, the legislation was aimed more at the elderly, a growing segment of the population who famously vote in large numbers and who have, across western countries, disproportionately benefited from welfare expansion since the 1980s (Lindert 2021). Nonetheless, after examining the relentless, albeit sometimes sporadic, growth of government spending, the neoliberal Economist seems reluctantly reconciled to western governments’ inevitable expansion, and instead calls for responsible examination of the benefits and costs of individual programs (Economist 2021b). Kenworthy (2017) examines the effects of increased government spending across 21 of the world’s industrialized democracies over recent decades but is hampered by a lack of comparable long-term data on questions other than economic growth. In most of these countries, he finds that government size, especially relative government size, has not changed much since the mid-1980s. But measures for most of the hypothesized consequences of big government—ease of doing business, government effectiveness, competition, innovation, and employment hours—are only available for more recent years. While various hypotheses on Big Government, especially the effects of government spending, may apply in specific short-term situations, such as the financial crisis of 2008 (when US federal employees shrank) or the Greek budgetary crisis, the evidence indicates that the world’s rich longstanding-­democratic countries have not passed any tipping point for general harmful effects of government spending. There is no association between countries with higher taxes and government spending and more ‘regulatory burdens on business, less effective government, higher government debt, less product market competition, less innovation, less work effort, or slower economic growth’ (Kenworthy 2017). The lack of convincing empirical evidence for any deleterious effects of big government may help account for why there has been a loss of interest in this question

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over the years, even as the study of public policy has flourished in other dimensions.

The Problem of Consent As Rose points out, a large measure of public consent, or acceptance of government actions, is necessary for Big Government to function effectively, with a high level of compliance. Is there a connection between institutionalized democracy and the growth of government? What are the implications of public consent for government programs? Even if they originate in the ideas of educated elites rather than in the public, most government programs increasing welfare have majority popular support and can maintain that level. But most people do not care about the source of welfare measures, only that they receive benefits, and usually the more, the better. Hence, welfare can be supplied by private enterprises, family, and corrupt sources as well as legitimate public ones. Furthermore, people are not primarily political creatures; Rose therefore finds that life satisfaction and democratic satisfaction vary independently. The situation in Western democracies generally could be described as ‘qualified consent’, based on both varying expectations and achievements. Rose argues that political consent, not socioeconomic consent, is the most critical ingredient for governments. The general level of political consent varies among countries; in low consent countries, government authority is fragile. Are there consequences for consent if government grows larger? Is there a relationship between the size of government and the increasing suspicion and distrust of government in Western societies over the past half century? It is hard to disengage these two variables from the multitude of others that might affect political behavior. But the problem of maintaining consent, which Rose (1971) pioneered with his early research into Northern Ireland, has now become a more mainstream topic (Anderson et al. 2005). In comparison to the relatively high ratings for popular consent to governmental versus nongovernmental institutions when Rose first wrote, recent years have seen a reversal (Edsall 2022). As Rose points out, law enforcement depends largely on voluntary consent, and this seems to be declining in several countries. Rose cites public health as an issue on which there was considerable consent for government action in the 1980s. Subsequently, a succession of measures were legislated in western countries to combat smoking as a major public health

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hazard. Some of these measures were based on voluntary compliance, which was largely successful (Cairney et al. 2012). However, the recent experience of the COVID pandemic featured intense reaction against public health measures of governments in some countries, including the United States and Canada. While most people complied, such cooperation declined as the toll of the epidemic increased, and dissidents were especially vocal and demonstrative in their objections. Thus, even in the case of a clear threat to public well-being, governments could not count on compliance (Sullum 1998). Other public health issues with compliance problems in some countries include cannabis, abortion, and earlier, prohibition. These are also issues that have a substantial component of social regulation (morality). As Rose says, political consent, especially on such issues as political and civil rights, is the first priority of governments, more important than political effectiveness. In generating that consent, the expectations of Marshall (1950) that social rights (welfare) would become as important as more longstanding political and economic rights have not been fulfilled. Nonetheless, a shift in some countries, especially in the Nordic area, from means-tested benefits, limited to low-income groups, to all citizens being entitled to benefits apparently has broadened the base of public support for this state aid. Broadening access to benefits in general is an important source of government growth (Rose 2023). Nevertheless, despite a period of expanding welfare benefits in the United States in recent years, in 2022 some surveys found that, for the first time in their sampled history, the status of democracy was ranked as the top political problem, and large majorities think democracy is at risk (Bump 2022). Rose indicates that in the early 1980s support for anti-regime political parties that reject compliance was not widespread. Matters have changed considerably since then, with the rise of anti-regime rightwing (sometimes labeled ‘populist’) parties to significant shares of the vote and even a role in government in several established democracies, including the United States. Except for the United States, however, these rightwing insurgent parties do not challenge the enlarged role of the state, and in fact most of them favor welfare benefits, least for their preferred groups of people. As Rose indicated, their concerns are more likely to be cultural, religious, and identity ones. These include the aggressive maintenance of Christian values and traditional culture and limits on immigration, crime, ethnic minority rights, and sexual and reproductive practices (Busemeyer et al. 2021). They also often favor moving from established liberal democratic practices

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to ‘illiberal democracy’. In some cases, this has led to rejection of certified electoral results, a critical ingredient for maintaining consent (Anderson et al. 2005). Federal and quasi-federal systems are particularly prone to problems with compliance as jurisdictional authority often overlaps. Challenges to central authority, as well as to each other’s legal competences, are often undertaken by lower-level jurisdictions in these systems. This has occurred in recent years in the United States on such issues as migration and abortion. The larger question, of course, is whether such noncompliance becomes part of the political culture and whether it portends a more generalized lack of consent, leading to secessionism and potential Civil War. It remains to be seen whether changes toward increased devolution in response can stifle separatist movements in the long run. In the quasi-federal system of the EU, Rose (2013; 2020) has identified the lack of direct links between the demos (public) and EU decision-­ making institutions as a particular problem for consent. Thus, the main instrument for the public to indicate dissent about EU policies is through referendums on EU issues (Brexit) and, more indirectly, through individual member state elections. Rose’s earlier work on transitions to democracy in central and eastern Europe suggested that it was an ironic advantage for these new regimes (all non-federal) to have a long and recent history of non-democracy (Rose et al. 1998). The citizens were more likely to be patient and satisfied with smaller, imperfect increments of democracy, or the ‘lesser evil’, but this patience may erode over time.

Conclusion: Is Big Government Inevitable? Most political analysts have accepted that Big Government is inevitable, at least in the macro sense if not in individual programs. That helps explain why there are not more recent studies addressing the causes and consequences of Big Government. Many of the dozens of hypotheses that Rose offered in 1984 have not been extensively explored. It is still early days in the assessment of the medium-term and long-term effects of recent complicating factors such as the COVID pandemic, the Ukraine War, the climate crisis, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the possible decline of globalization. Based on previous results, especially on the lasting impact of widespread wars, we might expect increases in government spending and personnel. But how much consent is necessary to achieve these tasks? As

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Rose indicates, if countries maintain relatively free societies, consent will be necessary. These questions are worth increased attention. We can now reexamine some of the earlier questions, especially whether Big Government in the United Kingdom and the United States is a permanent feature, and possibly even could increase. The Conservative governments in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s were able to avoid fiscal and political stress by harnessing two important but unsustainable sources of revenue, the sale of public assets such as housing (McAllister and Studlar 1989) and North Sea oil. The subsequent record of British public spending reveals a pattern of temporary cutbacks (periods of austerity) but increases in times of economic crisis. Broadly, while the United Kingdom is now at the bottom of public spending in Europe and has progressively descended the European league table for domestic public spending, it responds similarly to other countries in macroeconomic cycles, spending more when an economic downturn hits. With all levels of government included, the United States shows a similar trend, albeit at even lower levels of public spending (Ortiz-Ospina and Roser 2016). In both countries, attempts at supply side economic policies through tax cuts and reducing the burden of government regulation while continuing high levels of spending have been stymied, ironically, because of a lack of confidence by private market forces that such an approach can avoid fiscal stress. Reaganomics left that president’s successor, George H.W. Bush, with a fiscal and political dilemma over increasing taxes. US state experiments, notably in Kansas, have led to fiscal problems and political departures. The fate of UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s attempt was even more short-lived than those in the United States. Although some recent programs in both countries were an emergency response to the economic and social dislocations of the pandemic, attempts by US Republicans in Congress to enact more comprehensive retrenchments thus far have foundered on their reluctance to identify the specific reductions they envision and to bear the electoral consequences of deep cuts in such extensive and popular programs as social security (old age pensions) and Medicare (medical support for the elderly). Thus, they are left to make attention-getting arguments about relatively small reductions. Overall, the specific public programs in a country at a particular time may vary in size. There may be temporary reductions in government spending and even elimination of some programs. But the larger trend in Western democracies over the past 40 years has been for government to remain not only big but to increase.

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Note 1. For more on the fiscal policies of the EU, see Peters in this volume.

References Anderson, C.J., et al. 2005. Losers’ Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Bump, P. 2022. Americans Agree Democracy Is at Risk. They Disagree Vehemently on Why. Washington Post, October 18. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/2022/10/18/democracy-­risks-­democrats-­republicans/. Accessed 26 October 2022. Busemeyer, M.R., P. Rathgeb, and A.H.J. Sahm. 2021. Authoritarian Values and the Welfare State: The Social Policy Preferences of Radical Right Voters. West European Politics 45 (1): 1–25. Cairney, P. 2012. Understanding Public Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cairney, P., D.  Studlar, and H.  Mamudu. 2012. Global Tobacco Control: Policy, Governance and Transfer. London: Palgrave. Castles, F.G., ed. 1993. Families of Nations: Patterns of Public Policy in Western Democracies. Aldershot: Dartmouth. ———. 1998. Comparative Public Policy: Patterns of Post-war Transformation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Clinton, W.J. 1996. State of the Union address. US Capitol, 23 January. https:// clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/New/other/sotu.html. Accessed 23 November 2022. DiIulio, J.J. 2017. 10 Questions and Answers About America’s Big Government. Brookings Institution, 13 February. https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/ votervital/public-­service-­and-­the-­federal-­government/. Accessed 16 November 2022. Dodds, A. 2013. Comparative Public Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Economist. 2021a. Briefing: Government Spending. 20–26 November. ———. 2021b. The Triumph of Big Government. 20–26 November. Edsall, T.B. 2022. When It Comes to Eating Away at Democracy, Trump is a Winner. New York Times, 24 August. https://www.nytimes. com/2022/08/24/opinion/us-­democracy-­trump.html?searchResultPosit ion=9. Accessed 27 October 2022. Esping-Andersen, G. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Esping-Andersen, G., et  al., eds. 2022. Why We Need a New Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press. Finer, S.E., ed. 1975. Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform. London: Anthony Wigram.

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Flora, P.J., et al. 1983. State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe 1815–1975: A Data Handbook in Two Volumes. Volume I: The Growth of Mass Democracies and Welfare States. London: Macmillan. Horton, H. 2022. UK Plans for ‘Sunsetting’ EU Laws Post-Brexit ‘Not Fit for Purpose’. Guardian, 22 November. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/22/uk-­plans-­for-­sunsetting-­eu-­laws-­post-­brexit-­not-­fit-­for-­ purpose. Accessed 23 November 2022. Kelton, S. 2020. The Deficit Myth. London: John Murray. Kenworthy, L. 2017. Is Big Government Bad for the Economy? The Good Society. https://lanekenworthy.net/is-­b ig-­g overnment-­b ad-­f or-­t he-­e conomy/. Accessed 26 October 2022. King, A. 1975. Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s. Political Studies 23 (2): 284–296. Krugman, P. 2019. How Much Does Heterodoxy Help Progressives? (Wonkish). New York Times. 12 February. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/ opinion/how-­m uch-­d oes-­h eterodoxy-­h elp-­p rogressives-­w onkish.html. Accessed 1 March 2023. ———. 2022. The World Is Getting Less Flat. New York Times. 6 September. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/krugman+Septmeber+6/ FMfcgzGqQSKNXPLjChWJCbkzJXkBpWQV. Accessed 26 October 2022. Lindert, P.H. 2021. Making Social Spending Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowi, T. 1964. American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory. World Politics 16 (4): 677–715. Marshall, T.H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAllister, I., and D.T. Studlar. 1989. Popular Versus Elite Views of Privatization: The Case of Britain. Journal of Public Policy 9 (2): 157–178. Mitchell, W., et al. 2019. Macroeconomics. London: Red Globe. Obinger, H., and U. Wagschal. 2001. Families of Nations and Public Policy. West European Politics 24 (1): 99–114. Ortiz-Ospina, E., and M.  Roser. 2016. Government Spending. https://ourworldindata.org/government-­spending. Accessed 26 October 2022. Peters, B.G., and B.W.  Hogwood. 1982. Policy Dynamics: The Policy Succession Process. Brighton: Harvester. Posen, A.S. 2022. The End of Globalization? What Russia’s War in Ukraine Means for the World Economy. Foreign Affairs. 17 March. Reich, R. 2022. America Used to Regulate Business. Now Government Subsidizes It. Guardian. 21 August. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/21/america-­used-­to-­r egulate-­business-­now-­government-­ subsidises-­it. Accessed 27 October 2022. Rose, R. 1971. Governing Without Consensus. Boston: Beacon Press.

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———. 1975. Overloaded Government: The Problem Outlined. European Studies Newsletter 5 (3): 13–18. ———. 1984a. Do Parties Make a Difference? 2nd ed. Chatham NJ: Chatham House. ———. 1984b. Understanding Big Government: The Programme Approach. Beverly Hills: Sage. ———., ed. 1985a. Public Employment in Western Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1985b. The Programme Approach to the Growth of Government. British Journal of Political Science 15 (1): 1–28. ———. 1989a. How Exceptional Is the American Political Economy? Political Science Quarterly 104 (1): 91–115. ———. 1989b. Ordinary People in Public Policy: A Behavioural Analysis. London: Sage. ———. 1993. Lesson Drawing in Public Policy. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. ———. 1994. Comparing Welfare Across Time and Space. Vienna: European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, Eurosocial Report 49. ———. 2005. Learning from Comparative Public Policy: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Representing Europeans: A Pragmatic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Learning About Politics in Time and Space. Colchester: ECPR Press. ———. 2020. How Referendums Challenge European Democracy: Brexit and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2023. Welfare Goes Global: Making Progress and Catching Up. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, R., and P.L.  Davies. 1994. Inheritance in Public Policy: Change Without Choice in Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rose, R., W.  Mishler, and C.  Haerpfer. 1998. Democracy and Its Alternatives. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rose, R., and C. Peiffer. 2018. Bad Governance and Corruption. London: Springer. Rose, R., and G.  Peters. 1978. Can Government Go Bankrupt? New  York: Basic Books. Rose, R., and R. Shiratori, eds. 1986. The Welfare State East and West. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, T.A. 1975. The Comparative Policy-Process. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. Smith, T.A., and R. Tatalovich. 2003. Cultures at War: Moral Conflicts in Western Democracies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stepan, A., and J.J. Linz. 2011. Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States. Perspectives on Politics 9 (4): 841–856.

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Studlar, D.T. 1993. Ethnic Minority Groups, Agenda Setting, and Policy Borrowing in Britain. In Minority Group Influence: Agenda Setting, Policy Formulation and Public Policy, ed. P.D.  McClain. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Studlar, D.T., and G.J.  Burns. 2015. Toward the Permissive Society? Morality Policy Agendas and Policy Directions in Western Democracies. Policy Sciences 48 (3): 273–291. Sullum, J. 1998. For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health. New York: Free Press. USA Facts. 2021. Employees. https://usafacts.org/annual-­publications/2021/ government-­10-­k/part-­i/item-­1-­purpose-­and-­function-­of-­our-­government-­ general/employees/. Accessed 27 October 2022. van Mechelen, D., and R.  Rose. 1986. Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation. Aldershot: Gower. Waltman, J.L. 2008. Minimum Wage Policy in Great Britain and the United States. New York: Algora. World Atlas. 2022. The Best Countries for Employment in the Public Sector. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-­best-­countries-­for-­employment-­in-­ the-­public-­sector.html. Accessed 27 October 2022.

PART IV

Public Policy

CHAPTER 8

Learning Across Time and Space: Richard Rose’s Work on Lesson-Drawing Mauricio I. Dussauge-Laguna

As in the case of all other topics included in this volume, Richard Rose’s work on ‘lesson-drawing’ (a term he coined back in the early 1990s) has been tremendously influential in the public policy and administration fields. During the past 30 years, Rose’s ideas about how countries may— or should seek to—draw lessons from policy experiences in other jurisdictions have provided a fruitful source for researchers. Indeed, a quick look at Google Scholar shows thousands of articles and books citing Rose’s The author would like to thank Professor Maira Vaca for her wonderful advice on this work and everything else; Professor Kensuke Takayasu and Seikei University’s Center for Asian and Pacific Studies’ staff for their generous hospitality and support while writing the chapter; Professors Ed Page and Guy Peters for their helpful comments and their kind invitation to contribute to this volume; and last, but not least, to Professor Richard Rose for taking the time to read these pages and clarify some points about his lesson-drawing approach.

M. I. Dussauge-Laguna (*) Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Sede México, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_8

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lesson-drawing approach (Rose 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Rose and Wignanek 1990). Rose’s concepts and overall take on lesson-drawing have endured the test of time, and have stimulated many authors to amplify, discuss, and challenge the principles he laid out (James and Lodge 2003; De Jong 2009; Page and Mark-Lawson 2007; Evans 2006). There is now a substantial number of works using lesson-drawing as a point of departure in fields as diverse as climate governance (Benson and Lorenzoni 2014), health insurance (Leiber et al. 2015), regulatory impact analysis (Radaelli 2004), or the Covid-19 pandemic (Petridou et  al. 2020). More importantly, Rose’s approach has also become a core element of subsequent debates on policy transfer and related areas (Wolman 1992; Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Cairney 2019; Porto de Oliveira 2021a). This chapter discusses Richard Rose’s main propositions about lesson-­ drawing. The first section summarizes his central ideas on this subject. The second section debates the extent to which Rose’s path-breaking work has found empirical support in the academic literature. As the chapter shows, Rose’s insights have remained relevant in many respects, yet subsequent works have also shown some of its limits. The overall result has been the emergence of an academic field which has built and expanded on Rose’s work, and which now provides an interesting set of references for learning about how policy ideas travel across space, as well as for better understanding how and why such exchanges influence policy developments in different jurisdictions across time.

Lesson-Drawing and Policymaking In his classic paper on lesson-drawing, Rose (1991a, 3) wrote: ‘Every country has problems, and each thinks that its problems are unique to its place and time’. Yet, he argued, unique public problems are rare. On the contrary, governments around the world usually face similar policy challenges for providing health and education, building infrastructure, collecting taxes, and so on. Therefore, while policymakers may imagine and devise new solutions, Rose argued they could instead look at other government settings (whether locally, nationally, or abroad) to ‘draw lessons’. Per Rose’s approach, policymaking should not be a parochial activity. In fact, policymakers should aim to ‘learn from’ others in similar conditions. If the existence of common problems leading (potentially) to common solutions was the first ‘precondition’ (Rose 1993, 3) to lesson-drawing,

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the other was easy access to information about policies in other jurisdictions. Writing on this subject initially in the 1990s, Rose flagged how international information flows had ‘been radically accelerated by modern technology moving people and information from one continent to another’ (Rose 1993, 3). This trend would further accelerate with the introduction of worldwide internet-based communications, as noted in Rose’s second book on the subject (Rose 2004). The implication for policymakers was simple: they could easily search for lessons anywhere, anytime. Indeed, Rose stated (1993, 5) that ‘differences across space are increasingly matters of degree, not kind’. In contrast to previous policy diffusion discussions which focused on the timing and territorial patterns by which similar policy innovations were adopted across jurisdictions, Rose argued that lesson-drawing was less determined by ‘geographical propinquity’ than by ‘subjective identification’ (Rose 1991a, 14). While local officials may look at adjacent municipalities, and national policymakers may explore policies in neighboring countries, Rose stressed that, ‘[p]otentially, there is no limit to the distance that might be travelled’ (1991a, 14). Political affinities are certainly important to determine where to look for lessons. Money matters, too (Rose 1993, 96). And there will always be some ‘exemplar’ countries ‘attracting a stream of visitors to examine their programmes’ (Rose 1991a, 14). Yet, Rose’s central point was that, when policymakers were searching for lessons, this activity was (and should be) less bounded by cultural or institutional patterns than guided by functional concerns. In the end, it should be functional considerations (e.g., the presence of common problems) which motivate policymakers to contact people with similar interests, whether government officials, international organization experts, or participants in broader epistemic communities (Rose 1993, 101). According to Rose, the search for policy lessons is not ‘driven by idle curiosity’ (Rose 1991a, 10): or by policymakers’ desire to learn about the world, but in response to some kind of ‘dissatisfaction’ regarding a particular public program (Rose 1991a, 1993). This dissatisfaction could be a result of electoral changes or shifting political values. Yet, ultimately, it was the policymakers’ dissatisfaction about the functioning or effects of a government program which would trigger an interest in looking for lessons elsewhere. Lesson-drawing is, thus, a ‘voluntaristic’ process (Rose 1991a, 9). But above all, lesson-drawing is ‘problem-oriented’ (Rose 2004, 5). Thus, policymakers need to ‘search analytically rather than anecdotally’ (Rose 1991a, 19).

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Lessons are not ‘big ideas’, ‘symbols’, ‘historical analogies’, ‘comparisons’ (Rose 1991a, 8-10), or ‘disjointed set of ideas’ (Rose 1993, 13). For Rose, a lesson is: ‘a program for action based on a program or programs undertaken in another city, state, or nation, or by the same organization in its own past’ (Rose 1993, 21). Policymakers may decide to ‘copy’, ‘adapt’, ‘make a hybrid’, ‘synthesize’, or get ‘inspiration’ based on programs found in other jurisdictions (Rose 1993, 19-32). They may also draw a ‘negative’ lesson: ‘learn what not to do from watching the mistakes of others’ (Rose 1991a, 4). Ultimately, lessons are supposed to be ‘cause-and-effect models’ (Rose 1993, 27) from policies found elsewhere, which may then guide policymakers’ policy (re)design efforts in their own jurisdictions. Rose argues that policymakers need to answer a key question: ‘Can a programme now operating in country X be put into effect in country Y in future?’ (Rose 1991a, 19). To do so, Rose proposes a set of detailed procedures, which in his later works on the subject becomes a ‘ten-steps guide’ with clearly practical intentions (Rose 2002, 2004). Rose’s guide lists each of the actions policymakers should follow to draw lessons from abroad, from preparing their search to deciding how to apply the lesson in their own jurisdiction. Like ‘doctors of medicine’ (Rose 2004, 16), policymakers need to understand the underlying causes of the problems they face. They need to compare programs and look for benchmarks and best practices in other jurisdictions, both near and far (Rose 2004, 47). Once a relevant experience has been found, policymakers need to act as ‘engineers’ (Rose 1991a, 2004). They have to gather all necessary information to understand the context and foundations of the program under study to produce a ‘model’, that is a ‘generic description […] in terms sufficiently general for it to be portable across national boundaries, yet sufficiently concrete so that policymakers in the country importing a model will be able to relate to each of its parts to activities with which they are familiar’ (Rose 2004, 71). Policymakers then return home and must decide whether a lesson may be applied or not. Resources, political support, program characteristics, and value congruence, among others, are all factors to be assessed when thinking about the ‘transferability’ of a program, as well as about the kind of lesson (e.g., copy, hybrid, etc.) to be implemented (Rose 1993, 2004). Thus, while Rose acknowledges that policymakers need to consider institutional and organizational conditions, a rather rationalistic aspiration cuts across his ‘ten-steps guide’ and the exhaustive search for examples, information, and calculations it requires.

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For Rose, lesson-drawing is an exercise across space, but also across time. This is because policymakers ‘search for lessons that will alter what they do in the future’ (Rose 1993, x). This means that learning from other experiences also imply conducting a ‘prospective evaluation’ (Rose 1991b). In contrast with regular policymaking processes, lesson-drawing promotes ‘bounded speculation’ that allows anticipating ‘future consequences’ (Rose 1991a, 4). By looking at other examples and understanding their underlying functioning, policymakers obtain an idea of what they need to do today to improve future conditions (Rose 1991a, 4-5). Even when learning about policies elsewhere does not lead to immediate changes in programs, Rose argues that when a lesson is not welcome, policymakers may ‘adopt a patient stance, waiting for the winds of political fortune to shift, and drive support in their direction’ (Rose 1991a, 28). In the end, ‘[a]nalysis across time and space is both comparative and dynamic’ (Rose 1993, 32).

Learning Lessons About Lesson-Drawing Since the publication of Rose’s pioneering works on lesson-drawing, the literature on this and related subjects has grown significantly. There are now hundreds of studies, both conceptual and empirically oriented, which discuss who, what, how, and why policymakers learn from others (Page 2000; Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Benson and Jordan 2011; Graham et al. 2013; Hadjiisky et  al. 2017; Stone 2017; Minkman et  al. 2018; Evans et al. 2019; Porto de Oliveira 2021a, 2021b). Many of the findings from this literature have provided support for Rose’s ideas. While not a modern development, as Rose himself noted (Westney 1987; Page 2000), lesson-­ drawing has certainly become a frequent activity among national and local government officials alike (Mossberger and Wolman 2003; Wolman and Page 2002; Shipan and Volden 2012). The rise of similar institutions across very different nations (e.g., regulatory agencies, ombudsman offices, tobacco control regulations, gender equality legislation) not only shows the presence of global diffusion dynamics; it also gives support to the idea that policymakers facing common problems tend to look for similar solutions elsewhere. The active role of international organizations in producing cross-national indicators and comparative studies, mostly for the consumption of national policymakers, has also contributed to the consolidation of global epistemic communities facilitating the borrowing of ideas (Evans and Davies 1999; Pal 2012; Stone 2012).

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At the same time, the academic literature in the past three decades has offered both important nuances and interesting additions to some of Rose’s pioneering insights. While there are different literatures that study ‘how ideas travel’ (Mukhtarov and Daniell 2016; Graham et  al. 2013; Porto de Oliveira 2021a, 2021b; Osorio and Vergara 2016; Dussauge-­ Laguna 2012a, Dussauge-Laguna and del Castillo 2020), including policy transfer, policy diffusion, policy circulation, policy mobilities, and lesson-­ drawing itself, many of the works have revolved around the same basic issues and questions Rose initially flagged in his works. The following is but a brief discussion on some of these topics, trying to show that many of these debates remain open. Lesson-Drawing and the Limits of Rationality One area of discussion regarding lesson-drawing relates to the degree of rationality involved in such processes. Rose’s point of departure is that of Herbert Simon’s ‘bounded rationality’: faced with dissatisfaction, policymakers do not search for optimal solutions, but only for satisficing ones (Rose 1991a). On the other, Rose’s overall approach (particularly his ‘ten-­ steps guide’, devised by him on a Weberian ‘ideal-typical’ spirit) has been perceived as a rationalistic one (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Page and Mark-Lawson 2007). Indeed, Rose’s approach to learning from comparative policy does suggest an understanding of rationality that is perhaps too ambitious and demanding on policymakers (De Jong 2009). While there are some historical examples that do point at rational-oriented endeavors, such as the experience of Japanese officials studying several countries during the Meiji era (Westney 1987; see also Shipan and Volden 2012; Gilardi et  al. 2009), is this really a pattern applicable to most lesson-drawing experiences? For some authors, the degree of rationality underlying cross-national learning activities is far from what Rose imagined. Writing about social policy reforms in Latin America, Weyland (2009) has shown that policymakers hardly search, compare, and assess several programmatic options. Nor do they abstract models out of what they think are the best foreign programs to learn from. In fact, policymakers employ ‘heuristics’ to simply use whatever model is already ‘available’ and can be used as an ‘anchor’ to develop a program at home. Other authors, like Page and Mark-Lawson (2007), and Mossberger and Wolman (2003) have argued that policymakers face several challenges that impede them fulfill Rose’s ideal approach to

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drawing lessons. For most policymakers, it simply is not easy to gather detailed information about programs in other jurisdictions. Nor is it always possible for them to assess the differences between the original program’s institutional setting and their own. Therefore, building ‘models’ about how a program works elsewhere or performing accurate prospective evaluation exercises are very difficult tasks. Other authors have argued that lesson-drawing may not always be rational simply because there are reasons other than ‘learning’ that trigger the transfer of some programs or policy ideas (Elkins and Simmons 2005; Marsh and Sharman 2009; Shipan and Volden 2008; Osorio 2019; Kuhlmann 2021). Contemporary debates about the ‘mechanisms’ behind policy diffusion and policy transfer have underlined how policy borrowing may have its origins in ‘coercive’ dynamics (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Stone 2012). For instance, the enactment of national laws which mandate the application of certain programs or instruments across subnational governments (e.g., matching grants in the United States; Shipan and Volden 2012); or in the adoption by national governments of international standards when joining a multilateral organization (e.g., the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD; Carroll and Kellow 2011). In such cases, a detailed analysis of a foreign program may be less a trigger for policy transfer than an ex post exercise needed to cope with a forced program change. In yet other instances, the travel of certain programs or institutions across nations may be simply a result of emulation, as the literature on non-majoritarian institutions and regulatory agencies has shown (Thatcher and Sweet 2002). Thus, it would be hard to think that policymakers followed Rose’s ten-steps guide in empirical experiences where institutional changes resulted from policy fashions or institutional mimicry. The rationality of lesson-drawing has also been put into question by policy transfer processes that end up being anything but beneficial for importer jurisdictions. For instance, Sharman (2010) has studied how the adoption of national tax blacklists across various countries resulted in a ‘dysfunctional’ outcome, national policymakers simply copied and pasted other countries’ legislations and incurred in significant mistakes (e.g., including the name of their own country in the blacklist). Similarly, Park et al. (2017) have argued that the adoption of the UK social enterprise policy by the South Korean government produced a ‘distorted’ policy transfer experience. While policymakers borrowed certain aspects of the British policy, they did not really consider the particularities of the British

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context. As a result, the adopted policy negatively affected the very target population (socially disadvantaged people) it was supposed to help. Lesson-Drawing and the Role(s) Policymakers Play Rose attributes a key role to policymakers (e.g., government officials) as the people in charge of drawing lessons about other policy experiences. This is, indeed, their core feature, and it is one that has been well supported by the literature. However, there is also now abundant empirical evidence that shows policymakers also play many other different roles. This is particularly the case if policymakers do not just sit and wait until favorable conditions facilitate the adoption of the lessons they have drawn, but instead try to actively promote changes informed by their learning. The emergent literatures on policy circulation and policy mobilities, for instance, have explained how policymakers use policy tours for purposes other than just learning. Montero (2017) shows that the circulation of ‘ciclovías’ (bicycle lines) across Latin American countries was not only the product of several ‘study tours’. In fact, the transfer of this program in the region was facilitated in some cities because policymakers tried to persuade relevant actors and sought to build policy change coalitions. Similarly, Wood (2014) describes how the repeated meetings held between South African and South American officials were helpful not only for knowledge exchange purposes, but also to build their social relationships. This in turn, she argues, was key for the adoption of the Latin American Bus Rapid Transit System model across African cities. Besides trying to learn from the experience of others, policymakers are also faced with the challenge of developing strategies to ensure the lessons they have learned can be effectively implemented (Page and Mark-Lawson 2007, 50). For instance, when trying to introduce performance-oriented practices learned from the experience of other countries, both Chilean and Mexican policymakers realized the lessons they had drawn were not evidence enough to advance policy changes (Dussauge-Laguna 2019). They thus had to find ways to embed policy changes into their country’s institutional and regulatory framework. They also engaged in active political and bureaucratic ‘marketing’ activities so that key political and policy actors understood how the newly borrowed programs suit their countries’ public administrations. And they actively sought ‘international legitimation’ to shield the newly imported programs from criticisms. Thus,

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policymakers interested in lesson-drawing sooner than later become involved in policy institutionalization processes, and they need to act accordingly. In other cases, the traditional role that policymakers play in learning from abroad gets basically reversed: instead of being avid policy importers interested in drawing lessons from the experience of others, they become policy exporters actively engaged in the international dissemination of lessons about their own programs. In his research of the diffusion of participatory democracy and hunger eradication policies, Porto de Oliveira (2020) has shown that national policymakers sometimes assume a role of ‘policy ambassadors’. These policymakers invest their time and effort, and take advantage of their skills and institutional position, to promote their programs in different forums. Lesson-Drawing and the Relevance of International Agents In Rose’s lesson-drawing approach, agents such as international/multilateral organizations and global epistemic communities play a key role. The former serve as repositories of useful advice to national policymakers, particularly due to the rankings, benchmarks, and other cross-national analyses they produce. The later provide a source of expert information and ideas for their national counterparts. While the literature has indeed provided significant support to Rose’s view (Stone 2012; Hadjiisky 2021), discussions have also showed that international actors sometimes perform a more central role on how lessons are learned. Moreover, discussions have described international circuits for cross-national learning which are much more complex than those initially depicted by Rose. Some international organizations have had a central role in the construction and diffusion of certain policy ‘lessons’. In such cases, the transfer of lessons from abroad does not have its origins in a model produced by national policymakers after they have carefully studied a program in another jurisdiction. For instance, Walt et al. (2004) show how the World Health Organization (WHO) managed to design, package, and market a particular health policy approach to controlling tuberculosis. Given its leadership on the subject and the alliances it built with some policy communities and other international organizations, the WHO was in a position to promote a ready-made solution (e.g., DOTS) that countries could simply adopt. National policymakers thus did not have to look for a

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‘lesson’ to a common problem. In fact, the lesson had been already devised for them by the WHO. Other analyses have shown that international organizations are not merely passive actors waiting to be consulted by national officials on certain policy issues. For example, works on the OECD have shown how this organization does not limit itself to producing valuable comparative assessments and detailed country policy reviews (Pal 2014). In fact, through its cross-national comparisons, the OECD ends up creating and monitoring certain policy and regulatory standards (Stone 2012), which its member countries are then expected to follow. Moreover, as the experience with the New Public Management approach of the 1990s and early 2000s showed (Pal 2012), international organizations may sometimes use their ‘soft power’ to promote a reform agenda during its meetings. National policymakers are thus exposed to certain models, while at the same time, they are offered advice and support for the adoption and adaptation of said models (Perales and Dussauge-Laguna forthcoming). Many authors have also pointed at the increasing relevance of international multilevel networks in cross-national policy transfers (Evans and Davies 1999). Besides the epistemic communities and international organizations mentioned by Rose, there are now dozens of international think tanks, private consultancies, aid agencies, global foundations, and university centers which actively participate in the global circulation of ideas, ‘best practices’, and policy instruments (Stone et al. 2021). These international agents may serve as ‘instrument constituencies’ (Howlett and Saguin 2021), developing norms and standards, facilitating study tours, funding advisory teams, and supporting capacity building exercises, among other things. As a result, they exert a significant influence on the kind of examples national policymakers may observe and, ultimately, on the specific lessons they may draw. Some transnational networks have also served as privileged channels for the transmission of ideas eventually leading to policy learning and policy changes. In his work on policy networks in the ‘Anglosphere’, Legrand (2021) has shown how policymakers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States met regularly to discuss various policy topics, such as the introduction of welfare reforms and the adoption of New Public Management principles. Meeting on a regular basis throughout the years, these national policymakers become ‘agents of transgovernmental policy transfer’, exchanging information and

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data, building common benchmarks, sharing experiences, and supporting an ‘iterative’ process of lesson-drawing. Lesson-Drawing and Its Temporal Implications Rose was a pioneer both in stressing the relevance of lesson-drawing for policymaking processes, as well as in arguing that learning across space also implied learning across time. As noted above, he pointed to several ways in which time matters, but his initial insights were mostly ignored by the literature until recently (Dussauge-Laguna 2012b). As Rose argued, time matters because policymakers need to carry out prospective evaluations to ponder about the transferability of certain lessons, and because sometimes they need to wait for the right time to implement the lessons they learned. Yet time also matters for lesson-drawing for several other reasons. Policy transfers, for example, generally take considerable time. They are ‘protracted’ processes (Page 2000) which may last a few months, but often take years, even decades (Sangar 2020). Westney’s (1987) study about how hundreds of Japanese officials were sent to learn from various European government policies for more than three decades in the late 1800s is a classic but not rare example. The transfer of performance-­ oriented policies from Anglo-American countries to Chile and Mexico happened throughout the 1990s–2000s (Dussauge-Laguna 2013b). Similarly, van de Velde (2013) describes how Dutch railways officials learned from Japanese railways practices over two decades. Therefore, more than a single act by which policymakers solve a specific programmatic issue, lesson-drawing sometimes ends up being a continuous process by which officials draw several lessons about a broader policy topic. The duration of cross-jurisdictional learning processes also matters because policy borrowing becomes much more complex. This is a point repeatedly flagged by the literatures on policy circulation and policy mobilities (McCann and Ward 2012; Baker and Walker 2019). Policymakers may look at and learn from various jurisdictions at the same time as the Japanese did in Meiji Japan (Westney 1987); or they may shift their attention from one place to another across time, as in the case of the Australian government described by Carroll (2012). The extended duration of transfer processes also implies that policy importers may eventually become a source of learning for the very countries from which they drew inspiration. This was the case, for instance, in

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the Gateway review procurement process studied by Fawcett and Marsh (2012). In the span of a decade, the Australian government adopted the program from the United Kingdom, adapted it successfully, and turned it into an exemplar from which the British government could then draw lessons. Indeed, it has been increasingly recognized in the literature that policies move around in a nonlinear fashion, sometimes in ‘iterative loops’ (Walt et al. 2004), and sometimes in simultaneous process across multiple jurisdictions (Porto de Oliveira 2021b). Yet, another way in which time matters for lesson-drawing has to do with the policy and administrative ‘zeitgeist’ (Dussauge-Laguna 2012b). The recent global diffusion of certain institutions, such as regulatory agencies (Jordana et  al. 2018), ombudsman offices (Pegram 2010), or environmental policy instruments (Pacheco-Vega 2021), shows that certain policy ideas do travel quickly across jurisdictions. Yet, the existence of these international diffusion ‘waves’ (Elkins and Simmons 2005) also points at another relevant fact: national policymakers are sometimes temporally bounded in terms of which policies to learn from. Dominant policy ideas or programs at a certain point in time somewhat introduce an international reform agenda. National policymakers then need to search for relevant examples to guide them in aligning their policy systems to changes happening abroad. The Politics of Lesson-Drawing Rose’s depiction of lesson-drawing as a process in which policymakers may solve their problems by learning from others is mostly a functional and technical (and positive) one. Of course, as an expert in politics, Rose also points out that sometimes there might be disagreements among actors (particularly about goals; Rose 1993, 36), and that policymakers will inevitably face the challenge of political acceptability (Rose 1991a, 21-22). Yet, in the end, Rose’s normative approach focuses on how lesson-­drawing can be a practical and helpful policymaking tool; he is less concerned about how political factors may affect such processes. There are several studies, however, which have shown that lesson-­ drawing is essentially a politically ‘contested’ exercise (Dussauge-Laguna 2013a). In their study about the health insurance reform in South Korea, Kim and Lee (2022) have argued that the adoption of the Japanese model was adapted to accommodate the preferences of interest groups and bureaucratic actors. This resulted in a ‘distorted’ system which allowed the

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manipulation of subsidies for political reasons and excluded disadvantaged social groups. Similarly, Duong (2023) states that the transfer of merit-­ based practices to Vietnam’s central administration is not merely guided by a search for ‘best practices’, but it is controlled by the governing party in the context of an authoritarian environment. In other cases, both the lessons learned and the process by which they are implemented are strongly conditioned by the ‘resistance’ of some actors (Porto de Oliveira and Pal 2018), or by bureaucratic turf battles (Dussauge-Laguna 2013a). Politics has also played a central role in contemporary lesson-drawing processes, such as those related to the current Covid-19 pandemic (Weible et al. 2020; James 2023). As the crisis evolved, political leaders from some countries like New Zealand began drawing lessons from abroad to design their policy responses (Mazey and Richardson 2020). However, some national leaders decided not to learn from other countries despite having access to the same information regarding the same problem. This was particularly the case of nations like Brazil, the United States, Mexico, or the Philippines, all governed by populist presidents (Peci et  al. 2023; Lasco 2020). These experiences raise some questions about how lesson-­ drawing exercises take place under populist regimes (Porto de Oliveira 2021b). In such instances, the process of drawing lessons may not only fall far from its normative ideal-type; it may even be deliberately blocked by the governing elites, who claim to have a monopoly over the ‘people’s will’, relevant knowledge, and viable policy models. Lesson-Drawing and Other Forms of Policy Learning Rose’s approach to policy learning centers on the assumption that policymakers will abstract ‘lessons’ from other jurisdictions as they observe and study them. However, as the previous subsections have made clear, lesson-­ drawing processes are rather complex. Therefore, ‘lessons’ cannot always be obtained or transferred for a variety of reasons. Why is it then possible to still talk about cross-national learning? The simple fact is that policymakers use information from other jurisdictions in many ways, without necessarily engaging in very complex lesson-­drawing processes. When looking at other governments or nations, policymakers can learn ‘smart ideas’ or ‘tricks’ regarding how to cope with a certain administrative situation (Page and Mark-Lawson 2007, 58). They may also observe that certain policies work elsewhere and thus use such experiences to ‘demonstrate’ that a similar policy may be

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implemented in their own country (Page and Mark-Lawson 2007, 58). Policymakers may employ policy techniques or tools used abroad for training public servants in their own country, just as Chilean officials did when showing examples of performance indicators from the governments of New Zealand and Australia to their own public servants, to build capacity for the introduction of the (then) new Chilean performance management system (Dussauge-Laguna 2013b). Or they may use foreign programs as a broad reference or ‘template’ to develop their own version, as the same Chilean officials did with the British ‘efficiency scrutinies’ despite lacking detailed information about its day-to-day operation (Dussauge-Laguna 2013b). Lastly, policymakers may employ policy labels such as ‘enterprise zones’ (Mossberger 2000) or ‘programas de mejora de la gestión’ (Dussauge-Laguna 2013b) to associate a newly created program with those found elsewhere. Learning may sometimes be more politically than programmatically oriented. According to Gilardi (2010), policymakers are often more interested in the political rather than the policy effects of some programs. In studying the experience of cuts in unemployment benefits across OECD countries, he finds that depending on the electoral consequences that policy decisions (e.g., retrenchment policies) had in other jurisdictions, some political parties (e.g., those from the right) were more willing to adopt similar programs. In their study of antismoking restrictions across state governments in the United States, Shipan and Volden (2014) found that more politically expert (e.g., professional) legislators were more willing to adopt the policies of other state governments when they considered such policies ‘successful’. Therefore, key policymakers (whether they are in the executive or in the legislative power) may be more willing to draw lessons about a program in another jurisdiction depending on the program’s level of political success or their own political experience, and not because of the program’s intrinsic features or suitability. Finally, drawing lessons from other experiences may not always result in the adoption of a similar program (or its components). For instance, Hudson and Kim (2014) studied the ‘policy tours’ conducted by several South Korean officials during the 2000s to the United Kingdom. They found that no direct policy changes (e.g., no explicit lessons leading to program reforms) resulted from such exchanges. However, they also found that policymakers valued these ‘tours’ as a source of learning: the British experience allowed them to get relevant information about another empirical experience; provided them with information and ideas which

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could be eventually used in political debates; and helped them better understand why certain reforms were not relevant for their country. In other cases, gathering detailed information about the experience of other countries may not end up being used in the design of specific programs, yet may still be useful for policymakers as a ‘compass’ to better understand which reform topics are being discussed internationally and why (Dussauge-Laguna 2013b). Therefore, policymakers may decide not to use information from other jurisdictions and still learn from such experiences, without this necessarily implying that they have drawn a ‘negative lesson’.

Conclusion Richard Rose’s pioneering discussion on lesson-drawing remains as relevant and thought-provoking as it originally was three decades ago. His ideas about who and how learn from whom, where, and why, have provided an important analytical perspective for the study of cross-­jurisdictional policy processes. His emphasis on policy ‘learning’ over policy ‘diffusion’ ignited a much-needed discussion about the role that policymakers play in the travel of policy ideas across space. His international perspective and interest on the relevance of foreign examples being purposefully used in the design of programs represented (and still do) a welcome contrast to other policy approaches focused on learning through conflictual processes (e.g., the advocacy coalitions approach), the serendipity of policy decisions (e.g., the multiple streams approach), or the rather legalistic and apolitical public law and administration works that were predominant when he introduced his lesson-drawing approach. His conceptual and theoretical insights established the foundations for much of the debates that would ensue in the academic literature on policy transfer, as well as in other areas such as policy mobilities, and policy circulation. His works on lesson-­ drawing have become classic and remain a must-read for anyone interested on these subjects. The significant body of literature that has emerged since Rose’s foundational works has validated or expanded on many of his points, but many contributions have also provided nuances and have even challenged Rose’s main assertions. As this chapter has shown, lesson-drawing is a far more complex process than initially portrayed by Rose. Policymakers draw lessons, but also get involved in many other roles to implement and institutionalize the policies they introduce inspired by such lessons. Policymakers

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certainly learn from the experience of others, but they rarely follow ‘ten-­ steps’ sequences. Policymakers get advice and support from international actors, but sometimes they are followers rather than leaders in the cross-­ national circulation of programs. Time matters for policymakers seeking lessons because they need to evaluate prospectively, but also because they are faced with changing ideas, conditions, and actors as the processes of adopting and adapting policy ideas from other jurisdictions unfold throughout several months or years. Lesson-drawing is about learning and ideally improving policies, but also about political contestation and, often, mistakes. In the end, policymakers learn by drawing lessons and abstracting policy models from other places, but much more by using the policy and administrative tactics, labels, templates, and broader ideas they see applied elsewhere in the (re)design of their own policies.

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———. 2013a. Policy Transfer as a ‘Contested’ Process. International Journal of Public Administration 36 (10): 686–694. ———. 2013b. Cross-National Policy Learning and Administrative Reforms: The Making of ‘Management for Results’ Policies in Chile and Mexico (1990-2010). London: London School of Economics and Political Science. PhD Thesis. ———. 2019. Policy Transfer Strategies: How Agents’ Actions Ensure Lessons from Abroad Stick at Home. In Public Policy Circulation, ed. T.  Baker and C. Walker. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Dussauge-Laguna, M.I., and G. del Castillo, eds. 2020. Enfoques Teóricos de Políticas Públicas: Desarrollos Contemporáneos Para América Latina. FLACSO: Buenos Aires. Elkins, Z., and B.  Simmons. 2005. On Waves, Clusters, and Diffusion: A Conceptual Framework. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 598 (1): 33–51. Evans, M. 2006. At the Interface Between Theory and Practice–Policy Transfer and Lesson-Drawing. Public Administration 84 (2): 479–515. Evans, M., and J. Davies. 1999. Understanding Policy Transfer: A Multi-Level, Multi-Disciplinary Perspective. Public Administration 77 (2): 361–385. Evans, M., D. Stone, and K. Moloney. 2019. International Policy Transfer. In The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration, ed. D. Stone and K. Moloney. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fawcett, P., and D. Marsh. 2012. Policy Transfer and Policy Success: The Case of the Gateway Review Process (2001–10). Government and Opposition 47 (2): 162–185. Gilardi, F. 2010. Who Learns from What in Policy Diffusion Processes? American Journal of Political Science 54 (3): 650–666. Gilardi, F., K. Füglister, and S. Luyet. 2009. Learning from Others: The Diffusion of Hospital Financing Reforms in OECD Countries. Comparative Political Studies 42 (4): 549–573. Graham, E.R., C.R.  Shipan, and C.  Volden. 2013. The Diffusion of Policy Diffusion Research in Political Science. British Journal of Political Science 43 (3): 673–701. Hadjiisky, M. 2021. International Organizations as Complex Agents in Policy Transfer Processes. In Handbook of Policy Transfer, Diffusion and Circulation, ed. O. Porto de Oliveira. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hadjiisky, M., L.A. Pal, and C. Walker, eds. 2017. Public Policy Transfer: Micro-­ Dynamics and Macro-Effects. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Howlett, M., and K. Saguin. 2021. Instrument Constituency and Policy Transfer: How a Collective Actor Mediates the Transnational Movement of Policy Instruments. In Handbook of Policy Transfer, Diffusion and Circulation, ed. O. Porto de Oliveira. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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Hudson, J., and B.Y. Kim. 2014. Policy transfer using the ‘gold standard’: exploring policy tourism in practice. Policy & Politics 42 (4): 495–511. James, T.S. 2023. Policy Transfer During the COVID Era. Policy Studies 44 (1): 1–3. James, O., and M. Lodge. 2003. The Limitations of ‘Policy Transfer’ and ‘Lesson Drawing’ for Public Policy Research. Political Studies Review 1 (2): 179–193. Jordana, J., X. Fernández-i-Marín, and A.C. Bianculli. 2018. Agency Proliferation and the Globalization of the Regulatory State: Introducing a Dataset on the Institutional Features of Regulatory Agencies. Regulation and Governance 12 (4): 524–540. Kim, S., and S.W. Lee. 2022. Distorted Policy Transfer and Institutional Conflicts: The Health Insurance Reform in South Korea. Japanese Journal of Political Science 23 (1): 18–33. Kuhlmann, J. 2021. Mechanisms of Policy Transfer and Policy Diffusion. In Handbook of Policy Transfer, Diffusion and Circulation, ed. O.  Porto de Oliveira. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Lasco, G. 2020. Medical Populism and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Global Public Health 15 (10): 1417–1429. Legrand, T. 2021. The Architecture of Policy Transfer. New York: Springer. Leiber, S., S. Greß, and S. Heinemann. 2015. Explaining Different Paths in Social Health Insurance Countries–Health System Change and Cross-Border Lesson-­ Drawing Between Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Social Policy and Administration 49 (1): 88–108. Marsh, D., and J.C. Sharman. 2009. Policy Diffusion and Policy Transfer. Policy Studies 30 (3): 269–288. Mazey, S., and J.  Richardson. 2020. Lesson‐drawing from New Zealand and covid‐19: The need for anticipatory policy making. The Political Quarterly 91 (3): 561–570. McCann, E., and K. Ward. 2012. Policy Assemblages, Mobilities and Mutations: Toward a Multidisciplinary Conversation. Political Studies Review 10 (3): 325–332. Minkman, E., M.W.  Van Buuren, and V.J.J.M.  Bekkers. 2018. Policy Transfer Routes: An Evidence-Based Conceptual Model to Explain Policy Adoption. Policy Studies 39 (2): 222–250. Montero, S. 2017. Study Tours and Inter-City Policy Learning: Mobilizing Bogotá’s Transportation Policies in Guadalajara. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49 (2): 332–350. Mossberger, K. 2000. The Politics of Ideas and the Spread of Enterprise Zones. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Mossberger, K., and H. Wolman. 2003. Policy Transfer as a Form of Prospective Policy Evaluation: Challenges and Recommendations. Public Administration Review 63 (4): 428–440.

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CHAPTER 9

Inheritance, Choice and Change Edward C. Page

‘Inheritance before choice’ is a recurring theme in Richard Rose’s work. He begins his article of the same name (Rose 1990, 263) with characteristic pithiness: ‘[p]olicy makers are heirs before they are choosers’. When they enter office, politicians take responsibility for processes of government established by laws, institutions, structures, procedures and arrangements covering vast ranges of economic, social, political and cultural activity. Some were created or established before the Second World War or earlier, and the great majority before the prime minister of the day entered parliament, but all form part of the inheritance of any government. Governments must make choices about what they want to change—introduce new programmes or terminate old ones. Even so, as he wrote in a study of the post-war corpus of primary legislation in the United Kingdom, ‘the stock of [existing] laws has a far greater impact upon government than does the smaller flow of legislation’ (van Mechelen and Rose 1986). The emphasis on the legacy of the past is an observation that underpins many of his insights in a range of different contexts.

E. C. Page (*) Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_9

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The ‘juggernaut of incrementalism’ (Rose and Peters 1978) is key to understanding the growth of government. The impact of parties on government is constrained among other things by sheer scale of existing policy commitments and only few can be changed (Rose 1985). In the United States, initiatives aimed at asserting presidential objectives have to be weighed against the wealth of programme commitments of executive agencies (Rose 1976). The point about inheritance is not only that it serves to limit change but also that it shapes its nature. Some inherited commitments, such as social security entitlements or the provision of health services, themselves develop through inertia as governments meet open-ended obligations entered into by predecessors. Over an extended time period, the scale and nature of such programmes can become transformed, even without deliberate political intention or design, as the number of people entitled to such open-ended benefits increases and the cost of services rises with inflation. Some change results from ‘fringe tuning’ existing commitments, as Rose and Karran (1987, 33) point out in their study of taxation by inertia. Certainly, some policies, such as the creation of an independent Bank of England after Labour’s 1997 election victory, are more clearly novel than inertia-driven, and such policies are of course politically important (see Rose 1984). Yet, an understanding of the nature and impact of inheritance is crucial for understanding the portfolio of policies for which the government of the day is responsible. The issue of policy inheritance has been well covered in the social science literature. From Tocqueville’s (1955 [1856]) vision of post-­ revolutionary France as the inheritor of ancien régime institutions through Wildavsky’s (1979) discussion of ‘policy as its own cause’ to ‘historical institutionalism’ (Béland and Schlager 2019), policies of the past have been understood to be a constraint or stimulus to subsequent policymaking. One of the difficulties with the observations in these literatures is that they develop very plausible mechanisms for understanding how inheritance might work yet, for the most part, do so on the basis of a few selected examples. By contrast, van Mechelen and Rose (1986) base their conclusions on a complete census of laws and policies persisting, introduced or repealed over more than a quarter-century. Probably the last thing the study of policy inheritances needs is another think-piece about the theories and insights that abound in this area (excellently reviewed and assessed in Béland et al. 2022). So instead of trying to synthesise existing material, I will follow a course set out by Richard Rose on many occasions. Just as he analysed general theories about party

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manifesto promises, presidential objectives or government programmes by deriving empirical indicators of these hard-to-measure concepts and examining their characteristics, I will explore more precisely what the policy legacy of a government might look like by taking a limited tranche of ‘policies’ and tracing them through. Though the number of ‘policies’ (53) looked at in this exploratory examination is limited, this is larger than conventional samples of policies. While it cannot offer a definitive account of policy inheritances, it can highlight ways in which inheritance works that tend to be missed by approaching understanding them through one, two or a handful of selected policy examples. The paper starts with two broad views of how policy inheritances work. It points out that one of the central problems of analysing inheritances is identifying what a ‘policy’ is. Another problem is that of defining what a ‘change’ is (see Dempster and Wildavsky 1979). These are not insuperable problems and I set out how it is possible to isolate novel arrangements (hereafter ‘novelties’) that policy initiatives seek to make work. Such novelties can be seen in the legislative output of government and to explore how they can be analysed I look at one calendar year’s worth of legislation passed in 2002. I then go on to examine how the two different views of inheritance fare in the face of the analysis of these 53 novelties and draw conclusions about the nature of policy inheritance.

How Inheritance Works: Two Perspectives There are, in brief, two very broad sets of mechanisms that transmit policy legacies from one government to another: inertia-based mechanisms and feedback-based mechanisms. I use ‘one government to the another’ for ease of exposition, while recognising that it is quite possible for governments to bequeath things to themselves, as Brexit has shown. Under inertia, policies carry on from one period to the next because they continue to have an effect as long as they are not withdrawn or in another way undermined (say starved of funding). The laws, organisations, manpower, norms, procedures, practices and whatever else goes to make up a policy have life of their own. This is the main sense in which Richard Rose outlines inheritance. Having been created, a government would have to devote resources such as time, effort and/or money and possibly political resources, to reverse or challenge a policy. The more resources it expends on changing existing policies, the less time it has for other priorities, so policies tend to persist. For example, the Thatcher government policy of

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selling council houses in 1980 to residents would have been politically costly for a subsequent government to end (still less reverse). Governments come to accept the status quo even when composed of policies it may have opposed at the time, and this is what Rose (1984) terms the ‘dynamics of a moving consensus’. Feedback-based mechanisms of inheritance derive not from the direct impacts of the policies themselves, but from the policy processes they either set in train or sustain. It has long been argued that ‘policies shape politics’ (Lowi 1972); policies shape constellations of support and opposition (whether among political elites, interest groups or the public) that shape demands for subsequent policies. Feedback in this sense is usually divided into two broad types, positive and negative (I am basing this discussion on the account set out in Béland et al. 2022). ‘Positive feedback’ arises when past policies have an effect because they either create or reinforce a particular direction of travel. As Pierson (2000, 253) puts it, ‘[e]ach step along a particular path produces consequences which make that path more attractive for the next round’ of policymaking. For example, it may be argued that policy measures aimed at improving air quality stimulated the demand for further and more stringent measures (Defra 2014). ‘Negative feedback’ is where a policy causes some form of discontent within policy communities that then causes policymakers to look for ways of addressing the perceived drawbacks—Béland Campbell and Weaver term this ‘self-undermining’ because of the terminological imprecision that has grown up around the notion of ‘negative feedback’. In both positive and negative feedback, the impact of the policy is above all through agenda-setting on subsequent governments: a policy creates constituencies of support for more of the same kind of policy or for a change in the way a policy is structured if not its reversal. Both mechanisms sound plausible but they suffer from a fundamental flaw when we come to consider them as empirical accounts of how policies have lasting effects: empirical discussions of them tend to have a very heavy selection bias. The typical way of justifying empirically these categories is through the use of examples, much like I have tried to do in the preceding paragraphs. Here, examples of policies that persist are likely to be selected as evidence. Yet, not all policies passed can be expected to survive into subsequent eras. Some may not make it through to subsequent eras: they might be easier to reverse than we think, they may wither through lack of use, simply ‘evaporate’ for no immediately apparent reason or suffer some other form of demise that we do not really know much

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about. So, while it is possible to hypothesise these broad mechanisms of inertia, positive and negative feedback, we do not know much about how they work. We do not know whether they are at all empirically identifiable in anything like a systematic way and if ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ feedback offers a good account of how policy impacts persist through time.

First Catch Your Policies There is no easy remedy for this selection bias problem because we don’t really have a population of ‘policies’ from which we may make a random selection to examine. One easy way of coping with the sampling frame question is to focus on one published source that contains a good population of policy changes if not the entire universe of them. In Rose’s (1985: 7) formulation of the ‘programme approach’ to the growth of government, policy programmes are ‘packages of three resources—laws, money and personnel’ (see also Hood’s 1983 discussion of ‘Nodality, Authority, Treasure and Organization’). Typically, policy changes involve changes in personnel and money, yet laws are especially important as an indicator of new policies as they often (though not invariably) accompany attempts to make significant changes in the way that policy regimes work. Moreover, it is easy to identify the body of laws issued by any government and their development, impact and subsequent fate are often well covered by some sort of documentation, commentary and analysis. While we might know where to catch our policies, in the lists of laws government produces, we don’t really have a definition of what constitutes a ‘policy’. We can conceive of policies as regimes: bundles of measures, arrangements and practices surrounding a particular set of functional services which can be aggregated at almost any level we choose. So, for example, using Halsbury’s Laws of England (2014) that classifies legislation according to relevant policy regime, bee importation rules could be part of an ‘eradication and prevention of animal diseases’ regime, part of a bigger ‘animal health’ regime, part of an even bigger ‘animals’ regime and so on. The aggregation issue is made somewhat easier if instead of focussing on a ‘policy’ or regime change we focus on what I have termed ‘novelties’: defined changes brought about or intended by the measures within a statute. New statutes do not, however, invariably produce significant policy change. Much primary legislation contains small alterations to the status quo that hardly count as change. For instance, the 2002 National Heritage

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Act primarily transferred responsibility for underwater archaeology from part of the (then) Department for Culture, Media and Sport to an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the same department. Using Hall’s (1993) definition of types of policy change this constitutes a lower type of change in policy regimes: a change in ‘settings’ characterised by routine bureaucratic changes to instruments while the broad structure of the policy regime and its goals remain the same. We are especially interested in changes that come closer to Hall’s ‘second order’ change which bring in new instruments or significant changes to old instruments while maintaining policy goals. Thus, for example, we might include as one novelty in the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act the series of powers to sequester criminal assets without a criminal trial. The same law can have more novelties than one: the same Proceeds of Crime Act has another novelty of creating a new body supposed to take a lead in sequestering criminal assets. There is a third category of change in Hall’s classification, ‘paradigm change’. Since this is especially difficult to mark off from ‘instrument change’ and also extremely rare (see Cairney 2019, 230f), I use the distinction between ‘settings’ and ‘instrument/paradigm’ as the simple definition of what constitutes a novelty. The examination of the survival of novelties conducted here is exploratory. On the negative side, it is just one year (Acts receiving the Royal Assent in 2002). It has to be a long time ago since the analysis has to have a reasonable time for a novelty to have died, disappeared or generated the kind of positive or negative feedback suggested in the literature. Twenty years is a somewhat arbitrary time period, but time periods are rarely specified in general discussions of inheritance, so there is no a priori reason to suspect that this period is either too long or too short. On the plus side, it contains 53 novelties which are enough to give some indication of how hard or easy it is likely to be to find evidence of inheritances surviving or falling as well as how they live on or die. The precise period chosen comes straight after the re-election of a New Labour government and contains a range of initiatives that were included in the 2001 Labour election manifesto, so we might expect some key policy priorities to be included.

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The Policy Novelties of 2002: The Finishers and the Fallers Classifying a novelty, like any coding, involves judgment. It involves answering the question of whether a clear change to the regime surrounding a particular policy was intended that goes beyond the routine adjustment or upgrading of existing measures. It is also important to note that some of the novelties were formally enacting things that were already happening and appeared not to need legislation to bring them into effect. For example, the creation of the Police Standards Unit (supposed to spread good policing practices nationwide), the granting of extended powers for ministers to order the slaughter of animals to combat foot-and-mouth disease, and the rights of same-sex couples in adoption appeared to exist before the 2002 acts that covered these novelties. Yet, they were included as separate novelties as they signalled that these apparently permitted actions were explicitly put on a statutory basis (see, e.g. Marsh 2022) or ended controversy about whether existing law allowed for these things (Connolly 2014). Some of the novelties thus coded appear particularly big (e.g. the European Communities (Amendment) Act 2002 incorporates the Nice Treaty into UK law). Others appear particularly small (e.g. the Divorce (Religious Marriages) Act 2002 which makes it easier to dissolve religious marriages in the context of a civil divorce). Moreover, some novelties are simpler than others: for instance, the incorporation of the Nice Treaty could possibly have been subdivided into the different aspects of EU procedures changed by the Treaty. Overall, it was possible to identify 53 novelties in the 38 Acts of Parliament (excluding five finance, consolidated fund and appropriation acts). Thirteen Acts contained no novelties. Fourteen Acts were one-novelty Acts and 11 had more than one novelty. The National Health Service Reform and Health Care Professions Act had the most novelties (seven) followed by the Adoption and Children Act (six). These 53 novelties largely persisted for the 20 years after 2002.1 Of the 53, 10 were no longer there in 2022: so an extinction rate of only 19 per cent after 20 years. A significant portion of the casualties (four of 10) seem to be novelties that involved setting up new organisations or transforming older ones. Six similar organisational novelties were among the 43 that survived. Setting up an organisation to deliver a policy is treated as a separate novelty from anything the organisation might have been expected to

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do, indeed the Office of Communications Act sets up the organisation with minimal functions in preparation for legislation planned for later. Among the organisational novelties that failed to survive were the Primary Care Trusts (finished 2013) and the Police Standards Unit, a separate national unit supposed to identify and ‘enforce’ ‘good practice’ in policing survived until around 2008 before its work became part of the Police and Crime Standards Directorate within the Home Office. It is possible to say something about the costs of removing or ending existing policies, presumed to be high and a cause of their persistence? We can get some idea of the actual costs by looking at how these 10 non-­ survivors ended their days. The evidence here is rather mixed. Of the 10 it is possible to argue that five met their end following the expenditure of significant costs, whether in terms of time, political capital or financial or legislative resources. The law incorporating the Nice Treaty was repealed by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 as part of arguably the most politically and administratively costly episode in peacetime UK political history. Two welfare benefits, the Working Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit were replaced by a similarly administratively costly and contentious reform of social security through the Universal Credit reforms not expected to be completed before 2024 (see Steele 2021 for an extensive bibliography of analysis and commentary associated with this reform). The ‘centralising’ aspirations of the National Police Plan disappeared following the shift towards greater ‘localism’ after the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, whether this was indeed a ‘decentralisation’ or a change in the nature of central control is not directly relevant to this question of costs (see Jones and Lister 2019). In the case of the other five fallers, it appears that something close to simple administrative decisions sealed their fate without any costly process or even consequences in terms of significant political of public criticism. The Assets Recovery Agency set up by the Proceeds of Crime Act had attracted significant criticism for not have recovered many assets, above all from the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, was achieved by a largely non-contentious addition to the 2007 Serious Crime Act (Alldridge 2018; Peck and Danby 2007). The statutory adoption register was ‘paused indefinitely’ by a decision of the (then) Department for Education in 2018 (see House of Lords 2019 Appendix 1). Similar low-cost processes of change account for the other three novelties to be abandoned.

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The remaining 43 novelties persist in recognisable form in 2022. It is unlikely that we can come up with a general account for their longevity. Some remain on the statute book but do not appear to have much effect. The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act created a new form of property tenure (commonhold) which was intended to become the standard form of tenure for all newly built flats but has been used rarely; the International Development Act mandates that UK government international aid be exclusively linked to poverty reduction and is a vague ‘judge proof’ law’; ‘no meaningful case has proceeded through the courts’ despite strong signs that much aid does not conform to what it seemed to intend (Campbell 2021; McAuslan 2003). A large number, 13 by my calculation, appear to conform to what is often termed ‘permissive’ legislation (see, e.g. Busby 2003, 250) in the sense that they are contingent on people, whether citizens or officials, taking up the possibilities they offer—allowing a minister to develop a scheme for preventive slaughter of cattle during a foot-and-mouth crisis, permitting developers to set up commonhold tenancy arrangements, making it possible for divorcees to ensure their civil divorces are followed by religious divorce. Since only one of the 10 non-survivors could be classed as ‘permissive’ this might indicate some greater resilience of this group. But 30 surviving novelties are not ‘permissive’ even by a broad definition of the term; these include the regime for judicial appointments in Northern Ireland, creating new crimes associated with mobile phone theft and introducing Pension Credit. Each survivor must have a story helping explain why it survives, it is just unlikely that such stories conform to any theory more specific than suggesting that there is some sort of need or demand for them or, in some cases, nobody has bothered to abolish them.

Searching for Feedback Effects: The Life of Laws After Royal Assent It is much more difficult to find a direct impact of one policy on another, whether positive or negative, when we look from the perspective of the individual policy innovation. If positive feedback is about the creation of constituencies for expanding a programme, and negative feedback is about the programme being ‘cut back, terminated, or radically transformed’, identifying what broad policy or programme any individual novelty is part of is in many cases unclear. For example, the impact of the novelties in the

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2002 Adoption Act might be explored from the point of view of their impact on adoption law, or on a more general body of general children’s law or even, in one view, on the wider movement towards ‘deprofessionalising’ social service workers (Kirton 2013). And even if we can define what broad ‘programme’ any novelty is part of, ‘expansion’ and ‘contraction’ are not always easy to assess. Using the same example, ‘expansion’ could take the form of subsequent initiatives aimed at expanding the number of people likely to want to adopt a child, it might involve strengthening the rights of the child in the adoption and post-adoption process or it might concern expanding the role of non-government agencies in it. The same sorts of arguments could be made about cutback, termination or radical transformation. Rather than pursue a novelty-by-novelty discussion of why feedback is exceptionally difficult to detect, let me first present four detectable ways in which the laws that created the novelties of 2002 live on as a legacy for subsequent policymakers apart from as an inertial constraint; the legislative process involved can have a long tail, laws can be part of a series, they can be frameworks on which new generations of novelties are developed and they can be unfinished business. I will then go on to discuss why these are difficult to characterise as positive or negative feedback; in a nutshell because it is difficult to find any direct impact on subsequent policy of the individual policy novelties themselves as opposed to the broader policy conditions that produced them. The Long Tail of the Legislative Process Some laws generate a range of further measures that are needed to put them into effect including regulations, guidance, codes of practice and instructions. In the absence of any precise definition of the term (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984), whether one calls such things matters of ‘implementation’ or not is a matter of preference. Either way, three things make them distinctive from the exercise of administrative discretion, often associated with ‘street level bureaucrats’, that usually forms the focus of implementation activity (see Hupe 2019). First, while implementation tends to emphasise what happens after a law has been passed, many of these subsequently-­developed measures are themselves legislation or have the force of law. Delegated legislation, laws passed without the full parliamentary procedures of primary legislation, is one obvious example of this type of legislative tail. Of the 25 laws containing our novelties, 11 were

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followed by 10 or more items of delegated legislation, with the Proceeds of Crime Act followed by 130. A second reason for distinguishing such measures from conventional understandings of implementation is the long timescale. Seven of the 25 laws had their latest piece of delegated legislation passed in the time after the Labour Government responsible for them left office in 2010, the latest being the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (Commencement No. 15) Order 2023. A third reason for regarding these measures as distinct is that they frequently involve deliberative processes rather than the exercise of discretion by implementing officials’ characteristic of street-­ level bureaucracy. The 2023 order cited above was part of a consultation launched in the ‘New Plan for Immigration’ (Home Office 2022). Such deliberative processes can bring consultation and bargaining with the different interests involved, albeit the ability of those outside the executive and/or bureaucracy to change the shape of the proposed measures is usually very limited (Page 2001). Among our 53 novelties of 2002 (here we must include even those that no longer exist in 2022), it is possible to point to 45 for which one can reasonably suspect some degree of deliberative consultation of the kind outlined above. Since such procedures are usually not well documented, evidence that they have taken place was sought in the existence of significant secondary legislation, guidance or official statements about the novelties involved. This is admittedly a very broad interpretation of deliberative processes. Even so, in 18 of them it is possible to argue that the long tail had important effects; for example, some local authorities otherwise mandated to produce a report on homelessness in their areas by the Homelessness Act 2002 were exempted by the Local Authorities’ Plans and Strategies (Disapplication) (England) Order 2005 (although this only proved temporary), The Tobacco Advertising and Promotion (Point of Sale) Regulations 2004 relaxed the prohibition of advertising for some shops and the character of the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with referral partners for the Assets Recovery Agency following its setting up in the Proceeds of Crime Act was widely regarded as a significant reason for its failure (NAO 2007). Laws as Frameworks for New Policies A second way in which the laws producing novelties live on is as the statutory framework for new policies which take the form of amendments to

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them. We can only offer an approximate account of this. Of the 25 laws, only three were not amended by subsequent primary legislation (figures here are based on calculations derived from the ‘changes to legislation’ search facility at legislation.gov.uk). A further three were amended by subsequent Acts that repealed or replaced them. The 19 remaining were amended an average of 280 times each by subsequent primary legislation. This only offers an approximate account of the degrees to which legislation provides a framework for future legislation because most of the changes do not seem particularly large, they include things such as applying provisions of a law to the Isle of Man and changing the text to reflect the change in name of an enforcing organisation. Some laws contain very significant extensions of powers of enforcing organisations or changing definitions of what is to be enforced. Ten of the 25 laws had over 50 subsequent amendments, of these 3 had over 500, with the Proceeds of Crime Act coming in at the clear top with 1861 amendments followed by the Police Reform Act (1367) and the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (505). Key items of subsequent legislation (e.g. Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the Policing and Crime Act 2017) take the form of amending these 2002 laws. Some changes might correspond closely to Rose’s notion of ‘fringe tuning’ in the sense that the basic goals and structure of the policy remain largely unchanged. Yet, it is also clear that some Acts become the targets for amendments, significant or minor, because they provide the basic framework for the law governing particular policy areas, with substantial new legislation in those policy areas taking the form of amendments to such Acts. Thus, the Proceeds of Crime Act of 2002 provides a basic framework for laws around the recovery of criminal assets. Later innovations such as the creation of ‘unexplained wealth orders’, aimed at facilitating the seizure of assets in the Criminal Finances Act 2017, take the form of a series of amendments and additions to the 2002 Act. Laws as Part of a Series Many of our 53 novelties are part of a longer-term policy thrust. The mandate that prisons and NHS bodies work together in the National Health Service Reform and Health Care Professions Act was not the first law that involved the NHS bodies taking responsibility for prisoner health, yet this collaboration developed in a series of initiatives stretching forward to

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2011 (outlined in NHS England 2015: Appendix A) eventually transforming the role of the NHS in the provision of prison health services. Many of our novelties were the subject of subsequent legislation or other policy initiatives in a similar area; sometimes, as discussed above, even taking the form of amendments to the 2002 laws. One area that produced particularly strong activity is in the field of the Proceeds of Crime Act as successive governments have sought to make it easier for government authorities to confiscate the assets of criminals and more difficult for criminals to hide their assets. By my calculation, 39 of our 53 novelties involved subsequent policy action in a similar or directly related area and as such offer circumstantial evidence of feedback of one kind or another, to be discussed further below. Laws as Unfinished Business Any measure that is disliked by anyone produces disappointing results or does not go far enough could be classified as ‘unfinished business’ for some individuals or groups. However, some novelties that disappoint produce a recognition of this disappointment from governments and a willingness (if not a firm commitment) to do something about it. Two of our novelties fall squarely into this category. Successive governments have recognised that legislation in 2002 attempting to set up e-conveyancing for property transactions and the separate legislation seeking to create a new form of commonhold tenure for home ownership have disappointed and both have produced expressed willingness to address the specific failing of earlier novelties, with further legislation in both areas apparently mentioned as a possibility. Are These Feedback Mechanisms? There might well be other potential types of legacy which were not found in this 2002 sample. For instance, legislation might contain hidden time-­ bombs in the form of innocuous clauses that only with hindsight gain significance and stymie or constrain subsequent policy development. Rozenberg (2022) discusses the ‘imprisonment for public protection’ (IPP) scheme, allowing those convicted for seriously violent crimes to be imprisoned indefinitely. The way the scheme was set up (a year after our sample in the Criminal Justice Act 2003) posed severe problems when government wanted to abolish the IPP scheme after 2012 as simply

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abolishing it would involve setting hundreds of potentially dangerous prisoners free, and successive governments since been trying to deal with the consequences of this dilemma. This is not to seek to introduce cherry-­ picked examples into the discussion, but to illustrate that a larger sample might throw up different forms of legacy. On the basis of the sample itself, is it possible to characterise any of these forms of legacy discussed above as positive or negative feedback? The central mechanism of feedback is in shaping the constituencies of support for more or less of the same kind of policy in a later policymaking episode. The long tail of the law does not qualify as feedback as this form of legacy is effectively part of the same legislative process rather than a later one. Rubin argues that legal and political science scholarship has suffered from too narrow and outdated a view of what the legislative process is; in the reality of the ‘modern administrative state’, legislation is a ‘continuous interaction between the legislature and the agency’ (Rubin 1989, 424) that includes a range of administrative actions, including but not limited to regulation making, and statutes are only part of this process. This argument has many implications for our understanding of the administrative state, but one that concerns us here is that we are not really talking about feedback from one process to another, but the unfolding of a single process, albeit frequently ramshackle and convoluted. Laws continuing to serve as frameworks for subsequent policies are hard to classify as instances of ‘feedback’ because such a legacy emphasises, at best, the influence of technical constraints of the way the statute is structured rather than the knock-on effect of any policy measure within it via constituencies of support. Laws as unfinished business in general is rather an indeterminate group since it is the nature of policy puzzling (Heclo 1974) that there are officials, policy specialists and groups that are concerned about developing improvements, as they see them, in the way almost any policy regime works. Thus, to say that there are policy communities interested in the development of adoption, social security, money laundering and proceeds of crime or any of the topics in the novelties covered here is not to say much about policy development. The more restrictive definition I have offered above, where government is on record as acknowledging an issue as unfinished business, comes closer, perhaps, to negative impact, but since the two particular 2002 novelties falling into this category still remain unfinished business it is not possible to say what effect this acknowledgement has in practice.

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The most promising legacy as a possible form of feedback is the tendency for our novelties to be followed by other novelties in a series appearing to build on them. Taking the 39 novelties for which there was subsequent legislation, in 17 cases it is possible to argue that they have been ‘expanded’, though expansion means rather different things. In the case of the requirement that Northern Ireland voters provide identification before they vote, this has been extended (at least in part) to the rest of the United Kingdom in the 2022 Elections Act; in the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002, the provisions were extended in time (they were subject to a sunset clause originally) under the Equality Act 2010; a range of provisions in the Proceeds of Crime Act have been extended and developed in subsequent laws including the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 and the Criminal Finances Act 2017 which are designed to make it easier to confiscate proceeds of crime (and indeed do so significantly by amending the 2002 Act). The question is whether it is possible to argue that these 17 constitute ‘positive feedback’ in the sense that subsequent legislation was significantly prompted, shaped or constrained by these novelties. In some cases, the link between the novelties and the subsequent legislation can be considered tenuous; the requirement for voter ID in Northern Ireland may have been used as an example by those advocating voter ID in the rest of the United Kingdom, but the constituencies of support involved in each appear very different, and the impetus for voter ID extension to the wider United Kingdom appears to be almost exclusively the priorities of the Conservative leadership as it was a manifesto commitment in 2019. More commonly, what links the 2002 novelties to later legislation is a much longer-term trend that seems to be a strong candidate for explaining both 2002 novelties and subsequent related measures. It was not feedback from the Adoption and Children Act 2002 that created the Children and Families Act 2014; a long-standing process of reform aimed at regulating, promoting, opening up adoption to wider groups in ways similar to those developed in the 2002 Act can be detected in a range of earlier measures since at least the 1975 Children Act running through the 1989 Children Act. The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 tapped into and reinforced an ‘ideological’ belief that developing measures connected with ‘money laundering’ are an effective way of dealing with crime whether or not the evidence supported such a view (Chistyakova et al. 2019). Such tendencies are often characterised as broader policy ‘moods’ or ‘waves’ (Mayhew 1991; Kingdon 1984; Stimson 1999). The 2002

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Proceeds of Crime Act might have been early this wave or mood, but it did not create it (there was indeed a Proceeds of Crime Act in 1995 which also sought to facilitate the confiscation of criminally-acquired assets). Certainly, it cannot be doubted that perceived successes seem likely in a very general sense to encourage advocates and discourage opponents of broad policy directions, yet it is very difficult to single out any particular novelty among the 2002 sample that can be seen to have directly caused or triggered a fundamental additional change in the policy regime in a subsequent period. In sum, while we can identify a range of legacies of the sample of policies from 2002, these do not seem to conform in any particularly close way to the kinds of ‘feedback’ mechanisms often identified by expositions of them based upon selected examples and illustrations. This might be because 2002 was just a bad year and that other years are more promising for feedback approaches. It could also be, as Richard Rose (1980) pointed out in his essay on ‘government against subgovernment’, that the United Kingdom with a system of government dominated by the executive has less powerful or stable ‘subgovernmental’ policy constituencies that might be expected in the US literature to be the main conduits for feedback effects. Or it may be that whenever policy is tweaked, mainly after those in government become convinced that the novelties don’t work in the way that they want them to work, feedback of a sort is taking place. But such observations, as well as the observation that legislation comes in batches that can be characterised as ‘policy moods’ or ‘waves’ do not really establish the kind of direct causal linkage between one policy and another invoked by conventional understandings of ‘feedback’.

Conclusion One characteristic of Richard Rose’s public policy work is his development of systematic and original ways of exploring theoretical propositions using distinctively designed units of analysis and measurement, such as party manifesto pledges, presidential objectives and government programmes. Here, I have tried to explore another significant theme of Rose’s work, inheritance in public policy, through tracing inheritance forward in time rather than backward on the basis of selected examples. The conclusions of this exploratory study offer significant support for Rose’s emphasis on inheritance before choice in two ways. The first way, and in line with expectations, new policies introduced a long time ago do tend to live on.

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It is possible to qualify this conclusion by pointing out that the costs of discontinuing or reversing policies is not always very high, with some initiatives abandoned or radically changed by administrative decisions requiring little political or administrative expense. A second and less expected way in which the examination of 2002 legislation endorses Rose’s inheritance argument is that in looking for feedback we find, instead, more evidence pointing to a different kind of inertia-based legacy. It is not only the content of the policy legacy, the old novelties, that is handed from one government to the next, but also structural features of the legislative process are also passed on. The settings in which new policies are created are passed on as well as the policies themselves. The legislative framework, above all with its long tail and its ability to persist as the central reference point that structures subsequent policy changes as they are created through new legislation, can act as a further inheritance-based constraint on policymakers’ choices.

Note 1. In tracing through the novelties, I have, where they apply to different parts of the United Kingdom, traced through the story as it applies in England only. Two novelties in the Justice (Northern Ireland) Act and the novelty in the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act apply to Northern Ireland only; otherwise, the remainder are traced UK-wide or for England only. Identifying and tracing the novelties rely heavily on two sources: the research briefings produced by the House of Commons Library on most of the Bills before parliament in 2001–2002 session and, where relevant, subsequent sessions and the website legislation.gov.uk for the text of the legislation and subsequent amendments.

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Rozenberg, J. 2022. The Law of Unintended Consequences. A Lawyer Writes Substack. https://rozenberg.substack.com. 11th October. Accessed 27 December 22. Rubin, E.L. 1989. Law and Legislation in the Administrative State. Columbia Law Review 89 (2): 369. Steele, S. 2021. Universal Credit a reading list. London: House of Commons Library Briefing Paper 9211, 4 May. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament. uk/documents/CBP-­9211/CBP-­9211.pdf. Accessed 28 April 23. Stimson, J.A. 1999. Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. van Mechelen, D., and R.  Rose. 1986. Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation. Aldershot: Gower. Wildavsky, A. 1979. Policy as Its Own Cause. In Speaking Truth to Power. The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis, ed. A. Wildavsky. Boston: Little Brown.

CHAPTER 10

The Ordinary People Perspective: Coping at the Grass-Roots Caryn Peiffer

When trying to understand more about the consequences and processes of public policy, the gaze is often concentrated on those closest in proximity to the work of lobbying for, designing, implementing and evaluating policy. However, we also stand to learn volumes about comparative public policy by focusing instead on how ordinary people are impacted by and choose to engage with such processes. This is not only because ordinary people are the intended beneficiaries of most public policy outputs, but also because doing so allows us to see the negative space in public policy— the limits of how public policy impacts on the lives of its intended beneficiaries. How do ordinary people react to the absence of a policy output? In Professor Richard Rose’s words, ‘government failure is not a sign that nothing works, but that formal organisations do not work as they do in a modern society’ (Rose 2009, 66). And so, the extent to which people rely on the state or draw on other resources and tactics to safeguard their own well-being and that of those who they are connected to can serve as a specific kind of mirror to the state of governance and public policies.

C. Peiffer (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_10

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The ideas that comparative policy differences will have distinct impacts on the lives of ordinary people and that the decisions of ordinary people shape policy processes and outcomes, as well, are at the centre of Rose’s ordinary people perspective. The first of a trilogy of books lays out this perspective’s conceptual approach (1989), with two others applying the approach to understand the impact of regime collapse on how ordinary people cope (Rose 2009) and the comparative experiences of grass-roots corruption (Rose and Peiffer 2015). At the time of the first book’s publication, this perspective contrasted with and was a complement to many other major studies in public policy analysis, which either focused attention on the role and decisions of political and administrative elites in shaping public policy or considered ordinary people as singular public policy actors, focusing on their role as voters, alone. The ordinary people perspective instead found its motivation in two understandings. First, that public policy processes do not live separately in the houses of government away from those that they intend to reach; they are shaped by how citizens engage with each other and with the state. Second, that defining ordinary people as voters, only, ‘gives a distorted picture of the significance of government for people who may be more worried about their spouse or children or about buying a house than the problems that concern a diplomat or a politician (Rose 1989, 1). In this chapter, I will consider key contributions and findings from Rose’s work from his ordinary people perspective. In doing so, I will highlight a prominent theme which features across this trilogy of applications of this perspective: when faced with the patchy provision of services or even regime collapse, ordinary people do not necessarily just ‘do without’ but instead they use what is available to them to try to make do and get things done (Rose 1986). Ordinary people draw on a range of tactics and resources to safeguard their well-being and try to get ahead. Next, I discuss that the recognition that ordinary people are strategic, resourceful and active actors in the delivery of public policy outcomes is consistent with what I have called an individual-level corruption functionality lens, a theme I have focused on since working with Rose. In this work, grass-roots corruption is seen as one of the many strategies ordinary people rely on to reach a goal, address a (perceived) need or solve a problem. With anticorruption policies specifically in mind, I then discuss why thinking about ‘functionality’ matters. A focus on the functionality of corruption, put briefly, is very likely important for inspiring more effective and sustainable anticorruption interventions.

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The chapter then examines something I had yet to explore previously. An ordinary people perspective shines light on a tension between functionality thinking about corruption and morality framings found in many anticorruption policies and efforts. An ordinary people perspective recognises that some people view grass-roots corruption to be the only way to get things done, and, in doing so, it inherently makes room to consider complex public moralities around the engagement in corruption. This complexity is not typically appreciated when corruption is addressed through policies which frame the issue to be one of morality: corruption is wrong and rejecting or fighting corruption is right. This recognition of complex public moralities around corruption therefore casts doubt upon the efficacy of wide-reaching morality framed anticorruption policies. Fighting corruption with an undertone of or by explicitly trying to convince people that it is ‘wrong’ will not work when it is not a morally black and white issue for those at the grass-roots.

Conceptual Groundings The ordinary people perspective was forcefully articulated in the aptly titled first (1989) book of the trilogy, Ordinary People in Public Policy: A Behavioural Analysis. This book brings ‘ordinary people into the study of public policy by examining the extent and also the limits of the impact of public policy upon ordinary lives’ (1989, 2). Within, Rose made clear that people spend more time engaging with public employees that deliver the outputs of public policies than on their role in providing input into public policy, that is, voting. Drawing on household-level survey data, Rose found that popular notions of national pride were seemingly ‘independent of the everyday failings of government’ (Rose 1989, 36) and that ‘sure’ political wins like tax cuts can have very little impact on public opinion. It was also shown that ordinary people routinely and regularly rely on the state for basic services like education and health care but, importantly, are also likely to turn to the household economy or their social networks when the national economy dips. ‘While ready and willing to benefit from public policies, most people do not see government as the source of their wellbeing’ (Rose 1989, 6). Therefore, macro public policy concerns with respect to socio-economic inequalities are deeply rooted in the micro differences between ‘ordinary families’:

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As long as the ordinary family can secure welfare from a mixture of sources, then it can get by or get ahead…Some people fail to meet the income test that the market imposes. Others may not meet bureaucratic standards for public benefits…People living alone, in broken homes or without long-term family ties have less access to welfare based on family affection…The maintenance of total welfare thus depends upon the ability of ordinary people to have a portfolio of claims as family members, consumers and as citizens. (Rose 1989, 148)

Indeed, this examination of welfare as being both made up of public and non-public resources builds on Rose’s earlier work. In 1986, Rose developed a concise and yet holistic model of the welfare of individuals where welfare is conceptualised as a combination of what is produced in the household, from the market and from the state, in that historical order. This model made clear that ordinary people could cope without state provisions (Rose 1986).

Ordinary People in Transition The second part of Rose’s ordinary people trilogy focuses on how ordinary people cope when their regime collapses. Rose and collaborators, focused on how ordinary people were impacted by post-Communist transitions in Central and Eastern European countries with data from the New Democracies Barometer, New Europe Barometer and New Russian Barometer (e.g. Rose and Haerpfer 1998; Rose 2009). This research examined associations with ordinary peoples’ political trust or distrust (i.e. Mishler and Rose 1997, 2001, 2005; Rose and Mishler 2001) as well as shifting and variable attitudes towards democracy (Mishler and Rose 2001b; Rose et al. 1998; Rose et al. 2011; Rose and Mishler 1996; Mishler and Rose 1996), as two prominent thematic examples. However, its Rose’s findings and analysis of coping mechanisms that people employ to deal with socio and political transition that makes most sense to spotlight in this chapter. In the first instance, this is where Rose’s approach is able to illuminate the negative space of public policy. In the absence of formal systems, how do ordinary people navigate and negotiate with public policy processes? Moreover, it highlights one of the major advantages of analysing public policy from the bottom-up: it naturally illuminates the logic of both desired and undesired patterns of popular behaviour. In other words, there is a reason why ordinary people tend to act

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close to what we might call a ‘model citizen’ in some settings, and distant from such a model, in others. And that reason is, simply, because it works for them. To this end, in Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom-Up Approach, Rose establishes that ‘the skills that ordinary people developed to get around the old regime could be used to cope with the shocks of the transformation’ (Rose 2009, 2). In practice, this means that when faced with regime collapse, weak or non-functioning public institutions, ordinary people drew on a range of resources and tactics to safeguard their well-being, including even the bending and breaking of rules (2009, 66). Offering a bribe in the form of a small cash payment for the delivery of a state service or growing food in an urban plot, amidst hyperinflation, are seen as analogous displays of resourcefulness, in a context of a failed or transitioning state. This is because each act can share a similar motivation of securing the welfare of family and others in a social network. Indeed, more frequently, in such a context, ordinary people draw on those informal connections (social capital) to get things done, like to jump a prohibitively long bureaucratic queue or even to see a doctor when ill (Rose and Peiffer 2015, Chapter 2). In Rose’s words, the menus of resources drawn upon are ‘the distinctive forms of social capital that people had developed to cope with its pathologies were useful in dealing with the immediate shock of economic transformation. In the absence of civil economy, people turned to uncivil...Juggling multiple economies enabled households to avoid destitution’ (Rose 2009, 5). This analysis—that ordinary people navigate weak systems through drawing on a range of tactics, social connections and resources—relates directly to the third instalment of the ordinary people trilogy, which focuses on the experiences ordinary people have with corruption and bribery. Working with Rose, as a post-doctoral researcher, was my first gig after receiving my PhD. I was lucky enough to meet Rose whilst he was extending his ordinary people perspective to the study of bribery and corruption.

Ordinary People and Corruption Just as other articulations of Rose’s ordinary people perspective contrasted with and complemented a focus on the role of elites in policy processes, our examination of corruption at the grass-roots similarly stood in contrast to an overarching preoccupation in research on corruption at the

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time which focused on elite-level grand scale corruption and/or the aggregate national-level impacts of corruption on the economy, institutions or on public policy outcomes (Osrecki 2017; Heywood 2017). Our substantive analysis of ordinary peoples’ experiences with corruption focused on what happens when the public interacts with public services, who is most vulnerable and why, to requests for bribes in these interactions, and under what circumstances do people rely on bribery to solve the problems they face. We examined patterns of vulnerability to bribery across six continents, resulting in both country-level, comparative findings as well as insights into what individual-level factors make ordinary people more vulnerable to bribery, around the world. We found that country-level histories of early bureaucratisation or colonialism had substantial impacts on the bribery patterns of ordinary people and that people who frequently make use of public services and perceive government as corrupt are more likely to pay bribes (Rose and Peiffer 2016). Our analyses made clear that in most countries bribery is routinely required when engaging with the state, and at the same time, that the outcome of interactions between citizens and public officials is variable. In our (2015) book, Paying Bribes for Public Services: A Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption, we estimated that more than 1.6 million people around the world had to pay a bribe, annually. Our findings also showed that bribery patterns were service specific, a message that chimes well with literature that emphasises the impact of service specific characteristics on public policy outcomes (e.g. Batley and Mcloughlin 2015). We found, for example, that ordinary people are most likely to pay bribes for health care, because so many people use public health systems. Considering global averages, the police and courts are the public institutions that ask service users to pay bribes most frequently. And so, our findings suggested that the causes of grass-roots corruption are often rooted in particularities of services, a theme that we took up in more depth in our second book (Rose and Peiffer 2018). Our second book also explored corruption’s curious lack of impact on voting decisions, and the relationship between popular notions of corruption and distrust in institutions and in others in society. We also examined whether and how poverty impacted bribery patterns in Sub-Saharan Africa (Peiffer and Rose 2018). Whereas most studies understood that the poor were more vulnerable to bribery because they were seen as ‘easy targets’ in the eyes of public officials (e.g. Justesen and Bjørnskov 2014; Brady and Burton 2015; Piven and Minnete 2015;

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Sefton 2006; Mbate 2018), our analysis showed that the poor were more likely to pay a bribe in the region because they were unable to pay for private services and avoid contact with the state. Once in contact with the state, ordinary people—of all socio-economic statuses—were equally likely to draw on bribery to solve problems they faced, be it avoiding a speeding ticket or getting seen by a doctor (Peiffer and Rose 2018).

Functionality of Corruption for Ordinary People One of the strongest appeals of Rose’s ordinary people perspective is that it inherently recognises that ordinary people are strategic, resourceful and therefore not passive actors in the delivery of public policy outcomes. From this perspective, bribery—the type of corruption ordinary people are most likely to encounter—is often best understood as a rational response to a system where bribes work and/or are required. Grass-roots corruption is one of the many strategies ordinary people (have to) employ to safeguard their own well-being and to shape their access to public policy outputs. This thinking is central to the work Professor Heather Marquette and I have since done on the functionality of corruption. Corruption’s functionality has been discussed in two very different conceptual ways, which are sometimes conflated in the literature (Persson et al. 2019). It is therefore useful to briefly explain the distinction. The first way is to emphasise the potential societal or system-level functions of corruption. In this view, corruption serves a system-level, mostly sustaining, function, but the function itself is not thought to necessarily motivate elites or ordinary people to engage in corruption. For instance, Huntington (1968) argued that because corruption provided benefits to alienated groups it reduced these groups’ willingness to try to destabilise the system. In other words, the argument here is that the stability of the system happens to have been bolstered because corruption occurred. Similarly, early work on bureaucratic corruption argued that by allowing businesspeople to circumvent bureaucratic red tape, and be more productive and competitive, bureaucratic corruption was seen to generate beneficial system-­level economic effects; this is part of the famous ‘grease the wheels’ hypothesis (Leff 1964; Huntington 1968; Leys 1965). The argument went that corruption functioned in such a way that benefitted the broader economy, though those that engaged in the referenced corruption would not have sought such system-level aims.

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Beyond this early work, research certainly continued to focus on corruption’s system-level impacts, though arguably far fewer in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s highlighted potentially positive system-level impacts or by-products of corruption. This trend reflects a larger shift in corruption research, wherein an almost overwhelming consensus emerged about corruption having only negative impacts on society, the economy and political systems. Especially in development policy circles, it became relatively taboo to entertain the idea that corruption may have net-­ economic, social or political benefits.1 To be clear, the work Marquette and I have done on functionality has not explored the potential for corruption to have system-level functions. The second way in which corruption’s functionality has been discussed is far more consistent with Rose’s ordinary people perspective and what Marquette and I have focused on. This way emphasises an individual-level functionality. When thinking of ordinary people, the concept of individual-­ level functionality simply appreciates the fact that ordinary people are often motivated to engage in corruption because doing so will help them to solve a problem they face (Marquette and Peiffer 2015, 2018, 500; 2019, 2020; Peiffer et al. 2021).2 Especially in resource scarce environments, these problems materialise as symptoms of a ‘weak state’, and for ordinary people, they often take the form of patchy and incomplete provisioning of public services. Structurally, ordinary people find themselves within states that promise to provide citizens public goods, like access to a hospital bed or a place in secondary school, but those states are unable to fulfil such promises of entitlements for all who require them because they cannot afford to, and often also because resources needed to do so are lost in corrupt exchanges higher up the chain. When social services and goods are scarce, they can either be allocated by a points system (e.g. grade points), queuing, through personal connections or after the receipt of a bribe. Therefore, an individual-level corruption functionality perspective suggests that corruption is drawn upon by ordinary people as a response to the public system they encounter, when formal routes to access a state service or good are either not available, too costly or are (perceived) to be unreliable, and when a person does not have required necessary personal connections to access a service or good informally. Obadare (2019) similarly calls this the ‘necessity of everyday corruption’, the idea that ordinary people use corruption to fix problems they face in their day-to-day lives. This appreciation is conceptually distinct from system-level functionality, as

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the focus here is on how corruption is used intentionally, as an informal tool for the purpose of trying to reach a goal, address a (perceived) need, or solve a problem. Marquette and I were certainly not the first to argue that corruption is functional in this way, but our first works about corruption functionality were instead written as a corrective to a tone in theoretical literature on corruption which tended to overlook the functional logic of corruption for ordinary people (Marquette and Peiffer 2019). Indeed, as early as the late nineteenth century, scholarship emphasised how individuals used corruption to achieve certain aims (Navot 2014, 359). The idea was especially prominent in modernisation theory scholarship during the 1950s until the early 1970s, wherein corruption was discussed as having both levels of positive functions—positive functions both for individuals and for the political and economic systems (Osrecki 2017). Merton (1968), for example, argued that corruption was intentionally used as a way for outsiders to accumulate private wealth, to achieve social mobility. Similarly, Huntington (1968) argued that new industrial and commercial elites used corruption to influence political systems that were dominated by groups that traditionally inhabited the formal political space. Elites or political ‘machine’ bosses were seen as using corruption to strengthen their hold on power by targeting and co-opting groups and voters with (Scott 1969). Scholarship started to avoid using the term ‘function’ in reference to corruption after the late 1970s, when economists dominated the mainstream study of corruption (Marquette 1999; Osrecki 2017; Williams 1999).3 Over the last two decades, research on corruption, however, has become more interdisciplinary, and the theme of corruption serving vital functions is seeing a resurgence (Marquette and Peiffer 2018). Several contemporary examples, from a range of contexts, highlight how corruption’s individual-level functionality may play out for elites and ordinary people. With respect to elites, in the 1990s and early 2000s, for instance, it was argued that lower-income country budgets often do not have the fiscal space to accommodate an egalitarian distribution of resources, presenting a political challenge for leaders hoping to stay in office and/or to quell instability. In such contexts, political leaders were observed to use targeted transfers of resources, that necessarily remain hidden, to political elites in order to garner or maintain political support (Khan 2004, 2006; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Ghura 1998; Herbst 2000; Stotsky and WoldeMariam 1997).4

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As noted, for ordinary people, bribery and the use of personal connections is especially seen as a way (sometimes, the only way) to navigate a system where services are scarcely provided (Bauhr 2016; Walton 2013; Hickey and Du Toit 2013). Outside of trying to access services, individuals also use such grass-roots corruption to strengthen social relationships. Reciprocal corruption, for example, is a gift-type (gift comes typically from a public organisation) corrupt exchange that creates a counter obligation and is built on trust (Jancsics 2019). Jancsics (2019) argues that reciprocal corruption is used not only or even primarily for the materially benefit the actors involved, but it is often used as a way of building social trust, maintaining the stability of social systems, keeping social groups together and even integrating new group members. Consistent with individual-level functionality literature, according to Jancsics (2019), the emergence and persistence socially functional corruption is often also a response to contextually systemic problems. The persistence of such corruption is a function of ‘historical patterns and serves as a survival kit to deal with the inadequacies of macro-level formal institutional arrangements such as shortages, insufficient rights, harsh uncertain environments, rigid authoritarian political regimes, or physical violence by authorities’ (Jancsics 2019). Relatedly, in previous work, Marquette and I discuss Gauri, Woolcock and Desai’s (Gauri et al. 2011, 27) observation that in Honduras, where many communities have experienced a history of violence and conflict, patron-client relationships are defended by ordinary people because, in addition to giving them (sometimes corrupt) access to public funds, such relationships provide security and safety for ordinary people in a place where governments cannot do so. These examples are useful insofar as they show that ordinary people can use grass-roots corruption to solve more than just the problem of lacking access to public goods and services.

Fighting Corruption Without Addressing Functions Marquette and I have argued elsewhere that a focus on the individual-­ level functionality of corruption is important for inspiring more effective and sustainable anticorruption interventions (Marquette and Peiffer 2020). Through a functionality lens, anticorruption efforts are most likely to work in the long term when the functions that corruption serves are addressed and fulfilled in another (non-corrupt) way. ‘Truly effective anticorruption efforts, therefore, may not even attempt to directly tackle

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corruption in the first place. Instead, the logical extension of our argument would imply that serious attempts to control corruption would have to start by trying to gain an understanding of what solutions corruption provides to those who engage in it, and then try to deal in the business of providing those solutions through other means’ (Marquette and Peiffer 2018, 11). By addressing the functionality, the perceived necessity to use corruption to solve key problems can theoretically be removed. Moreover, if an anticorruption drive is pursued and the functionality of corruption is not addressed, two issues are expected to arise from this perspective. First, any reduction in corruption is likely to be temporary, and second, reductions in corruption are predicted to potentially lead to unwanted unintended consequences. Marquette and I found support for these ideas in our research into bribery reduction among the police in Limpopo, South Africa and among healthcare workers in Uganda (Peiffer et al. 2019, 2021; Marquette and Peiffer 2022). In both cases, an unexpected and dramatic decrease in bribery was observed (Peiffer and Armytage 2019). Our field research into what caused these decreases indicated that, in common across both contexts, bribery patterns were disrupted because police and healthcare workers believed that high-level pushes to control corruption in their sectors were being pursued, which took the form of harsher monitoring and punishment regimes. As a result, these public sector workers became especially fearful of being caught and receiving harsh punishments for engaging in bribery (Marquette and Peiffer 2022). However, in each case, bribery rates likely rebounded after a relatively brief time. Given their exclusive focus on monitoring and punishment, these anticorruption drives did not attempt to also address the underlying functionality of bribery (Marquette and Peiffer 2022). In both cases, bribery functioned to supplement low wages in the sectors and as a way for ordinary people to get access to health services in Uganda, or to avoid police fines and harassment in Limpopo. The short-lived reductions in bribery, therefore, make sense. Not only is it difficult and costly to sustain harsh monitoring and punishment regimes for long, but these interventions did not change the perceived need engage in bribery from either party. When public sector workers felt comfortable navigating or evading new systems and desperate enough to take a risk being caught, they still had an incentive to do so, and the motivations for accessing health care or avoiding police scrutiny and harassment, respectively, for ordinary people had not changed.

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In the case of the anticorruption push which reduced bribery for health workers in Uganda, our analysis suggested that because it did not address the functionality of corruption, the intervention likely also had unintended consequences for the broader health care system. This is because the intervention limited the opportunities available to health workers to meet their financial needs. We concluded that such pressure very likely contributed to the decisions of many health workers to leave the sector or engage in absenteeism, so they could work somewhere else during working hours (Peiffer et al. 2019). At the system level, for the ordinary people that rely on the state health system, such potential impacts would very likely mean a further reduction in access and quality of services.

Ordinary People, Moralities and Translation of Anticorruption Normative Framings In addition to the anticorruption policy insights described above, an ordinary people perspective on corruption also sheds light on an additional reason for why many anticorruption efforts often fail. The individual-level functionality perspective about corruption has been historically pitted against so-called ‘morality framings’ of (anti) corruption (Osrecki 2017). In de Sousa’s (De Sousa 2010, 11) words, since the late 1980s, ‘efforts to combat corruption were increasingly contaminated by the rising moral tone of what could be defined as a global movement against corruption’. This moral tone, Bukovansky (2002) argues is inspired by neoliberal ideas about the ‘moral underpinnings of a successful market economy’ (see also Navot 2014). In practice, it is further argued that ‘anticorruption efforts necessarily require an image of a ‘good’ polity which carries significant moral weight, as well as requiring moral behaviour on the part of at least some individual human beings’ (Bukovansky 2002, 26). Such moral underpinnings are present when corruption is seen as a result of a moral decay amongst officials or broader, as well as the casting of the choice to engage in corruption as a black and white issue, where those that engage in corruption are thought to be lacking in morality or have poor values and ethics (Gebel 2012; Osrecki 2017; Bukovansky 2006; Sinpeng 2014). However, where grass-roots corruption is recognised as being functional, there lies a conflict between how ordinary people tend to judge the morality of such acts and the before-mentioned moral anticorruption narratives. In places where the state is weak and public services are scarcely

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provided, bureaucratic rules are often circumvented—either through the payment of a bribe or with drawing on personal connections—with the belief that doing so is the ‘right thing to do’, given presented circumstances. Focusing on bribery, in resource scarce environments, ordinary people are often well aware that public servants often rely on bribery to supplement very low or non-existent wages. It is often because of this awareness that such small bribes are not always popularly resented. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, an anticorruption drive aimed at reducing bribery amongst road police was resisted and undermined by many motorists, partly because motorists recognised that road police officer’s incomes were inadequate and unreliable and felt that the officers needed bribes to get by (Malukisa 2017, 113–114). Of course, for ordinary people, refusing to engage in bribery is an impractical option in many places as it means doing without a needed service or assistance from the state. As Rose and I demonstrated, this will be especially the case for those who have fewer resources and connections (Peiffer and Rose 2018). An ordinary people perspective makes room to consider complex public moralities around the engagement of corruption and the use of personal connections, as, like the functionality perspective, its starting point is to understand how ordinary people perceive such interactions and the ways in which they may instrumentalise or rely on them. Beliefs about the morality of engaging in corruption are not independent from that of its individual-level functionality. Using a cliché example, which is useful for this purpose, nonetheless: if a parent knows that offering a bribe will mean that their very sick child will be seen by a health worker, they will very likely not only pay it if they have the resources, but they will do so with the belief that it was the morally right thing to do. Policies targeted at reducing grass-roots corruption which internalises an understanding that such corruption as primarily the result of (narrowly defined) poor ethics, deficits in integrity, or defunct moralities, are therefore especially well placed to overlook its potential functionality and may therefore be prone to falter in the long term or have undesired consequences. In Walton’s (Walton 2013, 187) words, ‘expecting people to reject corruption based on the premise that “it wouldn’t be honest” is not tenable when corruption serves to redistribute state resources to the poor’. The antibribery intervention in DRC example noted above illustrates that when anticorruption efforts fail to account for the sometimes-complex

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moralities ordinary people hold around engaging in corruption, well-­ intentioned anticorruption interventions can be undermined. This blind spot is important to recognise as it has unique implications for how anticorruption programmes are ‘translated’ at local levels and for the potential for ordinary people to lose faith in broader anticorruption efforts. In not making room to understand how ordinary people define the morality of their engagement in grass-roots corruption, anticorruption efforts and the actors that deliver them will lose or continue to lack legitimacy. To this end, Bukovansky writes: Externally imposed standards will lack legitimacy unless they are embraced and internalized by the culture on which they are imposed. Legitimacy of a law or standard is at least in part an ethical problem; a standard must be embraced as ‘right’ or ‘fair’ by a social actor to be considered legitimate. Standards that lack legitimacy (the ethical problem) are less likely than legitimate standards to be effectively enforced (the pragmatic problem). (Bukovansky 2006, 184)

From this perspective, it makes little sense to pursue corrective ethics training for public sector actors, integrity management reforms, or awareness raising campaigns, if a recognition is made that bribery, for ordinary people, is often the ‘only way to get things done’, and for low-level public officials, sometimes, the only way to get paid sufficiently. This perspective makes clear that anticorruption efforts targeted at changing the attitudes and behaviours of ordinary people will likely not be effective when they are designed without internalising a recognition that corruption is functional for many ordinary people and, because of that, is not always perceived to be immoral. Even if they are successful in changing how people think about the morality of corruption, without addressing the structural reasons which led to bribery patterns in the first place, such efforts are unlikely to impact on whether people engage in grass-roots corruption.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have reflected upon key contributions and findings from Rose’s work from his ordinary people perspective. I have highlighted a prominent theme which features across a trilogy of applications, which is that people draw on a range of resources and tactics to safeguard their well-being and to try to get ahead including drawing on the state and

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public policy outputs, but also on their social networks and, especially in some contexts, even the bending and breaking of bureaucratic rules. I have argued that, as it relates to grass-roots corruption, this notion is consistent with the central understanding on individual-level corruption functionality. And, synergistic insights from both individual-level corruption functionality work and the ordinary people perspective make room to consider complex public moralities around the engagement of corruption. The functionality lens, as I have described it, argues that corruption is best fought indirectly—to take away the impetus to engage in corruption, its functions need to be addressed. We have some evidence to support the ideas I have articulated here about what happens when functionality is not considered, in anticorruption policies. Future research should not only test these hypotheses further, challenging or adding to this evidence base, but it should also aim to test the core promise of the lens. As it relates to ordinary people: does grass-roots corruption reduce when the functionalities of it are addressed through policy? My guess is that addressing the individual-level functionality of corruption will be a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieving changes in grass-roots corruption. Work from other theoretical frameworks on what sustains corruption highlights the importance, for instance, of having the right accountability infrastructure in place in order to effectively deter corruption as well as the impact that social trust can play in sustaining corruption patterns (Persson et al. 2019). Taken together, the message is that behavioural patterns of ordinary people become entrenched for lots of reasons and are sometimes notoriously intractably difficult to shift. As Rose has shown us, there are real limits to the impact of many public policy processes upon ordinary lives.

Notes 1. Some recent exceptions, however, do reflect themes seen in early work on the system-level functionality of corruption. For example, Yuen Yuen Ang’s (Ang 2020) work on corruption in China argues that high-level corruption, between politicians and businesspeople, has stimulated investment and economic growth. As before, these economic benefits are not argued to have motivated the businesspeople who engage in corruption, but they are seen as a by-product of the exchange itself. 2. Though conceptually different, these two perspectives are not necessarily incompatible. It is possible that corruption patterns can both shape or

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s­ ustain a system and be seen as a way to solve a problem for individuals. The famous ‘grease the wheels’ hypothesis, for instance, wherein bureaucratic corruption is discussed as having potentially positive system-wide economic benefits, is also discussed as fulfilling an individual-level function. The argument goes that people will choose to engage in bureaucratic corruption to solve the problem of personally encountering a slow bureaucracy (Leff 1964; Huntington 1968; Leys 1965). 3. However, research emphasising the functionality of corruption can be found in many anthropological accounts before, throughout and after the 1990s (see Torsello and Venard 2016, for a critical review). 4. Baez-Camargo and Ledeneva (2017) discuss some of the specific mechanisms involved in such functionality. They argue that corruption is commonly used to co-opt politically important actors in especially weak or non-democratic contexts. Co-option practices can involve networks of political elites, business elites, organised crime groups and even grass-roots social groups.

References Ang, Y.Y. 2020. China’s Gilded Age. The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baez-Camargo, C., and A.  Ledeneva. 2017. Where Does Informality Stop and Corruption Begin? Informal Governance and the Public/Private Crossover in Mexico, Russia and Tanzania. Slavonic and East European Review 95 (1): 49–75. Batley, R., and C.  Mcloughlin. 2015. The Politics of Public Services: A Service Characteristics Approach. World Development 74 (2): 275–285. Bauhr, M. 2016. Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action Against Corruption. Governance 30 (4): 561–581. Brady, D., and L. Burton, eds. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bukovansky, M. 2002. Corruption Is Bad: Normative Dimensions of the Anti-­ Corruption Movement. Canberra: Australia National University Department of International Relations Working Paper No. 2002/5. ———. 2006. The Hollowness of Anti-Corruption Discourse. Review of International Political Economy 13 (2): 181–209. Chabal, P., and J. Daloz. 1999. Africa Works: The Political Instrumentalization of Disorder. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. De Sousa, L. 2010. Anti-Corruption Agencies: Between Empowerment and Irrelevance. Crime, Law and Social Change 53 (1): 5–22. Gauri, V., M.  Woolcock, and D.  Desai. 2011. Intersubjective Meaning and Collective Action in ‘Fragile’ Societies: Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications. Washington, DC: World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 5707.

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Gebel, A. 2012. Human Nature and Morality in the Anti-Corruption Discourse of Transparency International. Public Administration and Development 32 (1): 109–128. Ghura, D. 1998. Tax Revenue in Sub-Saharan Africa: Effects of Economic Policies and Corruption. Washington, DC: IMF. Herbst, J. 2000. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heywood, P.M. 2017. Rethinking Corruption: Hocus-Pocus, Locus and Focus. Slavonic and East European Review 95 (1): 21–48. Hickey, S., and A. Du Toit. 2013. Adverse Incorporation, Social Exclusion, and Chronic Poverty. In Chronic Poverty: Concepts, Causes, and Policy, ed. A. Shepard and J. Brunt. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Huntington, S. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jancsics, D. 2019. Corruption as Resource Transfer: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis. Public Administration Review 79 (4): 523–537. Justesen, M., and C.  Bjørnskov. 2014. Exploiting the Poor: Bureaucratic Corruption and Poverty in Africa. World Development 58 (1): 106–115. Khan, M. 2004. State Failure in Developing Countries and Strategies of Institutional Reform. In Toward Pro-Poor Policies: Aid Institutions and Globalization, ed. B.  Tungodden, N.  Stern, and I.  Kolstad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Determinants of Corruption in Developing Countries: The Limits of Conventional Economic Analysis. In International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption, ed. S. Rose-Ackerman. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Leff, N. 1964. Economic Development Through Bureaucratic Corruption. American Behavioral Scientist 8 (3): 8–14. Leys, C. 1965. What Is the Problem About Corruption? Journal of Modern African Studies 3 (2): 215–230. Malukisa, A. 2017. La Gouvernance Réelle du Transport en Commun à Kinshasa : La Préeminence des « Normes Pratiques sur les Normes Officielles. University of Antwerp. PhD dissertation. Marquette, H. 1999. Corruption Eruption: Development and the International Community. Third World Quarterly 20 (6): 1215–1220. Marquette, H., and C.  Peiffer. 2015. Corruption and Collective Action. Birmingham: Development Policy Research Paper. ———. 2018. Grappling with the ‘Real Politics’ of Systemic Corruption: Theoretical Debates Versus ‘Real-World’ Functions. Governance 31 (3): 499–514. ———. 2019. Thinking Politically About Corruption as Problem-Solving: A reply to Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell. Governance 32 (4): 811–820. ———. 2020. Corruption Functionality Framework. Washington, DC: Global Integrity.

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———. 2022. Corruption and Anticorruption: Uganda and South Africa as Positive Outliers in Governance Reforms? In Handbook on Governance and Development, ed. W. Hout and J. Hutchison. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Mbate, M. 2018. Who Bears the Burden of Bribery? Evidence from Public Service Delivery in Kenya. Development Policy Review 36: O321–O340. Merton, R. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Mishler, W., and R.  Rose. 1996. Trajectories of Fear and Hope: Support for Democracy in Post-Communist Europe. Comparative Political Studies 28 (4): 553–581. ———. 1997. Trust, Distrust and Skepticism: Popular Evaluations of Civil and Political Institutions in Post-communist Societies. Journal of Politics 59 (2): 418–451. ———. 2001. What are the Origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post-Communist Societies. Comparative Political Studies 34 (1): 30–62. ———. 2001b. Political Support for Incomplete Democracies: Realist vs. Idealist Theories and Measures. International Political Science Review 22 (4): 303–320. ———. 2005. What are the Political Consequences of Trust? A Test of Cultural and Institutional Theories in Russia. Comparative Political Studies 38 (9): 1050–1078. Navot, D. 2014. The Concept of Political Corruption: Lessons from a Lost Epoch. Public Integrity 16 (4): 357–373. Obadare, E. 2019. Farewell to Norms? Corruption and Social Decomposition in Africa. Newcastle: University of Newcastle Keynote Address ‘Beyond Corruption?’ Conference. Osrecki, F. 2017. A Short History of the Sociology of Corruption: The Demise of Counter-Inductivity and the Rise of Numerical Comparisons. American Sociologist 48 (1): 103–125. Peiffer, C., and R.  Armytage. 2019. Searching for Success: A Mixed Methods Approach to Identifying and Examining Positive Outliers in Development Outcomes. World Development 121 (1): 97–107. Peiffer, C., R. Armytage, H. Marquette, and P. Gumisiriza. 2021. Lessons from Reducing Bribery in Uganda’s Health Services. Development Policy Review 39 (5): 721–739. Peiffer, C., H. Marquette, R. Armytage, and T. Budhram. 2019. The Surprising Case of Police Bribery Reduction in South Africa. Crime, Law and Social Change 72 (5): 587–606. Peiffer, C., and R. Rose. 2018. Why are the Poor More Vulnerable to Bribery in Africa? The Institutional Effects of Services. Journal of Development Studies 54 (1): 18–29. Persson, A., B.  Rothstein, and J.  Teorell. 2019. Getting the Basic Nature of Systemic Corruption Right: A Reply to Marquette and Peiffer. Governance 32 (4): 799–810.

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Piven, F., and L. Minnete. 2015. Poor People’s Politics. In The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty, ed. D. Brady and L. Burton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, R. 1986. The State’s Contribution to the Welfare Mix. In The Welfare State East and West, ed. R. Rose and R. Shiratori. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989. Ordinary People in Public Policy. London: Sage. ———. 2009. Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach. London: Routledge. Rose, R., and C.  Haerpfer. 1998. New Democracies Barometer V: A 12-Nation Survey. Vol. No 306. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy. Rose, R., and W.  Mishler. 1996. Testing the Churchill Hypothesis: Popular Support for Democracy and its Alternatives. Journal of Public Policy 16 (1): 29–58. ———. 2001. What Are the Origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post-Communist Societies. Comparative Political Studies 34 (1): 30–62. Rose, R., W.  Mishler, and C.  Haerpfer. 1998. Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rose, R., W. Mishler, and N. Munro. 2011. Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime: The Changing Views of Russians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, R., and C. Peiffer. 2015. Paying Bribes for Public Services: A Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption. London: Springer. ———. 2016. Integrating Institutional and Behavioural Measures of Bribery. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 22 (3): 525–542. ———. 2018. Bad Governance and Corruption. London: Springer. Scott, J. 1969. The Analysis of Corruption in Developing Nations. Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (3): 315–341. Sefton, T. 2006. Distributive and Redistributive Policy. In The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, ed. M.  Moran, M.  Rein, and R.E.  Goodin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinpeng, A. 2014. Corruption, Morality, and the Politics of Reform in Thailand. Asian Politics and Policy 6 (4): 523–538. Stotsky, J., and A.  WoldeMariam. 1997. Tax Effort in Sub-Saharan Africa. Washington, DC: IMF Working Papers No. 107. Torsello, D., and B. Venard. 2016. The Anthropology of Corruption. Journal of Management Inquiry 25 (1): 34–54. Walton, G. 2013. Is All Corruption Dysfunctional? Perceptions of Corruption and its Consequences in Papua New Guinea. Public Administration and Development 33 (1): 175–190. Williams, R. 1999. New Concepts for Old? Third World Quarterly 20 (3): 503–513.

CHAPTER 11

Governments and Citizens Under Stress B. Guy Peters

Governing is not an easy task. Every day, governments, along with their allies in the private sector, face challenges when attempting to make good policy and to put those good policies into effect within the society. Even when they are capable of making very good policy choices, governments need to marshal the resources to pay for them. And they must raise that money without overly antagonizing their citizens, or losing the confidence of the markets that provide at least part of the funding for the public sector. The challenge of maintaining public confidence and legitimacy in order to be able to govern is perhaps the most fundamental challenge for any government. Autocratic governments that are willing to utilize various forms of coercion against their citizens may be able to gain the compliance of the population in almost any circumstance, but compliance is gained at some cost—financial as well as in terms of legitimacy. Democratic governments attempt to govern without the use of coercion most of the time. They may, however, have to resort to that resource against criminal activity, or perhaps during times of crisis such as flood, pandemics, or other catastrophic event that require higher levels of control over the public

B. G. Peters (*) Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_11

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than might be acceptable in ‘normal times’. The goal of democratic governments, however, is to be able to govern through legitimate authority, with as little direct intervention as possible (Dahl 1989). I had the great good fortune to work with Richard Rose on a book entitled Can Government Go Bankrupt? (1978). We were to some extent concerned with the financial operations of governments, and especially the demands for services that were fueling large increases in taxation, or budget deficits, or both, in European and North American governments during the early 1970s. For this book, however, the meaning of bankruptcy was more metaphorical. We were concerned with the possibility of governments losing legitimacy because of those financial issues, as well as other policy failures. How long would the public continue to accept the decrees of a government that did not appear capable of managing its own budget, or of controlling its own policy agenda? Or accept public sector spending that eroded their own take-home pay? This concern with legitimacy also affects contemporary democracies and can be seen in the decline of trust and confidence that citizens have in their governments. Trust in government, and in one’s fellow citizens, has been declining in advanced democratic systems (Warren 2019). This decline in trust has been apparent even in cases such as the Scandinavian countries with long histories of benevolent and effective government. In cases such as the United States, in which the public have displayed skepticism about government for some time, already low levels of trust have declined even further. If the public do not trust their government, nor have confidence in it, then the government’s capacity to govern can be severely limited. The decline in trust in government, and increasing political polarization, reflects the feeling among many people that being an ordinary citizen is not an easy task either. Many of the same problems that affected the public in the 1970s, and led to their declining faith in the governance capacity of their political systems, are relevant in the early twenty-first century. Two recent crises—one financial and one a pandemic—have led more citizens to question the capacity of their governments. Can Government Go Bankrupt? was written at a time in which there was a great deal of discussion, among academics, the media, the chattering classes, as well as ordinary citizens, about the seemingly fundamental problems of democratic governance. Individuals on the political left talked about the problems of late capitalism (O’Connor 1973), while those on the political right were concerned about the real, financial bankruptcy of

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governments and their inability to maintain their own, or the societies, financial stability. As well as the issues of financial stability, there were issues about how overloaded the agendas of governments were, and whether they were actually capable of controlling so many aspects of social and political life (Crozier et al. 1975). While some of these concerns may have been exaggerated, there was little doubt that governments faced significant stress and that stress has not been fully alleviated. Richard Rose himself wrote on overloaded government (1975) and problems of ungovernability (1979). In those writings, he again stressed the centrality of legitimacy and authority in governing, and the potential threats to those crucial resources of the public sector. He also pointed to some of the excesses in this literature, for example deeming ungovernability to be a nonsense. His assumption has been that there will always be some form of governance. The real question is how good that governance will be. Will governments be able to govern depending on authority and consent, or will they have to use more invasive means? Further, can governments maintain some form of working consensus about policy, or will divisions over policy and politics place even greater overload on government? Another important aspect of Richard Rose’s contributions to the understanding of governments under stress was to emphasize that citizens were also under stress. Governments may have had, and may be continuing to have, troubles paying their bills, but the ordinary citizen was also facing financial problems as well. Economic growth has become less certain, and governments may not be providing ordinary citizens good value for their tax money. Like governments, ordinary people are squeezed.

Overload and Stress, Then and Now The good news is that democratic governments that were under stress in the 1970s have survived until 2023. The financial issues that were driving much of the concern with bankruptcy and overload in the 1970s have persisted and from time to time have increased. The possibility of financial bankruptcy for Greece was, for example, discussed during the Great Recession (Nguyen 2012). Political leaders and central banks, however, have come to accept these financial problems as facts of life. Efforts to control deficits and public debt, for example, the deficit rules employed by the European Union, or various bits of legislation such as Balanced Budget Act in the United States, may have slowed some of the increase in public

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deficits and debt, but certainly not eliminated those problems. These fiscal problems have in fact been enlarged by successive crises such as the fiscal crisis beginning in 2009, and COVID. While democratic governments may have survived until 2023, and may have normalized some of the fiscal problems that have been plaguing them for decades, their problems of legitimacy and the potential bankruptcy of legitimacy persist. The tide of democratization that included former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (see Przeworski 2016) and authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world (Boese et al. 2021) appears to have ebbed, and ‘democratic backsliding’ (Bermeo 2016; Bauer et al. 2022) has become a concern for political scientists and political leaders alike (see Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). While democratic backsliding and the growth of populist politics have been perhaps the most obvious challenges to the legitimacy of contemporary democratic regimes, there are other challenges as well. One of these is analogous to the overload problems discussed in the 1970s. That is, contemporary governments have very large commitments for programs such as pensions and healthcare that will be increasingly difficult to fulfill. Some of the economic changes that were beginning when we wrote Can Government Go Bankrupt?, such as low productivity growth and the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas suppliers, and now to automation, will make maintaining the promised benefits from the public sector a major burden on governments and on taxpayers. Finally, there appear to be increasing problems of insecurity confronting contemporary governments and society. This insecurity is related in part to the growth of populism discussed above (see Hibbing 2020). The public in many countries fear that their comfortable, or even not so comfortable, way of life is being eroded by forces such as immigration, crime, uncertainties in the economy, and fundamental social and cultural change. They may feel that they somehow have been cheated by government, business, or some other forces that they cannot identify (Keller and Kirkpatrick 2022). This sense of being deprived of rights can only further undermine the legitimacy of governments.

Democratic Backsliding The democratic backsliding experienced in any number of countries has been primarily in terms of the erosion of liberal democracy. That is, populist parties and populist leaders claim to be implementing a democratic

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mandate derived from their elections. Politicians such as Victor Orban, Giorgia Meloni, and Donald Trump all have won elections and have won those elections by running against the ‘deep state’ and the (allegedly) entrenched elites that populate those states (Moynihan 2022). Once in office, these populist leaders do not want to be thwarted in their efforts to govern by bureaucracies or other public institutions that may have their own ideas about what constitutes appropriate public policy (Bauer et al. 2022). The increased strength of populist politics and leaders is having a significant impact on legitimacy and on governance in many countries. These impacts come primarily through undermining other institutions such as courts, the bureaucracy and other non-majoritarian institutions that had the capacity to place checks and balances on elected leaders in liberal democratic regimes. The weakening of those institutions has also meant some weakening of minority rights. In addition, the media that has served as another check on the actions of governments is being attacked, and to some extent replaced by social media with content that is not mediated, as is true for traditional media (Engesser et al. 2017). Populism and democratic backsliding have rather complex relationships with legitimacy and authority. On the one hand, populist leaders tend to come to power by attacking the legitimacy of other political parties, and the existing state structures. They argue that the contemporary governments and their elites have undermined the true meanings of the state, and have imposed an illegitimate form of governance. Populist rhetoric, therefore, is often about returning the country in question to some glorious, if perhaps mythical past.1 In populist regimes, legitimacy is a function of a direct connection between a forceful leader—Orban, Trump, AMLO, or whoever—and the people. Rather than the legitimacy of the government of the day being derived from institutions and constitutional procedures, it derived from the direct support of the people. It is perhaps especially interesting that populist governments have been so unconcerned about, and ineffective in, delivering the types of benefits that their supporters have wanted. Much of the discussion of legitimacy and authority in the 1970s assumed a basic consensus on the ‘mixed-economy welfare state’ in the consolidated democracies. That consensus has now largely vanished, with deep divisions between right and left. In addition, the cleavages in societies are no longer just about economic issues. Those economic issues are easy to resolve with money. The cleavages are now as much or more about

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culture and social values, and these cannot be papered over with money. These issues are over things such as minority rights, and the rights of a majority (women) are the very types of issues that the backsliding of liberal democracy is placing at the center of politics. These cultural and social divisions, which are largely unbargainable, may indeed produce something approaching ungovernability for some societies. As Richard Rose argued, ungovernability may be a nonsense if taken literally, but the possibility of deadlock, extended political conflict, and an inability to cope with major policy problems—in the short-term and especially in the long-term—can be very real. Democratic governments in almost all ages have faced a problem of ‘democratic myopia’ (MacKenzie 2020), and also face the challenge of reforming entitlement programs, for example, pension reform in France. The level of populist mobilization in contemporary politics can be contrasted with the concerns about political changes we expressed in the 1970s. The concerns expressed in Can Government Go Bankrupt, as well as in some of Rose’s other work (Rose 1980, 168ff), were more about a retreat from politics. While many younger people do appear to be dismissing politics, the reactions of many if not most discontented citizens has been to mobilize and to seek political solutions to their perceived problems and insecurities. At least at present, voice, with its own attendant problems, seems more appealing than exit.

The Return of Overload, or Did It Never Really Leave? The problem of overloaded governments has not decreased since the 1970s, but it has become a chronic rather than an acute disease. The more optimistic and stable periods of governing since the 1970s, associated with leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, Blair, and Merkel, have largely been overshadowed by continuing uncertainties about the capacity of governments to govern effectively. The fiscal problems of democratic governments continue to worry citizens, markets, and political leaders, but those leaders appear to find no solutions for the problem. As was true for the earlier period, they are faced with the imbalance of demand for services and revenues. Citizens continue to resist taxation, even in countries with large and benevolent public sectors. The neoliberal consensus on public finance that began with Reagan and Thatcher has become more rooted

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among citizens than among leaders in democratic countries, and cutting taxes (but not services) always appears to be a good campaign pledge.2 Despite the continuing problems of public finance, for much of the twenty-first century, political and economic leaders have had something of a reprieve from more immediate pressures of fiscal and policy overload. The major source of that reprieve has been a period of extremely low borrowing costs, making the expansion of public debt appear virtually costless—in the short-term at least. Therefore, political leaders could expand spending without a proportionate increase in taxation, weathering storms such as the ‘Great Recession’ and COVID by using massive borrowing. The economic consequences of COVID, and the increase in interest rates beginning thereafter, have returned the concept of scarcity to a more central position in thinking about public finance. Scarcity was always there but given that the effects of scarcity could be displaced onto future generations then politically they were much less important. The future does not vote, and therefore, it makes sense politically to displace present costs onto the future and to wish good fortune to presidents and prime ministers of that future. The uncertainties of the economy can be compared to some of the certainties of social policy, notably demography. In all wealthy democracies, and in many not so wealthy countries, the proportion of the population aged over 65 is projected to increase, and in some it is already high. Stated differently, the number of workers supporting each retiree may halve in many countries, meaning that support for pensions and medical care will be extremely strained. These demographic shifts have been known for decades, but governments have not been able to make the difficult choices necessary to ameliorate the stress on crucial government programs. To some extent, the proportion of the population over 65 understates the problem facing governments as they confront demographic change. Not only are more people living to age 65, they are living into their 80s and 90s, and as they do the demands on healthcare programs will increase exponentially and their demand for pension payments will continue unabated. Healthcare programs have to some extent been too successful, with people living much longer and suffering from chronic diseases for which there is no cure, only costs for continuing treatment. Although healthcare will be a continuing drain on public resources, pension programs are perhaps the most threatening programs for political legitimacy. In the first place, many citizens depend on them for their livelihood in retirement, having little or no private income. Second, these

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programs have been financed largely through social contributions, and citizens can identify a direct connection between those contributions and the benefit they are supposed to receive.3 It is not surprising therefore that even seemingly minor changes in eligibility and benefits can produce very large political reactions (Häuserman 2015). Many governments have chosen to avoid all but the most trivial reforms in pensions, leaving the problems for the governments that come after them and hoping, like Mr. Micawber, that ‘...something will turn up’. As unsettling as issues such as pension financing and soaring health costs may be, governments face even greater existential crises from climate change, and have shown themselves to be unwilling, or unable, to deal with this set of interconnected policy issues. In the first place, the costs of mitigating climate change and adapting to the changes that already appear to be inevitable will impose immense financial burdens on government for infrastructure, relocating populations, and changing basic components of their economies. Further, even those expenditures may be insufficient to avert serious humanitarian crises. Even if governments were capable of meeting some or even all of these challenges at home, they remain hostages to other governments, and to their society, for climate change and perhaps others. As Levin et al. (2012) have pointed out, one of the characteristics of ‘super-wicked’ problems such as climate change is the absence of an effective governance structure. International conferences on climate change have produced high-minded rhetoric and pleasing plans, but have not been able to produce enforceable rules, or to find ways to alter the behavior of many actors. If the dire predictions of large-scale disruption of food supplies, violent climactic events, and more pandemic diseases are at all accurate, the legitimacy of governments may be challenged by events over which they have had minimal control. The politics of contemporary overload is different from that in the 1970s for several reasons. Perhaps the most important difference is that the political right is much more powerful now than in the previous era of overload. Even for the non-populist right, there is now much less faith in the capacity of the public sector to solve important policy issues than there had been in the past. Further, the issues that activate the contemporary right appear to be more about social and cultural issues—abortion, sexual preference, immigration, identity politics—than about the issues of managing economies and major social programs. Indeed, some of the political

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right appears at least as unconcerned about deficits and debt as does the political left, so long as the deficits are the result of cutting taxes.4 In addition to the dominance of the right, the contemporary politics of coping with financial and other crises is that governments no longer have a reservoir of legitimacy from which they can draw when facing crises. The perceived weakness of governments in the first period of overload and presumed ungovernability was not systemic, but had more to do with policy choices, and their governance capacity when confronting growing demands accompanied by stable or declining resources. The lack of confidence in governments in the contemporary period borders on systemic, with many citizens questioning whether the existing institutions are appropriate for their society. Contemporary political strategy for coping with overload appears to be confined to one principal strategy: delay. Any political decision that might address the looming policy issues tends to confront entrenched political and economic interests, including those of ordinary citizens who expect to retire at a certain age and to have free healthcare as long as they live. Those are not unreasonable expectations perhaps, given that the citizens have paid into pension funds their entire working lives, and they have been promised to receive commensurate benefits once they retire. Delay may be an appropriate strategy if there is a clear path out of the problems that can be identified. But the available forecasts are for worsening conditions that will affect the capacity to make effective policies. This negative prognosis is certainly true for climate change, as environmental conference after conference provides credible predictions of massive disruption to business as usual. In addition, the clearly apparent demographic changes will result in taxes from fewer workers supporting the healthcare and pensions of a growing number of retirees. Avoidance, denial, and delay appear to be insufficient approaches to the current state of overloaded government.

Insecurity and Identity The insecurity dimension of contemporary responses to governance issues reflects Richard Rose’s concern with the impact of public policies on ordinary people. John Hibbing (2020) in particular has made the argument that individuals who have been attracted to populist politics, and have been associated with democratic backsliding, are doing so because they feel insecure about their place in the world, and in their country. Hibbing

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was primarily concerned with Trump supporters in the United States, but the argument could be made for supporters of other populist leaders and movements. The individuals who have been supporting these leaders worry first about the capacity of governments to keep them safe from physical threats, whether from foreign enemies or from crime. These citizens further worry about economic insecurity and the decline of their communities—in especially rural areas and small towns. To some extent, all these insecurities have been bound up with a fear of immigrants and the fear of social change more generally. Thus, many people in the ‘forgotten places’ have a sense of loss already, and a foreboding that they and those like them will suffer even greater loss. Some of this sense of loss is justified by the evidence of the decline of opportunities in rural areas, and the absence of the basic infrastructure for economic growth—high-speed internet as the most obvious example—in these areas. The losses experienced by these skeptics of government, however, go beyond the loss of income and life chances. They also involve a sense of abandonment by government, other elites in the society, and much of the society in general. The loss of take-home pay and other benefits experienced by citizens during the 1970s (Rose 1979) are now being magnified by what are perceived to be greater social and cultural losses.5 My discussion to this point has focused, at least implicitly, on the United States, but the same fears and feelings appear to motivate the voters for politicians such as Marine Le Pen, Jair Bolsonaro, and Giorgia Meloni. Populist politicians all direct appeals toward lower-middle-class and working-class voters who have been, or believe they have been, marginalized by economic and social change. These voters can identify no solutions to their perceived problems coming through the mainstream political parties in their countries and therefore are attracted to outsiders and more extreme parties that offer them seemingly simple solutions to the complex problems they are confronting. At the same time that groups that have been dominant in the economy, or have at least enjoyed a reasonable standard of living, have become threatened by economic and social change, identity politics by groups who have not been privileged is making additional claims on government (Bernstein 2005). Some of these claims are economic, including reparations for past injustices in some instances, but the claims often are more about status and cultural change. Those nonmonetary claims on

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governments can create more of an overload on government than do economic demands. Demands of socio-economic benefits can be met, if by no other means that turning on the printing presses, but demands for greater status and cultural identity require not only governments to change, but for society also to change. Governments have relatively few effective instruments for changing societal norms, and patterns of interpersonal behavior. These changes have been attempted, but the results have been slow and often unpredictable. Large-scale social engineering programs in the past were directed at least in part to changing values, but had at best limited success. Perhaps the most difficult challenge of this sort in contemporary politics is that the populist movements are, in some cases, being fueled by the groups who are usually considered to be dominant in society, notably white males (Berman 2019). In other countries, the collapse of old industries and social and economic pressures from immigrants have placed members of the dominant groups in society in vulnerable positions and have contributed to the rise of populist political leaders. Insecurity, and the associated search for security, is a more amorphous and perhaps vague source of overload and the decline of legitimacy than are factors such as increasing public deficits and the apparent incapacity of governments to deal with issues such as immigration. The effect on political behavior is, however, no less real. Individuals who had expected a predictable career and a predictable place in a stable society now find themselves facing declining expectations and a precarious future. The public sector and its elites provide easy targets of resentment about those changes in life chances.

The Interactions These three sets of problems and perceptions within contemporary democracies can be understood individually, but they also interact to produce greater challenges to the legitimacy of contemporary governments. The real fiscal problems of governments, and the associated pressures on public programs, reduce their capacity to address the problems of declining areas and segments of the population who are seeing their perceived life chances diminish. Political promises such as ‘leveling up’ in the United Kingdom sound promising, but it is not clear where the money will come from (Sparrow 2022). Likewise, governments may choose to try to find

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the growth areas of the future rather than attempting to ameliorate the problems of decline. The failures of governments to deal adequately with financial management and fiscal overload tend to exacerbate the sense of many critics that the money the ordinary citizen pays in taxes is being squandered, or even stolen, by the corrupt elites. In the original period of overload, political mobilization tended to be within relatively established parties and interest groups, but in the contemporary period, those cartel parties face competition from a range of parties that have less commitment to the values of liberal democracy. These parties are, however, often less interested in policies to remedy the problems of overload than they are in merely expressing opposition to the established parties and elites. The development of new niche parties—on the left as well as on the right—may also contribute to ungovernability and overload. The dominance of cartel parties for decades (Katz and Mair 2009) provided a predictable political environment within which to govern. Party systems are now more fragmented, more fluid and contain more extreme parties. This change in parties reduces the possibilities of making long-term and transformative policies and thus adds to a sense of ungovernability in democratic systems. Further, the perception of ungovernability may contribute to more populist responses against an ineffective government.

Solutions? As well as identifying the governance problems facing societies and the governments, we also need to think about solutions. In our book on bankruptcy, we offered a set of possible remedies for the threat of bankruptcy— few of which governments appear to have considered worthy of adopting. Those problems persist, and are still wanting solutions, and the contemporary problems of declining legitimacy and democratic backsliding certainly warrants concerted efforts if liberal democratic governance is to survive. So, what are we to do? One perhaps unlikely solution is to rely on the commitment of the majority of the public in democratic countries to the norms of democracy. Popular mobilization and the results of elections have been pushing back against some of the worst excesses of illiberal ideas and actions in political. While those reassertions of democratic values have occurred at approximately the same time as some further successes of populist and anti-system

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politicians, some countries have been able to step back from the brink, and reject the extreme positions of some populist politicians. A related solution to these problems is more direct involvement of the public in the processes of governing (see MacKenzie 2020). The argument here would be that ordinary citizens find the processes of government to be opaque, and their information increasingly has come from extreme, unmediated sources. Finding means for greater engagement by the public may lead to greater understanding of the challenges of governing, and with that greater respect for the individuals who are involved in governing. While this solution may contain something of a Catch-22 (if people are so skeptical how and why would they become engaged in government?), it may still be a way of reducing some of the alienation felt by populist supporters. Yet, a third option for enhancing legitimacy is to depoliticize more of the decision-making about difficult policy issues. While this solution may appear undemocratic at first glance, and perhaps even at a second glance, it also appears to be acceptable to voters.6 Citizens want certain benefits from their governments, but they also want predictability (see Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002). Institutions such as central banks and the courts provide greater predictability and therefore may make governments appear more competent to the ordinary citizen. Most of the challenges to governing discussed so far have come from the political right, but the solutions must also take into account the contributions of the political left to the loss of legitimacy for government. The austerity that has been a standard solution for governments to its problems of ‘overload’ has provoked reactions from the left demanding more public spending and the creation of more equitable societies (see Alesina et al. 2019). Thus, attempting to govern from the center involves balancing competing demands and competing conceptions of what constitutes ‘good governance’. These possible solutions may appear to some extent contradictory, but they need not be. For example, even if some major policy decisions are depoliticized at least in part, as has been successful with central banks in most cases, some other aspects of governing can be more overtly participatory. In addition, austerity could be managed in ways not to harm the most vulnerable members of the society. Producing these possible responses requires, however, careful design of policies and some reduction in the level of partisan rhetoric that surrounds most contemporary policy decisions.

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Conclusion Richard Rose has reminded us a number of times that ordinary people are major considerations in public policy. The numerous organizations in the public sector each deliver their specialized programs, but individual citizens consume a range of those services and can see how they work together. Individual citizens are also the ones paying the taxes to finance those programs and have to worry if there is enough money left over after the claims of government to be able to finance their private consumption in the way they would like. It is these ordinary citizens that confer legitimacy on governments, and who can also open the doors for politicians who want to use popular discontent as an avenue for their own political advancement. In the first period of overloaded government, that discontent was principally about economic issues and could be channeled through established political parties and political institutions. In the second wave of overload and ungovernability, the discontent is directed at the institutions themselves, as well as the leaders who are alleged to have used those institutions for their personal gain. The good news that has been emerging is that democratic institutions are more resilient than their detractors, or their supporters, had assumed. In Brazil and in the United States, elections in the autumn of 2022 demonstrated that those ordinary citizens continued to have substantial faith in institutions, as well as in some of the liberal democratic values supporting those institutions. Especially in the United States, when given the opportunity voters rejected politicians who had questioned the outcomes of elections and who had supported attempts to overturn elections. The struggle over the preservation and expansion of democratic institutions is not over, but many of the signs are now more positive than in recent years. The governance challenges facing governments and ordinary citizens are not, however, at all resolved and may be becoming more pressing. In addition to shorter-term but vexing issues such as a pandemic, the longer-­ term issues of climate change, pensions, food security, immigration, and many more remain unsolved, and in some cases almost unaddressed. Ordinary citizens may be able to make some contributions to solving these issues, but in the end, it must be governments who find the conviction, and the ideas, to govern and to make policy.

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Notes 1. ‘Make America Great Again’ is the clearest example of this yearning for a lost past. 2. Sometimes, although infrequently, that pledge is honored after the election. When it is, it can produce disastrous results (as in the United Kingdom with Truss). 3. This connection is especially clear in the United States where Social Security pensions are financed almost entirely from an earmarked tax. Although the predictions are that the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted in the 2030s, Congress has not been willing or able to do anything to increase the viability of the program. 4. The most obvious example is the budget proposed by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng in the United Kingdom. Further, Donald Trump showed little concern with fiscal probity when advocating his tax cut legislation, and the Republicans in Congress were more than willing to support the cuts. 5. Although the book is deeply flawed, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy captures some of the sense of loss and abandonment in rural America, especially Appalachia. 6. This evidence is admittedly limited, but it is suggestive of a desire for effective governance, even if that requires more limited political involvement. In addition to central banks, the agency model in New Public Management involves some depoliticization of important policy decisions.

References Alesina, A., C. Favero, and F. Givazzi. 2019. Austerity: When It Works and When it Doesn’t. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bauer, M.W., B.G.  Peters, J.  Pierre, K.  Yesilkagit, and S.  Becker. 2022. Democratic Backsliding and Public Administration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berman, S. 2019. Populism Is a Symptom, Rather than a Cause: Democratic Discontent, the Decline of the Center-Left, and the Rise of Populism in Western Europe. Polity 41 (3): 654–667. Bermeo, N. 2016. On Democratic Backsliding. Journal of Democracy 27 (1): 5–19. Bernstein, M. 2005. Identity Politics. Annual Review of Sociology 11: 47–74. Boese, V.A., S.I. Lindberg, and A. Lührmann. 2021. Waves of Autocratization and Democratization: A Rejoinder. Democratization 28 (5): 1202–1210. Crozier, M., S.P.  Huntington, and J.  Watanuki. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University Press. Dahl, R.A. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Engesser, S., et al. 2017. Populism and Social Media: How Politicians Spread a Fragmented Ideology. Information, Communications and Society 20 (5): 1109–1126. Häuserman, S. 2015. The Politics of Welfare State Reform in Continental Europe: Modernization in Hard Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hibbing, J.R. 2020. The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why it Matters for the Post-Trump Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hibbing, J.R., and E. Theiss-Morse. 2002. Stealth Democracy: American’s Beliefs About How Government Should Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, R., and P. Mair. 2009. The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement. Perspectives on Politics 7 (4): 753–766. Keller, M.H., and D.D.  Kirkpatrick. 2022. Their America Is Vanishing: Like Trump They Feel Cheated. New York Times, 23 October. https://www. nytimes.com/2022/10/23/us/politics/republican-­e lection-­o bjectors-­ demographics.html Levin, K., B. Cashore, S. Bernstein, and G. Auld. 2012. Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Future Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change. Policy Sciences 45 (1): 123–152. Levitsky, S., and D. Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown. MacKenzie, M.K. 2020. Future Publics: Democratic Deliberation and Future-­ Regarding Public Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moynihan, D. 2022. Populism and the Deep State: The Attack on the Public Service Under Trump. In Democratic Backsliding and Public Administration, ed. M.S. Bauer et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nguyen, D.V.H. 2012. Too Big to Fail–Towards a Sovereign Bankruptcy Regime. Cornell International Law Journal 45 (5): 698–722. O’Connor, J. 1973. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin’s. Przeworski, A. 2016. Democracy: A Never Ending Quest. Annual Review of Political Science 19: 1–12. Rose, R. 1975. Overloaded Government: The Problem Outlined. European Studies Newsletter 3 (December): 1–3. ———. 1979. Ungovernability: Is There Fire Behind the Smoke? Political Studies 27 (4): 351–370. ———. 1980. Ordinary People in Extraordinary Economic Circumstances. In Challenges to Governance, ed. R. Rose. Beverly Hills: Sage. Rose, R., and B.G.  Peters. 1978. Can Government Go Bankrupt? New  York: Basic Books. Sparrow, A. 2022. Levelling-Up Bill includes no Money to Make Levelling Up Happen. Guardian, 24 August. Warren, M.E. 2019. Trust and Democracy. In The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust, ed. E.M. Uslaner. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART V

Trust and Legitimacy

CHAPTER 12

Democracy and Its Alternatives Thomas F. Remington

Rose and Regime Transformation Richard Rose took a long view of regime evolution. He understood the development and replacement of regimes as a process of continuous interaction between rulers and ruled. In his model, the populace holds demands and expectations of government. Citizens compare the current regime with the past regime and an anticipated future regime, as well as potential alternative regime types. People have expectations about how they are likely to fare in the future based on their experience with the old regime and the regime currently in place, and their levels of support are continuously shaped by their personal experiences with it. Since even an authoritarian government requires some level of acceptance on the part of the populace, those attitudes and expectations affect the quality of the government the rulers provide. In his work on the transformation of the post-­ communist countries, Rose builds on the classic political culture research program initiated by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, the World Values Study launched by Ronald Inglehart, and the later literature on regime

T. F. Remington (*) Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_12

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transitions. He builds on Samuel Huntington’s model of waves of democratization followed by reversions to autocracy, as well as Robert Dahl’s conception of the dimensions of evolution of democracy, participation, and contestation (Huntington 1991; Dahl 1971). One of Rose’s many arresting ideas—expressed in a characteristically pithy formulation—was that third-wave democracies were going about ‘democratization backwards’ (Rose and Shin 2001). By that he meant that although formal ‘parchment’ institutions of democracy, such as competitive elections and representative assemblies, are necessary for a viable democracy, they are not sufficient. For democracy to operate effectively, requisite are the conditions of what Rose termed a ‘modern state’. These included at least three critical features: an impersonal judicial system (equivalent to the German notion of a ‘Rechtsstaat’ or the Russian concept of a ‘pravovoe gosudarstvo’) and a professional state bureaucracy; some elements of accountability by the rulers, if not ‘vertically’ to the general population, at least ‘horizontally’, that is, to other elites such as landed aristocrats; and some autonomy on the part of the formations of civil society such as universities, labor unions, professional and business associations, communications media, and churches. In a modern state, these organized social bodies acted with some degree of autonomy of the state (and, Robert Dahl would add, of one another) as they advanced their interests. Adoption of a democratic constitution that provided for electoral contests and electoral representation of public interests would not suffice to establish these foundational features of democracy. To the contrary, it was likely that democratic elections under these conditions would arouse expectations that the new government could not fulfill, since, as Rose pointed out, the new governments inherited the same crushing burdens of economic dysfunction that had contributed to the fall of the prior regime. The gap between high expectations and poor performance would then undermine support for the new, nominally democratic system. Further evolution was therefore likely. In the seminal 2001 article making this argument, written with Doh Chull Shin, Rose uses three case studies as illustrations of the idea, Korea, the Czech Republic, and Russia (Rose and Shin 2001). Democratization in Korea followed after the prerequisites of a modern state that had been established under authoritarian rule. Power was exercised by powerful industrial family-dominated holding companies—the chaebol—and by the authoritarian rulers. However, the chaebol had to compete in overseas markets, so had to adapt themselves to external economic conditions they

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could not control. Moreover, the elements of a professional bureaucracy and civil society were in place before competitive elections began to be held. The Czech Republic had the relatively modern administrative legacy of the Habsburg Empire to draw upon as well as a limited period of democracy between the world wars. Therefore, it had a more hospitable environment for a democratic opening after 1989 than did most of its post-communist neighbors. Russia, by contrast, lacked a developed civil society, a professional bureaucracy and impersonal judiciary, or a legacy of constraints on autocratic rule. Russia’s 1993 constitution embodied Yeltsin’s view that only the concentrated power of the presidency could overcome the resistance to transition that was mounted by the active and passive resistance of most of the old regime’s inherited structures. Neither in society nor in the design of the constitution, therefore, were the requisites for making a successful transition to democracy present. Rose’s argument revives a long debate about the necessary conditions for democratization. For Rose, the concept of the modern plays a crucial role; in his understanding, a modern state and modern economy operate under impersonal rules rather than by corruption and personal ties. Rose’s concept of the sequence of stages of democratization revisits the work of many historically oriented social scientists. Among these were the comparativists working in the paradigm laid out by Gabriel Almond in the early 1970s when he proposed ‘taking the historical cure’ and examining the historical record of political systems that underwent democratization (Almond et al. 1973; Tilly 1975; Moore 1966). Two questions inevitably arise from these historical-institutional studies. First, can they be generalized to political development outside the European context? Second, to the extent that Rose’s proposition is valid, how is democratization in the contemporary world possible? Does it imply that if and only if an enlightened absolutist autocrat holds power and transforms the state and society along modern lines can democracy take root? A number of Russian thinkers in the 1990s made this case (e.g., Migranyan 2015). There is some evidence to suggest that Vladimir Putin and some of his advisors held similar views in the early 2000s. Rose’s argument ran counter to the then-ascendant perspective, associated with transitions scholars such as O’Donnell and Schmitter, that political elites could construct the institutional infrastructure of democracy through bargaining and negotiation. It was closer to earlier, more sociologically informed, theories of democratization, such as those in the tradition of Seymour Martin Lipset (Lipset 1959; O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986).

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Recognizing the historical uniqueness of the democratization of the states of the communist bloc, Rose organized a remarkable large-scale comparative public opinion research project studying the triple transformation of the new post-communist countries—state, society, and economy. Beginning in 1991, working through the Paul Lazarsfeld Society for Social Research in Austria, Rose and his colleagues administered five waves of mass opinion surveys in 11 countries (Rose et al. 1998; Rose, 2009). 1 Called the ‘New Democracies Barometer’ (NRB), and later, after many of the post-communist countries acceded to European Union membership, the ‘New Europe Barometer’, the surveys sought insights on the dynamics of regime-populace interaction. A parallel set of Barometer surveys—the New Russia Barometer—covered Russia. Rose framed the Barometer surveys around the question of how people compared their lives under the current regime—with its nominal commitment to democracy—with life under the old, pre-communist regime, and their expectations about life in the future. In Rose’s approach, people’s attitudes about the relative value of democracy were shaped by reference to their own experiences, hopes and expectations. Moreover, he saw the interaction of popular attitudes and regime performance as one of continuous mutual interaction and adaptation. Through this process, the regimes would tend in the direction of some sort of equilibrium. Some might be expected to revert to an authoritarian system, others to evolve in the direction of full democracy. Most insightfully of all, Rose argued that still other regimes would fall into a ‘low-level equilibrium trap’, where people’s expectations of what government would provide them ratcheted downward as the regime’s performance deteriorated. Rose couched this relationship using the metaphor of demand and supply: people’s demands adjusted to the flawed operation of a partial democracy, settling into a condition of low expectations. Government, recognizing that society accepted its relatively poor quality, did not tighten the screws further, but also did not raise the quality of the governance it provided. The result was a relatively stable steady state with no inherent imperative for further evolution of the regime. Rose strongly argued against teleological perspectives that the eventual triumph of democracy was implicit in the launching of formal democratic institutions. The book written with William Mishler and Neil Munro, Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime: The Changing Views of Russians, illustrates how fruitful this framework for analysis was (Rose et al. 2011). Rose and his coauthors drew on 18 waves of NRB surveys between 1992

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and 2009 to show how the Russian public had come to accept the undemocratic Putin regime, which supplied them with just enough freedom, security, and improved living standards to obtain the public’s support. Although Russians had a clear conception of democracy, which they also saw as entailing extensive social welfare provision, they did not demand or expect it of the regime. The sheer passage of time, the authors showed, and the absence of any plausible alternative to Putin’s regime, had brought about a resigned acceptance of the status quo. The book offered a powerful and persuasive explanation for Putin’s long tenure. Based on this theoretical framework, the Barometer surveys asked people to rate their level of satisfaction with the current regime and to compare it with the previous regime, the expected future regime, as well as hypothetical alternatives such as a dictatorship. The surveys found wide variation across countries. Overall, in most countries, most people held expectations for a better life in the future but hope for the future and condemnation of the past regime were far higher in the Czech Republic than in Ukraine or Belarus. Rose also considered whether characteristics of the social structure were significantly related to variation in attitudes within countries. Although differences in levels of educational attainment were significantly related to attitudes, a finding consistent with many other public opinion surveys in the post-communist world, Rose found surprisingly little association between social structure and attitudes. His measures were relatively limited, however. Educational attainment was measured on a scale of four categories; the indicator of religiosity was frequency of church attendance; place of residence was dichotomized into urban vs. rural. To tap the degree of cosmopolitan as opposed to traditional values, the surveys asked people whether they believed their country should develop more along the lines of EU countries or more in keeping with national cultures. However, because the survey instrument was designed to measure individual-level attitudes and behavior, it did not tap the strength of organizational bonds in civil society. The communist regimes had weakened associational life substantially, of course, albeit more fully in some countries than others (Howard 2003). However, the emergence of business, professional, religious, and other groups cannot be determined from Rose’s data. Therefore, the issue of the degree of cohesion or autonomy of civil society, a key condition in Rose’s theory of democratization, lies outside the results of the surveys. As to the other elements of Rose’s theory—the importance of some measure of limits on rulers’ power and the degree of professionalism of the bureaucracy

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and integrity of the judiciary—the surveys afford a window onto these issues from the standpoint of individuals’ own direct experience. His measurements of social capital therefore stressed close interpersonal ties with friends and colleagues rather than the cohesiveness or reach of associational life in society. Rose distinguished between the experience of citizens who had experienced totalitarian rule for a protracted time, such as Soviet citizens, with those living under less enduring control. One major difference was in coping strategies. The former tended to rely on ‘anti-modern’ tactics, such as bribery and connections, more than the latter. This distinction showed through clearly in the NRB surveys: Russians were more than twice as likely to use illegal methods obtain a permit or seek immediate hospital treatment than Czechs, and four times likelier to do so to get someone into university. The Russians tended to address bureaucrats personally rather than to comply with regular procedures. At the same time, they were more likely to think that nothing can be done to solve their problems (Rose 2009). At the same time, the common legacy of communism affected all the countries in similar ways, albeit in different degrees. Among these were low levels of trust in state institutions; social networks based more on personal ties than membership in civic associations; a weak and ‘floating’ party system. An important theme in Rose’s analyses of the findings of the NRB studies concerned levels of trust, both with respect to confidence in current institutions, as well as generalized interpersonal trust. With William Mishler, for example, he argued that while differences in levels of trust across countries existed, much more significant was intra-country individual-­level variation. They found that trust was influenced strongly by individual experiences with the regime, and much less strongly by prior socialization into a national political culture or by an individual’s age, sex, or educational level. Overall, levels of institutional trust tended to be low in the post-communist world, but higher among people who assessed the current regime and its performance more positively (Mishler and Rose 2007; Mishler and Rose 2001, 2002). A large literature detailing the importance of trust has developed these points. For example, recent studies in the public health literature have demonstrated that societies with lower levels of interpersonal trust and lower levels of trust in government have experienced higher levels of infections and mortality from COVID-19 (Bollyky et al. 2022; Adamecz-Völgyi and Szabó-Morvai 2021).

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A crucial instrument that the NRB studies used was the scale for evaluating and comparing regimes: on a scale from plus-100 to minus-100, where did the respondent rate the current regime, the old regime, and the regime as it was likely to be in five years? This measure enabled Rose to weigh how the experience of the current regime—in the light of past experience and anticipation of how the regime was evolving—on individuals' support for the current regime. Rose constantly recalled the Churchill epigram—about democracy as compared to its alternatives—to point out that popular preferences about regimes are always based on comparison, comparison of the present to what was and what may come.

Rose’s Work on Post-communist Transformation in Retrospect Thirty years later, how well do Rose’s arguments about post-communist transformation hold up? Rose’s skepticism about the ability of newly established democratic institutions to withstand pressures powerful countervailing forces has been amply justified. Just as Rose pointed out, the fallacy of ‘electoralism’ can mask the reality of unaccountable power, deep corruption, and the concentration of wealth and power in a narrow circle of elites. The NDB’s findings about wide differences across the post-communist world presciently forecast the trajectories of development for most of the countries he studied, although the strong evidence for the preconditions of a democratic regime in Ukraine—especially evident after the Russian annexation of Crimea and the full-scale war launched by Russia in February 2022— might have surprised Rose. Rose’s insight that the characteristics of regime-populace interactions in the 1990s were transitory and likely to yield to more stable outcomes has been amply borne out by the region’s subsequent evolution. Some polities, such as Poland and Hungary, have preserved some formal institutional features of democracy while stifling many of its crucial elements, among them free competition of parties, an impartial judiciary, and constraints on the executive. Others, such as the Czech Republic and the three Baltic Republics, have evolved toward a full-­ fledged European-style democracy. Still others, Russia most notably, have reverted to a regime bearing close similarities to totalitarianism: unlimited power in the hands of the country’s leader, tight control over public

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communications, and suppression of independent sources of political initiative, trends that reached their apotheosis with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Missing from Rose’s account, however, are two domains that the literature has shown to be critical in shaping the character of political systems: the distribution of power, interests, and identities in society; and the economic dimensions of employment, occupational structure, and property ownership. Because the old regime’s power rested in large measure on its control over the country’s economic resources—alongside the party’s monopoly on political leadership and ideology—the issue of how productive resources are owned and managed after the transition is crucial. Rose did not directly address the question of whether a system of property rights is a necessary condition for democracy. He did, however, assert that successful democratization requires replacing bureaucratic administration of the economy’s resources with a market economy, noting that this is a crucial challenge for the new regime (Rose and Shin 2001). The structure of property ownership and employment, the degree to which the market actually allocates goods according to a free price system rather than barter, hoarding, and black markets, matters for the outcome of the transformation, but receives little illumination in the surveys. Rather, Rose addresses how people are faring under the new regime, and whether they are getting by primarily through help from friends and family. As he emphasized, citizens in the post-communist world lived in multiple economies, including the formal economy, the black market, and various intermediate grey economies. Whether an entrepreneurial middle class was forming remained out of view. Other research has found, however, that the degree to which a class of people whose incomes falls between rich and poor is based in state employment as opposed to the private sector is crucial for a regime’s evolution (Rosenfeld 2020; Bellin 2000). Similarly, the nature of associational life in society is given little direct attention. The NDB studies recorded levels of education, age, gender, income, urban or rural residence, and church attendance at the individual level. These measures are poor proxies for such regime-shaping factors as the clout of the Catholic Church in Poland or the cultural impact of Eastern Orthodoxy in societies such as Russia’s, Serbia’s, or Bulgaria’s. Missing are the meso-level bodies that played a crucial role political culture studies such as Robert Putnam’s or Ashutosh Varshney’s: the degree to which social attachments are ‘bonding’ or ‘binding’, whether social cleavages are coinciding or cross-cutting, and whether shared membership

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in civil society organizations tends to induce cooperation in providing public goods such as responsive and honest government. For pluralist theories of democracy, these questions are fundamental, just as in the political economy literature on democracy, levels of income and wealth inequality, of social mobility, and the degree of rent extraction critically influence the quality of the regime. Rose’s insight that the degree to which a given regime is stable rests on the interaction of the populace and the rulers, leading him to predict that the countries in the post-communist world were likely to evolve further, is important but limited. First, the conceptual tool of equilibrium is misleading. Second, not only is the choice of criteria for determining whether a complex social and political system is in equilibrium is arbitrary, the use of the term can also obscure longer-term feedback effects from the society and economy back onto the regime. In the same year that Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer published their book summarizing the results of the NDB studies, Joel Hellman published an article in World Politics with a related observation. He showed that partial liberalization of the economies in the post-communist countries allowed a small group of influential owners and managers of lucrative assets in newly liberalized markets—such as those in the natural resources and financial industries—to take advantage of their market positions to lock in power and block a further opening to a fully competitive market economy. These ‘early winners’, who captured disproportionate gains from arbitrage between state prices and market prices, allied with political leaders to claim rents from suppressing market competition. Hellman argued that it was these early winners, not the broad strata of net losers, who were the real obstacles to a full market opening. Reform became stuck partway in what Hellman termed a ‘partial reform equilibrium’ (Hellman 1998; Frye 2002). Hellman’s insight parallels Rose’s notion of the ‘low-level equilibrium trap’ that can form in the macro-level relationship between regime and populace but has different implications for the regime’s evolution. Hellman’s political economy approach suggests the possibility that as that alliance of wealth and power grows more consolidated, both partners will seek ways to prevent threats from open market competition and from meaningful democratic contestation. If this oligarchic alliance can insulate itself from competitive pressures in the global economy—for example, by possessing major energy resources needed by the outside world—it can reinforce autarky and state monopoly control over production while suppressing the vestiges of democratic institutions remaining from the

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transformation in the 1990s. A regime where rent-seeking and rent-sharing on the part of the wealth holders and political leaders motivates the suppression of all economic and political competition can evolve not just toward a ‘low-level equilibrium trap’ or ‘partial reform equilibrium’, but toward an authoritarian—or even outright totalitarian—regime. The concept of equilibrium should not be taken as more than a metaphor in political analysis. In economic models, it is a useful device for explaining the direction of movement of prices and the factors of production. An economist recognizes, however, that equilibrium is never reached, but only approached, and that changes in the environment for the market constantly drive actors to adapt. Self-perpetuating oligarchy then turns to anti-democratic populism for popular support. Contemporary examples of ‘plutocratic populism’ abound; fully one-third of the Hungarian public reported in spring 2022 that Viktor Orban had made the political system ‘more democratic’ (Clancy 2022).2 Likewise, the economists’ demand and supply model, as compelling a metaphor as it is, nevertheless has limited theoretical value for explaining political life. The notions of ‘the rulers’ or ‘the elite’ or ‘the regime’ can mask genuine differences and conflicts over the distribution of power within the state. ‘Society’ or ‘the people’ or other generic terms for the group making demands on the regime can only take us so far; the society is differentiated in many ways. Some groups may ally with the power holders against others, maintaining a privileged position against the threat of democratization and redistribution, or seeking to maintain their holds on lucrative rent-extracting opportunities. One section of the public may want to impose its own language or religion on another; not all of the goods and services provided by government are fungible. Divisions within society may be at least as great as the gap between society and government. Survey research can only cast so much light on such divisions and alignments. It may be useful to compare Rose’s concept of democratization with that of Robert Dahl. In a series of seminal works, Dahl outlined a theory of democracy by proposing the concept of polyarchy (Dahl 1956, 1971, 1982). Dahl’s theory proceeded inductively rather than by deducing a set of necessary conditions for democracy from first principles. Examining the group of present-day political systems—present day meaning the mid-­1950s—that approximated what is commonly regarded as democracy, Dahl asked what characteristics they shared that could be considered necessary conditions for democracy. After exploring the theory of limited

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government associated with James Madison and other framers of the US constitution, with its attention to reconciling majority rule and minority rights, as well as theories of full majority rule, Dahl found that they failed to answer the crucial question of how their formal institutional features could be sustained. For Dahl, the most important characteristic of polyarchy was the activity of groups in society, not the formal institutions of government. How autonomous organized social groups were of one another; the degree of security their elites felt in the face of the power of government and other groups; the level of tolerance groups had for one another; the diversity of their interests and values; the degree to which their memberships are cross-cutting and overlapping rather than cumulative. The norms held by the population mattered, to be sure, particularly the degree of consensus over the range of acceptable policy alternatives. His primary focus, however, was on the relative power of groups and the values and beliefs of their leaders. Competition among groups, with dispersed resources, and a shared understanding of the rules of competition, determined the degree to which government power could fall into the hands of a minority that ruled tyrannically or to a tyrannical majority that suppressed core interests of minorities. The diversity, dispersion, and competition of groups in society, the inability of any one of them to impose its power entirely on others, these, Dahl concluded, were the guarantee of some stability of an order approximating democracy—a system that he termed polyarchy. Rose suggests that we take Germany rather than England as the paradigmatic case for democratization. This is because Germany underwent the phases of absolutist monarchy and state modernization that Rose argues are necessary conditions for a successful democratic transition. Moreover, Germany experienced the failures of liberal democratic movements in the mid-nineteenth century and Weimar periods. Following World War II, however, the Federal Republic built a thriving liberal democracy with high economic performance. Although Rose does not point it out, none of the reformers in the communist and post-communist world referred to Germany’s post-war history as providing any guidance about the way a successful transition might proceed. Rather, post-­ communist reformers, certainly in Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, were influenced by neo-liberal ideology. Germany’s successful democratic performance is the direct result of deliberate institutional engineering to replace a totalitarian regime with one that preserved as much freedom and

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equality in the political and economic systems as was possible to prevent another breakdown of democracy. The architects of the postwar German system operated with a different conception of liberalism than the laissez-faire ideas associated with Hayek or Friedman, and they rejected Keynesianism, French-style dirigisme, and Scandinavian Social Democratic models as well. Their guiding principles were liberal, as interpreted by the Freiburg School ordoliberals, but tempered by the conviction that the economic order must serve society’s well-­ being (Dyson 2021; Föste 2006; Kolev 2017; Blumenberg-Lampe 1973). Above all, German liberals emphasized the importance of competition both for ensuring economic growth and protecting individual freedom against concentrated market power, whether state or private, and insisted that the government act to protect competition. They imposed a substantial 50 percent tax on wealth; preserved collective bargaining between employers and workers; built on the inherited employment-based social insurance system; and adopted a constitutional provision that capital has an obligation to society. Accordingly, liberalization in Germany set in motion a very different path of evolution, one conducive to consolidated democracy. No ruling group has mounted an assault on the political rights of its opponents. Liberalization never permitted business or government to sabotage workers’ rights as it has done in the United States. However unique the German case may be, it illustrates the integrated nature of economic, social, and political institutions. Surveys can only capture the behavioral reflections of these systemic characteristics; they do not reveal the underlying forces driving them. In the light of Dahl’s pluralist theory of democracy, Germany’s distinctive adaptation of liberalism after World War II, and Rose’s notion of ‘democratization backward’, how might we explain the divergence of pathways taken by the post-communist states? Where popular demand for democratic practices was reasonably high, and the society-flattening experience of communist rule relatively short, the prospects for a democratic outcome were favorable. Where the inherited state was patrimonial and corrupt, communism’s impact long and deep, and the transition produced a tight embrace between extreme wealth and concentrated state power, the prospects for democratic consolidation were nil. No amount of constitutional engineering could make up for legacy of history. Rose’s analyses of the transformation of the post-communist world are fully borne out by the developments of the last decade.

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Conclusions How might we sum up the contributions that Richard Rose made to our understanding of regime transformation? Rose recognized that the outcome of democratization is never final. With Samuel Huntington, and against many who thought liberal democracy had finally triumphed for good in 1989, Rose argued that a backsliding from some initially democratic regime is entirely possible, depending on the outcome of the dynamic relationship between rulers and ruled. As Rose predicted, a regime with only a few of the features of democracy can settle into a self-­ perpetuating condition of low-quality governance and low expectations on the part of the public—the low-level equilibrium trap. His pioneering survey work throughout the post-communist world teased out the forces shaping popular attitudes about government. Rather than supposing that individuals’ preferences over a system of government are independent of their experience of it, he showed that people constantly compare their present regime with their knowledge of the past regime and their expectations about what is likely to come in the future. Crucial orientations such as trust in the institutions of government and in fellow citizens are the product of continuous learning rather than having been set early in life by socialization in the family, school, and social milieu. Their attitudes toward government are a cumulative tally of their experiences and reflections, based on the degree to which they demand change, or, alternatively, ratchet down their expectations to a resigned acceptance of the status quo. Rose had no illusions about the outcomes of democratization in the post-­ communist world: their paths would remain open-ended, the product of constant encounters between the populace and their rulers. Rose also rightly called attention to the fundamental conditions required for democracy to work: impersonal justice, a professional state administrative apparatus, some constraints on the exercise of power, and the relative autonomy of civil society. Rose emphasizes that while a successful new democracy presupposes that these are in place, it may not necessarily build them. However, it might be pointed out that, by same logic, just as competitive, fair, and free elections are necessary for democracy but not sufficient, it follows that a phase of authoritarian rule certainly is not sufficient to build a democracy (whether it is necessary or not has not been shown). This point is regularly ignored by many thinkers, in Russia, China, and elsewhere, who assume that a lengthy period of

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autocratic rule will create the preconditions needed for democracy without asking how or why an autocrat would establish them. Rose underlines the dynamic nature of the interaction between political elites and the populace, each side shaping the other’s behavior and expectations through a process of continuous mutual adaptation. There is no inevitability that a democracy once introduced will grow into a fully fledged democracy. Indeed, following Rose’s logic, there is also no necessary reason a functioning democracy cannot slide backward toward a ‘broken-­back democracy’ if the distribution of economic and social power and popular norms no longer supports full democracy. Certainly, this point is relevant to the present crisis of democracy in the United States.

Notes 1. The countries were Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (https://office.eurasiabarometer.org/projects/ new-­democracies-­barometer). 2. The term ‘plutocratic populism’ was coined by American political scientists Hacker and Pierson (2020). The marriage of extreme inequality with anti-­ democratic populism is characteristic of many contemporary political systems (cf Müller 2021).

References Adamecz-Völgyi, A., and Á. Szabó-Morvai. 2021. Confidence in Public Institutions Is Critical in Containing the COVID-19 Pandemic. Global Labor Organization Discussion Paper Series 861. Almond, G.A., S.C.  Flanagan, and R.J.  Mundt, eds. 1973. Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development. Boston: Little Brown. Bellin, E. 2000. Contingent Democrats: Industrialists, Labor, and Democratization in Late-Developing Countries. World Politics 52 (1): 175–205. Blumenberg-Lampe, C. 1973. Das wirtschaftliche Programm der ‘Freiburger Kreise’: Entwurf einer freiheit-sozialen Nachkriegswirtschaft Nationalökonom gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot. Bollyky, T.J., et al. 2022. Pandemic Preparedness and COVID-19: An Exploratory Analysis of Infection and Fatality Rates, and Contextual Factors Associated with Preparedness in 177 countries, from Jan 1, 2020, to Sept 30, 2021,’ Lancet, February 1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/ PIIS0140-­6736(22)00172-­6/fulltext

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Clancy, L. 2022. Hungarians Differ in Their Evaluations of Democracy Under Orban’s Leadership. Pew Research, August 3. https://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-­tank/2022/08/03/hungarians-­differ-­in-­their-­evaluations-­of-­democracy-­ under-­orbans-­leadership Dahl, R.A. 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1982. Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dyson, K. 2021. Conservative Liberalism, Liberalism, Ordo-Liberalism, and the State. New York: Oxford University Press. Föste, W. 2006. Grundwerte in der Ordnungskonzeption der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft. Marburg: Metropolis. Frye, T.J. 2002. The Perils of Polarization: Economic Performance in the Postcommunist World. World Politics 54 (3): 308–337. Hacker, J., and P. Pierson. 2020. Let Them Eat Tweets. New York: Liveright/Norton. Hellman, J. 1998. Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions. World Politics 50 (1): 203–234. Howard, M.M. 2003. The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, S.P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Kolev, S. 2017. Neoliberale Staatsverständnisse im Vergleich. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Lipset, S.M. 1959. Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy. American Political Science Review 53 (1): 69–105. Migranyan, A. 2015. Peculiarities of Russian Politics. In Democracy in a Russian Mirror, ed. A. Przeworski. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mishler, W., and R. Rose. 2001. What Are the Origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post-Communist Societies. Comparative Political Studies 34 (1): 30–62. ———. 2002. Learning and Re-learning Regime Support: The Dynamics of Post-­ Communist Regimes. European Journal of Political Research 41 (1): 5–36. ———. 2007. Generation, Age, and Time: The Dynamics of Political Learning during Russia’s Transformation. American Journal of Political Science 51 (4): 822–834. Moore, B. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2021. Democracy Rules. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. O’Donnell, G., and P.C.  Schmitter, eds. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Rose, R. 2009. Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach London. New York: Routledge. Rose, R., W.  Mishler, and C.  Haerpfer. 1998. Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rose, R., W. Mishler, and N. Munro. 2011. Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime: The Changing View of Russians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, R., and D.C.  Shin. 2001. Democratization Backwards: The Problem of Third-Wave Democracies. British Journal of Political Science 31 (4): 331–354. Rosenfeld, B. 2020. The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C., ed. 1975. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 13

Northern Ireland: Searching for Consensus Bernadette C. Hayes and Ian McAllister

Since the start of the Northern Ireland Troubles in 1968, thousands of books and articles have been written about the conflict, a trend that not only accelerated throughout the 1990s but has continued beyond the signing of the Northern Ireland Belfast Agreement1 in 1998 (Smyth and Darby 2001; Schubotz 2005). The intellectual progenitor—sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not—of much of this scholarship is Richard Rose’s 1971 book Governing Without Consensus, together with a later and shorter 1976 book, Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice, and many journal articles, book chapters and newspaper and magazine articles. Pioneering and innovative, Governing Without Consensus appeared at the height of the violence and was based on an opinion survey fielded in 1968, on the very eve of the conflict.2

B. C. Hayes (*) University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] I. McAllister School of Politics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_13

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The themes highlighted in Rose’s work—virtually all appearing in the 1970s at the height of the Troubles—were hugely influential in shaping later academic discourse about the conflict. However, they were not translated into policy until the 1990s when they saw their ultimate expression in the 1998 Belfast Agreement. In essence, the Agreement reflected the idea of establishing institutions which would include the two communities and create regime legitimacy. It also implicitly recognized that the United Kingdom was a multinational state and that the differing values and priorities in its component nations had to be incorporated into the system of government. These were core themes in Governing Without Consensus and in most of Rose’s academic work on Northern Ireland. The origins of Rose’s interest in Ireland began at Johns Hopkins University when he read the works of Synge, O’Casey and Yeats and realized how divisive the Irish struggle for independence had been (Rose 2014, 107). This was reinforced by a hitchhiking tour around Ireland in 1954 when he observed the low standard of living in Dublin and in the west of Ireland, and the dominance of the Catholic Church over many aspects of social policy. Clerical influence had ensured that Ireland remained neutral during the Second World War and that social policy lagged behind other parts of Europe, notably in the absence of a national health service. For a curious young American interested in understanding the history and politics of the British Isles, this raised many questions.

Scholarship Prior to the Troubles The political turmoil of the Home Rule Crisis in 1912–1914 and the Irish War of Independence between 1919 and 1921 settled the question of regime legitimacy by revolution and guerrilla war. The devolution settlement of 1920—which ceded most decision-making powers to a regional parliament at Stormont—legitimized through legislation what had already been decided by force. The settlement suited the major British parties as well as the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, and the Irish government. The problem, which the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the violence that erupted in 1968 dramatically brought to worldwide attention, was that a majoritarian Westminster parliamentary system would ultimately fail when a significant minority of the population withheld their support for the regime. The core problem in Northern Ireland was one of regime legitimacy.

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Northern Ireland’s effective marginalization within the United Kingdom meant that until 1968 it was only sparsely covered in the academic social science literature. Most scholars considered Northern Ireland to be a ‘place apart’, a unique, relatively obscure and often unintelligible backwater of the United Kingdom, which had only limited intellectual importance to the scholarly community. Northern Ireland was also neglected by both the British and Irish governments, especially the latter, who regarded meddling in Northern Ireland affairs as a potential risk to its own hard-won political stability (Jenkins 1984; Taylor 1988; Whyte 1990). With few exceptions, the pre-1968 studies tended to lack a social scientific research perspective (Taylor 1988) and were often geographically specific, theoretically limited and unable to locate their research in a comparative and/or international framework. For someone wanting to learn about the politics of Northern Ireland prior to 1968, the existing studies tended to fall into three categories, broadly covering institutions, history and community relations. One area in which the scholarship did provide some insight was in the workings of the post-1920 political institutions. The 1920 devolution settlement provided a rich vein for research on Northern Ireland’s institutional design, examining how it had emerged and evaluating its effectiveness. The first substantive work in this genre was Nicholas Mansergh’s The Government of Northern Ireland: A Study in Devolution, published in 1936, which outlined the main institutions in detail. Even at this early stage, Mansergh (1936, 173) concluded that the British government’s primary goal regarding Northern Ireland was non-interference. Later works had the benefit of more time in which to consider how well devolution functioned. Thomas Wilson’s 1955 book, Ulster Under Home Rule, covered the constitutional arrangements but placed them in the context of the provision of local services such as education and health. Wilson (1955, 211) concluded that, on balance, devolution had worked well but perversely reasoned that this was because ‘the majority of the people do not particularly want it’. A further study, R.J.  Lawrence’s 1965 book, The Government of Northern Ireland: Public Finances and Services, 1921–1964, which focused on the operation of public services, concluded that the Northern Ireland experience provided lessons for other parts of the United Kingdom that might seek greater local autonomy in the future. These institutional works were notable for either ignoring or glossing over party politics and the underlying problem of regime legitimacy. This could not be said of the main historical works, the most important of

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which prior to 1968 was J.C. Beckett’s A Short History of Ireland (1966), which dealt extensively with the party political dimension to the conflict.3 Aside from Beckett and a small number of other scholars, most of the work by professional historians during this period tended to be sympathetic to one or other community. For example, A.T.Q.  Stewart’s The Ulster Crisis (1967) was primarily an account from a moderate unionist perspective of the 1912 Home Rule crisis and the partition of Ireland in 1920, while various works by F.S.L.  Lyons on Ireland, most notably Ireland Since the Famine (1973), approached the problem from a moderate nationalist perspective. The third category of research was concerned with community relations, often with the goal of ameliorating community polarization. The most famous work in this category was Denis Barritt and Charles Carter’s short 1962 book The Northern Ireland Problem: A Study in Group Relations. Both Quakers—one an academic economist, the other a social worker—Barritt and Carter investigated the nature and extent of the community divide. For many years, the book was the standard introduction to Northern Ireland society and politics (Lijphart 1975). The study provided the first objective survey of controversial issues in Northern Ireland by covering attitudes to Irish unity and the religious tensions that existed between Protestants and Catholics. Based largely on interviews conducted exclusively in Belfast with a small amount of fieldwork in two regional towns, Barritt and Carter showed how religion structured the educational system, political and legal rights, the trade union movement, the provision of social services and even the population’s leisure activities. The book was also the first study to ask how the political system in Northern Ireland could continue to function when a large minority of the population did not support its constitutional position as an integral part of the United Kingdom. Another study that used limited survey evidence to inform its work was Budge and O’Leary’s book Belfast: Approach to Crisis. While not published until 1973, it was substantially based on a 1966 Belfast survey. The first half of the book provided a detailed history of Belfast from the early nineteenth century to the 1960s with an emphasis on community conflict. The second half of the book reported the results of the survey which had sampled 229 residents, 45 councillors and 6 municipal correspondents and was modelled on an earlier survey of local politics conducted in Glasgow. The primary purpose of the study was to examine comparatively two cities that shared similar socio-economic conditions, community

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compositions and government structures, but exhibited divergent politics, namely compromise in Glasgow and overt violence in Belfast. While Budge and O’Leary diagnosed the scale of the community divisions, they avoided the political implications of what they reported. This brief review of scholarship prior to the start of the Troubles in 1968 shows that the available work was limited, both theoretically and empirically. With few exceptions, most studies tended to ignore or skirt over the central issue of regime legitimacy. None of the studies dealt with the issue of how Westminster-style majoritarian institutions could produce cross-community support when one community was in permanent government and the other in permanent opposition. Most scholars viewed the 1920 settlement as less than ideal, but one which had maintained a measure of peace and political stability, certainly compared to the 1912–1914 Home Rule crisis. Not least, it removed Northern Ireland from the British political agenda. Finally, virtually all the scholars lived in Northern Ireland or had been born there and inevitably brought to their work their own inherent biases. These were limitations that Richard Rose’s work was able to overcome.

Governing Without Consensus Matching to British politics what Rose had seen in Ireland during his 1954 hitchhiking tour meant that when he wrote the first edition of Politics in England, he had to continually qualify his generalizations with ‘except for Ireland’ (Rose 2014, 107). Since England had the political power to govern the union, the United Kingdom was assumed to be synonymous with England (Rose 1965, 25ff). Observing how little Northern Ireland was understood, he observed the confusion between England and Great Britain being considered to constitute the United Kingdom, leaving out Northern Ireland. His goal was to understand ‘why political institutions that were legitimate in England were only partially legitimate in Northern Ireland’ (Rose 2014, 107). There was also a personal element to Rose’s interest in Northern Ireland: the political divisions he observed resonated with his experience growing up in Missouri, a border state in the American Civil War. He understood how difficult events of the past could shape the politics of the present, often to the detriment of the latter. This was particularly relevant to the unresolved question of race relations in the United States.4

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Governing Without Consensus and the 1968 Loyalty Survey on which the book was based represented a quantum leap in social science approaches to Northern Ireland. The book brought together Rose’s interest in regime support and its importance for political stability with his interest in understanding and measuring mass opinion. Combined with Rose’s ability to explain complex concepts clearly and succinctly, the eventual product was a work that even 50 years on merits careful reading. The main theme in Governing Without Consensus is regime legitimacy, a theoretical question largely ignored in previous academic work on Northern Ireland. Why and under what circumstances might citizens withhold support for the regime? And what are the consequences when legitimacy is either absent or contested? These questions are rarely discussed in the context of the United Kingdom—for obvious reasons since the legitimacy of the regime is not contested in Britain. However, as Rose (1971, 25) stated, ‘if nothing else, the violent events of the 1960s have shown that it can happen here’.5 The dynamics of legitimacy were laid out in a four-fold typology, in which the regime either becomes fully legitimate or the minority refuses to comply and instead uses illegitimate force to claim legitimate rights (Rose 1971, 32). Northern Ireland provided an ideal case study to address these questions. Britain has provided Northern Ireland with a Westminster system of government in 1920, but the majoritarian electoral system meant that the majority unionist community formed a permanent government and the minority nationalist community a permanent political opposition. The dominance of the constitutional question in politics meant that there was no alternation in government.6 Moreover, unlike many other societies, individual rights could not be enforced by the courts (Rose 1977). Faced with this dilemma, the opposition could choose to continue with electoral competition and face permanent exclusion from government, engage in non-violent political protest, or use political violence to force a change in the ‘rules of the game’. When applied to Northern Ireland, none of these strategies had proved effective before 1968. Electoral competition had consigned the Nationalist Party, until the outbreak of the Troubles the main political representative of the Catholic community, to permanent opposition. For example, in half a century of parliamentary representation, the Nationalist opposition had managed to have just one piece of legislation enacted, the 1931 Wild Birds Protection Act. Non-violent political protest, such as flying the Irish tricolour at mass demonstrations (an illegal act), had been equally ineffective

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and provoked violence from the Protestant-dominated police. This left the use of physical force, but this had been equally ineffective in the 1956–1962 Irish Republican Army (IRA) border campaign due to a lack of Catholic support (Augusteijn 2003). Leading social science approaches to how this dilemma could be resolved concentrated on economics. Modernization theory predicts that as a society becomes economically developed political competition will emerge between capital and labour and pre-industrial divisions disappear. Both British and Irish politicians pinned their hopes on economic prosperity eventually delivering Catholic support for the regime (Rose 1971, 275ff). Historically, three other cleavages in addition to owner versus worker have dominated party competition—centre versus periphery, state versus church and land versus industry (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). As in other industrial societies, Northern Ireland exhibited elements of all four cleavages, but the puzzle was why religion remained by far the dominant cleavage when it had faded into obscurity in the rest of the United Kingdom. The dominance of the religious cleavage in Northern Ireland and its resilience in the face of economic change led Rose to view the conflict as essentially unresolvable, at least within accepted norms. Without (bargainable) economic competition, the conflict took the form of a (non-­ bargainable) religious divide, with the two religious communities seeking different and mutually exclusive constitutional goals. This was the underlying theme throughout Governing Without Consensus, but it was also expressed explicitly in Rose’s usual pithy language in his 1976 book, Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice.7 In evaluating the possible solutions, Rose (1976, 139, italics in original) stated bluntly: Many talk about a solution to Ulster’s political problem but few are prepared to say what the problem is. The reason is simple. The problem is that there is no solution—at least no solution recognizable in those more fortunate parts of the Anglo-American world that are governed by consensus.

Problems without solutions are not what democratic politicians are equipped to deal with, and Rose’s blunt assertion of the problem had a major effect on thinking about the Northern Ireland conflict during the late 1970s and 1980s.8 This conundrum was not resolved until the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

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To test his hypotheses, Rose used a large-scale survey—another innovation for Northern Ireland. Judged against comparable international surveys of the period, the Loyalty Survey was highly sophisticated. To ensure the reliability and validity of the personal interviews, a series of seven pilot questionnaires was fielded. Only women interviewers were used since they were viewed as less threatening by the respondents and more likely to establish a rapport with them.9 To maximize the response rate, each potential respondent received an advance letter from Stanford University saying that they had been selected for interview. A total of 1500 households were selected for contact, resulting in 1291 valid responses. This represented a response rate of 87 per cent, considerably higher than for most comparable academic surveys of the period and easily more than twice the response rate for a similar survey today. Governing Without Consensus was also notable for placing Northern Ireland in a multinational and international context. While the problem of contested political authority is rarely a concern in the Anglo-American democracies, it is in many African and Asian countries. Northern Ireland came in existence through armed conflict—when 26 of the 32 counties on the island of Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom. This model of state formation was common to many former colonial societies, when the former colonial powers drew state boundaries that encompassed many different ethical and racial groups. In some of these societies, such as India in 1947, the resulting divisions were resolved only by repartition and major violence. In many respects, Northern Ireland follows this model. Governing Without Consensus and the work that followed reprising the theme of regime legitimacy represented a major advance compared to the scholarship on Northern Ireland that existed before its publication. Many reviews of the book noted its broad and objective approach to the problem—the historian David W.  Miller (1973, 142), for example, called it ‘the most comprehensive study of its kind for Northern Ireland’—while others (e.g. Lijphart 1975; O’Leary 1972) highlighted the conclusion that Northern Ireland was different from the rest of the United Kingdom and one component of a multinational state.10 In the next section, we examine how influential the book was in academic and political thinking about Northern Ireland.

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Governing Without Consensus and Its Influence Twenty years before the Belfast Agreement, Rose’s answer was that Northern Ireland could only be governed through institutions supported by a concurring majority of Protestant unionists and Catholic republicans, a fundamental rejection of the winner-take-all form of government at Westminster. The argument was laid out in an analysis of almost 100 public opinion polls written with two young Strathclyde staff (1978). The paper concluded that there was no agreement on a preferred form of government but there was a concurring majority between Catholics and Protestants that direct rule from London was the ‘least worst’ form of government. By contrast, the British and Irish publics concurred on the withdrawal of British troops and the creation of a united Ireland. In 1998, the Belfast Agreement institutionalized a power-sharing form of government with the overwhelming support of the republican minority and the support of half the divided unionist majority. Since the abolition of the Stormont parliament in 1972, successive British governments had been committed to establishing power-sharing institutions, which would see Catholics and Protestants share government. A power-sharing government was established in January 1974 but collapsed just five months later in the face of a general strike organized by Protestant workers opposed to the new institutions. The 1975 Northern Ireland Convention, intended to find a model suitable to both communities, only underscored the lack of legitimacy for power-sharing when a large majority of the unionists elected to the Convention came from anti-­ power-­sharing parties.11 Rose acted as a consultant to the chair of the Convention. Immediately after the failure of the 1975 Convention to reach agreement, the British government considered radical options. One was to withdraw from Northern Ireland completely, effectively making it independent. Such a move would have found support among the British public, where a majority had wanted to withdraw troops from 1974 onwards but would have been insufficient to satisfy republicans seeking the unification of the island of Ireland by all means necessary (Hayes and McAllister 1996). An article by Rose and McAllister (1975) showed that repartition would probably leave a majority of Northern Ireland Catholics in a re-­ partitioned statelet giving legitimacy to permanent Catholic rule. It would also risk massive flight by those who would become a minority in the

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repartitioned areas. These discussions understandably alarmed the Irish government; their own assessment of what would happen in the event of a British withdrawal was that the violence would almost certainly spill over the border and threaten the integrity of the Republic of Ireland. The consequences of repartition highlighted by Rose and others led to this option being quietly dropped. Post-1975 discussions by the British government concentrated on establishing institutions which would address the problem of compliance in a low legitimacy state identified by Rose. There were two main parts to this debate. The first was how to gain public acceptance for a consociational solution, especially after the collapse of the 1974 power-sharing government. John Whyte (1971) had proposed allocating ministries based on parliamentary representation as early as 1971, while Arend Lijphart had proposed a consociational solution modelled on the Netherlands model in an influential 1975 article. Rose (2014, 119) also consistently argued for ‘a government in which posts in cabinet would be assigned in proportion to each party’s share of the vote’. However, a consociational solution requires each participating elite to have the support of its community; for the majority Protestant community the events of 1974 and 1975 had demonstrated the complete absence of such support. How, then, to create durable institutions which could command broad support across both communities? Rose’s answer to this question was to again focus on the results of opinion polls, this time using questions asked in the four groups with a direct interest: the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland, the British public and the Irish public (Rose et al. 1978). The goal of the study was to investigate the extent to which a concurring majority (that is, agreement by majorities in two or more communities) existed on any of the possible forms of government for Northern Ireland. By analysing almost 100 opinion polls covering attitudes in Northern Ireland, Britain and the Irish Republic, the paper concluded that there was no agreement on a preferred form of government. There was, however, a concurring majority between Catholics and Protestants that direct rule from London was the ‘least worst’ form of government. By contrast, the British and Irish publics concurred on the withdrawal of British troops and the creation of a united Ireland. Events since the 1970s have seen power-sharing arrangements becoming more acceptable to Protestants as direct rule from Westminster has declined in popularity. In the 1970s, (Rose et  al. 1978; see also Whyte

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1990, 82) found that most Protestants opposed power-sharing. However, by 2000, around 40 per cent of Protestants said that they supported it and only 18 per cent opposed it; these proportions have increased since (Hayes and McAllister 2013, 141). At the same time, the public’s views about who should be included in any power-sharing arrangement have also undergone change. In the 1970s, the relatively small proportion of Protestants who supported power-sharing saw it as an expedient to create a temporary coalition among moderate supporters of the constitutional status quo. By 1998 and the Belfast Agreement, power-­sharing was implicitly seen as requiring the participation of all parties in government based on their electoral representation (McGarry and O’Leary 2004). A second part of the debate about how to gain public support for power-sharing institutions was the need to involve the Irish government. Rose’s analysis of the opinion survey results underscored the need to satisfy four publics—Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and the British and Irish publics. The requirement for an ‘Irish dimension’—some form of institutional arrangement between north and south on matters of mutual interest—had been recognized early on, but it was not given institutional form until the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. The Agreement created the Intergovernmental Conference which gave the Irish government a say on Northern Ireland affairs for the first time (Coakley 2009). The 1998 Belfast Agreement was possible only because of successive negotiations between the British and Irish states (Coakley and Todd 2020, 2). This demonstrated the importance of interstate action which Rose had emphasized continually in his work. Rose’s work on Northern Ireland also advanced discussion about the United Kingdom towards the concept of a multinational state, as Michael Keating outlines in his chapter in this volume. Rose’s work on British politics, especially his highly influential book Politics in England which went into five editions between 1964 and 1989, emphasized the political distinctiveness not only of Northern Ireland but also of Scotland and Wales. This led to the formation of a Political Studies Association group dedicated to the study of the territorial dimension in the United Kingdom, co-directed by Peter Madgwick and Rose. Their 1982 edited collection, The Territorial Dimension in United Kingdom Politics, was the first serious academic attempt to interpret the United Kingdom as a multinational state. This approach to the United Kingdom was reinforced by Rose and McAllister in their 1982 book, United Kingdom Facts.

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Evaluating the influence of a body of work on academic and political thinking is always problematic. Ideas and themes weave into the intellectual discourse often without attribution. Governing Without Consensus established regime legitimacy as central to the Northern Ireland problem and the requirement for a concurring majority as the basis of any future institutional arrangements. This thinking was eventually embodied in the institutional design of the 1998 Belfast Agreement which has remained the blueprint for governing Northern Ireland since then. Governing Without Consensus is also one of Rose’s most cited books, with over 800 citations as of late 2022, and easily one of the most cited books on the post-1968 Troubles.12 Rose’s work on Northern Ireland also attracted students and scholars interested in pursuing their own research on the problem. Doctoral topics ranged from studies of the main political parties on both sides of the conflict (Diskin 1985; McAllister 1977) to the Protestant paramilitaries (Nelson 1984) and the civil rights movement (Purdie 1990). Visiting students and academics interested in researching Northern Ireland would almost invariably travel to Glasgow to consult Rose who was always generous with his time in assisting with advice and contacts.

Aftermath The significant intellectual contribution of Rose’s work on Northern Ireland in shaping the main themes of later scholarship on the topic is without question. The focus on regime legitimacy in the 1971 and 1976 books gave way in the 1980s to Rose’s research placing Northern Ireland within the context of the United Kingdom as a multinational state. While the academic impact of Rose’s 1970s work is unambiguous, it is more difficult to explain why the main themes took much longer to permeate policy thinking about Northern Ireland. Even in the context of centuries of Irish history, three decades is a long time before ideas see practical expression, especially when so much time and resources had already been devoted to identifying workable solutions. There are several possible answers to this question. The first answer concerns Rose’s identification of the core problem as being insoluble—or at least, having no solution that does not produce significant loss for one or other community. Expressed in his blunt language, this interpretation of the conflict as zero sum and effectively non-­ bargainable became widely quoted. It may also have had the effect of

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dissuading politicians, used to solving problems rather than simply managing them, from engaging with the issue. This may explain why successive British governments after 1975 held all-party talks—from the Atkins talks in 1980 to the Brooke–Mayhew talks in 1991–1992—while at the same time maintaining direct rule from Westminster (Coakley and Todd 2020, 8). None of these talks produced any meaningful progress and simply petered out. It was only when British politicians began to consider un-­ British solutions to the problem that progress began to be made. A second and related reason why Rose’s Northern Ireland work took longer to be translated into policy was the problem of understanding the role of physical force as well as constitutional methods in Irish politics. British politicians have consistently failed to understand that the decision to use physical force in Irish politics is less a moral question than simply one of expediency and rests on a decision about which method is most likely to succeed in achieving their goals. At the same time (and unlike Britain), there is considerable underlying public support for the use of physical force to achieve political goals. Rose observed the strength of this public support—or at the very least, equivocation—in Governing Without Consensus (1971, 192–194), and it appears undiminished by lengthy exposure to the Troubles (Hayes and McAllister 2005). Viewing the use of violence as a matter of expediency rather than morality was central to the IRA’s change of strategy from physical force to elections. This decision followed the unexpected success of the 1980–1981 hunger strikes and the associated by-elections which saw Bobby Sands, the most prominent of the hunger strikers, elected to Westminster shortly before his death (McAllister 2004). It also raises the vexed question of whether politicians should negotiate with physical force activists, in this case the IRA. Despite protestations to the contrary, successive British governments maintained active contacts with the IRA throughout the Troubles and these proved pivotal in the period immediately prior to the 1998 Belfast Agreement (O’Dochartaigh 2015). A third reason for the reluctance of government to directly address Rose’s articulation of the core problem in Northern Ireland is the sensitivity in bringing the Irish government into negotiations. Rose’s idea of a concurring majority was predicated on the need to include the Irish government in any negotiated settlement. However, following the collapse of the 1974 power-sharing government, the Protestant majority effectively exercised a veto over Irish government involvement. This veto was not challenged until the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the Irish

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government a direct role in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time (Todd 2011). It is perhaps no surprise that the initiative—the most far-reaching since the 1920 Government of Ireland Act—was implemented by a Conservative government which had the best chance of convincing the Unionists to accept it. Finally, following the success of the 1968 Loyalty Survey, opinion surveys gained a new respectability among social scientists working on Northern Ireland. A Northern Ireland Attitudes Survey was conducted in 1978 (Moxon-Browne 1983). While the themes of the 1978 survey (and the subsequent book published in 1983) reprised many of the themes in the Loyalty Survey, few of the original survey questions were replicated and an opportunity for valuable longitudinal comparison was lost. Subsequent surveys, such as the 1989–1996 Northern Ireland Social Attitudes Surveys, did replicate some of Rose’s questions, but by then more than 20 years had elapsed (see Hayes and McAllister 2013, Appendix). For policymakers, vital years of benchmarking public opinion were lost, leaving a gap in understanding the dynamics of public opinion during the most violent years of the conflict. By the time the 1998 Belfast Agreement was signed—the significance of which was neatly encapsulated in Tony Blair’s statement that ‘I feel the hand of history on our shoulders’—Rose’s survey work on Northern Ireland was three decades in the past. But the themes his work highlighted had been taken up by other scholars and these ideas were crystallized in the 1998 Agreement. More than 20 years on, and half a century after the publication of Governing Without Consensus, Northern Ireland is yet again in focus. This time the problem has been caused by the British withdrawal from the European Union, and the need to safeguard the Belfast Agreement from the consequences of Brexit. Once again, this is a concern for the British and Irish governments, as well as for the European Union and the US government.

Notes 1. The Agreement is also known as the Good Friday Agreement. We use ‘Belfast Agreement’ here. 2. The last survey interview took place one week before the first sectarian killing. 3. Beckett subsequently published a series of works on Irish history but more particularly on the formation of Northern Ireland.

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4. ‘Going back to study relations between white and blacks in my native city of St Louis during a hot summer in 1964 made it clear there was no easy answer to America’s great unfinished problem’ (Rose 1971, 11). 5. The central theme of legitimacy was developed in a journal article published in 1969 (Rose 1969) and formed the first chapter of the book. 6. On this point, Rose (1971, 218) quotes the historian J.L.  McCracken: ‘There is no floating vote on the constitutional issue’. 7. There is a similar statement in the introduction to Governing Without Consensus (1971, 21): ‘The political activist and the political optimist may wonder why this book does not conclude by propounding a clear and final solution to the Northern Ireland problem. The reason is simple. In the foreseeable future, no solution is immediately practicable’. 8. In Learning About Politics in Time and Space (2014, 114–115), Rose reports attending the 1972 Darlington conference and asking the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, William Whitelaw, what he thought the problem was. In response, Whitelaw ‘smiled and remained silent. We both knew that the problem was there was no solution, at least none in the form that would be normal in a Westminster-style system of government’. 9. The pilot surveys also experimented with matching the interviewer with the respondent’s religion and making it clear to the respondent that the interviewer was from ‘their’ community. This was found to make little difference to the responses and was discarded. A further effort to make the survey as objective as possible and to reduce any concerns about religion was the questionnaire introduction, which introduced Rose as ‘an American university professor’, that is, in practice an ‘outsider’ to the conflict. 10. O’Leary (1972, 281) concludes that the book ‘is likely to supersede all previous works on the politics of Ulster and although the author's judgments may not find universal acceptance they can scarcely be ignored by any serious student of the problem’. 11. See Coakley and Todd (2020) for all the main documents relating to these efforts at the return of devolution. 12. Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice has just over 200 citations. Perhaps, the only other book on Northern Ireland that exceeds Governing Without Consensus in citations is McGarry and O’Leary’s Explaining Northern Ireland (1995) which has just over 1000 citations as of late 2022.

References Augusteijn, J. 2003. Political Violence and Democracy: An Analysis of the Tensions Within Irish Republican Strategy, 1914–2002. Irish Political Studies 18 (1): 1–26. Barritt, D.B., and C.F. Carter. 1962. The Northern Ireland Problem: A Study in Group Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Beckett, J.C. 1966. A Short History of Ireland. London: Hutchinson. Budge, I., and C.  O’Leary. 1973. Belfast: Approach to Crisis: A Study of Belfast Politics, 1613–1970. London: Macmillan. Coakley, J. 2009. Implementing Consociation in Northern Ireland. In Consociational Theory: McGarry and O’Leary and the Northern Ireland Conflict, ed. R. Taylor. London: Routledge. Coakley, J., and J.  Todd. 2020. Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland, 1969–2019. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diskin, M. 1985. Official or Democratic: The Battle for Unionist Votes in Northern Ireland. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde. PhD thesis. Hayes, B., and I. McAllister. 1996. British and Irish Public Opinion Towards the Northern Ireland Problem. Irish Political Studies 11 (1): 61–82. ———. 2005. Public Support for Political Violence and Paramilitarism in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Terrorism and Political Violence 17 (4): 599–617. ———. 2013. Conflict to Peace: Society and Politics in Northern Ireland Over Half a Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jenkins, R. 1984. Understanding Northern Ireland. Sociology 18 (2): 253–264. Lawrence, R.J. 1965. The Government of Northern Ireland: Public Finances and Services, 1921-1964. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lijphart, A. 1975. Review Article: The Northern Ireland Problem; Cases, Theories, and Solutions. British Journal of Political Science 5 (1): 83–106. Lipset, S.M., and S. Rokkan. 1967. Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction. In Party Systems and Voter Alignments, ed. S.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan. New York: Free Press. Lyons, F.S.L. 1973. Ireland Since the Famine. London: Fontana. Madgwick, P., and R.  Rose, eds. 1982. The Territorial Dimension in United Kingdom Politics. London: Macmillan. Mansergh, N. 1936. The Government of Northern Ireland: A Study in Devolution. London: Allen and Unwin. McAllister, I. 1977. The Northern Ireland Social Democratic and Labour Party: Political Opposition in a Divided Society. London: Macmillan. ———. 2004. ‘The Armalite and the Ballot Box’: Sinn Fein’s Electoral Strategy in Northern Ireland. Electoral Studies 23 (1): 123–142. McGarry, J., and B. O’Leary. 1995. Explaining Northern Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. The Northern Ireland Problem: Consociational Engagements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, D.W. 1973. Review: Governing Without Consensus: An Irish Perspective, by Richard Rose; Ireland’s English Question: Anglo-Irish Relations, 1534–1970, by Patrick O’Farrell. Political Science Quarterly 88 (1): 142–144.

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Moxon-Browne, E. 1983. Nation, Class and Creed in Northern Ireland. Aldershot: Gower. Nelson, S. 1984. Ulster’s Uncertain Defenders. Belfast: Appletree Press. O’Dochartaigh, N. 2015. The Longest Negotiation: British Policy, IRA Strategy and the Making of the Northern Ireland Peace Settlement. Political Studies 63 (2): 202–220. O’Leary, C. 1972. Review: Governing without Consensus: An Irish Perspective by Richard Rose. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 61 (2): 276–281. Purdie, B. 1990. Politics in the Streets: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff. Rose, R. 1965. Politics in England. London: Faber. ———. 1969. Dynamic Tendencies in the Authority of Regimes. World Politics 21 (4): 612–628. ———. 1971. Governing Without Consensus: An Irish Perspective. London: Faber. ———. 1976. Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice. London: Macmillan. ———. 1977. On the Priorities of Citizenship in the Deep South and Northern Ireland. Journal of Politics 38 (2): 247–291. ———. 2014. Learning About Politics in Time and Space. Colchester: ECPR. Rose, R., and I.  McAllister. 1975. Repartition not the Solution to Northern Ireland’s Problems. Irish Times, 16 September. ———. 1982. United Kingdom Facts. London: Macmillan. Rose, R., I. McAllister, and P. Mair. 1978. Is There a Concurring Majority about Northern Ireland? Glasgow: University of Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy No. 22. Schubotz, D. 2005. Beyond the Orange and the Green: The Diversification of the Qualitative Social Research Landscape in Northern Ireland. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 6: Art 29, September. Smyth, M., and J. Darby. 2001. Does Research Make any Difference? The Case of Northern Ireland. In Researching Violent Divided Societies, ed. M. Smyth and G. Robinson. London: Pluto Press. Stewart, A.T.Q. 1967. The Ulster Crisis. London: Faber. Taylor, R. 1988. Social Scientific Research on the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland: The Problem of Objectivity. Economic and Social Review 19 (1): 123–145. Todd, J. 2011. Institutional Change and Conflict Regulation: The Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and the Mechanisms of Change in Northern Ireland. West European Politics 34 (5): 838–858. Whyte, J. 1971. The Reform of Stormont. Belfast: New Ulster Movement. ———. 1990. Interpreting Northern Ireland. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, T., ed. 1955. Ulster Under Home Rule: A Study of the Political and Economic Problems of Northern Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 14

Reflections of a Comparative Social Scientist Richard Rose

Humani nihil a me alienum (Nothing that concerns humanity is alien to me). Terence

Initially I thought of calling my contribution ‘I Am a Dependent Variable’, but quickly realised that the making of a comparative social scientist is a complex process that cannot be reduced to a single characteristic. Systems analysis offers an appropriate approach to joining up what has made me what I am. Most social scientists, having become identified with a country or a topic, have tended to stay within that area. Don Stokes made this point to me in 1964 when I asked him about choosing a new field of study. His recommendation was to devote my career to a single subject as he was doing. This struck me as boring. A year later when Rudolf Wildenmann invited me to give a seminar at Mannheim, I offered him a choice between a soon-to-be-published paper and a new idea I was starting to explore. He said, ‘Give us what’s new’. I found this congenial. It has guided me to research new subjects in places from Washington and Tokyo to Moscow and Belfast. The pages that follow identify six themes

R. Rose (*) University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5_14

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that together have influenced my career as a comparative social scientist (see also Rose 2014).

Developing Empathy with People Past and Present From the age of seven, I began learning about people and places far beyond what one could experience in the comfortable St. Louis, Missouri suburb into which I was born. The radio and the daily papers I began reading in 1940 not only reported news about Major League Baseball but also gave an eyewitness account of Marshal Pétain surrendering France to Adolf Hitler. Following the progress of the Second World War gave me a map of Europe full of the names of battlefields from Dunkirk to Stalingrad and the beaches of Anzio and Normandy. By the age of ten, I had an adult reader’s card at the local library. My introduction to English life came at 14, reading classic novels, with a particular attraction to Charles Dickens. When I got my driver’s licence for a car at the age of 16, I followed the recommendation of Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers; he let his son run in the streets of London to learn how people lived. St. Louis was not so exciting, but it was diverse, divided by race, religion and class, and its culture owed a lot to liberal German immigrants from the 1840s. It was a Northern city in Missouri, a Southern-­ facing border state. It had bars, both black and white, where one could listen to Billie Holiday and Stan Getz. The local theatre offered first-run productions of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. Specialist cinemas imported English comedies and European films such as The Blue Angel, set in Weimar Germany; Open City, an account of resistance in occupied Rome; and Kanal, about the failure of resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. My introduction to the European past came when I entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1951. It was founded in 1876 in emulation of German research universities, and the tradition was reinforced by the infusion of professors who were refugees from Hitler’s Third Reich. The humanities classes organised materials chronologically rather than topically. They included a two-year survey of Western civilisation from the Greeks to the French Revolution and separate classes on the history of architecture, of art and of music. I studied comparative literature and specialised in the history of drama. The syllabus started with reading the complete works of the classical Greek playwrights in translation. Aristotle on tragedy has influenced my

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recognition faults in American and British politics that were often ignored. They were very clear in William Faulkner’s novels of Mississippi and Sean O’ Casey’s plays about how the Irish fought each other. One of my undergraduate dissertations contrasted the idea of time in the novels of Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe, and the other contrasted the evolution in the poetry of T.S.  Eliot from dissonance to harmony and the move in the opposite direction from jazz in New Orleans to bebop in Harlem. Baltimore was a large city that enabled me to apply the pragmatic principle of learning by doing. I wangled a position as a freelance stringer for United Press and skipped constitutional law classes to cover a big murder trial. I had a part-time job in a print shop and learned how manual workers viewed their lives; politics was peripheral, money was central. Washington, then a Southern city, was close at hand, and I went there for its museums and monuments. What impressed me most were the words inscribed on the walls of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials; to this, I would now add the inscriptions on the memorials to the dead of the Vietnam War and to Martin Luther King, Jr. Before I set foot in England, I knew a lot about English medieval churches and pre-Shakespearean plays. My knowledge of continental Europe was a jumble; it covered ancient and medieval history, great architectural monuments built in the distant past under long-dead rulers, and Europe as it appeared to pre-1914 avant-garde novelists. I knew more about no-longer-existing European empires than about contemporary politics, for I had never taken a course in comparative European government. I had a lot of catching up to do. When I arrived in London in 1953, I had never spoken with anyone who was English, and my ignorance was such that I thought England was part of Europe. To see medieval cathedrals, I spent many weekends hitchhiking around England. Drivers explained to a curious young foreigner how the class system affected their lives; their explanations varied with the type of car or lorry they drove. At the London School of Economics, my priorities were going to lunch-time political meetings, to plays that characterised stiff-upper-lip England as it then was and exploring nearby streets and buildings dating back to the churches of Christopher Wren. Going to the library was a low priority, and I was happy when my supervisor, Robert T. McKenzie, told me my master’s dissertation topic was no longer viable because it was covered by a new book. This gave me more time to explore England and Europe.

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In the breaks between terms, I explored Western Europe, using a book on the history of European architecture as a guide. Less than a decade after the Second World War ended, the effects of war were still palpable. I saw my first Soviet troops in four power-occupied Vienna and celebrated my 21st birthday in the only concert hall in Munich with a roof on it. Following a tip from a Hopkins instructor, I always travelled by myself. This meant that I communicated with people who were part of the countries I was visiting or I talked to no one. When people in third-class train compartments or cheap restaurants discovered I was an American, they were happy to describe how they were living. They said less than British people did about how they had lived during the Second World War.

Turning Words into Concepts and Books At the age of ten, I got a pocket dictionary that introduced me to new words rarely met even in wide reading, such as tergiversation. Reading H.L. Mencken’s two volumes on The American Language introduced me to many words not found in the Oxford English Dictionary. At Hopkins, the aesthetics seminar introduced me to the maxim of the Roman author Longinus, who stressed making words have an impact, and that of the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney, who emphasised that writing should entertain as well as instruct. I learned from reading James Joyce about using a few words as epiphanies to reveal an individual’s character, a useful skill when writing about politicians. I think of words as metaphors that can stand for more than their literal denotation or as icons that are worshipped such as the word democracy(cf. Ogden and Richards 1923). Because the key to a word’s connotations is often found in its etymology, I keep a copy of the two-volume Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles by my desk. Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, one word won me a $25,000 prize in international economics (Rose 1992). I pointed out that, while there were theories about what the Germans call a Rechtsstaat (rule of law state), Western economists promoting a free market economy in Russia did not realise that this would result in massive corruption in the absence of a Rechtswirtschaft (rule of law economy). My literary training makes me very conscious that numbers are mute facts. They do not speak for themselves but are indicators of a social science concept. In the words of Ted Gurr, a pioneer of quantitative political science, ‘All the best variables are nominal’. Thus, my approach to data

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analysis gives priority to writing questionnaires. I start by outlining the analytic concepts that require measurement and only then begin drafting questions that are both appropriate indicators and meaningful to the people who are asked to answer the questions. Thus, the New Europe Barometer questionnaire I designed after the fall of the Berlin Wall was about how people were coping with the unprecedented transformation of their economy, society and polity (Rose 2009). For Transparency International, I have designed a questionnaire that complements its elite index of perceptions of corruption by asking nationwide samples whether they had paid a bribe to use public services such as health care (Rose and Peiffer 2019). My formal training in writing for publication began when I became a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1955. The first requirement was positivist: Get facts that would stand up in a court. Everything I wrote was checked twice over for accuracy and clarity before it could be set in type. Secondly, give precise details and avoid the use of vague words such as ‘many’. Thirdly, organise facts in your mind and write fast against deadlines measured in minutes or hours rather than months or years. This training has stood me in good stead ever since. Whereas most historians rely on the archives of dead people for their stories, the sources of newspaper reporters are very much alive, and I was trained to identify who they were and get them to talk about what I knew they knew. When I asked the director of President Nixon’s project on managing presidential objectives for documents, he refused, telling me ‘You’ve got to snake it on your own’. I found an alternative source who gave me the documents I needed to write Managing Presidential Objectives, whereas the presidential appointee who dismissed my request was soon out of his White House job because of Watergate. In my time at Oxford, any discussion of political ideas was met with the question: What do you mean by that? This implied the answer: It all depends. The dialogue was based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1953) theory of words not having a single meaning but fuzzy similarities with no one meaning common to all its uses. This was often used as an objection to introducing concepts or theories to the study of British politics. The Warden of Nuffield College told me I didn’t need to define any concepts when writing my doctoral thesis, The Relation of Socialist Principles to the 1945-51 Labour Government’s Foreign Policy. I could just read what was said in parliamentary debates and party documents and write a descriptive account. I did not follow his advice.

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My first book was as the junior author of a descriptive Nuffield study of the 1959 British general election (Butler and Rose 1960). Thanks to my Post-Dispatch training, I researched the chapters that gained headlines. They show the amount of money that the Conservative Party and anti-­ nationalisation campaigners had spent on an unprecedented barrage of political advertising. When I found that neither the election winners nor the losers knew why the electorate had voted as it did, I went straight to sources of evidence, Mark Abrams and Henry Durant. They ran market research firms doing surveys and were generous to the first academic to ask them for their politically relevant data. I used this to refute empirically generalisations about class being the primary influence on voters (Rose 1968). My second book used concepts about how elections are won and lost to give a contingent answer to the question Must Labour Lose? Its conceptual framework was adapted from the path-breaking model of The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960). David Butler had given me a copy of the book sent him by its publisher, saying he wouldn’t have time to read it since he was going to the United States to observe the 1960 presidential election. When Gabriel Almond invited me to write a book applying his conceptual framework for global comparison to the study of politics in England (Almond and Coleman 1960), my reaction was cautious. I outlined two very different ways of writing a book with this title. The first was for a Penguin that would describe political behaviour as well political institutions, but do so without concepts, thereby preventing comparisons. The alternative outline applied Almond’s conceptual framework in a way that was then novel in political science and unthinkable in England. I decided that Almond’s approach was better and accepted his offer. To make widely available sources on which I drew when writing Politics in England, I edited a reader, Studies in British Politics (1966). Indicative of the state of political studies in British universities at that time, in the first edition, only two contributions were by British political scientists writing for academic journals, while four were authored by members of the House of Commons or Lords, five by American political scientists and half the chapters were reprints of insightful articles initially published as journalism. By the time of the third edition in 1976, the study of political science in British universities had been transformed. Only six of the original articles survived, just two were by journalists, and articles by British academics substantially outnumbered contributions by American political scientists.

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The 50-plus books I have written since have had at least half a dozen different origins. Some have been written to satisfy my curiosity; others because I have seen a big gap in the academic literature, a lack of factual resources or in response to events such as a general election. Over four decades, I’ve written three books because of dissatisfaction with exaggerated claims that democracies were dying: Can Government Go Bankrupt?; Britain: Progress and Decline; and How Sick Is British Government? When Rei Shiratori invited me to collaborate on a study of Japan, I agreed in order to learn what would result from examining a modern non-Western society with Western concepts. The result was The Welfare State East and West. I care about what I write, whether it is a university press book, a piece of journalism or a Christmas note to a friend, and adapt my style to the audience at hand. Academic writings are normally circulated for comment, and I welcome criticisms from people who have read what I’ve written. If I agree, my interpretation is altered; if I don’t, it is revised to make my point clearer. It is only when an author purports to discuss my work and gets it wrong by ignoring it that I seek a correction, sometimes meeting surprising resistance. I write to please myself rather than to rack up citations as in a game of snooker.

Travelling in Three Dimensions To become a comparative social scientist requires travelling across space, time and social science disciplines. At Oxford in the 1950s, there were no boundaries between social science disciplines because there were no departments of political science and economics, and sociology was left to the LSE. I therefore have an undisciplined doctorate awarded by the Faculty of Social Studies. The only requirement for the degree was to write a thesis, and I had no difficulty in doing that in two years. Instead of working my way through lists of books that established the boundaries of what a graduate student should read to become a professional political scientist, I read books that had interesting titles, such as Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and Roberto Michel’s Political Elites. Reading a variety of Max Weber’s writings made me conscious of a rich range of fuzzy social science concepts applicable across time and space. Marty Lipset’s Political Man opened my eyes to employing concepts to pose and answer significant political questions through

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comparative, quantitative analysis. The ideas of Stein Rokkan provided a conceptual framework for comparing parties across the non-Anglophone world and long conversations with Juan Linz offered a way of distinguishing between many types of regimes. Robert Merton’s latent function analysis provided a theoretical framework I’ve used more than once to analyse the gap between what theories stipulate are objective functions of political behaviour and the latent functions of politicians and voters (Merton 1957). Peacock and Wiseman’s study of The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom gave me an awareness of the path-dependent dynamics of public policy. My introduction to the importance of timing in politics came from Paul Tillich’s (1951–1963) concept of Kairos. An outlook on politics fed by reading outside political science has been invaluable in my work in public policy, which I define as studying undisciplined problems of governance by applying to the problem at hand relevant concepts and methods from across the social sciences (Rose 1976a). Thus, beginning with Understanding Big Government, I published books that approached the subject through law, public finance and taxation, sociology, public administration, geography and history. The central focus of New Europe Barometer surveys was not on voting or what kind of political system people would like to live in but how they were coping with the problems thrown up by the transformation of the society in which they were actually living. I became a World Bank consultant on transformation because my unofficial data provided insights that were hidden by their official economic data. As an American who has lived most of his life in two different parts of a multi-national United Kingdom, I am accustomed to moving across national boundaries. In the course of my career, I have presented papers in 45 countries and done fieldwork across Europe from Belfast and Lisbon to Ankara and Moscow. Sometimes the fieldwork has been at my initiative, for example, in Northern Ireland. Sometimes it has been initiated by others, such as a UN agency asking me to advise the president-elect of Colombia on how to organise his Executive Office. My forthcoming book, Welfare Goes Global: Making Progress and Catching Up, draws on experiences accumulated in fieldwork on six continents to examine systematically long-term social change in 95 per cent of the world’s population. Field research has involved interviewing politicians and policymakers, talking with social scientists in all kinds of institutions, and collecting published and unpublished documents and survey data in the days before archives defined what was and was not available. I learn a lot about other

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countries by ‘soaking and poking’ in the back streets and markets of cities and read inscriptions on statues, especially in Mitteleuropa and the Deep South of the United States. In a detour up the Amazon after a conference in Rio de Janeiro, I tested my knowledge of the shadow economy by finding a place that would sell me cruzeiros at the unofficial black market rate rather than the Intercontinental Hotel rate. My first trip to Russia in 1976 taught me the meaning of a market economy in a way that no textbook could: its importance was made evident by its absence. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 launched me on two decades of repeated travel to organise more than one hundred surveys in 17 post-­ Communist countries. There I met with social scientists who shared my concern with how people in their country were coping with the transformation of their society. In the course of discussions in Sofia, Prague, Vilnius and Moscow, I produced questionnaires in a dozen languages that captured the concerns of respondents in ways that were also relevant to social science concepts. I knew my surveys were asking appropriate questions when a Moscow audience switched from asking me about my research to disputing with each other the implications of my evidence. I learned that I had done justice to all sides in Baltic states that had forced their citizens to choose between Nazi and Soviet invaders when out of the blue I received a letter from the President of Latvia thanking me for my fairness. Travelling across time is easy for me since I have lived through nine-­ tenths of a century. My grandfather was born when Abraham Lincoln was president and my wife’s grandparents were born before the death of Albert, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria. This enables me to see history forwards as well as backwards. History backwards is easy: You know what to explain. History forwards is uncertain but constrained by history, past and present. An understanding of time past and time present can support credible alternative scenarios about time future. My introduction to the study of the European Union was writing a chapter in my doctoral thesis about why the British Labour government rejected joining the 1950 Schuman initiative that led four decades later to the foundation of the European Union. As I made clear in What Is Europe? (Rose 1996), at that point, Europe had evolved from being a system of undemocratic multi-national empires and undemocratic nation-states to becoming a system of democratic nation-states. Stein Rokkan, along with British politicians of his generation, saw co-operation between independent nation-states, defended by the American-based North Atlantic Treaty

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Organisation, as sufficient for maintaining Europe’s peace. When the United Kingdom joined what was then the European Economic Community, I was inclined to be in favour on the same grounds as Harold Macmillan: it was desirable for Britain to be part of a European economic alliance because it was no longer a world power. When the debate on Britain joining the euro emerged, I sided with those opposing Britain joining on political and economic grounds (Rose 2002). My research on the European Union has been driven by a recognition of the need to move beyond comparing national political systems in separate boxes to recognising the public policy importance of cross-national interdependence (Rose 1991). When Ed Page read my view, he asked me: ‘Does that mean we all have to do international relations?’ The need to take into account the interdependence of national and foreign policies is set out in my studies of The Post-Modern Presidency and The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World. A current research project, stimulated by the war in Ukraine, is about where European countries look for allies. The answer is: it all depends: to Washington for military help, to Brussels for the economy and to the UN for climate change. My approach to the European Union is the bottom-up approach of the 450 million people who are first of all citizens of member-states and often without knowing it thereby citizens of the European Union. I was led to research EU institutions by noting that seats in the European Parliament are allocated by a system of ‘disproportional representation’ that produces cross-national inequalities between citizens of member states (Rose 2012, 79ff). In the run up to the 2016 UK referendum that produced Brexit, I lobbied in the House of Lords with a little success to improve the referendum bill and viewed the majority vote for Brexit as the consequence of British elites assuming that ordinary voters would follow them without question. In How Referendums Challenge European Democracy, I argued that cosmopolitan European elites should not fear national referendums on EU issues: they should convince their citizens that EU membership is in their national interest. A big majority of such referendums result in a pro-EU majority. While I agree with academics who argue that the EU has a democratic deficit, I disagree with their prescriptions for making it more democratic. It is structurally impossible for a confederation of states different in history and population to be accountable to the peoples of 27 member states by the same standards that define national democracy (Rose 2015). The EU can justify its existence on grounds of effectiveness in dealing with

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problems of interdependence, but an attempt to justify it on grounds of common values does not stand up to a study of Europe’s past. I give three cheers for the free movement of people, ideas and goods in Europe, two cheers for the policies of the EU and one for its political accountability.

Caring About What Government Does My friends learned to care about politics at first hand. Stein Rokkan, Giovanni Sartori and Hans Daalder went into hiding rather than be conscripted into Hitler’s service in occupied Europe. Karl Deutsch was a refugee with a stateless person’s passport as a young assistant in the committee planning the creation of the United Nations. Juan Linz did his military service in post-Civil War Spain translating German military sociology books into Spanish. Rudolf Wildenmann and Heinz Kienzl learned their politics as conscripts in the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. American friends such as Marty Lipset and Aaron Wildavsky learned about politics from their parents’ experience of living through Jewish pogroms in Russia and Ukraine I began to develop views as a liberal along the lines of Isaiah Berlin (1969) when my primary school teachers started talking about their views. They were socialist critics of big business and supported Henry Wallace when he was a communist fellow-traveller running for the American presidency in 1948. In reaction, I began reading books by ex-communists who spelled out what the dictatorship of the proletariat actually did. It broadened my view of totalitarianism to include communism as well as Hitler’s Nazism. The outbreak of the Korean War made me accept the Cold War as a global battle. I was registered for military service and expected to be in uniform in Korea until deferments were introduced for college students and I failed the physical examination due to a high school football injury. An interest in jazz made me actively aware as a teenager of racial discrimination in St. Louis, in which segregation existed in law and practice. I participated in organising an annual Brotherhood Day conference sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Catholic and Lutheran schools did not participate because they did not want their pupils to mix with youths whose beliefs were in error. I studied constitutional law at a time when the dispute about interpreting the Bill of Rights was critical. The Supreme Court had not yet declared segregation unconstitutional, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was smearing as communists people whose political views he disliked. This led me to be active in the St. Louis

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chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. When race relations were first seen as a problem in England, I was commissioned by the British Institute of Race Relations to report on how anti-discrimination policies worked on the ground in St. Louis (Rose 1965). When offered a full-time post to direct research on British race relations, I rejected it out of hand. I saw that British trade unions and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins were not prepared to act as seriously as Lyndon Johnson and the American courts had done. My father did not register to vote because he thought all politicians were like the worst he had seen on the streets of St. Louis. The only thing I knew about my mother’s political beliefs was that she was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for which I was trebly ineligible. Hence, I did not inherit a parental party identification. The only presidential vote I have ever cast was for Adlai Stevenson, who ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1956 with the slogan ‘Let’s talk sense to the American people’. Had I been in America in 1960, I would not have voted for Jack Kennedy because of the Kennedys’ tolerance of Joseph McCarthy. Researching the American presidency made me admire how Lyndon Johnson dealt with voting rights and launched the Great Society for poor whites as well as blacks. A visit to the unpretentious but very well-documented Truman Museum near Kansas City strengthened my pride in being a Truman Democrat. Given my American nationality, I have never been eligible to vote in Britain and, unlike many Americans, did not transfer my American party allegiance to the Labour Party in the mistaken belief it stood for the same things as America’s Democratic Party. My independent outlook has been reinforced by writing on election campaigns in which there are things to be said for and against both the winning and the losing parties. For a quarter of a century, I regularly attended the annual party conferences of both the Conservative and Labour parties to assess intra-party politics by talking and drinking with all kinds of people. Among the 17 prime ministers during my career, the two most impressive have been Clement Attlee, who self-effacingly managed a Labour Cabinet that collectively delivered policies that lasted a generation, and Margaret Thatcher, who by conviction and force of personality changed the political agenda at a time when it needed changing. As for Scottish independence, the heart can make a case for independence, while the pocketbook recommends remaining in the United Kingdom.

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As an Oxford student of politics—the term ‘political science’ was scorned in my day—I was ready to offer thoughts about the practical implications of my research to anyone interested regardless of party. After the 1959 election Mark Abrams had done a post-election survey that Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, wanted the Labour Party to fund. It had to be financed by his friends because Aneurin Bevan rejected the need for a survey, saying, ‘I know what the working class thinks.’ Mark invited me to contribute chapters about the survey to a Penguin special to be published just before the 1960 Labour Party conference. My contribution used a model of how elections are won and lost to identify shortcomings that Labour would need to overcome in order to have a chance of winning the next election. My model was not deterministic. I made this clear by placing a question mark at the end of the title of Must Labour Lose? When Tony Crosland asked me to comment on a draft of his Fabian Tract addressing similar issues, he dismissed my title as too pessimistic so I suggest the complement, Can Labour Win? My analysis left it up to Labour politicians to fight about whether to give priority to winning an election or repeating party shibboleths that had led to three straight defeats. In the event Labour’s 1964 victory owed a lot to luck. The party won just one more seat than the minimum needed to have an absolute majority, thanks to Conservative grandees making the 14th Earl of Home prime minister. What I wrote also had a sleeper effect. It inspired the work of Philip Gould, the polling expert who crafted voter appeals that helped Tony Blair’s New Labour Party to win three consecutive elections beginning in 1997. My major engagement in British politics was an unexpected byproduct of regarding legitimacy and rights as badly discussed by British academics writing about an unwritten constitution (Rose 1976b, 2021, Chap. 7). In 1965, I began studying Northern Ireland as a political system in which Protestant unionists, then a big majority of the population, saw the political system as legitimate while Catholic republicans did not. Immediately after my big survey was completed, non-violent civil rights demonstrations started and were met with resistance by Protestant politicians and police. Given my border-state background, I could understand why each side was doing what it did. When the guns came out, this created a new division between those who were using guns to advance their cause and those who opposed killing. I was among the latter. For more than a decade, I used my political contacts in London, Belfast and Dublin to caution against actions that would lead to more deaths and to suggest measures that might reduce or end the killing (see Rose 2014, Chap. 7). The British

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government introduced internment without trial in Northern Ireland in 1971 and killings escalated into the thousands. I signed letters to people I knew in Whitehall ‘Yours Cassandraically’. A quarter of a century later, my position was shown to be prematurely right. As Weber notes, politics is the steady boring of hard boards; it requires patience (Rose 1997).

Adopting Identities Pinning a single identity on a person is an act of oversimplification, for everyone has multiple social and political identities. For example, 450 million people can identify themselves as citizens of the European Union because they are citizens of one of its 27 member states. I am neither. Likewise, 330 million Americans are both citizens of states as well as of the United States. I hold both a Missouri driver’s licence and a passport issued by the federal government in Washington, DC. I have gone through life adopting a series of identities in keeping with the situation. However, my identities were often qualified because I did not quite fit in. In primary school, I was one of the boys, but I was also the one who read more than his teachers. The parents of teenage girls I liked were Jewish and I was not. At Johns Hopkins, I preferred to spend my weekends reading rather than partying with classmates. At the PostDispatch, I learned to get along with policemen, but the offer to be the paper’s art critic indicated I wasn’t seen as a reporter who would send politicians to jail. As a postgraduate student at Oxford, I was collecting evidence for a thesis rather than arguing about an essay with dons who had brilliant BAs and had bought their MA. Fitting into different situations up to a point reflects the fact that I have always been inner-directed rather than outer-directed, with a strong sense of what the Germans call Bildung (Riesman 1950). I have been relaxed about being an outsider since reading in secondary school an essay by Thorstein Veblen (1919) that argued that being an outsider was an intellectual asset because it encouraged one to question views that insiders accepted without thinking. Karl Deutsch similarly argued that fresh ideas were more likely to come from academics who ventured into a discipline outside their normal academic base. Becoming friends with Karl showed me that thinking across disciplines could also be fun. Given all that I have experienced, the easiest part of comparative research is talking to foreigners, starting with my wife, whose roots were English but whose readiness to go where I wanted to go was Irish. When

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the Scottish census asks me to reduce my Grund der Wesen into single words in response to questions about national identity and religion, I write: European, humanist.

Having Bases Conducting comparative research requires a lot of travelling; it also requires multiple bases. Going back to the same place to do research creates a number of second homes. Over time, I have accumulated a portfolio of second homes: the Reform Club in London, the Cosmos Club in Washington and a mixture of accommodations in Belfast, Berlin, Brussels, Florence, New York and Vienna. A university is the normal base for a political scientist. In 1966, I became what a journalist described as Scotland’s youngest and swingingest professor at the University of Strathclyde because I mentioned I played the drums. I am now Scotland’s oldest and still swinging professor. I have kept Scotland as my base by adapting to change in ways that have enabled me to advance my comparative research. In 1976, I founded the first Centre for the Study of Public Policy in a European university. Five years later I became a full-time research professor free of teaching and committee obligations. I have turned down offers of full-time posts at MIT, the European University Institute and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Universities have changed radically since I became a professor. There was no need then to post photographs of departmental staff as everyone knew each other. The post-war baby boom, rising aspirations of youths and government have transformed universities. They now have the cash flow of big businesses and are administered as such. University politics has remained a constant. When I became an assistant lecturer in Manchester, I joined the lecturers union in order to get a discount on the purchase of sherry. When I became a professor at Strathclyde, I resigned from the union as I saw myself as on the side of the employers. In my eighties I rejoined the union after finding that senior university administrators since departed were ignoring my contract of employment in efforts to restrict my activities or worse. I did not need Covid restrictions to adopt the practice of doing research from home. The jet airplane came into service at the time I moved to Scotland, thereby abolishing the tyranny of the English Channel that for centuries had defended Britons from regarding Europeans as neighbours. I can have breakfast at home, work on a plane and have lunch or supper wherever I

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choose across two continents. I ration my travel to make sure that it does not impinge on time needed to write books and articles. Pre-Covid, I was normally out of Scotland upwards of 90 days a year. For me, holiday time is being at home to enjoy the long days and mild temperature of a Highland summer. For more than half a century, my research base has been an informal network of colleagues extending across three continents. Initially, I was the youngest and least learned person at meetings of the Committee of Political Sociology led by Stein Rokkan and Marty Lipset. Giovanni Sartori was ruthless in demanding conceptual clarity, Juan Linz drew on his lived experience to differentiate between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, Mattei Dogan emphasised studying politics in its social context. They were my mentors and became my friends. As I became senior, my network has developed to research fresh topics requiring a mixture of skills and knowledge beyond my own. Thus, I have co-authored books and journal articles with social scientists from a dozen countries in Europe and from Russia, the United States, Australia, Japan and Korea. The order of authors’ names depends upon who wrote the bulk of the text. The network has been extended by editing two dozen books and special issues of journals. For decades, I have drawn on the formidable capacity of Ian McAllister and Bill Mishler to analyse data, and more recently Bernhard Wessels at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. They have patiently and forcefully explained to me how statistics can and can’t be used to test my ideas and added ideas of their own. Research grants have enabled me to hire postdoctoral research officers to manage data and conduct statistical analyses, thereby gaining credit as co-authors of articles and books. For example, Neil Munro was appointed because he was fluent in Russian and ready to become fluent in statistics too. For more than a decade, he managed the New Russia Barometer database and became the co-author of four books and numerous journal articles. For a decade, I was a junior co-author with Sir Michael Marmot and Martin McKee, leading public health experts puzzled by the distinctive mortality statistics produced by communist and post-communist societies. My role was to design survey questions about unhealthy lifestyles of communist subjects that led to their premature death. I have been involved with large and small organisations that have institutionalised collegiality across national borders. I was one of the founding members of the European Consortium for Political Research in 1970,

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which now provides a network for thousands of political scientists. I was on the Council of the International Political Science Association, in which professors from Soviet-controlled states could espouse the party line. I have preferred to be active in working groups that focus on a specific research theme, such as the Committee on Political Sociology, for which I was the secretary for years. I co-founded the British Politics Group within the American Political Science Association to support Americans researching British politics, and the Working Group on United Kingdom Politics, as distinct from politics in England, to bring together researchers scattered across the United Kingdom’s dispersed nations. To make available pre-­ print and longer-length research papers, I created the Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy series, with contributions by junior and senior scholars from across two continents. It published 520 papers before being overtaken by electronic media. At its height, the CSPP website annually had hits from 100 countries, led by the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia and Germany. The third leg on my tripod of bases is a home and a hinterland. I am fortunate that both were acquired early in life and have travelled well in time and space. I was not 21 when I met Rosemary Kenny in the postgraduate common room at the LSE, and she became the cause of my first airplane flight to marry her in Kent in 1956. For 65 years, we shared a peripatetic life, and Rosemary put up with a husband who thought it more important to finish writing a paragraph than to sit down to a meal as soon as it was cooked. She was the anchor of our family home in Helensburgh, where the Highlands come down to the sea less than 40 minutes from Glasgow airport, and where I write these words now. My hinterland began to develop long before I came to Britain by reading novels and plays and listening to music of all kinds. I long ago stopped reading fiction because I spend enough time crafting words in efforts to understand people in real life. Music has been my companion since childhood—the radio providing an eclectic mixture of jazz and the three Bs, Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. My engagement with the Gesamtkunst operas of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss introduced me to the world of German Kultur before 1933, and I have occasionally contributed comments to fanzines of both. Typography is the one visual art I practise. When I have free time in my travels, I enjoy going to museums of applied arts from Taipei to St. Petersburg and Washington. My favourites are the Pergamon Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin and museums in Florence that are much less crowded than the Uffizi.

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The way in which different strands of my life have intertwined to make me a comparative social scientist is not the result of a plan mapped out in youth. It is the result of abandoning at age 24 the plan I had adopted at the age of 8: to become a newspaper reporter. Dame Fortuna has helped too, prompting the prime minister to call a British general election in October 1959. This made me author of two widely cited books at the age of 27. The goddess has since created unexpected events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led me to spend two decades researching half of Europe where I, and more importantly its citizens, could travel freely. When my old secondary school elected me to its wee Hall of Fame, I was asked to provide two words to describe myself on a plaque. The words I chose were: Writer. Scholar.

References Almond, G.A., and J.S. Coleman. 1960. The Politics of Developing Areas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, D.E., and R. Rose. 1960. The British General Election of 1959. London: Macmillan. and New York: St. Martins, 1960; reprinted, 1970, 1999. Campbell, A., P.E. Converse, W.E. Miller, and D.E. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. New York: Wiley. Merton, R.K. 1957. Social Structure and Social Theory. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Ogden, C.K., and I.A. Richards. 1923. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and the Science of Symbolism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Riesman, D. 1950. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rose, R. 1965. Toward Fair Employment: A Review. RACE 6 (4): 281–287. ———. 1968. Class and Party Divisions: Britain as a Test Case. Sociology 2 (2): 129–162. ———. 1976a. Disciplined Research and Undisciplined Problems. International Social Science Journal 28 (1): 99–121. ———. 1976b. On the Priorities of Citizenship in the Deep South and Northern Ireland. Journal of Politics 38 (2): 247–291. Rose, Richard. 1991. Comparing Forms of Comparative Analysis. Political Studies 39 (3): 446–462. Rose, R. 1992. Eastern Europe’s Need for a Civil Economy. In Finance and the International Economy 6, ed. R. O’Brien. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1996. What is Europe? A Dynamic Perspective. New  York: Addison Wesley Longman. ———. 1997. How Patient Are People in Post-Communist Societies? World Today 159 (3): 130–144.

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———. 2002. Putting Monetary Policy in Its Political Place. Journal of Public Policy 22 (2): 257–269. ———. 2009. Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. Representation in Parliamentary Democracies: The European Parliament as a Deviant Case. In Multilayered Representation in the European Union, ed. T. Evas, U. Liebert, and C. Lord. Baden-Baden: Nomos. ———. 2014. Learning About Politics in Time and Space: A Memoir. Colchester: ECPR Press. ———. 2015. Representing Europeans: A Pragmatic Approach. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. How Sick is British Democracy? A Clinical Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, R., and C. Peiffer. 2019. Bad Governance and Corruption. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tillich, P. 1951–1963. Systematic Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3 vols. Veblen, T. 1919. The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe. Political Science Quarterly 34 (1): 33–42. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Index1

A Abrams, M., vii, 5, 60, 260 Accountability, v, 197, 222, 265 Adamecz-Völgyi, A., 226 Adenauer, K., 104 Adern, J., 100 Adoption and Children Act 2002, 177 Africa, 188 Alexiadou, D., 108 Alldridge, P., 170 Almond G.A., 6, 8, 22, 23, 26, 31, 221, 223, 260 Andeweg, R., 98 Andrews-Lee, C., 108 Ang, Y.Y., 197n1 Animal health, 167 Anticorruption policies, 184, 185, 194, 197 Armytage, R., 193 Assets Recovery Agency, 170, 173

Attlee, Clement, 4, 29, 266 Authoritarian regimes, 206 B Baez-Carmago, C., 198n4 Bagehot, Walter, 8, 52n1 Baltic Republics, 227 Baltimore, 2, 256, 257 Bank of England, 164 Barberá, P., 105 Barry, B., 2 Batley, R., 188 Bauhr, M., 192 Behaviour/behavioral, vii, x, 8, 10, 25, 26, 29–31, 33, 34, 42, 43, 75, 76, 80, 88, 98, 103, 186, 194, 196, 232, 260, 262 Béland, D., 164, 166 Belarus, 14, 225

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Keating et al. (eds.), The Problem of Governing, Executive Politics and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40817-5

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INDEX

Bellin, E., 228 Beloff, Max, 24 Bennister, M., 111n12 Berlin Wall, 13–15, 258, 259, 263, 272 Berlusconi, S., 102, 111n10 Biden, J., 101, 102, 105, 109, 128 Bjørnskov, C., 188 Blair, Tony, 48, 59, 66, 71, 208, 250 Blondel, Jean, 39, 104 Blumenberg-Lampe, C., 232 Bollyky, T.J., 226 Brady, D., 188 Brexit, 14, 28, 50–52, 66, 67, 125, 132, 165, 250, 264 British Election Study (BES), 63 Brown, A., 99 Bukovansky, M., 194, 196 Bureaucracy, x, 124, 173, 198n2, 207, 222, 223, 225 Burton, L., 188 Busby, N., 171 Bush, George (junior), 102 Bush, George (senior), 15, 102, 133 Butler, D.E., v, 4, 5, 14, 29, 34n4, 60–62, 69, 260 Byrne, C., 109 C Cabinet, 4, 13, 25, 29, 99, 111n12, 246 Cairney, P., 119, 131, 142, 168 Cameron, D., 49, 101, 111n12 Campaigns, 7, 29, 49, 66, 67, 69, 79, 108, 111n7, 196, 209, 243, 266 Campbell, Angus, 6, 69, 75, 90n2, 166, 260 Campbell, M., 171 Carey, J.M., 110n2 Carter, J., 102 Central and Eastern Europe, x, 27, 132, 186, 206

Centre for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP), 10, 11, 13, 269, 271 Chabal, P., 191 Chaisty, P., 98 Children Act 1975, 177 Children Act 1989, 177 Children and Families Act 2014, 177 Chistyakova, Y., 177 Churchill, Winston, 13, 23, 100 Ciampi, C.A., 102 Citizen satisfaction, 130, 143, 146, 225 Civil rights movement, 24, 238, 248 Clancy, L., 230 Class, vii, 5, 6, 8–11, 24, 29, 30, 42, 46, 59–64, 66–70, 100, 204, 228, 256, 257, 260 Coleman, J.S., 6, 260 Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act (2002), 171 Communist regimes, 4, 225 Comparative politics, v, viii, 22, 31, 32, 34, 98, 110n2 Comparative social science, 261 Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), vii, 80, 90n3 Connolly, J., 169 Conservative Party, 4, 42, 59, 72n6, 103, 111n7, 260 Constitution, 22, 25–28, 39, 40, 46, 50, 222, 223, 231, 267 Converse, P.E., 75 Corporatism, 63 Corruption, ix, 124, 184, 185, 187–197, 197n1, 197–198n2, 198n3, 198n4, 223, 227, 258, 259 COVID, ix, 67, 105, 125, 131, 132, 142, 153, 206, 209, 226, 269 Criminal Finances Act 2017, 174, 177 Criminal Justice Act 2003, 175 Cullinane, M.P., 110n2 Czech Republic, 222, 223, 225, 227

 INDEX 

D Daalder, H., 10, 265 Dahl, R.A., 204, 222, 230–232 Dahlström, C., 98 Daloz, J., 191 Danby, G., 170 De Gaulle, C., 104 De Sousa, L., 194 De Tocqueville, A., 164 De Vries, J., 107 Delegated legislation, see Secondary legislation Democracy, v, vii, x, 14, 25–27, 60, 63, 102, 105, 106, 111n6, 111n7, 120–123, 125, 126, 129–133, 149, 186, 204, 206–209, 213, 214, 221–234, 244, 258, 261, 264 Democratic backsliding, 206–208, 211, 214 Democratization, x, 118, 127, 206, 222–225, 228, 230–233 Dempster, M.A.H., 165 Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 168 Department for Education, 170 Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 166 Desai, D., 192 Devolution, 6, 34, 43, 44, 46–50, 118, 132, 238, 239, 251n11 Dicey, A.V., 44 Dingler, S.C., 111n7 Dini, L., 102 Divorce (Religious Marriages) Act 2002, 169 Dowding, K., 104 Draghi, M., 102 Du Toit, A., 192 Dyson, K., 232

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E Economic and Social Research Council, 11 Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, 174 Edwards, G., 107 Elections Act 2022, 177 Electoral behaviour, vii, 34, 43 Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002, 179n1 Elgie, R., 98, 105, 110n2, 110n4 Elites, v, x, 8, 30, 44, 103, 109, 118, 130, 153, 166, 184, 187, 189, 191, 198n4, 207, 212–214, 222, 223, 227, 231, 234, 264 England, vii, 3, 5, 6, 8–11, 21–34, 39–42, 50, 52, 173, 179n1, 231, 241, 257, 260, 266, 271 Equality Act 2010, 177 Ethnic minority population, 68 European Communities (Amendment) Act 2002, 169 European Consortium for Political Research, 10, 270 European Convention of Human Rights, 50 European Economic Community, 122, 264 European Union, viii, 14, 34, 50, 66, 104, 118, 126, 205, 224, 250, 263, 264, 268 European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, 170 European University Institute, 9, 16, 269 F Fabbrini, S., 110n2 Farr, M., 110n2

278 

INDEX

Federation, 41, 43 Feedback, negative, vii, 78, 84, 166–168, 171, 172, 176 Feedback, positive, 166, 171, 177 Field, B.N., 101, 262 Finer, Samuel, 39, 40, 123 Flandrin, A., 111n8 Flinders, M., 10 Fong, C., 107, 108 Forster, E.M., 1 Föste, W., 232 France, 3, 23, 45, 90n4, 104, 111n8, 118, 127, 164, 208, 256 Franklin, M., vii, 9, 76, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85, 89, 90n3, 91n9 Fringe tuning of policy, 164, 174 Frye, T.J., 229 Functionality of corruption, 184, 189–194, 197, 197n1, 198n3

Heffernan, R., 99, 110n2, 111n12 Hellman, J., 229 Helms, L., viii, 98, 99, 104, 106, 110n2, 111n7 Herbst, J., 191 Heywood, P.M., 188 Hickey, S., 192 Hinden, Rita, 60–61, 71n3 Homelessness Act 2002, 173 Home Office, 5, 170, 173 Homogeneity thesis, vii, 39–43 Hood, C.C., 167 House of Commons, 4, 13, 16, 25, 43, 260 House of Lords (UK), 170, 264 Howard, M.M., 225 Huntington, S.P., 189, 191, 198n2, 222, 233 Hupe, P., 172

G Garnett, M., 29, 106 Gauri, V., 192 Gebel, A., 194 Germany, viii, 3, 23, 72n5, 90n4, 104, 106, 118, 120, 127, 231, 232, 271 Ghura, D., 191 Good Friday Agreement, 46, 48, 50 Governmental reform, 124, 150, 152, 155, 231 Grey economy, 228

I Identity politics, 7, 70, 210, 212 Ie, K.W., 105 Imprisonment for public protection (IPP) scheme, 175 Inácio, M., 98 Incrementalism, 33 Institutions, vi–x, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 22–29, 34, 42–44, 46, 47, 50, 103, 130, 132, 145, 147, 152, 163, 164, 187, 188, 207, 211, 215, 216, 222, 224, 226, 227, 229, 231–233, 238, 239, 241, 245–247, 262, 264 International Development Act 2002, 171 Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, 9 Iraq, 15 Ireland, vi, x, 3, 7, 14, 42, 44, 45, 49, 52, 53n3, 65, 90n4, 100, 238, 240, 241, 244–246 Italy, 3, 100, 102, 118

H Hacker, J., 234n2 Haerpfer, C., 186, 229 Hall, P.A., 168 Hargrove, E.C., 110n2 Hartlepool, 59 Harvard University, 3 Heath, Edward, 46 Heclo, H., 31, 33, 176

 INDEX 

J Jalalzai, F., 103 Jancsics, D., 192 Japan, v, ix, 111n9, 124, 261, 270 Johansson, K.M., 104 Johns Hopkins University, 2, 238, 256 Johnson, B., 66, 101, 106 Jones, Charles O., 31 Jones, T., 170 Journal of Public Policy, 11 Justesen, M., 188 Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002, 175, 179n1 K Karran, T., 164 Kennedy, J.F., 81, 100, 105, 111n11, 266 Khan, M., 191 Kilbrandon Commission on the Constitution, 24 Kingdon, J.W., 177 Kirton, D., 172 Kolev, S., 232 Kolltveit, K., 98 Krcmaric, D., 99 Kurz, S., 100, 110n5 L Labour Party, 4, 24, 42, 45, 46, 59, 60, 64, 68, 69, 71n3, 266 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, 8 Laing, M., 109 LaPalombara, Joseph, 32 Lasswell, H., 8, 14, 35n7 Laws, see Legislation Leadership, viii, 27, 78, 98, 99, 104, 105, 108–110, 111n6, 149, 177, 228 Ledeneva, A., 198n4

279

Leff, N., 189, 198n2 Left-right location, 78, 87, 91n10 Legislation, ix, 11, 12, 25, 46, 47, 50, 51, 118, 119, 123, 124, 126, 128–130, 145, 147, 155, 163–165, 167–179, 179n1, 196, 205, 217n4, 238, 242, 257, 258, 262, 265 Legislative-executive relations, 98 Legitimacy, v, vi, x, 7, 26, 27, 44, 48, 196, 203–207, 209–211, 213–216, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244–246, 248, 251n5, 267 Leys, C., 189, 198n2 Lieberman, R., 102 Lincoln University of Missouri, 4 Lipset, S.M., 8, 11, 223, 243, 261, 265, 270 Lister, S., 170 Liu, A.H, 108 Llanos, M., 98 Local Authorities’ Plans and Strategies (Disapplication) (England) Order 2005, 173 London School of Economics (LSE), 3, 5, 257, 261, 271 Loveless, M., 101 Lovenduski, J., 103 Lowi, T.J., 123, 166 Lutz, Georg, 76–78, 80, 89, 90n3 M Mace and maze, 28, 43–47, 49–52 Mackenzie, W.J.M., 5–8, 22 Mackie, T., 11 Macron, E., 111n8 Madgwick, Peter, 41, 247 Malukisa, A., 195 Manchester University, 2, 5, 6 Mans, T.C., 110n6 Marin, S., 100

280 

INDEX

Marquette, H., 189–193 Marsh, R., 169 Martin, S., 101 May, T., 103 Mayhew, D.R., 177, 249 Mbate, M., 188 McAuslan, P., 171 McCaffrie, B., 109 McConnell, A., 110 McKenzie, R.T., 63, 257 McLoughlin, C., 188 Media, 27, 104, 105, 125, 204, 207, 222, 271 Mediatization, 98, 105 Merkel, A., 102, 106, 107 Merton, R.K., 191, 262 Migranyan, A., 223 Milbank, D., 103 Miller, W.E., 9, 75 Minnete, L., 188 Mishler, W., 186, 224, 226, 229 Monti, M., 102 Moore, B., 223 Morini, M., 101 Mossawir, H., 8 Müller, J-W., 234n2 Müller-Rommel, F., 101 Munro, N., 224, 270 Musella, F., 104, 107 N National Health Service (NHS), 123, 174, 175, 238 National Health Service Reform and Health Care Professions Act 2002, 169 National Heritage Act 2002, 168 Nationalism, 34, 42, 48, 49 Nationality and Borders Act 2022, 174 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (Commencement No. 15) Order 2023, 173, 174

National Police Plan, 170 Naurin, E., 106 Navot, D., 191, 194 Nehru, J., 104 Nelson, S.C., 248 Neustadt, Richard, 6 New Democracy Barometer, 13 New Plan for Immigration, 173 Nice Treaty, 169, 170 Norris, P., 76, 103 Northern Ireland, vii, x, xi, 7, 12, 15, 24, 26, 27, 34, 39–41, 44–52, 122, 123, 130, 171, 177, 179n1, 237–250, 251n12, 262, 267, 268 Nossiter, Tom, 23 Nuffield College, 4, 259 O Obadare, E., 190 Obama, B., 102, 103 O’Donnell, G., 223 Office of Communications Act 2002, 170 Ogden, C.K., 258 Oligarchy, 230 Olson, M., 10 O’Malley, E., 108 Ordinary people, ix, 8, 13, 183–197, 205, 211, 216 Osrecki, F., 188, 191, 194 Overloaded government, x, 12, 118, 121, 122, 205, 208, 211, 216 Oxbridge, 109 Oxford University, 3–6, 8, 23, 245, 259, 260, 267, 268 P Page, E.C., vi, ix, 142, 145, 146, 148, 151, 153, 154, 173, 264 Parties, vi–viii, 5, 8, 11, 12, 16, 22, 23, 25, 28–31, 33, 41, 42, 45–48, 52,

 INDEX 

59–70, 71n3, 71n4, 72n5, 75–89, 101–103, 105, 107, 108, 111n7, 111n12, 119, 131, 153, 154, 164, 178, 193, 206, 207, 212, 214, 216, 226–228, 238–240, 245–248, 259, 262, 266, 271 Partisanship, 30, 75–77, 79 Partitocrazia, 102 Party agents, 101 Party choice, vii, 22, 30, 75–77, 82–86, 88, 89, 90n2 Party competition, vii, 23, 60, 80, 243 Party impact, 76, 164 Party principals, 4, 101 Party support, vii, 75–89, 90n2 Passarelli, G., 105 Peck, M., 170 Peiffer, C., ix, 15, 184, 187–195, 259 Personalization, 66, 98, 104–106, 111n9 Persson, A., 189, 197 Peters, B.G., vi, x, 12, 27, 98, 99, 122, 123, 164 Pierson, P., 166, 234n2 Piven, F., 188 Pluralism, 229, 232 Poguntke, T., 105, 106 Police Reform Act 2002, 174 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, 170 Police Standards Unit, 169, 170 Policing and Crime Act 2017, 174 Policy, ix, 4, 22, 47, 63, 76, 106, 119, 141, 151, 153–155, 164, 183, 185, 203, 231, 238, 265 change, 88, 148, 150, 154, 167, 168, 179 inheritance, 119, 123, 164, 165 novelties, 169–172 puzzling, 176 Political culture, 6, 8, 23, 28, 35n5, 132, 221, 226, 228

281

Political development, 223 Political machines, 191 Political Studies Association, 10, 247 Populists, x, 105, 108, 131, 153, 206–208, 211–215 Post-Communist countries, 221, 224, 229, 263 Powell, Enoch, 27 Power, T., 98, 222 Presidentialization of politics, 105, 106 Presidents Brazil, 103 demographic characteristics, 103 experience, 100–102, 110n6 France, 104, 111n8 gender, 102–103 lame duck, 105–107 legacies, 107–109 United States, viii, 98, 99, 102, 105, 125, 164 Presley, Elvis, 23 Pressman, J.L., 172 Primary Care Trusts, 170 Prime ministers Austria, 100, 104, 106 Canada, 103 Chile, 100 demographic characteristics, 103 experience, 100–102 Finland, 100, 103 gender, 102–103 Germany, 104, 106 India, 104 and international politics, viii, 110n2 Ireland, 100 Italy, 100, 102 lame duck, 105–107 legacies, 108, 109 Moldova, 103 Netherlands, 104, 105

282 

INDEX

Prime ministers (cont.) New Zealand, 100, 103 Poland, 103 Takeover prime ministers, 108 United Kingdom, 100, 101, 103, 106, 111n12 Proceeds of Crime Act 1995, 178 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, 168, 173–175, 177, 178 Programme approach, viii, 118, 119, 167 Przeworski, A., 63, 206 Public policy, v, vi, viii, ix, 10–12, 14, 22, 28, 31–34, 118, 124, 130, 141, 178, 183–186, 188, 189, 197, 207, 211, 216, 262, 264, 271 Putin, Vladimir, x, 223, 225 Putnam, R., 10, 228 Pye, Lucien, 22 R Race relations, 241, 266 Ratas, J., 100 Reagan, R., 13, 208 Rechtsstaat, 222, 258 Redcliffe-Maud report, 24 Referendums, 46–51, 132, 264 Renzi, M., 100 Representation, v, viii, 41, 66, 68, 69, 222, 242, 246, 247 Rhodes, R.A.W., 104 Richards, I.A., 258 Riesman, D., 268 Rockman, B.A., 98 Rokkan, Stein, 8–11, 42, 44, 243, 262, 263, 265, 270 Rose, Richard, v, 1–16, 22, 40, 60, 75, 97, 117, 122–125, 141–156, 163, 183, 204, 221–232, 238, 256

career, v–vii, 2, 6, 14, 117, 256 life, 2, 8, 27, 130 media work, 27 prizes, 3, 10, 258 style of writing, 1–3, 11, 13, 14, 32, 44 Rosenfeld, B., 228 Rousseff, D., 103 Rozenberg, J., 175 Rubin, E.L., 176 Russia, v, x, 14, 222–224, 227, 228, 231, 233, 258, 263, 265, 270, 271 Rutte, M., 105 S Sartori, G., 10, 265, 270 Schlager, E., 164 Schmitter, P.C., 223 Scholz, Olaf, 103 Scotland, vii, 9–16, 26, 39–42, 44–52, 53n2, 247, 269, 270 Scott, J., 191 Scottish National Party (SNP), 49 Secondary legislation, 172, 173 Sefton, T., 188 Serious Crime Act 2007, 170 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, 177 Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002, 177 Shaw, R., 98 Shin, D.C., 222, 228 Shiratori, Rei, 12, 124, 261 Simon, Herbert, 10, 146 Sinpeng, A., 194 Skowronek, S., 109 Social capital, 187, 226 Social democracy, vii, 60 Socialisation, 6, 23, 26, 29–31, 88, 92n12, 226, 233

 INDEX 

Social security reform, 170 Social welfare, 131, 225 Soroka, S., 81 South Korea, 152 Soviet Union, 4, 117 St. Antony’s College, 4 St. Louis, 2, 3, 251n4, 256, 265, 266 Statutes, see Legislation Steele, S., 170 Stimson, J.A., 177 Stokes, D., 29, 34n4, 62, 69, 75, 255 Stotsky, J., 191 Street level bureaucrats, 172 Structural-functional approaches, 22, 26, 31 Subgovernment, 178 Suleiman, E., 97 Sunak, R., 100, 101 Supreme Court (of the United Kingdom), 51, 52, 265 Surveys, vii, x, 5, 7–11, 13–16, 22–24, 28, 29, 34n4, 50, 60–62, 78, 80, 84, 90n3, 119, 124, 131, 185, 224–226, 228, 230, 232, 233, 237, 240, 244, 247, 250, 250n2, 251n9, 256, 257, 260, 262, 263, 267, 270 Sykes, P., 103 Szabó-Morvai, Á., 226 T Tallberg, J., 104 Taxation, 31, 121, 123, 126, 164, 204, 208, 209, 262 Territorial politics, 41–43 Thatcher, Margaret, 102, 103, 147, 165, 208, 266 Theakston, K., 107 Tillich, P., 262 Tilly, C., 223

283

The Tobacco Advertising and Promotion (Point of Sale) Regulations 2004, 173 Transparency International, 15, 124, 259 Troubles, x, 41, 45, 205, 238–242, 248, 249 Trudeau, J., 103 Trump, D., 101, 102, 105, 106, 111n10, 207, 212, 217n4 Truss, L., 103, 106, 133, 217n2, 217n4 Trust, 186, 192, 197, 204, 226, 233 Turnout, vii, 66, 75–89 Twitter, 105 U Ukraine, 14, 67, 125, 225, 227, 228, 234n1, 264, 265 Unexplained wealth orders, 174 Ungovernability, x, 27, 205, 208, 211, 214, 216 Unionism, 43, 45, 47, 48 Union state, 44 Unitary state, 41, 43, 50 United Kingdom (UK), v–viii, x, 6, 7, 12–14, 24–26, 28, 31–34, 39–52, 65, 100, 101, 103, 106, 111n12, 118, 120–124, 126–128, 133, 147, 150, 152, 154, 163, 169–171, 177, 178, 179n1, 213, 217n2, 217n4, 238–244, 247, 248, 262, 264, 266, 271 United States (US), v, viii, 4–6, 9, 10, 14, 34, 90n4, 98, 99, 102, 105, 118, 120, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131–133, 147, 150, 153, 154, 164, 204, 205, 212, 216, 217n3, 232, 234, 241, 260, 263, 270, 271

284 

INDEX

University of Michigan, 5, 8, 9 University of Strathclyde, 9, 16, 76, 269 V Van Dorp, E.J., 104 Van Mechelen, D., 123, 163, 164 Varadkar, L., 100 Veblen, T., 268 Venard, B., 198n3 Verba, Sydney, 8, 26, 221 Vercesi, 109 Voting studies, 5, 30, 75, 89 W Wales, vii, 26, 39, 40, 42, 44–47, 49, 50, 247 Walton, G., 192, 195 Weak states, 190 Weaver, R.K., 166 Webb, P., 105, 106 Weber, Max, 10, 261, 268

Welfare state, 40, 45, 63, 118, 120, 122, 128, 207 Westminster, 5, 7, 25, 27, 43, 46–52, 102, 106, 111n7, 238, 242, 245, 246, 249 Wildavsky, A., 10, 32, 164, 165, 172, 265 Williams, R., 63, 191 Wilson, Harold, 5, 100 Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 16, 269, 270 Wittgenstein, L., 259 WoldeMariam, A., 191 Woolcock, M., 192 World Bank, 15, 124, 262 Worthy, B., 108 Y Yale University, 9 Z Zeitzoff, T., 105 Zilliacus, K., 4