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How does news about the economy influence voting decisions? We isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking advantage of left‐digit bias. We show that unemployment figures crossing a round‐number "milestone" cause a discontinuous increase in the amount of media coverage devoted to unemployment conditions, and we use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of attention to unemployment news on voting, holding constant the actual economic conditions on the ground. Milestone effects on incumbent U.S. governor vote shares are large and notably asymmetric: Bad milestone events hurt roughly twice as much as good milestone events help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article contributes to recent research that seeks to understand the political consequences of ‘outsider’ labour market status. There is an emerging consensus that labour market outsiders have systematically different policy preferences and display systematically different political behaviour to securely employed ‘insiders’ in Europe. Yet the political consequences of outsider status in the USA are less clear. They may be expected to differ from those that have been documented in the European context, because: (1) the USA is characterized by low employment protection of insiders; and (2) there is evidence that Americans are more reluctant than Europeans to hold governments responsible for personal economic hardship. We therefore use the General Social Survey to examine how outsider labour market status is related to voting behaviour and to social policy preferences in the USA. We find that the concept of ‘labour market outsider’ – as conventionally operationalized – holds little explanatory power in the American context. Disaggregating the outsider category, our results suggest that the political consequences of outsider labour market status may be contingent on individual beliefs about government responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often argued that unemployment depresses political involvement because unemployment deprives workers of important workplace-related resources. We challenge this argument from two sides. Theoretically, we argue that the resource approach neglects life cycle stages. Socialization theory suggests that workplace-related resources influence political involvement mostly during adolescence and early adulthood but not later in life. Ignoring life cycle stages therefore risks underestimating unemployment effects on young workers and overestimating them for older workers. Our second criticism is methodological. Existing literature on unemployment and political involvement largely uses cross-sectional data, which makes it impossible to eliminate unobserved heterogeneity. Using German panel data, we show that unemployment depresses the growth of political interest in early adulthood, while it does not have an effect later in life. Moreover, we find that early unemployment experiences have scarring effects that reduce the long-term level of political interest and participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1980, over one-quarter of social pact proposals have failed to result in social pact agreements. In order to explain this high failure rate, the social pact formation process is broken down into two stages. In the first stage, governments decide whether to propose a pact. In the second stage, governments and labour unions decide whether to complete a pact agreement. Using data on social pacts in Western Europe, the article finds that pact proposals are likelier in the presence of moderately centralised unions, high unemployment, and large budget deficits; but that pact agreements are likelier when employers’ associations are centralised, and labour unions have a high degree of organisational centralisation, low membership fractionalisation, and represent a small share of workers. It is submitted that the inability of moderately centralised unions to complete a social pact agreement may be a primary cause of the high failure rate of social pact proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A classical question in political sociology is whether unemployment depresses political involvement. However, we still know very little about how individual and contextual factors influence the involvement of unemployed citizens. We therefore provide a framework to study variation across countries as well as among the unemployed. Borrowing mechanisms from psychological unemployment research, we develop a set of hypotheses about individual and contextual moderators that mitigate or exacerbate the negative effect of unemployment on political involvement. Our empirical analyses are based on the European Social Survey and use internal political efficacy as a dependent variable. Multi-level models with interaction effects show that the negative effect of unemployment on political efficacy is stronger in countries with low welfare state generosity, low levels of economic development, high unemployment rates, and large income inequality. On the individual level, the negative effect is stronger for men, middle-to-high-income earners, and political independents. The effect of age is hump-shaped (stronger negative effect for the young and older citizens). An important implication of our results is that public policies can foster the political integration of vulnerable citizens and therefore make a contribution to the functioning of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines to what extent a social norm to work moderates the relationship between employment status and subjective well-being. It was expected that the detrimental impact of non-employment on subjective well-being would be larger in countries with a stronger social norm. Using a direct measure of the social norm to work and employing data from 45 European countries, this study assessed subjective well-being levels of five employment status groups for men and women separately. Results showed that subjective well-being of unemployed men and women is unaffected by the social norm to work. However, non-working disabled men are worse off in countries with a stronger norm. Living in such a country also decreases the well-being gap between employed and retired men, whereas retired women are worse off in these countries. This effect for retirees disappears when a country’s GDP is taken into account, suggesting that norms matter less than affluence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate a time series model of voter turnout for 34 US presidential elections, 1880–2012. Employing a variety of econometric techniques, our major results are as follows. (1) A negative and significant structural shift in voter turnout occurs in 1972 and is too large to be explained by the lowering of the voting age. (2) The 1972 shift is the only statistically significant structural shift to occur since the first decade of the twentieth century. (3) Short-term macroeconomic conditions significantly impact turnout, with unemployment having a positive effect. (4) Turnout in recent presidential elections has not deviated significantly from the post-1972 norm. (5) Turnout is positively related to the expected closeness of the election outcome, but contrary to some theoretical predictions, closeness exhibits no trend over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The diversity of European responses to unemployment has increased since 2008. On the basis of an analysis of French labour market and employment policies since 2008, with a particular focus on the policy output under the Hollande presidency since 2012, this article argues that France has maintained a distinctive mix of labour market policies. Although in some respects France's pattern of labour market segmentation aligns it with what has been defined as a classic Mediterranean model, the Eurozone crisis has led to greater divergence between France and other countries in the Mediterranean cluster. Rather, France is one of several outliers in the continental economies that are undergoing distinctive dualizing processes of transition. Thus although the distinction between liberal market and coordinated market economies remains valid, there is evidence of converging pressures and trends (such as, at a very general level, deregulation and a search for bargained 'flexicurity') while at the same time multiple patterns of domestic change are at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to study and to compare the influence of local unemployment on the vote in French elections for the European Parliament, in French legislative elections and in French presidential elections. The results of our paper showed that if we study the vote in the second round of French presidential elections over the 1988-2007 period (without 2002), the influence of the annual change in the local unemployment on the vote for the Left is much greater than for the vote for the Left in the first round of legislative elections (1986-2007), and French elections for the European Parliament (1984-2009). For French presidential elections, we build two variables taking into account the responsibility of the incumbent President for the economic situation after a cohabitation period. We make estimates for the second-round vote of French presidential elections (without the 2002 French presidential election or with an estimated vote for this election). We show that over the 1988-2007 and 1988-2012 periods (without 2002), it is not necessary to take into account the influence of cohabitation periods on the responsibility of the government in relation to the economic situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the authors' chapter "Insider-Outsider Politics" in the book "The Age of Dualization," evaluating the electoral fate of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti) from 1994 to 2010. Topics include the influence of insiders and outsiders on center-left political parties, the impact of unemployment and the labor market on Swedish politics, and the relation of economic issues to political campaigns in Sweden.

The article explores the common notion that advances in technology cause people to lose their jobs and breed greater inequality in modern societies. It discusses the arguments made by both liberal and conservative economists which established that the problem is not caused by computers and technology but by politics.

Unemployment emerged as a specific social issue in the late-19th century, but the nature of the threat it posed and the governing instruments available to address it varied widely. Using Britain and France as strongly contrasting cases, this article demonstrates the variable and historically contingent constructions of unemployment as a problem, and demonstrates how policy to address it was developed using administrative agencies that embodied specific, normative visions of how society and employment should operate. The different governing trajectories through which the issue was tackled is analyzed in terms of the context within which the problem of unemployment originally emerged. The article demonstrates the socio-political nature of unemployment's construction and, with reference to recent labour market change, questions its utility as a means of assessing economic or social well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of economic voting developed in the United States and Europe take security for granted. However, many countries in other regions of the world suffer from daily political violence. The Colombian experience suggests that additional sources of performance failure beyond traditional economic measures should be examined to understand support for incumbents. Colombia has suffered from political violence for decades. This paper examines whether or not political violence is a factor that should be taken into consideration when explaining support for incumbent parties. Given the peculiarities of its party system, accountability is not easy to assess in Colombia, so factors that may undermine the clarity of accountability are also examined. In addition to political violence, traditional economic voting variables such as unemployment, inflation, and gross domestic product (GDP) growth are included. Colombia has experienced varying intensities of political violence and differing economic conditions since the reforms that culminated in the 1991 constitution. We examine first round presidential elections in 1998, 2002 and 2006 to see if the theory of economic voting should be supplemented with violence to understand support for incumbent parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A common proposition in welfare state research is that programs financed through dedicated payroll taxes tend to be more durable. This article examines American unemployment insurance (UI) as an exception to this proposition. UI is a self-financed social insurance program whose benefits have been dismantled over time because of an inability to maintain a constant revenue base. The study first examines the long-run decline in UI finances and concludes that changes in UI taxes are associated with the largest declines in state finances. It then examines why more states have not pursued reforms to strengthen UI finances and finds that opponents of more generous UI benefits have generally succeeded in preventing such measures, thus constricting UI finances and gradually retrenching benefits. These findings have implications for those seeking to improve UI solvency, as well as for the study of welfare state retrenchment more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends the traditional focus of active labour market policy evaluation from a static comparison of participation in a programme versus non-participation (or participation in another programme) to the evaluation of the effects of programme sequences, that is, multiple participation or timing of such programmes. Explicitly allowing for dynamic selection into different stages of such programme sequences we analyse multiple programmes, the timing of programmes, and the order of programmes. The analysis is based on comprehensive administrative data on the Austrian labour force. Our findings suggest that (i) active job search programmes are more effective after a qualification programme compared to the reverse order, (ii) multiple participation in qualification measures dominates single participation and (iii) the effectiveness of several labour market programmes deteriorates the later they start during an unemployment spell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In social and historical science literature the rise of mass unemployment in Germany until 1933 is often described as causally related to the success of the NSDAP in German elections. Only rarely, however, is the hypothesis concerning the interrelatedness of these two variables adequately founded empirically. An examination of a database covering all districts and administrative reforms instead reveals a negative relation between NSDAP electoral success and figures of unemployment. The analysis of contrast groups shows the variables including the proportion of workers, the proportion of unemployed and the level of urbanization as having a negative effect on the NSDAP's election chances. Seen from their absolute strength, as well as from growth in voters, the NSDAP had more success in regions where the unemployment rate was lower in relation to the average of the Third Reich and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can we ever practically control the degradation of the environment if the world continues to emphasize economic growth as its answer to social justice? Guarantee employment and grow less rapidly, says the author. He offers an unorthodox idea that deserves a hearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We examine how economic hardship affects civic engagement. Using the Roper Political and Social Trends data, we show that the unemployed were less civically engaged throughout the period covered in the data (1973–1994). The gap in civic engagement between the employed and the unemployed is stable throughout the period. We find little evidence that national economic recession affects the overall level of civic engagement. We do find that higher state unemployment is positively related to political participation for both employed and unemployed residents, especially for political partisans. Finally, we find a strong and negative relationship between state-level income inequality and civic engagement. Our findings suggest that in terms of civic engagement: (1) the state-level economic context matters more than the national context; (2) economic recession may affect political and non-political civic participation differently; (3) economic inequality, rather than economic hardship, appears more negatively to impact civic engagement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Despite limited government control over the pre-1914 economy, opposition politicians were enthusiastic in blaming bad economic news on the incumbent. In a study of 458 by-elections between 1857 and 1914, we find that voters typically gave new governments a ''honeymoon'' but thereafter held them responsible for high unemployment and high prices. Each 1% rise in the price level, on average, brought about a 0.21% swing against the government of the day, while each one-point rise in the percentage unemployed had double this effect. However, when we split the electorate into borough and county constituencies, economic voting appears to be confined to the former. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article builds and estimates several econometric models that explain and forecast the outcomes of the French elections for the European Parliament. These models show the influence of the change in the local unemployment rate to explain the vote for the moderate Left and the moderate Right in the French elections for the European Parliament. These models appear to be accurate in forecasting the elections of the past, and their behavior for the 2009 French election for the European Parliament is satisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president and governor move together. Other things being equal, higher unemployment increases the vote shares of Democratic candidates. The effect is greatest when Republicans are the incumbent party, but Democrats benefit from unemployment even when they are in control. The explanation for these findings is that unemployment is a partisan issue for voters, not a valence issue, and that the Democratic Party “owns” unemployment. When unemployment is high or rising, Democratic candidates can successfully convince voters that they are the party best able to solve the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I examine this nexus between the social and political meaning of unemployment and the political responses that follow. I focus on Depression-era Vancouver and investigate the broad ideologies, representations and practices that contributed to the derision of the unemployed, which in turn, informed the establishment of rural relief camps that aimed to address the unemployment crisis of the 1930s. The social and political meaning of unemployment shaped the contours of the Federal Unemployment Relief Scheme, which housed men in work camps and aimed to both discipline and rehabilitate the unemployed. However, the relief camps were plagued by several contradictions exploited by the Relief Camp Workers Union, which constructed oppositional understandings of unemployment. In discussing the relationship between unemployment and relief I attend to questions of space, highlighting the urbanisation of unemployment and the ideological distinctions between the city and the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo analiza la situación del mercado laboral y las políticas laborales implementadas en Venezuela desde 1999 hasta 2012. Posibles consecuencias de la nueva Ley del Trabajo aprobada en 2012, aumento del número de jubilados y tasas de desempleo son algunos de los temas discutidos. También se nota que los trabajadores con más educación no tienen más oportunidades de trabajar.

The article presents abstracts on sociolinguistic topics which include a content analysis concerning the political and administrative discourse in support of the unemployed in Belgium, rationalizing the management of job seekers, and the use of epistemic expressions in letters.

Copyright of Langage & Societe is the property of Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Langage & Societe is the property of Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Escuela de Historia is the property of Revista Escuela de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses broadcasting and the political relation of unemployment in Great Britain from 1930-1935. It offers an account of contributions by radio broadcast towards the examination of such social problem in the country. It mentions the radio programs "S.O.S." and "Time to Spare" which introduced new methods of presenting social problems. It also notes that both programs drew sharp reactions with the aim of mitigating the consequences of unemployment in the nation.

• We test competing hypotheses on distributive politics (swing, core, opposition) with Argentine data from 2001 to 2003. • Exploiting the political and economic crises, we use the allocation of a poverty relief program, to show the political bias. • Opposition strongholds received a disproportionally larger share, controlling for the number of potential recipients. • The clientelist purpose of spending is demonstrated. First, counties with "better" monitoring obtained more resources. • Second, counties with greater spending experienced greater turnout and greater vote shares for the incumbent. We show that in the month prior to the 2003 Argentine presidential election, the expenditures of an Argentine poverty relief program exhibit a partisan bias. Taking into consideration the number of potential recipients (the unemployed with children 18 years old or less), the counties that were ideologically against the incumbent received a disproportionately large amount of the spending. Hence, instead of targeting swing or core districts, as established in the distributive politics literature, in Argentina the incumbent targeted opposition strongholds. To identify these effects and to classify districts into swing, core and opposition ones, we exploit the 2001 crises in Argentina. In particular, we use the 2001 political discontent that led to 15% of blank and null votes to estimate swing districts. Finally, we also show that this tactical spending had an electoral purpose. In counties where it was arguably cheaper to monitor the recipients' voting behavior, the spending was significantly larger. In return, the clientelist exchange took place in districts with greater spending and monitoring. Thus, the politicians' incentives to design an appropriate poverty relief program may be at odds with their electoral motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]