Open Access

Welfare is the largest expenditure category in all advanced democracies. Consequently, much literature has studied partisan effects on total and policy-specific welfare expenditure. Yet, these results cannot be trusted: The methodological standard is to apply time-series cross-section-regressions to annual observation data. But governments hardly change annually. Thus, the number of observations is artificially inflated, leading to incorrect estimates. While this problem has recently been acknowledged, it has not been convincingly resolved. We propose Mixed-Effects Models as a solution, which allow decomposing variance into different levels and permit complex cross-classification data structures. We argue that Mixed-Effects models combine the strengths of existing methodological approaches while alleviating their weaknesses. Empirically, we study partisan effects on total and on disaggregated expenditure in 23 OECD-countries, 1960-2012, using several measures of party preferences.

Visuals can be effective tools for educating an audience about peacebuilding and the need to engage with a nation's violent past. However, research on visuality has pointed to the ambivalence visuals can develop through audiencing and the dominant political discourse. Building on this, this article argues that ambivalence can also occur between narratives by different media although the same institution produced them, and that such inherent contradictions can limit the institution's effectiveness. The analysis centers upon a case study of the East Timorese Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) that compares the commission's documentary dalan ba dame (“road to peace”) with its final report about peace and the human rights violations committed in the territory between 1975 and 1999. While the commission's final report stresses the individual responsibility of members of the Indonesian military and formulates the need for an institution-based liberal peace, the documentary communicates the message that all parties to the conflict are guilty of committing crimes and that peace has already been created, mitigating the need to further engage with the violent past. The analysis identifies the media's different formats and their different agendas as reasons for the creation of these contradicting messages. Based on an assessment of the dissemination of both media and their reception within the political discourse in Timor-Leste, the implications of these conflicting narratives for educating an international audience are discussed. Since the final report is difficult to access due to its length and its legal language, the documentary remains the more accessible medium to educate an international audience about the nation's violent past. However, due to the narrative it conveys, the documentary's ability to mobilize an international audience is limited. Thus, the article argues for considering three aspects when designing visuals for peace education: the intermediality of visuals with other media and its potential effects concerning the communication of a specific message, the reception of the message by the target audience, and the reception of the message by broader audiences when the visual is distributed online.

Parties should develop a consistent issue profile during an electoral campaign. Yet, manifestos, which form the baseline for a party’s programmatic goals in the upcoming legislative period, are usually published months before Election Day. We argue that parties must emphasize policy issues that are of key relevance to their likely voters in the last weeks of the election campaign, in which an increasing share of citizens make up their minds in terms of which party they will choose. To test this notion empirically, we draw on a novel data set that covers information on party representatives’ statements made during the final weeks of an election campaign in nine European countries. Focusing on the campaign messages of social democratic and socialist parties, we find that these parties indeed intensify their emphasis of unemployment policy, which is a salient issue for their core voter clienteles, particularly in times of economic hardship.