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Supplemental Material for Workfare and Attitudes toward the Unemployed: New Evidence on Policy Feedback from 1990 to 2018 by Alexander Horn, Anthony Kevins and Kees van Kersbergen in Comparative Political Studies.

Social acceleration – the progressively faster rate of technological, social and life-pace change – poses a dilemma for democratic problem solving: It increases the amount of new social problems emerging on the political agenda and hence amplifies the demand for rapid and effective policy solutions. Democratic politics is, however, slow. So either the political system speeds up decision making at the cost of democracy, or it holds on to democracy at the cost of problem solving. Obviously, neither option is desirable. How do governments try to solve this dilemma and provide positive-sum solutions that are both effective and democratic? We present two so-called paradigm cases of governments, in Denmark and the Netherlands, that have developed a remarkably quick and effective digitalization response to social acceleration. By focusing on four markers – (1) awareness and timing; (2) motivation; (3) new strategic goals; and (4) goal-directed strategic policy action – we theorize how governments aim to solve the dilemma for democratic problem solving under conditions of social acceleration.

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-ppq-10.1177_1354068820907998 for Political parties and social groups: New perspectives and data on group and policy appeals by Alexander Horn, Anthony Kevins, Carsten Jensen and Kees van Kersbergen in Party Politics

The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data set quantifies how much parties emphasize certain topics and positions and is very popular in the study of political parties. The data set is also increasingly applied in comparative political economy and welfare state studies that use the welfare-specific items rather than the CMP’s left–right scale to test hypotheses on the impact of political parties on social policies, (in)equality and the welfare state. But do these items provide a valid basis for descriptive and causal inferences? What do the items precisely capture? To answer these questions on concept validity, we use the new manifesto corpus data for German parties 2002–2013 and, to provide a further test, for US parties 2004–2012. Corpus data are the digitalized, originally hand-annotated and coded texts of electoral programmes. We assess the validity of the codings directly at the level of quasi-sentences by re-categorizing and subcategorizing the originally coded statements on equality, social justice and welfare state expansion. Although concept validity concerns about the data seem exaggerated, we find that theoretically relevant and meaningful variation is ‘hidden’ behind the original categories. Hence, our approach allows researchers to assess the substantive meaning of the CMP data directly, and we offer an efficient new strategy for testing more specific hypotheses on the impact of political parties on policy.