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Hierarchical accountability often proves insufficient to control street-level implementation, where complex, informal accountability relations prevail and tasks must be prioritized. However, scholars lack a theoretical model of how accountability relations affect implementation behaviors that are inconsistent with policy. By extending the Accountability Regimes Framework (ARF), this paper explains how multiple competing subjective street-level accountabilities translate into policy divergence. The anti-terrorism “Prevent Duty” policy in the United Kingdom requires university lecturers to report any student they suspect may be undergoing a process of radicalization. We ask: what perceived street-level accountabilities and dilemmas does this politically contested policy imply for lecturers, and how do they affect divergence? An online survey of British lecturers (N = 809), combined with 35 qualitative follow-up interviews, reveals that accountability dilemmas trigger policy divergence. The ARF models how street-level bureaucrats become informal policymakers in the political system when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen-agents, or “political animals.”

There is an oft-stated claim in political science research that public sector reforms in Western democracies are consistent with a shift from government to governance. This article challenges that claim. Based on a comparative analysis of governance reforms in Swiss metropolitan areas, the article reveals that what seems to be a shift to governance may turn out to be a path to government, however, including a change either from the local to the metropolitan level or from general-purpose authorities to task-specific jurisdictions. Further, the article analyzes the political dynamics behind governance reforms. It shows that exogenous pressures put existing governance schemes under strain. Its impact, however, is mediated by the initial institutional setting and the narratives responding to case-specific political dilemmas.

This is the peer reviewed version which has been published in final form at [https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12537]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions., The core assumption of the bureaucratic politics model and a large part of public administration scholarship is that bureaucrats influence politicians and political decisions via their crucial role in preparing, coordinating and formulating policy. While this influence has been analysed in a vertical direction, that is, how much do bureaucrats influence politicians, the horizontal perspective has been mostly neglected: which bureaucrats are most powerful and influential during the process of bureaucratic coordination and decision-making? Deducing hypotheses from bargaining theory and testing them with a novel network dataset on German Intergovernmental Relations (IGR), this contribution finds that bureaucrats indeed possess varying degrees of power. Jurisdictional and organizational power resources, such as voting, financial and institutional power, and also party politics, can best explain these variances in bureaucratic power. Personal characteristics, such as experience and education, however, are not used as power resources.

In the last decades, municipal mergers have been one major element of local government reforms in Switzerland and beyond. In this article, we describe and analyze the political effects of this development. We use a quasi-experimental setting to test the impact of municipal mergers on electoral participation. We find that in merged municipalities, the decrease in turnout is significantly stronger than in non-merged municipalities. Further, the effect is more pronounced in relatively small localities. There is a temporal dimension to this effect – that is, turnout drops mainly in the first election after the first merger, but not so much after the second or third merger. Hence, the study provides a skeptical yet differentiated perspective on the democratic consequences of municipal mergers and points to further research avenues to develop a more comprehensive understanding of local government consolidation.

The current study aimed to investigate value projection between Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and Swiss as a function of their group's stance toward the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. Drawing on image theory, we assumed that images – operationalized by value projection – would be a function not just of features of the target group, but of the rater group's relationship with the target group. Value projection can be seen as an indicator of (de)humanization as values represent goals and desirable behaviors of a person. We therefore expected higher projection to ally than to enemy groups, whereas we expected no difference in projection to out‐groups with neutral relations. Results show that allies did indeed project Security and Power to a higher degree to each other than to enemies, and enemies showed no, or even negative, projection onto each other. The ally of the enemy (Americans) was projected less negatively by Palestinians than vice versa, pointing to the higher complexity of third‐party images as opposed to the more classical ally and enemy images. As expected, Swiss students showed almost no difference in projection to the different out‐groups. These results confirm that the relationship between groups (e.g., alliance, enmity) rather than a consensual view of particular nations determines images.

We combine community-level outcomes of 27 votes about immigration issues in Switzerland with census data to estimate the effect of immigration on natives' attitudes towards immigrants. We apply an instrumental variable approach to take potentially endogenous locational choices into account, and we categorize immigrants into two groups according to the cultural values and beliefs of their country of origin to understand how the cultural distance between natives and immigrants affects this relationship. We find that the share of culturally different immigrants is a significant and sizable determinant of anti-immigration votes, while the presence of culturally similar immigrants does not affect natives' voting behavior at all in most specifications. We argue that the differential impact of the two groups of immigrants is, at least in part, driven by natives' concerns about compositional amenities. We finally find that the share of right-wing votes in favor of the Swiss People's Party appears to be more elastic with respect to the share of culturally different immigrants than natives' attitudes themselves, suggesting that the party has gained a disproportionate vote share from attitudinal changes caused by immigrant inflows.

Literature claims that scientific evidence makes better democracies. This paper analyses whether and which voters choose empirical evidence in the form of policy evaluation results when informing themselves about issue-specific votes. The analysis is based on a split-ballot survey where participants chose media items with different content to make a decision on a specific issue. Results show that voters do indeed choose evidence-based information, especially if their involvement with the issue is high and if they are well educated and that they choose a higher amount of such information if they are also politically engaged. In a setting that fosters political engagement and provides policy-relevant information, the findings imply that voters want to be informed when making a democratic issue choice. Involved and engaged voters might be a solution to sceptics against direct democracy out of fear of uninformed decisions and post-factual populism.