Search

The digitalisation of public policy requires that the State uses citizens' personal data. Although researchers agree that data privacy is important, we know little about the conditions under which citizens approve of their personal data being used in different policy domains. This study relies on data from original surveys conducted in Switzerland to demonstrate that citizens' willingness to share their data with the State is low and varies across policy domains. Support for sharing is significantly higher when the data are used to prevent benefit fraud in social assistance or to improve health research than when they are used to fight tax evasion or to prevent crime and terrorism. Nevertheless, we also argue that the more citizens trust government and the more important they consider a policy issue to be, the more likely they are to share their data with the State officials in charge of the relevant policy. Previous use of apps also increases citizens' agreement for the policy-related use of their personal data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political representation can be described as a process brought about via an electoral and a perceptual path. Drawing on original survey data on the perceptual accuracy of elected representatives in Belgium, Canada and Switzerland, this study explores whether and how the two paths are connected. It shows, first, that representatives who more accurately perceive voters' opinion are more likely to be re‐elected, suggesting that perceptual accuracy impacts the electoral path to representation. Second, representatives who are electorally safe hold less accurate perceptions of voters' policy preferences, meaning that the electoral path impacts the perceptual path. In all, the study provides evidence for the role of politicians' perceptual accuracy in their electoral career: voters sanction those representatives who are not sufficiently acquainted with their preferences, and representatives who fear to be voted out of office put more effort in getting acquainted with what voters want. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Policy Analysis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)

Politicians regularly bargain with colleagues and other actors. Bargaining dynamics are central to theories of legislative politics and representative democracy, bearing directly on the substance and success of legislation, policy, and on politicians' careers. Yet, controlled evidence on how legislators bargain is scarce. Do they apply different strategies when engaging different actors? If so, what are they, and why? To study these questions, we field an ultimatum game bargaining experiment to 1,100 sitting politicians in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. We find that politicians exhibit a strong partisan bias when bargaining, a pattern that we document across all of our cases. The size of the partisan bias in bargaining is about double the size when politicians engage citizens than when they face colleagues. We discuss implications for existing models of bargaining and outline future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]