Hanretty, Chris (2022). “The Effect of Employment on Attendance: A Response to ’Identifying and Understanding the Drivers of Student Engagement’.” Politics. Accepted for publication I challenge Strong’s (2022) findings that student employment is not related to attendance. I argue that the original analysis is guilty of controlling for a post-treatment variable. As a result, the coefficients in the regression model do not show how employment causes changes in attendance. I show that employment likely has a negative effect on attendance even given severe confounding. Academics should, if asked, tell students that their attendance will likely suffer the more paid work they do.
- Hanretty, Chris (2022). “Party System Polarization and the Effective Number of Parties.” Electoral Studies 76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102459. Polarization is a key characteristic of party systems, but scholars disagree about how polarization relates to the number of parties in a system. Different authors find positive, negative, or null relationships. I claim that when polarization is measured using the weighted standard deviation of standardized party positions, seat-level polarization is equal to (NS − 1)(1/√2 + NS − 1), where NS is the effective number of seat-winning parties. This relationship is what one would expect if parties were drawn randomly from a super-population with an effective sample size somewhere between the effective and raw number of parties. I test this claim using multiple datasets which report party positions and seat shares, before extending my analysis to consider vote-level polarization, the range of positions, and polarization in presidential and parliamentary regimes. My work extends the Taageperaan research agenda of building interlocking networks of equations relating key quantities of electoral and party systems.
- Replication data at https://osf.io/5dbgx/
- Hanretty, Chris, Patrick English, and Jon Mellon (2021). “Members of Parliament Are Minimally Accountable for Their Issue Stances (and They Know It).” American Political Science Review 115(4): 1275–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055421000514. For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are “out of step” with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative’s stance on Brexit were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent’s Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.53 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are one and a half times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs’ estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit, which should be maximally amenable to such effects.
- Replication data at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KSTD9J
- Hanretty, Chris (2021). “The Pork Barrel Politics of the Towns Fund.” The Political Quarterly 92(1): 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12970. The article reviews the selection of towns in England under the Town Deals scheme, a funding scheme set up in the summer of 2019. Under the scheme, 101 towns in England were selected from a long-list of 541 towns to bid for funding to improve local infrastructure. The findings show that Conservative-held areas (and in particular marginal Conservative-held areas) were much more likely to be selected for the scheme, and that this association remains—even when controlling for the ranks that civil servants awarded towns on the basis of qualitative and quantitative criteria. The findings call into question ministers’ commitment, under to the Nolan principle, to take decisions “impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias”.
- Replication data at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JG9U2B
- Hanretty, Chris (2021). “Forecasting Multiparty by-Elections Using Dirichlet Regression.” International Journal of Forecasting 37(4): 1666–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2021.03.007. By-elections, or special elections, play an important role in many democracies – but whilst there are multiple forecasting models for national elections, there are no such models for multiparty by-elections. Multiparty by-elections present particular analytic problems related to the compositional character of the data and structural zeros where parties fail to stand. I model party vote shares using Dirichlet regression, a technique suited for compositional data analysis. After identifying predictor variables from a broader set of candidate variables, I estimate a Dirichlet regression model using data from all post-war by-elections in the UK (n=468). The cross-validated error of the model is comparable to the error of costly and infrequent by-election polls (MAE: 4.0 compared to 3.6 for polls). The steps taken in the analysis are in principle applicable to any system that uses by-elections to fill legislative vacancies.
- Replication data at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JUQPDC
- Bentsen, Henrik Litlere, Chris Hanretty, and Jon Kaare Skiple (2020). “The Government Deference Dimension of Judicial Decision Making: Evidence from the Supreme Court of Norway.” Scandinavian Political Studies 43(4): 264–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9477.12176. Past research has revealed conflicting findings regarding the degree to which judges on European apex courts enact their policy preferences or instead disagree on the basis of divergent legal views. We investigate disagreement between judges on the Norwegian Supreme Court between 1996 and 2016. During this period, the court dealt with a greater volume of policy-relevant cases than previously. The method of appointment to the court was also changed to a judicial appointments commission. We analyse non-unanimous cases using item response theory models. We find that judges are not divided along left-right lines, but instead disagree about the appropriate degree to deference to give to public authorities. There is no significant association between the appointing government and judges’ ideal points either before or after the reform to appointments. Judges who were formerly academics are however much less deferential than career judges or judges who were previously lawyers in private practice.
- Replication data at https://https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DEVMTI
- Lauderdale, Ben, Chris Hanretty, and Nick Vivyan (2020). “A Choice-Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate.” American Journal of Political Science 64(3): 519–35. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12470. Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey-experimental, choice-based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (i) direct questions eliciting respondents’ positions on different issues with (ii) a conjoint experiment asking respondents to trade-off departures from their preferred positions on those issues. Applying this method to study the relative importance of 34 issues in the UK, we show that British voters attach significant importance to issues like the death penalty which are not presently the subject of political debate and attach more importance to those issues associated with social liberal-conservative rather than economic left-right divisions.
- Replication data at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0EIQXL
- Hanretty, Chris (2020). “An Introduction to Multilevel Regression and Post-Stratification for Estimating Constituency Opinion.” Political Studies Review 18(4): 630–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919864773.
- Replication data at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IPPPNU
- Lauderdale, Ben, Chris Hanretty, and Nick Vivyan (2018). “Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy and Instability.” Journal of Politics 80(2): 707–12. https://doi.org/10.1086/695673. We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the remaining 3/7. These shares vary substantially across issue types and the average share attributable to ideology doubles when a second ideological dimension is permitted. We also find that (unidimensional) ideology accounts for almost twice as much response variation (and response instability is substantially lower) among respondents with high, rather than low, political knowledge. Our estimation strategy is based on an ordinal probit model with random effects, and is applicable to other data sets that include repeated measurements of ordinal issue position data.
- Replication data at https://dx.doi.org/10.7910/dvn/khbdwu
- Hanretty, Chris (2017). “Areal Interpolation and the UK’s Referendum on EU Membership.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 27(4): 466–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1287081. I show how results from the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union can be remapped from local authority level to parliamentary constituency level through the use of a scaled Poisson regression model which incorporates demographic information from lower level geographies. I use these estimates to show how the geographic distribution of signatures to a petition for a second referendum was strongly associated with how constituencies voted in the actual referendum.
- Replication data at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/S4DLWJ
- Hanretty, Chris, and Steven Vaughan (2017). “Patronising Lawyers? Homophily and Same-Sex Litigation Teams Before the UK Supreme Court.” Public Law 2017(2): 426–49. http://chrishanretty.co.uk/pubs/2017-pl.pdf. In this paper, we investigate patterns of team formation amongst barristers who appeared before the UK Supreme Court between October 2009 and August 2015. We show that there is evidence of considerable gender homophily in the formation of teams of barristers appearing before the UK Supreme Court. Same-sex teams of barristers are over-represented compared to the number we would expect if barristers paired up randomly. We also show that this gender homophily remains when we allow for the possibility that barristers pair up randomly within their chambers, or within their area of law. As such, the formation of teams of barristers in the Supreme Court is governed by practices and preferences which make same-sex legal teams more likely than they would be if team formation simply involved a gender-blind draw from a pool of lawyers. Barristers appearing before the Supreme Court prefer, for whatever reason, to work with other barristers of the same sex. We set out reasons why homophily in team formation is undesirable and discuss the routes through which different remedies might operate.
- Replication data at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NOFKNI
- Hanretty, Chris, and Christel Koop (2018). “Political Independence, Accountability, and the Quality of Regulatory Decision-Making.” Comparative Political Studies 51(1): 38–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0010414017695329. Recent decades have seen a considerable increase in delegation to independent regulatory agencies, which has been justified by reference to the superior performance of these bodies relative to government departments. Yet, the hypothesis that more independent regulators do better work has hardly been tested. We examine the link using a comprehensive measure of the quality of work carried out by competition authorities in 30 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries, and new data on the design of these organizations. We find that formal independence has a positive and significant effect on quality. Contrary to expectations, though, formal political accountability does not boost regulatory quality, and there is no evidence that it increases the effect of independence by reducing the risk of slacking. The quality of work is also enhanced by increased staffing, more extensive regulatory powers, and spillover effects of a more capable bureaucratic system.
- Replication data at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YLENUI
- Hanretty, Chris (2017). “The Influence of Legislators’ Endorsements in Party Leadership Elections.” British Politics 13(4): 454–66. https://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41293-017-0056-6. In the 2010 election for the post of leader of the British Labour party, almost all members of parliament (MPs) endorsed one of five leadership candidates. I investigate the effect of these endorsements on the votes cast for candidates in each Westminster constituency. I find that an MP’s endorsement caused an average increase of 7.5 percentage points in the vote share of the endorsed candidate in that MP’s constituency.
- Replication data at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2TCFTF
- Hanretty, Chris, Benjamin E Lauderdale, and Nick Vivyan (2017). “Dyadic Representation in a Westminster System.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 42(2): 235–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12148. Is policy representation in contemporary Westminster systems solely a function of programmatic national parties, or does the election of legislators via single-member districts result in MPs whose policy positions are individually responsive to public opinion in their constituencies? We generate new measures of constituency opinion in Britain and show that, in three different policy domains and controlling for MP party, the observed legislative behavior of MPs is indeed responsive to constituency opinion. The level of responsiveness is moderate, but our results do suggest a constituency-MP policy bond that operates in addition to the well-known bond between voters and parties.
- Replication data at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UXFNFN
- Hanretty, Chris (2016). “Lawyer Rankings Either Do Not Matter for Litigation Outcomes or Are Redundant.” International Journal of the Legal Profession 23(2): 185–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09695958.2015.1133422. I investigate the success of litigants in tax cases in England and Wales between 1996 and 2010. I explore the effect upon success of having better-ranked legal representation, according to rankings of barristers published by Chambers. I find that, for a variety of model specifications, there is no significant positive effect of having better-ranked legal representation. After conducting a sensitivity analysis, I conclude that better-ranked legal representation might have a positive effect on litigation outcomes, but only if better-ranked lawyers receive cases that are substantially more difficult to win. However, if better-ranked lawyers receive substantially more difficult cases, this suggests consumers of legal representation are sophisticated enough to dispense with legal rankings.
- Replication data at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AZXYIB
- Hanretty, Chris, Ben Lauderdale, and Nick Vivyan (2016). “Comparing Strategies for Estimating Constituency Opinion from National Survey Samples.” Political Science Research and Methods 6(3): 571–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.79. Political scientists interested in estimating how public opinion varies by constituency have developed several strategies for supplementing limited constituency survey data with additional sources of information. We present two evaluation studies in the previously unexamined context of British constituency-level opinion: an external validation study of party vote share in the 2010 general election and a cross-validation of opinion toward the European Union. We find that most of the gains over direct estimation come from the inclusion of constituency-level predictors, which are also the easiest source of additional information to incorporate. Individual-level predictors combined with post-stratification particularly improve estimates from unrepresentative samples, and geographic local smoothing can compensate for weak constituency-level predictors. We argue that these findings are likely to be representative of applications of these methods where the number of constituencies is large.
- Replication data at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IVNNBK
- Hanretty, Chris, Ben Lauderdale, and Nick Vivyan (2016). “Combining National and Constituency Polling for Forecasting.” Electoral Studies 41(March): 239–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2015.11.019. We describe a method for forecasting British general elections by combining national and constituency polling. We reconcile national and constituency estimates through a new swing model.
- Replication code at https://github.com/chrishanretty/election4castUK
- Hanretty, Chris (2015). “The Appointment of Judges by Ministers: Political Preferment in England 1880 - 2005.” Journal of Law and Courts 3(2): 305–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/681543. I investigate appointment to the Court of Appeal and House of Lords between 1880 and 2005. Exploiting the fact that appointment is almost invariably from within the ranks of existing High Court judges and using a conditional logit model, I test for effects of legal, professional, and political factors on appointment prospects. Although there is no advantage to having the same political affiliation as the appointing lord chancellor, judges are more likely to be promoted if they were previously appointed by the incumbent party.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FTE3YK
- Rutter, Richard, Chris Hanretty, and Fiona Lettice (2015). “Political Brands: Can Parties Be Distinguished by Their Online Brand Personality?” Journal of Political Marketing 17(3): 193–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2015.1022631. This paper investigates whether five English political parties are differentiating themselves based on the brand personality they are communicating through their websites. The relative brand positions of five English political parties are analyzed using Aaker’s brand personality scale. The text from each party website is analyzed using content analysis and a dictionary-based tool. The results are plotted in relation to one another on a correspondence analysis map. We find that the two main dimensions on which parties’ brand personalities differ relate to the trade-offs between communicating competence and communicating sincerity and between communicating sophistication and communicating ruggedness. We find that parties’ brand personalities are distinctive, with the exception of the Green Party, and that the position of one party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, is particularly distinctive. Our research uses Aaker’s existing framework for thinking about brand personalities, rather than creating a new framework for politics. By using an existing framework, we are able to use tools developed in other disciplines and show their usefulness for the study of political marketing.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/X6TKOO
- Greasley, Stephen, and Chris Hanretty (2015). “Credibility and Agency Termination Under Parliamentarism.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 26(1): 159–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muu050. We investigate the life span and risk of termination of 723 arm’s length agencies in the United Kingdom between 1985 and 2008, an under investigated question in parliamentary systems. We hypothesize that termination risk depends on three groups of factors: (1) factors relating to the rationales for initial delegation of responsibility to the arm’s length agency; (2) factors relating to the political and economic position of the government; and (3) factors relating to the institutional form of the agency. We find that agencies intended to generate credible commitments in regulation are less likely than others to be terminated in any given year. Agencies operating under right-wing governments and under heavily indebted governments are more likely to be terminated, although left-wing governments are more sensitive to the effects of debt. Agencies structured as executive non-departmental public bodies and non-ministerial departments are also longer lived than others. Contrary to expectations about arm’s length agencies in parliamentary systems with single-party government, partisan change does not affect the risk of termination.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HNFYY0
- Hanretty, Chris (2015). “Judicial Disagreement Need Not Be Political: Dissent on the Estonian Supreme Court.” Europe-Asia Studies 67(6): 970–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2015.1054260. I investigate the non-unanimous decisions of judges on the Estonian Supreme Court. I argue that since judges on the court enjoy high de jure independence, dissent frequently, and are integrated in the normal judicial hierarchy, the Estonian Supreme Court is a crucial case for the presumption that judicial disagreement reveals policy preferences. I analyse dissenting opinions using an ideal point response model. Examining the characteristics of cases which discriminated with respect to the recovered dimension, I show that this dimension cannot be interpreted as a meaningful policy dimension, but instead reflects disagreement about the proper scope of constitutional redress.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IIYY15
- Hanretty, Chris et al. (2015). “What Makes for Prize-Winning Television?” European Journal of Communication 30(3): 267–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267323115577304. We investigate the determinants of success in four international television awards festivals between 1994 and 2012. We find that countries with larger markets and greater expenditure on public broadcasting tend to win more awards, but that the degree of concentration in the market for television and rates of penetration of pay-per-view television are unrelated to success. These findings are consistent with general industrial organisation literature on quality and market size, and with media policy literature on public service broadcasting acting as a force for quality. However, we also find that “home countries” enjoy a strong advantage in these festivals, which is not consistent with festival success acting as a pure proxy for television quality.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BMKKTY
- Banducci, Susan, and Chris Hanretty (2014). “Comparative Determinants of Horse-Race Coverage.” European Political Science Review 6(4): 621–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1755773913000271. We investigate the levels of horse-race coverage in 160 different European print and broadcast outlets in 27 different countries at three different points in time. We match information on outlets’ content to survey-based information on the average levels of interest in politics and education of outlets’ audiences. We formulate hypotheses concerning journalists’ and citizens’ preferences over the ideal level of horse-race coverage, as well as hypotheses concerning the information content of horse-race coverage in different party systems. After controlling for the composition of each outlet’s audience, we find that horse-race coverage is most frequent in polarized party systems with close electoral contests, and in large markets with professional journalists. These findings challenge the traditional view of horse-race journalism as a “low-quality” form of news.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/82GIUZ
- Hanretty, Chris (2014). “The Bulgarian Constitutional Court as an Additional Legislative Chamber.” East European Politics & Societies and Cultures 28(3): 540–58. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325414530149. Although not the most prolific of courts, the Bulgarian Constitutional Court (BCC) has now made enough decisions for us to begin characterising its decision making. Generally, decision making on the BCC is characterised by a low caseload dominated by referrals from parliament, by a high level of dissent, and by dissent that in turn is characterised by a disagreement between left- and right-wing judges. I make these claims on the basis of an analysis of BCC decisions over the period 1991 to 2010, and in particular on the basis of an analysis of judges’ dissenting votes as the expression of an underlying latent trait. I argue that this latent trait should be interpreted as a left–right dimension, both because the positions on this latent dimension match descriptions of judges’ politics and the politics of those who appointed, and because court majorities from the right end of the recovered dimension are often found when ruling in favour of right-wing opposition groups. On the basis of these findings, I argue for an interpretation of the BCC as an additional legislative chamber, comparable in this respect to the French Conseil Constitutionnel.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P1UZGG
- Hanretty, Chris (2014). “Media Outlets and Their Moguls: Why Concentrated Individual or Family Ownership Is Bad for Editorial Independence.” European Journal of Communication 29(3): 335–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267323114523150. This article investigates the levels of owner influence in 211 different print and broadcast outlets in 32 different European media markets. Drawing on the literature from industrial organization, it sets out reasons why we should expect greater levels of influence where ownership of individual outlets is concentrated, where it is concentrated in the hands of individuals or families and where ownership groups own multiple outlets in the same media market. Conversely, we should expect lower levels of influence where ownership is dispersed between transnational companies. The article uses original data on the ownership structures of these outlets and combines it with reliable expert judgements as to the level of owner influence in each of the outlets. These hypotheses are tested and confirmed in a multilevel regression model of owner influence. The findings are relevant for policy on ownership limits in the media and for the debate over transnational versus local control of media.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UER0AE
Hanretty, Chris (2014). “Haves and Have-Nots Before the Law Lords.” Political Studies 62(3): 686–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12041. One important characteristic of justice, and thus of our judicial system, is impartiality. One type of judicial impartiality is impartiality between litigants who command status and material resources (‘haves‘) and those who do not (“have-nots”). I investigate the success of “haves” in appeals to the House of Lords between 1969 and 2003. I investigate two separate paths by which “haves” might succeed more: relative status advantage over other litigants, and being able to hire more experienced and more successful counsel. My innovative operationalisation of relative status advantage shows that while relative status advantage does exist, it is largely a matter of governmental actors having significant advantages over all others; businesses and associations have no advantages over individual litigants. Instructing more experienced counsel also increases the chances of a litigant succeeding. This effect holds when accounting for the relative number of counsel and their relative win rates in previous cases.
- Hanretty, Chris (2013). “The Decisions and Ideal Points of British Law Lords.” British Journal of Political Science 43(3): 703–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123412000270. Policy-sensitive models of judicial behaviour, whether attitudinal or strategic, have largely passed Britain by. This article argues that this neglect has been benign, because explanations of judicial decisions in terms of the positions of individual judges fare poorly in the British case. To support this argument, the non-unanimous opinions of British Law Lords between 1969 and 2009 are analysed. A hierarchical item-response model of individual judges’ votes is estimated in order to identify judges’ locations along a one-dimensional policy space. Such a model is found to be no better than a null model that predicts that every judge will vote with the majority with the same probability. Locations generated by the model do not represent judges’ political attitudes, only their propensity to dissent. Consequently, judges’ individual votes should not be used to describe them in political terms.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JL9UUK
Hanretty, Chris (2013). “The Structure of Supreme Court Judgments: Eleven Ways to Leave One’s Mark.” Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law 2(1): 41–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.7574/cjicl.02.01.87.
- Hanretty, Chris, and Christel Koop (2013). “Shall the Law Set Them Free? The Formal and Actual Independence of Regulatory Agencies.” Regulation and Governance 7(2): 195–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5991.2012.01156.x. Regulation by independent agencies, rather than ministries, is believed to result in better policy outcomes. Yet this belief requires one to accept a complex causal chain leading from formal independence to actual independence from politics, to policy decisions, and, ultimately, to policy outcomes. In this study, we analyze the link between the formal and actual independence of regulatory agencies in Western Europe. New data on the appointment of chief executives of these agencies is used to create a proxy for the actual independence of agencies from politics. The analysis demonstrates that formal independence is an important determinant of actual independence, but the rule of law and the number of veto players matter as well.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Y0YCO9
- Hanretty, Chris (2012). “Dissent in Iberia: The Ideal Points of Justices on the Spanish and Portuguese Constitutional Tribunals.” European Journal of Political Research 51(5): 671–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2012.02056.x. In this article, the non-unanimous decisions of the Portuguese and Spanish Constitutional Tribunals for the periods 1989–2009 and 2000–2009 are analysed. It is shown that judicial dissent can be predicted moderately well on the basis of judicial ideal points along a single dimension. This dimension is equivalent to the left–right cleavage in both Portugal and Spain. The characteristics of the recovered dimension are demonstrated by analysing both the properties of the cases and the properties of the justices who decided them.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/II7FGU
Hanretty, Chris, and Christel Koop (2012). “Measuring Regulators’ Statutory Independence.” Journal of European Public Policy 19(2): 198–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2011.607357. While the literature on delegation has discussed at length the benefits of creating independent regulatory agencies (IRAs), not much attention has been paid to the conceptualization and operationalization of agency independence. In this study, we argue that existing attempts to operationalize the formal political independence of IRAs suffer from a number of conceptual and methodological flaws. To address these, we define what we understand by independence, and in particular formal independence from politics. Using new data gathered from 175 IRAs worldwide, we model formal independence as a latent trait. We find that some items commonly used to measure independence – notably, the method used to appoint agency executives and the scope of the agency’s competences – are unrelated to formal independence. We close by showing that our revised measure partially changes conclusions about the determinants and consequences of formal independence.
Hanretty, Chris (2011). “The Concept of Pluralism in the Italian Public Media.” Modern Italy 16(1): 19–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13532944.2010.485371. In this paper it is argued that the concept of pluralism – the most important value in the Italian media debate – is conceptually confused. The author identifies three mutually incompatible conceptions of pluralism used when discussing the public broadcaster Rai: (1) structural pluralism, satisfied when the public broadcaster is divided into autonomous channels or programme groups; (2) summative pluralism, satisfied when output is divided between political actors according to some ideal distribution; and (3) pluralism “lottizzato”, satisfied when a number of different political positions are “represented” by journalists within the broadcaster.
- Hanretty, Chris (2010). “Explaining the de Facto Independence of Public Service Broadcasters.” British Journal of Political Science 40(1): 75–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S000712340999024X. Institutions operating beyond direct control of government, such as central banks, constitutional courts and public broadcasters, enjoy guarantees of de jure independence, but de jure independence is no guarantee of de facto independence. This is especially so for public broadcasting, where cultural variables are often assumed to be decisive. In this article, the de jure and de facto independence of thirty-six public service broadcasters world-wide are operationalized, and de jure independence is found to explain a high degree of de facto independence when account is taken of the size of the market for news. Other variables considered in previous literature – such as bureaucratic partisanship and the polarization of the party system – are not found to be significant.
- Replication code at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ITYDK1
Renwick, Alan, Chris Hanretty, and David Hine (2009). “Partisan Self-Interest and Electoral Reform: The New Italian Electoral Law of 2005.” Electoral Studies 28(3): 437–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2009.04.003. In December 2005, Italy’s mixed-member electoral system was replaced with a system of bonus-adjusted proportional representation. The reform conformed with rational-choice models in that it was imposed by the ruling coalition, which sought to bolster its own power interests. But the case illustrates the impossibility of reducing such power-based motivation to a single goal, such as seat maximization. Power is shaped by many factors, and electoral systems influence many of these. This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the various power-oriented considerations that may operate in electoral reform. It then analyses the role these played in Italy. It argues, in particular, for the need to take account of coalition dynamics when studying such processes.
Hanretty, Chris (2020). “Courts in the United Kingdom.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, Oxford University Press.
Hanretty, Chris (2016). “Public Interest.” In The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, eds. Gianpietro Mazzoleni, Kenichi Ikeda, and Kevin Barnhurst. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Banducci, Susan, and Chris Hanretty (2016). “The EU Issue Space, Party Competition and News Coverage of EP Elections.” In (Un)intended Consequences of European Parliament Elections, eds. Wouter van der Brug and Claes de Vreese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hanretty, Chris (2012). “The Coalition in Comparative Perspective.” In The Coalition: Voters, Parties and Institutions, eds. Hussein Kassim, Charles Clarke, and Catherine Haddon. London; Norwich: Institute for Government; University of East Anglia.
Hanretty, Chris, and Alex Wilson (2010). “The Troubled Early Years of the Partito Democratico.” In Italian Politics: A Review, eds. Marco Giuliani and Erik Jones. New York: Berghahn.
Hanretty, Chris (2010). “The Italian Media Between Market and Politics.” In Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe, eds. Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe A. Veltri. London: Routledge.
Hanretty, Chris (2007). “Fem Måder at Styre En Public-Service Institution På.” In DR Og TV2 - I Folkets Tjeneste?, eds. Martin B. Carstensen, Flemming Svith, and Per Mouritsen. Århus: Ajour, 149–72.