The 2012 ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops will take place at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, 10-15 April.

For more details please click here.

The steering committee has decided to support three workshop proposals for the 2012 Joint Session of Workshop in Antwerp. One of them was accepted:

Title: Policy Feedback, Political Behaviour, and Democratic Citizenship in European Welfare States

Workshop directors:
Staffan Kumlin, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway
and
Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen, University of Konstanz, Germany and University of Berne, Switzerland

Abstract:
In democracies, citizens’ attitudes and behaviour should influence future public policies. But the reverse may be just as true: attitudes and behaviour are also results of previous policies. This idea of policy feedback can be traced through the history of political science. But it has been slow to reach the mainstream of empirical political behaviour research. In the last decade, however, feedback hypotheses have increasingly been tested in studies on political trust, participation, social policy attitudes, social capital, and civil society participation. Collectively they suggest that political behaviour and democratic citizenship not only function as exogenous democratic input but are (re)shaped by policies. Many studies concern the welfare and social policy domain. In Europe, this is because many countries experience difficulties in delivering on previous commitments to public services and income replacement systems. Similarly, labour market policies and incentive structures are changing. Thus, a broad ambition for the workshop is examining how the restructuring of European welfare states affect political behaviour and democratic citizenship. In doing this, we aim at general scientific progress along several lines. We invite studies conceiving of feedback effects (also) in an interactive and disaggregated manner, with different groups and individuals affected differently by the same policies, and with different individuals being exposed to different parts of the same “welfare regime.” Further, we want to identify generic mechanisms of feedback relevant for a whole range of specific dependent variables. This will have an integrating function and allow a parsimonious understanding of policy feedback. Methodologically, we need studies that take seriously the reciprocal causal relationship between policy and individual behaviour/attitudes.