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Citizens' Perceptions of Standards in Public Life

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Citizens' Perceptions of Standards in Public Life CITIZENS’ PERCEPTIONS OF STANDARDS IN PUBLIC LIFE JONATHAN RICHARD ROSE, M.A. SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY JULY 2012 Abstract This thesis analyses citizens' perceptions of standards in public life. It attempts to understand whether perceptions such as these are important substantively for questions of citizen disaffection, and begins the task of analyzing how citizens come to hold the perceptions they do. The thesis presents a systematic investigation into this topic, placing perceived standards in the context of a discussion about citizen disaffection and the perceived legitimacy of political systems. As they are conceived of in this thesis, 'standards in public life' can usefully be thought of as the 'rules of the game' or the 'spirit of public service'. Standards in public life are less a set of formal, prescriptive rules, more an exhortation to the appropriate exercise of public office. Such a focus upon the 'rules of the game' results in the primary concern of this thesis being about the process of governing, as opposed to the outcomes governors can produce. The thesis investigates perceptions of standards in two parts. Part 1 considers broad questions of the conceptualisation, measurement and structure of citizen beliefs about government in general, and perceptions of standards in particular. The findings of Part 1 therefore provide a base upon which future analyses can be built. Part 2 investigates the causes of perceptions of standards, focusing upon three aspects of political ‘conditions’: partisan co-alignment, the ‘scandal’ concerning Derek Conway’s use of parliamentary expenses to employ his son to do essentially no work, and the MPs’ expenses scandal. The analyses in this thesis are primarily quantitative, and investigate a series of four datasets, which contain data collected in the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2011. Acknowledgements As with any thesis, the production of this work would not have been possible without a significant amount of help and support from a wide variety of people and organisations. In particular, I would like to thank Cees van der Eijk, my first supervisor. I began this post having only completed a 10-week module in quantitative methods, and knew little over how to run a regression in SPSS. With Cees’ help and support, I now also know how to run regressions in R. Along the way, I have also gained an appreciation of the many different and varied approaches to social science investigation and gained an appreciation of the application of a wide variety of methods. It is not an understatement to say that I could not have done this without Cees’ help. Moreover, I should also say that I have incredibly enjoyed my supervisions with Cees. His comments on my work may not always have been the fastest to come back, but I am unaware of any supervisor who gives as detailed and thoughtful comments as Cees. Finally, as a recent first-time father, Cees has also been incredibly helpful with a raft of practical advice about bringing up children; from advice on when to worry about a child’s temperature to general pointers on how not to lose children in busy city centres (it turns out reins are helpful). I would also like to thank my second academic supervisor, Lauren McLaren, and my non- academic supervisor, Peter Hawthorne. Both have been incredibly helpful and interested in the project throughout. They have provided me with thoughtful comments on my work, and I think it is substantially better for their involvement. I must also thank the ESRC and Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL), both of whom provided funding and support for this project. In particular, this project could not have been completed without the help of the CSPL, whose data I analyse here. Being mindful of public beliefs is incredibly important for every political system, and the CSPL should be heartily congratulated for their work in this regard. It is very easy to disregard the public’s attitudes, and very hard to consider them properly; the willingness of the CSPL to take on this project reflects extremely positively upon them. I would also like to thank the R Development Core Team, as well as the numerous authors of libraries used in this thesis, for developing one of the most powerful tools for statistical analysis, and giving it away freely. The same is true of GNU/Linux, which has provided me with a free, flexible, and stable operating system upon which to work. Free (Open Source) Software is incredibly important academically, and the option to investigate the functioning of libraries down to the base code has been useful on more than one occasion. Finally, I would like to thank my family. In particular, my wife, Ceri, and son, Noah. Ceri has been incredibly supportive during the whole of my PhD, as she was during my BA and MA. I would have struggled to produce anything, let alone a full thesis, without her help and support. Noah too has been supportive; coming home to his smiling face makes working long hours seem much more worthwhile. Table of Contents Page 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Page 24 Part 1: Foundations Page 25 Chapter 2: Public Perceptions and Political Legitimacy Page51 Chapter3: Latent Variables: Measuresand Implications Page 84 Chapter 4: Process performance and Political trust: Structural Models Page 113 Part 2: Causes of Perceptions of Standards Page 114 Chapter 5: Partisan Co-alignment and Perceptions of Standards Page 137 Chapter 6: ‘Why We Hate Politics’? The Impact of Negative Political Events upon Political Perceptions of Standards in Public Life Page 160 Chapter 7: Perceptions of Standards after ‘MPs’ Expenses’: The Impact of the Local MP’s Performance Page 179 Chapter 8: Conclusion: Standards in Public Life Page 193 Appendix A Page 199 Appendix B Page 211 Bibliography List of Tables Page 6 Table 1.1 – Percentage of British Citizens Expressing Trust in Three Groups of Professionals Page 15 Table 1.2 – Survey Information Page 70 Table 3.1 – Results of a Mokken Scale Analysis of Three Batteries of Items Page 72 Table 3.2 – Results of a Mokken Scale Analysis of All Items Simultaneously Page 108 Table 4.1 – Comparative Structural Model Fit Page 120 Table 5.1 – A Typology of Unqualified Co-alignment Page 121 Table 5.2 – A Typology of Qualified Co-alignment Page 130 Table 5.3 – Predictors of Perceived Standards at the National Level Page 132 Table 5.4 – Predictors of Perceived Standards in Scotland Page 156 Table 6.1 – Average NPE ‘Treatment’ Effects Page 174 Table 7.1 – Impact of Local MPs’ ‘Expenses’ Involvement upon Perceptions of Standards in Public Life List of Figures Page 11 Figure 1.1 – Percentage of all Two-word Phrases Matching ‘political corruption’ Within Google’s Corpus of Books in the English Language Between 1780 and 2008 Page 35 Figure 2.1- The Structure of Political Legitimacy Page 53 Figure 3.1 – Graphical representation of a latent variable model. Page 107 Figure 4.1 – Model 5: A Reciprocal Model of Political Trust and Political Performance. Page 147 Figure 6.1 – Mentions of ‘Derek Conway’ in UK National Newspapers Chapter 1 Introduction "I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard." Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages. "It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..." "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?" "What?" "I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?" "I'll look. Tell me about the lizards." Ford shrugged again. "Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it." Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) This thesis analyses citizens' perceptions of standards in public life. It attempts to understand whether perceptions such as these are important substantively for questions of citizen disaffection, and begins the task of analyzing how citizens come to hold the perceptions they do.
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