Alan M Jacobs
Biographic Data
| ID | 3627944 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alan M Jacobs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alan M |
| FAMILY NAME | Jacobs |
| SIGNATURE | JACOBS A M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1008-2551 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 646 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Providers, patients, and the politics of the service welfare state
Downward Mobility and Far-Right Party Support
Much debate has centered on the relative effects of economic and cultural factors on support for far-right parties. Recent work, however, has proposed a synthesis focused on the role of social status , a concept capturing a combination of economic position and social esteem. While previous studies have adduced suggestive evidence that status loss shapes far-right support, this paper presents the broadest empirical assessment of the proposition to…
The Nonconsequences of Covid-19 on Left–Right Ideological Beliefs
Unequal Democracies
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that fo…
Integrated Inferences
There is a growing consensus in the social sciences on the virtues of research strategies that combine quantitative with qualitative tools of inference. Integrated Inferences develops a framework for using causal models and Bayesian updating for qualitative and mixed-methods research. By making, updating, and querying causal models, researchers are able to integrate information from different data sources while connecting theory and empirics in a…
Testing Negative
Responding to COVID-19, governments implemented large-scale economic and social policies of unprecedented scale. This highlighted the state's capacity to guarantee economic and health security, and affected demographic groups that are less commonly beneficiaries of state support. We hypothesise that exposure to the pandemic and these policy responses caused change in attitudes to the role of government in the economy and redistribution. We test t…
Using Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) to Teach Qualitative Research Methods
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Whose News? Class-Biased Economic Reporting in the United States
There is substantial evidence that voters' choices are shaped by assessments of the state of the economy and that these assessments, in turn, are influenced by the news. But how does the economic news track the welfare of different income groups in an era of rising inequality? Whose economy does the news cover? Drawing on a large new dataset of US news content, we demonstrate that the tone of the economic news strongly and disproportionately trac…
Preregistering Qualitative Research
Preregistrations-records made a priori about study designs and analysis plans and placed in open repositories-are thought to strengthen the credibility and transparency of research. Different authors have put forth arguments in favor of introducing this practice in qualitative research and made suggestions for what to include in a qualitative preregistration form. The goal of this study was to gauge and understand what parts of preregistration te…
Policy Attitudes in Institutional Context
This article examines the link between citizens’ policy attitudes and the institutional context in which policies are carried out. The article develops a theory of opinion formation toward policies that impose costs on citizens in order to invest in broadly valued social goods. In this framework, problems of agency loss and time inconsistency leave citizens uncertain about whether promised policy benefits will be delivered. Citizen support for pu…
Inequality and Electoral Accountability
Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how electorates in advanced democracies respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 countries, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distribut…
Policy Making for the Long Term in Advanced Democracies
A range of policy problems—from climate change to pension sustainability to skill shortages—confront governments with intertemporal dilemmas: trade-offs between maximizing social welfare in the present and taking care of the future. There is, moreover, substantial variation in the degree to which democratic governments are willing to invest in long-term social goods. Surprisingly, the literature on the politics of public policy has paid little ex…
When Policies Undo Themselves
Most studies of policy feedback have focused on processes of self‐reinforcement through which programs bolster their own bases of political support and endure or expand over time. This article develops a theoretical framework for identifying feedback mechanisms through which policies can becomeself‐underminingover time, increasing the likelihood of a major change in policy orientation. We conceptualize and illustrate three types of self‐undermini…
Mixing Methods
We develop an approach to multimethod research that generates joint learning from quantitative and qualitative evidence. The framework-Bayesian integration of quantitative and qualitative data (BIQQ)-allows researchers to draw causal inferences from combinations of correlational (cross-case) and process-level (within-case) observations, given prior beliefs about causal effects, assignment propensities, and the informativeness of different kinds o…
Why Do Citizens Discount the Future? Public Opinion and the Timing of Policy Consequences
It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens’ policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of signifi…
Governing for the Long Term
In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of lo…
Policymaking as Political Constraint
Today, few features of the American policy landscape are as prominent and popular, or have proven as resilient over time, as the Social Security program. The largest single item of federal expenditure, Social Security routinely ranks among the state activities most valued by ordinary citizens (United States Office of Management and Budget 2008). Over the last thirty years, the retirement program has survived largely intact against assault by a hi…
Explaining Institutional Change
This book contributes to emerging debates in political science and sociology on institutional change. Its introductory essay proposes a new framework for analyzing incremental change that is grounded in a power-distributional view of institutions and that emphasizes ongoing struggles within but also over prevailing institutional arrangements. Five empirical essays then bring the general theory to life by evaluating its causal propositions in the …
How Do Ideas Matter
How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that actors' mental models of the domains in which they ar…
The Politics of When
Why do some elected governments impose short-term costs to invest in solving long-term social problems while others delay or merely redistribute the pain? This article addresses that question by examining the politics of pension reform in Britain and the United States. It first reframes the conventional view of the outcomes – centred on cross-sectional distribution – demonstrating that the politicians who enacted the least radical redistribution …
Seeing Difference
The comparative literature on health care reform has identified a convergence upon market models as nations respond to similar economic, technological, social, and demographic pressures. In this article I first challenge the conventional view by comparing “market” reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Though these nations did indeed converge upon the instrument of the market incentive, there…
The employment of Asian studies graduates
(1982). The employment of Asian studies graduates. Asian Studies Association of Australia. Review: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 26-28
When Policies Undo Themselves
Most studies of policy feedback have focused on processes of self‐reinforcement through which programs bolster their own bases of political support and endure or expand over time. This article develops a theoretical framework for identifying feedback mechanisms through which policies can becomeself‐underminingover time, increasing the likelihood of a major change in policy orientation. We conceptualize and illustrate three types of self‐undermini…
Policy Making for the Long Term in Advanced Democracies
A range of policy problems—from climate change to pension sustainability to skill shortages—confront governments with intertemporal dilemmas: trade-offs between maximizing social welfare in the present and taking care of the future. There is, moreover, substantial variation in the degree to which democratic governments are willing to invest in long-term social goods. Surprisingly, the literature on the politics of public policy has paid little ex…
Why Do Citizens Discount the Future? Public Opinion and the Timing of Policy Consequences
It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens’ policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of signifi…
Mixing Methods
We develop an approach to multimethod research that generates joint learning from quantitative and qualitative evidence. The framework-Bayesian integration of quantitative and qualitative data (BIQQ)-allows researchers to draw causal inferences from combinations of correlational (cross-case) and process-level (within-case) observations, given prior beliefs about causal effects, assignment propensities, and the informativeness of different kinds o…
Policy Attitudes in Institutional Context
This article examines the link between citizens’ policy attitudes and the institutional context in which policies are carried out. The article develops a theory of opinion formation toward policies that impose costs on citizens in order to invest in broadly valued social goods. In this framework, problems of agency loss and time inconsistency leave citizens uncertain about whether promised policy benefits will be delivered. Citizen support for pu…
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
How Do Ideas Matter
How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that actors' mental models of the domains in which they ar…
The Politics of When
Why do some elected governments impose short-term costs to invest in solving long-term social problems while others delay or merely redistribute the pain? This article addresses that question by examining the politics of pension reform in Britain and the United States. It first reframes the conventional view of the outcomes – centred on cross-sectional distribution – demonstrating that the politicians who enacted the least radical redistribution …
Preregistering Qualitative Research
Preregistrations-records made a priori about study designs and analysis plans and placed in open repositories-are thought to strengthen the credibility and transparency of research. Different authors have put forth arguments in favor of introducing this practice in qualitative research and made suggestions for what to include in a qualitative preregistration form. The goal of this study was to gauge and understand what parts of preregistration te…
Whose News? Class-Biased Economic Reporting in the United States
There is substantial evidence that voters' choices are shaped by assessments of the state of the economy and that these assessments, in turn, are influenced by the news. But how does the economic news track the welfare of different income groups in an era of rising inequality? Whose economy does the news cover? Drawing on a large new dataset of US news content, we demonstrate that the tone of the economic news strongly and disproportionately trac…
Inequality and Electoral Accountability
Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how electorates in advanced democracies respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 countries, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distribut…
Downward Mobility and Far-Right Party Support
Much debate has centered on the relative effects of economic and cultural factors on support for far-right parties. Recent work, however, has proposed a synthesis focused on the role of social status , a concept capturing a combination of economic position and social esteem. While previous studies have adduced suggestive evidence that status loss shapes far-right support, this paper presents the broadest empirical assessment of the proposition to…
The employment of Asian studies graduates
(1982). The employment of Asian studies graduates. Asian Studies Association of Australia. Review: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 26-28
Seeing Difference
The comparative literature on health care reform has identified a convergence upon market models as nations respond to similar economic, technological, social, and demographic pressures. In this article I first challenge the conventional view by comparing “market” reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Though these nations did indeed converge upon the instrument of the market incentive, there…
The Politics of When
Why do some elected governments impose short-term costs to invest in solving long-term social problems while others delay or merely redistribute the pain? This article addresses that question by examining the politics of pension reform in Britain and the United States. It first reframes the conventional view of the outcomes – centred on cross-sectional distribution – demonstrating that the politicians who enacted the least radical redistribution …
Policymaking as Political Constraint
Today, few features of the American policy landscape are as prominent and popular, or have proven as resilient over time, as the Social Security program. The largest single item of federal expenditure, Social Security routinely ranks among the state activities most valued by ordinary citizens (United States Office of Management and Budget 2008). Over the last thirty years, the retirement program has survived largely intact against assault by a hi…
Explaining Institutional Change
This book contributes to emerging debates in political science and sociology on institutional change. Its introductory essay proposes a new framework for analyzing incremental change that is grounded in a power-distributional view of institutions and that emphasizes ongoing struggles within but also over prevailing institutional arrangements. Five empirical essays then bring the general theory to life by evaluating its causal propositions in the …
How Do Ideas Matter
How do ideas affect political decision making? Despite much evidence that ideas matter, relatively little is known about the specific mechanisms through which they influence actors' beliefs, goals, and preferences. Drawing on psychological findings, the article elaborates a cognitive mechanism through which ideational frameworks shape political elites' preferences among options. It argues that actors' mental models of the domains in which they ar…
Governing for the Long Term
In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of lo…
Why Do Citizens Discount the Future? Public Opinion and the Timing of Policy Consequences
It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens’ policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of signifi…
When Policies Undo Themselves
Most studies of policy feedback have focused on processes of self‐reinforcement through which programs bolster their own bases of political support and endure or expand over time. This article develops a theoretical framework for identifying feedback mechanisms through which policies can becomeself‐underminingover time, increasing the likelihood of a major change in policy orientation. We conceptualize and illustrate three types of self‐undermini…
Mixing Methods
We develop an approach to multimethod research that generates joint learning from quantitative and qualitative evidence. The framework-Bayesian integration of quantitative and qualitative data (BIQQ)-allows researchers to draw causal inferences from combinations of correlational (cross-case) and process-level (within-case) observations, given prior beliefs about causal effects, assignment propensities, and the informativeness of different kinds o…
Inequality and Electoral Accountability
Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how electorates in advanced democracies respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 countries, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distribut…
Policy Making for the Long Term in Advanced Democracies
A range of policy problems—from climate change to pension sustainability to skill shortages—confront governments with intertemporal dilemmas: trade-offs between maximizing social welfare in the present and taking care of the future. There is, moreover, substantial variation in the degree to which democratic governments are willing to invest in long-term social goods. Surprisingly, the literature on the politics of public policy has paid little ex…
Policy Attitudes in Institutional Context
This article examines the link between citizens’ policy attitudes and the institutional context in which policies are carried out. The article develops a theory of opinion formation toward policies that impose costs on citizens in order to invest in broadly valued social goods. In this framework, problems of agency loss and time inconsistency leave citizens uncertain about whether promised policy benefits will be delivered. Citizen support for pu…
Preregistering Qualitative Research
Preregistrations-records made a priori about study designs and analysis plans and placed in open repositories-are thought to strengthen the credibility and transparency of research. Different authors have put forth arguments in favor of introducing this practice in qualitative research and made suggestions for what to include in a qualitative preregistration form. The goal of this study was to gauge and understand what parts of preregistration te…
Testing Negative
Responding to COVID-19, governments implemented large-scale economic and social policies of unprecedented scale. This highlighted the state's capacity to guarantee economic and health security, and affected demographic groups that are less commonly beneficiaries of state support. We hypothesise that exposure to the pandemic and these policy responses caused change in attitudes to the role of government in the economy and redistribution. We test t…
Using Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) to Teach Qualitative Research Methods
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Whose News? Class-Biased Economic Reporting in the United States
There is substantial evidence that voters' choices are shaped by assessments of the state of the economy and that these assessments, in turn, are influenced by the news. But how does the economic news track the welfare of different income groups in an era of rising inequality? Whose economy does the news cover? Drawing on a large new dataset of US news content, we demonstrate that the tone of the economic news strongly and disproportionately trac…
Unequal Democracies
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that fo…
Integrated Inferences
There is a growing consensus in the social sciences on the virtues of research strategies that combine quantitative with qualitative tools of inference. Integrated Inferences develops a framework for using causal models and Bayesian updating for qualitative and mixed-methods research. By making, updating, and querying causal models, researchers are able to integrate information from different data sources while connecting theory and empirics in a…
The Nonconsequences of Covid-19 on Left–Right Ideological Beliefs
Downward Mobility and Far-Right Party Support
Much debate has centered on the relative effects of economic and cultural factors on support for far-right parties. Recent work, however, has proposed a synthesis focused on the role of social status , a concept capturing a combination of economic position and social esteem. While previous studies have adduced suggestive evidence that status loss shapes far-right support, this paper presents the broadest empirical assessment of the proposition to…
Providers, patients, and the politics of the service welfare state
Political science (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Economics (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (9 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Public economics (7 works)