Clinton,Europe and Economic Diplomacy: What Makes the EU Different?

The Clinton administration's economic diplomacy has been more aggressive, politicized and controversial than that of any recent US administration. We examine its application to the European Union (EU) and seek to answer the question: what makes Europe different? Put another way, why has the US pursued cooperation on “behind-the-border” issues such as competition policy, standards and investment rules, and eschewed export promotion? We offer three explanations. First, the EU's market is unique: it is a mature, but lucrative one for large US-owned firms concerned more with behind-the-border issues than with market access issues. Second, American companies who have invested heavily in Europe have developed their own political links to the EU, particularly through the EU Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce. Third, these same companies have a powerful influence over US policy towards Europe as well as EU policymaking. Our analysis develops these three hypotheses, and also offers an assessment of the progress and meaning of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue.     

On the value of formal assessment of uncertainty in regulatory analysis

The US Office of Management and Budget introduced in 2003 a new requirement for the treatment of uncertainty in Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs) of proposed regulations, requiring agencies to carry out a formal quantitative uncertainty assessment regarding a regulation’s benefits and costs if either is expected to reach $1 billion annually. Despite previous use in other contexts, such formal assessments of uncertainty have rarely been employed in RIAs or other regulatory analyses. We describe how formal quantitative assessments of uncertainty – in particular, Monte Carlo analyses – can be conducted, we examine the challenges and limitations of such analyses in the context of RIAs, and we assess how the resulting information can affect the evaluation of regulations. For illustrative purposes, we compare Monte Carlo analysis with methods typically used in RIAs to evaluate uncertainty in the context of economic analyses carried out for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Nonroad Diesel Rule, which became effective in 2004.     

Using state-level simulations in a political economy model of US trade policy

Most analyses of US congressional votes on trade policy identify political and economic factors, and general economic conditions as significant factors. In this paper we examine whether simulated state-level impacts of trade policy changes obtained from an applied general equilibrium model explain recent US Senate votes on trade bills. We find that simulated gross state product effects are good predictors of recent trade-policy votes. Our model-based measures of trade sensitivity perform slightly better in statistical terms than the more traditional economic measures. For the Senate as a whole, import considerations have a larger impact on senate voting than export considerations.     

Redistribution in a political union: The case of the EU

A key function of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union's (EU) budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross-national and cross-regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross-national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states – what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it – is very diverse and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU changes over time. We develop a novel panel dataset (1979–2014) to study how key national and EU-level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics. We find that redistribution via the EU budget primarily targets developments in inequality within EU member states, and that an increase in domestic unemployment may also improve the country's fiscal balance. Moreover, we find that voting power in the Council is unrelated to a more positive fiscal balance. However, we find that governments with a centre-right profile are in general more successful in improving their redistributive position vis-à-vis the other member states. This may create a problem of budgetary ‘rent extraction’.     

Voting on Europe,again and again: Stability and change in the Irish experience with EU referendums

This article is about comparative voting behaviour in referendums on the EU and explores variation within one country rather than variations across countries. This enables us to control for broad national context while allowing variations in the immediate referendum context, in terms of campaign intensity and incumbency. It analyses voting behaviour in the many referendums that have taken place in Ireland. The major part of the analysis deals with the five referendums since 2001, as this allows the use of the same measurement of EU support and the use of post referendum surveys. Most attention is paid to attitude to the EU, party support and satisfaction with the incumbent government, reflecting the main debates in the literature on the issues and party cues. The relative importance of each is said to depend on contextual factors such as campaign intensity and economic strength. We find both party cues and issues matter consistently, and suggestive evidence that incumbency matters to the effectiveness of cues given by the two main pro-EU parties but the major finding is that variations in the factors driving voting behaviour in different Irish polls on Europe are slight and barely significant.     

Building organizational reputation in the European regulatory state: An analysis of EU agencies' communications

Organizational‐reputation literature has advanced our understanding about the U.S. regulatory state and its agencies. However, we lack contributions on what a reputational account can add to our knowledge about the European regulatory state, the strategic behavior of supranational agencies, and their endeavors to legitimize themselves in a multilevel political system. We know little of how reputation‐management strategies vary across EU agencies and why. The study offers the very first mapping of organizational‐reputation‐management patterns across all EU agencies, as well as the first empirical assessment on how reputational considerations guide supranational agencies' legitimation strategies. The results indicate that EU agencies facing higher reputational threats revert to their avowed raison d'être (i.e., technical conduct). We find that regulatory agencies utilize a more diverse set of reputational strategies by emphasizing the technical, procedural, and moral reputations more than nonregulatory agencies, whereas social‐policy agencies foster their technical reputation more than economic‐policy agencies.     

The Political Consequences of Blame Attribution for the Economic Crisis in the 2013 Italian National Election

Abstract

This article describes the events that brought about the dismissal of the Berlusconi government in November 2011 and the appointment of a cabinet led by former EU commissioner Mario Monti, before moving to an analysis of how popular perceptions of the economic and political situation have evolved since that time. Relying on an ITANES five-wave inter-electoral panel study, the article shows the EU's growing importance as a divisive political issue. Blaming the EU or the former Berlusconi government as a source of the economic crisis exerted a significant impact on party choice in the 2013 election, while retrospective sociotropic economic evaluations were conditional in their impact on the structure of blame attribution for the economic crisis.     

Policy Lessons from Iraq on Managing Uncertainty in Intelligence Assessment: Why the Strategic/Tactical Distinction Matters

This paper focuses on how pre-existing policy priorities and goals among policy elites in the US, UK, and Australia encouraged the blurring of strategic and tactical intelligence assessment as a mechanism for legitimising the Iraq invasion. Through the selective use and interpretation of sometimes vague or unsubstantiated tactical and technical intelligence and the many uncertainties it contained, proponents of the war were able to undermine existing strategic assessments on Iraq by introducing a range of possible, but largely unsubstantiated, threat scenarios as justification for military action. The paper argues that in so far as intelligence reforms are needed, they should be focused primarily on the interface between analysis and policy making, and the issue of how policy makers interpret and understand the uncertainties that intelligence assessments necessarily contain.     

Partisanship, Political Control, and Economic Assessments

Previous research shows that partisans rate the economy more favorably when their party holds power. There are several explanations for this association, including use of different evaluative criteria, selective perception, selective exposure to information, correlations between economic experiences and partisanship, and partisan bias in survey responses. We use a panel survey around the November 2006 election to measure changes in economic expectations and behavioral intentions after an unanticipated shift in political power. Using this design, we can observe whether the association between partisanship and economic assessments holds when some leading mechanisms thought to bring it about are excluded. We find that there are large and statistically significant partisan differences in how economic assessments and behavioral intentions are revised immediately following the Democratic takeover of Congress. We conclude that this pattern of partisan response suggests partisan differences in perceptions of the economic competence of the parties, rather than alternative mechanisms.     

The triumph of regulatory politics: Benefit–cost analysis and political salience

While benefit–cost analysis (BCA) is now a permanent part of the regulatory process in the United States, and many other countries around the world as well as the European Union have adopted it or are moving toward it, there have been few empirical attempts to assess either whether its use improves regulations or how BCA interacts with the political environment. We use a unique US database of the costs and benefits of 109 economically significant regulations issued between 2000 and 2009 to examine whether the amount of information provided in the BCA or political factors surrounding the regulation better correlate with the net benefits of the regulation. We find that there is little correlation between the information provided by the analysis and the net benefits. However, we find that regulations that receive few public comments and are not issued at the end of an administration, have the highest net benefits. These are the regulations that are the least politically salient. This interaction between the political environment and the economic performance of a regulation has been under‐examined and deserves further study.     

Are integrated impact assessments the way forward for mainstreaming in the European Union?

This article assesses the utility of impact assessments (IAs) as an effective tool for mainstreaming. Specifically, it analyses whether the European Union's (EU's) system of integrated impact assessments (IIAs) contributes to the realization of six mainstreaming objectives defined in the EU treaties. The article first studies whether the legal framework for the EU's system of IIAs makes it a viable tool for mainstreaming. It then proceeds with an empirical analysis of 35 IAs to assess the extent to which mainstreaming objectives are taken into account in practice. The analysis shows that all six mainstreaming objectives have a place within the IIA system, but the system does not ensure systematic consideration of them. There is considerable variation across mainstreaming agendas, as well as across Directorates‐General. The article concludes that the IIA system is no panacea for mainstreaming, and proposes changes to the institutional framework to improve its mainstreaming potential.     

How Europe Shapes the Nature of the Belgian Federation: Differentiated EU Impact Triggers Both Co-operation and Decentralization

This paper disentangles the impact of various dimensions of European integration on different aspects of the Belgian federal polity. We discern two opposite trends. While the institutional embeddedness of Belgium as an EU member state results in domestic centralizing tendencies and co-operative political practices, economic integration stimulates political pressures for regional autonomy, contributing to further divergence and hollowing out of the federal level. We conclude by arguing that the EU clearly affects territorial politics in Belgium, but, as the European causes are multidimensional, that also the effects, albeit substantial, will be diverse.     

Europeans outside the EU: Telecommunications and Electricity Reform in Norway and Switzerland

Norway and Switzerland are two western Europe states that are not members of the European Union (EU), and they are among a number of small and economically open states in which reform of economic sectors is seen to be incremental and reactive. This article poses two questions about the reform of telecommunications and electricity in the two countries. First, what impact has nonmembership of the EU had on the reforms? Second, have their small and open economies and policymaking systems—conceptualized as “social corporatism” in Norway and “liberal corporatism” in Switzerland—had a decisive impact? Some influence from the EU is evident, particularly in telecommunications, but parallels with EU states indicate that nonmembership of the EU, though influential, is not decisive. Although national characteristics matter, social and liberal forms of corporatism are shown to have limited utility. The “actor‐centered institutionalism” approach, which allows a more nuanced analysis of actors and national institutions, is better at explaining the reforms.     

Partisanship,media and the objective economy: Sources of individual-level economic assessments

Economic voting studies have repeatedly shown that voter's assessment of incumbent economic performance is important for the vote decision. However, there is little work explaining how individuals form their economic assessments. Utilizing individual-level data from Turkey, we find that variation in retrospective assessments can actually be predicted by individual income growth rates over the previous year, and the association is stronger for pocketbook assessments. Nonetheless, partisanship and media are important sources of bias, especially for sociotropic assessments. Controlled for partisanship, viewers of pro-government media are more likely to think that the national economy has done better than their own household over the last year, and also more likely to believe that the economy would fare worse if the incumbent is replaced. The findings testify both to the capacity of the individuals to anchor their assessments to personal experience, and to the media's ability to weaken this anchor.     

The Lure of New Jobs: How Framing Impacts Perceptions of Local Subsidies for Sports Teams

Municipalities often use public funds to support private projects in pursuit of economic growth or improved quality of life. How does the framing of municipal subsidies impact public support for such funding? We examine the case of government-funded minor league baseball stadiums to address this question. Using nationally representative survey data, we find respondents are much more likely to support funding for stadiums when told that baseball will bring jobs and improve the local economy, compared to other frames. Local governments may therefore rely on positive, economic frames to gain public support, despite a lack of evidence that sports stadiums deliver net economic benefits.     

Explaining subnational parliamentary scrutiny powers: A fuzzy-set analysis of German Landtage

While the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty has important implications for regional parliaments with legislative competences, most studies have focused on cross-country differences or examined the activities of regional parliaments at the EU level. This contribution shows the existence of substantial intra-country differences in the formal scrutiny rights of regional parliaments. We analyse how German regional parliaments (Landtage) have addressed the challenge of controlling their governments in EU affairs. Using fuzzy-set comparative qualitative analysis, we find that institutional and partisan factors (vote share in the second chamber, economic potential, and conservative governments) explain the differences found among German Landtage particularly well. Landtage with otherwise weak parliamentary prerogatives were successful in using the reform momentum to strengthen their rights in the field of EU policy. Combined with the party political salience of EU policy-making, the integration process has thus empowered formally weaker Landtage.     

Promoting customer engagement: A new trend in utility regulation

This paper traces a new development in regulation that encourages utilities to engage more directly with their customers. We make four contributions: First, we perform a comprehensive analysis of how regulators are using customer engagement, and offer a simple model for understanding different customer engagement initiatives. Second, we review assessments of customer engagement. We find that there are no quantitative, empirically robust assessments of the effectiveness of customer engagement as a regulatory tool. Third, we develop two detailed case studies of an energy regulator and a water regulator that are in the forefront of customer engagement efforts. We find that there is no direct link between the engagement strategy used and the economic incentives received by a firm. Finally, we propose a framework for improving the customer engagement process. The new framework relies on microeconomics, modern tools of program evaluation, and supplying the regulated firm with direct incentives to engage with the customer.     

Interest group networks in the European Union

Interest group networks are crucial for understanding European Union (EU) integration, policymaking and interest representation. Yet, comparative analysis of interest organisation networks across EU policy areas is limited. This study provides the first large-scale investigation of interest group information networks across all EU policy domains. We argue that interest groups prioritise access to trustworthy and high-quality information coming from partners with shared policy goals. Thus, interest organisations form network ties with other organisations if the latter are from the same country, represent the same type of interest, or are policy insiders. The effect of these three factors varies across policy domains depending on the extent to which the institutional setting assures equal and broad organisational access to decision-making. Our empirical analysis operationalises information ties as Twitter-follower relationships among 7,388 interest organisations. In the first step of the analysis, we use Exponential Random Graph Models to examine tie formation in the full network and across 40 policy domains. We find strong but variable effects of country and interest type homophily and policy insiderness on the creation of network ties. In the second step, we examine how the effect of these three variables on tie formation varies with policy domain characteristics. We find that shared interest type and policy insiderness are less relevant for tie formation in (re-)distributive and especially regulatory policy domains characterised by more supranational decision-making. Sharing an interest type and being a policy insider matters more for tie formation in foreign and interior policies where decision-making is more intergovernmental. The effect of country homophily is less clearly related to policy type and decision-making mode. Our findings emphasise the importance of institutional and policy context in shaping interest group networks in the EU.     

EU issue voting and the 2014 European Parliament elections: a dynamic perspective

EU issue voting in European Parliament elections has been shown to be highly conditional upon levels of EU politicization. The present study analyzes this conditionality over time, hypothesizing that the effect of EU attitudes on EP vote preferences is catalyzed as EP elections draw closer. In contrast to extant cross-sectional post-election studies, we use a four-wave panel study covering the six months leading up to the Dutch EP elections of 2014, differentiating between party groups (pro, anti, mixed) and five EU attitude dimensions. We find that EU issue voting occurs for both anti- and pro-EU parties, but only increases for the latter. For mixed parties we find no effect of EU attitudes, yet their support base shifts in the anti-EU direction as the elections draw closer. The overarching image, however, is one of surprising stability: EU attitudes form a consistent part of EP voting motivations even outside EP election times.     

IMPACT ASSESSMENT FOR FEDERAL WILDLIFE POLICY

This article is one of the first efforts to describe and assess the environ- rricntal impact asscssmcnt process iri the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The FWS environmental impact assessment process has evolved from a procedural requirement limited to biological concerns to a more c o m p r e 11 ensi ve pro ce ss i nvol vi n g soc i a 1 and economic consider at i ons. 7'h i s historical overview describes changes in agency actions. Recent FWS en- vironmental impact assessments are examined that concern translocation of the Southern Sea Otter in California; master planning efforts related to thc heavily-visited Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge; use of steel shot for hunting fowl; antf comprehensive use plans for Alaskan national wildlife refuges.