Constitutional political economy in the European Union

This article surveys recent research in constitutional political economy in Europe. Although not all of the works discussed necessarily focus only on European constitutional issues or are written by Europeans, European constitutional issues figure importantly in each area surveyed. The article examines the literatures linking constitutional institutions to economic growth, government size, government deficits and corruption, bicameralism, direct democracy and federalism. Three exclusively European topics also are covered: constitutional issues in the transition countries, the structure of the European Union and the draft constitution for the European Union.     

Expectancy theory in developing nations: Motivating Botswana public servants

The degree to which individuals are motivated to apply themselves depends in part on how far they expect to be able to achieve given goals. This study, based on interviews of local government administrators in Botswana, not only stresses the importance of expectancy in motivation but reports the importance of altruistic goals among these administrators. Among those interviewed there was a strong desire to advance their own careers, both by developing themselves in the job they currently hold, and by advancing through the organizational hierarchy. Employees, however, were also anxious to accomplish concrete objectives in their current jobs and thus to contribute to the development of the nation. Here unless officials have the expectancy of being able to achieve these goals their motivation is affected. Thus emphasis is placed in this article on the need to supplement traditional attention to pay and promotion as devices to improve motivation with a concern to remove road blocks to development. The enquiry thus strengthens the case for the performance improvement programme of the United Nations.     

Community size, heterogeneity and voter turnouts

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between the closeness of an election, the size of the electorate and voter turnout. It is often claimed that this relationship supports the rational voter hypothesis, with closeness and size proxying for the decisiveness of a vote. We offer a different interpretation. Larger communities are more heterogeneous than smaller ones, and turnouts are inversely related to the heterogeneity of a community. We present empirical support for this hypothesis using data for voter turnouts in Norwegian school language referendums. Community size is found to have a negative effect on voter turnouts, even after accounting for the probability of a single vote being decisive and the linguistic dimension of this heterogeneity. Our findings question the adequacy of the turnout regression in testing the rational voter hypothesis, as neither a positive correlation between closeness and turnout, nor a negative correlation between size and turnout can be exclusively attributed to instrumental voting.