The determinants of democracy: a sensitivity analysis

Public Choice - Numerous studies—operating with diverse model specifications, samples and empirical measures—suggest different economic, social, cultural, demographic, institutional and...     

Determinants of Firm‐Level Lobbying and Government Responsiveness in Agricultural Biotechnology in China

Understanding what stimulates agribusiness firms to lobby the government and what makes the government responsive to lobbying are the two issues that have been discussed extensively in the debates concerning determinants of biotechnology policy. This paper examines the factors influencing agribusiness firms' lobbying and government response using econometric modeling on a new data set of 160 leading agribusiness firms in the food, feed, chemical, and seed industries in China. The results show that approximately 10% of agribusiness firms lobbied the government about biotechnology policy and regulations and over half of those that lobbied received a verbal or written acknowledgment from government agencies. Seed and feed companies are more likely to engage in lobbying than chemical companies. Owning GM patents not only has a positive impact on firms' lobbying activities, but firms with these patents are more likely to receive a government response to their lobbying efforts. The experience of selling GM products does not significantly influence lobbying activities or response from the government.     

The lack of experimental research in criminology—evidence from Criminology and Justice Quarterly

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Despite experiments being termed the “gold standard,” criminology has been slow to adopt experimentation as a methodology. The goal of this...     

Competition and service quality: Evidence from Swedish residential care homes

Against a backdrop of increased levels of marketization of welfare services in OECD countries, this article aims to shed light on the separate effects of private ownership and competition for the market on service quality. Using residential elder care homes in Sweden as our case, we leverage unique panel data of ownership and competition against a set of indicators, pertaining to the structure, process, and outcome dimensions of care quality. The main finding of our analyses is that competition for the market does surprisingly little for quality: private entrepreneurs perform neither better nor worse under stiff competition and the quality of care is approximately the same in those nursing homes that are exposed to the market as in those that are not.     

Evaluating Bioinformatic Pipeline Performance for Forensic Microbiome Analysis*,†,‡

Microbial communities have potential evidential utility for forensic applications. However, bioinformatic analysis of high-throughput sequencing data varies widely among laboratories. These differences can potentially affect microbial community composition and downstream analyses. To illustrate the importance of standardizing methodology, we compared analyses of postmortem microbiome samples using several bioinformatic pipelines, varying minimum library size or minimum number of sequences per sample, and sample size. Using the same input sequence data, we found that three open-source bioinformatic pipelines, MG-RAST, mothur, and QIIME2, had significant differences in relative abundance, alpha-diversity, and beta-diversity, despite the same input data. Increasing minimum library size and sample size increased the number of low-abundant and infrequent taxa detected. Our results show that bioinformatic pipeline and parameter choice affect results in important ways. Given the growing potential application of forensic microbiology to the criminal justice system, continued research on standardizing computational methodology will be important for downstream applications.     

Autonomy and distance from the centre as drivers of innovation in the public sector: Testing a positioning-based hypothesis

A generally accepted assumption is that innovation in the public sector is easier when managers have more autonomy. Previous research has revealed a paradox: the most innovative organizations are autonomous organizations, but also central agencies, more so than ministries. What has not been documented so far in Canada is the quality and nature or type of innovation by location. We developed a database of applications for IPAC's innovative management award with 1712 innovations in federal and provincial governments over the past 29 years. Using statistical analysis that takes into account the proximity of applicant organizations to political power, we provide a picture of innovation and institutional position in the public sector in Canada.     

Electoral Rules,Labor Market Coordination and Macroeconomic Performance

Two distinct literatures have studied the macroeconomic effects of electoral systems and of labor market structures, respectively. Results include a positive association between proportional representation (PR) electoral systems and growth, but also between PR and inflation, as well as negative or hump‐shaped relationships between labor market coordination and the ‘misery variables’, unemployment and inflation. However, these results could be biased; particular electoral system and labor market features co‐vary systematically, and extant studies have typically not taken this into account. Effects attributed to PR systems could really stem from labor market coordination, and vice versa. In this article the relationships with macroeconomic outcomes for both electoral systems and labor market structures are re‐evaluated by modelling them jointly. Employing data from more than 30 democracies, with time‐series from the period 1960–2010, some robust and some non‐robust associations are identified. First, PR systems are, indeed, associated with higher growth rates, but not with higher inflation. Regarding labor market coordination, robust curvilinear relationships with unemployment and inflation are identified; intermediate levels of coordination correspond with worse macroeconomic performance – albeit not lower growth – even when accounting for electoral system features.