Financial Regulation in the United States: Lessons from History

History is institutional memory writ large. One looks at economic history to see what problems recur, what causes them to recur, what solutions have worked best in the past, and which interventions have made the problems worse. The authors argue that a moderately complex interaction between the workings of the financial sector, the way in which the political system is organized, and the administration of regulation makes perfect regulation of the financial sector extremely unlikely. Many of these problems arise as a result of conflicting incentives for those participating in and regulating the financial field. The authors find that some proposed solutions have improved matters but have costs, and that some proposed solutions have actually worsened problems in the financial sector.

Peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1837

     

Politics of the precautionary principle: assessing actors’ preferences in water protection policy

This paper analyzes the prospects for introducing the precautionary principle in water protection policy. In situations where a problem enters the political agenda and scientific uncertainties remain about causes or effects, political actors can justify state intervention based on the precautionary principle. It allows for public action even if risks related to the problem remain unclear. While the precautionary principle is widely applied in health and environmental policy fields all over the world, the mechanisms leading to its adoption are not fully understood. To close this gap, the paper investigates decision-makers preferences for the precautionary principle and further asks: Which factors promote political actors’ preferences for precautionary policy measures? In order to answer this question we study the case of emerging micropollutants—a water quality issue that recently entered political agendas, where many uncertainties remain about sources and effects. We rely on data gathered through a standardized survey among the political elite in Switzerland, which represents one of the first countries that adopted policy measures to reduce micropollutants in water bodies, despite the uncertainties that remain. Results analyzed through a temporal network autocorrelation model reveal that actors embedded in collaborative governance arrangements have the tendency to prefer precautionary action. Certain aspects of policy design, such as problem prioritization and target group membership, also impact the prospects for introducing the precautionary principle.     

论资本主义经济中的公有制因素——对一个传统理论观点的重新思考

在我国传统的经济学理论中，存在着一条“原理”，即认为资本主义经济中不可能产生公有制因素。这种认识．不符合西方经济发展的实际情况，不符合历史唯物主义的基本原理，也不符合和平与发展的时代潮流，理应予以摒弃。     

Does formal independence of regulators change? Evidence from Portuguese agencies

The rise of the regulatory state has led to the global diffusion of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). IRAs are the result of the tension between the functional demands of regulatory capitalism and the need of politicians to control policies. Their life cycles have not been linear. Their legal statuses have changed over time, affecting their degrees of independence. This article revisits Gilardi's formal independence index, makes an in‐depth diachronic and cross‐sectorial analysis of 11 regulatory bodies in Portugal, and searches for explanations for the observed variations. It concludes that the formal independence of IRAs tends to increase due to external pressure and the need of governments to project credible commitment, but principals only grant as much independence as they see fit to satisfy those (external) demands (for change).     

Foreign policy by commission: Reforming the intelligence community

Can presidential commissions serve as a source of significant policy innovation in the area of intelligence analysis? This study shows that intelligence commission recommendations present a decidedly mixed bag. We cannot speak of a linear movement toward improving the quality or management of intelligence analysis in which one problem is solved and attention then is turned to the next. Yet presidential commissions looking into intelligence analysis cannot be mere symbolic window dressing. Many of their recommendations have been listened to. It would be more accurate to see them as having in each instance narrowed the range of policy choices receiving serious consideration as means of improving the intelligence product.     

The ‘I’ and the ‘we’ of citizenship in the age of waning democracy: Wolin and Balibar on citizenship,the political and dedemocratization

Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However, the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We of citizenship.     

Professional roles for policy analysts: A critical assessment

Analysts who act as employees or advisors in agencies that make public policy may find themselves operating in any of several different roles. They may see themselves as objective technicians, above the political fray, or as advocates of causes of their own choosing, or as unquestioning proponents of the positions adopted by their employers. Their choice of roles will differ, according to some systematic characteristics found in the environment. Any serious effort to develop a code for the behavior of policy analysts must take these differences into account.     

Party Politics and the Common Good in Swedish Local Government

Local government in Sweden is usually classified as the northwest European type of local government, together with the local government systems of the other Nordic countries and Britain. In the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, Swedish local government has been especially susceptible to the ideas of 'new public management' (NPM). At the same time there has been a long-ongoing trend of increasing party-politicisation of local councils. In this paper a selection of five local authorities are examined in order to see how party politics and party-politicisation are confronted by the new organisational doctrines. It is concluded that in this respect the doctrines guiding local government organisation can be characterised by three common traits: the legitimacy of particular interests is denied in favour of the common good of the locality; it is denied that conflict and competition between political parties perform any democratic function; finally, when it comes to the relation between politics and administration there is a common confession of the management-by-objectives doctrine. Somewhat surprisingly, these three principles guide organisation and politics not only in those authorities most enthusiastically adopting NPM but also in the authorities implementing organisational reforms based on more communitarian principles and even organisationally conservative municipalities not even considering any organisational change. One interpretation of this contradictory observation may be that NPM concepts and ideas have also found their way into local doctrines that are based on quite different principles. Another interpretation is that there is a consensus tradition in Swedish political culture that can also account for similar results in municipalities not explicitly introducing an apolitical organisation doctrine.     

The Mormon dilemma: How old and new religious divides hurt Mormon candidates in the United States

This paper shows that attitudes towards Mormons are very divisive on two levels: many religious conservatives distrust Mormons and refuse to vote for them because they are not Christian as they claim to be, while religious and political liberals see Mormons as part of a repressive religious coalition along with evangelicals and Catholics. Mormon politicians are in an awkward position between these two sides of America's “culture war,” not fully accepted by either. Using new survey questions about attitudes towards Mormons and Mitt Romney, this paper explores the nature of the two anti-Mormonisms and their electoral consequences. I argue that feelings about Mormonism have been an important factor in respondent evaluations of Mitt Romney.     

Changing the Boundaries but Keeping the Disproportionality: The Electoral Impact of the Fifth Periodical Reviews by the Parliamentary Boundary Commissions for England and Wales

Parliamentary boundary reviews in the UK are undertaken to remove — as far as is practicable — inter-constituency variations in the number of electors. Their impact has almost invariably favoured the Conservative party — largely because population shifts between reviews tend to favour Labour with the movement of electors away from the inner cities and old industrial areas. That has been the case again with the Fifth Periodical Reviews conducted by the Boundary Commissions for England and Wales. The next general election will thus be slightly easier for the Conservatives to win than if the boundaries used for the 2005 contest were to be retained. But not much easier. Recent elections have seen very substantial biases operating in the translation of votes into seats favouring Labour. The biases are the result of the interaction of several geographies — of constituency size, abstentions and party support- only one of which (size) is directly tackled by the reviews. Unless those other geographies are changed the next two or three UK general elections are likely to see a continuation of these marked biases.     

Making moral incentives pay

Politicians often appeal to moral principles as a least-cost method of enforcing their policy demands. To do so effectively, they must understand how such principles fit into ordinary people's decision functions. Here I distinguish three ways for formally representing moral principles. One reduces morality to enlightened self-interest, denying that morality has any special place in the decision calculus. Another, while acknowledging that people do internalize moral principles per se, enters them into utility functions as just another consumption good. Truly strong moral principles, however, are best represented by a third model of seriously held moral principles which must be kept formally apart from mundane considerations. Such principles are as precarious as they are powerful. Policy-makers who want to tap them must respect the formalisms that make them strong, most typically by shielding moral principles from contamination by egoistic impulses.This is a revised version of a paper read at the 1978 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association in New York. I am grateful to Stanley Benn for prodding that prompted this essay and to Brian Barry, David Braybrooke, Joseph Carens, Russell Hardin, Martin Hollis and David Miller for advice on its improvement.     

Public management research: The triumph of art over science

If the lights that guide us ever go out, they will fade little by little, as if of their own accord. Confining ourselves to practice, we may lose sight of basic principles, and when these have been entirely forgotten, we may apply the methods derived from them badly; we might be left without the capacity to invent new methods, and only able to make a clumsy and an unintelligent use of wise procedures no longer understood.     

略论司法鉴定样本

司法鉴定样本是指从受审查客体中抽取的用于进行比对和分析的样品或标本.司法鉴定样本可以分为比对样本和分析样本两大类.司法鉴定样本的种类、数量以及收集样本的主体、程序和方法等,对鉴定意见的客观性和合法性都会产生直接或间接影响.要确保司法鉴定的客观性和合法性,收集和制作司法鉴定样本必须坚持同类性原则、重复性原则、相近性原则、充分性原则和合法性原则.     

Procedural legitimacy and political trust: The case of citizen juries in Spain

Abstract.  During the past few years, new mechanisms of citizen participation in decision making have been introduced into local governance frameworks in many countries around the world. One of the basic objectives of these mechanisms is to bridge the gap between citizens and politicians or, in other words, to build political trust. In Spain, citizen juries are one of the main manifestations of this trend towards local democratic innovation. Their contribution to the building of political trust depends above all on their ability to secure their own procedural legitimacy. Case studies of Spanish citizen juries demonstrate that this mechanism can guarantee sufficient pluralism, and that appropriate amounts of information and deliberation, as well as devices to guarantee neutrality, can be incorporated. However, the limited role that citizen juries assign to associations and the strategic considerations that all political actors have with respect to them are crucial limits to their broader political acceptance. Moreover, their educative effects are limited by two factors: they are isolated experiences in a context of very limited opportunities for participation; and their impact on decision making tends to be irregular and diffuse. Nevertheless, Spanish citizen juries also have the potential to increase citizens' interest in local events and the topics under discussion, and to stimulate reflection on social problems. Their contribution to achieving better informed and more responsive bureaucrats and politicians could also be a crucial step towards establishing a greater degree of political trust.     

Capitalism,Markets and Politics

The term ‘capitalism’ is no longer a relevant way in which to describe or to understand a modern economy. Ownership of capital is not the source of economic power that it once was. Business leaders of today do not own the factories and the machines, nor do they need to. Let us consider instead, markets. Not the markets for financial products that we see depicted on rows of flickering screens in Canary Wharf, but real markets. Market economies have proved to be chaotic, and imperfect and yet they are the most successful way we know to allocate goods and services. Through a process of experimentation, much failure and some success they evolve. Their development is necessarily uncertain, but that is also their greatest strength.     

Doing Rawls Justice: An Experimental Study of Income Distribution Norms

Distributive justice has been the focus of political theory with the postwar rise of the social welfare state, and Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) is arguably the most important work of political philosophy during that period. Parallel to this theoretical literature is a body of empirical research into distributive justice. We offer a synthesis of the theoretical and empirical approaches with an experimental study of how individuals use allocation principles in making judgments concerning income distribution under conditions of strict impartiality. Our experiment is designed in part to examine the extent to which they prioritize them consistent with Rawls' theory. We find that distributive justice judgments are complex but structured, with individuals tending to use several principles simultaneously and weighing them according to predictable factors, with sex and race being particularly important. We also find that individuals use several strategies in using competing allocation principles and that a considerable minority prioritize them consistent with a Rawlsian maximin strategy.     

Integrated Impact Assessment as Environmental Policy: The New Zealand Experiment

The scope, complexity and interrelatedness of environmental problems presents a difficult challenge to policymakers. To date, public policies have been responsive largely to particular matters of public concern. They have typically been ad hoc, sectoral and segmental. Their administration has been charged to various agencies, each with its special mission. In consequence, governments have often acted to cross purposes; small results have often been ineffectual and, as often, unnecessarily expensive. Incremental innovation is seldom able to affect significantly the tendencies of the larger system of public policy and administration within which it is undertaken. Inasmuch as no country has had long experience with administration of environmental policy, a comparison of different approaches to environmental problems is useful. Direct transfers of method from one country to another may seldom be practicable, yet there may be lessons learned from the diverse experience of governments addressing similar problems. A comprehensive and radical institutional experiment in environmental policy has been initiated in the government of New Zealand. The New Zealand experiment may illuminate the effects of institutional structure on the implementation of policy. The relationships between constitutional principles, policy priorities and administrative structures have never been clear. The problems of coping with multiple environmental trends, their causes and their consequences justify efforts to find more effective methods of policymaking.     

Human rights and cultural conflict

Conclusion In speaking of a right in relation to identity formation, I have avoided many important questions, including questions about how properly to understand identity formation itself. Evoking such a right does draw from existing trends, but it remains speculative. Nonetheless, it captures one valuable insight in criticisms of human rights as a Western imposition, namely the insight that an important kind of oppression figures in the imposition of identities. By affirming a human right in relation to identity formation, we can not only confront this kind of oppression but see that it has specific weight in contemporary globalizing politics, economics, and culture. Moreover, we see that human rights can offer a critical relation to that kind of identity assertion and cultural imperialism that has itself employed the language of universal principles. One reason to emphasize this possibility of human rights discourse is to explore how this discourse offers more generally a significant normative perspective for challenging various kinds of oppression and domination today. Emphasizing such possibilities is a way of exploring the respects in which any viable notion of democracy must provide an important place for human rights.     

Reluctant Coalitionists: The Conservative Party and the Establishment of the Coalition Government in May 2010

The Conservative party has been the real awkward partner in the Conservative‐Liberal Democrat coalition government because its backbench MPs have rebelled more frequently than their Liberal Democrat counterparts since May 2010. This reflected the fact that the Conservatives were reluctant coalitionists to begin with: they would have preferred to see a minority Conservative government, they had made far too many concessions to the Liberal Democrats, they had been bounced into accepting a coalition deal by a controlling party leadership, and they had lost out on those ministerial positions now held by Liberal Democrats. There was thus no great enthusiasm for the establishment of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in the parliamentary Conservative party in May 2010. Conservatives merely resigned themselves to an outcome which they had been given little opportunity to influence and which David Cameron had made it very difficult for them to reject.     

Financial Management Development in Spain: Who is Playing Sancho Panza?

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza. “Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.” “Look, your worship,” said Sancho, “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.” “It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou are not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.” So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting.