The UK Politics of Overseas Voting

The enfranchisement of non‐resident citizens has always been controversial in the UK, where for historical reasons, voting rights are not as closely associated with citizenship as elsewhere. The introduction of ‘overseas’ voting in the 1980s by the Conservatives was contested by Labour as a form of ‘international gerrymandering’ since expatriates were widely assumed to be disproportionately wealthy and therefore more likely to vote Tory. Expatriate campaigners have been increasingly vocal in denouncing the ‘electoral injustice’ of the ‘fifteen‐year rule’ which disenfranchises them after fifteen years abroad, and the exclusion of so many from the EU referendum highlighted their cause. A recent private member's bill proposing ‘votes for life’ for UK expatriates aimed to meet their demands to abolish the time restriction, now considered anachronistic. But their arguments were hijacked by historically embedded attitudes and disputes driven by party politics, ending in a dramatic and bewildering filibuster which this paper elucidates.     

The Politics of Ideas in Reforming the Dutch Disability Fund

This article looks at the long struggle to reform the Dutch disability insurance fund, which covered close to 10% of the labor force in 2002. Ideas played a strategic role in the framing and discourse of the policy reforms. A template propagated by the European Commission was used by center‐left reform advocates to soften a neoliberal campaign to overhaul the disability insurance scheme. Center‐left politicians used European deliberations to convince their colleagues to accept increased spending on activation programs rather than rely on rounds of cutbacks. Labor market activation also resonated with voters, for very different reasons. Voters in the 2000s rallied around activation in order to bar ethnic minorities from taking advantage of the disability program. By the time that the disability law was repealed in 2006, many voters had altered their minds about the disability fund, resenting the fact that “problematic” minorities lived off welfare state benefits.     

Presidential Bureaucratic Power and Supreme Court Justice Voting

Presidency scholars suggest that the federal bureaucracy has become presidentialized and that the federal agencies have become a primary tool for presidential policy implementation. However, in its review of federal agency litigation, the Supreme Court stands as an important monitor of executive bureaucratic action. Here, the conditions under which Supreme Court justices choose to facilitate executive bureaucratic action are assessed. This study tests the proposition that Supreme Court justices' voting decisions to support the president's bureaucratic agents are conditioned upon theoretically interesting extra-legal factors. Logistic regression analysis was conducted on justices' votes from Supreme Court cases involving cabinet and independent agencies during the years 1953–1995. The results indicate that Supreme Court justices' voting decisions to favorably review bureaucratic actions are influenced by extra-legal factors including attitudinal, political, and external concerns.     

Flexible Integration,EMU and Relative Voting Power in the EU

This paper studies the implications offlexible integration in the European Union. Itanalyses the voting power of member states in theCouncil of Ministers when differently sized subgroupsof the EU are set up. European Monetary Union isreferred to as the most important example of flexibleintegration. The Banzhaf-Index is calculated to studythe distribution of voting power in the decisionmaking process according to the stability and growthpact. The results show considerable fluctuations,especially for smaller countries, in relative votingpower, the latter being defined as the relationbetween voting power and relative voting weight.     

Politics and Power in the European Convention

The Convention on the future of the European Union has been heralded by many as a unique political setting. So far the process of EU Treaty change was subject to the collision of national political interests in Intergovernmental Conferences. By contrast, the Convention appears to promise a fundamentally open and normatively informed arena. This article probes the validity of this promise by dissecting the political dynamics of the Convention along three dimensions: political behaviour and alliance formation; agenda management; and the norms informing its proceedings.     

Politics and Power in the United Kingdom

PRODUCING an introductory text for any academic discipline isa challenging task; however, the work involved in compilingand writing a comprehensive user-friendly and contemporary workfor British Politics undergraduate students has to be one ofthe most daunting tasks to face the political scientist. With the trend towards receiving ever more information and newson politics and political events from the worldwide web, coupledwith the expansion of transmission time by a range of radioand television outlets, much political coverage tends towardssimplistic explanation, driven largely by personality ratherthan policy concerns. Consequently, the importance of producinga thorough introductory text removing misperception and misinformationhas intensified. However, in Politics and Power in the United Kingdom editedby Heffernan and Thompson, both established and well-respectedfigures in their subject disciplines,     

The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems

Compulsory voting laws have consistently been demonstrated to boost electoral participation. Despite the widespread presence of compulsory voting and the significant impact these laws appear to have on voting behavior, surprisingly little effort has been devoted to analyzing how mandatory voting alters the decision-making calculus of individual voters in these systems. Moreover, studies that investigate the influence of compulsory voting laws on electoral participation generally treat these policies monolithically, with scant attention to the nuances that differentiate mandatory voting laws across systems and to their consequences for voting rates. Analyses that explicitly and empirically examine the effects of penalties and enforcement are surprisingly rare. This study aims to fill that void by adapting rational choice models of participation in elections for compulsory voting systems. I find that the level of penalties countries impose for non-compliance and the degree of penalty enforcement impact turnout rates. Voters in mandatory voting systems abstain least when both the penalties and the likelihood of enforcement are high, and abstain most when both meaningless.

Government Strength, Power Dispersion in Governments and Budget Deficits in OECD-Countries. A Voting Power Approach

We test for the influenceof government strength and dispersion ofpower among the parties of coalitiongovernments on the size of annual debtaccumulation through budget deficits inOECD-countries from 1970 to 1999.Government strength and power dispersion incoalition governments are measured by theBanzhaf index of voting power, respectivelythe standard deviation of Banzhaf indicesof coalition parties. We believe that theseare better-suited proxies than most of whathas been applied so far. Governmentstrength turns out to be insignificant.However, coalitions with equally strongpartners run significantly higher deficitsthan coalitions with one dominating party.     

Power Politics and Wars without States

In order to evaluate the applicability of power politics theories of war and international stability to interactions among nonstate actors, I test hypotheses from power transition theory and from neorealist arguments about systemic polarity against the behavior of 20 state and nonstate actors in nineteenth‐century South America. I find considerable support for two of the three hypotheses tested and conclude that existing IR theory has more explanatory power within the empirical domain of nonstate relations than critics of such theory claim.     

A Priori Voting Power: What Is It All About?

We explain the meaning of a priori voting power and outline how it is measured. We distinguish two intuitive notions as to what voting power means, leading to two approaches to measuring it. One conception, I-power, focuses on a voter's potential influence over the outcome of decisions by a voting body. The second conception, P-power, focuses on voters' payoff, their expected share of a fixed winning 'prize'. We discuss and rebut some philosophical and pragmatic objections, according to which a priori (as distinct from actual) voting power is worthless or inapplicable.     

Power Sharing and Inclusive Politics in Africa's Uncertain Democracies

Power‐sharing agreements have been widely used in Africa as paths out of civil war. However, the research focus on conflict mitigation provides an inadequate guide to recent cases such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. When used in response to flawed elections, pacts guaranteeing political inclusion adversely affect government performance and democratization. Political inclusion in these cases undermines vertical relationships of accountability, increases budgetary spending, and creates conditions for policy gridlock. Analysis using three salient dimensions highlights these negative effects: Origin distinguishes extra‐constitutional pacts from coalitions produced by more stable institutions, function contrasts postwar cases from scenarios where the state itself faces less risk, and time horizon refers to dilemmas that weigh long‐term costs versus short‐term benefits. The conclusion suggests that the drawbacks of inclusive institutions can be moderated by options such as sunset clauses, evenhanded prosecution of human rights violations, and by strengthening checks on executive authority.     

Politics, Economics and the Measurement of Power

To what extent is political power fundamentally different from or, alternatively, comparable to economic power? While it is true that the basic institutions of democratic political life - the electoral arena and the sovereign representative assembly - differ from such capitalist economic institutions as the market and the joint-stock company, the logic of the power game which takes place in both settings is quite similar. In both institutions power will be a function of the capacity to enter decisive coalitions with other players: individuals, political parties, stockholders or groups of stockholders. Power indices may therefore be employed in order to reveal aspects of the strategic gaming that takes place both in representative assemblies and at yearly stockholders' meetings. This article discusses and compares various quantitative measures of voting power in the two kinds of voting bodies.     

Paradoxes of Constitutional Democracy

Drawing on the work of Frank Michelman and Jürgen Habermas, I outline two interconnected paradoxes of constitutional democracy. The paradox of the founding prevents a purely democratic constitution from being founded, because the procedures needed to secure its legitimacy cannot be spontaneously self-generated. It displays an infinite regression of procedures presupposing procedures. The paradox of dynamic indeterminacy heads off any attempt to resolve this problem through constitutional amendment. It shows that we cannot evaluate the legitimacy of a dynamically evolving constitution based on projections of its future development. To do so, we would need a stronger basis for making probabilistic judgments about the constitution's future path. After exploring the problems of using constitutional patriotism as such a basis, I outline an alternative built on the ideas of dynamic constitutionalism and reflexive citizenship. It shows how a dynamically evolving constitution can promote its own legitimacy from within, simultaneously resolving both paradoxes.