Who will deregulate the deregulators?

A well-intentioned and fully informed regulator may determine that the optimal policy is to deregulate the market, yet the regulator may be constrained from doing so. In this condition, deregulatory policies originate in exogenous shocks to the regulator’s choice environment. Entrepreneurship in political and economic markets is a primary source of institutional change that promotes deregulation.     

Who Pays the Piper?

Abstract

This paper, using research from the UK and comparable US studies, looks at the growth in party fundraising, ethics of the process, impact on electoral systems, candidates, parties, campaigning and methods of obtaining funds (one donor in the UK has recently agreed to give £5 million to the Conservative Party because they are anti EU whilst Labour gained £1 million from the smoking lobby in 1997). It then links this to a growth in strategic public affairs and outlines the direct causal link between political lobbying and party fundraising.     

Who cares about the public sphere?

This article offers the first empirical and cross-national analysis of citizens’ views about the democratic importance of the public sphere. We first identify three normative functions that public spheres are expected to perform in representative democracies: they provide voice to alternative perspectives, they empower citizens to criticise political authorities and they disseminate information on matters of public interest. We then argue that citizens develop differentiated views about the importance of these democratic functions, depending on (1) their ability to influence political decisions through public debate, and (2) the extent to which voice, critique and information address democratic problems they particularly care about. Drawing on Wave 6 of the European Social Survey, the statistical analysis indicates that citizens in most European countries consider the public sphere very important for democracy, especially its role as a supplier of reliable information. However, certain groups tend to care more about different aspects of the public sphere. More educated citizens are more likely to assign greater importance to all three functions. Members of cultural and sexual minorities are more likely to emphasise the importance of giving voice to alternative perspectives, while citizens dissatisfied with the government are more likely to prioritise public criticism and access to reliable information. Finally, in countries with more democratic public spheres, differences based on education and minority status are wider, while differences based on government satisfaction disappear. These findings support the claim that citizens care more about the public sphere when they can effectively influence political decision making through public debate or when the public sphere addresses democratic problems that are especially important to them. Moreover, our results indicate that citizens see some of the functions that public spheres perform as core aspects of democracy, comparable in importance to free and fair elections and the rule of law. The article thus advances an empirically grounded defence of the centrality of public debate for democracy.     

Who will vote quadratically? Voter turnout and votes cast under quadratic voting

Who will vote quadratically in large-N elections under quadratic voting (QV)? First, who will vote? Although the core QV literature assumes that everyone votes, turnout is endogenous. Drawing on other work, we consider the representativeness of endogenously determined turnout under QV. Second, who will vote quadratically? Conditional on turning out, we examine reasons that, in large-N elections, the number of votes that an individual casts may deviate substantially from that under pure, rational QV equilibrium play. Because turnout itself is driven by other factors, the same determinants may influence how voters who do turn out choose the quantity of votes to cast. Independently, the number of votes actually cast may deviate dramatically from pure QV predictions because of the complex and refined nature of equilibrium play. Most plausibly, voting behavior and outcomes would be determined predominately by social and psychological forces, would exhibit few of the features emphasized in the analysis of hyper-rational equilibrium play, and would have consequential properties that require a different research agenda to bring into focus. Some of our analysis also has implications for voting behavior under other procedures, including one person, one vote.     

What are the best quorum rules? A laboratory investigation

Public Choice - Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device added most commonly to majority...     

Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions?

Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first is that in deciding a case, justices must resolve a concrete dispute, and that they may have preferences over which party wins the specific case confronting them. The second is that justices who are dissatisfied with an opinion are free to write concurrences (and dissents). We demonstrate that both features undermine the bargaining power of the Court's median and shift influence towards the coalition median. An empirical analysis of concurrence behavior provides significant support for the model.     

Mixed-member proportional electoral systems – the best of both worlds?

Mixed electoral systems are often associated with the hope of combining proportional election outcomes with a concentrated party system, and thus achieving the best of both worlds in electoral system design. It is especially the mixed-member proportional (MMP) variant that has retained a good reputation in this regard. Via a comparative analysis, we analyze whether or not the general praise for MMP systems is corroborated empirically. Our results show that the performance of MMP systems is heavily influenced by technical details, and elections conducted under MMP vary broadly with regard to possible proportionality–concentration combinations.     

Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict

Postulating grievance‐based mechanisms, several recent studies show that politically excluded ethnic groups are more likely to experience civil conflict. However, critics argue that endogeneity may undermine this finding since governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independently of conflict. Focusing on postcolonial states, we exploit differences in colonial empires' strategies of rule to model which ethnic groups were represented in government at the time of independence. This identification strategy allows estimating the exogenous effect of inclusiveness on conflict. We find that previous studies have tended to understate the conflict‐dampening impact of political inclusion. This finding suggests that grievances have been prematurely dismissed from conventional explanations of conflict, and that policy makers should consider conflict resolution methods based on power sharing and group rights.