From parliamentary pay to party funding: The acceptability of informal institutions in advanced democracies

While direct state funding of political parties has been a prominent theme in cross‐national research over the last decade, we still know little about party strategies to access state resources that are not explicitly earmarked for partisan usage. This article looks at one widespread but often overlooked informal party practice: the ‘taxing’ of MP salaries – that is, the regular transfer of fixed salary shares to party coffers. Building on notions of informal institutions developed in work on new democracies, the theoretical approach specifies factors that shape the acceptability of this legally non‐enforceable intra‐organisational practice. It is tested through a selection model applied to a unique dataset covering 124 parties across 19 advanced democracies. Controlling for a range of party‐ and institutional‐level variables, it is found that the presence of a taxing rule and the collection of demanding tax shares are more common in leftist parties (high internal acceptability) and in systems in which the penetration of state institutions by political parties is intense (high external acceptability).     

To pay or not to pay: A model of international defaults

Most lenders in international financial markets accede to reschedule overdue payments when sovereign borrowers fail to meet repayment requirements rather than foreclose and force a default. This practice provides borrowers with strong incentives to avoid prompt payment and to sak rescheduling instead. Because lenders cannot distinguish between borrowers who are unable, and those who are merely unwilling, to repay the loan, they will agree to reschedule loans of borrowers who would choose to pay rather than face outright default. This paper augments the traditional lender-borrower model by explicitly considering rescheduling, in addition to default and repayment, and places it in a game theoretic context. It develops a theory of unwillingness to pay, as opposed to inability to pay, and derives strategies by which lenders can at least partially protect themselves against rescheduling requests by borrowers unwilling, but not unable, to fulfill their obligation.     

把公开选拔提升到选拔公开——基于电视直播选拔公开模式的探讨

通过电视直播面向全社会公开干部选拔过程,是近些年出现的公开选拔领导干部模式。这一模式有利于推动民主政治发展,提高干部人事工作的民主公开程度,为干部选拔中的群众监督提供了良好平台,为改变干部"官本位"从政意识奠定了坚实基础。其存在的问题主要是组织和经济成本比较高,哪些职务岗位适合选拔公开还需要权衡,考评的内容与方式的科学性也有待进一步提高。改革和完善的对策是:将选拔公开纳入公开选拔党政领导干部的常规工作,选择适当的岗位实施选拔公开,探索提高群众的参与程度与选择权,完善面试答辩的工作内容与程序,尝试电视直播以外的选拔公开方式。     

Does it pay to move from welfare to work?

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act requires welfare recipients to look for work and has made it more difficult for nonworking recipients to remain on the welfare rolls. In addition, the economic boom of the 1990s and changes in federal and state policies have raised the net income gain associated with moving from welfare to work. This paper analyzes data from a panel survey of single mothers, all of whom received welfare in February 1997. In 1999, those who left welfare and were working had a higher household income and lower poverty rate, experienced a similar level of material hardship, engaged in fewer activities to make ends meet, and had lower expectations of experiencing hardship in the near future than did nonworking welfare recipients. Estimations of fixed‐effect regressions of income that control for both observable and unobservable time‐invariant characteristics show that monthly net income increases by $2.63 for every additional hour of work effort. About 60 percent of the observed monthly income difference between wage‐reliant and welfare‐reliant mothers can be attributed to differences in their work effort. Thus, after welfare reform, it does pay to move from welfare to work. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

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.     

From Conversation to Conference

The Alfred Kazin Centennial Symposium in May 2015 took place with no external funding on a budget totaling less than $200. Despite these overwhelming limitations, this "symposium on a shoestring" proved a rich intellectual experience for all. Its success is a tribute not only to the participants but also to the example of Alfred Kazin himself and his devotion to the life of the mind and the humanistic calling.     

From pluralism to multiculturalism

Five of his many books have been published by Transaction Publishers, mostly recently the forthcoming paperback edition of Ideology and the Ideologists.He is at work on a sociointellectual and psychological biography of John Dewey.     

From science to survival

He has written widely in his field and is author of The Search for Society; The Violent Imagination; The Red Lamp of Incest; Kinship and Marriage; Encounter with Anthropology,and co-author of The Imperial Animal.(with Lionel Tiger). This is an abridged version of the author’s new introduction to Encounter with Anthropology,to be published by Transaction.     

From ideology to pragmatism

He is editor-in-chief of Praxis International. His books include In Search of Democracy in Socialism; Between Ideals and Reality;and, forthcoming From Marxism and Bolshevism to Gorbachev’s Perestroika.     

From agribusiness to agriculture

Abstract

One way in which colonialism injured Africa was through the rupture it caused in the integration of the civil with the political aspect of her social life. That integration was one of the strong points of traditional society. Indeed, in traditional life the distinction between the state and civil society was largely inoperative. This seamless‐ness was, however, not complete. It was still possible in traditional times to distinguish between societies with states and societies without state apparatus. The Zulu of South Africa are an example of societies with an organized state, while the Tallensi of Ghana exemplify societies without state apparatus.