Can markets be expected to prevent themselves from self‐destruction?

Even if competitive markets have shown themselves to be the most efficient organizational form for creating economic efficiency, the question of how they can avoid destructive influence from agents with opportunistic motives remains unresolved. Different institutional approaches have argued that to be efficient, markets need to be embedded in a set of formal and informal institutions. Because such institutions will in the long run make all market agents better off, they are labeled efficient institutions. Contrary to what is argued in neoclassical economics, it is unlikely that such institutions will be created endogenously by market agents because the institutions are to be understood as genuine public goods. Moreover, if such institutions have been established, we should expect market agents to face a collective action problem when sustaining them, leading to the destruction of the institutions. The conclusion is that if left to themselves, markets should be understood as inherently self‐destructive.     

Bush,Blair and Hitler? A review of comparative self‐presentation

• This article (while emphatic in stressing the absence of any political or ethical connection between two recent governments, those of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and one historic one, the genocidal empire of Adolf Hitler), argues that the Nazi regime did in fact anticipate many communications methods pursued subsequently. The Nazis sponsored a communications revolution. The conscious production of political imagery and tableaux, government via symbolic strategies, the rhetoricizing of civic culture and the centrality of the rhetorical vision, all these have become part of our political truth as well as the Nazis'. Such a reality, then as now, is underpinned by spin, rapid rebuttal, duplicity and the construction of a nirvana of statistics and benevolent data. The ultimate fate of all these regimes was bound up with an ethos of government that placed symbolism centre‐ stage; a parallel universe of imagery and symbolism is no basis on which to construct an edifice of permanence. The methodologies of these regimes do sustain comparison, the ends, of course, do not.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are Parental Welfare Work Requirements Good for Disadvantaged Children? Evidence From Age‐of‐Youngest‐Child Exemptions

This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low‐income children's cognitive and social‐emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules—namely, age‐of‐youngest‐child exemptions—as a source of quasi‐experimental variation in first‐year maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate the impact of work‐requirement‐induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the reduced form and instrumental variables estimates reveal sizable negative effects of maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breastfeed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to nonparental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life.     

E‐Participation and Environmental Protection: Are Local Governments Really Committed?

There is widespread acceptance that current institutions are inadequate to address the challenges of sustainable development. At the same time, there is an urgent need to build awareness and increase capacity for promoting action with respect to environmental protection at the local level. This article analyzes the Web sites of the environment departments of European local governments that signed the Aalborg Commitments to determine the extent to which they are using the Internet to promote e‐participation in environmental topics and to identify the drivers of these developments. Potential drivers are public administration style, urban vulnerability, external pressures, and local government environmental culture. Findings confirm that e‐participation is a multifaceted concept. External pressures influence the transparency of environmental Web sites, while public administration style and local government environmental culture influence their interactivity.     

Models of E‐Government: Are They Correct? An Empirical Assessment

Research into e-government is relatively new. Nevertheless, much contemporary thinking and writing about e-government is driven by normative models that appeared less than a decade ago. The authors present empirical evidence from three surveys of local e-government in the United States to test whether these models are accurate or useful for understanding the actual development of e-government. They find that local e-government is mainly informational, with a few transactions but virtually no indication of the high-level functions predicted in the models. Thus, the models do not accurately describe or predict the development of e-government, at least among American local governments. These models, though intellectually interesting, are purely speculative, having been developed without linkage to the literature about information technology and government. The authors offer grounded observations about e-government that will useful to scholars and practitioners alike.     

What do we really know? The effect of reporting thresholds on inferences using environmental right‐to‐know data

Environmental right‐to‐know regulations require regulated entities to publicly disclose measures of environmental performance but exempt entities from these disclosure requirements if they manufacture, process, or use a chemical below some threshold level. Environmental right‐to‐know data are widely used to assess environmental performance by academics, regulators, non‐profit organizations, and the public. This paper uses data from Massachusetts to estimate the effect of reporting thresholds in environmental right‐to‐know programs on the validity of inferences using data from these programs. The analysis indicates that errors in inference introduced by reporting thresholds may be significant. Up to 40% of the observed decline in reported toxic releases in Massachusetts may be attributed to non‐reporting due to the reporting thresholds. In addition, quartile rankings of facilities may be in error up to 45% of the time when behavior around the reporting thresholds is not taken into account.     

Commercial‐in‐Confidence: An Obituary to Transparency?

This article addresses the issue of accountability and transparency in relation to the use of commercial-in-confidence clauses to withhold information. The issue is contentious. On the one hand some like the Senate Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee (SFPARC) argue that: 'Put simply there can be no accountability if there is no information' (SFPARC 2000).
On the other hand, an alternative view is: 'I think that the sanctity of contract ... [is] a fundamental pillar of our legal system, and if private businesses enter into contracts with governments that specify confidentiality, then that ought to be respected' (Paterson 1999).
This paper is an abridged version of a keynote address to CPA Australia (Queensland Division) Audit Intensive Day 2000, Brisbane Hilton, 10 November 2000.     

Expected utility or learned familiarity? The formation of voters' coalition preferences

In most modern parliamentary democracies, it is unlikely that single party governments will be formed, meaning that a voter's preferred party presumably has to share cabinet offices and negotiate policy compromises in a coalition government. This raises the question of how voters evaluate potential (coalition) governments, especially since recent studies have shown that coalition preferences influence voting behaviour. In this paper, we combine theories of voting behaviour, government formation and political learning to derive expectations regarding the factors that may impact voters' coalition preferences. We test our hypotheses by analysing survey data from the German federal and state levels. The results of a mixed logit regression analysis support our arguments: Voters' coalition preferences not only depend on the perceived policy distance between the positions of voters and the most distant party within combinations of parties, but also on predominant patterns of government formation.     

Are There Hidden Costs Associated With Conducting Layoffs? The Impact of Reduction‐in‐Force and Layoff Notices on Teacher Effectiveness

Few studies examine employee responses to layoff‐induced unemployment risk; none that we know of quantify the impact of job insecurity on individual employee productivity. Using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and Washington State during the Great Recession, we provide the first evidence about the impact of the layoff process on teacher productivity. In both sites we find that teachers impacted by the layoff process are less productive than those who do not face layoff‐induced job threat. LAUSD teachers who are laid off and then rehired to return to the district are less productive in the two years following the layoff. Washington teachers who are given a reduction‐in‐force (RIF) notice and are then not laid off have reduced effectiveness in the year of the RIF. We argue that these results are likely driven by impacts of the layoff process on teachers’ job commitment and present evidence to rule out alternate explanations.     

Anti‐elitist cyber parties?

In the digital age, new ways of interaction provide a new type of public sphere, which dramatically changes party politics. This not only includes the modernisation and professionalisation of mainstream political parties but also paves the way for new challengers and a new dimension of campaigning. The current examples, the Pirate Party, especially in Germany, and the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, show at least short‐term potential. The Pirate Party caused a media hype about the young activists. Grillo transcended the borders between comedy and politics without the helping hand of the traditional media, which ignored him. The threat for representative democracies lies in the growing anti‐elitism, which combines the Pirates and Grillo. Mainstream political parties should indicate that the claim for a new participatory politics beyond right and left is a utopian one, while attacking the way that party politics works. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the analysis of political competition?

This presidential address assesses the crisis of the Downsian model of political competition in light of the mounting evidence on policy divergence and evaluates the possibility that the new theories of politicians’ quality and political selection provide an alternative theoretical conceptualization of political competition. Based on a critical review of the literature and on the author’s works on content analysis of policy speeches, income redistribution, politicians’ quality, and political legislation cycles, this address concludes that multidimensional Downsian models of political competition are adequate to explain policy divergence and points out the serious theoretical and empirical problems that models of political selection have to solve.     

Nowhere to Run,Nowhere to Hide? The 2010 General Election and the Defence of First‐past‐the‐post

The 2010 general election threw traditional arguments about electoral reform into chaos: defenders of the status quo suddenly found themselves defending outcomes the existing system is supposed to prevent, while advocates of reform were obliged to praise outcomes arising from current arrangements. This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of first‐past‐the‐post in the light of the 2010 result and asserts that—contrary to many claims—FPTP remains a defensible electoral system. In doing so, the article highlights the peculiar political circumstances attending the last general election, while reminding readers that other recent UK elections, conducted under other electoral systems, have not been free of serious anomalies.     

Participant or Spectator? Victim‐Focused Political Activity since 2010

The public significance of the victim has shifted over successive governments. Each party, when in power, has utilised and politicised the victim to support its policy and legislative agenda. However, on the whole, this attention has been reserved for those who are victims of serious crime (such as murder, sexual violence and domestic abuse) and not volume offences (such as burglary, criminal damage, theft). Recent years have seen the inquiry rising in popularity, a ‘quick political fix’ to satisfy victims—and the public—that action on societal ills is being taken. However, in so doing, successive governments have, perhaps inadvertently, tended to replicate the ‘hierarchy of victimisation’ that is witnessed in frontline criminal justice activities. This has the result of affording victims only a spectator role when policy and legislative changes are being developed in their name. By contrast, the actions taken in developing expert and practitioner‐led policy around victim experience have proved to be more ‘successful’ in generating lasting change. This article suggests that there is no single ‘right’ approach to involving victims in policy development, but that each particular incident or situation needs consideration as how most ‘effectively’ to involve first‐hand victim experience.     

How can ‘Britishness’ be Re‐made?

Modern Britishness is widely seen to be based on shared values like ‘fair play’, ‘tolerance’, and respect for ‘diversity’. Can such a ‘values‐based Britishness’ be effective as a national binding agent in an era of devolution and globalisation? The idea that a uniquely ‘British’ character is based on shared values of some kind is not new. The contemporary debate is framed by decisions made over a century ago in the Victorian era—when the decisive shift occurred from a British identity based on religious difference to one based on shared moral values. Through political rhetoric, legislation, and the courts, Victorian governments shaped and changed the character of Britishness. The same tools remain available to contemporary lawmakers in shaping a twenty‐first century Britishness that embraces modern universal values, but also defines some more uniquely British emotional connection points around which national identity can be built.     

Institutional Characteristics and Regime Survival: Why Are Semi‐Democracies Less Durable Than Autocracies and Democracies?

Previous studies report that semi‐democratic regimes are less durable than both democracies and autocracies. Still, mixing democratic and autocratic characteristics need not destabilize regimes, as three highly plausible alternative explanations of this correlation remain unaccounted for: (a) semi‐democracies emerge under conditions of political instability and social turmoil; (b) other regime characteristics explain duration; and (c) extant democracy measures do not register all regime changes. We elaborate on and test for these explanations, but find strikingly robust evidence that semi‐democracies are inherently less durable than both democracies and autocracies. “Semi‐democracies are particularly unstable political regimes” should thus be considered a rare stylized fact of comparative politics. The analysis yields several other interesting results. For instance, autocracies and semi‐democracies are equally likely to experience “liberalizing” regime changes more specifically, and once accounting for differences in degree of democracy, there is no robust evidence of differences in duration between military and single‐party regimes.