The political obstacles to economic reform in North Korea: The ultra cautious strategy in comparative perspective

As a result of the financial crisis, some commentators see the reform process in the East Asian states as an outcome of the disciplining behaviour of financial markets that will lead to the emergence of a neoliberal form of capitalism. The Malaysian experience suggests, however, that progress to neoliberal forms of economic organization will not be inevitable, despite governments having to increasingly accommodate global markets. In Malaysia, the degree to which a neoliberal adjustment response could be embraced was limited by domestic political factors. First, the government needed to maintain the ethnic based distributive policy that favours ethnic Malays with material entitlements for reasons of state and regime security. Second, the state was not wholly insulated from a key social group that emerged as a result of the ethnic-based distributive policy, namely an elite Malay corporate group. A third reason was economic nationalism, a major component of Prime Minister Mahathir's vision for the country that stressed the building up of Malaysian corporations and conglomerates. Access to domestic sources of funds for adjustment and the centralization of power in the government, particularly in the office of the Prime Minister, facilitated this process of defending national economic arrangements, at least during the period in question. The limited liberalization of the ethnic based distributive policy did not, however, imply a shift in the ideological and policy agenda towards complete embrace of neoliberal norms and practices. The imposition of capital controls, although announced as a temporary measure to allow space for the government to pursue its preferred course of adjustment, further indicates that the commitment to free markets in Malaysia is instrumental. The Malaysian case suggests that movement towards neoliberal forms of economic organization as a result of the financial crisis may be limited and is not inevitable.     

The gender gap in comparative perspective

Abstract. Although the 'gender gap' in Western democratic publics has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention, one interesting anomaly has not been addressed. At the level of many specific issues, women appear to be more liberal than men. However, at the level of general ideological orientations, women are either more conservative, or there are no significant gender differences. We explore this disjuncture between levels of cognitive abstraction through the 1984 Eurobarometer data and conclude that the left-right continuum appears to have a different meaning for men and for women. Women seem much more likely to regard the left-right space as referring to 'preservationist' values of religion and cultural homogeneity, and men conceptualize the left-right space in economic and 'New Polities' terms.     

Democratic legitimacy in regional economic organizations: the European Union in comparative perspective

Regional organizations have been widely criticized for lacking democratic legitimacy, but these criticisms have been rather ad hoc, concerned with single case studies and reliant on unclear standards or metrics. Are all organizations similarly deficient? And how does the European Union (EU), the target par excellence of the criticisms, fare in comparative perspective? In this paper, we take a first step towards answering these questions by leveraging the rich debate on the EU to identify several institutional dimensions of democratic legitimacy and operationalizing them for comparative analysis. We then investigate the most important regional economic organizations (REOs) in the world. Our findings are three-fold: (i) there is systematic variation across REOs, with a group doing rather well, one mixed, and one poorly; (ii) procedural dimensions fare better than those related to representation or local self-determination; (iii) no organization exhibits or lacks legitimacy in all dimensions. These results qualify the perception that democratic legitimacy deficits are indiscriminately pervasive and indicate that the EU belongs to the most democratically legitimate group.     

Barometer elections in comparative perspective

This paper develops a conceptual framework for studying the performance of the government in what we term ‘barometer elections’. Barometer elections are defined as elections that reflect changes in citizens' attitudes toward the government in response to changing political and economic conditions, absent the opportunity to install a new executive. We classify British by-elections and German Land elections as barometer elections and test a general model that incorporates the electoral cycle; public opinion toward the government; economic conditions; and previous performance as determinants of election outcomes. Considering both short-term and long-term changes in public attitudes and economic performance in the empirical analysis, we find that barometer election outcomes can be explained with a similar set of independent variables across systems.     

Swiss corporatism in comparative perspective

Compared with the trajectories of corporatism in other Western European countries, Swiss social partnership is remarkably stable. How can this be explained? In this article Swiss corporatism is hypothesised to share many of the important facilitating and sustaining circumstances, institutions and traditions of European corporatism. On the other hand, it is different with regard to the major challenges facing corporatist interest intermediation. These challenges are still missing, to a large extent, in Switzerland.     

Ideology and party support in comparative perspective

Abstract. From the original Downs (1957) conceptualization to the Enelow and Hinich (1984) reformulation, ideology has been the key organizing dimension for electoral competition in the spatial model. The unidimensional spatial model is best suited to responsible multiparty systems where left-right position is known to be an important determinant of individual political behaviour. We contrast the traditional spatial model with the directional model recently proposed by Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989) and test the models using data from six northern European democracies. Based on 57 different parties, the results suggest that even in this unidimensional ideological context the cleavage-oriented directional model provides a better explanation of mass attachments to political parties.     

The Japanese House of Councillors election 1998 in comparative perspective

The Japanese House of Councillors is elected by a two-vote electoral system that is a unique combination of non-unique components. As such, it provides a useful case to examine theories about the impact of electoral systems on the number of parties that will compete nationally and within each constituency, and on the level of proportionality. The election is considered within a comparative context provided by two-vote elections in Germany, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales. It emerges that the level of vote-splitting in Germany, though extensively studied, is relatively low in comparative terms. The extent and impact of malapportionment are also examined.     

Party identification and party closeness in comparative perspective

The present analysis uses data from 1974 and 1981 U. S. cross sections, which incorporate a panel, to compare the standard NES measure of party identification (ID) with a measure of partisanship derived from a party closeness question widely employed in cross-national research. Important features of the two scales are examined by transforming the closeness measure into a scale of very close, fairly close, not very close, and no preference corresponding to the seven-point ID scale. The scales are highly correlated and are similar in their reliability. More than 75% of the independents in the ID scale choose a party in the closeness version, and over half of these select the fairly close category. Respondents do not volunteer that they are independents when that alternative is not stated in the question.     

Donald Trump and right-wing populists in comparative perspective

ABSTRACT

We compare sources of Donald Trump’s appeal in the 2016 US presidential campaign to the appeal of right-populists from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. We compare the appeal of right-populist to center-right candidates in each case (as measured with feeling thermometers) and test hypotheses about how the appeal of right-populists differs from that of center-right candidates. Standard predictors of affect toward right-of-center candidates were generally less relevant as a basis of affect toward right-populist candidates. This comparative perspective demonstrates that Trump’s appeal was based on racial resentment, anti-immigration sentiments and anxiety. Affect toward Trump and other right-populists from these Anglo-democracies fits patterns previously observed in Europe, a pattern that appears to be world-wide.     

The political rationalities of regionalism: APEC and the EU in comparative perspective

Abstract

The essay is a comparative analysis of APEC and the EU, which looks at the particular sorts of economic orders these institutions are helping to create. It is argued that the two regions display some noteworthy differences that result from different approaches to the problem of economic governance. These differences reflect much more than the relative degree and level of regional institutionalization; they flow from different ‘political rationalities’ that are themselves a function of the very different liberal and illiberal polities in Europe and East Asia. Our key theoretical innovation is to use the framework of political rationality to explain different regional approaches to economic governance; more specifically we argue that the EU and the East Asian members of APEC may be understood as respectively subscribing to broadly conceived liberal and cameralist approaches to economic governance which are in turn reflected in the design of regional institutions.     

Third party decline in the UK: The SNP and SDP in comparative perspective

The failure of ‘third’ parties to displace their larger rivals is a consistent (although not universal) feature of competitive democracies which have simple majority electoral systems. It is argued that there are structural features intrinsic to most third parties which tend to accelerate the process of decline once it has set in. Because of their reliance on individual members, these parties put great stress on individual participation and provide the opportunities for it. As a result, they are particularly subject to the effects of internal competition which electoral decline is likely to intensify. The study tests this hypothesis by looking at two cases of third party decline, and concludes that the mass branch party format is ill‐able to cope with electoral failure.     

The comparative endurance and efficiency of religion: a public choice perspective

Public Choice - All of the major religious confessions existing today have outlasted every single secular ruling regime known in human history. That observation poses an interesting puzzle for...     

Understanding unequal turnout: Education and voting in comparative perspective

Well-educated citizens vote more frequently than the poorly educated in some countries, including the USA. However, in many countries, no such differences are observed. One classical explanation of the presence or absence of this inequality in voting is that the strength of left-wing forces sharpens or reduces it. An alternative explanation is that some institutional arrangements and contextual features disproportionately affect the voter participation of some individuals depending on their resources, thus shaping turnout inequality. These theories are tested using multilevel modeling with data from 28 advanced industrial democracies. Compulsory voting reduces inequalities because under this system quasi-universal turnout is achieved. In addition, the poorly educated vote more frequently when the voting procedure is easy and when there are few political parties, thus reducing turnout inequality. However, strong left-wing parties and trade unions are not associated with more equal turnout.     

The impact of candidate selection rules and electoral vulnerability on legislative behaviour in comparative perspective

Legislators are political actors whose main goal is to get re-elected. They use their legislative repertoire to help them cater to the interests of their principals. It is argued in this article that we need to move beyond treating electoral systems as monolithic entities, as if all legislators operating under the same set of macro-rules shared the same set of incentives. Rather, we need to account for within-system variation – namely, candidate selection rules and individual electoral vulnerability. Using a most different systems design, Germany, Ireland and Portugal are leveraged with both cross-system and within-system variation. An original dataset of 345,000 parliamentary questions is used. Findings show that candidate selection rules blur canonical electoral system boundaries. Electoral vulnerability has a similar effect in closed-list and mixed systems, but not in preferential voting settings.     

激励相容视角下的循环经济发展

循环经济是发展中的人类反思发展模式的思想,能够克服传统的经济增长模式带来的诸如环境污染、资源过度消耗的问题,从而能够构建和谐的人与自然的关系,这是经济发展方式转变、降低经济发展代价的途径.将激励搞对,实现利益相容是推进循环经济进程中应当把握的原则.