Independent and competing agencies: An effective way to control government

Controlling government is a primary focus of the politico-economic literature. Recently, various political institutions have been analyzed from this perspective, most importantly balanced budget rules, fiscal federalism, and direct democracy. However, one type of institution has been neglected so far: elected competitors to the government. Such institutional competition between the government and an independent agency can be found at the Swiss local level, where finance Commissions compete with the government. In some parts of Switzerland, local finance commissions can ex ante criticize government projects and bring alternative policy proposals onto the political agenda, which are then voted on by the citizens. Thus, they become strong competitors to the government. We econometrically investigate this institutional setting by comparing the 26 Swiss cantons. We find the power of the local finance commission to have an economically relevant, statistically significant and robust negative effect on the tax burden and on public expenditures.     

Is Britain Facing a Crisis of Democracy?

This article contributes to the debate in this journal about the state of British democracy. I criticise the tendency to use a ‘demand–supply’ dichotomy in interpreting the strong distrust experienced by institutions and politicians, and especially the idea that all the blame for current problems is to be attributed to the inadequateness of the British political tradition (BPT). By referring to international data on democracy and to recent British trends in both public attitudes and institutional innovations, a more nuanced picture on the state of democracy emerges. I argue that the BPT is not incompatible with incremental changes that have already introduced innovations in the way politics works in Britain today, and that the task of empowering citizens is one of the most delicate aspects in this process of innovation.     

Globalisation,liberal theory and the spatiality of governance in Sub‐Saharan Africa

The debate over development and democracy is a highly charged one, because the two concepts are open to such divergent interpretation. In recent years, while academics were discovering globalisation, the major international financial institutions have been championing a particular version of the democracy‐development debate centred upon the notion of governance. They contend that democratisation and institutional reforms must occur before or alongside economic development. This article argues that their vision of governance is highly normative and simplifies reality for ideological purposes. This revolves around a particular reading of liberal political economy which sees political institutions as neutral arbiters and civil society as a space of freedom for plural voices. These formulations are implicitly spatial since they see political space as divided neatly into the international, national and local and thereby ignore the multiple power flows between these sites. The article concludes by trying to reformulate some of these concerns around the idea of the developmental state and progressive democracy.     

Sweden: The Fall of the Strong State

From the 1930s to the 1980s, Swedish politics was based on the assumption that social change could be accomplished through a specific political and administrative process. National politicians decided the aims of policy, government commissions of inquiry engaged experts who compiled available knowledge, Parliament turned the resulting proposal into law, a civil service agency implemented the policy and local authorities put it into effect. This rationalistic model of social steering can be called 'the strong state'. This article documents the fall of the strong state. It also argues that these changes to the output side of government have troubling im-plications for the operation of democracy. The reason is that the strong state model provided citizens with a reasonably clear idea of how public policies were – or should be – produced and implemented. As a result of the strong state's decline, the link from elections to policy is partly obscure, partly broken. The question for the future is whether the strong state will be replaced by some new model that provides the necessary focal points for debates on public policy, or whether stable norms will remain absent due to an inherently obscure division of labour within Sweden's policy-making and administrative structures.     

International Organizations ICTs Policies: E‐Democracy and E‐Government for Political Development

New technologies provide new channels of access to political information and participation in decision‐making processes. This assumption is clearly important in the action plans and policies of International Organizations (World Bank, Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, United Nations), which have assumed a leadership role in the reform of political institutions. Starting from an analysis of the reasons that have brought the state and processes of institution building back into focus, this paper will reconstruct the International Organizations' vision of the transformative potential of new information technologies and their activity in this field. Particular attention will be devoted to e‐democracy and e‐government as policies to build democracy in developing countries.     

Against Localism: Does Decentralising Power to Communities Fail Minorities?

The continued decline in levels of political engagement among British citizens has led many politicians, commentators and academics from across the political spectrum to advocate a move toward a more direct form of democracy via some kind of localism. The claim is that citizens feel increasingly estranged from the democratic process, and from those organisations on which they have historically relied to represent them within the political system. Consequently, localists argue, there now exists a gap between the people, the institutions which are supposed to work on their behalf, and the decisions made in their name, so the system needs to be reformed in such a way as to give individuals and local communities more of a direct input into the decision-making process. Calls for a more direct form of democracy via localism are popular among members of the progressive left and the 'new Conservative' right, and have become so dominant in political discourse that it is often suggested that 'we are all localists now'. This article raises questions about the localist agenda, and suggests that the adoption of a more direct form of democracy in Britain may not only fail to address the decline in political engagement, but may also result in the exclusion, marginalisation, and oppression of minority groups.     

Enforcement or Ethical Capacity: Considering the Role of State Ethics Commissions at the Millennium

Looking back on the twentieth century, the American public has witnessed numerous incidents of unethical behavior by a variety of federal, state, and local government officials. Ongoing cases of political and bureaucratic corruption raise questions about what governments are doing to prevent these "ethical lapses." Most state governments have comprehensive ethics laws and ethics commissions to enforce these laws. Very few studies have examined the role of ethics commissions in state government. This article stems from research conducted during 1997–98 involving more than 60 anonymous interviews with ethics officials and stakeholders in Connecticut, Florida, and New York. This analysis reveals that ethics commissions are instruments and symbols, policemen and consultants, politicians and neutral technicians, and interpreters of and prisoners to the ethics laws. The article concludes with 10 recommendations to improve ethics enforcement and the ethics-building capacity of state governments as society enters the next millennium.     

Electoral institutions, partisan status, and political support in Lesotho

Does the introduction of proportionality in electoral systems help to boost popular evaluations of democracy? This article takes advantage of an electoral reform in Lesotho to conduct a natural experiment. We trace shifts over time in popular political support, using Afrobarometer data collected before and after reform to measure mass satisfaction with democracy and public trust in political institutions. We find both direct and indirect effects. In the aggregate, Lesotho's transition from a majoritarian to a mixed electoral system is directly associated with increased levels of citizen support for the country's state and regime. Importantly, however, formal institutions have only indirect effects at the individual level, where a person's informal partisan status – as a member of a winning majority or losing minority – mediates the impacts of institutional change.     

Elite strategies and incremental policy change: The expansion of primary education in India

This article analyzes India's recent enactment of universal primary education. This programmatic policy change is puzzling given the clientelistic features of Indian democracy. Drawing on interviews and official documents, I demonstrate the catalytic role of committed state elites, who introduced incremental reforms over three decades. These officials operated beneath the political radar, layering small‐scale initiatives on top of the mainstream school system. Following India's globalization in the 1990s, support from the World Bank gave committed officials the political opportunity to experiment with new programs in underperforming regions, which they progressively extended across the country. These incremental reforms supplied the institutional blueprint for India's universal primary education program. Along with state initiative from above, civil society mobilized from below, using the judiciary to hold the state legally responsible for policy implementation. Reforms exposed acute gaps in service delivery, propelling new civic demands for state accountability.     

The End of a Distinctive Model of Democracy? Country‐diverse Orientations among Young Adult Scandinavians

International research into democracy has uncovered severe changes in patterns of political engagement and participation. Even political institutions such as political parties and voluntary organisations have undergone major alterations. Scandinavian democracies hitherto have been regarded as exceptionally stable and strong due to their homogenous qualities of mass-based class politics, strong political parties, high degree of associationalism, peaceful labour market relations and developed welfare policies. However, three official democratic audits recently revealed that Scandinavian democracies have also been severely affected by both exogenous and endogenous constraints. In addition, Scandinavian democracies appear to be diverging heterogeneously from the assumed 'pan-Scandinavian' model. This article examines whether the distinctive country characteristics uncovered by the commissions can be traced among young adults. Three dimensions of attitudes of young adults are analysed – political trust, political engagement and political equality – using survey data obtained from students in academic programmes at the upper secondary level in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 2000. Generally, the results not only confirm a country diversity that threatens to jeopardise Scandinavian homogeneity, since the Danes stand out as superior in most measures of political participation, but also, from an international perspective, young Scandinavians cannot be characterised as the most politically interested or participative between elections or even as the most multiculturally tolerant among today's youth.     

Political Institutions and Pollution: Evidence from Coal‐Fired Power Generation

What is the relationship between political institutions and air pollution generated by the power sector? Here we focus on the association between democracy and power generated from coal, the most polluting of all fossil fuels. Using a new dataset on coal‐fired power plants commissioned between 1980 and 2016 in 71 countries, we find that the relationship between democracy and coal varies according to the environmental Kuznets curve logic. Democratic political institutions at lower levels of economic development are correlated with increased commissioning of coal power plants, as governments seek to appeal to an electorate prioritizing economic growth and affordable energy access. As a country becomes richer, democracy comes to have a negative association with coal power, as clean air becomes a more salient issue for the public.     

Direct Democracy and Women's Political Engagement

What are the conditions that promote gender equality in political participation? In this article, I propose that the presence of direct democracy expands gender equality in political participation by signaling the system's openness to women's voice, confirming their political competency, and highlighting their stake in political decisions. To test this argument, I leverage a quasi‐experiment in Sweden in the aftermath of the introduction of universal suffrage, where the type of municipal political institutions was determined by a population threshold. My findings lend strong support to the effect of direct democracy on the political inclusion of women. I find that the gender gap in electoral participation was smaller in municipalities using direct democracy than in similarly sized municipalities that only had representative institutions.     

Military Policies and the State System as Impediments to Democracy

Military policies impose severe limits on democracy and call into question the viability of the liberal democratic state. Military mentality undermines democratic culture; the complexity of warfare defies public understanding; speed required in decision-making prevents public debate; secrecy misleads the public while often disguising executive abuse of power; vested interests in high military expenditure skew political processes; and concentration of power among a few obstructs democratic participation. Even state sovereignty, which military policies bolster, obstructs democracy because interdependence requires governments to be held accountable, through transnational law and institutions, to 'foreign' as well as 'domestic' citizens since both are affected by national decisions.     

Political Competition,Agenda Power,and Incentives to Innovate: An Empirical Examination of Vested‐Interest Theory

Technological innovations are by no means Pareto‐improving. I build on the argument that incumbent innovators can use political means to block rival innovations by emphasizing that the competitiveness of political system and some political institutions may diminish their ability to do so. I specify an institutional mechanism of agenda power, which provides newcomers with an improved ability to enter the game. The number of agenda power holders varies significantly among political systems, electoral systems, and administrative structures. With a sample of about 100 countries and across 20 years I show that politically competitive regimes, majoritarian electoral rules, and federal structures supply more holders of agenda power in comparison to their counterparts and, other things being equal, produce more innovations.     

An Examination of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and New Political Participation

The mobilisation of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on New Years Day 1994 in Mexico attracted considerable attention from those concerned with the democratic deficits of neoliberal globalisation and the increasing sense of individual powerlessness as states synchronise economic and public policy with the ideas and institutions of global capital. The paper argues that as a critical social movement the EZLN explores the meaning and practice of economic, political and social democracy. The EZLN practises a politics of radical democracy that incorporates a variety of strategies for enriching the democratic project. However, the EZLN's democratic project has little in common with the inclusive democracy project and yet the EZLN's project of radical democracy does cultivate a useful way of rethinking the site and nature of democracy in an age of globalisation when such institutions seem so increasingly inept.     

Intra-Party Politics and Public Opinion: How Candidate Selection Processes Affect Citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Scholars often mention the centrality of parties for the democratic political system. Indeed political parties are indispensable institutions for the linkage between state and society, and should not remain absent in any comparative analysis of citizens’ political attitudes. Yet, only rarely do scholars study how parties shape people’s opinion about democracy. This article seeks to amend this lacuna and examine empirically how party level characteristics, specifically the nature of a party’s candidate selection procedure, relate to the level of satisfaction with democracy among citizens. The authors constructed a cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 130 political parties in 28 country-sessions to examine whether citizens that vote for democratically organized parties are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country. Additionally, this relationship is examined more closely in Israel and Belgium, two countries where candidate selection procedures show substantial variation and where politicians have made a strong claim for intraparty democratization. Both the cross-national as well as the country-specific analyses indicate that democratic candidate selection are indeed associated with greater satisfaction with democracy.     

Local community on trial

Abstract

While plenty has been written about the reinvention of the social by the Third Way as a new governmentality of control, consensus, and social integration, less has been said about its subtle elision of social and the local, and the implications of this elision for urban and regional regeneration. This is the theme taken up by this paper, beginning with a critical appraisal of the recent turn by New Labour to community cohesion and social capital as a means of overcoming local poverty and disadvantage. It shows how the social has come to be redefined as community, localized, and thrown back at hard-pressed areas as both cause and solution in the area of social, political, and economic regeneration. The second half of the paper develops an alternative designation of the local-social that is less instrumentalist, decidedly a-moral (though equally ethical), agonistically political, and geographically unconstrained. It argues for a return to ideas of agonistic democracy and the society of commitments and connections so thoroughly repudiated by new versions of market social democracy.     

Local Democracy and Political Leadership: Drawing a Map

Different concepts of local democracy imply different tasks, functions and reform strategies for local political leadership. This article draws a map of local democracy that entails four non-exclusive components: representative democracy, user democracy, network democracy and participatory democracy. After reflecting on the nature of local democracy in governance and the functions of political leadership generally, the article considers in turn the bases of constructing the common good within each form of democracy. Special attention is given to the role of political leadership within these forms.     

Clientelism and polarized voting: empirical evidence

One must take country-specific institutional features into account when analyzing former communist countries’ transformation process to new political institutions. We do so for post-communist Albania, where the regional and cultural polarization that has existed for centuries has evolved to clientelism in the new democracy. We show how clientelistic parties give rise to very particular voting patterns. These reveal major differences across regions not only in party choice but also in voters’ responses to government policies. These responses depend on the party in government and on the region concerned. This is in sharp contrast with results obtained when applying the same model to a large number of more advanced democracies with similar electoral institutions. A proper evaluation of democratization in Albania thus requires looking beyond the formal institutions governing elections and taking clientelism and its effect on voter behavior into account.