Violence,Nonviolence, and the Effects of International Human Rights Law

Under what conditions are individuals more likely to approve of human rights abuses by their governments? While various theoretical expectations have been offered about public approval of repression, many of them have not been directly tested. We analyze the effects of differing opposition tactics, differing government tactics, and legal constraints on approval of repression through a series of survey experiments in India, Israel, and Argentina. Our results indicate that violent action by opposition groups consistently increases support for government repression. In the context of contentious politics, we find that the effects of international law vary by national context. While our respondents in India were less likely to approve of their government when told the government violated international law, the same information likely increased approval of the government in our Israel experiment. The findings provide insights into the microfoundations of existing theories and suggest areas for theory refinement.     

The politics of local government reform in rural Bangladesh

Several changes have been introduced in the system of local government in rural Bangladesh following the country's independence. Examination reveals that they were changes only in nomenclature, and did not result in significant improvements. The constant effort by the central government to retain control over local bodies, and the tendency of the ruling elite not to disturb the existing local government system, have worked to the detriment of reforms. The existing local government system failed to satisfy the aspirations of the rural Bangladeshis for increased participation in local affairs. After the first change of government in Bangladesh, the new ruling group felt the need for a support base in the rural areas. The formation of a new political party and the necessity of extending it to the grass roots, increased the desire of the people to participate in local affairs, and the realization of the importance of initiating and completing rural development programmes at the lowest level made the government aware of the need for local government institutions based in the villages. The government was impressed by the success of the Swanirvar Bangladesh Andolon, and introduced Swanirvar Gram Sarkar as a major reform in the local government system.     

Measuring government duration and stability in Central Eastern European democracies

Existing studies of government duration in parliamentary democracies typically measure the length of a government's tenure in office without accounting for delays in the government formation process. By assuming that a cabinet leaves office on the day prior to the new cabinet taking office, these measures ignore periods during which a government has lost its mandate but is still legally in power as a caretaker government. A consequence is that governments that are actually stable and governments that only appear stable because replacement governments take a long time to form are observationally equivalent. This suggests that some existing studies of government stability are potentially flawed. It also means that a number of interesting research questions cannot be answered with existing data. Many of these questions address the various consequences of caretaker governments. The answers to these questions are relevant for scholars interested in representation and accountability. This article presents a new dataset collected on government duration in eleven Central Eastern European democracies from 1990 to 2008 that specifically takes account of caretaker periods and delays in the government formation process. These data will provide scholars with more flexibility to choose the measure that best reflects their underlying conception of government stability.     

Veto player theory and reform making in Western Europe

Veto player theory generates predictions about governments’ capacity for policy change. Due to the difficulty of identifying significant laws needed to change the policy status quo, evidence about governments’ ability to change policy has been mostly provided for a limited number of reforms and single‐country studies. To evaluate the predictive power of veto player theory for policy making across time, policy areas and countries, a dataset was gathered that incorporates about 5,600 important government reform measures in the areas of social, labour, economic and taxation policy undertaken in 13 Western European countries from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐2000s. Veto player theory is applied in a combined model with other central theoretical expectations on policy change derived from political economy (crisis‐driven policy change) and partisan theory (ideology‐driven policy change). Robust support is found that governments introduce more reform measures when economic conditions are poor and when the government is positioned further away from the policy status quo. No empirical support is found for predictions of veto player theory in its pure form, where no differentiation between government types is made. However, the findings provide support for the veto player theory in the special case of minimal winning cabinets, where the support of all government parties is sufficient (in contrast to minority cabinets) and necessary (in contrast to oversized cabinets) for policy change. In particular, it is found that in minimal winning cabinets the ideological distance between the extreme government parties significantly decreases the government's ability to introduce reforms. These findings improve our understanding of reform making in parliamentary democracies and highlight important issues and open questions for future applications and tests of the veto player theory.     

Guilds,corporations and socialist theory

This book is reviewed as an example of the manner in which cultural critique approaches the question of the formation and regulation of personal capacities and conducts. Despite its sophistication and power, it is argued that the dialectical character of this critique leaves it incapable of interrogating its two central objects: subjectivity and government. As a results, Donald's critique retains the notion of subjectivity and its unconscious formation as the essential site of resistance to government. Against this oppositional cultural politics it is argued that human agency has no single general (subjective) form that might be captured by or freed from government. It is further argued that the heterogeneity of the instruments and objectives of government robs such a politics of both a general logic of power that might be resisted and any general reason for resistance.     

Citizen satisfaction under changing political leadership: The role of partisan motivated reasoning

There exists a gap in our understanding of what citizen satisfaction evaluations actually represent. While recent years have witnessed a move away from performance‐based models to cognitive‐implicit models of citizen satisfaction, the inherent political nature of government, its institutions, and services has been largely ignored. Drawing on the functional responsibility chain between political principals and governmental, public‐service‐delivering institutions, we outline a theory of citizen satisfaction that accounts for the political nature of these institutions. In the context of two consecutive general elections, we find a partisan bias in citizen satisfaction with government and the legislative branch, but not for institutions that are more clearly separated from national government. These mixed findings are suggestive of a dispersion effect of the partisan bias in citizen satisfaction, namely, that citizens are less likely to use their partisan lenses in cases where the responsibility of political principals is dispersed across multiple actors.     

Partisanship,attribution and approval in a public health shock

Political scientists have long agreed that partisanship can bias how voters evaluate government performance and attribute responsibility. However, less is known about how – and to what extent – these biases work across different types of voters, or how they respond to positive or non-partisan policy outcomes. In this research note we address these questions, focusing on how voters respond to a positive, non-partisan public health shock: the successful early rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations in England. Through a pre-registered information experiment embedded in the British Election Study (N > 6000), we test how voters respond to claims that the quasi-independent National Health Service, rather than the government, deserved credit for the success of the programme. On average, subjects do attribute less responsibility to government, but this has no downstream effect on general approval. Exploratory heterogeneity analyses suggest that government and opposition supporters, as well as historic swing voters, respond homogeneously to our intervention. Our findings are not fully explained by rational or selective frameworks of responsibility attribution, and add nuance to existing experimental work on the political effects of the pandemic.     

An Integrated Theory of Budgetary Politics and Some Empirical Tests: The U.S. National Budget, 1791–2010

We develop a general theory of budgetary politics and examine its implications on a new data set on U.S. government expenditures from 1791 to 2010. We draw on three major approaches to budgeting: decision‐making theories, primarily incrementalism and serial processing; policy process models; and path dependency. We show that the incrementalist budget model is recursive and that its solution is exponential growth, and isolate three periods in which it operates in pure form. The equilibrium periods are separated by critical junctures, associated with wars or economic collapse. We assess policy process dynamics by examining the deviations within equilibrium periods. We offer three takeaways: (1) exponential incrementalism is fundamental to a theory of budgeting; (2) disjoint shifts in the level of exponential incrementalism are caused only by critical moments; (3) temporally localized dynamics cause bends in the exponential path, longer returns to the path within budgetary eras, and annual punctuations in budget changes.     

Slow Change at the Top: ‘Old Hands’ and ‘Accidental Executives’ in New South Wales Local Government

Scholars and practitioners alike have recognised that an increased role for women leaders in Australian local government would strengthen the sector, yet little research to date has examined the career paths of non‐elected officials. This article combines the gender in organisations literature with career theory to examine the career paths of 16 general managers (GMs) in New South Wales. We found that half the participants had linear career paths based entirely within local government and half had boundaryless careers originating outside the sector. This second cohort consisted overwhelmingly of women. Nevertheless, a high incidence of happenstance characterised both career types. Several participants saw themselves pitted against a gendered (i.e. male) group of ‘old hands’ who were resistant to change being driven by ‘accidental executives’, a high proportion of whom were women. The findings have implications for a sector attempting to attract and retain skilled staff, particularly women.     

Video election note: The UK General Election of 2010

This video election note is a very brief introduction to some of the main points of interest regarding the 2010 UK general election. It touches on events since the 2005 election, the course of the campaign, the salient issues, policy differences between the main parties, key features of the outcome for the major and minor parties, turnout, government formation and the implications for British politics. There are also preliminary observations on what the pattern of constituency results tell us about how the recession and the expenses crisis affected outcomes.     

Collaboration or competition? Experimental evidence for coalition heuristics

Does coalition formation have a causal effect on the perceived ideological distance between the coalition members? Observational research shows that voters typically think of parties that form a coalition government as more ideologically similar than those that do not, holding everything else constant. Their many qualities aside, the existing studies are not able to establish a causal relationship between coalition formation and changing perceptions. It is quite possible that voters are reacting to concurrent changes in parties' stated policy and not the coalition information itself. In this paper, I present two survey experiments that isolate the difference between telling voters that two parties can cooperate and telling them that they cannot. In both experiments, I find evidence supporting the theory of coalition heuristics.     

Finding Partisanship Where We Least Expect it: Evidence of Partisan Bias in a New African Democracy

Much of the literature on political behavior in Africa’s new semi-democracies has treated partisan affiliation as weak, purely pragmatic, or a proxy for other, more meaningful identities such as ethnicity. In this article, I dispute these conceptions by demonstrating that partisanship in an African context, like partisanship in established democracies, is a psychologically meaningful identity that can inspire voters to engage in motivated reasoning. By combining survey data with an original dataset of objective indicators of local public goods quality in Uganda, I show that supporters of the incumbent president systematically overestimate what they have received from government, while opposition supporters systematically underestimate. Partisan support precedes, rather than results from, this mis-estimation. I also show that partisans of the incumbent (opposition) are significantly more (less) likely to attribute any bad outcomes they observe to private actors rather than the government. I argue that these findings are consistent with the predictions of social identity theory: the conflict that marked many African political transitions, and the mapping of African parties onto existing social cleavages, are sufficient conditions for the creation of strong political-social identities like those that characterize partisanship in the West. My findings indicate that Africanists should take partisanship seriously as a predictor of political behavior and attitudes.     

Constitutional Design and Government Formation: The Expected Consequences of Negative Parliamentarism

In the early 1970s the Swedish parties designed new rules for government formation. In this study it is shown that the choice of a new voting rule stemmed from a combination of goaloriented behaviour and a process of socialization. In a cross national comparison, it is also shown that there exists an empirical correlation between the Swedish type of rule and (1) a high frequency of minority governments, (2) a high frequency of small minority governments and (3) a short government formation process. From the perspective of coalition formation theory, this is a challenging finding.     

Punctuations and agendas: A new look at local government budget expenditures

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) is an agenda‐based theory that offers a theoretical foundation for large budget shifts. PET emphasizes that the static, incremental nature of agendas is occasionally interrupted by punctuations. These punctuations indicate shifts in priority among the agenda items, and with those agenda shifts come trade‐offs. This article expands the discussion of punctuated budgets to the level of local government by determining that local government expenditures have the characteristics espoused by the punctuated equilibrium theory. The article also determines the frequency of punctuations and the probability for future punctuations. The findings show that some budget functions and policy types are more prone to punctuations and, therefore, have a less stable agenda. The practical significance of extending PET to local government budgeting is the implication on planning, forecasting, and the agenda‐setting process. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Understanding Informal Payments in the Public Sector: Theory and Evidence from Nineteenth‐century Sweden

Informal payments for public services such as health care are a major problem in many countries around the world. Explanations for their prevalence include cultural factors, lack of enforcement as well as insufficient funds and low wages for public employees. This paper analyzes the phenomenon from an economic perspective, arguing that they are a logical consequence of low wages in the public sector. However, informal payments from citizens to public employees for services may be preferable to a situation in which no services are delivered. Given that the informal payments thus can be seen to have a functional element, and that reforms aimed at eliminating them largely have been unsuccessful, formalization and legalization rather than increased enforcement may be a way forward. Many government employees in nineteenth‐century Sweden received their salary through semi‐informal payments (‘sportler’) from citizens. A case study reveals that politicians at the time reasoned along the lines of what could be expected from economic theory: although undesirable and problematic, sportler were necessary to finance the wages of the government employees, given the lack of tax revenue and monitoring capabilities. In contrast to previous research, this article argues that reform efforts were aimed at pragmatically improving the existing system through formalization and regulation rather than simply prohibiting the informal payments.     

The limits of tax and expenditure limits: TEL implementation as a principal-agent problem

Previous scholarship has shown that Tax and Expenditure Limits (TELs) often fail to constrain government growth. This paper views the implementation of TELs as a principal-agent problem. Agency theory predicts that delegation is affected by the preferences of agents and the costs of monitoring those agents. Using panel data for the US states from 1970 through 2008, I conduct an empirical test of the validity of the principal-agent model for TELs. I find that state spending limitations are only effective at cutting the growth of state and local spending under the direction of agents who have a preference for limited government. Additionally, state property tax limitations are only effective when monitoring does not require costly coordinated action. These findings contradict an alternative theory of TEL implementation that looks towards the policy’s origin. My research suggests that the arrangements of delegation determine when and under what conditions TELs effectively reduce government growth.     

Costs of taxation and the size of government

Existing theory on the form of government suggests that a parliamentary system promotes a larger size of government than does a presidential system. This paper extends the existing theory by allowing for distortionary taxation. A main result is that if taxation is sufficiently distortionary, the parliamentary system may promote a smaller size of government than the presidential system. The proposed mechanism appears consistent with several empirical patterns in the data that cannot be explained by other theories.     

Who governs? Parties and policies in Denmark

Abstract. The literature on party government, coalition formation, and links between party and policy tends to assume that parties in government command legislative majorities that can be used to enact desired policies. This assumption, however, does not apply in general. In Scandinavia, and especially in Denmark, the minority type of government is predominant. Minority governments cannot govern by means of their own votes. Two questions for research are therefore obvious. Why do Scandinavian countries deviate from the normal pattern of government formation? And what are the consequences of minority government for policy making? While the first question has been treated in recent research, this paper carries the analysis a step further by exploring the policy consequences of minority government in Denmark during the 1980s. It is shown that the government may in fact not always govern, that the government may actually be the opposition, and, consequently, that the party-policy link can indeed be extremely complex.     

Parliament without Government: The Belgian Parliament and the Government Formation Processes of 2007–2011

Parliamentary systems are characterised by strong links between the executive and the legislature. While the importance of executive–legislative relationships is well-known, the extent to which executive dominance affects parliamentary behaviour is hard to grasp. This study uses the recent institutional crises in Belgium to study parliamentary behaviour in the absence of a government with full powers. Cabinet formation in Belgium has proved to be protracted in recent years, leading to long periods of government formation in both 2007–2008 and 2010–2011. Such circumstances provide a unique comparison between normal situations of parliament in the presence of government, and exceptional situations of prolonged periods of caretaker government. In particular the article looks at three aspects of parliamentary behaviour that are usually linked to executive–legislative relations: legislative initiatives, voting behaviour and party unity. The general hypothesis is that prolonged periods of government formation gave parliamentarians more opportunities to influence the legislative process and more (ideological) freedom. The results show a nuanced picture: parliament became more pro-active, the salience of the government–opposition divide declined, while party unity remained as strong as ever. It is concluded that government formation processes did not lead to drastic changes in the legislative–executive relationship, but rather permitted a modest correction to the extremely weak position of parliament.     

Veto Players and Institutional Analysis

The veto players theory can be used to analyze all political systems regardless of regime (presidential or parliamentary), party system (one-, two-, or multiparty), and type of parliament (unicameral or multicameral). This paper develops the veto players theory to account for a series of important political phenomena: the difference between majoritarian and supermajoritarian institutions; the importance of absenteeism, or of political marginalization; the importance of agenda control and referendums; the reasons for government stability (parliamentary systems) and regime stability (presidential systems); the reasons for independence of bureaucracies, and judicial independence. All these phenomena are analyzed in a coherent way, on the basis of the same framework. Empirical evidence from existing literature corroborating the theory is provided.