The Democratic Quality of Institutional Regimes: a Conceptual Framework

Lijphart's spectrum of democracies – recently expanded by Jack Nagel to a sub-majoritarian sphere of pluralitarian systems which use disproportional electoral systems in order to manufacture majority governments from minorities in the electorate – is based on only one dimension: inclusion of preferences. Political scientists in the Lijphartian tradition wrongly assume that inclusion of preferences, which is an input characteristic, automatically leads to responsiveness, which refers to actual policy decisions and hence is an output characteristic. We therefore add 'responsibility' as a second input characteristic and employ it alongside the inclusiveness of institutional regimes. We argue that in representative democracies there exists a trade-off between inclusiveness and responsibility. This trade-off helps us to measure the democratic quality of institutional regimes. The now expanded spectrum of democracies based on these two dimensions shows that majoritarian democracy proper – in which governments represent a majority of individual preferences but not more than necessary – is the best possible combination of the two democratic values.     

Controlling Corruption in the Public Sector

Much of the literature on political corruption is based on indices such as the ones presented by Transparency International, but the reliability and validity of these indices are questionable. The main alternative approach – qualitative case studies – often lacks a theoretical framework allowing for systematic empirical analysis. To remedy this shortcoming, this article places qualitative case studies into the framework of principal-agent theory. The cases comprise two Swedish county councils (regional governments), both of which reorganised their administrations in similar ways in the 1990s. One experienced corruption scandals, but the other did not. In comparing them, the article links the propensity for corruption to institutional design – in particular, the mechanisms of delegation and control.     

Managing research institutions in developing countries: Test of a model

This article proposes a model for the analysis, management and development of research institutes in developing countries which incorporates four interdependent dimensions: (i) a strategic management dimension concerned with the management of the organisation's internal and external environments and their interrelationships; (ii) a dimension concerned with ‘collaborative institutional arrangements’; (iii) an internal management and supervision dimension; and (iv) a ‘research operations’ dimension. A preliminary corroboration of the model's validity is derived from a review of relevant published literature and summaries of evaluation studies of research institutions in developing countries.     

The Franco‐German relationship and economic and monetary union: Using Europe to ‘Bind Leviathan’

This article explores the interaction between the institutional, strategic and cognitive dimensions of the Franco‐German relationship on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). It begins by spelling out its institutional setting and its context of structural power. These sections highlight the main informal rules that have shaped the relationship and help explain the choice of negotiating strategies to reconcile their objectives and secure influence on the design and content of EMU. The next section focuses on the cognitive dimension of the relationship, identifying the nature of Franco‐German objectives, their basis in differences of inherited beliefs and problems in reconciling them. In the final section the nature of the political theory underpinning EMU is clarified and explained and the kind of challenge that it poses for French policy makers as it tests the limits of the republican state tradition. More broadly, EMU is an attempt to redefine the relationship between state and Europe and state and society, bringing with it new political meanings.     

Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance

The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. These three dimensions constitute a space in which any particular mechanism of participation can be located. Different regions of this institutional design space are more and less suited to addressing important problems of democratic governance such as legitimacy, justice, and effective administration.     

Claiming races,broiler contracts,heresthetics, and habits: ten concepts for policy design

The formulation of policy alternatives can be viewed as an exercise in institutional design. What concepts should inform the craft of institutional design? This essay draws ideas from three intellectual sources to develop and illustrate ten representative concepts for institutional design. First, it presents concepts from the economics of organization involving the creation of desirable incentives: (1) inducing third-party enforcement through the creation of value, (2) making commitments credible, and (3) maintaining competition through tournaments. Second, it presents concepts from heresthetics involving the favorable structuring of decisions: (4) fixing agendas behind the ‘veil of ignorance,’ (5) automating policy decisions, (6) linking policy dimensions, and (7) collapsing and unlinking policy dimensions. Third, it presents concepts from the behavioral perspective recognizing the importance of habits and norms: (8) adapting organizational routines, (9) instilling and exploiting norms, and (10) monitoring through reporting and diligence requirements. These concepts are intended to help policy analysts be more creative in the crafting of policy alternatives.     

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.     

Institutional Inconsistency and Political Instability: Polity Duration, 1800–2000

This article examines how political institutional structures affect political instability. It classifies polities as autocracies or democracies based on three institutional dimensions: election of the executive, constraints on executive decision-making authority, and extent of political participation. It hypothesizes that strongly autocratic and democratic regimes will exhibit the greatest stability resulting from self-enforcing equilibria, whereby the maintenance of a polity's institutional structure is in the interest of political elites, whether through autocratic or democratic control. Institutionally inconsistent regimes (those exhibiting a mix of institutional characteristics of both democracy and autocracy) lack these self-enforcing characteristics and are expected to be shorter-lived. Using a log-logistic duration model, polity survival time ratios are estimated. Institutionally consistent polities are significantly more stable than institutionally inconsistent polities. The least stable political systems are dictatorships with high levels of political participation. The most unstable configuration for polities with an elected executive is one where the executive is highly constrained, but the electorate is very small.     

Rational and Compassionate Information Processing: A Conceptual Framework for Authentic Dialogue

Authentic dialogue is a key component of deliberative democracy. Public administration scholars and practitioners have focused on institutional settings for authentic dialogue, but they have paid less attention to behavioral aspects, especially the emotional component, of authentic dialogue. The author proposes a conceptual framework for authentic dialogue that highlights the three dimensions of its social‐behavioral foundation: epistemic, social, and compassionate information processing motivation. The article reviews the discourse on authentic dialogue in public administration and provides a conceptual framework for authentic dialogue, with a discussion of the three behavioral dimensions, their relationships, and their effects. This framework may be used in empirical analysis of authentic dialogue and the design of institutions for deliberative democracy.     

Dimensions of political conflict and party positions in multi-level democracies: evidence from the Local Manifesto Project

Partisan conflicts have been frequently analysed in comparative political science research. Yet little is known about the dimensions of political conflict at the local level in multi-level democracies. This article contributes to the literature on the estimation and analysis of party positions by first presenting a new dataset of more than 800 local party manifestos in Germany that allows for a systematic analysis of the dimensions of political conflict at the German local level. Secondly, it is demonstrated that (semi-)automatic content analysis of these texts offers a promising approach for gaining new insights into local party positions. Thirdly, the empirical analysis of German local party manifestos shows that partisan conflicts are not only structured along the left–right dimension but also along a dimension which distinguishes between parties addressing ‘local’ and ‘national’ issues to a varying degree in their manifestos, due to the different behaviour of established and populist parties.     

Constraint in European party activists' sympathy scores for interest groups

Abstract. This paper presents an analysis, country by country, of sympathy scores given by European party activists from 58 political parties in 11 countries of the European Community to more than 100 different national interest groups. In all countries but one, the left-right dimension is the predominant criterion for interpreting the sympathy scores given. In Belgium, the exception, a regional (Flemish-Walloon) cleavage line is most important. The analyses were performed with a new adapted version of the unidimensional Coombsian unfolding model. Bad fit to the unidimensional model is not remedied by postulating additional common dimensions, but by identifying and removing stimuli (interest groups) that do not conform to the unidimensional unfolding model. The nonrepresentability of these stimuli can be attributed to lack of agreement among activists about the location of these stimuli on the left-right dimension. More specifically, certain relatively popular stimuli are perceived by most respondents as close to their own location on the left-right scale, and, conversely, certain relatively unpopular stimuli are perceived by most respondents as distant from their own location.     

论县级政府行政改革的战略选择

改革战略的正确选择是县级政府行政改革实现历史性突破的前提。未来的县级政府行政改革必须走出纯粹的组织变革层面,进入组织变革、职能变革与政治变革三重良性互动的全面变革时代。在中央与地方、政府与党委的纵横关系中,增加县级政府在行政改革中的自主性和县域公共利益的代表性,依据县域特殊性寻求政府职能与机构的合理性,变革权力结构,形成政府与社会良好合作的善治格局,是新时期县级政府改革与发展的战略选择。     

Constructing Institutional Measures: Indicators of Political and Property Rights in Mozambique, 1900–2005

In this article, we focus on the role of political and economic institutions in Mozambique's development. We produce a set of institutional indicators for Mozambique for the period 1900–2005. The first index tracks political freedoms and is unique in its duration and complexity. The second index is a measure of property rights for Mozambique, and such a measure has not existed previously and certainly not for this length of time. The construction of these indices is a painstaking process through historical records but it provides us with a richness of institutional data previously not available. The new institutional indices will allow us to explore the role of the institutional environment in determining economic growth and development in Mozambique over time.     

Reconsidering Nordic Party Space1

The erosion of the social and economic bases underlying traditional party systems has led analysts to search for new cleavage structures undergirding the present party systems. Meanwhile, analysts have identified a range of issue dimensions that also bear on voters’ party preferences. This article studies the degree to which grid-group theory's four political biases of hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism can make inroads into the left–right dimension's stronghold in accounting for voters’ party preference. The analysis draws on a 1999 survey in the five Nordic countries (N= 4,832). The method combines voters’ party preferences with their scores on issue dimensions, or political dimensions. Analyses show that conventional party families, with one exception, are not identified along any of the five political orientations. Only the five conservative parties are exclusively identified as a party family on the left–right dimension. Party preference is more closely associated with the left–right dimension than the political biases. Sweden has the purest and simplest party cleavage, whereas Denmark has the most composite one. Across the Nordic countries, the green party family is most dissimilar, whereas the progress siblings are most alike. The left–right dimension accounts well for differences between parties within polities, whereas political biases, and egalitarianism in particular, account well for differences between parties of similar origin across polities.     

“一体双权”:中国政治学的一个分析框架——与景跃进教授商榷和对话

在《中国政治学的转型:分化与定位》一文中,景跃进教授将政治共同体确立为中国政治学的逻辑起点,揭示维系中国大一统的集权逻辑,搭建了一个国体、政体和政治共同体“三位一体”的中国政治学分析框架。景跃进教授提出的问题及所做出的分析极具启发性,但仍有进一步商榷和对话的空间。中国政治学研究的逻辑起点是现代性的国家共同体;现代性国家共同体既服从统一逻辑,又遵循共和逻辑。在“一体双权”的中国政治学分析框架中,“一体”是指现代国家共同体以主权独立、领土完整、国族一体等为核心内容的一体格局和统一状态,体现统一逻辑;“双权”则包括“民权”和“国权”,处理二者之关系的制度安排事关共和逻辑能否得到实现。相对于“三位一体”的中国政治学分析框架,“一体双权”有一定的理论优势,有可能拓展中国政治学的学术研究范围,为中国政治学和西方政治学的对话提供更加开放的交集空间。     

Developing and Testing a Theoretical Framework for Computer‐Mediated Transparency of Local Governments

This article contributes to the emerging literature on transparency by developing and empirically testing a theoretical framework that explains the determinants of local government Web site transparency. It aims to answer the following central question: What institutional factors determine the different dimensions of government transparency? The framework distinguishes three dimensions of transparency—decision making transparency, policy information transparency, and policy outcome transparency—and hypothesizes three explanations for each: organizational capacity, political influence, and group influence on government. Results indicate that each dimension of transparency is associated with different factors. Decision‐making transparency is associated with political influence; when left‐wing parties are strong in the local council, local government tends to be more transparent. Policy information transparency is associated with media attention and external group pressure, and policy outcome transparency is associated with both external group pressure and the organizational capacity. The authors discuss the implications for policy and administration.     

Making a Place for Alternative Technologies: The Case of Agricultural Bio‐Inputs in Argentina

This article characterizes the ways in which the actors in charge of designing and implementing public policies intervene to promote the emergence of alternatives to problematic technologies. It is based on a case study conducted in Argentina that focuses on initiatives to promote the development of biological agricultural inputs in the context of increasingly controversial chemical inputs. The study spotlights the political, institutional, and semantic efforts made by policy makers and public administrations to ensure these new inputs find their way into organizations and onto their agendas. Their work consists in attenuating the boundaries between chemical and biological inputs, and reducing opposition by creating categories and organizations that downplay potential dissension and highlight the possible coexistence of technological paradigms. Contrary to what the injunctions of technological substitution suggest, we show that putting alternative technologies on the public agenda depends largely on their inclusion in institutional and regulatory infrastructures originally designed for technologies that are likely to decline. More broadly, it relies on the construction of continuity between the two types of technologies.     

Coupling citizens and elites in deliberative systems: The role of institutional design

A significant shortcoming in contemporary deliberative systems is that citizens are disconnected from various elite sites of public deliberation. This article explores the concept of ‘coupling’ as a means to better link citizens and elites in deliberative systems. The notion of ‘designed coupling’ is developed to describe institutional mechanisms for linking otherwise disconnected deliberative sites. To consider whether it is possible and indeed desirable to use institutional design to couple different sites in a deliberative system, the article draws on insights from a case study in which a mini‐public was formally integrated into a legislative committee. The empirical study finds that it is not only feasible to couple mini‐publics to legislative committees, but when combined, the democratic and deliberative capacity of both institutions can be strengthened. To be effective, ‘designed coupling’ requires more than establishing institutional connections; it also requires that actors to step outside their comfort zone to build new relationships and engage in new communicative spaces with different sets of ideas, actors and rules. This can be facilitated by institutional design, but it also requires leaders and champions who are well‐placed to encourage actors to think differently.     

Potentials and limitations of executive leadership: the Austrian cabinet since 1945

Abstract. This article analyzes the Austrian cabinet along the representation-efficiency and the leadership-collective decision-making dimensions. After outlining the respective traditions of the Austrian cabinet some information about the personal styles of Austrian chancellors and their respective ability for leadership is provided. Some aspects of pre-ministerial careers are analyzed in terms of the representation-efficiency dimension, while a discussion of cabinet life tries to detect indicators for the systematic analysis of the leadership-collective decision-making dimension. The final section links the two dimensions: in the Austrian case high leadership efficiency on the one hand and collective decision-making representation on the other appear to be positively correlated.     

The Cartography of Opportunity: Spatial Data Science for Equitable Urban Policy

As evidence of the contextual effects of place upon individual outcomes has become increasingly solid over time, so too have urban policies and programs designed to connect underserved people with access to spatial opportunity. To this end, many attempts have been made to quantify the geography of opportunity and quite literally plot it on a map by combining evidence from studies on neighborhood effects with spatial data resources and geographic information systems (GIS) technology. Recently, these opportunity maps have not only become increasingly common but their preparation has been encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A closer look at the foundations and methods that underlie these exercises offers important lessons I examine the practice of opportunity mapping from both theoretical and methodological perspectives, highlighting several weaknesses of the common methods. Following this, I outline a theoretical framework based on Galster’s categorization of the mechanisms of neighborhood effects. Using data from the Baltimore metropolitan region, I use confirmatory factor analysis to specify a measurement model that verifies the validity of the proposed theoretical framework. The model provides estimates of four latent variables conceived as the essential dimensions of spatial opportunity: social-interactive, environmental, geographic, and institutional. Finally, I develop a neighborhood typology using unsupervised machine learning applied to the four dimensions of opportunity. Results suggest that opportunity mapping can be improved substantially through a better connection to the empirical literature on neighborhood effects, a multivariate statistical framework, and more direct relevance to public policy interventions.