Institutional preconditions of privatization in market-based political economies: Implications for Jordan

Concepts of privatization have been adopted on a global scale. Yet few studies examine issues other than economic and selected political ones. This article argues, however, that a broad spectrum of institutional considerations must be evaluated in order to assess the viability of any proposed privatization strategy. A further distinction must be made between countries with developed markets and those market-based political economies (MBPEs) whose extant institutional configurations have not reached a level of independence to fully support extensive privatization measures. Jordan, Turkey and Egypt would be examples of such countries. This article contends that the enactment and implementation of privatization policies will achieve its avowed goals only (a) if the state-controlled enterprises (SCEs) are sufficiently independent of their supervising bureaucracies (presumably a ministry, the treasury or development planning organization) prior to their transfer to a private partner and (b) if the government possesses requisite monitoring capacity to ensure the fulfilment of contractual obligations of the privatized entity. An ancillary thesis suggests that the societal and organizational culture must be succinctly separated to warrant a full-scale transfer of SCEs to the private sector. In Jordan, privatization has been discussed for a number of years, but no projects have been attempted so far. The article assesses the likelihood of large-scale privatization occurring soon.     

Europeans and their money: Explaining public support for the common European currency

Abstract. Using public opinion surveys conducted in the member states of the European Union, this paper seeks to provide a systematic understanding of public support for the EMU project and European–level monetary policy authority. We develop models of support for EU monetary policy that incorporate a utilitarian component and elements of multilevel governance that is emerging within the EU. These models are tested at the aggregate level of survey respondents. The results show that variations in attitudes to the common currency are driven by collectively–based considerations of the costs and benefits associated with the common currency project as well as the interaction of European–level politics and the domestic politics of the member states.     

Europeans and their money: Explaining public support for the common European currency

Using public opinion surveys conducted in the member states of the European Union, this paper seeks to provide a systematic understanding of public support for the EMU project and European–level monetary policy authority. We develop models of support for EU monetary policy that incorporate a utilitarian component and elements of multilevel governance that is emerging within the EU. These models are tested at the aggregate level of survey respondents. The results show that variations in attitudes to the common currency are driven by collectively–based considerations of the costs and benefits associated with the common currency project as well as the interaction of European–level politics and the domestic politics of the member states.     

Understanding variation in public support for European integration

Abstract. Much of the research on the European Community focuses on elites and institutions and as a result downplays the importance of the mass public in determining the direction of European integration. A common justification for this viewpoint is that members of the public provide a stable reservoir of strong support for European integration. Recent political events, however, raise doubts about this depiction of a 'passive public'. Consequently, there is a need for a fuller understanding of European attitudes. We specify a number of hypotheses dealing with the effects of international trade interests, security concerns, and demographic characteristics on cross-national and cross-sectional variations in public support for European integration. Using Eurobarometer surveys and OECD data on EC trade from 1973–1989, we investigate these hypotheses in a pooled cross-sectional model. Our statistical results reveal that an individual's level of support is positively related to her nation's security and trade interests in EC membership and her personal potential to benefit from liberalized markets for goods, labour, and money.     

Dynamics of support for European integration in post-communist Poland

Abstract. This study examines the dynamics of citizen support for European integration in Poland. Using data from 1995 and 1998 surveys and from a three-wave panel study, we find that, as in Western Europe, both utilitarian calculations of self-interest and political considerations are equally important determinants of support for membership in the European Union. Moreover, between 1995 and 1998 there was considerable polarization of opinion along economic, partisan and ideological lines. We also consider the impact of pro-democratic and pro-capitalist values on support for integration. Our results show that, all things being equal, such values are significant predictors of European Union support. In addition, they have a strong impact on individual-level stability and change in attitudes toward Poland joining the European Union.     

Explaining variation and change in supervisory confidentiality in the European Union

Abstract

Some European Union member states’ financial regulators choose to make some of the data they routinely collect on individual banks publicly available. Others treat this data as confidential. What explains this difference? This paper considers the possible effects of crises, path-dependent legal institutions, and the design of deposit insurance schemes. At the national level, the paper focuses on contrasting German and Dutch cases. After the recent economic crisis, the Dutch released more data while the German authorities maintained strict confidentiality rules. The design of deposit insurance schemes provides a key reason why the level of secrecy varies, with the Dutch move from an ex post to an ex ante scheme where the government served as the ultimate backstop leading to questions about the accounts of individual banks while the German system favoured continued secrecy. The paper also describes the level of transparency at the EU level. Multilevel legal restrictions and bureaucratic capacity tilt EU banking union practices towards member states that treat financial supervisory data as confidential.     

Reconsidering individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.     

Child support enforcement policy and unmarried fathers' employment in the underground and regular economies

Some scholars have suggested that a negative consequence of strengthening child support enforcement is to encourage fathers to shift from regular sector to underground employment. We employ data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to investigate the relationship between the strength of child support enforcement (CSE) and levels of underground and regular sector employment among unmarried fathers. We find that, in general, living in a city with stricter CSE is associated with fewer hours of underground employment. We find little evidence that stronger enforcement is associated with employment or hours in the regular sector. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Across time and space: Explaining variation in news coverage of the European Union

News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This study investigates explanations for cross‐national and over‐time variation in news media coverage of EU affairs drawing on large‐scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in the EU‐15 (1999), EU‐25 (2004) and EU‐27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament (EP) elections. The analyses focus in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to media characteristics and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during EP election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU in combination with overall more negative positions towards the EU, the more visible the news. Also, increases in EU news visibility from one election to the next and the Europeanness of the news are determined by a country's elite positions. The findings are discussed in light of the EU's alleged communication deficit.     

Divided but united: explaining nested public support for European integration

Academic and general interest in public support for European Integration is on the rise. Theoretically, the utilitarian, identity, reference, cue-taking and signalling models have been developed to explain this perplexing phenomenon. While these models have been tested, there is no comprehensive up-to-date account of how well they perform separately, relative to each other and across levels. Empirically, this study utilises a data set with 110,873 respondents from the European Social Survey. Methodologically, a multilevel model is used to address causal heterogeneity between levels. The study shows that ‘attitudes towards multiculturalism’ at the individual level and ‘corruption’ at the country level are the strongest predictors. When interacting levels within models, it is demonstrated that individual trust in the national political establishment is being moderated by the level of corruption in a country in influencing support for European integration. On this basis, two models are proposed, named the ‘saviour model’ and the ‘anti-establishment model’.     

Present at creation: Italian mass support for European integration in the formative years

Abstract.  This article analyzes a period usually neglected in empirical studies of public opinion and European integration: the formative years between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. The analysis is based on one country – Italy – in which the European process was a source of deep political cleavage in the formative phase. The study of the sources and dynamics of support in these years sheds a different light on the determinants of support. More specifically, a pooled multivariate logistic analysis of six surveys conducted between 1952 and 1970 shows two things. First, it shows that public support in Italy was driven mostly by considerations that were affective and political rather than economic and utilitarian. Second, it explains under which conditions the political factors behind support (and opposition) for European integration in the 1950s and 1960s changed over time, mostly in reactions to international events and to developments in European institutionalization. The article points to the bottom-up nature of change in public support for European integration; changes in public opinion affected party positions, rather than vice versa.     

Immigration and the new politics of inclusion and exclusion in the European Union: The effect of elites and the EU on individual-level opinions regarding European and non-European immigrants

Abstract. Within European politics, a distinction is currently being made at the elite level between internal and external immigration, with individuals from EU countries being given special rights and privileges when they migrate within the EU. This paper addresses the question of whether individual EU citizens also view the two types of immigrants differently and what structures their beliefs regarding these two sources of migration. The findings indicate that (a) the vast majority of EU citizens view internal and external migration as identical and (b) elite cues and debates regarding immigration within each of the countries are helping individuals form their opinions regarding the two different types of immigration. These findings and their implications are discussed in the body of the paper.     

Social Security privatization in Latin America

The new, partially privatized social security system adopted by Chile in 1981 has attracted attention in many parts of the world. Since then, a number of Latin American countries have implemented the Chilean model, with some variations: either with a single- or multi-tier system, or with a period of transition to take care of those in the labor force at the time of the change. The single-tier version consists of a privatized program with individual accounts in pension fund management companies. Multi-tier systems have a privatized component and retain some form of public program. This article describes each of the new programs in Latin America, their background, and similarities and differences among them. Much more information is available for Chile than for the other countries (in part because Chile has the oldest system), enough to be able to evaluate what, in most cases, is the most accurate information. That is often not the case for the other countries, especially when dealing with subjects such as transition costs and net rates of return (rates of return minus administrative fees). No country has copied the Chilean system exactly. Bolivia, El Salvador, and Mexico have closed their public systems and set up mandatory individual accounts. Argentina has a mixed public/private system with three tiers. In Colombia and Peru, workers have a choice between the public and private programs. Uruguay created a two-tier mixed system. Costa Rica has a voluntary program for individual accounts as a supplement to the pay-as-you-go program and has just passed a law setting up mandatory accounts containing employer contributions for severance pay. All of the countries continue to face unresolved issues, including: High rates of noncompliance--the percentage of enrollees who do not actively and regularly contribute to their accounts--which could lead to low benefits and greater costs to the governments that offer a guaranteed minimum benefit; Proportionately lower benefits for women and lower earners than for men and higher earners; A minimum required rate of return among the pension fund management companies (in most of these countries) that has resulted in similarity among the companies and the consequent lack of meaningful choice; and High administrative fees in most of these countries, which reduce the individual's effective rate of return. To what extent these issues can be mitigated or resolved in the future is not yet clear. In general, a definitive assessment of the Chilean model and its Latin American variations will not be possible until a cohort of retirees has spent most of its career under the new system.     

Privata: A model for privatization with multiple non-transitive objectives

Deregulation of public enterprises and services by privatization is very fashionable nowadays. The aim of privatization is mainly to increase effectiveness, while the government itself likes to maximize its revenue at the occasion of the takeover. Most of these public enterprises show a shortage in investment while maintenance of a reasonable employment level in the new private firm is also strongly desirable, not to mention the ecological obligations imposed on the new private firm. It means that takeover bids have to face multiple non-transitive objectives and several parties interested in the issue even several decision makers. Traditionally the optimization of all these objectives are then judged upon case by case in a rather subjective way. Consequently there is a need for a more general and objective, not to say scientific, method which can compare several takeover bids for privatization optimizing multiple objectives sometimes with different units of measurement. With that purpose, the Privata model was developed. Privata takes into consideration upper limits, lower bounds, dominating and nondominating effects, ending up with a set of nondominated takeover bids, which are ranked by using the reference point theory based on the maximal criterion values. In this way objectivity and decreasing marginal utility are fully respected. A theoretical explanation is followed by a simulation on several takeover bids for a public enterprise given multiple objectives.     

Explaining the vote for slow growth

A model of equilibrium rent determination is developed to incorporate both the scarcity and amenity effects associated with limits to new housing construction in a non-open city where demand for housing has increased. Implications of the model are tested with data from California cities to determine which factors increase the probability that a local growth control ballot measure is proposed, or passed. It is found that limits to new housing development occur with greater frequency in communities where fewer substitute cities exist and where certain socioeconomic characteristics predominate, but not where current population densities, or growth, are high.     

Public support for coercive diplomacy: Exploring public opinion data from ten European countries

Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of public attitudes for shaping the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. Economic sanctions emerged as one of CFSP's central tools. Yet despite the emergence of sanctions as a popular instrument in the EU foreign policy toolbox, public attitudes towards sanctions are yet to be studied in depth. This article explains public support for EU sanctions, using the empirical example of sanctions against Russia. It looks at geopolitical attitudes, economic motivations and ideational factors to explain the variation in public support for sanctions. The conclusion suggests that geopolitical factors are the most important, and that economic factors matter very little. Euroscepticism and anti‐Americanism play an important role in explaining the support for sanctions at the individual level.     

The dynamic properties of individual-level party identification in the United States

Central to traditionalist and revisionist perspectives of individual-level party identification is a debate about the stability of party identification. We revisit the debate about the dynamic properties and processes underlying party identification. We present a conceptual framework that defines heterogeneity and state dependence as endpoints of a continuum underlying partisan stability, which is important in understanding an individual’s capacity for updating partisanship. Using panel data from the 1992-1996 National Election Study, we estimate dynamic, random effects multinomial logit models of party identification that distinguish between heterogeneity and “true state dependence.” In accord with traditionalist perspectives, our evidence suggests that in general, minimal state dependence underlies party identification; party identification is strongly stationary. However, we find that age enhances the magnitude of state dependence, which provides some support for revisionist theories. Overall, our work showcases how explaining individual-level dynamics expands our knowledge of partisan stability.