Taking Others into Account: Self‐Interest and Fairness in Majority Decision Making

Research on the formal properties of democratic aggregation mechanisms has a long tradition in political science. Recent theoretical developments, however, show that in the discussion of normative contents of democratic decisions, the actual shape of preferences deserves just as much attention. However, our knowledge about the concrete motivations of individual behavior in democratic decisions is incomplete. Using laboratory experiments, this article examines the existence of social preferences in majority decisions. Contrary to earlier experiments of committee decision making, we develop a design that controls for the conditions of communication and the level of information between subjects. This allows us to comparatively test the predictive power of several theories. We find strong evidence that self‐interest and fairness motivate human behavior in majority decisions.     

Slovenia: Interest group developments in a postsocialist‐liberal democracy

Slovenia has a rich tradition of associations and interest group activity dating back to the 19th century. To some extent, the development of the group system was stymied by the 60 years of authoritarian rule from the early 1930s to the late 1980s. However, the resilience of this tradition is evident in major developments in group activity since the return to democracy. In addition to influences from the past, including a neocorporatist tradition, is the impact of Slovenia's process of integration into the European Union. This article considers the extent to which the modern nature of the interest group system is both constrained by hangovers from the past but enhances by European integration, both of which have affected the development of Slovenia's majoritarian democracy.     

Interest group strategies in multi‐level Europe

• This article analyzes the political responses of French and Italian business associations to Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in the EU. I propose and test the empirical relevance of a multi‐level lobbying model for multi‐tiered systems, a model assumed by, but never systematically examined in, the pluralism literature. Data for this ten‐sector cross‐national panel study come from personal interviews with the presidents of French and Italian business associations. The interviews were held at the beginning and the end of the euro implementation process. The research shows that organized groups routinely overstep their territorial jurisdictions to lobby across multiple levels of government in multi‐level Europe. The degree of state political decentralization is a statistically significant variable in explaining the choice of lobbying target. This ‘crucial comparative case study’ finds that, in adjusting to deeper economic integration, regional associations in France focus their energy on the central government, while Italian groups favour the regional government.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Taking a Closer Look at the Empowerment‐Performance Relationship: Evidence from Law Enforcement Organizations

This article examines the influence of empowering leadership practices on police officers' job performance, perceptions of managerial effectiveness, and unit performance. These relationships are examined using multisource survey data collected from 100 law enforcement managers, 446 of their subordinates, and 98 of their direct supervisors. The analysis shows that empowering leadership contributes positively to subordinate officers' job performance and unit effectiveness. Empowering leadership is also positively associated with subordinate but not with supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Task‐oriented leadership, however, is positively associated with both subordinate and supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Implications of these results for managerial leadership in law enforcement organizations are discussed.     

Interest group–party linkage in the twenty‐first century: Evidence from Denmark,the Netherlands and the United Kingdom

This article systematically investigates interest group–party interactions in the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom based on cross‐national surveys with responses from 1,225 interest groups. The findings show that interest groups and parties still interact in the beginning of the twenty‐first century, but that the vast majority of their interaction involves a low degree of institutionalisation. Using fractional logit analysis, it is demonstrated that the strength of interest group–party linkage is primarily affected by systematic differences in state–society structures and organisational group characteristics. Moreover, differences are found in what conditions different types of interaction. Whereas historical legacies and partisan origin influence an interest group's structural party links, group resources make interactions of a less institutionalised, ad hoc nature more likely.     

The Retention of State Level Concealed Handgun Laws: Empirical Evidence from Interest Group and Legislative Models

The present research extends the work of Lott and Mustard (1997) by offering the first categorical examination (using an ordered logit model) of various types of right-to-carry handgun legislation across the50 states for 1997. Such an examination is based on the “market for laws” construct built by Crain (1979) and Benson and Engin (1988), which points out that various interest group (demand side) and legislative (firm, supply side) considerations are important in modeling legislation activity at the state level. To that end, we include a number of property rights, demographic and legislative institutional variables as explanatory factors in ordered log it models and tests for nonnested hypotheses. In general, we find that the property-rights movement has significantly shaped these statewide laws as pointed out by variables which measure the amount of federal land present within each state, per-capita income, and death-row inmate executions. Population density, Republican representation, length of legislative sessions and female legislative representation have also had significant impacts on the retention of various forms of right-to-carry legislation.     

Paid Family Leave,Fathers’ Leave‐Taking,and Leave‐Sharing in Dual‐Earner Households

Using difference‐in‐difference and difference‐in‐difference‐in‐difference designs, we study California's Paid Family Leave (CA‐PFL) program, the first source of government‐provided paid parental leave available to fathers in the Unites States. Relative to the pre‐treatment mean, fathers of infants in California are 46 percent more likely to be on leave when CA‐PFL is available. In households where both parents work, we find suggestive evidence that CA‐PFL increases both father‐only leave‐taking (i.e., father on leave while mother is at work) and joint leave‐taking (i.e., both parents on leave at the same time). Effects are larger for fathers of first‐born children than for fathers of later‐born children.     

Representation as a median mandate: Taking cross‐national differences seriously

The extent and ways in which popular preferences influence government policy are absolutely central to our understanding of modern democracy. Paul Warwick's discussion of these in the European Journal of Political Research in 2010 puts itself at the heart of the debate with its critique of the median mandate theory of McDonald and Budge, proposing an alternative ‘bilateralist’ concept of representation. This article questions whether this concept has much to add to our theoretical understanding of representational processes. However, Warwick's further conceptual points deserve serious consideration. These concern the time horizons within which representative processes work, and the status of the median position given multi‐motivated voting. At the evidential level, Warwick argues that survey‐based measures of voter and party left–right positions fail to produce the correspondence between median and government policy positions that median mandate theory would have us expect. However, survey‐based measures of median voter and party placements obscure important cross‐national variation. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems ( CSES 2007 ), as Warwick does, this article shows that survey respondents norm their own and their country's party positions to their national context. The consequence is to make the political centre in all nations appear similar. Allowing for the relevant cross‐national differences brings the relationship between the median voter and government position back in line with expectations.     

Taking Nonprofit Intermediaries Seriously: A Middle‐Range Theory for Implementation Research

The federal government often works through nonprofit intermediaries to reach and empower communities in the United States. One increasingly popular policy strategy is to offer grant funding to intermediary organizations in an effort to strengthen communities. Funded intermediaries are tasked with building the capacity of faith‐based and community organizations at the local level, but the policy theory that informs these programs does not specify how these capacity‐building efforts will lead to stronger communities. Missing is a middle‐range implementation theory that links inputs to community‐level changes through the actions of an intermediary. Derived from empirical case study evidence using process‐tracing analysis, the theory of the community‐integrated intermediary posited in this article helps fill that gap.     

Federalism and Interest Group Cohesion: A Comparison of Two Peak Business Groups in Australia

The stock opinion among students of interest groups has, untilrecently, posited that groups in countries with a federal systemof government are less cohesive and more prone to disunity thaninterest groups in unitary states. This article addresses thisrelationship bet ween federalism and weak group cohesion inan attempt to explain the contrasting patterns of cohesion intwo peak Australian business groups, each a confederation instructure. The literature on federalism and group cohesion givesinsufficient attention to the divisive impact of three factors:party go vernment, size and wealth inequalities among a group'sconstituent units, and a group's decision and payoff rules.The literature also gives insufficient attention to the determinantsof group secession. It is the contention of the article thatconflicts over the fairness of a federated organization's rules,particularly when the large, wealthy units find themselves outvotedby the small, poor units, can be sufficient to provoke the aggrievedunits to secede.     

Taking enforcement on its own terms: EPA's heavy‐duty diesel engine litigation

The authors of Regulation by Litigation characterize the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s enforcement action against diesel engine manufacturers as an effort to achieve by litigation what the Agency was unable to achieve by regulation: immediate reductions in emissions of nitrogen oxides. By substituting litigation for rulemaking, the authors of the book argue, the Agency avoided political and judicial accountability and put itself on a suboptimal policy track. This comment argues that the diesel engine litigation may be better understood as what it purported to be, an enforcement action, not rulemaking in disguise. The authors' characterization of the litigation is questionable on at least two grounds. First, it fails to fully appreciate the distinct functions of enforcement and policymaking in a regulatory setting. The goal of enforcement is not primarily to make policy, but to enforce it – to punish violators, deter future violations, and mitigate harms caused by violations. That goal supplies the proper measure of the litigation's success. Second, in applying public choice analysis to create a story of agency circumvention of appropriate rulemaking procedures, the authors' account misses key features of how agency enforcement decisions are made – and were made in this litigation. This latter shortcoming raises broader questions about the difficulties of applying public choice analysis in complex institutional settings.     

Accountability in Accounting? The Politics of Private Rule‐Making in the Public Interest

Over recent decades governments have increasingly delegated domestic and international regulatory functions to private-sector agents. This article examines the reasons for such delegation and how private agents differ from public ones, and then analyzes the politics of regulation post delegation. It argues that the key difference between delegation to a public agent and delegation to a private one is that in the latter case a multiple-principals problem emerges that is qualitatively different from the one usually considered in the literature. An agent's action will be determined by the relative tightness of competing principal–agent relationships. This tightness is a function of the relative importance of each principal for the agent's financial and operational viability as well as its effectiveness in rule making. Further, the article posits that exogenous changes in the macro-political climate can deeply affect the nature of principal–agent relationships. The authors test their hypotheses about the politics of regulation in the postdelegation period through the study of accounting standards setting in the United States, a case of delegation of regulatory authority to a private agent that goes back to the New Deal era and has received renewed public attention in the wake of recent corporate financial scandals.     

Civil War and Social Cohesion: Lab‐in‐the‐Field Evidence from Nepal

We study effects of wartime violence on social cohesion in the context of Nepal's 10‐year civil war. We begin with the observation that violence increased levels of collective action like voting and community organization—a finding consistent with other recent studies of postconflict societies. We use lab‐in‐the‐field techniques to tease apart such effects. Our causal‐identification strategy exploits communities' exogenous isolation from the unpredictable path of insurgency combined with matching. We find that violence‐affected communities exhibit higher levels of prosocial motivation, measured by altruistic giving, public good contributions, investment in trust‐based transactions, and willingness to reciprocate trust‐based investments. We find evidence to support two social transformation mechanisms: (1) a purging mechanism by which less social persons disproportionately flee communities plagued by war and (2) a collective coping mechanism by which individuals who have few options to flee band together to cope with threats.     

The instrumental power of transnational private governance: Interest representation and lobbying by private rule‐makers

While scholars have researched transnational private governance for over two decades, we still know little about some of the specific political activities in which private rulemaking schemes engage. This article addresses this topic by bringing together hitherto separate literatures on private governance and interest groups. I argue that examining private governance's instrumental power, and interest representation and lobbying specifically, complements the literature's dominant focus on the structural and discursive power of private governance. The article makes three contributions. First, it conceptualizes private governance schemes as interest organizations by analyzing similarities and differences with traditional interest groups. Second, the article examines instrumental power empirically by assessing the participation of 48 transnational private governance schemes in the European Union's lobby register and variation among private governance schemes in this respect. Finally, the article contributes to developing a new research agenda to continue bridging the gap between the private governance and interest group literatures.     

The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda

Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning authorities on cooperative behavior. We also show that the size of this effect depends on the political process by which authority is granted: subjects electing leaders contribute more to public goods than subjects who were assigned leaders through a lottery. To test the ecological validity of our findings, we relate farmers’ behavior in the experiment to their level of cooperation in their community organization. We show that deference to authority in the controlled setting predicts cooperative behavior in the farmers’ natural environment, in which they face a similar social dilemma.     

The Effects of Human Interest and Conflict News Frames on the Dynamics of Political Knowledge Gains: Evidence from a Cross‐national Study

A well‐functioning democracy needs the news media to provide information to its citizens. It is therefore essential to understand what kinds of news contents contribute to gains in citizens' political knowledge and for whom this takes place. Extant research is divergent on this matter, especially with respect to ‘softer’ news coverage. This cross‐national study investigates the effects of exposure to human interest and conflict frames in the news on political knowledge. Drawing on panel surveys and media content analyses in three countries, the study shows how these two frames contribute positively to political knowledge gain. This relationship is moderated by political interest so that those who are least interested learn the most from this type of easily accessible news coverage. The results are discussed in the light of research on news media and knowledge acquisition.