Strategic responses to institutional change: Parties,committees and multiple referral

Public Choice - Although multiple referral seems to remove committees' gatekeeping power, strategic opportunities exist for motivated committees to dominate late stages of the legislative...     

Note on rent-seeking and committees using a proportionate-sharing rule

The paper examines how the effort expended in pursuit of rents may be affected by having the rents awarded by either an individual or a committee, under differing allocation rules. Congleton (1984) found that rent-seeking efforts should be markedly lower when rents are awarded by committees rather than by a single administrator. This paper reexamines the proportionate-sharing rule, and finds that, depending on decision-making norms followed by committee members, allocation by committee may result in rent-seeking expenditures that are less than, equal to, or greater than those where rents are proportionately divided by a single administrator.     

Ethnic Politics and Women's Empowerment in Africa: Ministerial Appointments to Executive Cabinets

Under what conditions do women participate in executive power in multiethnic societies? Previous research has examined how political institutions, socioeconomic factors, and cultural norms affect the appointment of women as cabinet ministers. However, no study has assessed the extent to which the politicization of ethnicity—a cleavage that shapes political life in many countries—affects women's cabinet appointments. Focusing on sub‐Saharan Africa, we argue that women are less likely to become cabinet ministers where incumbents use such appointments to build patronage‐based alliances with politicians who act as advocates for ethnic constituencies. Using an original dataset on the composition of cabinets in 34 African countries from 1980 to 2005, we show that women's share of cabinet appointments is significantly lower in countries where leaders must accommodate a larger number of politicized ethnic groups, but it rises with higher levels of democracy and greater representation of women in parliament.     

Checks, Balances, and Appointments in the Public Service: Israeli Experience in Comparative Perspective

This article explores the process of appointing government ministers and senior executive officials in Israel. It provides several case studies of the appointment process in the 1990s, a period of hyperfragmentation in the Israeli parliament. These studies reveal evidence of gross irresponsibility in the appointment process, as well as a lack of a meaningful oversight and checks in the process. One consequence is that the Israeli High Court was asked to intervene and review and reject a number of these appointments. The article argues that although well meaning, this intervention represents a dangerous new trend; this new role for the Courts is both inappropriate and counterproductive. It is inappropriate because judicial intervention imposes a legal solution when a political solution is called for, and it is counterproductive because frequent judicial intervention weakens both the judiciary and the political process. The article concludes with a proposal for an alternative approach to cope with the lack of meaningful oversight in the political-appointment process.     

Legitimacy, trust and procedural fairness: Remarks on Marcia Grimes' study

Abstract.  This article is a reply to Marcia Grimes's 2006 contribution to the European Journal of Political Research entitled 'Organizing consent: The role of procedural fairness in political trust and compliance'. The remarks focus on two main points. First, the author discusses the conceptual basis of the study, to argue that trust and legitimacy are quite different concepts that should not be used synonymously. In particular, the author challenges the conceptualization of (subjective) legitimacy in that institutional legitimacy is partly defined as institutional trust. Additionally, the author justifies why (institutional) trust should not be treated as a 'component' of (institutional) legitimacy. Second, the author deals with a methodological problem in Grimes' article. This problem refers to the operationalization of norms of fairness in order to examine the influence of perceived fairness in decision processes on citizens' beliefs of legitimacy. Summing up the author's conceptual and methodological objections, this article offers a somewhat different interpretation of Grimes' main findings.     

What Really Happens: Department Secretary Appointments,Contracts and Performance Pay in the Australian Public Service

This account of the practice in the Australian Public Service (APS) for appointing department secretaries, using contracts and rewarding for performance, is based on my own experience in being appointed, reappointed and not reappointed, and in receiving and not receiving performance pay. It also draws on my experience as Public Service Commissioner in assisting with appointments and performance pay of secretaries. I also discuss weaknesses in the current system, and the drift to ‘politicisation’. I was first appointed as a department secretary at the end of 1993 after 25 years in the APS including 15 years in the Senior Executive Service (SES) in three different portfolios (Social Security, Finance and Defence). I was secretary of three different departments (Administrative Services, Housing, and Health, some of which went through changes in name and responsibilities during my tenure) before being appointed as Public Service Commissioner from the beginning of 2002. I retired from the APS in June 2005.     

Grain market deregulation: a case study of the Canadian and Australian wheat boards

The recent deregulation in Canada's grain marketing sector with the resultant removal of the Canadian Wheat Board's single‐desk status presents a useful case for policy and institutional analysis. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the Canadian case using deregulation in Australia as a reference. Case studies of deregulation in the two countries are presented, and the different approaches are compared. This is to predict the likely trajectory along which the Canadian Wheat Board may evolve. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Appointments, Civil Service Systems, and Bureaucratic Competence: Organizational Balancing and Executive Branch Revenue Forecasts in the American States

Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We evaluate our organizational balancing thesis using data on executive branch general revenue fund forecasts in the American states from 1987 to 2002. States with a combination of politically appointed agency executives and merit-selected subordinates generally provide more accurate revenue forecasts than states that possess uniformly politicized personnel selection systems. Conversely, states with a combination of department head–appointed executives and subordinates chosen from an at-will system (i.e., nonmerit) produce more accurate forecasts than states with uniformly autonomous personnel selection systems. Our statistical findings underscore the positive consequences associated with balancing politicized and autonomous means of selecting personnel within hierarchies of political organizations.     

Pluralistic programming and radio diversity: a review and a proposal

While radio is America's most abundant medium, its content is characterized more by sameness than by diversity. Stations find it more profitable to duplicate mass appeal programming formats than to program to minority tastes. Such rational business decisions come at the expense of the listening audience which is given few formats from which to choose. The regulatory system, which speaks to the value of program diversity, has been unsuccessful in creating effective incentives to foster radio diversity. The article suggests a novel approach to radio regulation that combines economic incentives with new methods for identifying audience preferences such that a profit-maximizing radio industry would serve more tastes than are presently served.An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism, Boston, August 1980.     

Authoritarianism,socioethnic diversity and political participation across countries

It is argued in this article that threatening stimuli affect political participation levels among non‐authoritarians more than among authoritarians. Focusing on socioethnic diversity, which is known to be particularly threatening to authoritarians and to relate negatively to political participation in the general public, analyses of individual‐ and macro‐level data from 53 countries is presented which supports this thesis. Participation levels among authoritarians are largely static, regardless of a country's level of socioethnic heterogeneity, while non‐authoritarians participate considerably less in countries with relatively high levels of socioethnic heterogeneity. This suggests that authoritarians participate to a proportionately greater degree in the most diverse countries.     

Janos Kornai: a non-mainstream pathway from economic planning to disequilibrium economics

This paper first positions Janos Kornai in the controversies about the feasibility of socialist planning (Lange, Hayek). Kornai has leant in favor of Hayek’s thesis contending that, without an actual market price system for conveying information to those who can beneficially use it, a socialist economy is impracticable. The paradox is that Kornai worked at the Computer Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in relation with the Planning Institute of the National Planning Office and conceived an algorithm for decentralized two-level planning, i.e., the best improvement ever brought into Lange’s model of market socialism. This is due to Kornai being also involved in actual dysfunctions of central planning in Hungary (shortages) that he eventually theorized with disequilibrium modelling in his Economics of shortage. However, the latter departs from standard disequilibrium economics (Barro–Grossman) which has been joined by most former planometricians (such as Malinvaud for instance). Eventually Kornai adopted a more institutional approach for his recommendations as regards post-communist transformation into a market economy with a Hayekian flavor, in particular his support to an organic development of a privately-owned sector within a gradualist process instead of mainstream-supported overnight privatisation. His recent analysis of capitalism as a surplus economy shows the continuity of his non-mainstream view of disequilibrium over five decades. All this makes Kornai an original front-running researcher and breaking-through analyst, though somewhat paradoxical, and a quasi-heterodox economist, one foot in and one foot out of the mainstream.

     

Reconciling cultural diversity with a democratic community: Mestizaje as opposed to the usual suspects

A fascinating development within the liberal‐communitarian debate is how to deal with cultural diversity in increasingly heterogeneous democracies. Particularly noteworthy are Will Kymlicka's recasting of liberalism to deal with cultural minorities, especially the indigenous peoples of Canada and Charles Taylor's and Michael Walzer's articulation of a ‘deep diversity’ with regard to the federal relationship of Quebec to Canada as a whole. Both approaches, though, insufficiently address how combinations of cultures have been underway in the Americas for the past 500 years. Instead, I contend that mestizaje, the combination of cultures which has ensued in Mexico and the United States Southwest, articulates a ‘unity in diversity’ in which cultures transform each other without culminating in assimilation. To bolster my exegesis of mestizaje from the works of the Virgil Elizondo and Gloria Anzaldua, I accent how Jeremy Waldron's cosmopolitanism, Iris Marion Young's relational group theory, and Homi Bhabha's hybridity similarly illustrate how proposals such as Kymlicka's or Taylor/Walzer's insufficiently incorporate how integral heterogeneity is to cultural identity. In view of how ‘the border’ between the United States and Mexico exemplifies the growing intersection of diverse cultures from the developed and developing world, mestizaje offers that the intersection of multiple cultures in collaborative—not hegemonic—relations is intrinsic to realizing democratic citizenship.     

Electoral systems,ethnic diversity and party systems in developing democracies

Party system nationalization is often viewed as critical to national unity, the production of public goods, and may have implications for democratic success. This paper assesses the impact of ethnic diversity and electoral rules in 74 economically developing democracies. Contrary to past studies, majoritarian electoral systems heighten the tendency of ethnic diversity to reduce nationalization while proportional representation greatly reduces its impact. Presidential systems produce higher levels of nationalization than parliamentary systems but the effect reverses as the number of presidential candidates increases. Though ethnic party bans may increase nationalization, ballot access requirements, the level of freedom, and relative prosperity have no effect.     

Becoming Liberal,Unbecoming Liberalism: Liberal-Local Hybridity via the Everyday as a Response to the Paradoxes of Liberal Peacebuilding

Abstract

It has become clear that the liberal international institutions and ‘corridors of power’ have so far failed to deliver on their promise of a liberal peace for all. Liberal peacebuilding has often offered resources to an elaborate structuration of sometimes predatory elites – international and local – but not to the general populations of these multiple states. Institutions have been created, but the reach of liberal politics has had little impact – other than in basic security and in rhetorical, rights oriented terms – on the everyday life of populations. The local is commonly deployed to depict a homogenous and disorderly Other, whose needs and aspirations do not conform to liberal standards. Claims that moves toward the everyday have already been made disguise the limited ambitions of liberal statebuilders to enable a real improvement in local agency. In the midst of all of this the real everyday needs and lives of individuals have become obscured. This essay briefly suggests some theoretical responses, via the concepts of the ‘everyday’ and ‘empathy’. These offer the possibility of placing the social contract back within the heart of post-conflict states, or of allowing a new, post-liberal, politics which is more locally ‘authentic’, resonant and agential, to emerge.