In Defense of Factions

We model faction formation in a world where party politicians' objective is the development of an informed program of governance. Politicians' preferences reflect their own views and their information that, when aggregated via intraparty deliberations, influences the party manifesto. By joining a faction, a politician increases the influence of its leader on the manifesto, but foregoes his individual bargaining power. For broad model specifications, we find that a faction formation process allows power to be transferred to moderate politicians. This facilitates information sharing, increasing the capacity of the party to attain its objective. These positive welfare effects may hold even when factionalism restricts intraparty dialogue, and hold a fortiori when information is freely exchanged across factions. We conclude that the existence of ideological factions may benefit a party: It provides a means to tie uninformed or extremist politicians to more moderate and informed faction leaders.     

COUNTERVAILING POWER AND A GOVERNMENT PURCHASING COMMISSION: AN OPPORTUNITY TO PROMOTE INCREASED COMPETITION IN AUSTRALIAN INDUSTRIES.

Abstract: Recent moves by both Labor and Liberal Governments in Australia indicate increased awareness of the possibilities that a centralized government purchasing body may be able to secure economies in purchasing large quantities of a wide range of goods used by government departments, agencies and commissions, and also that such a purchasing authority can be used as an instrument with which to put into effect government policies concerned with supporting a particular industry or geographic area. The argument in this paper elaborates on this theme. It is suggested that a centralized purchasing authority should act, using its countervailing power, to secure cost savings which would not only provide benefits to government departments, but which could also be passed on to the general public. For these savings to be achieved, significant changes would have to occur in the relatively passive system of tendering which characterizes most government purchases. The government purchasing body would need actively to induce some real competition between rival tenderers, if need be playing one bid against the other. A government contract would be awarded only on the condition that the lower price offered the government was, in fact, also passed on to the general public. Thus both the public and the firm would benefit; the public by paying lower prices and the firm by the extra demand likely to be generated for its product, as well as the security of the government contract. Of course, such a purchasing policy could only be followed against firms with significant market power and excess profits. Even if such a policy were followed for a small number of products, the result could be greater efficiency and lower prices for all consumers of these products.     

Can private governance boost public policy? Insights from public–private governance interactions in the fisheries and electricity sectors

Based on the inductive analysis of two parallel cases of private environmental governance – private, market-driven fisheries governance and private, market-driven governance for electricity decarbonization – this paper uncovers a trigger for positive public policy spillovers from private environmental governance. It identifies circumstances that prompt groups of business actors working as private regulators to also take on a role as public policy advocates and supporters, revealing a potential for private governance initiatives that are targeted at a particular environmental problem to serve as a bolster for the public regulatory governance of that problem as well. Both private governance cases at the basis of this analysis feature groups of business actors seeking to meet voluntary sustainability goals through the tools of private governance (specifically, through flexing buyer power and private authority in an effort to reform environmentally problematic practices among particular groups of suppliers). In both cases, the business's inability to attain private sustainability goals though private governance means alone has given rise to business demand for facilitative public environmental policy and regulation. The analysis presented in this paper thus points to the occurrence of a particular and intriguing pattern of complementarity between private authority and public policy – one where public policy is called on to fill gaps left by private environmental governance and authority. And it identifies key conditions for such private-governance-driven recentering of public policy to occur, namely the presence of private supply chain greening goals and commitments that are economically, reputationally, and/or competitively critical for businesses to attain, combined with shortfalls in the capacity of businesses' private authority to bring about such attainment. The two case analysis further suggests the importance of ENGOs in identifying and activating some of the opportunities for leveraging shortfalls in private environmental governance to the advantage of public environmental policy and regulation.     

Executive capacity to control legislatures and presidential choice of cabinet ministers in East Asian democracies

How do presidents in new democracies choose cabinet ministers to accomplish their policy goals? Contrary to existing studies explaining the partisan composition of the cabinet with institutional characteristics, such as formal authority, we argue that the broader political context surrounding the president's ability to control the legislature can affect cabinet partisanship. By analyzing original data on cabinet formation in all presidential systems in East Asia since democratization, we find that when presidents are more likely to be dominant in executive–legislative relations, they have less concern about legislative support and more leeway to focus on policy performance by appointing nonpartisan cabinet members. This analysis suggests that understanding cabinet partisanship requires a view of cabinet appointments as a trade‐off between securing legislative support and managing policy performance, and the scope of this compromise depends on the strength of the president vis‐à‐vis the legislature.     

Policymaking with Multiple Agencies

Authority over related policy issues is often dispersed among multiple government agencies. In this article, I study when Congress should delegate to multiple agencies, and how shared regulatory space complicates agency decision making. To do so, I develop a formal model of decentralized policymaking with two agencies that incorporates information acquisition and information sharing, delineating situations where legislators should and should not prefer multiple agencies. Greater divergence between the agencies' ideal points distorts information sharing and policy choices, but it may increase the amount of information acquisition. Congress achieves better policy outcomes by delegating authority to both agencies if the agencies have strong policy disagreements. If the agencies have similar policy preferences, however, then Congress may want to consolidate authority within one agency because this approach mitigates free-riding and takes advantage of returns to scale.     

Reforms, lobbies and welfare: A common agency approach

Citizens with heterogeneous tastes delegate to policy makers the authority to choose public policies. They may try to influence legislators in various ways. In this paper we assume that monetary lobbying and direct threats are the only instruments private individuals can use to influence the legislator. We model the relationship between the citizens and a single policy maker as a common agency game. Lobbies offer a policy and a payment according to a truthful contribution schedule, and the government takes the policy decision. In the truthful equilibrium, the government implements the social surplus maximizing policy. Introducing also direct threats, we find that, as far as both groups have an instrument to influence the legislator, the efficiency result is robust. We also show that when the lobby groups have asymmetric interests and political power, not all groups necessarily participate in the auction. In particular it turns out that one-lobby or non-lobby equilibria may arise, and those equilibria are also efficient.     

Lobbying when the decisionmaker can acquire independent information

Politicians trade off the cost of acquiring and processing information against the benefit of being re-elected. Lobbyists may possess private information upon which politicians would like to rely without the effort of verification. If the politician does not try to verify, however, the lobbyist has no incentive to be truthful. This is modelled as a game in which the lobbyist lobbies to show his conviction that the electorate is on his side. In equilibrium, sometimes the politician investigates, and sometimes the information is false. The lobbyists and the electorate benefit from the possibility of lobbying when the politician would otherwise vote in ignorance, but not when he would otherwise acquire his own information. The politician benefits in either case. Lobbying is most socially useful when the politician's investigation costs are high, when he is more certain of the electorate's views, and when the issue is less important.     

Politician preferences, law-abiding lobbyists and caps on political contributions

The effect of a contribution cap is analyzed in a political lobbying game where the politician has a policy preference. In contrast to the previous literature without politician policy preferences, more restrictive binding caps always reduce expected aggregate contributions. However the initial imposition of a cap increases contributions if the politician mildly favors the low-valuation lobbyist’s policy. The introduction of policy preferences permits analysis of monied interests’ policy influence. A more restrictive cap makes it more likely that the politician enacts the policy he would have enacted in the absence of lobbying, even in cases where expected aggregate contributions increase.     

Roll Calls, Party Labels, and Elections

We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individuallegislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators'preferences are private information, and they have two meansof communicating their preferences to voters. First, they eachhave a "party label" that credibly identifies an interval withinwhich their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votesmay convey additional information about their preferences. Eachlegislator must therefore tailor his or her votes to his orher district in order to forestall a reelection challenge fromthe opposing party. In equilibrium, nonsincere voting recordswill occur mostly in moderate districts, where extreme incumbentsare vulnerable to challenges from relatively centrist candidates.In those districts, the most extreme legislators may even chooseto vote sincerely and retire rather than compile a moderatevoting record. Thus, both roll call scores and candidate typeswill be responsive to district type. An empirical test of shiftsin roll call scores of retiring House members in moderate districtsconfirms these findings.     

Electoral Ambiguity and Political Representation

We introduce a Downsian model in which policy‐relevant information is revealed to the elected politician after the election. The electorate benefits from giving the elected politician discretion to adapt policies to his information. But limits on discretion are desirable when politicians do not share the electorate's policy preferences. Optimal political representation generally consists of a mixture of the delegate (no discretion) and trustee (full discretion) models. Ambiguous electoral platforms are essential for achieving beneficial representation. Nevertheless, electoral competition does not ensure optimal representation: The winning candidate's platform is generally overly ambiguous. While our theory rationalizes a positive correlation between ambiguity and electoral success, it shows that the relationship need not be causal.     

Helping Friends or Influencing Foes: Electoral and Policy Effects of Campaign Finance Contributions

Campaign finance contributions may influence policy by affecting elections or influencing the choices of politicians once in office. To study the trade‐offs between these two paths to influence, we use a game in which contributions may affect electoral outcomes and signal policy‐relevant information to politicians. In the model, a campaign donor and two politicians each possess private information correlated with a policy‐relevant state of the world. The donor may allocate his or her budget to either an ally candidate who has relatively similar preferences or a moderate candidate whose preferences are relatively divergent from the donor's preferred policy. Contributions that increase the likelihood of the moderate being elected can signal good news about the donor's preferred policy and influence the moderate's policy choice. However, when the electoral effect of contributions is too small to demand sufficiently high costs to deter imitation by groups with negative information, this informational effect breaks down.     

Making words count: Coalition agreements and cabinet management

The cabinet is a central actor in policy making in parliamentary systems. Yet, relatively little is known about how coalition cabinets operate. The delegation of decision‐making authority to ministers invites policy drift, which threatens the cohesiveness of the cabinet's policy programme. Cabinets employ a variety of methods to contain policy drift. The writing of coalition agreements is among the major tools, but there are others, including limiting ministerial autonomy and the use of junior ministers to shadow ministers. The present study demonstrates that coalition agreements are written to contain policy drift and that it is directly related to the degree of hierarchy in the cabinet. It studies the factors that affect the likelihood of a coalition agreement being written and how extensive they are, if written. Among these are the ideological diversity found in the cabinet, the use of alternative methods for controlling ministers and the complexity of the bargaining situation.     

March divided,fight united? Trade union cohesion and government appeal for concertation

Why does the government appeal for concertation? Starting from the principal?agent framework and delegation theory, the article argues that the government is more willing to share decision-making power with trade unions when the policy preferences endorsed by the unions are closer to those of the cabinet. Furthermore, it maintains that government propensity to negotiate with trade unions increases as the heterogeneity of union policy preferences grows because the cabinet can exploit its agenda-setting power to divide the union front. The article tests these two hypotheses through a longitudinal analysis of the Italian case (1946–2014). In detail, it takes advantage of two original datasets built through content analysis that provide unique in-depth information on the policy preferences of parties and cabinets and measures the policy positions of the main Italian trade unions, thus allowing assessment of their reciprocal heterogeneity. The results confirm the expectations.     

Privatization as institutional choice

A model based upon the common concept of rent-seeking behavior avoids an exclusive focus on the pecuniary motive in private institutions and the power motive in public institutions. Using this model, the case for privatization ranges from very strong to unpersuasive, with some fascinating intermediate cases. Where purchases are frequent, information is abundant, costs of a bad decision are small, externalities are minimal, and competition is the norm, privatization ought to be pursued. At the other extreme, in situations where externalities and collective interests abound, natural monopolies are dominant, distributional goals are important, or debate and experience will alter preferences, governmental determination of service levels and public provision should continue. Intermediate situations such as those involving education, health, and some aspects of enterprise development provide the most interesting and hotly debated areas. These intermediate situations have both private and collective characteristics, choices are made infrequently with little information, have monumental consequences, distributional considerations are critical, and public debate about the level and type of service substantially affects individual behavior.     

马克思主义权力观下建构防止利益冲突制度

腐败发生的重要根源在于公职人员的利益冲突,利益冲突的重要根源在于公职人员权力观的错位。树立“权为民所赋,权为民所用”的马克思主义权力观,从制度层面上规范和监督公共权力的运行过程,通过合理的制度安排使公共权力与私人利益相分离,从而阻断公职人员以权谋私的通道,最终达到预防腐败的目的。     

Transparency and political moral hazard

This paper analyzes the effects of asymmetric information on the public control of politicians in a world where the politicians’ pre-election promises are not credible. We study a model with identical politicians and a representative voter whose interests conflict with those of the politicians’. The voter’s decision to reelect the politician depends on both observable policies of the politician and the outcome of the unobservable policies. In equilibrium, either optimal decisions for the voter are not taken by the politician or if taken, the politician would extract more rent. In the latter case, politicians are also replaced more frequently.     

INADEQUACIES IN THE PROCESSES OF POLICY DEVELOPMENT IN AUSTRALIA

Abstract: Policy and policy development have received considerable attention in Australia over the last decade or more. This attention has resulted in many recommendations on policy in the series of major public service inquiries of the 1970s, in a number of books and journal articles on varied aspects of public policy, and in the considerable strengthening of the policy development capacities of many government agencies. This attention has to date been inadequate, because it has in almost all cases concentrated on the questions of where within the bureaucratic structure policy development should occur and what procedural mechanisms are needed to allow ministers or cabinet to choose between alternative policies and to facilitate the coordination of policies. These questions are of course important, but questions of how a well-considered policy option that can be considered by a cabinet or a minister is actually developed appear to have been almost totally ignored. In the public service inquiries, in the published literature, and in public accounts of the work of policy units, there appears to be virtually no analysis of the process of policy development. There is little or no discussion of how the standard formal models of policy development match or fail to match the techniques used in Australia, and although there have been many individual case studies of policy issues, there are no comparative case studies from which general observations might be drawn. Lastly, there are very few positive suggestions as to how policy development in Australia could be improved. Overcoming these inadequacies provides a major challenge to Australian policy workers.     

Policy‐Specific Information and Informal Agenda Power

In Gilligan and Krehbiel's models of procedural choice in legislatures, a committee exerts costly effort to acquire private information about an unknown state of the world. Subsequent work on expertise, delegation, and lobbying has largely followed this approach. In contrast, we develop a model of information as policy valence. We use our model to analyze a procedural choice game, focusing on the effect of transferability, i.e., the extent to which information acquired to implement one policy option can be used to implement a different policy option. We find that when information is transferable, as in Gilligan and Krehbiel's models, closed rules can induce committee specialization. However, when information is policy‐specific, open rules are actually superior for inducing specialization. The reason for this surprising result is that a committee lacking formal agenda power has a greater incentive to exercise informal agenda power by exerting costly effort to generate high‐valence legislation.     

A Case of a Surplus Majority Government: The Finnish Rainbow Coalition

Surplus majority government is the most frequent type of cabinet in postwar Finland. The case study investigates the explicative power of two groups of theories of surplus majority government on the Finnish rainbow coalition formed in 1995. Firstly, theories that model surplus size as instrumental for government capability, i.e. surplus size as critical to decision-making capability. Secondly, theories that model the surplus size as a possibility or where the size is the result of the expected utility of government being higher than that of opposition for the political parties in terms of goal realisation. The main materials studied are internal party documentation and interviews with key people. The result of the study is that parties' strategic features best explain the surplus size of the rainbow coalition, since participation in government offers greater opportunities for the realisation of party goals, such as policy, votes and future office.     

Legitimacy and the Privatization of Environmental Governance: How Non–State Market–Driven (NSMD) Governance Systems Gain Rule–Making Authority

In recent years, transnational and domestic nongovernmental organizations have created non–state market–driven (NSMD) governance systems whose purpose is to develop and implement environmentally and socially responsible management practices. Eschewing traditional state authority, these systems and their supporters have turned to the market's supply chain to create incentives and force companies to comply.
This paper develops an analytical framework designed to understand better the emergence of NSMD governance systems and the conditions under which they may gain authority to create policy. Its theoretical roots draw on pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy granting distinctions made within organizational sociology, while its empirical focus is on the case of sustainable forestry certification, arguably the most advanced case of NSMD governance globally. The paper argues that such a framework is needed to assess whether these new private governance systems might ultimately challenge existing state–centered authority and public policy–making processes, and in so doing reshape power relations within domestic and global environmental governance.