Who Pays the Piper?

Abstract

This paper, using research from the UK and comparable US studies, looks at the growth in party fundraising, ethics of the process, impact on electoral systems, candidates, parties, campaigning and methods of obtaining funds (one donor in the UK has recently agreed to give £5 million to the Conservative Party because they are anti EU whilst Labour gained £1 million from the smoking lobby in 1997). It then links this to a growth in strategic public affairs and outlines the direct causal link between political lobbying and party fundraising.     

Who will deregulate the deregulators?

A well-intentioned and fully informed regulator may determine that the optimal policy is to deregulate the market, yet the regulator may be constrained from doing so. In this condition, deregulatory policies originate in exogenous shocks to the regulator’s choice environment. Entrepreneurship in political and economic markets is a primary source of institutional change that promotes deregulation.     

Who cares about the public sphere?

This article offers the first empirical and cross-national analysis of citizens’ views about the democratic importance of the public sphere. We first identify three normative functions that public spheres are expected to perform in representative democracies: they provide voice to alternative perspectives, they empower citizens to criticise political authorities and they disseminate information on matters of public interest. We then argue that citizens develop differentiated views about the importance of these democratic functions, depending on (1) their ability to influence political decisions through public debate, and (2) the extent to which voice, critique and information address democratic problems they particularly care about. Drawing on Wave 6 of the European Social Survey, the statistical analysis indicates that citizens in most European countries consider the public sphere very important for democracy, especially its role as a supplier of reliable information. However, certain groups tend to care more about different aspects of the public sphere. More educated citizens are more likely to assign greater importance to all three functions. Members of cultural and sexual minorities are more likely to emphasise the importance of giving voice to alternative perspectives, while citizens dissatisfied with the government are more likely to prioritise public criticism and access to reliable information. Finally, in countries with more democratic public spheres, differences based on education and minority status are wider, while differences based on government satisfaction disappear. These findings support the claim that citizens care more about the public sphere when they can effectively influence political decision making through public debate or when the public sphere addresses democratic problems that are especially important to them. Moreover, our results indicate that citizens see some of the functions that public spheres perform as core aspects of democracy, comparable in importance to free and fair elections and the rule of law. The article thus advances an empirically grounded defence of the centrality of public debate for democracy.     

Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions?

Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first is that in deciding a case, justices must resolve a concrete dispute, and that they may have preferences over which party wins the specific case confronting them. The second is that justices who are dissatisfied with an opinion are free to write concurrences (and dissents). We demonstrate that both features undermine the bargaining power of the Court's median and shift influence towards the coalition median. An empirical analysis of concurrence behavior provides significant support for the model.     

Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict

Postulating grievance‐based mechanisms, several recent studies show that politically excluded ethnic groups are more likely to experience civil conflict. However, critics argue that endogeneity may undermine this finding since governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independently of conflict. Focusing on postcolonial states, we exploit differences in colonial empires' strategies of rule to model which ethnic groups were represented in government at the time of independence. This identification strategy allows estimating the exogenous effect of inclusiveness on conflict. We find that previous studies have tended to understate the conflict‐dampening impact of political inclusion. This finding suggests that grievances have been prematurely dismissed from conventional explanations of conflict, and that policy makers should consider conflict resolution methods based on power sharing and group rights.     

Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage

Can civilians caught in civil wars reward and punish armed actors for their behavior? If so, do armed actors reap strategic benefits from treating civilians well and pay for treating them poorly? Using precise geo‐coded data on violence in Iraq from 2004 through 2009, we show that both sides are punished for the collateral damage they inflict. Coalition killings of civilians predict higher levels of insurgent violence and insurgent killings predict less violence in subsequent periods. This symmetric reaction is tempered by preexisting political preferences; the anti‐insurgent reaction is not present in Sunni areas, where the insurgency was most popular, and the anti‐Coalition reaction is not present in mixed areas. Our findings have strong policy implications, provide support for the argument that information civilians share with government forces and their allies is a key constraint on insurgent violence, and suggest theories of intrastate violence must account for civilian agency.     

Who does better for the economy? Presidents versus parliamentary democracies

Are certain forms of government associated with superior economic outcomes? This paper attempts to answer that question by examining how government systems influence macroeconomic performance. We find that presidential regimes consistently are associated with less favorable outcomes than parliamentary regimes: slower output growth, higher and more volatile inflation and greater income inequality. Moreover, the magnitude of the effect is sizable. For example, annual output growth is between 0.6 and 1.2 percentage points lower and inflation is estimated to be at least four percentage points higher under presidential regimes relative to those under parliamentary ones. The difference in distributional outcomes is even starker; income inequality is 12 to 24% worse under presidential systems.     

Who Governs Japan? Politicians and Bureaucrats in the Policy-making Processes

The long-running debate about who governs Japan has been given a new twist by 'rat-choicers' who argue that Japan has been governed for the last thirty years or more neither by bureaucrats nor by a 'conservative coalition' of bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen but by the Liberal Democratic Party alone. This article examines their arguments and sets them in the context of other competing and conflicting explanations. It is argued that more relevant and researchable questions are what is governed and how, an approach calling for a more nuanced analysis of policy making in order to observe the impact on different policies and policy-processes of the role of the state and its institutional structures and their embedded 'collective identities'.     

Who talks about what? Issue strategies across the party hierarchy

We combine the recent literature on issue competition with work on intra-party heterogeneity to advance a novel theoretical argument. Starting from the premise that party leaders and non-leaders have different motivations and incentives, we conjecture that issue strategies should vary across the party hierarchy. We, therefore, expect systematic intra-party differences in the use of riding the wave and issue ownership strategies. We test this claim by linking public opinion data to manually coded information on over 3600 press releases issued by over 500 party actors across five election campaigns in Austria between 2006 and 2019. We account for self-selection into leadership roles by exploiting transitions into and out of leadership status over time. The results show that party leaders are more likely than non-leaders to respond to the public's issue priorities, but not more or less likely to pursue issue-ownership strategies.     

Who Benefits from KIPP?

The nation's largest charter management organization is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP schools are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and emphasizes traditional reading and math skills. No Excuses charter schools are sometimes said to target relatively motivated high achievers at the expense of students who are more difficult to teach, including limited English proficiency (LEP) and special education (SPED) students, as well as students with low baseline achievement levels. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP school in Lynn, Massachusetts that typifies the KIPP approach. Our analysis focuses on special needs students that may be underserved. The results show average achievement gains of 0.36 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn, with the largest gains coming from the LEP, SPED, and low‐achievement groups. Average reading gains are driven almost entirely by SPED and LEP students, whose reading scores rise by roughly 0.35 standard deviations for each year spent at KIPP Lynn.     

Who captures whom? Regulatory misperceptions and the timing of cognitive capture

To explain cognitive capture, economic sociologists often examine the structure of relationships between regulators and market participants. This paper argues that the nature of regulators' misperception should be subject to analysis as well. Different types of misperceptions develop over timelines of varying lengths. Depending on the misperception, different sets of relationships and parties may therefore be the cause of regulators' capture. The paper illustrates this point with a case study of regulators' failure to detect pervasive market power in California's electricity markets between 1998 and 2001. Existing explanations focus on sellers' short-term attempts to distract regulators from widespread evidence of market power. Using data from three archives and in-depth interviews, I show that the regulators did not fall prey to such “information problems.” Instead, their misperception resulted from a more foundational “worldview problem.” This error affects regulators' basic conception of the marketplace and can be traced to earlier and more gradual forms of influence exerted by utilities that, ironically, would become the victims of market power.     

Who protests? An exploration of the class dimensions of anticorruption mobilization

This article examines the role of economic class in mobilizing against corruption. Across several countries, recent anticorruption movements have been attributed to the growing urban middle class. Yet, existing studies have not examined how citizens view their own agency and how their views may be affected by their class position. We use Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer survey and a case study of India to critically examine the class dimensions of anticorruption mobilization. We find that citizens in middle‐income countries are most concerned with corruption. At the same time, those who identify as middle class are only slightly more likely than low‐income individuals to indicate a willingness to mobilize. In contrast, people who identify as high income are much less willing to engage with the issue. Our findings suggest that successful and sustained mobilization against corruption might require a coalition of middle‐and lower‐income groups.