Public health measures against neonatal tetanus on the island of Vestmannaeyjar (Iceland) during the 19th century

The article presents a study of neonatal tetanus on the tiny island of Vestmannaeyjar (Iceland) during the 18th and 19th centuries. At an early date, Vestmannaeyjar was known for its high levels of mortality from neonatal tetanus. This appalling mortality is analysed, inter alia, on the basis of parish registers at the individual family level. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, more than three out of four newborns on the island died during the first 2weeks of life. At the beginning of the 19th century, Icelandic and Danish authorities had already showed great interest in improving infant survival on Vestmannaeyjar. In 1827 a physician was appointed to the island and by the late 1840s the disease was successfully fought on the island. The achievement on Vestmannaeyjar is a good example of how the sanitary movement was able to bring about important improvements in infant survival long before the breakthrough of the bacteriological revolution.     

Explaining Interest Rates in Local Government Borrowing

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the usefulness of municipal accounting information in the interest rates agreed on by financial institutions in the European context. Most of the literature has focused on municipal bonds, mainly in the United States. Our core contribution is to study which factors determine the interest rates on bank loans to municipalities. This framework is different, since there is neither a secondary bond market nor credit ratings, and therefore information asymmetry is higher. Specifically, we investigate if municipal financial indicators and financial reports’ quality have an influence on interest rates paid by Spanish municipalities in the period 2001–2008. Our empirical results indicate that, in general, the municipal financial situation exerts an influence on the credit policy of lenders, who charge a risk premium to those municipalities with less current surplus, which is an indicator of the municipality's saving ability. Furthermore, there is also some inertia in the municipal annual interest rate (year t ? 1 interest determines around 27% of year t interest). Other findings indicate that high levels of expenditures and debt per capita increase the interest cost of municipal borrowing. Finally, municipalities that disclose full detailed financial reports pay less interest because information asymmetry and transaction costs are lower.     

Iceland

European Journal of Political Research -     

Agenda Power,Executive Decree Authority,and the Mixed Results of Reform in the Brazilian Congress

This article examines how institutional change in the use of extraordinary legislation affects delegation of power and unilateral action in new democracies. From 1988 to 2001, Brazilian presidents were able to reissue decrees indefinitely and thus had substantial legislative power. In 2001, Congress amended the constitution so as to restrict the president to a single reissue of each lapsed decree. This reform has had mixed results: although it ended the practice of infinite reissues, it induced Presidents Cardoso and Lula to use more decrees than previous executives had. Presidential agenda power, rather than being reduced, has been sharpened. By analyzing patterns of presidential initiatives from 1995 to 2005, we demonstrate the mixed results of this constitutional reform.     

Violence,the Subject,and the Beyond: Achille Mbembe and Violence in International Relations Theory

A double-barrelled question underpins this special edition: can International Relations (IR) be decolonised? If so, how? I argue that IR's insistence on more-or-less concretised subjects, which engage in dialectical relations of struggle, renders the discipline (and the practice it engenders) constitutionally blind to the origins of colonial violence. Traditional theory necessarily elides the violence which forges legible concrete actors and which culminates in colonialism and slavery. I offer a critique of this theoretical structure through Achille Mbembe's reading of Bataille, Fanon, Hegel, and Kojève, and I close by touching on the decolonising potential of Édouard Glissant's work for academic IR. I conclude that IR can indeed be decolonised, but it must become something quite unrecognisable if it is to do so.     

Democracies and Deficits: Prospects for Fiscal Responsibility in Democratic Nations

The financial crisis had significant implications for the fiscal positions of OECD. As nations seek to cope with the economic contraction, budget deficits and debt have risen to near record postwar levels. As the crisis in Europe and other advanced economies has deepened, fiscal consolidation will have to be coupled, and even preceded, by actions to jump‐start crippled economies. Nonetheless, when fiscal consolidation becomes necessary, nations that procrastinate by waiting for a crisis to provide cover for the politically hard choices will pay a steep price indeed both economically and politically. Many in the academic and policy community have raised questions about whether advanced democracies have the political wherewithal to respond to gathering fiscal pressures through early and timely action. Recent fiscal actions in advanced nations suggest that democracies are not doomed to wait for market shocks and crises. Rather, leaders have shown that fiscal sacrifice can be achieved in ways that promote electability. In this article, we discuss the impetus for democratic fiscal actions and the strategies used to gain public support.     

Republicanism Domesticated? All‐Ireland Politics in an Age of Austerity

This paper examines some of the key factors working in favour of mutual insulation between the two political jurisdictions in Ireland, factors that contribute to the ‘copper‐fastening’ of partition and that constitute a major obstacle to any Irish Republican project focused on the ending of partition. It outlines the powerful structural forces working for the naturalisation of Northern Ireland as a political unit. It argues that some of these factors are almost entirely independent of political unionism and in certain respects work to copperfasten partition despite the efforts of unionism. It goes on to outline a number of key elements that work against the mutual insulation of the jurisdictions and the domestication of Irish Republican and nationalist politics in a Northern Ireland context, factors that continue to pull the North back into an all‐Ireland context despite all of the powerful structural factors working to mutually insulate the politics of the two jurisdictions.     

WHY DO LOCAL GOVERNMENTS PRIVATIZE THE PROVISION OF WATER SERVICES? EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM SPAIN

Why do some local governments privatize water services, while others opt for public management? Economic literature has been unable to demonstrate that private management is more efficient than public management, so there must be other reasons that lead governments to privatize the service. But what are they? This paper presents the results of a study that analyses the factors behind the privatization of water services with data from 741 municipalities located in the South of Spain over a period dating from 1985 to 2006. A discrete choice model analyses the influence of each factor on the likelihood of privatization. One of the novelties of this paper is that we take the value of the explanatory variables at the time when water services are privatized. Among our findings, it is worth highlighting the importance of the size of municipalities, their financial burden and the neighbouring effect.     

Economic crises and the nationalisation of politics

The literature on party system nationalisation has yet to provide a better understanding of the impact of short‐term factors upon the nationalisation of politics. This article helps to fill this literature gap by analysing the effect of economic conditions on party system nationalisation. The argument is that economic crises will decrease levels of nationalisation by amplifying territorial variation in preferences for redistribution, limiting political parties’ capacity to coordinate divergent interests across districts and triggering the emergence of new political forces. Data on 47 countries for the 1960–2011 period confirm this hypothesis and show that lower economic growth during the years prior to the election is associated with a decrease in levels of party system nationalisation in the next election. The result is robust to variation in the specification of the econometric model and to the use of different measures of nationalisation. Results also show that federal institutions increase the impact of economic conditions on the nationalisation of politics, whereas any moderating effect of electoral system proportionality on the economy is not found.