The Logic of Private and Collective Action

Since Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action (1965), it is impossible for political scientists to conceive of political participation without reference to his powerful argument linking numbers of participants, public goods, and participatory outcomes. What is puzzling is the poor empirical support for this argument in the domain where it should work best, namely explaining business political activity. Olson thought his arguments principally applicable to economic groups, and for the empirical development of his arguments Olson drew heavily on business interests, the most active segment of the interest group community. We explore these arguments with business political activities data by examining the statistical performance of various measures of market structure in determining business political activity, and find little empirical support. We do offer an alternative basis for business behavior lodged in both private and collective goods that preserves business rationality and also helps explain not only the amount of business political participation but the modes of business participation .     

Organized Grour>Government Relations in Norway: On the Structured Selection of Participants, Problems, Solutions, and Choice Opportunities *

This article reviews the nature of direct interest organizational participation in government in Norway. Organizational involvement, while high, varies markedly across different kinds of associations and issues. Activities are concentrated in the two organizational forms of the committee and remiss systems. The analysis of the linkage patterns with the ministries suggests that corporatism is a somewhat inadequate concept for describing the Norwegian system in general.     

The Fourth Level of Government: on the Standardization of Public Policy within International Regions*

Both in the literature and in public documents one usually operates with three levels of government: local, regional, and national. This may be partly due to a common perception of coordination and standardization as something that takes place only through hierarchical forms of organization. However, if we realize that coordination and standardization may also take place through other organizational forms, as for instance bargaining, consultation, and autonomous adjustment, we can add A fourth level of government. At the same time, hierarchy seems considerably modified at the national levels. Thus, a central argument is that 'national' policies cannot be adequately explained by 'national' politics alone. Some data from the Norwegian context are used to illustrate this argument.     

The Institutional Context of Market Ideology: A Comparative Analysis of the Values and Perceptions of Local Government CEOs in 14 OECD Countries

During recent decades, various versions of market practices have, in most nation states, diffused into the public sector. We analyse variations in the adoption of market ideologies and examine plausible explanations for these variations. Four managerial ideal types are constructed, based on their attitudes towards two dimensions of market ideology. Managerial attitudes and perceptions are conceived as embedded in a global process of diffusion highly affected by varying institutional preconditions. The impact of five types of institutional contexts is examined: the national context, the organizational context, the context of interaction, the context of socialization and the norms of the manager.     

Do Municipal Mergers Improve Fiscal Outcomes?

Improved fiscal management is a frequent justification for promoting boundary consolidations. However, whether or not this is actually the case is rarely placed under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Hence, this article investigates if fiscal outcomes are improved when municipalities are merged. The basic argument is that the conceptualisation of fiscal management in political science is often too narrow as it focuses on the budget and pays hardly any attention to balances in the final accounts and debts – elements of management which are central to policy making. On this background, the causal relationship between municipal mergers and fiscal outcomes is analysed. Measured on the balance between revenues and expenses, liquid assets and debts, municipal mergers improve the fiscal outcomes of the municipalities in a five‐year perspective, although the pre‐reform effects tend to be negative. For liquidity and debt, however, the improvement only entails re‐establishing the levels prior to the reform. The testing ground is the recent mergers of Danish municipalities, which, it is argued, constitute a quasi‐experiment. This forms the basis of a Difference‐in‐Difference design, allowing the alleviation of endogeneity problems and enabling causal inference. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Danish municipalities in the period 2003–11.     

A Not So Technocratic Executive? Everyday Interaction between the European Parliament and the Commission

The European Commission, although generally portrayed as a technocratic, non-majoritarian institution, or as an agent of EU member governments, has become increasingly linked to the European Parliament (EP) through a range of semi-parliamentary measures intended to increase the executive’s legitimacy and accountability. In this article we argue that in addition to several highly visible and often treaty-based control instruments, an almost symbiotic, less visible, routine relationship can be observed between the two institutions. Based on an online survey of EP staff, as well as on minutes from EP committee meetings, this article examines the daily interaction taking place between the Commission and the EP, particularly at the level of officials. Although mutual interdependence in the legislative process may trigger daily interaction, the theoretical argument proposed is that the latter is facilitated and reinforced under two particular conditions: (i) if the two institutions share similar organisational patterns, and (ii) if they share similar behavioural patterns. Three such patterns are emphasised: sectoral, ideological and supranational.     

Size,Democracy, and the Economic Costs of Running the Political System

The search for the optimal size of political systems is one of the most enduring in political thought. Given the validity of arguments for and against small units, one might expect variation in rearrangements of unit sizes. However, the reform trend is uniform: units, often at the local level, are amalgamated to harvest scale effects. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the argument on economies of scale in the economic costs of running political systems. Our testing ground is a recent Danish reform. It allows us to avoid endogeneity problems often facing researchers of size reforms. The reform was directed by the central government and constitutes an exogenous shock to 239 municipalities, whereas 32 municipalities were left untouched. We thus have a quasi‐experiment with pre‐ and posttreatment observations for both an experiment and a control group. Our findings show that scale effects, measured as administrative costs per inhabitant, are considerable.     

Local government revenue policies in new Mexico

This examination of the revenue patterns of local governments in New Mexico finds that communities with the greatest social needs for public services-- small population rural areas, less affluent communities, and rapidly growing districts-- are precisely those that have the weakest revenue bases. Moreover, none of these types of disadvantaged jurisdictions receives above-average redistributive assistance from the federal government.Variations in revenue effort, especially among municipalities, exacerbate this problem because certain communities gain huge revenue windfalls which bear little relationship to either their social needs or taxing efforts but stem, rather, from fortuitous geographic positions. This advantage works its way through the entire revenue system, directly because state transfers are linked to place of collection and indirectly because of the overwhelming effect of revenue effort on revenue sharing allocations in the state. The local revenue system in New Mexico, therefore, works against the communities that have the greatest need for government services. Most of these inequities, however, do not appear to be the explicit goal of economic or political policy. Instead, they are the unintended consequences of a supposedly “neutral” allocation formula. This state of affairs certainly argues for policymakers paying more attention to the actual results of their policies.