Voters and Voting in Multilevel Systems – An Introduction

This Special Issue, ‘Voters and Voting in Multilevel Systems', is a contribution to a better understanding of the functioning and logics of the present-day German electoral system, but its findings and consequences stretch beyond the German case. After all, Germany is ideally suited for studying multilevel voting and the interdependences and mutual repercussions of multilayer electoral systems. The Special Issue takes the challenges and changes in voting behaviour as a starting point and searches for links and causal relationships between levels. Overall, it has two major goals: first, to examine how (increasing) volatility in voting behaviour and declining participation rates manifest themselves at all layers of the multilevel system, possibly amplifying each other; second, to turn the usual perspective on its head by examining the impact of second-order elections and vote choices on parties' fortunes and electoral outcomes at the national level.     

Multi-Level Voting: A Stabilising Force or a Push towards Increasing Voter Volatility?

Germany has witnessed a drastic decline in turnout and, at the same time, a clear increase in voter volatility, late deciding and party switching. These changes affected all layers of the federal system to different degrees and with varying speed. While standard explanations refer to processes of modernisation and value change to explain the decline of stable and loyal partisanship, this article focuses on the role of an – until now – neglected aspect: the significance of multi-level voting in both maintaining voter stability and fostering its decline. After all, party loyalty needs to be re-activated and mobilised across individuals' life-cycles. Electoral campaigns are the prime occasion for parties to revive the link with ‘their’ core clientele. When campaigning is frequent, as in federal systems, mobilising takes place almost constantly. This article argues that multi-level voting contributed considerably to the stability which characterised German party politics for decades after World War II. However, since parties increasingly use campaigns to recruit new voter segments at the expense of mobilising core voters, today, multi-level voting has negative effects on stable party attachments and thus contributes to the increase in fluidity and volatility we witness today.     

What Causes the Local Fiscal Crisis in China: the role of intermediaries

Local governments in China are seriously under-funded relative to their assigned expenditure responsibilities for public services, resulting in the infamous ‘revenue–expenditure gap’. The dominant explanation of local fiscal difficulties given in the literature refers to central government behaviour, namely the excessive centralization of tax revenue, but it does not tally with the large flows of central subsidies to local coffers in more recent years. The alternative account we put forward stresses the working of an intermediary level embedded in the multi-tiered governance structure of a large country, and the interaction between local officials' fiscal behaviour and the revenue–expenditure gap. Employing fine-grained analysis of aggregate statistics and local case data, we argue that broader intergovernmental dynamics and practices of local intermediaries, and not only central government policy, are critical to fiscal health and government performance at the county level.     

China's Economic Diplomacy towards the Arab Countries: challenges ahead?

Since the outbreak of the Arab revolts in late 2010, China has adhered to its ‘business-first’ economic diplomacy towards the Arab countries, a policy driven by China's ongoing geoeconomic interests. The ten-year-old China–Arab States Cooperation Forum serves as the nucleus for China's economic diplomacy in the region. The Chinese authorities have also initiated interagency coordination and central–local governments' power sharing in order to pursue this diplomacy successfully. However, while its economic diplomacy may be evolving, China, unlike what it has achieved in Black Africa, seems to have failed to develop strategic, political and cultural exchanges with its Arab counterparts. The intertwined geopolitical and geoeconomic factors that have emerged since the Arab revolts might make it harder for China to reap economic benefits while shelving political entanglement to sustain this economic diplomacy in the longer run.     

China in Global Food Security Governance

The Chinese public's domestic expectation is that its state will ensure a safe and affordable supply of food. However, in doing so, China has acquired large amounts of farmland abroad which has raised concerns among many developing countries. It has been argued that land grabbing in the developing world is a form of neo-colonialism. This role of a colonial power is in conflict with China's historical role, which presents China as a leader of the developing world. In order to bring these role expectations into conformity with each other, China has taken a more active role in global food security governance. It has brought food security to what is becoming the core of the global governance decision-making system, the G20. China's historical role, together with its growing economic power, has helped to push the G20 to understand the importance of food security. This has shifted the G20's understanding of economic global governance away from the traditional fields of banking and trade regulation toward understanding the developmental-oriented economic structure.     

Social capital,household income,and community development in Bhutan: a case study of a dairy cooperative

Using a case of a dairy cooperative in Bhutan, this study investigates how social capital enhances individual household income and community development in rural areas. It also examines the influence of cooperatives in social capital formation. The study finds that social capital facilitates households that are resource-constrained by working together to reduce costs through economies of scale, enhancing information accessibility, building confidence, and strengthening teamwork. It fosters not only an improvement in the livelihoods of cooperative members, but also provides a positive influence for non-members and the community as a whole. The study also reveals that cooperatives influence formation of three forms of bonding, bridging, and linking social capitals. While bonding social capital facilitates strong teamwork among the members, bridging and linking social capitals connect the cooperatives with the outside networks and provides them more opportunities and services for its sustainability.     

Tug of war: street trading and city governance in Kumasi,Ghana

Kumasi, Ghana, has witnessed accelerated population growth in the past two decades, leading to a significant increase in joblessness following years of economic decline and labour market liberalisation. As a survival strategy, residents have resorted to street trading, making it an important source of livelihood. However, its associated implications for urban governance and management has placed city authorities in the spotlight over the years. Examining the daily struggles that occur between city managers and street traders, this article finds that various strategies adopted by city authorities to decongest the streets have proved futile. Rethinking what could be a sustainable strategy for decongesting the streets of traders, the article concludes that chasing the traders out of the streets is not the panacea to solving the problem unless well coordinated land-use planning and appropriate regulations are competently enforced.     

Financial services to the poor: the microfinance dilemma in Andhra Pradesh

In India, microfinance and associated strategies of forming self-help groups came about in response to a newly independent nation and its need to include the rural non-banking population into national structures of development and governance. This article examines how the rapid growth of microfinance institutions during the last two decades – especially in the context of the more recent transition from non-profit to for-profit non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) – has led to a significant increase in the delivery of financial services to the rural poor. In Andhra Pradesh, the simultaneous existence of some of India’s most prominent microfinance institutions (MFIs) and their mobilisation of self-help groups – with state backing and linkages to banks leading to relatively easy availability of funds – has led to a tremendous surge in the availability of credit across the state.     

Associations between MMPI-2-RF (Restructured Form) and Inwald Personality Inventory (IPI) Scale Scores in a Law Enforcement Preemployment Screening Sample

The MMPI-2 is widely used in assessments of police officer candidates. The MMPI-2-RF, composed of 338 of the 567 MMPI-2 items, is designed to measure the core clinical constructs assessed by the MMPI-2, but in a more psychometrically sound and efficient manner (Ben-Porath and Tellegen 2008/2011). Law enforcement comparison group data are embedded in the scoring software for the inventory, and reported in the User’s Guide for the MMPI-2-RF Police Candidate Interpretive Report (PCIR; Corey and Ben-Porath 2014). In the present concurrent validity study, conceptually based hypotheses regarding associations between MMPI-2-RF scales and scores on the Inwald Personality Inventory (IPI, Inwald et al. 1982; Hilson Research 2006), a test specifically designed to screen law enforcement officers, were tested with a sample of 277 male, full-time police officer candidates from four separate police departments of varying sizes examined after a conditional offer of employment was tendered. The majority of participants were Caucasian (69%), followed by African-American (27%), or Other/Mixed ethnicity (4%). Our hypotheses were largely borne out, lending support to the construct validity of the MMPI-2-RF and the ability of scores on the inventory to assess variables relevant to police candidate evaluations.     

Tributary-level transboundary water law in the Syr Darya: overlooked stories of practical water cooperation

Conventional emphasis on basin-wide water management has often resulted in the formation of transboundary water law on the basin or near basin scale. In Central Asia, however, the Syr Darya Basin possesses an abundance of tributary-level cooperative agreements that guide and codify water sharing and management on the sub-basin scale. To understand the volume and nature of this cooperation, this paper compiled and analyzed a set of agreements that apply to small transboundary tributaries (STTs) in the Syr Darya Basin. The paper assembled the largest collection of STT water agreements—123 in total—and classified such documents according to a range of criteria including: purpose and objectives, water management issues, and operational mechanisms. Results of this work highlight a rise in sub-basin-scale cooperation in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a time when large-scale cooperation appeared tenuous; a practical orientation to transboundary water management at a small scale; and an abundance of treaties of short time duration. These findings present options related to scale, time duration and focus of transboundary water law that can help inform future treaty development.