Conserving the Councillor: A Case for Widespread Local Officeholding

Guided by participatory and deliberative conceptions of democracy, local governments have embraced the need for increased citizen participation in decision-making. Yet, at the same time, a systematic reduction in the number of councillor seats has seen a precipitous decline in opportunities to participate in the council chamber. With specific reference to the Australian case, this paper seeks to explain this incongruity, suggesting that the answer lies in the wide adoption of democratic theorists' narrow conceptualisation of the role of the councillor. Viewed solely as representatives, whether in the corporate, mirror, or delegate mode, councillors are valued only insofar as they prove instrumental to an efficient and responsive system of governance. Their participation, itself, is not intrinsically valued. Drawing on novel and extant empirical evidence to demonstrate the participatory virtues of officeholding, this paper argues that when due regard is afforded to councillors' participatory role, a normative case for widespread — and more inclusive — officeholding emerges.     

Partners in clime: Public‐private partnerships and British Columbia's capacity to pursue climate policy objectives

Governments are increasingly using public‐private partnerships (P3s) to draw the private sector into more active participation in infrastructure development. Climate action initiatives have not typically yielded profitable results for the private sector, and might therefore constrain the placing of conditions by governments on P3 arrangements. This article investigates a major P3 infrastructure project in British Columbia – the Canada Line extension to Vancouver's urban rail transit network – and concludes that the P3 organization did not constrain the government's capacity to pursue policy objectives for climate action. This counterintuitive result occurred because public sector leadership enabled an effective engagement with environmental policy priorities.     

A House Divided? Roll Calls,Polarization, and Policy Differences in the U.S. House, 1877–2011

The study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict—not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.     

Ideological Competition and Conflict in the Judicial Hierarchy

Circuit splits, or conflicting rules across multiple U.S. Courts of Appeals, have important policy implications and dramatic effects on Supreme Court case selection, yet we know little about the incentives ideological lower courts face when deciding whether to initiate conflict. This article develops a formal model of a judicial hierarchy where lower court judges are subject to review by a high court with distaste for unresolved conflict, termed “split-intolerance,” and with uncertain preferences over policy. Lower courts may compete by investing costly effort in legal quality to make their rules more attractive. In equilibrium, lower courts may initiate conflict even when the odds of success before the high court are remote. Surprisingly, lower courts grow more likely to create conflict as the high court's split-intolerance increases; however, split-intolerance can also incentivize greater lower court effort. I present qualitative evidence illustrating the model's explanatory power.     

Academia in Anarchy: 50 years on

Public Choice - In 1970, James Buchanan and Nicos Devletoglou published Academia in Anarchy: An Economic Diagnosis. Even though the book focuses on the industry Buchanan worked in for nearly...