Parliamentary Prorogation in Comparative Context

This paper examines the power to prorogue (or suspend) Parliament following the 2019 prorogation controversy in the UK. We outline the legal basis of prerogative-based prorogation, survey its uses in the UK and other Westminster systems, and compare it with equivalent rules in other European parliamentary democracies. The comparative perspective highlights the outlier status of the UK among comparable European democracies. In the UK, the absence of explicit legal limits on the use of prorogation gives the executive exceptional scope to employ the power for political purposes to sidestep Parliament. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for current discussions about the desirability of reforming the UK’s prorogation rules and placing express legal limits on the executive’s power.     

Sebastian Heilmann,Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy Making Facilitated China’s Rise

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Public-Private Partnerships als Gegenstand der (Politik-)Wissenschaft

The article reviews the state of research on public-private partnerships (PPP) which, following a development in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in the past few years have been introduced as a policy tool in Germany as well. Based on a short conceptual and historical introduction, recent political science publications as well as contributions from economic, legal, and administrative scientists are systematized and critically assessed. This also includes a review of selected publications on PPP experiences in Britain. Finally, the paper discusses relatively neglected research issues, including methodological deficits as well as problems of input legitimacy.     

Policy dynamics and the evolution of state charter school laws

Baumgartner and Jones (1993) showed how radically new policies emerge on government agendas as a consequence of exogenous shocks to policy subsystems displacing privileged interests. But how do these policies evolve post-punctuation? In this paper, we present three different models of policy change. Policies may revert to the old status quo if displaced interests re-assert themselves, or they may be “locked-in” by new interests now reaping the benefits. Alternatively, they may incrementally change as lawmakers “learn” how to better meet target population needs, particularly by witnessing how other jurisdictions address similar problems. We test these models with data on change in state charter schools laws over time. We find that whether old status quos are overthrow, and the fate of charter policies when they are enacted, is influenced more by competing political interests, especially interest groups, than elite and public perceptions of broad systemic crises. Yet, we also find that changing demands on the state and learning from the successes and failures of neighboring states also play significant roles.     

Projection effects and strategic ambiguity in electoral competition

Theories from psychology suggest that voters’ perceptions of political positions depend on their non-policy related attitudes towards the candidates. A voter who likes (dislikes) a candidate will perceive the candidate’s position as closer to (further from) his own than it really is. This is called projection. If voters’ perceptions are not counterfactual and voting is based on perceived policy positions then projection gives generally liked candidates an incentive to be ambiguous. In this paper we extend the standard Downsian model in order to investigate under what conditions this incentive survives in the strategic setting of electoral competition.     

Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of ‘deliberative democracy’. This debate is fanned by the claims of ‘traditional leaders’ that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from people's daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over local-level resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Peer Influence and Context: The Interdependence of Friendship Groups,Schoolmates and Network Density in Predicting Substance Use

This article focuses on the degree to which friends’ influence on substance use is conditioned by the consistency between their behavior and that of schoolmates (individuals enrolled in the same school, but not identified as friends), contributing to the literature on the complexity of interactive social influences during adolescence. Specifically, it hypothesizes that friends’ influence will diminish as their norms become less similar to that of schoolmates. The authors also propose that this conditioning relationship is related to the density of the friendship group. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AddHealth) (n ~ 8,000, 55 % female) to examine the interactive relationship between friend and schoolmate influences on adolescent substance use (smoking and drinking). The sample contains students ranging from age 11 to 22 and is 60 % White. The findings demonstrate that, as the substance use of the friendship group becomes more dissimilar from schoolmates’ substance use, the friendship group’s influence on adolescent substance use diminishes. Further, the results demonstrate that this conditioning relationship does not emerge when the friendship group is highly dense.