How Turnout Depends on the Number of Parties: A Logical Model

We illustrate the power of “logical models” (Taagepera, 2007 Taagepera, Rein (2007) Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems (NewYork: Oxford University Press).[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) by offering a three-parameter model of the relationship between the effective number of parties and electoral turnout that makes use of the constraints on what parameter values are internally coherent given boundary conditions to specify functional form, and seeks not optimal curve fitting but rather a direct model testing. In our model, one parameter reflects an effect that generally acts to increase turnout as the effective number of parties increases, another an effect that generally acts to decrease turnout as the effective number of parties increases, while a third parameter allows for baseline variation in turnout across countries (or within countries across elections). We fit this model to district-level data from 237 elections held in 17 countries, representing a wide range of electoral system types generating multi-party contests, with over 20,000 district-election observations. The basic intuition, that turnout rises to a peak as the effective number of parties increases and then falls slowly, fits our data pretty well.     

Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural features of the electoral landscape. In our framework, party-specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local candidates, linked to the national party organization and its contributors, interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive Senate contests. Three hypotheses emerge from this model: (1) the greater the diversity of a party’s national legislative delegation, the more highly competitive Senate elections we will observe; (2) states in which the ideological heterogeneity of the electorate is relatively high will exhibit a greater number of highly competitive elections; and (3) highly competitive Senate contests will be more common in states with closed primaries than in states with open primaries. We provide strong evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and some evidence in support of the third.     

Modeling the effects of changing issue salience in two-party competition

For a given distribution of voter ideal points, candidates may compete, not only by changing their policy platforms, but also by seeking to persuade voters to place more weight on one of the given dimensions. We do not examine persuasion mechanisms, per se, but, rather, investigate how change of the salience weights can lead to alternation of majorities for the candidates, even though candidate positions remain fixed. Thus, competition over the salience of issue dimensions can, under certain circumstances, be crucial for determining election outcomes. We illustrate potential non-monotonicities in priming effects in terms of the Fourier series decomposition of the distribution of voter preferences, showing that the existence of higher-level harmonics leads to greater uncertainty about election outcomes and about best heresthetic strategies. We then demonstrate the empirical relevance of our results with data on two issue dimensions of political competition in the 2000 U.S. presidential election.     

Congress and executive branch budget reform: the house appropriations committee and zero-base pudgeting

Local police agencies are in a fiscal crisis prompted by inflation on one hand and citizen tax revolt on the other. However, there is opportunity inherent in the budget crunch. It provides local government and police administrators with unprecedent political leverage to cut budgets in a manner where highly productive programs are retained while the unproductive ones are deleted. To this end the essay discusses avenues, drawn from recent police scholarships, for using budgetary retrenchment as means for substantive police reform.     

Recognizing regions: ASEAN's struggle for recognition

Abstract

Does recognition matter for a region as much as it does for a state and a person? This article examines the power of recognition in shaping regional cooperation. Rather than focusing on the behaviours and interactions between member states, which most studies have done, this article introduces a recognition model to investigate how the social practices of a region with non-member entities promote regional cooperation. By viewing recognition as a tradable commodity and an independent variable, the framework illustrates how the contest for recognition permeates beyond interpersonal and interstate interactions to include the struggle for recognition by regions. The model hypothesizes that the extent of recognition accorded to a region has an influence on its development. Drawing on newly released US declassified diplomatic records, this article tests the soundness of the proposed recognition model for regions by analysing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) struggle for recognition in the 1970s. It discusses how recognition was traded between ASEAN and three foreign powers, namely the USA, Japan and the European Economic Community, during the grouping's formative years. The findings suggest that the strengthening of a regional concept is influenced by the willingness of, and the extent to which, foreign powers recognize the entity. The central theme of this article is that recognition plays an important function in the development of a regional concept.     

The death penalty and the right to life

On the first anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, some reflection on the phenomenon of state-sponsored execution in an enlightened, civilised world seems appropriate. While this subject has an obvious international character, it also possesses some intriguing Irish and Northern Irish dimensions. In a wide ranging treatise, I examine how the rule of law has dealt with the death penalty at both the national and international levels, highlighting in particular the important influence of national constitutional laws in this sphere. I examine also the influence of the universally acknowledged right to life and the requirement of due process.     

On the Membership of Decision-Making Committees

The decision of a committee is determined jointly by the votingprocess it adopts and the composition of its membership. The paper analyses the process through which committee members emerge from the eligiblepopulation and traces the consequences of this for the decisions ofthe committee. It is shown that the equilibrium committee will becomposed of representatives from the extremes of the tastedistribution. These extremes balance each other and the committeereaches a moderate decision. However, this mutual negation by theextremes is a socially wasteful use of time. Data from the UK Houseof Lords is used to illustrate these results.     

Intermunicipal cooperation,municipal amalgamation and the price of credit

In many countries, local government size is increasingly thought to be insufficient to operate efficiently. Two possible solutions to this problem are amalgamation and intermunicipal cooperation. This paper applies a novel methodology to shed light on the efficiency implications of this choice. Using a unique and rich micro-level dataset, we find that intermunicipal organisations (IOs) in the Netherlands consistently pay higher interest rates than municipalities, while there is no economic reason to do so. We interpret this as a form of inefficiency. Municipal amalgamation, on the other hand, does not result in higher interest rates. Our analysis eliminates one possible explanation, dispersed ownership of IOs, as the number of partners cooperating in an IO does not affect interest rates (no ‘law of 1/n’). This leaves the introduction of extra hierarchical layers as a result of cooperation, and the ensuing reduction in monitoring, as the most probable explanation.