The labour market and income distribution in post-socialist economies – Non-obvious regularities

The goal of this paper is to analyse the major processes which took place on the labour market of post-socialist economies and to check what the outcomes of thee mechanisms used for income distribution. Few findings are especially interesting because of its counterintuitive character. First, there is a “strange” relation between the depth of recession and scale of rise in unemployment. Countries which suffered from quite moderate fall in GDP experienced high level of unemployment, while the economies which noticed substantial recession were able to sustain very limited unemployment rate. One can also expect that economy which suffered from sharp rise in unemployment should be the one in which income inequalities deteriorate in the biggest extend. Again, this is not what has happened in post-socialist countries. Economies like Russia or Ukraine which noticed quite limited rise in unemployment rates, experienced the highest deterioration in the income inequalities indicators. Finally, closer look at labour markets of EU New Member states shows that social cohesion in these countries is a much bigger problem than it appears from simple Gini coefficients.     

Ideological Congruence and Electoral Institutions

Although the literature examining the relationship between ideological congruence and electoral rules is quite large, relatively little attention has been paid to how congruence should be conceptualized. As we demonstrate, empirical results regarding ideological congruence can depend on exactly how scholars conceptualize and measure it. In addition to clarifying various aspects of how scholars currently conceptualize congruence, we introduce a new conceptualization and measure of congruence that captures a long tradition in democratic theory emphasizing the ideal of having a legislature that accurately reflects the preferences of the citizenry as a whole. Our new measure is the direct counterpart for congruence of the vote-seat disproportionality measures so heavily used in comparative studies of representation. Using particularly appropriate data from the  Comparative Study of Electoral Systems,  we find that governments in proportional democracies are not substantively more congruent than those in majoritarian democracies. Proportional democracies are, however, characterized by more representative legislatures.     

The Politics of Fertility and Economic Development

This paper presents a formal model that characterizes the two faces of development—persistent poverty, and industrialization and rising incomes—and establishes that the interaction between politics and economics determines which path a nation travels. We demonstrate that political factors affect fertility decisions so that a one-time disturbance compounds across generations, impacting a country's entire development trajectory. Modeling strategic multiobjective policy-setting by the government, we derive a new concept of political capacity and prove that a sufficient amount of political capacity is necessary to escape a poverty trap and develop the economy. Empirical tests for a sample of 100 countries from 1960 to 1990 provide strong support for the predictions of the formal model. In particular, we show that both political stability and political capacity significantly influence birth rates. We conclude that politics can be either a stimulant or a barrier to economic development.     

Election boycotts in the second and third republics of Poland,and their social implications

Traditionally, historians have been dismissive of the significance of voting in the Scottish parliament before the Covenanting revolution of 1638 and its first parliament in 1639–41. Recent, more detailed research has undermined many previous assumptions about the nature and procedures of parliament. Drawing upon local and national records, this article explores the evidence for the incidence of enumerated divisions as part of the decision-making process. It demonstrates that there is evidence for voting from as early as the fourteenth century, albeit that it is not unambiguous before the sixteenth century. As in the English House of Commons, enumerated divisions may have become more firmly established as a normal part of parliament's procedures during that century. The impact of the regal union is also analysed, although it is not clear that it had a significant impact upon this particular aspect of parliamentary procedure. It also examines the use of the word ‘vote’ in the Scots language, and its relationship to ‘voice’. It is argued that ‘vote’ was exported to England after 1603 and, as a consequence, it questions the view that the appearance of the word in England has significance for the emergence of contested elections there.