Capital Blight? The Regulation of Financial Institutions in Italy and Canada

The pressures of globalization and capital flight create two sets of challenges for national state structures. They are seen fo limit the boundaries of state action, and within those boundaries, they lead to a transfer of regulatory capacity to supra and/or subnational structures. The article explores the second set of challenges and asks whether globalization has led to uniform changes in the regulatory capacity of national states in the area of financial institutions. It argues that the Italian and Canadian experiences suggest that political and institutional factors may shape how national states respond to the pressure to shift regulatory capacity to structures at some other level. In the Italian case, the emergence of a single market for banking in Europe led to a strengthening of the state's policymaking capacity. In Canada, on the other hand, the federal government's authority was limited by competition with provincial regulatory regimes. Globalization may limit the boundaries of state action, but this does not necessarily mean that those boundaries will not be occupied primarily by national state structures.     

Personality traits,political attitudes and the propensity to vote

This article examines the link between personality traits, political attitudes and the propensity to vote in elections, using an Internet panel survey conducted in two Canadian provinces at the time of the 2008 federal election and the subsequent provincial elections. It first establishes that the two most proximate attitudes that shape one's propensity to vote are political interest and sense of civic duty. The article then look at specific personality traits (altruism, shyness, efficacy and conflict avoidance) that could affect level of political interest, civic duty and the propensity to vote in elections. In the last part of the analysis, a model is proposed and tested, according to which the impact of personality traits is indirect, being mediated by interest and duty. The article shows that the data are consistent with such an interpretation.