Party leaders and voter responses to political terrorism

Public Choice - In this article, we study the political implications of terrorism rooted in extremist political ideologies. Our data uniquely allow studying the potential role of party leader...     

Coercive Diplomacy: Israel,Transjordan and the UN—a Triangular Drama Revisited

The Arab states suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of Israel during the first Arab–Israeli war. Immediately following the war, Israel made brilliant and shrewd use of diplomacy to achieve its goals at the negotiating table, much as it had previously used armed force. Israel refused to negotiate with a united Arab negotiation team, preferring to isolate the states, picking them off one after the other. The Israeli–Transjordanian talks differed radically from the other armistice negotiations. Here, two parallel tracks were followed. At Rhodes, the two countries negotiated openly under UN auspices, while in Jerusalem and at King Abdullah's palace in Transjordan, representatives of the two countries held secret bilateral talks. Israel masterfully used the context of these talks to maximise its gains, using military operations to create ‘facts on the ground’, combined with direct coercion in the shape of blackmail, while taking full advantage of international power structures and abusing the trust that King Abdullah had placed in personal relations. The UN Acting Mediator, Ralph Bunche, was aware of the secret back channel, where the clearest cases of coercion took place. Physically and mentally exhausted by the protracted negotiations, he allowed the secret talks to progress despite his dislike of the outcome. The British government, at the time the protector of Transjordan, was unable to assist its client for fear of falling out with the USA, while the US government, in many ways the protector of Israel, maintained an equally ‘hands off’ stance because the talks concerned only an armistice, not a peace treaty. Already at this early stage in their relations, the power asymmetry between Israel and the Arab states was the main reason the parties could not arrive at a peaceful, sustainable solution. This article reinvestigates this diplomacy by using a combination of US, Israeli, British and UN archives, as well as the almost untouched Ralph Bunche diary.     

Habit formation, strategic extremism, and debt policy

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters’ preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability of reelection. Comparing to a benchmark case of a certain reelection, we demonstrate that the incumbent’s optimal policy features both a more polarized allocation between the alternative public goods and a debt bias.     

Foreclosure in contests

We consider a contest where one firm has a cost advantage over rivals. Instead of taking the set of rivals as given, the favorite can transfer the source of its advantage wholly or partially to a subset of rival firms. Foreclosure of those firms that do not receive the cost reduction may result. We present conditions under which this transfer will occur and consider the welfare properties of exclusion. The expected payoff of the dominant firm is independent of the size of the cost reduction transferred to rivals. Applications include lobbying, patent races and access to essential infrastructure.     

Population Pressure,Horizontal Inequality and Political Violence: A Disaggregated Study of Indonesian Provinces, 1990–2003

All parts of a country are rarely equally affected by political violence. Yet statistical studies largely fail to address sub-national conflict dynamics. We address this gap studying variations in ‘routine’ and ‘episodic’ violence between Indonesian provinces from 1990 to 2003. Within a grievance framework, the article focuses on the violence potential of resource scarcity and population pressure, as well as inter-group dynamics related to polarisation and horizontal inequality. Demographic pressure and inequality seem to have little effect in isolation. However, in provinces where population growth is high, greater levels of inequality between religious groups appear to increase the violence risk.     

MARRIAGE,IN‐LAWS,AND CRIME: THE CASE OF DELINQUENT BROTHERS‐IN‐LAW*

With marriage comes in‐laws, and if the in‐laws include delinquent males, their delinquency could affect the prosocial effects of the given marriage. In this article, I focus on the effect of having a convicted brother‐in‐law as a general indicator of this broader phenomenon of family‐formation processes impairing the positive impact of marriage on crime desistance. I use registry data on all men from birth cohorts 1965–1975 in Denmark (N = 69,066) to show that when a man marries, his new family ties to delinquent brother(s)‐in‐law do indeed hinder his criminal desistance. The results that take into account the characteristics of husbands, wives, their shared family‐formation process, and the criminality of male family members suggest that 1) family dynamics tend to keep criminality within family networks and 2) influences from one's broader social network through marriage are important for the protective effects of marriage. Analyses of previous conviction, co‐offending between a man and his brother‐in‐law, as well as analyses of in‐laws who reside in close proximity confirm the two mentioned main findings. In all, the findings reported in this article add to our understanding of the processes by which families are tied, and how these family‐formation processes influence men's behavior.     

Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change

Most countries struggle to implement CO₂ reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.     

REVENUE SCARCITY AND GOVERNMENT OUTSOURCING: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM NORWEGIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

It is often said that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. In this article, we assess whether this also applies to the design of public authorities' service provision. In particular, we evaluate whether revenue scarcity – as an indicator of fiscal stress – induces government outsourcing. In contrast to previous studies, we exploit arguably exogenous variation in local government revenue across time and space to derive stronger inferences on the role of revenue scarcity for outsourcing. Using data from Norwegian local governments covering the period 1995–2012, our main results indicate that a decrease in local government revenues is linked to more outsourcing of both infrastructure and support services.     

Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation

This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.