Procyclical government spending: a public choice analysis

Procyclical government spending occurs when government expenditures increase at a faster rate than income in an economic upturn but fall at a faster rate in a recession. Voracity effects occur when competition for increased spending proves more effective as national income increases. Public choice theory can be applied to describe the distribution of fiscal power across different tiers of government to shed insight into competition for intergovernmental transfers. Politicians have electoral incentives to press for intergovernmental transfers but they also have electoral incentives to signal their ability to manage the economy. With this mix of incentives, the prediction is that intergovernmental transfers will be procyclical and that sub-central government spending will be more procyclical than central government spending. Public choice analysis of pressure for increased public spending predicts a specific pattern of cyclical government spending. This pattern can be observed when analyzing government expenditures in 20 OECD countries between 1995 and 2006.     

Deep Interactions with MRP: Election Turnout and Voting Patterns Among Small Electoral Subgroups

Using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP), we estimate voter turnout and vote choice within deeply interacted subgroups: subsets of the population that are defined by multiple demographic and geographic characteristics. This article lays out the models and statistical procedures we use, along with the steps required to fit the model for the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Though MRP is an increasingly popular method, we improve upon it in numerous ways: deeper levels of covariate interaction, allowing for nonlinearity and nonmonotonicity, accounting for unequal inclusion probabilities that are conveyed in survey weights, postestimation adjustments to turnout and voting levels, and informative multidimensional graphical displays as a form of model checking. We use a series of examples to demonstrate the flexibility of our method, including an illustration of turnout and vote choice as subgroups become increasingly detailed, and an analysis of both vote choice changes and turnout changes from 2004 to 2008.     

The Road to Hell? Third‐Party Intervention to Prevent Atrocities

Preventing large‐scale atrocities has emerged as an important policy goal of the post–Cold War period. However, a debate exists about the effects of creating an international institution to prevent atrocities. Advocates of intervention argue that a credible threat to intervene should deter perpetrators and stop atrocities when deterrence fails. Critics argue that third‐party intervention, by strengthening weak minority groups and lowering the cost of war, encourages rebellions and so makes war and atrocities more likely. We develop a model of intervention to analyze this debate. The model shows that the negative effects of intervention highlighted by critics can be mitigated if the third party is relatively neutral and if alternative costs are imposed on decision makers. We conclude that with appropriate institutional design, the net impact of stronger third‐party commitments to end atrocities will be to lower the expected level of atrocities.     

The British Labour Party and monetary union

The real test of the British Labour Party's new orientation to Europe will be its policy on economic and monetary union (EMU). This article analyses Labours political economy in relation to European integration and to the management of the currency, and how the intersection of these two have produced four distinctive approaches to EMU within the party. It assesses the stance of new Labour towards EMU in the context of this internal Labour Party debate as well as in the wider context of European social democracy.     

First or Second Order Referendums? Understanding the Votes on the EU Constitutional Treaty in Four EU Member States

This article uses post-referendum Flash-Eurobarometer surveys to analyse empirically voter attitudes towards the EU Constitution in four member states. The theoretical model used incorporates first and second order variables for voting to ascertain whether the outcome of the vote was a reflection of either first or second order voting behaviour. It is hypothesised that the cleavage politics over integration in the European arena had a major impact on the four votes, as captured by three first order variables: ‘Europhile’ and ‘Constitution-phile’ attitudes and ‘Egocentric Europeanness’, respectively. The quantitative analyses – controlling for a number of dimensions – strongly supports the hypothesis when compared with a model using solely second order party identification variables. These findings establish that how voters understood the EU polity, in particular whether membership is beneficial to one's own country, was a crucial factor in all the referendums. Implications for future research include the need to discover the cues or proxies influencing first order voting within domestic politics.     

Politics like any other? Comparative politics,international relations and the study of the EU

This article disputes the claim made by Simon Hix (WEP January 1994) that ‘politics in the EC is not inherently different to the practice of government in any democratic system’ and argues against a rigid division between international relations and comparative politics. It contends first, that EU politics cannot be broken up into two categories: ‘politics’ and ‘integration'; second, that the nature of the EU system, the centrality of states and the continued importance of power considerations precludes explanations of EU ‘politics’ through the use of comparative government approaches alone; and third, that public policy cannot in general be studied without reference to international factors.     

Japanese foreign intelligence‐related activities

John J. Fialka, War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Pp.242, index. $25 (cloth); $15 (paper). ISBN 0–393–31821–4 and ‐04014–3.

James H. Hansen, Japanese Intelligence: The Competitive Edge (Washington DC: NIBC Press, 1996). Pp.222, index. $29.95. ISBN 1–878–29216–1.

Larry Kahaner, Competitive Intelligence: From Black Ops to Boardrooms ‐ How Businesses Gather, Analyze, and Use Information to Succeed in the Global Marketplace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Pp.300, index. $24 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–684–81074–3 and ‐84404–4.

Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Pp.307, index. $42.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8014–14326–0 and ‐8332–8.

Richard J. Samuels, ‘Rich Nation, Strong Army’: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Pp.455, index. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8014–9994–1.

Peter Schweizer, Friendly Spies: How America's Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993). Pp.342, index (out of print). ISBN 0–871–13497–7.     

Liberalism,neo-liberalism and governmentality: introduction

This paper concerns the emergence of a specifically 'economic' way of governing poverty at the start of this century, an event which is to be accounted for, though by no means exhaustively, by the discovery of 'unemployment'. The latter will make it possible to relate the nineteenth-century 'problem of the unemployed' to an object domain that is primarily economic, rather than cultural or moral. A new object of regulation will emerge from this economic problematization of the 'social question': the labour market. The paper pays particular attention to the national labour exchange system, the political technology that will visibilize the labour market in new ways. Together with unemployment insurance, it will suggest new ways of governing poverty and a new course for social policy.     

Escaping the resource curse: The case of Indonesia

Abstract

Numerous studies have suggested that natural resource abundance is bad for development. In this context, Indonesia's rapid growth during the 1970s and 1980s seems remarkable. Why was Indonesia able to grow strongly and what are the implications of its experience for other resource abundant countries? I argue that its rapid growth was not simply a matter of policy elites making rational economic policy choices, but rather reflected two more fundamental factors: (i) the political victory of counter-revolutionary social forces over radical nationalist and communist social forces in Indonesia during the 1960s; and (ii) the country's strategic Cold War location and proximity to Japan. Accordingly, the main implication of its experience is that improved economic performance in resource abundant countries requires shifts in structures of power and interest and the emergence of external political and economic conditions that provide opportunities for growth.     

Brazil and Lula, 2005: crisis,corruption and change in political perspective

The election of Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) as president of Brazil in October 2002 broke new ground: for the first time in Latin America a working man was directly elected as president of the Republic. Lula also came to power as leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers' Party, with its close links to ‘new unionism’, ‘liberation theology’ and mass social movements. The possibility of his election caused strong market reaction but, by the start of 2005, Lula and his government had reassured their critics on the right. They had also dismayed many supporters on the left, including members of the pt, by failing to tackle urgent social problems. Even so, on the basis of a strong economic performance and support in the polls, Lula seemed assured of re-election in October 2006. Suddenly, in May 2005, came the first revelations of a corruption scandal, leading to a crisis described as ‘the most extensive in the whole history of the Brazilian republic’. Lula lost some of his closest ministerial colleagues, and the pt most of its senior officers, with the threat of impeachment for Lula himself. That crisis is still unresolved, but has already severely damaged the pt, virtually paralysed government and made Lula's re-election seem ever more unlikely. This paper seeks to set the current crisis in wider political perspective and to reflect on its possible impact on a political system which in 2002, and even in 2004, gave evidence of supporting a robust and stable democracy.