Do state balanced budget requirements matter? Testing two explanatory frameworks

Balanced budget requirements (BBRs) affect all aspects of financial operations. Previous studies relied on characterizations that highlight a constitutional-statutory distinction. Hou and Smith (Public Budgeting & Finance 26(3):22–45, 2006) instead propose a political-technical construct. This article uses probit estimation, six measures of balance, and long panels to test which framework offers more explanatory power. The findings suggest that BBRs matter to varying degrees. Technical requirements exert bigger effects than political ones, the effects are more obvious on narrower than broader measures of balance and in the later phases of the budget cycle, and the political-technical construct offers more explanatory power than the constitutional-statutory distinction.     

Who gains from apparentments under D’Hondt?

Apparentments – or coalitions of several electoral lists – are a widely neglected aspect of the study of proportional electoral systems. This paper proposes a formal model that explains the benefits political parties derive from apparentments, based on their alliance strategies and relative size. In doing so, it reveals that apparentments are most beneficial for highly fractionalised political blocs. However, it also emerges that large parties stand to gain much more from apparentments than small parties do. Because of this, small parties are likely to join in apparentments with other small parties, excluding large parties where possible. These arguments are tested empirically, using a new dataset from the Swiss national parliamentary elections covering a period from 1995 to 2007.     

Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa

This article draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in 22 public opinion surveys in 10 countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical methodology, we find that these shifts are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the salience of occupational and class identities. Our findings lend support to situational theories of social identification and are consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Africa for instrumental reasons: because they are useful in the competition for political power.     

In Defense of Dwelling in Great Minds

It seems like a small and perhaps shrinking minority of economists know reverence of individual figures. Most economists seem to be without heroes, and sometimes disparage reverence as cultish idolatry. Here I collect from Michael Polanyi’s The Study of Man (1959) a few passages that eloquently suggest that “we need reverence to perceive greatness, even as we need a telescope to observe spiral nebulae.” The selection is made in the defense of seeking out and communing with great minds.     

The Privatisation of Prisoner Transfer Services in Western Australia. What Can we Learn from the Ward Case?

In 2008, Aboriginal elder Mr Ward died of heat stroke while being transported in the back of a prison van operated by private security company GSL (now G4S). This article will address the role accountability mechanisms can play in improving correctional and custodial services and whether existing oversight frameworks can provide a proper supervision and quality control of private security operators. It will focus on the key reports issued by Western Australia's Inspector of Custodial Services, the independent office to oversee the prisoner transfer system. Another central source of information will be an examination of the report and recommendations handed down by the Western Australian Coroner Alastair Hope in June 2009. The Hope Report details the numerous failings of the system which led to the Ward tragedy. Both GSL and the Western Australian state government had breached a duty of care to Mr Ward. Further, it remains highly problematical having a range of oversight bodies if elected government is able to simply ignore the subsequent advice. Parliament must therefore remain a central part of the system of political accountability.     

Pay to protect: Examining the factors of the use of market-based instruments for local water sustainability

Given the myriad of policy instruments aimed at enhancing water quantity conservation available to municipalities, what drives them to opt for a market-based instrument (MBI)? MBIs can be effective and efficient policy instruments to enhance water quantity conservation, but there is little known about why municipalities utilize them. This study hypothesizes that three contextual elements influence a municipality's use of an MBI: the natural, political, and structural environment. The results from two logistic regression models suggest that in a municipality suffering a higher drought level, both a conservative political environment and operating under a council-manager form of government (with the effect more pronounced under a non-council-manager form) will increase the likelihood that it will use an MBI to address water conservation.     

Agents of Destruction? Applying Principal-Agent Analysis to State-Sponsored Terrorism

This article evaluates state-sponsored terrorism as a principal-agent issue. More often applied to the study of licit national or international institutions as a way to improve their governance, we argue that applying principal-agent analysis to illicit relationships such as those between states and terrorist agents is an equally fruitful application, though one with different objectives. Rather than being used as a tool to improve governance, applying principal-agent analysis to illicit relationships such as state-sponsored terrorism may point to areas of susceptibility and thus inform more effective counterterrorism strategies. In this article, we explain why states delegate to terrorist groups, how they seek to control their agents, and the tensions in the relationship, both generally and through specific reference to Iran's sponsorship of Hizballah, Syria of various Palestinian groups, and the Taliban of al-Qa'ida. This analysis yields propositions about the conditions under which states are likely to delegate to terrorist groups and specific recommendations on how principal-agent problems of these illicit relationships may be used in practice to combat terrorism.     

Reflections on the Mutual Impact of Violence and Religious Change in Latin America

The mutual impact of violence and religious transformation in the recent experience of Latin America has reshaped the public presence of churches (both Catholic and Protestant) and altered their discourse and appeal. Many churches turned to promotion of human rights, protection of victims, and opposition to authoritarian rule. Others allied with repressive regimes in the name of a kind of Christian nationalism. The violence at issue ranges from the massive violence of repression, torture, and revolutionary struggle to the institutionalized violence of poverty, disease, and injustice, which is often accompanied by the violence of daily life and linked with migration, drugs, gangs, and domestic abuse. Religion itself has changed: the Catholic monopoly has been replaced by pluralism, as Protestant and Pentecostal churches reach new populations and offer potential converts a way of opting out of the violence of daily life through rebirth in a new religious community.     

The Path of the Law Review: How Interfield Ties Contribute to Institutional Emergence and Buffer against Change

Early neoinstitutional theory tended to assume institutional reproduction, while recent accounts privilege situations in which alternative models from outside an organizational environment or delegitimizing criticism from within precipitate institutional change. We know little about institutions that persist despite such change conditions. Recent advances in sociological field theory suggest that interfield ties contribute to institutional change but under‐theorize how such ties may reinforce institutions. Extending both approaches, I incorporate self‐reinforcing mechanisms from path‐dependence scholarship. I elucidate my framework by analyzing the student‐edited, student‐reviewed law review. Despite its anomalous position relative to the dominant peer‐reviewed journal model of other disciplines, and despite sustained criticisms from those who publish in them, the law review remains a bedrock institution of law schools and legal scholarship. I combine qualitative historical analyses of legal scholarship and law schools with quantitative analyses of law‐review structures and field contestation. The analysis covers law review's entire historical trajectory—its emergence, its institutionalization and coherence of a field around it, and its current state as a contested but persistent institution. I argue that self‐reinforcing mechanisms evident in law review's ties to related fields‐legal practice, law schools, the university, and legal periodicals—both enabled its emergence and have buffered it against change.     

Effects of Cremation on Fetal Bones

The charring process is a weak point of anthropological analysis as it changes bone morphology and reduces information obtainable, specially in fetuses. This experiment aims at verifying the conservation of fetal bones after cremation. A total of 3138 fetuses of unknown sex and age were used, deriving from legal and therapeutic abortions from different hospitals of Milan. Cremations took place in modern crematoria. Nine cremation events were analyzed, each ranging from 57 to 915 simultaneously cremated fetuses. During the cremations, 4356 skeletal remains were recovered, 3756 of which (86.2%) were morphologically distinguishable. All types of fetal skeletal elements were found, with the exception of some cranial bones. Only 3.4% of individuals could be detected after the cremation process, because of the prevalence of abortions under 12 lunar weeks. All fire alterations were observed and the results were statistically analyzed. This pilot study confirmed the possibility of preservation of fetal skeletal elements after cremation.