Government Selection and Executive Powers: Constitutional Design in Parliamentary Democracies

Provisions for a parliamentary investiture vote have become increasingly common in parliamentary democracies. This article shows that investiture provisions were largely introduced when new constitutions were written or old ones fundamentally redesigned. It also shows that the constitutions that endowed executives with strong legislative agenda powers also endowed parliaments with strong mechanisms to select the executive. It is argued that constitution makers’ decisions can be seen in principal–agent terms: strong investiture rules constitute an ex ante mechanism of parliamentary control – that is, a mechanism to minimise adverse selection and reduce the risk of agency loss by parliament. The findings have two broad implications: from a constitutional point of view, parliamentary systems do not rely exclusively on ex post control mechanisms such as the no confidence vote to minimise agency loss; parliamentarism, at least today and as much as presidentialism, is the product of conscious constitutional design and not evolutionary adaptation.     

Using myths: Former Yugoslav perpetrators and violence

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, increased levels of east to west immigration in Europe partly explains the delinquent activities among a growing number of Eastern Europeans in western cities. Young people from te former Yugoslavia have a reputation for being particularly violent. In this article we argue that the alleged violence among Yugoslav delinquents is not so much a reflection of reality, but rather a myth used instrumentally by Yugoslav delinquents themselves to establish a position on the criminal scene – as doorkeepers, bodyguards, money collectors or other so-called `specialists in violence'.     

Gender Equality and Intrastate Armed Conflict

In this article, I examine to what extent gender equality is associated with lower levels of intrastate armed conflict. I use three measures of gender equality: (1) a dichotomous indicator of whether the highest leader of a state is a woman; (2) the percentage of women in parliament; and (3) the female-to-male higher education attainment ratio. I argue that the first two measures in particular capture the extent to which women hold positions that allow them to influence matters of war and peace within a state. I further argue that all three measures, but especially the last two, capture how women are valued relative to men in a society, that is, the relative degree of subordination of women. Whereas female state leadership has no statistically significant effect, more equal societies, measured either in terms of female representation in parliament or the ratio of female-to-male higher education attainment, are associated with lower levels of intrastate armed conflict. The pacifying impact of gender equality is not only statistically significant in the presence of a comprehensive set of controls but also is strong in substantive terms.     

The Importance and Limits of Party Government: Problems of Governance in Denmark*

Pluralist democracies face the dilemma of reconciling representation of interests and government control. The tension between representation and governance is a problem for political parties in particular and has presumably become more important in recent years, at least in Denmark. Using data from questionnaire surveys of Danish political elites it is shown that interest organizations and bureaucrats indeed pose problems for party government. Some institutional changes might lighten the tasks of parties, but there is no way of avoiding the basic democratic dilemma.     

The Local Political Business Cycle

Although local political leaders have fewer policy instruments available than national politicians, they nevertheless engage heavily in the creation of political business cycles, i.e. they try to locate and time the costs and benefits of government policies in such as way as to optimize voter support. The study, which is based on data from the four Nordic countries and Italy and France, shows that expenditures tend to grow faster the closer the local election, while political action to increase local taxes is generally taken only in mid-term years. If one wants to predict how local tax rates and expenditures change, it is as important to know the number of years' to the next election as it is to know the change in the fiscal capabilities of local governments.     

Schools or Pools of Democracy? A Longitudinal Test of the Relation Between Civic Participation and Political Socialization

In this contribution we demonstrate how the usage of panel data offers possibilities for testing new hypotheses in a research tradition with a long history in political science. Focusing on citizens’ transitions in and out of voluntary associations, we tested four possible explanations for the well-documented correlation between civic engagement and political socialization. Two are due to self-selection effects (pools of democracy), and two are due to socialization effects (schools of democracy). Our analyses offer little support for the idea of voluntary associations playing a major role in political socialization processes: our latent growth curve models showed no or very little increase of political discussion, interest, efficacy, and action among those who became actively involved in voluntary associations. In contrast, we found convincing evidence for our pools-of-democracy hypotheses, and the self-selection turns out to be a double-edged sword: politically engaged citizens are more likely to join voluntary associations and less likely to leave them. These findings challenge the conclusions of many studies based on cross-sectional data.     

University–industry collaboration and regional wealth

Substantial research has been conducted towards understanding why and how universities shape regional wealth and competitiveness. In this paper we extend this literature to examine empirically causal relationships between university-induced knowledge spillovers and regional wealth using a hand collected panel data set from 1998 to 2012. Literature has identified three possible effects of causality, namely that a university exogenously fosters and spurs regional wealth, second that universities are endogenously shaped by regional wealth and finally that regional wealth and universities follow an interlinked and co-evolutionary path. Our findings support the latter direction in that universities and their regional endowment are linked together.     

Disclosure of child sexual abuse: expressed emotions and credibility judgments of a child mock victim

Both lay persons and professionals believe that the emotions displayed by a child witness during disclosure of sexual abuse are a factor of importance when judging the child's credibility. Unfortunately, not all children display emotions according to expectations, leading to misjudgments, and possible miscarriage of justice. In the present study, we examined how lay people's credibility judgments were influenced by a child's displayed emotions during the disclosure of sexual abuse. Participants (n?=?119), viewed video recordings of a mock police interview of an 11-year-old child actor disclosing sexual abuse, displaying one of four emotional expressions (angry, sad, neutral, and positive). Results showed that participants were strongly influenced by the emotions displayed; in particular, the display of strong negative emotions (anger) or positive emotions during disclosure significantly reduced judged credibility. The credibility ratings predicted the participant? judgments of the defendant's guilt and the willingness to pass a guilty vote in a hypothetical trial.