The Long Walk to Knowledge: On the Determinants of Higher Education Mobility to Europe

This paper investigates the determinants of demand for higher education mobility from students in developing countries to Europe. Used together with various linguistic relations, we emphasise the relevance of informal and formal networks in explaining resistance to student migration. The former are made up of friends or previous students while the latter are formal partnerships that have been established among higher education institutions. Overall, our results show that, apart from the usual economic considerations, student mobility is strongly correlated with non-monetary factors specific to origin and destination, such as socio-demographic characteristics, individual beliefs, and institutional profiles.     

The Dictator's New Clothes: The Relationship Between E-Participation and Quality of Government in Non-Democratic Regimes

It is often assumed that the development of e-participation and e-government initiatives aimed at stimulating citizen participation in the political process and fostering more efficient governmental services harbors a great potential for improved control of corruption and government performance. Thus, it is often argued that e-participation is an efficient instrument for increasing transparency and quality of government in non-democratic and developing countries. However, this article argues that these assumptions should be questioned on theoretical, empirical, and methodological grounds. The results of the empirical time-series cross-section analyses show that positive development in terms of e-participation in non-democratic countries does not lead to corresponding positive effects in terms of control of corruption and quality of government. Rather, in many cases the Internet offers political elites new opportunities in their quest for remaining in power.     

Issue Ownership Stability and Change: How Political Parties Claim and Maintain Issues Through Media Appearances

Drawing on a large-scale online experiment embedded in an electoral survey in Belgium, this study tests whether issue ownership is, rather than a stable condition, a dynamic process that can be manipulated by an experimental stimulus. Five thousand subjects were confronted with an embedded fake TV-news item in which the five leaders of the main Belgian parties offered their parties' stance on six issues. We find that issue ownership is a dynamic process and that news exposure leads to significant shifts in issue ownership. Especially on issues that are not owned by any party, a communicative performance by the party leader can make a difference. Regarding preowned issues, the effect is conditional; it depends on the balance of the news item.     

Quasi-Contractual Ministerial Steering of State Agencies: Its Intensity,Modes, and How Agency Characteristics Matter

ABSTRACT:

This article demonstrates the value of conceptualizing four ideal types when studying ministries’ contract steering of state agencies—relational, double-whammy, performance, and behavioral steering—each defined by its combination of input- and output-oriented steering. In the system under study—Norway—about half of all agencies are subjected to steering with a clear profile; the other half are not. The two profiles often dismissed or overlooked in existing research—relational and double-whammy steering—are most common. Thus, introducing a contract regime has not meant a clear shift from input to output control, as posited by some. Most agency characteristics under study—size, age, political salience, and tasks—have significant effects on the likelihood that an agency is subjected to one type of steering or another. Still, the analysis suggests that agency-level characteristics constrain ministerial choice about which steering to practice only to a limited extent.     

Explaining Chief Executive Empowerment: EU Summitry and Domestic Institutional Change

One of the most prominent trends in the organisation of European parliamentary democracies is the empowerment of chief executives. This article submits that an important reason contributing to this development is summit decision-making in the European Union, which requires states to confer additional authority, discretion and resources on chief executives. The effects are long-term shifts in the domestic institutional balance of power between the executive and the legislature, as well as within the executive branch. The explanatory power of this argument is tested through a case study of chief executive empowerment in Sweden, as well as comparative qualitative evidence from a broader set of European states. The findings carry implications for research on the presidentialisation of politics, the domestic implications of international cooperation, and the Europeanisation of EU member countries.     

Measuring intra-generational redistribution in PAYG pension schemes

Public Choice - Voters in ageing societies expect pension reforms to be both inter-generationally and intra-generationally fair. In this paper, we propose a global measure of intra-generational...     

The politics of fiscal policy during economic downturns, 1981–2010

This article investigates fiscal policy responses to the Great Recession in historical perspective. It explores general trends in the frequency, size and composition of fiscal stimulus as well as the impact of government partisanship on fiscal policy outputs during the four international recessions of 1980–1981, 1990–1991, 2001–2002 and 2008–2009. Encompassing 17–23 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the analysis calls into question the idea of a general retreat from fiscal policy activism since the early 1980s. The propensity of governments to respond to economic downturns by engaging in fiscal stimulus has increased over time and no secular trend in the size of stimulus measures is observed. At the same time, OECD governments have relied more on tax cuts to stimulate demand in the two recessions of the 2000s than they did in the early 1980s or early 1990s. Regarding government partisanship, no significant direct partisan effects on either the size or the composition of fiscal stimulus is found for any of the four recession episodes. However, the size of the welfare state conditioned the impact of government partisanship in the two recessions of the 2000s, with left‐leaning governments distinctly more prone to engaging in discretionary fiscal stimulus and/or spending increases in large welfare states, but not in small welfare states.     

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin against the Settlers: A Stakeholder Analysis

This case study considers how a minority stakeholder group of Israeli settlers blocked Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace initiatives. Drawing on interviews with those who served in Rabin's administration and with the settlers' leaders, this article contends that the prime minister's use of adversarial public rhetoric against the settlers denied the legitimacy of an influential stakeholder group, triggering a backlash of intense militancy from the right-wing minority. This, coupled with Rabin's failure to deal with opposing coalitions, diminished his capacity to implement "land for peace" initiatives. The case illustrates a leader's failure to maintain adequate forms of engagement with key stakeholders. The accompanying analysis demonstrates that stakeholder theories, though incomplete in their existing forms, can still illuminate the high risk and ineffectiveness of denying the legitimacy of stakeholder groups and the strategic importance of maintaining channels of flexible negotiation and cooperation with seemingly marginal groups when high-stakes rivalries are likely to ensue.     

The Underrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples on Canadian Jury Panels

Under common law, Canadian jury panels, or arrays, are supposed to be broadly representative. In the early 1980s, the Law Reform Commission and, in the early 1990s, the Supreme Court claimed that provincial legislation virtually guaranteed that this was the case. However, evidence presented to various provincial and federal commissions and a series of court cases has pointed to the continuing underrepresentation of Indigenous Canadians resulting from both the content and the administration of provincial laws. In this article, I examine evidence of underrepresentation and review various political and legal attempts to challenge bias in out-of-court selection. I suggest that contemporary practices in some jurisdictions have not consistently provided a representative jury pool or panel. As a result, the jury selection process has not always appeared to offer justice to Indigenous people and, in doing so, may not have served the Canadian legal system well.