More on Measuring Two-Party Competition: A Response to Dunleavy

Gaines and Taagepera [(2013) How to operationalize two-partyness. Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties, 23(4), pp. 387–404] propose two indices of two-party competition for district-level data, both of which are alleged to be flawed. The case against them rests mainly on whether or not elections with one dominant party should be regarded as exhibiting one- or two-way competition. For those inclined to see 90–10% and 50–50% outcomes are different in kind, our indices can provide better measures than the popular effective number of parties or the “gap”. We agree that assessment of a set of outcomes, in a given election or over time, requires careful attention to the important distinction between micro-level data and aggregate measures.     

Precedents in the Mountains: On the Parallels and Uniqueness of the Cases of Kosovo, South Ossetia and Abkhazia

International law, especially its customary part, evolves toa great extent through acts of State practice serving as precedents.If States do not want that their behaviour becomes law (i.e.if they prefer to act contrary to Kant's categorical imperative),they claim that certain acts of their behaviour are so unique,so peculiar that they must not be considered as contributingto the change of law (they express their opinio non juris).In the 1990s, the UN Security Council also found that only uniquenessof situations in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia-Herzegovina justifiedthe use of "all necessary means" to deal with those situations.More recently, the recognition of the independence of Kosovoby a number of States and the recognition of Abkhazia and SouthOssetia by Russia were described by recognizing States as beingso unique, so sui generis that they could not serve as precedents.The article argues that the uniqueness, or parallels for thatmatter, is usually in the eye of the beholder. Whether certainsituations, facts or acts serve as precedents depends to a greatextent on whether one is interested in seeing them as precedentsor not. People too often act upon their ideologies, beliefsand prejudices, not upon facts; the latter are interpreted inthe light of preconceived ideas, or as Charles King, writingof the Georgia–Russian war, observes, "unfortunately,Western thinking of Russia has too often substituted analogyfor analysis" ("Putin's March to the Sea", Foreign Affairs,Vol. 87, No. 6, November–December 2008). Then this articleproceeds to study in greater detail parallels and differencesbetween Kosovo, on the one hand, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia,on the other. The study ends with an inquest into the matterof how different States (or categories of States) deal withsecessionist problems.     

Regimes on Pillars: Alternative Welfare State Logics and Dynamics

Social welfare arrangements represent the conjunction of the twin logics of regimes and pillars. Regimes describe who receives the benefits and on what conditions; pillars describe who pays for and who provides the benefits. There are historical associations and '"natural" affinities' between certain regimes and certain pillars. But there is also scope for novel combinations and recombinations. Many contemporary welfare state reforms are best conceptualized in terms of shifting the mix of pillars and blurring regimes.     

The size of second chambers and European assemblies

Abstract. Second chamber sizes (in terms of seats) tend to increase with increasing population like first chamber sizes. Population seems to affect first chamber size directly, while the size of the first chamber goes on to affect second chamber size. When selected on the basis of territorial sub-units, the second chamber size tends to be around the geometric mean of first chamber size and the number of sub-units. From the viewpoint of representing the total population and the constituent sub-units, the European Parliament is more akin to a first chamber and its size has been approaching the cube root of population typical of first chambers. The Council of the European Union (CEU) is more akin to a second chamber and its size, in terms of qualified majority voting (QMV) votes, was approaching the size typical of second chambers at a given population. However, the Treaty of Nice has boosted the CEU to a size comparable to that of the European Parliament (EP), which may not be functional. Analogies to domestic first and second chambers suggest that the optimal size for the 27-country CEU might be 150 to 190 seats (Nice proposes 345), while that for the EP might be around 780 seats (Nice proposes 732).     

Managing Value Conflict in Public Policy

Policy issues are often characterized by conflicting values. Conventionally, students of public policy have conceptualized government's response to value conflicts as a matter of "balancing" competing goals, or striking trade-offs among values. In this paper we argue that this way of managing value conflicts represents only one possibility from a larger and more varied repertoire of strategies that draw from more complex models of practical reasoning. Policy actors do sometimes try to strike a "balance" among conflicting values, but they often avail themselves of other strategies as well: they cycle between values by emphasizing one value and then the other; they assign responsibilities for each value to different institutional structures; or they gather and consult a taxonomy of specific cases where similar conflicts arose. We argue that each of these strategies can be rational in some institutional contexts, and that conclusion challenges the view that policy values must always be treated as commensurable for rational policy choices to be made. Government responds to value conflict in ways that are more varied and changing than existing views of public policy imply.     

Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia

Over 5,000 years of history, the effective number of separate political entities has decreased from close to a million to 24, if going by geographical area, and from about a thousand to 15, if going by population. These changes have followed interconnected exponential patterns which extrapolate to a single world polity around year 4000. Within this long-term trend, three sudden increases in polity sizes occur: around 3000 BC , 600 BC , and AD 1600. This study tests the exponential model against area and population data for five millennia. It also gives tables and graphs of area versus time for all major polities since AD 600. The median duration of large polities at more than half the peak size has been 130 years, and it has not changed over 5,000 years. Polities that expand slower tend to last slightly longer. The prospects of the Moscow-centered state are discussed in the light of these findings.