The Seat Product Model of the effective number of parties: A case for applied political science

This paper extends Taagepera's (2007) Seat Product Model and shows that the effective number of seat-wining parties and vote winning parties can both be predicted with institutional variables alone, namely district magnitude, assembly size, and upper-tier seat share. The expected coefficients are remarkably stable across different samples. Including the further information of ethnic diversity in the models hardly improves the estimate of the effective number of parties, and thus the institutions-only models are preferable on the grounds of parsimony and the applicability to electoral-system design or “engineering”.     

从委托-代理理论看国有银行的金融风险

我国国民经济的金融依存度越来越高。国有银行是国民经济发展中最重要的力量之一。在市场经济条件下,国有银行应本着追求利润最大化原则进行市场交易,而不是一种国家权力保护下的信用工具。可是,我国金融业由于体制改革滞后以致国有银行成了经济生活中主要的风险承担者,金融风险的过度集中和扩大已对金融业和国民经济整体构成威胁。应用委托—代理理论,通过分析金融风险形成机理,探讨新形势下的我国银行金融风险的特殊原因,并尝试提出一些解决之道。     

The European Union in international environmental negotiations: a legal perspective on the internal decision-making process

From an EU point of view, most international environmental agreements are mixed. This means that both the European Community (EC) and its member states are party to the agreement. As the participation of the EC in international negotiations and agreements is properly arranged by the Treaty establishing the European Community, but the EU member states’ participation is not legally organized on the EU level, the internal decision-making process regarding mixed agreements is rather complicated. Insights into this process are needed to understand the representation and the role of the European Union in international environmental negotiations. This article clarifies the legal framework of the EU decision-making process regarding such negotiations.

ECOWAS protagonists for peace: An internal perspective on policy and community actors in peacemaking interventions

ABSTRACT

Despite an increasing academic interest, ECOWAS peacemaking interventions have largely been approached from a top-down perspective. This tends to highlight the roles played by high-level mediators who use ECOWAS and its instruments as the basis for their interventions. Deeper analyses of the undercurrent intra-ECOWAS processes and the role played by community actors, in particular the ECOWAS Commission and its cooperation with civil society organisations, are rare. Yet it is both the high-level policy and the community actors that constitute the protagonists of ECOWAS peacemaking. This article examines the roles of both protagonists in the planning and conduct of ECOWAS peacemaking. Based on secondary sources and insider accounts, it argues that, although policy actors have so far been dominant, community actors play a complementary role, which often goes unnoticed. This is illustrated with empirical examples of ECOWAS peacemaking interventions from the Liberian war in 1990 to the recent case of the Gambia.     

Electoral Reform as an Engine of Party System Change in Italy

Abstract

After more than forty years of proportional representation, in 1991 Italy embarked on a period of electoral law revision. The ongoing debate about how to engineer an electoral system capable of producing the preferred political outcomes stands out against the stasis in constitutional reform, most recently demonstrated in the rejection by popular referendum of Matteo Renzi’s package of reforms. The extent to which the different electoral reforms have had an impact on Italian politics, especially following the 2005 electoral legislation, can be evaluated by analysing the changing Italian party system over the past decade and beyond in terms of its morphology, dynamics, and party/parliamentary group switching. The 2005 electoral reform has had a clear effect on Italian politics and on the party system, but that effect is unlikely to endure given the highly controversial new electoral law that came into force in 2017.     

Speaking the Unspeakable,Naming the Unnameable: The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

The establishment of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse followed years of lobbying by survivor groups, damning findings from previous inquiries, and increasing societal recognition of the often lifelong and intergenerational damage caused by child sexual abuse. Through extensive media coverage, the Royal Commission brought into public view the reality that the sexual abuse of children was widespread, and its recommendations are prompting organisational, policy, and legislative reform. This article explores the background to the Royal Commission, situating it within the history of previous inquiries and growing community outrage at the failure of institutions to adequately protect children and respond appropriately when abuse occurs. The article explores the ways in which the Royal Commission, more so than previous inquiries, brought child sexual abuse into public discourse. It also serves as an introduction to this special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies, which illustrates how the Royal Commission has fostered new scholarship across a range of disciplines as researchers engage with complex issues related to institutional child sexual abuse, its history, causes, impacts, and the important role of inquiries in confronting it.     

Electoral rules and manufacturing legislative supermajority: evidence from Singapore

Electoral authoritarian regimes usually preserve the dominance of the ruling party through electoral fraud, violence and intimidation. This paper focuses on the subtler forms of manipulation that undermine the electoral integrity and democratic outcomes. Specifically, we examine how an unusual electoral rule, involving multimember districts elected through plurality bloc voting for party slates, exaggerates the legislative seat shares of the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore. This rule, used also by other electoral authoritarian regimes, facilitates the manipulation of district magnitude and gerrymandering, especially the ‘stacking’ form, to produce a large disproportionality which distorts the seats–votes linkage. It operates in an undemocratic fashion by precluding the opposition from gaining anything but token seats as long as the PAP remains the plurality-winning party. The importance of this electoral rule and its manipulation has been overlooked in current work that emphasises redistributive strategies or coercion to repress electoral competition.     

“Like photographs of ghosts”: representing post-apartheid South Africa in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) heard its first testimony in April of 1996. Two years later, in 1998, the first volume of the report of the commission was published. While it aims to be a document representing closure in terms of the history of apartheid, the TRC report is rife with gaps and omissions across the long history of apartheid. Approaching this history and its legacy in literary prose, Ivan Vladislavi?’s Double Negative (2010) serves as a counter-history to the TRC’s narrative of closure. Extending formal strategies from his earlier works, including composite literary form and performative modes of writing, Vladislavi? employs photography and ghosts within his text to unsettle official history and to offer a melancholic approach to the past of apartheid and its ongoing effects in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Why Geographically-Targeted Spending Under Closed-List Proportional Representation Favors Marginal Districts

Research on geographically-targeted spending under closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) is characterized by debate over whether ruling parties target core supporters or swing voters. We show that when CLPR is used in multiple districts and separate competitions are conducted in each, parties can reverse the formula through which votes are converted into seats to calculate how many additional votes they need to capture an additional seat. This enables parties to rank districts according to how close they are to winning an additional seat. We then show that under divisor-based formulae, parties will find they need fewer additional votes to capture another seat in districts where they captured fewer seats (‘marginal districts’). We posit that in these systems, ruling parties will steer geographically-targeted spending toward marginal PR districts and we present evidence of this from Japan.     

Ethnicity and electoral fraud in Britain

Several reports have highlighted that, within Britain, allegations of electoral fraud tend to be more common in areas with large Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. However, the extent of this association has not yet been quantified. Using data at the local authority level, this paper shows that percentage Pakistani and Bangladeshi (logged) is a robust predictor of two measures of electoral fraud allegations: one based on designations by the Electoral Commission, and one based on police enquiries. Indeed, the association persists after controlling for other minority shares, demographic characteristics, socio-economic deprivation, and anti-immigration attitudes. I interpret this finding with reference to the growing literature on consanguinity (cousin marriage) and corruption. Rates of cousin marriage tend to be high in countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, which may have fostered norms of nepotism and in-group favoritism that persist over time. To bolster my interpretation, I use individual level survey data to show that, within Europe, migrants from countries with high rates of cousin marriage are more likely to say that family should be one's main priority in life, and are less likely to say it is wrong for a public official to request a bribe.