Gender equality and the electoral system in the regional council of Sardinia

This article provides an account of the process followed by the legislative assembly of the autonomous region of Sardinia, the regional council, to change its electoral law. More specifically, this article will focus on equal access to the elective office at the regional council that the electoral law should have guaranteed. The introduction of measures of gender equality is part of the broader process of change in the electoral law of Sardinia. It is also part of the wider review process of Sardinian autonomy that finds its roots in the amendment of title V of the Italian Constitution of 2001. Following these reforms, constitutional law 3/2013 states that ‘In order to achieve the balance between men and women in representation’, the new electoral law should ‘promote a new equal opportunity in the access to the office of regional councillor’ (article 16). The introduction of double preference for male and female candidates would have guaranteed equality, instead of reserving a share of seats to the underrepresented sex. It would have involved a new approach to the problem of underrepresentation of women. At the 20 June 2013 meeting, however, double preference was rejected in a secret ballot. Yet only four years later, on 21 November 2017, the electoral law was changed to guarantee equal access for women.     

Is there a Common Path that could have Conditioned the Degree of Welfare State Development in Latin America and the Caribbean?

The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine from a multidimensional perspective the possible existence of a single path that could have conditioned the degree of welfare state development (WSD) in Latin America. Economic/industrial development, trade‐openness, democracy and the strength of leftist parties‐labour movement are used as explanatory variables in the qualitative comparative analysis. In contrast to previous findings, this paper shows that there is no evidence of a common path followed by countries with a relatively high/medium WSD. Nevertheless, countries that experienced a low economic/industrial development combined with a low democratic experience were conditioned to have low WSD.     

Stay or Go? Ecuadorian Immigrants in Spain in Times of Crisis

This article studies how the economic crisis affects Ecuadorian immigrants' decisions on staying in Spain or returning to their home country. Before the crisis, Ecuadorians were one of the most significant migrant groups in Spain in terms of volume and degree of settlement. The crisis has destabilised their situation and modified their migratory projects in different ways. This article presents the three main choices facing Ecuadorian immigrants during the crisis: permanence, wait and see, and return/re‐migration. The analysis focuses on how the decision‐making process is carried out and on the different factors that lead Ecuadorians to choose each option.     

Voting after war: Legacy of conflict and the economy as determinants of electoral support in Croatia

In spite of a rapidly expanding literature on democratization, elections, and conflict, we lack systematic understanding of what determines electoral results in post-conflict societies. This article offers a novel initiative in revealing electoral patterns in states recuperating from painful experiences of war by analyzing data from more than 500 Croatian municipalities during five post-war electoral cycles. While the findings suggest voters do respond to parties' economic policies, the underlying pattern of electoral support demonstrates that competition is heavily constrained by the legacy of conflict, with the communities more exposed to the violence being more likely to vote for the principal party of the center-right which led the country into independence and throughout the war. This tendency exhibits a remarkable level of stability over time, which suggests conflict dynamics can become firmly embedded in post-conflict democratic electoral competition – even in societies that are not ethnically diverse.     

论廉政前端风险的形成与管控

传统观点认为廉政风险存在于公权力运行体系之中,但却忽视了个体社会化进程中自我控制能力的养成、社会观念的隐性储备与准"腐败"行为首次生成等变量对最终腐败行为的作用机制。完整的廉政风险应由前端风险与本体风险构成。公务人员入职之前的个体社会化失范所引发的对个体犯罪性的高度盖然性是廉政前端风险的风险源。因此,有必要从家庭、教育、文化、准入四个层面进行廉政风险干预,防止个体犯罪的盖然性转化为廉政前端风险。     

网络监督的公共政治属性与建设路径

网络监督的兴起有现实需求、技术支持和制度政策基础。在社会转型期,面对腐败的高发和多变,以网络监督为核心生成的腐败治理意愿正是现阶段社会公众的政治需求。但是,网络监督对腐败治理具有双重效应。因此,为有效治理腐败,优化网络监督,要抑制其负面效应,强化网络监督的公共政治属性,培育网络主体理性参与精神;要激励实名举报,建立实名举报保护机制;要优化官民合作机制,建立腐败线索收集、整理和反馈机制。     

Complementing and correcting representative institutions: When and how to use mini-publics

In democratic theory and practice, it has become a popular view that designed deliberative mini-publics can effectively counteract failures of representative democratic institutions. But when should mini-publics be deployed, and how should they be designed? This article develops a framework for thinking about these questions. It argues that when representative democratic institutions ensure the empowerment of inclusions, enable the formation of collective agendas and wills, and are capable of translating those agendas into binding decisions, mini-publics should be used sparingly and as complementary initiatives; the less representative institutions are able to serve these functions, the more mini-publics should gain independence and standing to correct these problems. The article shows how this can be operationalised in light of two key institutional design issues – coupling and authority – and discusses some empirical examples that foreground the empirical leverage offered by the suggested framework.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

Money,candidates, and mayoral elections

In this paper, we extend a well-trod line of research from congressional and state-level elections—the electoral impact of campaign expenditures and candidate characteristics—to a relatively understudied context, urban mayoral elections. Using a sample of large U.S. cities, we provide evidence that mayoral elections are very similar to elections at other levels of office: there is a tremendous incumbency advantage, one that is overcome only with great effort; campaign spending is closely tied to incumbent vote share but it is challenger rather than incumbent spending that seems to drive outcomes; and challengers are hopelessly outspent. In addition, we find that the effect of local economic conditions on incumbent success is mediated by challenger spending and that incumbent candidates fare better in racially diverse settings.