Yet Another Case of Electoral and Government Epidemic? The Turkish Cypriot Legislative Election of January 2018

Following Bosco and Verney’s analyses of ‘electoral’ and ‘government epidemics’, the 2018 Turkish Cypriot legislative election is examined in the context of the impact of the economic crisis on elections and government formation in southern Europe. Despite its obvious idiosyncrasies as a self-declared state with 335,000 inhabitants, in the last decade of economic crisis and austerity policies, the Turkish Cypriot case has followed a largely similar pattern to other southern European countries: declining turnout; emergence of start-up parties; three consecutive early elections; a more fragmented parliament; sidelining of the biggest party in government formation; the first ever grand coalition; and, finally, an unprecedented four-party coalition bringing together parties from left, right, and centre.     

UK Governance: From Overloading to Freeloading

The UK's ongoing political turbulence has prompted a reprise of debates from the 1970s when many concluded the country was ungovernable. Then, the most influential diagnosis conceptualised the UK's governance problem as one of ‘overloading’ caused by the electorate's excessive expectations. This article argues that these accounts overlooked another phenomenon besieging UK governance during this period. This phenomenon was freeloading: the withering of government capacity deriving from the ability of actors to enjoy the benefits of citizenship without altogether contributing to the cost. In the interim, these problems have become endemic, not least because of the unspoken but discernible policy of successive governments to turn the UK into a tax haven. High‐profile scandals involving prominent individuals and corporations, plus the failure to clamp down on them have reinforced the perception that the UK's political system is geared towards the rich and the powerful at the expense of the marginalised majority.     

Do citizens care about government debt? Evidence from survey experiments on budgetary priorities

Ever since the Great Recession, public debt has become politicised. Some research suggests that citizens are fiscally conservative, while other research shows that they punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. This begs the question of whether and how much citizens care about debt. We argue that debt is not a priority for citizens because reducing it involves spending and tax trade-offs. Using a split-sample experiment and a conjoint experiment in four European countries, we show that fiscal consolidation at the cost of spending cuts or taxes hikes is less popular than commonly assumed. Revenue-based consolidation is especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidation is also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favour lower debt and taxes, but they support higher progressive taxes to pay for more government spending. The article furthers our understanding of public opinion on fiscal policies and the likely political consequences of austerity.     

Deal or no deal: why do social pact proposals fail?

Since 1980, over one-quarter of social pact proposals have failed to result in social pact agreements. In order to explain this high failure rate, the social pact formation process is broken down into two stages. In the first stage, governments decide whether to propose a pact. In the second stage, governments and labour unions decide whether to complete a pact agreement. Using data on social pacts in Western Europe, the article finds that pact proposals are likelier in the presence of moderately centralised unions, high unemployment, and large budget deficits; but that pact agreements are likelier when employers’ associations are centralised, and labour unions have a high degree of organisational centralisation, low membership fractionalisation, and represent a small share of workers. It is submitted that the inability of moderately centralised unions to complete a social pact agreement may be a primary cause of the high failure rate of social pact proposals.     

Austerity Regimes at the Local Level: Examining Fiscal Effects of Austerity Commissioners Using a Time-Series Synthetic Control Method

Abstract

From a democratic perspective, the replacement of government or parliament by a public manager to enforce budget discipline marks a serious intervention. Transferred to the local level, the replacement of the mayor and the council in three German municipalities by a state official (a so-called state commissioner) in recent years has raised questions about the legitimacy and adequacy of such a strong interventionist instrument. One crucial answer to be given to this legitimacy issue concerns effectiveness, in other words whether the instrument can fulfill its designated task by improving the local fiscal situation since the fiscal success of the commissioner is a basic prerequisite for legitimacy. By using a time-series approach of the synthetic control method (SCM) and constructing a synthetic comparison case to the town of Altena, an answer regarding the commissioner’s potential to reduce the short-term debt can be given. The commissioner was successful in limiting the debt increase and seems to have reversed the debt trend. This finding supports the effectiveness of rather hierarchical instruments for ensuring fiscal discipline at the local level and thereby adds to broadening the international public management literature on municipal takeovers.     

结构与功能的背离:宋代州府司法中的长属分职与长官专权

宋代州级司法职能配置在长官与属官之间存在明确的分工。这种职能分工被赋予了防范长官干预属官司法行为的权力约束功能。但在审判实践中,长官往往借助官制特权或法定特权赋予的优势地位,干预或控制属官的审判行为,操纵州府审判的过程与结果,使州府审判过程呈现出鲜明的长官专权特质。从其司法制度演进的历史考察,两宋时期之所以出现司法体制上的控权倾向与审判过程中的专权特质并存的局面,根源在于其政权建设中难以克服的"祖宗之法"与"汉唐故事"之间的深刻抵牾。     

Austerity Policies,the UK State and the Energy Utilities: a Changing Paradigm or Business as Usual?

In 2008, the economic downturn coincided with a major shift in the energy sector paradigm. This state of emergency forced the UK government to try to steer the objectives of its major energy players. This crisis put the UK state's capacity to influence its mostly privately‐owned energy sector to the test. Using the example of energy utilities, this article aims to explore whether the austerity agenda impacted the relationship between the UK state and its public services. The purpose is to determine whether current multiple crises have forced the UK state to adopt an exceptionally interventionist approach that doesn't tally with the austerity agenda, or whether these crises merely revealed dynamics which had been underlying in the management of its energy utilities since the beginning of the neo‐liberal era.     

The Second Time as Tragedy? Welfare Reform under Thatcher and the Coalition

The welfare reforms of the Coalition government are marked by the legacy of Thatcherism. Social security reforms in the 1980s reshaped the system towards reliance on means‐tested benefits. Negative policy feedback created by the opacity and perverse effects of means‐testing has made these benefits an easy target for the Coalition, at least so far as working age people are concerned. Different policy feedbacks affect policy towards old age pensions. The government is locked into promoting private pensions, and is extending this commitment with automatic enrolment. To make private pensions pay, it has to reverse the slide to means‐testing. The implication is that the pronounced bias against the working poor and in favour of older people in Coalition policy is not simply a matter of electoral preferences: rather, it reflects the political effects of previous policy decisions.     

Protest in Italy in Times of Crisis: A Cross-Government Comparison

Abstract

Using protest event analysis methodology and conceptual and theoretical toolkits developed in social movement studies, this article analyses protest mobilisation during the period of the height of the economic crisis in Italy (2009–2014) by comparing the protest trends in diachronic and comparative perspectives over a period of four different governments. Data show that the Italian anti-austerity protest arena was dominated by ‘old actors’ (the traditional trade unions) and was not able to produce the strong social and political coalitions that emerged in other South European countries. This was due to the specific relationship that developed between civil society and political parties that shaped the forms of anti-austerity mobilisation in this period.     

Austerity versus pragmatism: a comparison of Latvian and Polish economic policies during the great recession and their consequences ten years later

ABSTRACT

Despite many initial similarities, Latvia and Poland represent two opposite extremes in terms of practical and theoretical approaches to the economic crisis. The Polish government applied a ‘pragmatic’ approach to fight the recession, based on expansionary fiscal policies and currency devaluation. Conversely, the Latvian administration opted for the Austerity and internal devaluation strategy. Consequently, the objective of this paper is to analyze, from the perspective of political economy, the strategies chosen for the economic crisis management and their effects in Latvia and Poland, in light of the main EU narratives about its causes and responses. The research contends that the economic performance of both countries during the crisis was due to their respective economic structures. On the one hand, Poland is a bigger, more diversified and industrialized economy, with fewer channels of vulnerability and could apply expansionary policies effectively. On the contrary, the economic model established in Latvia generated a high exposure to external shocks, in particular, with a double vulnerability in the banking sector. In this context, due to internal and external motives, the Latvian government decided to apply the austerity and internal devaluation strategy, worsening the economic decline and the subsequent recovery.