Starker Steuerwettbewerb – starke Reformen? Ein neuer Blick auf Unternehmenssteuerreformen in 15 EU‐Staaten (1998‐2011)

Although many EU‐countries have reduced corporate taxes in the recent years, there is still a substantial variance between the 12 oldest EU‐member states. This contribution revisits this variation and analyses the determinants of corporate tax reforms and their magnitude from a perspective which is new in two respects: First, we combine logistic panel regression and fsQCA analysis allowing for an integration of qualitative assessments of tax reforms in the QCA analysis. This adds to the existing studies on tax reform which almost exclusively rely on regression techniques. Second, we focus on the time period 1998‐2011 where we expect tax competition to be especially intense. The results of our analyses confirm the major impact of tax competition on national corporate tax policies. This relationship dominates the regression analyses as well as the fsQCA. Furthermore, our findings allow nuancing the existing results on the influence of institutional constraints and partisan politics.     

Sweet dreams are made of this: The need for narrowly tailored statutory protection for documented dreamers

The growing backlog of immigrant visa petitions and legal permanent resident adjustment applications is a harsh reality of the American dream. Dependent children of immigrants can wait decades for their parents' visas to become current, only to age out of dependent status before stepping foot on American soil. Dependent children of nonimmigrants seeking to become legal permanent residents age out before their parents' adjustment application is approved – leaving them at risk of removal. This Note proposes a temporary visa status for these dependents, allowing them to maintain legal status in America and remain with their parents.     

Opposition Coordination in Singapore’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

Recent political science scholarship suggests that when opposition political parties are able to coalesce into a united coalition against an authoritarian regime, they will perform better in authoritarian elections, and can more credibly bargain with the regime for liberalising reforms. Yet, most of this literature pays little attention to the variety of ways in which opposition parties cooperate with each other. Drawing on the literature on the bargaining model of war, the author sketches out a theoretical framework to explain how opposition parties coordinate to develop non-competition agreements. Such agreements entail opposition parties bargaining over which political party should contest or withdraw in which constituencies to ensure straight fights against the dominant authoritarian incumbent in each electoral district. The author then applies this framework to explain opposition coordination in Singapore’s 2015 general elections, focusing on the conflict between the Workers’ Party and the National Solidarity Party.     

The Impact of Peace Journalism Training on Journalists’ Reportage of the 2015 Elections in Nigeria: An Action Research Case Study

During the run-up to the 2015 general elections in nigeria, there was widespread trepidation within and outside the nation that the increasing cases of electoral violence and political intimidation ravaging the country would snowball into full-blown violence, and possibly plunge it into civil war. this fear was largely instigated by the 2011 election, which was marred by pre- and post-election violence. Human rights Watch (2011) estimated that the violence led to over 800 deaths in three days of rioting which engulfed parts of northern nigeria. since the First republic elections in the early 1960s, the nigerian media have been very involved in the political process. the diverse nature of the media makes its ideological inclination easy to decipher, because of reportage that is often tilted along ethnic and religious lines. using data obtained through participatory action research involving 40 purposively selected participant journalists, this article proposes an alternative method of news reportage using the peace-journalism model. developed by lynch and mcGoldrick (2005), the model encourages journalists to report social issues in ways that create opportunities for society to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict, using insights from conflict analysis and transformation to update concepts of balance, fairness and accuracy in reporting. it also provides a new route map which traces the connections between journalists, their sources, the stories they cover and the consequences of their reportage.     

Party,Regional and Linguistic Proportionality Under Majoritarian Rules: Swiss Federal Council Elections

The elections to the Swiss Federal Council in December 2015 re‐established a system of party‐centred concordance, cherished in consociational theory, consisting of two representatives of the Swiss People's Party, two Radicals, two Social Democrats and one Christian Democrat. At the same time, the government has rarely been as unbalanced in terms of the representation of Switzerland's languages and regions. The article analyses the concept of concordance with regard to both aspects of governmental inclusiveness. It also highlights the crucial role of electoral rules used in governmental elections. It argues that they resemble the Alternative Vote, a majoritarian electoral system that has been criticized in consociational theory but prescribed by the rival, centripetalist approach to power sharing.     

Does accountability matter? How electoral systems affect conflict initiation

Recent work on conflict suggests that electoral systems impact foreign policy-making in important ways; however, the discipline has reached different conclusions regarding how different types of electoral systems affect conflict initiation. In this study we contend that legislators are more accountable individually in candidate-centred electoral systems which impacts a state’s decision to initiate interstate conflict. We test our argument using a time-series cross-sectional analysis of 54 democracies from 1975 to 2001. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that candidate-centred electoral systems result in less conflict initiation than party-centric systems due to higher levels of individual accountability for legislative members.     

Catalysts and barriers: Explaining electoral reform in Western Europe

Most accounts of electoral system change tend to consider it as being driven by purely partisan interests. Political parties are expected to change the electoral rules as a way to maximise gains or minimise losses. However, little work has been done on the question of why electoral reforms are so scarce in spite of these potential benefits. In this study, a wide range of both factors that may foster (‘catalysts’) and ones that may hinder (‘barriers’) the change of electoral institutions are investigated. A statistical analysis is performed of 16 West European countries from 1975 to 2005, covering 23 reforms of the proportionality of their electoral systems. It is found that procedural barriers are more effective for explaining the likelihood of electoral reforms than (most of) the catalysts. Additionally, there are indications that courts may play a more active role in triggering reform than previously thought.     

Gendered electoral systems in the French Sénat

A longstanding but contested hypothesis in political science suggests that proportional (rather than majoritarian) electoral systems tend to increase the share of legislative seats held by women. While scholars have used a variety of empirical methodologies to test this hypothesis, they have mostly neglected legislatures where different parts of the country use different electoral systems. This note looks at women’s election to the longest-established legislative body using such a mixed electoral system: the upper house of the French parliament, the Sénat, where high-population constituencies use proportional elections but low-population constituencies use a majoritarian system. Among elections to the Sénat from 1959 to 2014, regression estimates indicate that women’s share of seats is approximately 10 percentage points higher in proportionally allocated elections, all else being equal. This finding both contributes to the literature linking gender to electoral systems and shows the potential value of considering understudied institutions.     

Does voter polarisation induce party extremism? The moderating role of abstention

This article contributes to the literature on representation by examining how the ideological polarisation of the electorate affects parties’ programmatic positions in multiparty systems. The main argument is that parties face incentives to adopt more extreme positions when the electorate becomes more ideologically polarised and the share of non-moderate voters is higher. The reason is that by adopting moderate positions parties will prompt their non-moderate core constituents to sit out the election. This risk is conditioned by voters’ propensity to abstain. A higher (lower) propensity to abstain means that parties alienate a larger (smaller) share of their core constituents when adopting a moderate position. Parties therefore respond to greater voter polarisation by adopting more extreme positions, but the effect declines as voters’ propensity to abstain decreases. An empirical analysis of parties’ programmatic positions in 11 Western European countries between 1977 and 2016 strongly supports this expectation.     

Governments,decentralisation, and the risk of electoral defeat

In the last three decades several countries around the world have transferred authority from their national to their regional governments. However, not all their regions have been empowered to the same degree and important differences can be observed between and within countries. Why do some regions obtain more power than others? Current literature argues that variation in the redistribution of power and resources between regions is introduced by demand. Yet these explanations are conditional on the presence of strong regionalist parties or territorial cleavages. This article proposes instead a theory that links the government’s risk of future electoral defeat with heterogeneous decentralisation, and tests its effects using data from 15 European countries and 141 regions. The results provide evidence that parties in government protect themselves against the risk of electoral defeat by selectively targeting decentralisation towards regions in which they are politically strong. The findings challenge previous research that overestimates the importance of regionalist parties while overlooking differences between regions.