Who Advocates? Determinants of Political Advocacy in Presidential Election Years

Political discussion research often focuses on general discussion without analyzing interesting subsets of interpersonal communication, such as political advocacy. Political advocacy is crucial to study because it is where citizens make clear statements of their beliefs when trying to influence others, which democratic theorists cite as valuable in spreading information in discussion networks. In this project, we test theoretically relevant determinants of political advocacy, focusing on campaign spending. Using multilevel logistic regression models of American National Election Study survey data from presidential elections between 1976 and 2008, we find that campaign spending correlates with an increase in the likelihood of advocating. We also find that the likelihood of being an advocate correlates with greater political discussion, television usage, interest in politics, partisanship, efficacy, and socioeconomic status. Additionally, we break these results down by party spending and party identification, and find differentiated results by party. Generally, these results show how the electoral environment shapes interpersonal communication.     

Local Expenditure Interaction in Italian Municipalities: Do Local Council Partnerships Make a Difference?

This paper investigates interdependence among local councils in Italy in their public spending and distinguishes between possible sources of this interdependence. We find significant positive interaction among neighbouring local councils in regard to both spending at the level of total expenditure and spending on different sub-categories. Attempts to identify the source of this horizontal interaction seem to reject the yardstick competition hypothesis. Addressing the role that local council partnerships may play in internalising fiscal externalities, we suggest that expenditure interaction may be driven by spill-over.     

How federalism influences welfare spending: Belgium federalism reform through the perspective of the synthetic control method

The question of whether and how federalism influences a country's welfare state has been a longstanding concern of political scientists. However, no agreement exists on exactly how, and under what conditions, federal structures impact the welfare state. This article examines this controversy. It concludes theoretically that the specific constellation of federal structures and distribution of powers need to be considered when theorising the effects of federalism on the welfare state. Using the case of Belgium and applying the synthetic control method, it is shown in the article that without the federalism reform of 1993, the country would have had further decreases in social spending rather than a consolidation of this spending in the years after 1993. In the case of Belgium, the combination of increased subnational spending autonomy in a still national financing system provided ideal conditions for a positive federalism effect on social spending to occur.     

From the Executive Board to the Classroom. What Debt Relief Means for Education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

ABSTRACT

This analysis re-assesses the IMF’s decision to grant debt relief to the DRC in 2010 based on the country’s poverty reduction and growth performance: would the IMF come to the same conclusion given the current knowledge available about the impact of the debt relief process on public governance and service delivery? First, it shows that, whereas the direct resource effect of this aid modality was minimal, the indirect effect was more significant: the conditionalities attached to the process helped to stabilize the economy and increased the overall budget of the Congolese state. This increased resource availability also sustainably percolated to the education sector. Second, however, the impact on social development was minimal: school enrolment increased but was hardly accompanied by extra budget per pupil, whereas more complicated challenges like disparities in access or quality of schooling were left untouched. The government’s strategy was also partly short-circuited by the electoral process.     

Funding Local Government: Use (and Abuse) of Peru's Canon System

While decentralisation, properly understood, implies that sub‐national government involves devolution of authority over revenues, recent experience from Peru suggests that the canon system tends to create perverse incentives in encouraging open and democratic government at the local level. This is particularly the case in regions such as Cusco, which benefit disproportionately from this system. Examination of experiences in four provinces of Cusco shows how – in the absence of a robust civil society – excessive funding tends to encourage clientelism and corruption rather than accountable and transparent administration.