Governments in many industrializing democracies face difficult policy trade‐offs. Liberalization and informality have placed electoral pressure on them to expand noncontributory social spending. However, governments in developing democracies face constraints when attempting to finance this expansion. In some countries, the informal labor market is very large, thereby undermining the revenue that can be collected through income tax. We argue that this has given rise to a paradoxical situation. Left governments in developing democracies with large informal labor markets have a strong electoral incentive to expand welfare regimes to previously excluded outsiders, but to fiscally underwrite this expansion, they have increasingly been forced to fund their redistributive strategies via a regressive policy instrument, indirect consumption taxation. We examine this argument for a sample of 17 Latin American countries between the years 1990 and 2016. Our results suggest that labor informality forces left governments to turn to indirect taxation.
This article revisits theoretical claims that separation of power systems will display an inverse relationship between presidential power and party strength. Shugart and Carey posited this as a general equilibrium within presidential democracies; later, Shugart proposed that the inverse relationship resulted from founding institutional choices shaped in turn by modes of democratic transition. We test both the equilibrium and the genetic versions of the inverse relationship on a large-N dataset of presidential systems from 1900 to 2016. We find strong significant empirical support for an inverse relationship between executive power and party system institutionalization. However, the relationship is more dynamic than would be predicted by theories based on institutional foundings alone. Through analysis of decree reform in Argentina and Brazil, we observe changes in the expected inverse relationship despite the absence of a constitutional assembly and the lack of any change in electoral rules or party authority.
Identifying important policy outputs has long been of interest to political scientists. In this work, we propose a novel approach to the classification of policies. Instead of obtaining and aggregating expert evaluations of significance for a finite set of policy outputs, we use experts to identify a small set of significant outputs and then employ positive unlabeled (PU) learning to search for other similar examples in a large unlabeled set. We further propose to automate the first step by harvesting 'seed' sets of significant outputs from web data. We oer an application of the new approach by classifying over 9,000 government regulations in the United Kingdom. The obtained estimates are successfully validated against human experts, by forecasting web citations, and with a construct validity test.
The Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI) developed by Fish and Kroenig (2009) is the most important effort to date to measure legislative power in cross‐national perspective, but it has been criticized on both theoretical and methodological grounds. We build on the 32‐item PPI to develop an alternative indicator of legislative strength that is based on an expert survey of 296 political scientists in 2014. We reweight each of the powers by expert opinion, creating a new Weighted Legislative Powers Score (WLPS) for the 158 national legislatures in the Fish and Kroenig data set. In addition, the article reports the expert‐assigned weight factors for the entire set of 32 powers contained in the original PPI, thus allowing researchers to innovate alternative, disaggregated indicators of legislative power.
Presidents play a central role in legislative activity in Latin America. Previous research highlights that some form of ideological compromise on behalf of the president is vital to sustain successful legislative coalitions. Yet, primarily due to the lack of a firm empirical basis on which to measure such presidential give-and-take, the extent to which presidents make use of such policy compromise, and under what conditions this is a viable strategy, remains unknown. Applying quantitative text analysis to 305 annual `State of the Union' addresses of 73 presidents in thirteen Latin American countries, we remedy this situation and provide comparable time-series data for Latin American presidential movements in a one-dimensional issue space between 1980 and 2014. Our results indicate that presidents will compromise in response to changes in the median party, although this effect will be mediated by the institutional context within which the president operates.
Fluctuations in the volume and the value of financial remittances received from abroad affect the livelihood of households in developing economies across the world. Yet, political scientists have little to say about how changes in remittances, as opposed to the receipt of remittance payments alone, affect recipients' political attitudes. Relying on a unique four-wave panel study of Kyrgyz citizens between 2010–2013 and a cross-sectional sample of 28 countries in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, we show that when people experience a decrease (increase) in remittances, they become less (more) satisfied about their household economic situation and misattribute responsibility to the incumbent at home. Our findings advance the literature on the political consequences of remittance payments and suggest that far from exclusively being an international risk-sharing mechanism for developing countries, remittances can also drive fluctuations in incumbent approval and compromise rudimentary accountability mechanisms in the developing world.
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted routine hospital services globally. This study estimated the total number of adult elective operations that would be cancelled worldwide during the 12 weeks of peak disruption due to COVID-19. Methods: A global expert response study was conducted to elicit projections for the proportion of elective surgery that would be cancelled or postponed during the 12 weeks of peak disruption. A Bayesian β-regression model was used to estimate 12-week cancellation rates for 190 countries. Elective surgical case-mix data, stratified by specialty and indication (surgery for cancer versus benign disease), were determined. This case mix was applied to country-level surgical volumes. The 12-week cancellation rates were then applied to these figures to calculate the total number of cancelled operations. Results: The best estimate was that 28 404 603 operations would be cancelled or postponed during the peak 12 weeks of disruption due to COVID-19 (2 367 050 operations per week). Most would be operations for benign disease (90·2 per cent, 25 638 922 of 28 404 603). The overall 12-week cancellation rate would be 72·3 per cent. Globally, 81·7 per cent of operations for benign conditions (25 638 922 of 31 378 062), 37·7 per cent of cancer operations (2 324 070 of 6 162 311) and 25·4 per cent of elective caesarean sections (441 611 of 1 735 483) would be cancelled or postponed. If countries increased their normal surgical volume by 20 per cent after the pandemic, it would take a median of 45 weeks to clear the backlog of operations resulting from COVID-19 disruption. Conclusion: A very large number of operations will be cancelled or postponed owing to disruption caused by COVID-19. Governments should mitigate against this major burden on patients by developing recovery plans and implementing strategies to restore surgical activity safely.