This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.If most voters remain rationally ignorant about the details of public policy, how can politicians be held accountable for their actions? Information markets offer an unprecedented amount of data today to help people in their roles as consumers, workers, and audience members. Yet the stories that help voters hold politicians accountable face a number of hurdles in the market place. Investigative work about public affairs topics is expensive, uncertain, and not always highly demanded. Attempts by candidates to convey ideas through the media faces a conflict between what approaches motivate the marginal voter and what topics are of interest to the marginal viewer. Research in media economics offers evidence on what types of political information gets produced, what the impact of accountability journalism is on the functioning of government, and where market failures exist in the coverage of politics and policy.
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Referendums are puzzling because they are ubiquitous. Described in the theoretical literature as "veto-player institutions," referendums are used as frequently by autocratic dictators as they are employed in constitutional democracies. As an institution championed by both Hitler and Churchill, as well as Augusto Pinochet and Woodrow Wilson it is not surprising that political scientists of an earlier generation felt that they defied all attempts to develop testable hypotheses and that referendums—in the words of Arend Lijphart from his 1984 book Democracies—"fail to fit any clear universal pattern."More recently, beginning in the 1990s, however scholars from both historical institutional as well as rational choice schools have begun to develop testable propositions as well as they have advanced explanations as to the origins, practice and consequences of the increased use of referendums. Further, in addition to general theories of voting behaviour in referendums, an emerging literature has been established, which has investigated the policy consequences of referendums. These consequences include, lower levels of inequality, higher levels of trust in government and lower levels of public spending. Compared to an earlier period characterised by ideographic single country studies, and a general pessimism regarding the prospect of developing general theories, the study of referendums has entered a 'revolutionary' phase in the Kuhnian sense of the word. While no general paradigm has emerged, scholars are increasingly confident that general recurrent patterns exist and that it is possible to develop law-like statements about the emergence, use, and implications of the use of the referendum.
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.The New Political Governance (NPG)—or alternatively the New Public Governance—is best understood as a heuristic model that allows us to empirically consider, compare, and contrast the evolution of democratic governance and public administration beyond the reforms associated with New Public Management. Contributors have focused on NPG as both a product of and a response to the challenges of a complex, pluralist state. Key pressures said to spur NPG include aggressive, 24/7 media; greater demands for transparency; an expansion in government oversight and accountability; an expansion of the advocacy industry; and, an increasingly polarized and volatile electorate. While these pressures are not, unto themselves, new, what is new is the response to them. Four primary elements characterize NPG as a response to these forces: the onset of the permanent campaign; full, or nearly full, integration of the range of activities associated with governing with constant concerns and tactics historically associated with campaigning; the expansion and elevation of the role of partisan political staff; politicization through the personalization of appointments to senior public service positions; and the shift in norms from a neutral, non-partisan public service to an expectation of promiscuous partisanship that demands enthusiasm for the agenda of the government of the day.The NPG framework has not been without criticism. Theoretically, some have argued for greater precision in the core concepts of NPG (e.g., politicization). Others have questioned whether it is so much the behaviors themselves—expected or undertaken—or the more public context in which they occur that marks the real shift. Finally some have pointed out the lack of integration of exogenous influences in the NPG model. A number of commenters have pointed out the limited empirical evidence that has been provided to support the NPG model.
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Healthcare is an essential, but often expensive, good. It is largely a linear function of a country's wealth. Poorer countries have barebones care, primitive facilities, shortages of trained professionals, and usually very limited forms of social, or even private, insurance. Moreover, their public health systems are highly fragile and face shortages of basic sanitation facilities, potable water, and plumbing. Consequently, comparisons across systems are most meaningful when they are constrained by their level of wealth and public sanitation infrastructure. In this comparison, the United States stands as an outlier among other wealthy countries for the higher costs of its health care system and its relatively high level of inefficiency in achieving desirable health outcomes. Approximately 18% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product is spent on health care. That figure is considerably greater than the average for wealthy countries and is, indeed, the highest in the world. But that considerable input results in health outcomes that are among the worst of the wealthy countries.Why this is so has to do with historical developments, political values, the complexity of American political institutions, and the ability of well-heeled lobbies to successfully find champions to support their grievances. It also may have a good bit to do with some factors that lie outside the health care system but interact with it. The United States is among the leaders of the highly developed world in many risk factors: obesity and the illnesses it often leads to, lethal violence especially by guns, teen age pregnancy, infant mortality, and social inequality. Most notably, however, the United States is the only country in the highly developed world that, even with the passage and partial implementation of the Affordable Care Act, lacks universal accessibility through social insurance to the health care system. The United States also is unusual for its lack of pricing regulation and pricing transparency for medical procedures.Despite the fact that other health care systems seem to manage better with less, costs threaten to spiral in virtually all of the wealthy countries. This is because populations in all of these countries are getting older and most have a less than replacement birth rate. The demographic logic is that more people will be demanding more health care, and there will be fewer people to foot the bill. So, all systems are facing a cost crunch in the near future. While the United States is among these, thanks largely to immigration, it tends to have a more favorable ratio of donors to recipients than other rich countries.Ultimately, all health care systems have to juggle three critical factors: (1) access to the health care system; (2) costs of the system; and (3) the quality of the system. While all of these factors seem self-evident, none actually are. They involve trade-offs. All systems ration in some way. Rationing is a buzzword among some sectors of the American political class, but all systems do it and must do it, including the American system. But they do it in different ways. Why has much to do with politics, respect for evidence, or the lack of it, and high levels of social inequality.
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Tourism is important in debates on change and development because it is arguably the world's largest industry, a major driver of economic growth, and a high priority in developing countries' plans for economic development.Discourses of responsible tourism claim to address the concerns surrounding mass, packaged tourism: principally, the lack of environmental and cultural authenticity and sustainability. Responsible tourism promises to fulfill tourists' desires to experience authenticity while having positive economic and social impacts. Proponents of this kind of tourism claim that, by creating a demand for these "goods," communities can protect and revive pristine environments and authentic cultures.Authenticity plays an important role in the sustainable development discourse implicit in responsible tourism. However, there are tensions between authenticity, sustainability, and neo-liberal development whose historical trajectories can be traced from the 1970s to the present; from a rejection of market-led economic growth to delivering sustainability through market mechanisms. Critics have noted that the neo-liberalization of every aspect of development has been integral to the political agenda of global governance by institutions such as the World Bank. In short, by integrating sustainable development into neo-liberal mechanisms, alternatives to dominant market-led development are denied.Tourism plays a major part in these debates because conceptualizations of authenticity have followed a similar path: from imaginations of pre-contact, harmonious idylls; to creation of "value-added" products; to conservation of natural environments; and preservation and revival of traditional cultures for tourist consumption. The turn away from modernization development paradigms and towards cultural revival is politically fraught. Whereas traditional cultures, admired by the West for their environmental sustainability and social cohesion, existed largely outside of global markets, under global neo-liberal regimes, cultural revival is delivered through market forces. Moreover, delivering cultural revival through tourism often de-politicizes highly contentious issues. This is particularly pertinent in Latin America, where the continent has been experiencing a "left turn" in formal politics, including indigenous cosmovisions in new constitutions.Finally, debates on authenticity, sustainable development and tourism, and especially responsible tourism, are key to understandings of current political approaches to development.
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.South African trade unions had a decisive role in the political life of the territory that became the Union of South Africa and later the Republic of South Africa. Such a role was both formative and reactive; since their inception in the 1880s, trade unions attempted to shape the body politic, its legislation, its inclusions and exclusions, its bill of rights, and a whole range of social rights. They had a formative role to play in the construction and destruction of the country's racial order. They also reacted to policy and law in all periods, creating serious challenges that continue well into the Post-Apartheid period.
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Political representation is at the heart of liberal democracies. Whether democracy is understood as popular rule or as effective fate control by the people, representation is the means to realize the democratic idea of giving people a voice in large states. Thus, from a normative point of view, there should be a causal relationship between citizens' interests and policy decisions of representatives. Elections are the major link establishing causality between the wishes of the people and acts of governance. However, how and whom citizens elect varies considerably across democracies. The two ideal types, or "two visions of democracy" as Bingham Powell has called them, are majoritarian and proportional elections. In a majoritarian electoral system, citizens elect persons in single-member districts. In a proportional electoral system, citizens elect parties voting for lists and parties determine by candidate selection how those lists are composed. The causal link between citizens and representatives differs clearly between the two kinds of elections. The mandate in the majoritarian model is given to a person, and this person is held accountable in the next elections for her performance. In the proportional model, the mandate is given to a party, and the party is held accountable in the next elections. Thus, different actors have the duty to deliver representation in different electoral systems: individual deputies in the majoritarian, political parties in the proportional model. This implies that representatives should have different roles and foci of representation depending on the mode of their election. The two visions of democracy embedded in the two electoral systems carry distinct normative ideals about good representation. Looking at political representation in democracies from a comparative perspective, electoral systems seem to induce the respective orientation toward the mandate and whom to represent by different incentives for candidates running in single-member districts or on party lists. The role of a party delegate is more frequent in proportional, the delegate and trustee roles more frequent in majoritarian systems. In majoritarian systems, representatives are very much inclined to represent the median voter of the district; in proportional systems, representatives rather tend to represent their party voters.
