Suchergebnisse

Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image concerns motivate richer individuals to vote for the public provision of goods they themselves buy in markets, the reason being that a higher provision level attracts more individuals to the public system, enhancing the social exclusivity of market purchases. In effect, majority voting may lead to a public provision that only a minority of citizens use. Users in the public system may enjoy better provision than users in the private system. We characterize the coalition structures across voters that can prevail in a political equilibrium.

The last election in the Slovak and Czech Republic was special. It not only took place before the official electoral period (pre-elections), but new political parties were "again" successful. The article focuses not only on both elections in the last two years in a comparative perspective, but it analyses the opportunity structure of success as well, including types of new political parties (according to Lucardie). The article seeks to answer the question: why are new political parties electorally successful, able to break into parliament and even become part of a coalition government? We assume that the emergence and success of new political parties in both countries relied on the ability to promote "old" ideas in a new fashion, colloquially referred to as "new suits" or "old" ideological flows in new breeze.

We analyze and compare three separate efforts to code bias in Malaysia's media and find strong empirical evidence of an ongoing and profound progovernment bias in coverage. We also find, however, significant variation in bias between different types of news outlets. While Malay and Anglophone sources tended to be strongly progovernment, Chinese-language and online outlets were far more impartial. We demonstrate that both the general bias and the variation in it are largely the result of two factors: (1) government censorship and (2) ownership structures that link many major outlets to the ruling coalition. These findings provide a detailed view of the struggle for media independence in a less-than-democratic regime and supply insight into media bias across both authoritarian and democratic regimes in Asia, as well as outside it.

Depuis plus d'un an, l'« État islamique » fait la une de l'actualité pour ses avancées territoriales et sa mise en scène de l'horreur. Mais au-delà de ces aspects, l'organisation du calife auto-proclamé Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi comprend une dimension civile d'où il tire sa légitimité. L'administration des territoires sous son contrôle passe par une exploitation des ressources naturelles et humaines dont regorgent les territoires syrien et irakien. Les revenus que le groupe en tire lui permettent de financer ses opérations militaires et son embryon d'État. Un an après le début des bombardements d'une coalition emmenée par les États-Unis, l'« État islamique » a montré une capacité étonnante d'adaptation et de flexibilité. Une meilleure compréhension du groupe djihadiste est aujourd'hui nécessaire pour l'ensemble des acteurs œuvrant à sa disparition.

The practice of live tweeting while following a television programme is quickly becoming a widespread phenomenon. However, in Italy, commenting on a political debate via social media is a novelty. This article presents the first exemplary case study in an Italian context, the 'Italia bene comune' debate, hosted by SkyTg24 on 12 November 2012. This debate focused on elections to designate a candidate to lead the government from the centre-left coalition. The findings indicate the new hybridisation of media: television's centrality is confirmed regarding its domination in the public space in which political discussion occurs, and the web demonstrates its own capacity for an active role in an event central to Italian politics. The new element was the active participation of a vocal minority who commented online as the media event unfolded live on television.

John Kannankulam and Fabian Georgi show, that the dominant authoritarian neoliberal fraction of the german Federal Government made a change of course in summer 2012. It quits with some ordoliberal principles and stops resistance against the mutualization of debt and expansive monetary policy. The alliance of a national-conservative and an ordoliberal fraction broke up. The contradiction within the (neo-)liberals and conservatives result in a foundation of a new right-wing party, the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany). Anyway new conflicts arise and the Great Coalition of Merkel's CDU and the Social Democrats hold on its hard-line (against greece): austerity. John Kannankulam and Fabian Georgi reconstruct the dynamics on the basis of four phases in which the authoritarian-neoliberal fraction prevail.

AbstractThe global financial crisis of 2007 turned into a sovereign debt crisis that placed the economies within the EU in jeopardy. Despite hastily decided rescue packages, bailouts and far‐reaching reforms of economic governance in the EU the situation still looks grim in some Southern member states. In the course of these rescue attempts technocratic decision making at the European level and within the most crisis‐ridden countries became more influential. Instead of rethinking the economic system, political accountability shifted from citizens to markets in order to 'fix the system'. The knowledge base informing political decision making remained largely intact, allowing a dominant, international advocacy coalition to impose reforms deemed 'necessary'. The price to pay is a decline in trust in elected representatives and the threat to fall back behind even Schumpeterian‐style democracies.

The article examines the representation of housing risk in contemporary Australian policy discourse through a critical analysis of two policy texts from the recent Victorian Coalition government (2010–2014). Drawing on governmentality theory and contemporary debates on neoliberalism, it examines how these policy texts perpetuate a discourse in which 'housing risk' is primarily understood as an issue for individuals to manage, rather than as an issue with predominantly structural roots. It then explores how this particular neoliberal representation of 'housing risk' supports policy solutions that ultimately responsibilise individuals through a narrow focus on education and employment as the pathways to independence in the private housing market. The article argues that this situation is problematic in a context of increasing rates of homelessness and diminished access to affordable housing across Australia.

This article examines the democratic impact of the UK coalition government's Transparency Agenda, focusing on the publication of all local government spending over £500 by councils in England. It looks at whether the new data have driven increased democratic accountability, public participation, and information transmission. The evidence suggests that the local government spending data have driven some accountability. However, rather than forging new 'performance regimes', creating 'armchair auditors', or bringing mass use and involvement, the publication creates a further element of political disruption. Assessment of the use and impact of the new spending data finds it is more complex, more unpredictable, and more political than the rhetoric around Open Data indicates. The danger is that the gap between aims and impact invites disappointment from supporters.

Policy discourses around child poverty and its causes and effects on families emerged in the 1990s, culminating in the Coalition government's emphasis on the quality of couple relations in improving child outcomes and in reducing child poverty. This article reviews and updates the current evidence base around the relationship between parenting and poverty. Evidence suggests an intricate relationship between complex and mediating processes of, for instance, income, parental stress, disrupted parenting practices and neighbourhoods and environments, as opposed to a simplistic causal relationship between poverty, parenting and child outcomes. The article then proceeds to suggest responses to enhance the evidence and research. Lastly, it considers the implications for child poverty policy, arguing that current responses are too simplistic and do not sufficiently reflect the evidence base.

Le 25 janvier dernier, la gauche de la gauche, appelée « Coalition de la Gauche radicale » a remporté les élections législatives anticipées. Mais n'ayant obtenu la majorité absolue, elle s'est coalisée avec le parti souverainiste ANEL. Dépeint comme le mariage d'un parti d'extrême gauche avec un parti d'extrême droite, il n'en est rien. Il s'agit de deux forces politiques pragmatiques qui ont en commun de vouloir rejeter ce qu'elles estiment être un assujettissement du pays au diktat de la Troïka, composée de la Commission européenne, de la Banque centrale européenne et du Fonds monétaire international. Considérant que celle-ci n'est soumise à aucun contrôle démocratique, ni du parlement européen, ni des Etats souverains, leur combat leur semble juste. L'expérience grecque est suivie à la loupe par le reste de l'Europe.

En partant du constat que le fonctionnement d'un système électoral concurrentiel repose sur la croyance des élites dans la possibilité d'une alternance et sur la protection des droits de l'opposition, l'article désire attirer l'attention sur l'une des conséquences de l'absence de consensus sur les règles du jeu politique : l'impossible neutralisation des institutions. En Turquie, un pays dans lequel ce consensus n'existe pas, les activités de captation des ressources publiques représentent des modes d'accumulation de ressources primordiaux pour les partis. Elles ont notamment pour effet la politisation et la désobjectivation des institutions, la perte d'autonomie des champs sociaux et l'inclusion de l'institution militaire dans le jeu politique. Ces phénomènes renforcent alors l'absence de consensus sur les règles du jeu politique et permettent de comprendre les phénomènes de renforcement des gouvernements monocolores et d'instabilité des gouvernements de coalition.

The marginal involvement of the European Union (EU) in redistributive policies and its limited fiscal resources have led to a notable lack of attention by EU scholars towards the EU budget and its dynamics. Yet the nature of the budgetary data and their high usability for statistical analysis make them an excellent tool for studying and measuring policy change in the EU. In this article, I analyse an original dataset containing yearly data for the main categories of expenditure and how they have changed over the last three decades (1979–2013). Using time-series analysis, I find that the ability to form winning coalitions in the Council, the ideological positioning of the co-legislators and the inclusion of the cohesion countries have played a significant role in driving budget change.

We use data for all Italian municipalities from 2001 to 2007 to empirically test the extent to which two different electoral rules, which hold for small and large municipalities, affect fiscal policy decisions at local level. Municipalities with fewer than 15,000 inhabitants elect their mayors in accordance with a single-ballot plurality rule where only one list can support her/him, while the rest of the municipalities uses a runoff plurality rule where multiple lists can support her/him. Per capita total taxes, charges and current expenditure in large municipalities are lower than in small ones if the mayor of the large municipality does not need a broad coalition to be elected, otherwise the use of a single- or double-ballot rule does not make any difference in the policy outcome.

Policy discourses around child poverty and its causes and effects on families emerged in the 1990s, culminating in the Coalition government's emphasis on the quality of couple relations in improving child outcomes and in reducing child poverty. This article reviews and updates the current evidence base around the relationship between parenting and poverty. Evidence suggests an intricate relationship between complex and mediating processes of, for instance, income, parental stress, disrupted parenting practices and neighbourhoods and environments, as opposed to a simplistic causal relationship between poverty, parenting and child outcomes. The article then proceeds to suggest responses to enhance the evidence and research. Lastly, it considers the implications for child poverty policy, arguing that current responses are too simplistic and do not sufficiently reflect the evidence base.