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Standard political agency models generally predict an inverse relationship between the degree of partisan allegiance among citizens and political accountability. Does variation in voter attachments to political parties influence the behavior of public officials in new democracies? I take advantage of data from a unique audit of local governments in Ghana—the Functional Organizational Assessment Tool (FOAT)—to examine the impact of partisanship on public officials' compliance with formal rules and procedures. Because unattached or weakly attached voters are more responsive to the performance of incumbent officials, they are more likely to deter rent seeking, corruption, and other administrative malpractices. Analysis of the baseline FOAT results provides strong support for this idea: compliance with formal rules and procedures is significantly higher in districts where voters evince weak attachments to political parties. This result is robust to controls for alternate explanations and sheds light on the conditions under which politicians would abjure rent seeking and corruption, even in the context of a new democracy where they have so much opportunity to do so.

This study examines the personality traits of candidates for the Swiss government and how they are related to the candidates' electoral chances. Switzerland as a paradigmatic consensual democracy is an ideal test case to examine the connection between the specific pattern of a democracy and the government personalities that fit it. We argue that the cultural and institutional setting of the Swiss Government increases the electoral chances of kinder and gentler personalities. To test this, we estimate regression models on a new data set of candidates covering all vacancies in the Swiss government between 1982 and 2020. Our results reveal that candidates with a higher level of agreeableness do enjoy an advantage in the electoral process for Swiss consensus government.

Abundant research provides evidence that electoral systems have an impact on party system fragmentation. Taking up these findings, and adopting a dynamic approach, this article explores the effect of electoral refoms on electoral disproportionality. Specifically, it demonstrates that permissive changes in the electoral system improve the overall correspondence between vote-shares and seat-shares of parties. The explanation is that underrepresented parties in the parliament obtain more seats the more inclusive the electoral rules become. Likewise, disproportionality is higher after a restrictive electoral reform. The article employs my own data on electoral reforms from 59 established and new democracies between 1945 and 2010. Evidence is found not only that electoral reform has an effect on electoral disproportionality as measured with the Gallagher's least squares index, but also that this impact is in turn conditioned by the size of the change in the rules and the level of democratic experience.

Uncorrected proof of Book Chapter 45 in The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, Edited by Loch K. Johnson, Publication Date: 2010. ; In their path to consolidation, developing democracies strive to ensure the democratic transfer of political power, gain legitimacy with elites and civil society, reform and restructure their legal systems and economy, and, maybe most importantly, develop democratic civil-military relations (CMR)—that is establishing new security institutions (to include intelligence agencies) that are under democratic civilian control, and are effective and effi cient ( Bruneau and Boraz 2007 , 1–24).

Why have advanced democracies experienced a retreat of the interventionist state since 1980? This article provides evidence that in all relevant policy indicators (spending, subsidies, state-owned enterprises, regulation, capital taxation) government intervention has been scaled back across the OECD. An overview of the results of 130 quantitative studies analysing at least one of these indicators is provided. Focusing on five main explanatory variables – globalization, Europeanization, learning and emulation, socio-economic problems, and political parties – only limited agreement in the literature is found. The reasons for this disagreement are discussed. Ways forward are suggested for the theoretical models on which studies are based, how the dependent variable is chosen, the empirical approaches that may be applied, and how quantitative research and comparative case studies may be combined.

The ultimate goal of this work is to contribute to the contemporary debate over the crisis of nowadays Western liberal democracies. We approach the debate from the perspective of political philosophy. We contend that in order to provide a more helpful and insightful contribution to the topic, we must focus on providing a deeper understanding of the present situation. We put forth the idea that the conception of political order changed altogether during modernity, with John Locke as its main theorist. In order to justify this assumption, we first review what we hold to be the theoretical foundation for the typically modern natural rights liberal approach politics, i.e., that of John Locke. Following that, we open a new chapter in our dissertation in which we begin to focus on the United States of America's founding. We labeled this specific way of making politics, this combination of liberal and Lockean theory and practice, as the "liberal-lockean approach politics". First we look at Thomas Jefferson through the Declaration of Independence of 1776 to discover those revolutionary elements that were appealing to the entire humanity and were not restricted only to the American patriots. We try to disclose the essential role that man's rights played in the Jeffersonian political thinking and we then analyze in which exact way were those rights of man different to any other rights prior to that time. Lastly, we examine the Declaration in terms of the Lockean connections we discover within it. We review concepts such as government, property, inalienability… that have a crucial role in the constitution of America and can be traced, from our point of view, directly to the liberal theory of John Locke. Once we believed to have exposed the nature of the political-philosophical development in modernity, i.e., liberal democracies, we turn to observe the political-philosophical understanding of those concepts in the present time. We take the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and inspect those concepts that are most relevant for ...

AbstractStudies of party system size have looked at institutional and sociological factors in their attempt to explain what determines the number of parties. While some recent studies contend that party laws, beyond the district magnitude, have a significant impact on, among others, new party entry, we know very little about whether certain rules matter more in some societies than they do in others. In this paper, we study the extent to which various party finance rules affect party system size and differentiate the effect between new and established democracies. Specifically, we focus on direct and indirect public subsidization and limits on private donation and campaign expenditure. We hypothesize that compared to established countries, new democracies tend to have a larger party system size when the political finance rules create more equal conditions for electoral competition. Using data from 43 Europe democracies, the empirical analyses support our hypothesis.

This paper deals with judicial departures in consolidating democracies. It investigates to what extent and under what conditions judges in those contexts are not able to decide on their departures themselves but are rather forced to leave due to pressure from the elected branches. We undertook a cross-regional study of individual judicial departures in six consolidating democracies with elected presidents, three of them located in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay) and three in sub-Saharan Africa (Benin, Madagascar, and Senegal). We developed a unique data set containing information on 143 high-court judges in office since democratisation. We classified judicial departures as due and undue, and using a survival model we estimated the impact of institutional, political, personal, and contextual factors. The results indicate that undue judicial departures occur regardless of the region, but are most probable under the rule of politically powerful executives, and where there are lower levels of democracy and development.

Public media's contributions to democracy are well established. Less widely known are the specific policies that make these contributions possible. This study finds that professional autonomy and civic accountability in public media are supported by (1) funding established for multiyear periods; (2) legal charters that restrict partisan government influence while also mandating the provision of diverse, high-quality programming; (3) oversight agencies, whose "arm's length" independence from the government in power is bolstered through staggered terms and the dispersal of authority to make appointments; and (4) audience councils and surveys designed to strengthen links to diverse publics. Public media governed by policies that continue and extend, rather than depart from, these best practices will likely be the most successful in maintaining their civic mission online.