Suchergebnisse

First published in 1998. This book makes an original contribution to our understanding of policy failures at the European and international level. On the basis of a comparative analysis the study shows how the co-ordination mechanisms available in the European Community and OECD have complicated the regulation of national policies on state aid to exporting industries. This failure can be explained in theoretical terms: international and supranational organisations are not neutral arbiters, but have interests of their own, interests which are not necessarily aligned with those of their member states. In detailed case studies of Britain, France and Germany the book examines how the preference structure of governments in the exercise of their promotion programmes contrasts with the policies enacted by international bureaucracies. Walzenbach's interdisciplinary approach specifies the conditions under which policy co-ordination can have detrimental effects and thus, usefully corrects the benign view held by most regime theorists about transaction-cost reducing and efficiency enhancing role of such arrangement.

Richard Epstein's property scholarship tracks his classical liberal theory of government. The classical liberal would permit state intervention to overcome collective-action problems but not to engage in redistribution of wealth. With respect to private law, Epstein harbors no clear preference for either the legislature or the courts as a source of limits on owners' autonomy to overcome collective-action problems. With regard to public law, in contrast, Epstein would elevate the courts to a superior status relative to legislatures and would have courts enforce the classical liberal ideal as a matter of constitutional law. This article questions whether giving such power to courts makes sense, even on classical liberal assumptions.

Marketizing reforms are often suggested as remedies for the problems that plague socialist economies. Introducing market reforms is a complex problem. This article examines the obstacles to such reforms. It employs an institutional-choice perspective to study the conditions that are necessary to make marketization effective and discusses the likely outcomes of incomplete marketization.

States' choices on term limits are quantified as a multiple-categorical variable capturing variation in the type of limits passed. Measures of relative political influence in Congress explain much of this variation. Using 1992 data on the American states, the model controls for unobserved heterogeneity due to voter access to direct democracy in some states. At 2002 values for congressional tenure and federal spending, the model predicts approximately eight to ten additional states would choose to limit their own members' terms but cannot under a Supreme Court ruling. We discuss implications for institutional federalism and the potential passage of similar political institutions across the states. Adapted from the source document.

International bargaining depends not only on the negotiators but also on the domestic political system in which they find themselves. Knowing this, countries often change domestic political institutions to influence the outcomes of international negotiations and/or to shape the domestic distributional consequences of those negotiations. This institutional change generally occurs in an already-rich institutional environment, where many different actors must jointly agree to modify existing institutions. To examine these, this paper develops a thirteen-actor model of U.S. trade policy institutions over the past century. Whereas the existing literature emphasizes the role of the median legislator in delegating to or constraining the executive, I find that changes in nonmedian procedural actors drive institutional reform in trade policy. Some of these procedural actors do not have veto authority and yet they play decisive roles, taking this analysis beyond veto player theory. The president can sometimes present these procedural actors with a choice that they can only make in a way favorable to him. As a result, small changes in the relative preferences of different nonmedian actors, such as the House Rules Committee or the key filibuster member of the Senate, can lead to large policy or institutional changes. These make a big difference in bargaining outcomes involving the United States and dramatically restrict the bargaining leeway enjoyed by negotiators.

Offers a perspective on the state of the global economy. This book explores the possibility of an institutional dynamism that impacts not only on the characteristics of localities and their place in a hierarchical and ordered system of relationships, but on the nature of the system itself