A selection from the essays in the first and second series of "Essays: scientific, political and speculative". London, 1858-63. ; "New and enlarged edition." ; The philosophy of style.--Over-legislation.--The morals of trade.-Personal beauty.--Representative government.--Prison-ethics.--Railway morals and railway policy.--Gracefulness.--State-tamperings with money and banks.--Parliamentary reform: the dangers and the safeguards.--Mill versus Hamilton -the test of truth. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Recon7.
The development of political science in Switzerland in terms of an academic recognition has its origins in the French part of Switzerland in the 1960s to 1980s, followed by the German part. Today, ten institutions in Switzerland offer political science at Bachelors and at Masters level. While in 2'000, only about 2'300 students studied political science in Switzerland this number almost doubled within ten years. One of the main changes in political science education in Switzerland consists in the replacement of the existing degrees of Lizentiat and Diplom by Bachelor- and Master-programmes according to the 'Bologna reform' in the early 2000s, by which Switzerland has pioneered the transformation processes. The first chair in political science was installed in 1959. Currently, there are about 50 full professorships at Swiss Universities. The main research fields of political science consist of international studies, democracy and Swiss politics, although Swiss politics still is considered particularly important in Switzerland due to of its unique political system within Europe such as direct democracy.
Includes: Constitution of the Canadian Political Science Association. ; Date from text. ; Cover title. ; Electronic reproduction. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; 44
This thesis consists of three papers in dynamic political economy: "Ideology and the Determination of Public Policy Over Time" investigates how public policy responds to persistent ideological shocks in dynamic politico-economic equilibrium. We develop a tractable model to analyse the dynamic interactions among ideology, public policy and individuals' intertemporal choice. Analytical solutions are obtained to characterize the Markov perfect equilibrium. Our main finding is that the relationship between ideology and the size of government turns out to be non-monotonic. In particular, a right-leaning ideological wave may lead to higher taxation, which makes the size of government much less distinctive under different political regimes. Incorporating ideological uncertainty per se has its theoretical relevance. Sufficient ideological uncertainty helps pin down a unique equilibrium. This is in contrast with recent works on dynamic political economy which feature multiple equilibria and have no sharp empirical predictions. "Dynamic Inequality and Social Security" analyses the dynamic politico-economic equilibrium of a model where the repeated voting on social security and the evolution of household characteristics are mutually affected over time. Political decision-making is represented by probabilistic voting a la Lindbeck and Weibull (1987). We analytically characterize the unique Markov perfect equilibrium. The equilibrium social security tax rate are shown to be increasing in wealth inequality. The dynamic interaction between inequality and social security leads to growing social security programmes. The predictions of our model are broadly consistent with empirical evidence. We also perform some normative analysis, showing that the politico-economic mechanism tends to induce too large social security transfers in the long run. "A Markovian Social Contract of Social Security" analyses the sustainability and evolution of the pay-as-you-go social security system in a majority voting framework with intra-cohort heterogeneity. We find that there exists a Markovian social contract through which the self-interested middle-aged median voter has incentives to support the system. This is in contrast with the approaches in the existing literature, which either resorts to the imperfect temporal separation of contributions and benefits, or builds the expectation of future social security benefits on variables that are payoff-irrelevant for future policymakers. Correspondingly, our model has a number of distinctive empirical implications. First, the social security tax rate converges along an increasing path to the steady state. Second, the growth of social security is negatively correlated with income inequality. Third, the impact of income inequality on the equilibrium social contract induces a non-monotonic relationship between income inequality and social security. These predictions are broadly consistent with the data from the OECD countries.
government--what is it good for? State-tamperings with money and banks. Parliamentary reform: the dangers and the safe-guards. "The collective wisdom." Political fetichism. Specialized administration. From freedom to bondage. The Americans. Index, by F. Howard Collins. ; I. The development hypothesis. Progress: its law and cause. Transcendental physiology. The nebular hypothesis. Illogical geology. Bain on the emotions and the will. The social organism. The origin of animal worship. Morals and moral sentiments. The comparative psychology of man. Mr. Martineau on evolution. The factors of organic evolution.--II. The genesis of science. The classification of the sciences. Reasons for dissenting from the philosophy of M. Comte. On laws in general, and the order of their discovery. The valuation of evidence. What is electricity? Mill versus Hamilton--The test of truth. Replies to criticisms. Prof. Green's explanations. The philosophy of style. Use and beauty. The sources of architectural types. Gracefulness. Personal beauty. The origin and function of music. The physiology of laughter.--III. Manners and fashion. Railway morals and railway policy. The morals of trade. Prison-ethics. The ethics of Kant. Absolute political ethics. Over-legislation. Representative ; Mode of access: Internet.
III. Manners and fashion. Railway morals and railway policy. The morals of trade. Prison-ethics. The ethics of Kant. Absolute political ethics. Over-legislation. Representative government - what is it good for ? State-tamperings with money and banks. Parliamentary reform: the dangers and the safe-guards. "The collective wisdom." Political fetichism. Specialized administration. From freedom to bondage. The Americans. Index, by F. Howard Collins. ; I. The development of hypothesis. Progress: its law and cause. Transcendental physiology. The nebular hypothesis. Illogical geology. Bain on the emotions and the will. The social organism. The origin of animal worship. Morals and moral sentiments. The comparative psychology of man. Mr. Martineau on evolution. The factors of organic evolution.--II. The genesis of science. The classification of the sciences. Reasons for dissenting from the philosophy of M. Comte. On laws in general and the order of their discovery. The valuation of evidence. What is electricity? Mill versus Hamilton--The test of truth. Replies to criticisms. Prof. Green's explanations. The philosophy of style. Use and beauty. The sources of architectural types. Gracefullness. Personal beauty. The origin and function of music. The physiology of laughter. ; Mode of access: Internet.
El estudio de la relación entre el individuo y el grupo tiene una larga historia en las ciencias sociales. Aún si el impulsor principal de las acciones de la gente es perseguir sus propios objetivos, los seres humanos también cohabitamos, colaboramos y cuidamos unos de otros. Para armonizar los objetivos personales con los intereses del grupo, creamos normas y reglas. Estas normas y reglas afectan nuestras preferencias, gustos y decisiones. Las personas también pueden tener una influencia más directa entre sí: por ejemplo imitamos, enseñamos y aprendemos unos de otros. En la investigación del comportamiento político -- donde las decisiones pueden tener un efecto en el entorno social de quien toma las decisiones -- estas normas, reglas e influencias personales reciben cada vez más atención. Este nuevo enfoque no se centra solo en las características individuales, sino también en la relación y las interacciones de estos individuos. Para manejar la variedad casi infinita de las relaciones e interacciones, los investigadores necesitan agruparlas en estructuras sociales. En mi tesis doctoral, estudio el papel de dos estructuras sociales en la política. La primera estructura es la red social. La red social es la colección de todos los enlaces sociales bilaterales en un grupo. La segunda estructura que estudio en mi tesis es la facción política. Las facciones son grupos jerárquicos de políticos que trabajan juntos para obtener poder político. Mi tesis está dividida en tres capítulos principales. El primer capítulo es un trabajo empírico que mide la importancia de la posición (en la red social) de los políticos en su carrera pública. El segundo capítulo introduce en primer lugar un modelo nuevo de colaboración dentro de las facciones políticas, y luego contrasta empíricamente algunas de las principales predicciones del modelo. El tercer capítulo modela cómo se expanden las influencias en una red social y introduce una manera simple de encontrar el actor clave de una red política en una clase especifico de redes. El Capítulo 1 incluye mi trabajo de investigación titulado "Marrying the Right One -- Evidence on Social Network Effects in Politics from the Venetian Republic". En este capítulo mido el efecto de las redes sociales en el desarrollo de la carrera de los políticos. Con este fin, construyo una base de datos que contiene información sobre la red social de todo el electorado de una nación soberana, la República de Venecia del siglo XV. También identifico las carreras de 2.500 políticos casados del período entre 1400 y 1524. Analizando este panel de datos, encuentro evidencia empírica de que casarse con la hija de un padre más central en la red mejora significativamente las perspectivas de carrera futura en la política del marido. Además, demuestro que este efecto es independiente de otras características de cualquiera de las dos familias, como el prestigio histórico, la riqueza o el poder de voto (tamaño de la familia), y no está sesgado por matrimonios selectivos. Además, encuentro que el efecto de la red es acumulativo (se disfrutan las ventajas de un buen matrimonio durante un período prolongado) y que el efecto es más fuerte durante periodos políticamente o económicamente difíciles (como en una guerra defensiva). El Capítulo 2 está basado en mi trabajo de investigación titulado "Politics Behind the Curtain -- A Model of Endogenous Factional Competition and Evidence from the Venetian Republic". Este capítulo presenta un nuevo modelo de competición política entre facciones donde el poder político de una facción es endógeno. En el modelo, todos los políticos son miembros de una facción y la competencia (por una promoción) ocurre en dos etapas. Primero, los políticos compiten por el apoyo de su facción. Segundo, las facciones compiten para ganar la promoción para sus candidatos. El éxito del concurso en la segunda etapa es endógeno: depende del número y la posición de todos los afiliados de la facción. La primera contribución de este trabajo de investigación es que describe las fuerzas que facilitan la colaboración de los políticos y la aparición de facciones. El segundo es que revela la naturaleza ambivalente de la competencia política en sistemas dominados por facciones políticos: las facciones más grandes son más fuertes, pero sus miembros también se enfrentan a una competencia más fuerte dentro de las facciones. Usando datos de la República de Venecia, estimo los coeficientes del modelo teórico. La estimación separa los dos canales de efectos del tamaño (de la facción): el canal de competencia interna y el canal de poder de facción. Finalmente, capítulo 3 sigue el trabajo de investigación titulado "Influences and Elections in a Political Network". En este capítulo, desarrollo un modelo nuevo de lobbying y votación en una red social. Los jugadores en la red son votantes y candidatos potenciales al mismo tiempo. Los votantes prefieren al candidato al que puedan influir más, y el poder de presión está determinado por la posición relativa del votante y el candidato en la red social. En este modelo, las preferencias muestran algunas regularidades que son suficientes para demostrar que hay uno (o dos vecinos) candidato(s) de Condorcet en cualquier red en árbol, y que el(los) tiene(n) la mayor centralidad de proximidad en la red. Además, las preferencias tienen un solo pico en las redes en árbol, por lo que en una red en cadena (o línea) el teorema del votante mediano es aplicable. Muestro que la centralidad de proximidad supera a otras medidas de centralidad frecuentemente utilizadas (centralidad de vector propio, centralidad de intermediación) en ciertas redes. Finalmente, comparo mi modelo principal con el modelo de Cruz et al. 2017 donde los votantes tienen sesgos ideológicos: el modelo de Cruz et al. 2017 proporciona resultados más generales, pero mi modelo se basa en supuestos mejor alineados con las evidencias empíricas.
The Response of the Riksbank to House Prices in Sweden In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, an environment of historically low interest rates and extensive household indebtedness in the OECD countries have triggered a vivid debate on whether central banks should react to house-price fluctuations in their pursuit of monetary policy. In Sweden, a period of low policy rates and house-price inflation was halted when the central bank increased the interest rates in 2010. This study investigates whether the Riksbank reacted to house prices in the period from 1993 to 2013. Using Bayesian methods and quarterly data, I estimate a DSGE model with patient and impatient households, where the central bank reacts to house-price inflation. The results suggest that the Riksbank did respond to house prices during the sample period. The findings are robust and plausible from an economic perspective. Wealth Distribution under Heterogeneous Preferences The standard macroeconomic framework of uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk fails to generate key features of the aggregate wealth distribution. Although the assumptions of heterogeneity of either impatience rate or risk aversion are common in the literature, they do not reflect the evidence and common belief that both parameters are dispersed across the population. I extend the standard framework by allowing for heterogeneity in both impatience and risk aversion. The results suggest that this richer framework outperforms previous work in terms of matching actual properties of the wealth distribution. In particular, the model presented generates a greater concentration of wealth at the top of the distribution and a greater mass of poor households than models with preference heterogeneity in only one dimension. Political Budget Cycles and Dependence on Foreign Aid This study poses the question of whether countries with a higher share of foreign aid per GDP exhibit larger political budget cycles. Using data on a large sample of countries, I find a significant negative effect of aid dependency on the budget surplus in election years. The effect is quantitatively important and implies that on average, a 1% increase in foreign aid per GDP is associated with a 0.2 percentage point larger deficit in election years. The results are robust to the model specification, inclusion of control variables, and other political budget cycles' determining factors described in the recent literature.
Defence date: 17 May 2016 ; Examining Board: Professor Árpád Ábrahám, EUI, Supervisor; Professor Piero Gottardi, EUI; Professor Facundo Piguillem, EIEF; Professor César Sosa-Padilla, McMaster University. ; In this thesis I develop two models that bring together macroeconomics and political institutions; these models allow me to draw conclusions about the impact of institutions on economic outcomes, and about the effect of economics on political results. In the first essay, I provide a formal theory that explains the effect of government coalitions on the probability of sovereign default, and the seemingly excessive prevalence of surplus coalitions across the democratic world. In the second essay, I construct a model of an endowment economy in which a leader distributes income, and I show how investments in de facto power enable the leader to significantly increase his tenure in office, while collecting a large share of rents for his private benefit. Throughout the thesis it is assumed that leaders are selfish, and institutions (incentives) are the main determinant of their behavior in power.
This thesis consists of three self-contained essays in economics. Property Rights, Resources, and Wealth: Evidence from a land reform in the United States: This paper compares the effectiveness of two alternative property rights regimes to overcome the Tragedy of the Commons. One regime is to distribute access rights under public ownership, as proposed by Samuelson, the other is to sell land to generate private ownership as proposed by Coase. However, as property rights are not randomly allocated, causal evidence on the relative effectiveness of these two regimes is scarce. I exploit a spatial discontinuity generated by the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which created 20,000 miles of plausibly exogenous boundaries that separated publicly owned rangeland from open-access rangeland. I combine these boundaries with data on the timing of private-property sales to jointly estimate the effects of public and private ownership on resource exploitation and income in a spatial regression discontinuity design. Using satellite-based vegetation data, I find that both property rights regimes increased vegetation by about 10%, relative to the open-access control. Census-block-level income data reveals that public ownership raised private household income by 13% and decreased poverty rates by 18%. To study mechanisms, I exploit variation in pre-reform police presence and panel data on farm values, and show that legal enforcement through police presence is a necessary condition for the positive and long-lasting effects of both regimes to arise. State Repression, Exit, and Voice: Living in the Shadow of Cambodia's Killing Fields: This paper asks whether state repression is an effective strategy for silencing dissent and changing political beliefs. We use evidence from history's most severe episode of state-led repression, the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, to estimate the effects of political violence on political behavior four decades later. To establish causality, we rely on the Khmer Rouge's desire to create an agrarian society, moving forced labor to areas experiencing higher agricultural productivity. Using historic rainfall to generate exogenous variation in productivity shows that more people died in productive communes. Higher productivity under the Khmer Rouge leads to more votes in favor of the opposition over the authoritarian incumbent and increased support for democratic principles. At the same time, citizens become more cautious in their interactions with the local community as captured by lower participation in community organizations and less trust. Our results suggest that state repression makes people more convinced about the need for opposing views but more careful in expressing them, making politics less personal and more competitive. The Effects of Migration and Ethnicity on African Economic Development: Migration between countries has been shown to have positive effects on economic outcomes such as trade by fostering economic and cultural integration. In Africa, where ethnic identification is reasonably strong, omitting ethnic links between countries likely introduces a considerable bias in the estimates. Following the literature, I use past migrant clusters as instruments to show that migration in 1990 led to more bilateral exports for neighboring countries in the period 1989-2014. To account for the ethnic heterogeneity of African countries, I generalize this approach and use pre-colonial ethnic linkages between of home- and foreign-countries as an instrument for migration. The results suggest a downward bias when not accounting for ethnic heterogeneity. I discuss potential concerns of pre-colonial ethnic linkages and find no evidence of omitted variable biases caused by similar languages, preferences, or conflict. Ethnic connections instead facilitate trade, especially for groups that are excluded from government coalitions. The results are consistent with a model of international trade where cross border connections decrease the fixed costs of exporting.
[eng] The article 1 addresses the role of political parties and studies whether popularity shocks are crucial for electoral accountability beyond their effects on voter behavior. It specifically examines the impact of the revelation of information about a government's conduct on the types of candidates who stand for election. The empirical test focuses on the Brazilian city council elections in 2004 and 2008. The identification approach exploits the randomness of the timing of the release of audit reports on the use of federal funds by municipal governments. The study finds that when the audit reveals a high level of corruption (i.e., when it represents a negative popularity shock), the parties supporting the incumbent select more educated candidates. On the contrary, parties pick, on average, less educated candidates when the audit finds low levels of corruption (i.e., when it represents a positive popularity shock). These effects are stronger in municipalities that have easier access to local media. The evidence confirms that parties are strategic players that consider specific features of the electoral competition when making decisions and that their decisions are affected by shocks that influence the electoral race. The article 2 is devoted to examining aspects of the voter preference assumptions. Citizen assessment of government performance is a cornerstone of successful democratic functioning. However, accountability is a double-edged sword. When voters misunderstand the stakes, and provide the wrong incentives to elected officials, political accountability leads to an implementation of suboptimal welfare policies. This paper reveals that an electorate can demand clientelism. To address this question, I study the behavior of voters in a context of vote-buying in Brazilian politics known as the drought industry. The data cover the Brazilian democratic elections from 1998 to 2012, and as empirical strategies I implement both fixed-effects models with panel data and a regression discontinuity design with heterogeneous treatment effects. I find evidence that after a drought, voters increase the vote share of local incumbent parties that are politically aligned with the central government to ensure the inflow of partisan government aid relief. Such behavior reinforces the central government's incentives to bias policies in favor of politically aligned municipalities to influence elections. Consequently, the cycle of distortion of aid relief allocation is perpetuated. In connection with the findings indicating that the incidence of droughts and the Brazilian political economy are directly linked, the article 3 investigates the behavior of the local governments regarding the level of corruption. The analysis studies whether the allocation of aid relief policies increases the level of corruption in the context of natural disasters. More specifically, the study investigates the number of federal emergency declarations against droughts, as a proxy for aid relief, and the number of irregularities in the local governments' expenditures found by auditors in Brazilian cities during a full mayor's term. The study implements an instrumental variable approach exploiting the quasi-random nature of the cycle component of a municipality's aridity relative to its trend. The findings show that an additional recognition of the state of emergency leads to an increase in corruption per capita for an entire term of a mayor.
Transnational civil society networks have become increasingly important democratizing actors in global politics. Still, the exploration of democracy in such networks remains conceptually and methodologically challenging. Practice theory provides a framework to study democracy as routinized performances even in contexts of fluid boundaries, temporal relations and a diffuse constituency. The author attempts to understand how new forms of democratic practice emerge in the interaction between political actors and their structural environments.
