Suchergebnisse

In her contribution "Planting the Seeds of Change Inside" (ZIB 18: 1, 5-46), Tina Freyburg argues that some forms of functional cooperation of democratic and authoritarian regimes can trigger subtle processes of democratization in the latter. One example is the change of attitudes of officials towards key principles of democratic governance once these officials have participated in transgovernmental cooperation networks under the framework of the European Union's Twinning program. The results of an analysis of survey data of officials is interpreted as evidence for the hypothesis. In this reply I discuss some of the methodological problems that come along with identifying and establishing causal mechanisms when dealing with quasi-experimental and observational data in general and Freyburg's study in particular. Adapted from the source document.

Spatial models of simple majority rule voting suggest that stable decisions are not likely to exist under normal circumstances. Yet this instability result stands in contrast to the stability observed in experiments. This article examines the effect of relaxing the assumption that voting is costless by requiring a proposal to be a finite distance closer to a member's ideal point than the pending proposal before it is regarded as attractive. Using the concept of the epsilon-core the article estimates the minimal decision costs that guarantee stable outcomes. It shows that the minimal costs are equal to the minimal finagle radius (Wuffle et al., 1989) and that the epsilon-core contains the finagle point which is close to the center of the yolk. While the analytical model establishes that the minimal costs are smaller than the yolk radius, computational simulations of majority voting by committees of size 3 to 101 suggest that this is a weak upper bound, only, as the ratio of minimal costs to the yolk radius usually is small and decreases as committee size approaches infinity. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2007.]

Partisan models of budget politics largely concentrate on the size of government, budget deficits & debt, but most theories have little to say as to what the effect of party politics on both the size & the composition of budgets is. This paper seeks to extend previous literature in two directions. First, a model of spending preferences is developed that relates actors' preferred level & allocation of expenditure to electoral gains from fiscal policies. Second, changes in both total expenditure & the expenditure mix of two budget categories are analyzed for the effect of parties' spending preferences as stated in their election manifestos. Using data on 19 OECD countries from 1971 to 1999, the paper finds support for general partisan hypothesis. The results suggest that the actual spending preferences of parties matter whereas they do not indicate that parties of the left consistently differ from parties of the right in their spending behavior. Tables, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

The author counters the assumption underlying the legal argument that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) failed in the decision to go war in Iraq to argue that the members of the UNSC were driven by the pursuit of truth, not power. Analysis of the legality & legitimacy of the use of force regarding resolutions 687 & 1441 was actually a judicial question was undermined because of the refusal of some UNSC members to consider a new resolution. The author disagrees with the characterization that the UNSC is a political body making normative decisions. Two probability solutions are discussed & compared as a critique of Condorecetian social choice theoretical analysis of the UNSC decision to argue that the case against Iraq was actually a judicial trial rather than an information aggregation problem. In conclusion, the author argues that it was French reluctance that distorted UNSC decision-making & de-legitimized the UNSC as the key decision-maker. References. J. Harwell

This article analyzes the origins & consequences of multicameral representation & voting in international organizations. It is argued that the existence of visible & durable conflicts in an issue area can make standard procedures such as unicameral majority voting ineffective with respect to the functioning of the regime. Applying spatial models of strategic decision making, it is asserted that multicameralism is more likely to be effective than unicameralism if chambers consist of key groups with distinct interests. Empirical evidence is provided by studying the multicameral voting rule in the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). I compare likely decision-making outcomes under unicameral & multicameral voting rules from 1996 to 2002 & find that multicameral outcomes are more likely to be stable & supported by those actors critical for the effective functioning of the regime. 5 Tables, 1 Figure. Adapted from the source document.

Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real-life politics? To answer this question, this article discusses different arguments that link institutional and policy-related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co-sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, it relates policy-, office- and vote-related incentives, as well as institutional and resource constraints of legislative actors, to the likelihood that these actors will take the lead in legislative agenda-setting. These arguments are confronted with original data on the universe of all legislative bills in four parliamentary systems over one and a half decades. The article concludes that opposition and, in particular, bipartisan agenda-setting is indeed rare. Yet, in contrast to widely held maxims, it is neither absent nor spurious, but related to the allocation of power and the intensity of ideological conflict both within and between the (coalition) government and parliament. Adapted from the source document.

Party politics at the German state level plays a decisive role for patterns of party competition & for legislative decision-making at the federal level. This article analyses the impact of party politics at the state & the federal level on the formation of coalition governments in the German Laender. The empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset that covers information on the state parties' programmatic positions, their pre-electoral alliances, & the structure of party competition on the federal level in the time period between 1990 & 2007. The results reveal that the programmatic positions of state parties have a decisive impact on government formation. Other relevant factors are the parties' relative strength, their coalition preferences & the partisan composition of government & opposition on the federal level. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

In parliamentary systems, parties compete for votes and offices in the electoral arena, but in many systems they also cooperate in the legislative arena. This article examines the question of how the government status of parties affects their legislative behaviour. We develop a simple spatial model that includes parties' positional goals (vote, office, etc.) to formalize the notion of accommodating legislative behaviour. The model implies that government parties are most accommodating while opposition parties are least accommodating. The hypothesis is evaluated by comparing two pairs of similar political systems: Danish and Finnish coalition governments, as well as German and Australian bicameralism. The case studies support the main hypothesis that government status systematically affects parties' level of accommodation. We discuss the implications for two seminal approaches in comparative institutional analysis advanced by Lijphart (1999b) and Tsebelis (2002).