Suchergebnisse

The impact of host country institutions and policy on innovation by multinational firms in emerging economies. In the past, multinational firms have looked to developing countries as sources of raw materials, markets, or production efficiencies, but rarely as locations for innovation. Today, however, R & D facilities and other indicators of multinational-linked innovation are becoming more common in emerging economies. In this book, Patrick Egan investigates patterns of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries, considering the impact of host country institutions and policy on the innovative activities undertaken by multinational firms. He examines the uneven spread of innovation-intensive foreign direct investment and emerging sectoral distributions, then develops a number of arguments about the determinants of multinational innovation in developing countries. Firms are attracted by a country's supply of skilled labor and are often eager to innovate close to new markets; but, Egan finds, host country institutions and the configuration of the host country's investment policies have a strong impact on firm decisions and evolving country investment profiles. Egan uses econometric analysis to identify determinants of multinational innovation, and examines differences among state institutions as a key variable. He then offers a detailed case study, assessing Ireland's attempts to use foreign direct investment in innovation as a catalyst for development. While FDI is a potential vehicle for industrial upgrading, Egan cautions, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for development. Furthermore, innovation-intensive investments are not likely to develop linkages with local actors or otherwise embed themselves in host economies in the absence of active, discriminating policies channeled through coherent and coordinated institutions

Empirical results indicate that politicians exploit issue ownership—the degree to which the public trusts a political party to better handle a particular public issue (as they do with the Democrats on the environment, or with the Republicans on defense)—to enact policy that is unresponsive to changes in public opinion. In this paper, I present empirical evidence of three possible mechanisms that might link issue ownership to nonresponsiveness: the notions of issue ownership as (1) constituents' shared preferences with the issue-owning party, particularly in a context of policy uncertainty; (2) a party's relative competence at handling a particular issue; and (3) the greater degree of consistency of the positions taken by a party's politicians on the issues it owns. I then develop a theoretical model that incorporates all three of these candidate mechanisms. By identifying the conditions under which equilibria exist and generating comparative statics, I find theoretical evidence supporting the competence and shared preferences hypotheses, but poor evidence for the uncertainty and consistency hypotheses.

Americans consistently name Republicans as the party better at handling issues like national security and crime, while they trust Democrats on issues like education and the environment - a phenomenon called 'issue ownership'. Partisan Priorities investigates the origins of issue ownership, showing that in fact the parties deliver neither superior performance nor popular policies on the issues they 'own'. Rather, Patrick J. Egan finds that Republicans and Democrats simply prioritize their owned issues with lawmaking and government spending when they are in power. Since the parties tend to be particularly ideologically rigid on the issues they own, politicians actually tend to ignore citizens' preferences when crafting policy on these issues. Thus, issue ownership distorts the relationship between citizens' preferences and public policies

AbstractPolitical science generally treats identities such as ethnicity, religion, and sexuality as "unmoved movers" in the chain of causality. I hypothesize that the growing salience of partisanship and ideology as social identities in the United States, combined with the increasing demographic distinctiveness of the nation's two political coalitions, is leading some Americans to engage in a self‐categorization and depersonalization process in which they shift their identities toward the demographic prototypes of their political groups. Analyses of a representative panel data set that tracks identities and political affiliations over a 4‐year span confirm that small but significant shares of Americans engage in identity switching regarding ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and class that is predicted by partisanship and ideology in their pasts, bringing their identities into alignment with their politics. These findings enrich and complicate our understanding of the relationship between identity and politics and suggest caution in treating identities as unchanging phenomena.

This paper considers the relationship between assessments of institutional quality in developing countries and the innovative activities of multinational corporations. Firm entry mode literature has established links between domestic institutions and ownership equity patterns among multinationals, but institutionalist analyses have not adequately addressed the types of activities pursued by multinational firms. I argue that in addition to various socioeconomic indicators, the quality of domestic political institutions in developing countries is an important determinant of local innovative activity. I argue that institutional quality in host countries reinforces consistent patterns of interaction between states and firms, leading to reduced risk of technological expropriation and other undesirable outcomes for firms. I test this argument by examining the impact of institutional assessments, carried out by firms themselves and by outside observers, on R&D effort among multinationals, using firm-level surveys conducted in developing countries between 2002 and 2005. The multilevel empirical analysis suggests that multinational firms are likely to both locate R&D activities and pursue them intensively in developing countries with well-regarded institutions, and that the impact of institutional variables is more significant than other likely predictors, such as education levels in host countries.

Group identities that are chosen, rather than inherited, are often associated with cohesive political attitudes and behaviours. Conventional wisdom holds that this distinctiveness is generated by mobilization through processes such as intra-group contact and acculturation. This article identifies another mechanism that can explain cohesiveness: selection. The characteristics that predict whether an individual selects a group identity may themselves determine political attitudes, and thus may account substantially for the political cohesion of those who share the identity. This mechanism is illustrated with analyses of the causes and consequences of the acquisition of lesbian, gay or bisexual identity. Seldom shared by parents and offspring, gay identity provides a rare opportunity to cleanly identify the selection process and its implications for political cohesion.