Suchergebnisse

For five months in 2013–2014, Dušan Pavlović took time off from teaching to accept a senior position in Serbia's Ministry of Economy. This short period was long enough for him to make a penetrating diagnosis of the economic activity of the postcommunist government. He found that a coterie of tycoons and politicians live off the wealth of the majority of citizens and smaller entrepreneurs, while the economy performs below its capacities. In academic terms, extractive economic institutions create allocative inefficiency. Vivid, suggestive, and even entertaining accounts depict how privatization is administered and foreign investment projects are handled, and how party members, relatives, and friends are hired into public administration and state-owned companies. They show how the managers of firms that queue for state subsidies resist the systematic screening of their businesses. The principles of Keynesian economics are distorted and misused to conceal deliberate fiscal mismanagement. Huge ill-conceived development projects siphon taxpayers' money from "non-economic" activities like social services, health, education, science, and culture. What Pavlović found in Serbia is acutely symptomatic of many other European post-communist regimes of our time, lending his book singular importance

Abstract
The paper's key puzzle is the variation in lockdown-related democratic decline in the region of Central and Southeast Europe given the incumbents' ideological and regime (dis)similarity. Why did similar regimes not respond to the pandemic in the same manner by using the opportunity to grab more executive power and diminish the authority of other institutions? While some argue that a state of emergency provides an ideal opportunity for democratic decline due to reduced costs, others believe that autocratic regimes with a 'pre-existing condition for autocracy' are more vulnerable. To contribute to this discussion, I examine three examples from post-communist Central and Southeast Europe (Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia) during the pandemic-related state of emergency and lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. I consider several relevant factors, the most important of which is the prospect of winning the next election. To erode democracy, autocratic incumbents must feel insecure about the outcome of the next election to use the opportunity created by the state of emergency. If they are uncertain of victory, they may prefer to expand their executive powers during the state of emergency, thus undermining democracy.

Why would a large incumbent party, that can by itself muster more than 45 per cent of electoral support, add seven insignificant political parties to its electoral list, thus providing them with a free ticket into the Assembly, state-sponsored financing for the next four years, and an independent deputy club in the Assembly? More importantly, why would the incumbent party, as a consequence of this deliberate decision, end up without a parliamentary majority? In this article, I discuss less frequently mentioned aspects of institutional design that can help us understand why the incumbent party makes such decisions and why a party system in a hybrid regime has a large number of parties. I offer qualitative evidence from postcommunist Serbia (1990–2018). The first two aspects refer to electoral design (but not the electoral formula or district magnitude): a larger number of parties under the incumbent party's control provides stronger political influence in the Republican Electoral Commission and at polling stations on election day. In hybrid regimes, the incumbent party is interested in this influence because it can use it to arrange electoral fraud. The third aspect relates to parliamentary design: more parties in the Serbian Assembly under the incumbent party's control secure more minutes on the floor for the incumbent party during parliamentary debate.

Why do presidents in semi-presidential regimes sometimes call early elections? Is the behavior of incumbent presidents different from the behavior of presidential contenders when the former do not need to run for office but face the loss of parliamentary majority in a semi-presidential system? Prospect theory claims that agents make risky choices when facing a loss. Consequently, if incumbent presidents face a loss of majority in the parliament, they will call for early election to try to shore up or salvage the majority. To provide empirical evidence supporting this claim, prospect theory has been applied to the two presidential elections in Yugoslavia and Serbia in which two incumbent presidents, Slobodan Miloševiš (2000) and Boris Tadiš (2012), had lost early presidential elections. The expected contribution of the paper is to deepen our understanding of how semipresidential regimes resolve the problem of temporal rigidity and offer novel empirical data in support of the application of prospect theory in political science.

For a long time, political theorists who deployed game theory have believed that Hobbes's state of nature can be expressed as a Prisoner's dilemma in which war of all against all is a Pareto-inferior outcome of social cooperation. Some recent game theory studies have looked at the state of nature from a perspective of chicken game and assurance game. Assurance game seems to be more precise in explaining how individuals in Hobbes's state of nature overcome the conflict and establish cooperation. In assurance game, cooperation is established by credible signaling that assures other players that everyone is prepared to cooperate. If all players do the same, and they all know it, individuals can achieve a Pareto-superior outcome. ; Politički teoretičari su dugo smatrali da Hobsovo prirodno stanje može da se objasni zatvorenikovom dilemom u kojoj rat svih protiv sviju predstavlja Pareto-inferioran ishod društvene saradnje. Nedavni radovi teoretičari igara analizirali su prirodno stanje iz ugla igre kukavice i igre uveravanja (assurance game). Pokazalo se da igra uveravanja preciznije objašnjava način na koji pojedinci prevazilaze sukob u prirodnom stanju i uspostavljaju saradnju. U ovoj igri, suština prevazilaženja sukoba predstavlja kredibilno signaliziranje kojim drugu stranu uveravate da ste spremni na saradnju. Ako pojedinci ispune taj uslov, i znaju da su ga svi drugi ispunili, moguć je prelazak iz Pareto-inferiornog u Pareto-optimalno stanje.

This essay is an inquiry into the fundamentals of contemporary liberalism. I defend the following claim: the premises of contemporary liberal theory cannot avoid referring to the ideal of equality of individuals in some way. equality is a principle to orga­nize the fundamental level of the theory from which to derive the principles for organi­zing liberal institutions. To support these claims, I distinguish justificatory from perfectio­nist liberalism, and then look into some of the most relevant theories of contemporary political philosophy that provide the ethical basis for contemporary liberalism. ; Esej propituje temelje suvremenog liberalizma. Autor brani sljedeću tezu. Pre­mise suvremene liberalne teorije ne mogu izbjeći referiranje na ideal jednakosti pojedi­naca. Jednakost je načelo na kojem se temelji teorija iz koje se izvode principi potrebni za organiziranje liberalnih institucija. Da bi obranio ovu tezu, autor razlikuje opravdavajući od perfekcionističkog liberalizma, te razmatra neke od najutjecajnijih teorija suvremene političke filozofije koje nude etičke temelje suvremenom liberalizmu.

The article lays out the current state of the political economy. It begins with the question whether or not political economy is the discipline of political science. Sections 3-5 briefly review the development of political economy prior to the World War 2. Sections 6-8 review the state of the discipline after the World War 2. Section 7 reviews the most important works that grounded the contemporary discipline of political economy, including the works of Black, Downs, Buchanan & Tullock, and Riker. Section 8 reviews main research areas, concepts, and issues of contemporary political economy such as prosoners dilemma and the economic effects of the constitutions. ; Tekst izlaže današnje stanje političke ekonomije, tačnije teorije javnog izbora. Započinje sa pitanjem da li politička ekonomija spada u političku ili ekonomsku nauku. U odeljcima 3-5 iznosi se kratak razvoj političke ekonomije do Drugog svetskog rata. Drugi deo rada (odeljci 6-8) bave se stanjem discipline posle Drugog svetskog rata. U odeljku 7 izlažu se najznačajniji radovi i dela koja su utemeljila savremenu političku ekonomiju. Odeljak 8 govori o oblastima istraživanja i glavnim istraživačkim problemima savremene političke ekonomije.