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This article proposes a game-theoretic setting to explain the fragmentation of majority and opposition coalitions in governments. The model is two-stage: (1) the leaders of each coalition control the size of the parties in their g...
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This article proposes a game-theoretic setting to explain the fragmentation of majority and opposition coalitions in governments. The model is two-stage: (1) the leaders of each coalition control the size of the parties in their group so as to maximize the political power of their coalition, and (2) the political party leaders in each coalition decide their degree of participation in their coalition's collective action. The main conclusion is that the concentration in the two opposing coalitions will be related when the competition between them is fierce. This is shown to hold for the Left-wing and Right-wing coalitions in French local governments, revealing competition in fragmentation in these coalitions.
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This article explores the relationship between ICTs and politics. The first part of the article briefly looks back over the literature reconstructing the framework within which this relationship has been located. According to the ...
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This article explores the relationship between ICTs and politics. The first part of the article briefly looks back over the literature reconstructing the framework within which this relationship has been located. According to the optimistic approach, ICTs could act as a catalyst in establishing democracy worldwide: great expectations have been nurtured but they have been frustrated by reality. From the pessimistic perspective, this outcome is not surprising as politics in the virtual world reflects politics in the real world. Both approaches share a traditional idea of politics and therefore fail to find any relevant change. But significant changes have occurred, as shown by how citizens have refocused their political attention outside the formal political arena. Social movements, civil associations, single issue groups or even discussion groups can be considered indicators of what has been called 'life politics' or 'sub-politics'. In a nutshell, this new kind of politics crosses the boundaries between politics, cultural values, civil values and identity processes. The picture that emerges gives us a different idea of politics to which ICTs make a significant contribution.
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The impact of the fragmentation of executive and legislative bodies on the level and composition of government expenditure is a feature of politics that has attracted considerable attention from economists. However, previous autho...
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The impact of the fragmentation of executive and legislative bodies on the level and composition of government expenditure is a feature of politics that has attracted considerable attention from economists. However, previous authors have abstracted from two important concepts: ideology and intra-party politics. In this paper, we account for these two phenomena explicitly, and make two main contributions. First, we show that both intra- and inter-party ideological dispersion matter in explaining the level of sub-national public spending. Therefore, it is improper to consider parties as monolithic entities. We also show that ideological dispersion matters especially for current expenditures, and not so much for investment expenditures. To do so, we construct a panel database (2003-2010) comprising data from a survey that quantifies the policy preferences of party members who were candidates in Swiss elections.
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Sustainable budgets are important quality signals for the electorate. Politicians might thus have an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts, which are widely regarded as a key element of national budget plans. Looking at the...
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Sustainable budgets are important quality signals for the electorate. Politicians might thus have an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts, which are widely regarded as a key element of national budget plans. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, we systematically analyze whether national tax revenue forecasts in 18 OECD countries are biased due to political manipulation. Drawing on theories from the field of political economy, we test three hypotheses using panel estimation techniques. We find support for partisan politics. Left-wing governments seem to produce more optimistic, or less pessimistic, tax revenue forecasts than do right-wing ones. Contrary to the theoretical prediction based on the "common pool" problem, we find that more fragmented governments and parliaments tend to produce more pessimistic, or less optimistic, tax revenue forecasts. We find no empirical evidence that political business cycles play a role in tax revenue forecasts.
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We analyze how budgetary institutions affect government budget deficits in member states of the European Union during 1984-2003 employing new indicators provided by Hallerberg et al. (2009). Using panel fixed effects models, we ex...
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We analyze how budgetary institutions affect government budget deficits in member states of the European Union during 1984-2003 employing new indicators provided by Hallerberg et al. (2009). Using panel fixed effects models, we examine whether the impact of budgetary institutions on budget deficits is conditioned by political fragmentation (i.e., ideological differences among parties in government) and size fragmentation (i.e., the effective number of parties in government or the number of spending ministers). Our results suggest that strong budgetary institutions, no matter whether they are based on delegation to a strong minister of finance or on fiscal contracts, reduce the deficit bias in case of strong ideological fragmentation. In contrast, the impact of budgetary institutions is not conditioned by size fragmentation.
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Research concerning the impact of metropolitan political structures on political participation has generated a wide range of conflicting findings. This failure to solve this puzzle results from afail-ure to fully characterize the ...
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Research concerning the impact of metropolitan political structures on political participation has generated a wide range of conflicting findings. This failure to solve this puzzle results from afail-ure to fully characterize the many dimensions of metropolitan institutional context that bear on citizens' political behaviors. The authors provide such a characterization and test its implications with data on turnout in local legislative elections in 336 municipalities in 12 metropolitan areas. They examine the complex debate over the role of metropolitan political contexts in fostering political participation and identify four dimensions of contextual influence on turnout. They find that these contextual influences interact in significant ways that generate surprising results. Overall, however, the results lend far greater support to those favoring the consolidation of urban political institutions than those supporting further fragmentation of local government.
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Since Doi Moi (1986), decentralization in Vietnam has been expanded, but still limited to fiscal and administrative rather than political decentralization. From the central perspective, decentralization has undermined the uniformi...
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Since Doi Moi (1986), decentralization in Vietnam has been expanded, but still limited to fiscal and administrative rather than political decentralization. From the central perspective, decentralization has undermined the uniformity of national policies and encouraged unhealthy competition among local governments. For local governments, decentralization has not always been accompanied by institutional autonomy and sufficient financial resources. Moreover, there has been a lack of synchronization between central ministries as well as consistency between the different dimensions of decentralization. Finally, the people and businesses have neither been adequately involved nor had sufficient voice in the most important decentralization policies. This article analyses common and cross-cutting issues shared by different dimensions of decentralization in Vietnam since Doi Moi. It shows that serious institutional fragmentation has rendered decentralization ineffective. Given Vietnam's political economy, the first priority in designing decentralization policy is to overcome this fragmentation and prepare the prerequisites for effective and efficient decentralization.
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Fragmentation is a keyword in the history of critical urban thought. Yet the products of fragmentation - the fragments themselves - tend to receive less attention. In this paper, I develop a politics of urban fragments as a contri...
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Fragmentation is a keyword in the history of critical urban thought. Yet the products of fragmentation - the fragments themselves - tend to receive less attention. In this paper, I develop a politics of urban fragments as a contribution to debates both in urban theory and in urban poverty and inequality. I examine inadequate and broken material fragments on the economic margins of the urban global South, and ask how they become differently politicized in cities. I develop a three-fold framework for understanding the politics of fragments: attending to, generative translation and surveying wholes. I build these arguments through a focus on a fundamental provision -urban sanitation - drawing on research in Mumbai in particular, as well as Cape Town, and connecting those instances to research on urban poverty, politics and fragmentation.
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This article addresses the fragmentation of political communication in the context of Norwegian election campaigns. The fragmentation thesis refers to two distinguishable, interrelated tendencies: New technology providing incentiv...
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This article addresses the fragmentation of political communication in the context of Norwegian election campaigns. The fragmentation thesis refers to two distinguishable, interrelated tendencies: New technology providing incentives to tailor campaign communication to specific voter categories, and the audience fragment due to increasing number of media outlets. The consequence is asserted to be fragmented voter agendas. The findings undermine the fragmentation thesis as a general tendency. Norwegian parties hardly use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to multi-tailor campaign messages to different voter categories. The voters who considered online sources important for electoral information also identified traditional sources as important. Furthermore, the analysis offers no evidence that the voter agenda has fragmented over time, and online voters are preoccupied with the same issues as the rest of the electorate. The article addresses how both general countervailing forces as well as context-specific factors such as aspects of the law and the lack of existing practices concerning voter targeting curb the push towards fragmentation. Moreover, the campaign coverage in advanced democracies is proposed as a general constraint towards fragmentation of campaign communication.
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We provide a new framework to account for the diverging paths of political development in China and Japan during the late nineteenth century. The arrival of Western powers not only brought opportunities to adopt new technologies, ...
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We provide a new framework to account for the diverging paths of political development in China and Japan during the late nineteenth century. The arrival of Western powers not only brought opportunities to adopt new technologies, but also fundamentally threatened the sovereignty of both countries. These threats and opportunities produce an unambiguous impetus toward centralization and modernization for small states, but place conflicting demands on larger states. We use our theory to study why China, which had been centralized for much of its history, experienced gradual disintegration upon the Western arrival, and how Japan rapidly unified and modernized.
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