Scholars of the U.S. House disagree over the importance of political parties in organizing the legislative process. On the one hand, non-partisan theories stress how congressional organization serves ...members' non-partisan goals. On the other hand, partisan theories argue that the House is organized to serve the collective interests of the majority party. This book advances our partisan theory and presents a series of empirical tests of that theory's predictions (pitted against others). It considers why procedural cartels form, arguing that agenda power is naturally subject to cartelization in busy legislatures. It argues that the majority party has cartelized agenda power in the U.S. House since the adoption of Reed's rules in 1890. The evidence demonstrates that the majority party seizes agenda control at nearly every stage of the legislative process in order to prevent bills that the party dislikes from reaching the floor.
We document the emergence of nomination and office hierarchies within the nineteenth-century UK parties and the development of norms that ensured incumbent renomination and seniority progression ...through those hierarchies. We offer a property rights theory of why these norms developed and show that the reform acts, which reduced the influence of patronal peers and increased party-centered voting, were the main drivers of development. The overall effect was to transform a system in which political careers were only loosely organized by the parties into one in which they dominated career prospects.
I argue that Europe's political fragmentation interacted with her political innovations—self-governing cities and national parliaments—to facilitate “economic liberty,” which in turn unleashed faster ...and more inter-connected urban growth. Examining urban growth over the period 600–1800 ce throughout Eurasia, I show that inter-city growth correlations were positive and significant only in Western Europe after 1200 ce. Within Western Europe, I show that growth correlations were greatest in the most fragmented and parliamentary areas, individual cities became significantly more tied to urban growth when their realms became parliamentary, and spillover effects (due to competition between rulers) were significant.
This essay reviews models of strategic mobilization and turnout, focusing on two important questions about the effects of electoral rules. First, how does the disproportionality of the electoral ...system affect the variance and mean of mobilization and turnout? This question has been investigated at least since
Gosnell (1930)
. In addition to reviewing the literature, I argue that extant models should pay more explicit attention to secondary mobilization (conducted by interest groups, activists, and ordinary voters). Second, how do electoral rules regulating the electoral calendar and vote fusion affect mobilizational spillovers and, hence, incentives to build mobilizational alliances? This question has attracted less attention from modelers but is well represented in the empirical literature.
Ecosystem services mapping and modeling has focused more on supply than demand, until recently. Whereas the potential provision of economic benefits from ecosystems to people is often quantified ...through ecological production functions, the use of and demand for ecosystem services has received less attention, as have the spatial flows of services from ecosystems to people. However, new modeling approaches that map and quantify service-specific sources (ecosystem capacity to provide a service), sinks (biophysical or anthropogenic features that deplete or alter service flows), users (user locations and level of demand), and spatial flows can provide a more complete understanding of ecosystem services. Through a case study in Puget Sound, Washington State, USA, we quantify and differentiate between the theoretical or in situ provision of services, i.e., ecosystems’ capacity to supply services, and their actual provision when accounting for the location of beneficiaries and the spatial connections that mediate service flows between people and ecosystems. Our analysis includes five ecosystem services: carbon sequestration and storage, riverine flood regulation, sediment regulation for reservoirs, open space proximity, and scenic viewsheds. Each ecosystem service is characterized by different beneficiary groups and means of service flow. Using the ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES) methodology we map service supply, demand, and flow, extending on simpler approaches used by past studies to map service provision and use. With the exception of the carbon sequestration service, regions that actually provided services to people, i.e., connected to beneficiaries via flow paths, amounted to 16-66% of those theoretically capable of supplying services, i.e., all ecosystems across the landscape. These results offer a more complete understanding of the spatial dynamics of ecosystem services and their effects, and may provide a sounder basis for economic valuation and policy applications than studies that consider only theoretical service provision and/or use.
Shadowing Ministers Carroll, Royce; Cox, Gary W.
Comparative political studies,
02/2012, Letnik:
45, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to “shadow” the ministers of their ...partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze which ministers should be shadowed if governing parties seek to minimize the aggregate policy losses they suffer as the result of ministers pursuing their own parties’ interests rather than the coalition’s. Based on data from 19 mostly European parliamentary democracies, the authors find that the greater the policy disagreement between a minister’s party and its partners, the more likely the minister is to be shadowed.
This paper evaluates the budgetary origins of fiscal-military prowess, taking early modern Europe as a laboratory. We first review evidence that states adopting credible budgets accrued substantial ...advantages in raising taxes and loans. Since victory in war during the early modern period was largely a matter of outspending one’s opponent, credible budgets should also have conferred an advantage in winning wars. Exploiting new panel data on 10 major European powers over several centuries, we show that credible budgets led to significantly larger wartime expenditures and, thus, better chances of winning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic examination of its kind. Since credible budgets could be adopted by decidedly nondemocratic polities, ours is a theory of limited government—rather than participative democracy—leading to military strength. That said, we discuss the implications of our analysis for the modern debate over the democratic victory thesis.
The literature exploiting historical data generally supports the democratic advantage thesis, which holds that democracies can sell more bonds on better terms than their authoritarian counterparts. ...However, studies of more recent—and extensive—data sets find that democracies have received no more favorable bond ratings from credit rating agencies than otherwise similar autocracies; and have been no less prone to default. These findings raise the question: where is the democratic advantage? Our answer is that previous assessments of the democratic advantage have typically (1) ignored the democratic advantage in credit access; (2) failed to account for selection effects; and (3) treated GDP per capita as an exogenous variable, ignoring the many arguments that suggest economic development is endogenous to political institutions. We develop an estimator of how regime type affects credit access and credit ratings analogous to the “reservation wage” model of labor supply and treat GDP per capita as an endogenous variable. Our findings indicate that the democratic advantage in the postwar era has two components: first, better access to credit (most autocracies cannot even enter the international bond markets); and second, better ratings, once propensity to enter the market is controlled and GDP per capita is endogenized.
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