Search results

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework of international unions qua coalitions of countries adopting a common policy and common supranational institutions. We introduce a general class of non-cooperative spatial bargaining games of coalition formation among three countries in order to examine the endogenous strategic considerations in the creation and enlargement of international unions. Why would we observe a gradualist approach in the formation of the grand coalition even if the latter is assumed to be weakly efficient? We propose uncertainty about the benefits of integration as a mechanism that can generate gradual union formation in equilibrium. As it turns out, it may well be in the 'core' countries' interest to delay the accession of a third, peripheral country in order to i) stack the institutional make-up of the initial union in their favor and ii) signal their high resolve to wait out the expansion of their bilateral subunion. A related case from the European Union provides an interesting illustration.

This article seeks to analyze the political economy of military conscription policy and its relationship with a country's external security environment. National security is modeled as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable public good, whose production technology consists of either centrally conscripted or competitively recruited military labor. Conscription is construed as an implicit discretionary tax on citizens' labor endowment. Based on this, I propose a simple political economy model of pure public goods provision financed by two policy instruments: a lump-sum income tax and a conscription tax. Constraint optimization of a quasi-linear utility function gives rise to three general classes of preferences: high- and low-skilled citizens will prefer an all-volunteer army, albeit of different size, whereas medium-skilled citizens will favor positive levels of conscription. These derived preferences allow me to tease out an explicit relationship between military manpower procurement policy, a country's level of external threat, and its pre-tax income inequality levels. One of my key findings is that more egalitarian countries are more likely to use conscription as a military manpower procurement mechanism.

Building on a Condorcetian common-values framework, this paper tackles the question of optimal committee formation within a community of finite size. Solving for the Bayesian information aggregation game yields some interesting normative results that emphasize the presence of informational externalities as root causes of suboptimally low voluntary participation levels in communal decision-making and the potentially Pareto-enhancing nature of drafting vis-à-vis decentralized mechanisms of self-selection. I firstly derive the optimal size of a committee based on the assumption of informative voting and, then, I show that it is globally optimal amongst all voting equilibrium strategies. I subsequently compare it to the various symmetric equilibria that may arise in a complete information setting or a Bayesian environment with heterogeneous private costs. I finally sketch out an optimal transfer scheme that can ex ante implement the socially efficient committee size.

Building on a Condorcetian common-values framework, this paper tackles the question of optimal committee formation within a community of finite size. Solving for the Bayesian information aggregation game yields some interesting normative results that emphasize the presence of informational externalities as root causes of suboptimally low voluntary participation levels in communal decision-making and the potentially Pareto-enhancing nature of drafting vis-a-vis decentralized mechanisms of self-selection. I firstly derive the optimal size of a committee based on the assumption of informative voting and, then, I show that it is globally optimal amongst all voting equilibrium strategies. I subsequently compare it to the various symmetric equilibria that may arise in a complete information setting or a Bayesian environment with heterogeneous private costs. I finally sketch out an optimal transfer scheme that can ex ante implement the socially efficient committee size. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework of international unions qua coalitions of countries adopting a common policy and common supranational institutions. We introduce a general class of non-cooperative spatial bargaining games of coalition formation among three countries in order to examine the endogenous strategic considerations in the creation and enlargement of international unions. Why would we observe a gradualist approach in the formation of the grand coalition even if the latter is assumed to be weakly efficient? We propose uncertainty about the benefits of integration as a mechanism that can generate gradual union formation in equilibrium. As it turns out, it may well be in the core' countries' interest to delay the accession of a third, peripheral country in order to i) stack the institutional make-up of the initial union in their favor and ii) signal their high resolve to wait out the expansion of their bilateral subunion. A related case from the European Union provides an interesting illustration.

Abstract
The shifting emphasis on performance evaluation and accountability in the context of financial lending or foreign-aid arrangements sponsored by international organizations (IOs) has brought to the fore the question of government ownership of reforms. While the concept of ownership has featured highly in academic and policy debates over the effects of IO conditionality, it arguably remains theoretically elusive, ill-identified, and under-specified. In this article, we focus on International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs and define government ownership with respect to the counterfactual level of de jure structural reforms that would be achieved in the absence of IMF conditionality. We then use the synthetic control method to identify continuous levels of ownership as a function of a treatment effect on treated compliers and operationalize the concept of ownership over external- and financial-sector conditionality across a restricted sample of uninterrupted IMF arrangements (1980–2014). Furthermore, we probe the criterion and construct validity of our measure with respect to known determinants, proxies, and outcomes of ownership. We argue that ours is a reliable, replicable, valid, robust, and systematic measure of ownership that can help better identify and estimate the indirect relationship between program design and policy implementation.

AbstractDoes conditionality always work? If, as it appears, the answer is negative, why do certain externally incentivized countries comply while others do not? To answer these questions we rely on cognitive psychology and dynamic Bayesian principal‐agent games to develop a theory of downwards‐sloping long‐run supply curves. More specifically, we explain how, when applied to an intrinsically motivated agent, external incentives imposed by an informed principal carry an informative signal which in the long run crowds out the agent's intrinsic motivation. To probe the plausibility of the ensuing hypotheses we compare the reformist pace of two centre‐left governments of financially distressed Southern European countries during the eurozone crisis, namely Greece's Papandreou administration and Spain's Rodríguez Zapatero administration. Based on the analysis of more than 400 newspaper reports and 12 expert interviews we find positive support for our theory: while Papandreou quickly admitted the need for far‐reaching and politically costly reforms, Zapatero initially delayed all kinds of measures. But as European incentives kicked in, the strongly incentivized Papandreou went into irreversible reform fatigue, while the softly incentivized Zapatero dedicated his last months in office to bring about unprecedented reforms. We conclude with some indications about future research in this direction.

What explains a party's dual decision about whether to endorse a referendum on an international treaty and whether to support that treaty in a referendum campaign? Relying on an original game of second-order electoral competition, this article argues that the relative likelihood of a party endorsing a referendum is highest at the beginning and end of the electoral cycle, and when the public supports the treaty. The study uses data on the position of 175 parties in 24 member states vis-à-vis the EU's Constitutional Treaty and its preferred mechanism of ratification to test these expectations against empirical evidence. Using a multinomial logistic regression model, it finds robust support for the argument.