Suchergebnisse

AbstractLegislative checks give whoever wields them influence over policy making. It is argued in this article that this influence implies the ability not only to affect legislative content, but also to direct public resources toward private ends. Rational politicians should use access to checks to make themselves better off – for example, by biasing policy toward private interests or creating opportunities to draw directly from the public till. Disincentives exist only to the extent that those able to observe or block corruption do not themselves benefit from it. Political opponents thus can use checks to stymie each other, but legislative checks controlled by political allies create conditions for collusion and corruption. Testing this claim against data from a sample of 84 countries, the results presented in this article show strong support for the hypothesised relationship between institutional checks and corruption.

We present strong evidence that governing coalitions in Italy exercise significant negative agenda powers. First, governing parties have a roll rate that is nearly 0, and their roll rate is lower than opposition parties' roll rates, which average about 20% on all final‐passage votes. Second, after one controls for distance from the floor median, opposition parties have higher roll rates than government parties. These results strongly suggest that governing parties in Italy are able to control the legislative agenda to their benefit. We also document significantly higher opposition roll rates on decree‐conversion bills and budget bills than on ordinary bills—results consistent with our theoretical analysis of the differing procedures used in each case.

Why would sovereigns ever grant political or economic liberty to their subjects? Under what conditions would rational rulers who possess ultimate authority and who seek to maximize power and wealth ever give up any of that authority? This book draws on a wide array of empirical and theoretical approaches to answer these questions, investigating both why sovereign powers might liberalize and when. The contributors to this volume argue that liberalization or democratization will only occur when those in power calculate that the expected benefits to them will exceed the costs. More specifically, rulers take five main concerns into account in their cost-benefit analysis as they decide to reinforce or relax controls: personal welfare, personal power, internal order, external order, and control over policy--particularly economic policy. The book shows that repression is a tempting first option for rulers seeking to maximize their benefits, but that liberalization becomes more attractive as a means of minimizing losses when it becomes increasingly certain that the alternatives are chaos, deposition, or even death. Chapters cover topics as diverse as the politics of seventeenth-century England and of twentieth-century Chile; why so many countries have liberalized in recent decades; and why even democratic governments see a need to reduce state power. The book makes use of formal modeling, statistical analysis, and traditional historical analysis. The contributors are Paul Drake, Stephen Haggard, William Heller, Robert Kaufman, Phil Keefer, Brian Loveman, Mathew McCubbins, Douglass North, Ronald Rogowski, and Barry Weingast