Suchergebnisse

AbstractReforms to campaign finance laws at the beginning of the twenty-first century led to concerns that Canadian political parties would become more centralized, thereby altering the stratarchical arrangement between local party organizations and the national party office. This article extends the period of analysis to 2008 and 2011. Although concerns were not unfounded, data reported in this article reveal that horizontal linkages developed between constituency associations in the Conservative Party of Canada, instead of downward money transfers from the national office. The article compares the Conservative party to its major competitors and explores three regional cases where these linkages are prevalent. Tobit regression is used to examine whether monetary transfers are coordinated by the central office or initiated by local constituency associations. Given weak evidence for the latter, the findings demonstrate that parties with a reliable base of support can leverage their campaign resources from one region into a national presence.

Political parties around the world have made widely publicized efforts to improve women's representation in elected office. While many have investigated these efforts by focusing on gender dynamics during candidate recruitment and selection, party support for women after they are nominated remains somewhat under-analysed. We begin addressing this gap by asking if central party bodies provide women candidates with additional financial support during general election campaigns. Our study leverages population data capturing intraparty financial transfers within three major parties during the 2008 and 2011 Canadian federal elections ( n=1845). The results demonstrate that parties, regardless of ideology, can and do support women candidates with additional campaign funds. However, support from the centre is not always consistent across time or competitive contexts. We conclude that if political parties are sincere in wanting to reduce representational inequities, then consistently providing women candidates with additional financial support is another way of doing so.

SummaryTo improve overall market sustainability, governments and their donors are ramping up efforts to strengthen stewardship in developing country health markets. Key stewardship functions include generating intelligence that enable policymakers, ministerial leaders, and program managers to develop evidence‐based policies and strategies to improve the resource management, supply, and use of health products and services. The total market approach (TMA), an analytic and policy framework, generates market intelligence and improves evidence‐based decision‐making, and also strengthens other stewardship functions, such as building and sustaining partnerships, strengthening tools for implementation, aligning government policy with market interventions, and ensuring accountability/transparency. TMA evolved in response to the phase out of donor support for reproductive health (RH) and family planning (FP) programs and the need to improve coordination among public, private, nongovernmental organizations, and civil society to achieve greater equity, health impact, and market sustainability. To assess TMA's role in strengthening the stewardship of RH/FP markets, this article reviews three countries that applied TMA principles: Mali, Uganda, and Kenya. It identifies how TMA processes influenced stewardship functions and assesses to what degree these processes have contributed to concrete actions to improve market efficiency and sustainability.