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Informal Workers as Outsiders:Political Participation and Voice Across MENA Countries
No full textThis study explores how informal employment, prevalent across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, impacts political behavior by creating insider–outsider divides. While previous research offers mixed evidence on the relationship between informal employment, voting patterns, and social policy preferences, our analysis reveals a significant and robust negative association between informality and various forms of political mobilization, including petitioning, protesting, and the use of force for political causes. Informal sector workers are less likely to engage politically due to limited resources, organizational constraints, and diminished incentives within exclusionary economic and political systems. Importantly, our findings show that this inverse relationship persists regardless of democratic context, although social assistance programs can partially mediate the effects of informality on political engagement. Our findings emphasize the importance of structural barriers in fostering inclusive political participation and expand the literature on the relationship between labor markets, social policy, and democratization in Global South
Regulating Over-the-Counter Markets
No full textOver-the-counter (OTC) trading thrives despite competition from exchanges. We let OTC dealers cream skim from exchanges in an otherwise standard Glosten and Milgrom framework. Restricting the dealer's ability to cream skim induces “cheap substitution”: some traders exit while others with larger gains from trade enter. Cheap substitution implies trading costs, trade volumes, and market shares are poor policy indicators. In a benchmark case, restricting the dealer raises welfare only if trading cost increases, volume falls, and OTC market share is high. By contrast, the restriction improves welfare when adverse selection risk is low. A simple procedure implements the optimal Pigouvian tax
Building a Transnational Developmental State in Europe:Lessons from the Big Bang enlargement for the next integration round
No full textWhy should the EU care about the developmental externalities of enlargement? To answer this question, we bridge the enlargement literature, which studies rule transfer prior to accession, and the political economy literature, which examines how economic actors from less developed EU member states adapt to these rules in the post-accession period. Each has its own blind spots. The enlargement literature does not explain why the EU cares–or should care–about anticipating and mitigating the longer-term negative externalities of rule transfer. The political economy literature offers insights into how new member states cope with these externalities but it does not examine in detail how and why the EU takes - or should take - market-correcting measures while integrating less developed economies into the Single Market. In this paper, we show that during the Eastern enlargement the EU laid the foundations of a short-lived Transnational Developmental State (TDS) to correct market outcomes. We also identify three mechanisms that compelled EU insiders to address the negative externalities of rule transfer. Beyond its theoretical contribution, our analysis provides crucial lessons for the next round of EU integration and especially for managing Ukraine's EU accession
Illiberal Social Policy in Europe:When Policy Implementation Meets Welfare Ideas
No full textThis article examines the role of social policy in the electoral success of illiberal political parties in Europe between 2010 and 2024, systematically comparing social policies of illiberal actors in Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. Utilizing qualitative content analysis, we differentiate between the welfare ideas of illiberal parties and their actual policy implementations to understand the mechanisms behind their sustained popularity. We paid special attention to the link between ideas and policy reforms to understand whether illiberals carried out paradigmatic changes that altered the underlying goals of social policies. Our findings reveal that illiberal actors align their social policies with the welfare ideas they propagate, targeting specific demographic groups often neglected by earlier democratic politics. We observe that besides their exclusionary rhetoric and reforms against the “undeserving outsiders,” such as immigrants, illiberals implement paradigmatic inclusionary reforms, especially to social insurance systems. Notably, the consistency and ideological alignment of their social policies contribute significantly to building loyal constituencies and challenging previous welfare state arrangements. This study highlights the necessity of recognizing the complexity of illiberal social policy to fully grasp the dynamics of their political appeal and offers insights to liberal democratic actors on effective policy responses
Conceptualizing and Measuring Support for Democracy:A New Approach
No full textMuch of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national samples to evaluate these rights and institutions. We find considerable heterogeneity across countries in how our items cohere, especially in less developed contexts. Yet, those items that are more weakly connected with general support for liberal democracy tend to reveal the influence of political events and actors, arguably indicating weaknesses in political cultures. We further identify a concise subset of seven items that provide a reliable and valid measure of support for liberal democracy across our different samples
