1,721,113 research outputs found
Natural resources and conflict: the crucial role of power mismatch and geographic asymmetries
No full textNatural resource rents are often equated with political turmoil and fighting. While one can easily find examples where there has been such a link (see e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Chad, Nigeria or Iraq), one can as easily pick examples of both democracies (e.g. Norway) or nondemocracies (e.g. Saudi Arabia) where resource wealth has not been associated with political instability. As argued below, whether the spoils of nature give birth to the horror of war depends on a series of geographical and political factors, namely asymmetries and mismatches that are not compensated by appropriate policies
Populist policy making
No full textPolicymaking involves both politicians and bureaucratic agencies, and their interaction is regulated by a number of institutional rules. The populists who manage to enter an executive office typically wish to weaken checks and balances, including the bureaucracy. Thus, the consequences of populism for economic policy can be divided in direct consequences and indirect consequences, through the institutional erosion they cause. Moreover, they can be divided in subnational, national, and global consequences. The paper ends with some advocacy of European-level policymaking rather than national policymaking
Self-enforcing voting in international organizations
No full textSome international organizations are governed by unanimity rule, others by (simple or qualified) majority rules. Standard voting models, which assume that the decisions made by voting are perfectly enforceable, have a hard time explaining the observed variation in governance mode, and in particular the widespread occurrence of the unanimity system. We present a model whose main departure from standard voting models is that the organization cannot rely on external enforcement mechanisms: each country is sovereign and cannot be forced to comply with the collective decision or, in other words, the voting system must be self-enforcing. The model identifies conditions under which the organization adopts the unanimity rule, and yields rich comparative-statics predictions on the determinants of the mode of governance. (JEL D72, F53
Polity size and the congested budget: evidence from italian municipalities
No full textOnce in office, politicians propose policies aimed at maintaining the support of their constituencies. This form of political activism increases with polity size – i.e., the number of politicians in government – but it may clash with capacity constraints, leading to a congestion effect whereby politicians’ plans are not enacted in practice. With novel data on Italian municipalities, we estimate the causal effect of polity size on a battery of planned and actual budget outcomes. We leverage a reform that introduced a new temporary population threshold where polity size changed discontinuously and estimate local treatment effects with a difference-indiscontinuities design. We document a congestion effect. Municipalities with larger polities have a larger planned budget which does not translate into a larger actual budget. The congestion effect decreases when bureaucratic capacity is high, proving how administrative capacity can be a binding constraint for politicians’ behavior
The common determinants of legislative and regulatory complexity
No full textLegislative and regulatory reforms often contain various forms of complexity multiple contingencies, exemptions, and the like. Complexity may be desirable if the benefits of additional contingencies are higher than the increased administrative costs. Both benefits and costs are better understood by a reform drafter than by the other players involved in the reform process. This asymmetric information on the costs and benefits of complexity and the potential misalignment between the drafter and other players create incentives for inefficiently complex policies. We show that reform drafters use complexity to pander to persuade their political principals to adopt reforms
Bureaucrats under populism
No full textWe explore the consequences of populism for bureaucrats’ incentives by analyzing a model of delegated policymaking between politicians and bureaucrats. Populist politicians prefer a bureaucrat who implements their policy commitment, while non-populist politicians prefer a good bureaucrat with discretion.The presence of populist politicians thus determines replacement of good with bad bureaucrats and creates incentives for good bureaucrats to ‘‘feign loyalty”. We show that feigning loyalty is more prevalent when the probability of populist leadership in the future is higher and the bureaucrats’ pool of potential replacements is worse. We also show that bureaucratic turnover is higher under populists when the bureaucracy is strong and higher under non-populists when the bureaucracy is weak
Bad politicians
No full textWe present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theory offers three main insights. Low-quality citizens have a 'comparative advantage' in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). Hence, voters may find themselves supply constrained of high-quality candidates. Second, bad politicians generate negative externalities for good ones, making their rewards from office increasing in the average quality of office holders. This leads to multiple equilibria in quality. Third, incumbent policymakers can influence the rewards of future policymakers, leading to path dependence in quality: bad governments sow the seeds for more bad governments. © 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V
Ideology and information in policymaking
No full textWe consider how the incentives for politicians to pander to public opinion depend on preference heterogeneity and information. Politicians are more likely to pander on issues where politicians’ preferences are divided than on issues where there is a clear majority view. As pandering involves ignoring socially valuable information that goes against the ex ante preferred action of the majority, an increase in the ex ante probability that a politician may hold a minority view can then lead to
policy outcomes more biased towards the action ex ante preferred by the majority. In addition, because the updating about the politician’s type is dampened when the voters are uncertain about the state of the world, politicians are more likely to pander when voters are more informed about which action is in their interest. It is then possible that increasing the information available to the voters, by increasing the likelihood of pandering by politicians, can make all voters worse off
The Turkey-KRG Energy Partnership: Assessing Its Implications
No full textTen years after the U.S. invasion and two years after the complete withdrawal of American forces from its soil, Iraq faces a number of challenges to its long-term stability and development. These range from corruption
to poor public services, from rising terrorist violence to ethnosectarian tensions in the context of a complex powersharing system. An important, but often
overlooked, aspect of Iraq’s political scene
concerns the dispute between the federal government and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) over the management of the country’s and the Kurdish region’s
natural resources and over appropriate revenue-sharing mechanisms. The parties have been stuck in a costly political stalemate for the past few years, as the absence of a federal hydrocarbon law has discouraged
international investment in Iraq’s natural resources, and oil extracted from KRG-controlled fields has had only intermittent access to international markets
Party Formation and Policy Outcomes under Different Electoral Systems
No full textI introduce a model of representative democracy that allows for strategic parties, strategic candidates, strategic voters, and multiple districts. If the distribution of policy preferences is sufficiently similar across districts and sufficiently close to uniform within districts, then the number of effective parties is larger under Proportional Represen-tation than under Plurality Voting (extending the Duvergerian predictions), and both electoral systems determine the median voter’s preferred policy outcome. However, for more asymmetric distributions of preferences the comparative results are very different; the Duvergerian predictions can be reversed; compared with the median voter’s preferred policy, the outcome with Proportional Representation can be biased only towards the center, whereas under Plurality Voting the policy outcome can be anywhere. The sin-cere vs. strategic voting issue is welfare irrelevant, but sincere voting induces more party formation
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