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Politics
About: Politics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 263762 publications have been published within this topic receiving 5388913 citations.
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Book•
01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: Ames et al. as mentioned in this paper investigated the effect of different electoral rules for election to Brazil's legislature and showed that the effects of these electoral rules varied with the number of candidates running for office.
Abstract: Many countries have experimented with different electoral rules in order either to increase involvement in the political system or make it easier to form stable governments Barry Ames explores this important topic in one of the world's most populous and important democracies, Brazil This book locates one of the sources of Brazil's "crisis of governance" in the nation's unique electoral system, a system that produces a multiplicity of weak parties and individualistic, pork-oriented politicians with little accountability to citizens It explains the government's difficulties in adopting innovative policies by examining electoral rules, cabinet formation, executive-legislative conflict, party discipline and legislative negotiationThe book combines extensive use of new sources of data, ranging from historical and demographic analysis in focused comparisons of individual states to unique sources of data for the exploration of legislative politics The discussion of party discipline in the Chamber of Deputies is the first multivariate model of party cooperation or defection in Latin America that includes measures of such important phenomena as constituency effects, pork-barrel receipts, ideology, electoral insecurity, and intention to seek reelection With a unique data set and a sophisticated application of rational choice theory, Barry Ames demonstrates the effect of different electoral rules for election to Brazil's legislatureThe readership of this book includes anyone wanting to understand the crisis of democratic politics in Brazil The book will be especially useful to scholars and students in the areas of comparative politics, Latin American politics, electoral analysis, and legislative studiesBarry Ames is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh
642 citations
TL;DR: The principal-agent theory has been used to model the role of information asymmetry and incentives in political relationships as discussed by the authors, and it has been applied to the problem of credible commitment.
Abstract: ▪ Abstract With tools borrowed from the economic analysis of insurance, principal-agency theory has allowed political scientists new insights into the role of information asymmetry and incentives in political relationships. It has given us a way to think formally about power as the modification of incentives to induce actions in the interests of the principal. Principal-agency theory has evolved significantly as political scientists have sought to make it more applicable to peculiarly political institutions. In congressional oversight of the bureaucracy, increasing emphasis has been placed on negotiation of administrative procedures, rather than the imposition of outcome-based incentives, as originally conceived. Awareness of the problem of credible commitment has impelled more dramatic reformulations, in which agents perform their function only when their interests conflict with those of the principal, and they are guaranteed some degree of autonomy. The ‘political master’ finds himself in the position o...
641 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that contemporary democracies are involved in another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what are desirable forms of administration and government: that is, a struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances.
Abstract: This article questions the fashionable ideas that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable, and non-viable form of administration and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards marketor network-organization. In contrast, the paper argues that contemporary democracies are involved in another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what are desirable forms of administration and government: that is, a struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances. The argument is not that bureaucratic organization is a panacea and the answer to all challenges of public administration. Rather, bureaucratic organization is part of a repertoire of overlapping, supplementary, and competing forms coexisting in contemporary democracies, and so are market-organization and network-organization. Rediscovering Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic organization, then, enriches our understanding of public administration. This is in particular true when we (a) include bureaucracy as an institution, not only an instrument; (b) look at the empirical studies in their time and context, not only at Weber’s ideal-types and predictions; and (c) take into account the political and normative order bureaucracy is part of, not only the internal characteristics of ‘‘the bureau.’’ MAKING SENSE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Is ‘‘bureaucracy’’ an organizational dinosaur helplessly involved in its death struggle? Is it an undesirable and nonviable form of administration developed in a legalistic and authoritarian society and now inevitably withering away because it is incompatible with complex, individualistic, and dynamic societies? Are, therefore, the term bureaucracy and the theoretical ideas and empirical observations associated with it, irrelevant or deceptive when it comes to making sense of public administration and government in contemporary democracies? Or are the mobilization of antibureaucratic sentiments and the claim that it is time to say good-bye to bureaucracies and bureaucrats just another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what desirable forms of administration and government are—that An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote speech at the Ninth International Congress of Centro Lationoamericano de Administracion Para el Desarrollo (CLAD) on State and Public Administration Reform, Madrid, 4 November 2004. The original version will be printed in Spanish in Revista del CLAD Reforma y Democracia (Caracas). I thank H. George Frederickson, Robert E. Goodin, Morten Egeberg, James G. March, Jon Pierre, Christopher Pollitt, R. A. W. Rhodes, Ulf I. Sverdrup, and Hellmut Wollmann for constructive comments. Address correspondence to the author at j.p.olsen@arena.uio.no. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui027 Advance Access publication on March 1, 2005 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory a 2005 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc.; all rights reserved. JPART 16:1–24
641 citations
Book•
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TL;DR: Public Choice II (1989) as discussed by the authors represents a considerable revision and expansion of Public Choice II, and several new chapters have been added and several chapters from the previous edition have been extensively revised The discussion of empirical work in public choice has been greatly expanded.
Abstract: This book represents a considerable revision and expansion of Public Choice II (1989) Six new chapters have been added, and several chapters from the previous edition have been extensively revised The discussion of empirical work in public choice has been greatly expanded As in the previous editions, all of the major topics of public choice are covered These include: why the state exists, voting rules, federalism, the theory of clubs, two-party and multiparty electoral systems, rent seeking, bureaucracy, interest groups, dictatorship, the size of government, voter participation, and political business cycles Normative issues in public choice are also examined including a normative analysis of the simple majority rule, Bergson–Samuelson social welfare functions, the Arrow and Sen impossibility theorems, Rawls's social contract theory and the constitutional political economy of Buchanan and Tullock
640 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the determinants of participation in insurgent and counter-insurgent factions in Sierra Leone's civil war and found that poverty, a lack of access to education, and political alienation predict participation in both rebellion and counterrebellion.
Abstract: A range of seemingly rival theories attempt to explain why some individuals take extraordinary risks by choosing to participate in armed conflict. To date, however, competing accounts have typically not been grounded in systematic, empirical studies of the determinants of participation. In this article, we begin to fill this gap through an examination of the determinants of participation in insurgent and counterinsurgent factions in Sierra Leone’s civil war. We find some support for all of the competing theories, suggesting that the rivalry between them is artificial and that theoretical work has insufficiently explored the interaction of various recruitment strategies. At the same time, the empirical results challenge standard interpretations of grievance-based accounts of participation, as poverty, a lack of access to education, and political alienation predict participation in both rebellion and counterrebellion. Factors that are traditionally seen as indicators of grievance or frustration may instead proxy for a more general susceptibility to engage in violent action or a greater vulnerability to political manipulation by elites. hy do some individuals take enormous risks to participate as fighters in civil war? What differentiates those who are mobilized from those who remain on the sidelines? What distinguishes those who rebel from those who fight to defend the status quo? In spite of a large literature on the topic, scholars continue to debate the conditions under which men and women take up arms to participate in deadly combat. In this article, we examine the evidence for prominent, competing arguments in the context of Sierra Leone’s civil war, drawing on a unique dataset that records the attitudes and behavior of 1,043 excombatants alongside a sample of 184 noncombatants.
640 citations