The Problem of Governance: A Critical Review of Dan Greenwood’s Effective Governance and the Political Economy of Coordination

This paper argues that although the presidential system of government in post-reform era has been refining the 1999 elections, but has not produced a stable and effective government. One of the main factors of effectiveness and stability of the government's problem is not caused by a combination of maximal system of government and the party system, the presidential and multiparty systems, not to support the creation of an effective and stable government. Nevertheless, we could not deny that the factors supporting fragile coalition government, the composition of the cabinet, the size structure of the coalition, the threat of impeachment, presidential prerogative is limited, political considerations, the dualism of loyalty, and the weak character of the national leadership also affects the effectiveness and stability of government. The thesis concludes that in order to create an effective and stable government in a presidential system of government with a mix of multi-party system, it would require a change in the political system in Indonesia. Presidential system of government can realize an effective and stable when combined with a simple party system, and supported by a solid coalition, and the application of the ideal presidential system of government and balanced.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how institutional designs governing the executive-legislative relations in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) have weakened the government’s capacity to effectively govern the HKSAR.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines institutional designs and rules that govern Hong Kong’s executive-legislative relations. It uses the case of the HKSAR Legislative Council (LegCo) to illustrate the impacts of institutional designs and rules on the performance of political institutions and government performance.FindingsThis paper finds that institutional designs and rules do affect the performance of a political institution. This paper suggests changes to the institutional designs and rules that govern the operation of the HKSAR LegCo, and the interaction between the legislature and the executive so as to create a facilitative context for good governance.Originality/valueStudies on governance in Hong Kong mostly focus on individual institution’s behavior and performance. This paper studies the problem of governance in Hong Kong from the perspective of executive-legislative relations. It adopts the institutional theory to examine the behavior, performance, and interaction between the legislative and executive branches.

This coherent collection of previously published and unpublished papers also includes a specially written introduction by Warren Samuels. The book examines some of the fundamental issues in political economy in a non-judgemental and non-ideological way. The political economy is a process of decision making and these papers attempt to identify the deepest levels of conduct of collective choice. These include official and private government, the ‘rule of law’, the nature of property, rules and markets, deliberative and non-deliberative choice, and the operation of selective perception and of intellectual fraud in politics.

This article assesses the impact of strategic foresight in shaping the European Commission’s new industrial policy. It argues that, since it was introduced by President von der Leyen as a political portfolio, foresight has contributed to mainstreaming the concepts of ‘resilience’ and ‘open strategic autonomy’ into the EU's industrial strategy, via the Strategic Foresight Reports and new participatory structures inside and outside the Commission. This responded to the need for building up preparedness in the face of ‘radical uncertainty’ on future supply chain disruptions. We conclude that strategic foresight—if supported by an effective governance—will play an increasingly large role in shaping the EU's future policymaking. In particular, the concepts of ‘competitive sustainability’ and people's wellbeing, advanced by the 2023 Strategic Foresight Report as pillars of open strategic autonomy, may help futureproof the EU's green industrial policy going forward.

Electronic government as a theme became popular in Brazil in the 2000s. The term, either the more or the less broad conception, suggests the usage of communication and information technology means by the public administration when serving citizens, promoting governmental actions transparency and allowing citizens to participate in the processes of elaboration, following-up and evaluation of public policies. At least theoretically egovernment means the possibility to redesign public administration structures and processes. Based on e-government itself, this thesis investigates the e-government policies institutionalization process in Brazilian states. Neo-institutionalism was used as the central theoretical axis for this work. Two questions were essential in building the research issue: (i) what is the level of e-government institutionalization in the Brazilian Federation states? And (ii) does the e-government institutional policy design influence governance in state governments? In order to answer these questions an assumption group was used. Among these assumptions the following should be highlighted: (a) e-government institutional policies design influences the government of each state in its services delivery and in each of its Secretariats’ as well; (b) an institutional design which favors the building of an e-government integrated policy influences electronic governance positively; (c) the level of e-government policy institutionalization in the states of Brazil’s Federation is low. The insulation of actions and initiatives and CIT (Communication and Information Technology) management models based on fragmentation prevails; (d) CIT management models in state governments present structural arrangements which are little operable and often useless. In order to test these assumptions and presuppositions quantitative and qualitative methods were conjugated. Multiple case studies were used and the qualitative part was carried out in five states of Brazil whereas the quantitative part was done in ten states. Results confirm the assumptions and presuppositions previously made and suggest a general state government need to rethink e-government policies, otherwise these governments will not achieve the promises made in e-government literature. This work demonstrated that the institutional design in e-government policies is essential to effective electronic governance and public services deliveries. Beyond that, this thesis also showed that e-government institutionalization is a present challenge which needs to be faced by state governments in Brazil.

This paper re‐evaluates conventional Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) scholarship which has traditionally prioritized the study of specific rules configurations and their role in forming effective institutional arrangements. We suggest that effective institutional governance may actually be more reliant on the narrative foundations and personal cognitive interpretations of these rules than on the explicit rules themselves. By drawing insights from the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), which delves into the internal cognitive processes of individuals, we seek to enrich the understanding of institutional‐actor‐rule dynamics. We contend that policy actors often rely on narrative heuristics to navigate complex institutional landscapes, underscoring the role of narratives in both understanding institutional structures and instigating collective action. Although institutional scholarship recognizes the centrality of communication, its impact on shaping institutional arrangements and rule formation remains insufficiently explored. This paper advocates for the integration of the NPF and the Institutional Grammar Tools' (IGT) ADICO, identifying potential parallels between the two frameworks. Our preliminary theorization suggests a cyclical relationship between narratives and institutions, with narratives shaping and being shaped by institutional rules and norms. Building upon Narrative Attention Theory, we aim to understand the broader implications of institutional narratives in driving or reinforcing policy stasis. Our paper represents a foundational step toward a comprehensive theoretical framework on the role of narratives in institutions, spotlighting institutional rules and pointing to future research directions. Through the proposed integration of NPF and IGT's ADICO, we hope to provide a more nuanced understanding of narrative dynamics in institutional arrangements and pave the way for empirical exploration of this relationship.

Where does change come from in the architecture of global environmental governance? To the extent that a traditional answer to this question exists, it is that states self-consciously make changes in the architecture, to meet specific cooperative goals and in response to new information about the state of the natural environment. This is the classical neoliberal, institutionalist, regime theory answer: States, understood as rational unitary actors, create new institutions to reduce the market imperfections in international cooperation. This answer has informed much good work on global environmental politics over the past two decades, but it is limited by its terms of reference. States are often neither rational nor unitary, and they are not the only actors of relevance to global environmental governance. A more recent counter-narrative to state-based regime theory abjures the state and the formal intergovernmental organizations created by states, looking both to other levels of government and to nongovernmental actors as sources of environmental governance. This approach looks at networks of nonstate actors as the source of voluntary global environmental leadership, built up from the grass roots rather than imposed from the top. This is a useful corrective to an exclusive focus on the state as the unit of analysis, and on conscious design rather

A key source of institutional variation across judicial systems is the degree of control that the highest court has over its docket. Despite this variation, the consequences of various institutional designs in judicial hierarchies remain relatively unexplored by the theoretical literature. In this article, we develop a formal model of high court resource allocation. We analyze the model under two institutional designs: (1) the Court must allocate at least some minimum effort to all cases; (2) the Court has complete discretion over which cases to hear. We analyze the model to identify the optimal allocation of resources across cases as the institutional design varies. We then consider the conditions under which the various institutional rules increase or decrease the legal efficiency, or performance, of the judicial system. Our analysis reveals the complex relationship among the institutional rules governing high court dockets, the design of the judicial hierarchy, and the performance of the legal system. We find that the effect of institutional design on legal efficiency is conditioned by the performance of the lower courts and the incentives for judicial ‘shirking’ at the High Court. While requiring some per-case effort by the High Court may marginally increase aggregate efficiency, such a requirement causes the High Court to divert resources away from the most difficult cases toward relatively easier cases. The consequence is that more difficult cases are less likely to be decided correctly, while relatively easier cases are more likely to be decided correctly. The model substantively informs policy debates among judicial reformers and scholars concerned with institutional design as well as disciplinary debates about case selection and judicial decision making.

Abstract: Much of the debate about the of in democratizing states centers on formal institutional design as the key to building a democratic judiciary. While acknowledging the importance of a good institutional blueprint, I argue that superior institutional rules do not necessarily lead to a healthy judicial culture that enshrines democratic principles and compels actors within the judiciary to take the formal rules seriously. Drawing on nearly 400 original survey and interview responses from judges in Romania and the Czech Republic, this article offers an empirical overview of aggregate-level trends across several key dimensions of judicial culture, including perceptions of judicial independence, attitudes toward corruption in the judiciary, and the professional satisfaction and commitment of judges. The findings of the study not only run counter to the institutionalist thesis that better institutional rules will produce a more democratic judiciary, they suggest an important theoretical linkage between judicial culture and patterns of trust in the self-governing institutions of the judiciary. (1) Keywords: Czech Republic, democratization, judicial culture, Romania, of ********** In both academic and policy circles, the rule of law (2) is often treated as a kind of panacea for democratizing states--at once credited with protecting the basic rights and liberties of citizens, providing a key horizontal check on government power, and laying the institutional groundwork for a functioning market economy. (3) In turn, a substantial body of literature has emerged in recent years examining the development of the of in politically transitioning states around the world, including a significant corpus of research focused specifically on the challenges faced by transitioning legal systems in the post-Communist region. One of the clearest themes in this literature is the importance of institutional design in the post-Communist legal reform process. More specifically, reform advocates argue that by crafting institutional rules that encourage judicial independence and protect against political interference in the judiciary, policymakers can stave off corruption and lay the foundations for the democratic of law. However, empirical studies of courts in the region tell a different story, indicating that court performance is seldom a direct function of formal institutional powers and protections. Moreover, a large body of social science research suggests that formal legal institutions, like other political and social institutions, are shaped by powerful informal rules and norms that may contradict or undercut the effectiveness of formal procedures and safeguards. Following these insights, the present study explores the role of the judiciary's informal culture in the process of post-Communist legal reform. While acknowledging the importance of a good institutional blueprint, I argue that superior institutional rules do not necessarily lead to a healthy judicial culture--i.e., one that enshrines democratic principles and compels actors within the judiciary to take the formal rules seriously. Rather, the informal culture of the judiciary reflects a variety of concerns beyond the bounds of formal institutional design, which often work at cross purposes with formal structures and safeguards designed to foster transparency and judicial independence. In turn, if we are interested in building the of in the transitioning states of the region, I argue that we must focus not only on designing good institutions, but on promoting an informal judicial culture that contributes to that goal, rather than working against it. Drawing on nearly 400 original survey and interview responses from judges in Romania and the Czech Republic, this article offers an empirical overview of aggregate-level trends in judicial culture in two post-Communist states. Surveying several key dimensions of informal culture--including perceptions of judicial autonomy, attitudes toward corruption and professional misconduct, and the professional satisfaction and commitment of judges--I demonstrate that macro-level attitudinal patterns in the two cases run counter to the institutionalist thesis that better institutional rules will produce a more democratic judiciary. …

Essays in Political Economy

If intergovernmental relations are necessary in normal times, it should be even more required to face complex intergovernmental problem (CIP) as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, collaboration between governments depends on institutional rules as well as on political will. To discuss this issue, the analytical model is based on two dimensions: institutional design and political agency. As for the first dimension, since COVID-19 pandemic is considered as a CIP, three aspects are relevant when discussing how federations can organize the coordination between different levels of government: autonomy of subnational governments, mechanisms of coordination, and policy portfolio. As for political agency, the performance of political leadership (national presidents and governors) will be analyzed. The possibility of sharing collective goals across the federation is also a consequence of the political agency that takes place within the institutional systems of each federation. In short, it seeks to analyze the relationship between institutional design and political agency to deal with this CIP in five American federations.

A key source of institutional variation across judicial systems is the degree of control that the highest court has over its docket. However, despite this variation, the consequences of various institutional designs in judicial hierarchies remains relatively unexplored by the theoretical literature. In this paper, we develop a formal model of high court resource allocation. We analyze the model under two institutional designs. First, the Court must allocate at least some minimum effort to all cases; second, the Court has complete discretion over which cases to hear. We analyze the model to identify the optimal allocation of resources across cases as the institutional design varies. We then consider the conditions under which the various institutional rules increase or decrease the legal efficiency or performance, of the judicial system. Our analysis reveals the complex relationship among the institutional rules governing high court dockets, the design of the judicial hierarchy, and the performance of the legal system. The model informs substantively policy debates among judicial reformers and scholars concerned with institutional design as well as disciplinary debates about case selection and judicial decision-making.

ABSTRACTWhy does power‐sharing lead to peace and effective governance in some cases but not others? Whereas the current literature on this question predominantly focuses on institutional design, this article argues that more attention should be given to the everyday activities, routines and processes through which power‐sharing is operated. Defining power‐sharing as a way of governing that combines inclusivity and joint decision‐making, the article argues that variations in the performance of power‐sharing result from the work deployed by various actors to achieve or resist elite cooperation across conflict lines. Three practices are essential in determining elites' ability to cooperate: the (convergent or divergent) socialization of power‐holders, the (polarizing or unifying) representation of their supporters and the (constructive or obstructive) interpretation of power‐sharing rules. This argument is evaluated empirically against two cases of post‐conflict, ethnic power‐sharing presenting variations in performance that cannot be explained by institutional design alone—Burundi and Northern Ireland.

The purpose of the article is to provide a theoretical and methodological basis for a special tax mechanism for resolving conflicts of interest of corporate stakeholders, which is called the «regressive-dynamic profit taxation system». The relevance of the topic is determined by the need to abandon the declarative approach to building a corporate governance system in Ukrainian companies in favor of effective practices aimed at improving business performance. Current corporate governance codes in Ukrainian companies are an empty set of beautiful words, a tribute to the requirements of national legislation. The study was conducted using general scientific and special methods, in particular: analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, abstraction and concretization, systematic and comparative analysis. Based on the processing of a wide range of literary sources and business practice, the author critically analyzes the main definitions and problems of corporate governance. A number of unfounded claims and widespread myths in this area are refuted. The author reveals the internal structure of the corporate governance system and the true economic and legal meaning of the concepts of “conflict of interest” and “major problem of corporate governance”. The author presents a causal scheme of corporate governance problems. Attention is focused on the conflict of interests of stakeholders as a fundamental problem of corporate governance. It has been established that this particular problem of corporate governance gives rise to many other problems. The author's own concept of resolving the conflict of interests of stakeholders with the help of a regressive-dynamic system of corporate profit taxation is proposed. A detailed description and theoretical justification of this tax mechanism is provided. The practical value of the article lies in the possibility of testing the recommendations formulated by the author at the level of legislative initiatives and for building an effective and efficient corporate governance system in Ukrainian companies, which can radically improve the final financial results and market positions of companies.

The Pure Theory of Government Finance: A Suggested Approach