Institutional Gridlock Research Articles

A reality check and a way forward for the global governance of artificial intelligence

ABSTRACT Global governance of artificial intelligence (AI) must grapple with four monumental challenges. AI is a tough problem to govern given the speed, scale, and uncertainty of its progress. Various aspects of the AI problem require governing because of the range of benefits, risks, and impacts on other global issues. Multilateral efforts on AI are nascent, as is national-level policy. And the multilateral system is under immense pressure from institutional gridlock, fragmentation, and geopolitical competition. No one global governance model for AI is perfect, or desirable. Instead, policymakers must pursue several governance models, each starting in a targeted and focused manner before evolving. They must make clear what policy outcomes are being sought and which institutional functions are needed to reach those outcomes. AI governance within regional and multilateral issue-based groupings would commit nations to action and test models for governing AI globally. And national champions will be critical to success. This pragmatic yet optimistic path will allow humanity to maximize the benefits of artificial intelligence applications and distribute them as widely as possible, while mitigating harms and reducing risks as effectively as possible.

Colorado River Basin: conflict management under hydrologic stress and institutional gridlock

ABSTRACT In the Colorado River, hydrologic and legal conditions create difficulty in sharing water effectively and equitably during a deep 22-year drought. Demand outstrips supply, water entitlements are over-appropriated, and institutional arrangements are nearly gridlocked. The crisis poses challenges not experienced before, and these may worsen with climate change and warming. It threatens the water supplies of major cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as well as critical agricultural regions in the U.S. The background began to unfold more than 100 years ago, prior to signing of the Colorado River Compact in 1922. The decade prior to 1922 was relatively wet, and the Compact made water allocations that are not sustainable. Institutional challenges are caused by the rigidity of the rules governing river operations and the complex array of stakeholder organizations and management authorities. Although a wet 2022-3 winter provided temporary and only incremental relief, without a hydrologic reversal and/or effective regulatory controls, water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead will decline further and no storage water will be available to satisfy downstream interests. To avoid that scenario, it is likely that drastic curtailments will occur but forecasting them involves uncertainties and speculation. Achieving effective river basin management during the drought will likely require involuntary cuts, voluntary cuts, and possibly litigation, which will be expensive and long-lasting. Federal funding may help on a temporary basis. Involuntary cuts will require a forceful mechanism to push ahead with solutions despite lack of consensus. Lessons include the challenges in creating equity and sustainable conditions in the dry regions with water right systems based on prior appropriation and how to manage transboundary water conflicts within a federal system of government.

Riders on the storm: the politics of disruption in European member states during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper explores how democracies handle the trade-off between public safety and fundamental democratic principles. We show that an exogenous shock, like the pandemic, creates incentives for governing elites to deploy self-empowering mechanisms to avoid institutional checks and balances – with lasting consequences for democratic performance. We examine this prospect in Italy and Romania. These cases have a long history of institutional gridlock; such history reinforces incentives to work around traditional institutions in responding to the pandemic. While the two cases vary in terms of the quality and resilience of their democratic institutions, we find that elites displayed a similar propensity to overlook the intricate institutional balances during a moment of crisis. In Italy, the executive strengthened its power relative to the legislature; in Romania, the strengthening is relative to the judiciary. This finding has implications in assessing the risk for falling standards of liberal democracy across the European Union.

‘Failing forward’: a critique in light of covid-19

ABSTRACT This article examines the policy responses of the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) to the Covid-19 pandemic during its first twelve months. The intensity of the policy challenge, and the ways in which both political systems have been forced to respond, create a ‘moment révélateur’ – a revealing inflection point – that casts light on their relative institutional strengths and weaknesses. It is also a propitious moment for evaluating existing analytical frameworks, in this case the ‘failing forward’ approach to studying the EU. Far from ‘failing forward’, the pandemic has revealed the EU’s ability to innovate and build new institutions, while effective US crisis management through early 2021 was impeded by poor leadership, political polarization and institutional gridlock.

Implementing Domestic Violence Policy: When Accountability Trumps Mission

Nonprofit and governmental relations become increasingly formidable with a nonprofit’s number of public funding streams. Complexity of conflicting funding regulations traps the nonprofit in a state of dysfunction. Interviews with managers currently working in domestic violence advocacy organizations (DVAOs) in the United States are analyzed with a grounded analysis approach to identify the outcome of policy conflict tied to their multiple public funding streams. An unspoken policy narrative emerges that underlies more overt social policy narratives. This emergent narrative drives organizational activities toward accountability tasks and away from mission fulfillment tasks. DVAOs are bound within institutional gridlock.

Legacies and innovations in global economic governance since Bretton Woods

The international economic system that emerged after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference became the most durable international arrangement devoted to economic openness. Seventy-five years after the conference, however, global shifts in power, institutional gridlock, and populist backlash figure prominently in accounts predicting the system’s demise. This article examines the legacies of the Bretton Woods conference for structures and practices of global economic governance and innovations that emerged over time to adapt the system to new political and economic circumstances. It explores how and why the Bretton Woods system became a more variegated system over time with respect to four features of governance: membership, legalization, organizational focality, and market embeddedness. It identifies sources and effects of expanding membership in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the emergence of new formal and informal institutions, the challenges of a more fragmented institutional landscape, and shifts in the underlying principles of economic governance. Finally, the article discusses lessons from past crises in and reforms to the Bretton Woods system, and their implications for understanding recent challenges to global economic cooperation.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES

Public Transport Institutions are imperative in countries or cities to plan, coordinate, regulate and integrate city public transport as well as provide the necessary platform for subsidy applications in the operations of public transport. Considering the place which public transport occupies in development and social services, an independent body is needed to create a level playing field for public and private sector initiatives in transport. The paper highlights the duties and models of Transport Institutions with examples from some selected countries and draws a conclusion on the need to avoid institutional gridlock to transport planning efficiency. Article visualizations:

The impact of the Eastern enlargement on the decision-making capacity of the European Union

ABSTRACTThis contribution investigates the impact of the Eastern enlargement on the decision-making capacity of the European Union. On the basis of new data on the number and types of legal acts produced by the EU (1994–2014) and on the time between the proposal and adoption of legislative acts (1994–2012), the contribution argues that enlargement has had a rather limited impact on legislative production and duration and that it is extremely hard to disentangle this impact from other contemporaneous institutional and socioeconomic developments. On the basis of analyses of expert-based policy positions of member states in EU negotiations and on voting data from the Council of Ministers of the EU, it is argued that enlargement has possibly added a new dimension of contestation in EU legislative decision-making, but one that concerns a relatively small share of all negotiations in few policy fields like environment. All in all, there is no evidence that the Eastern enlargement has led to the institutional gridlock and loss of decision-making capacity that the public, many politicians and some academics as well have feared.

More Behavioral vs. More Economic Approach: Explaining the Behavioral Divide between the US and the EU

While US courts and regulatory agencies have set sail towards what may be dubbed a “more behavioral approach”, their European counterparts still mostly navigate the charted waters of a neoclassical “more economic approach”, as first advocated in EU competition law. This paper claims that this “behavioral divide” can be explained by a theory of social norms and expectations. Two decisive factors are uncovered that drive the behavioral divide: first, the trust a society places in the self-ordering forces of individual and market behavior (ts); and second, the degree to which each individual is supposed to contribute to a cognitively demanding collective social project (cs), such as the construction of an internal market in the EU. A high score on either variable in this model leads to the adoption of a more rational concept of human agency. Historical changes in the social norms and expectations expressed by these variables can be credited for the inverse tendencies in the US and the EU. Arguably, the more individualistic social conception of the US leads to a greater sensitivity to empirical, i.e., behavioral findings. By contrast, the European political project has long been driven by the construction of an ever closer union on the basis of a single market. This overriding goal could significantly inhibit the long-term prospects of behavioral law and economics in the practice of European law. Other factors play a lesser role in the explanation of the behavioral divide: diverging mandatory risk regulation, differences in legal education, and the distinct political economy of nudging. The latter refers to the potential of bridging otherwise insurmountable political differences in times of political institutional gridlock by behaviorally informed legal strategies. However, this may well prove a potent force in the future if the EU continues on its deplorable path to an ever greater political and ideological divide. This political dimension may thus create a tendency cutting against the current move toward more rational models of human agency in EU law.

Partisan Politics and Dynamics in the U.S. Agriculture Protection

Agriculture policy is an important, albeit contentious, political economic issue that has been at the center of trade wars, legal disputes, and a stalling of the current World Trade Organization (WTO) trade round. Unlike trade negotiations in non-agricultural industries, advanced agriculture producers such as members of the European Union and the United States are quite reluctant to liberalize their agriculture sectors. In this articlewe explain the dynamics of agricultural protection in the United States by focusing on the role of partisan politics. We argue that major shifts in the size of U.S. farm support benefits have been shaped by partisan battles over the food stamp program ever since this program’s inclusion in the 1971 farm bill. While Democratic Congresses try to increase the size of the food stamp program, Republican Congresses try to shrink it. In the case of divided government, these partisan interventions generate a trade-off between changes in the size of the food stamp program and changes in the size of farm support benefits. This tradeoff becomes necessary due to spending constraints and institutional gridlock. We provide empirical evidence in support of this claim from county-level data on farm payments and food stamp benefits and aggregate changes in both programs between 1973 and 2002.

Environmental legislative standstill and bureaucratic politics in the USA

In spite of growing environmental problems in the USA, an environmental legislative standstill has been prevalent in US politics for about 20 years. Several studies on lawmaking have argued that this legislative standstill has been caused by conflicts among elected officials, such as legislators and the president (institutional gridlock). This paper suggests a different view on the environmental legislative standstill in terms of bureaucratic politics. Using a case study on the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding hazardous waste disposal and the Superfund, the current study contends that the EPA's collaborative efforts to resolve interest conflict expansion have led to legislative standstill.

A Democratic Responsiveness Approach to Real Reform: An Exploration of Health Care Systems' Resilience

Real reforms attempt to change how health care is financed and how it is rationed. Three main explanations have been offered to explain why such reforms are so difficult: institutional gridlock, path dependency, and societal preferences. The latter posits that choices made regarding the health care system in a given country reflect the broader societal set of values in that country and that as a result public resistance to real reform may more accurately reflect citizens' personal convictions, self-interest, or even active social choices. "Conscientious objectors" may do more to derail reform than previously recognized.

Of veto players and entity-voting: institutional gridlock in the Bosnian reform process

Entity-voting in the Bosnian Parliamentary Assembly is a veto mechanism in Bosnia's consociational institutional setting and an important reason for the country's orientation towards the political status quo. An empirical analysis of the number and nature of adopted and rejected draft laws during the legislative period 2006–2010, embedded in George Tsebelis's veto player approach, leads to the conclusion that the veto players in the parliament – either delegates from Republika Srpska or delegates from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – have pushed the consociational system of checks and balances to its extremes. Entity-voting enables the veto players to “hijack” the parliament for their exclusionary ethnic interests and discourages cooperation and compromise between the veto players. Significant legislation, which in the present article is defined as legislation relevant for the European Partnership, faces severe obstacles to getting passed. In the light of these findings, the article discusses three policy implications: institutional redesign, a change of the actors, and an active role of the European Union for providing the actors with a realistically achievable goal which they equally share. This should reset the current calculus of self-interest and encourage cooperation between the veto players.

Political Understandings of Reform

Given the long struggle to enact health care reform in the United States, the passage of such significant reform in 2010 — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) — has prompted many seasoned political analysts to consider these questions: What was different this time? How did this reform pass when so many other attempts have failed? Political scientists Lawrence D. Brown, Mark A. Peterson, and Jacob S. Hacker each offer conceptual frameworks for understanding the passage of the ACA. From these, we turn to essays that examine particular factors that influenced the passage of the ACA. Joseph White focuses on the legislative need to build a Democratic coalition and the political dangers of accommodating the median legislator — in this case, the Blue Dog Democrats. Jill Quadagno examines the multifaceted role of interest groups in shaping the ACA. James Brasfield considers the evolution of the public option in the larger politics of health reform. Federalism, as that ever-important institution in U.S. health care policy, has been no less important in shaping the passage of the ACA. Michael S. Sparer shows us how intergovernmental politics interacted with interest-group politics, political culture, and institutional grid-lock as various bills wound their way through Congress, leading to the ultimate passage of the ACA. Scott L. Greer considers the role of states under the ACA and argues that this new framework — increased federal financing and regulation combined with substantial state flexibility — has the potential to be a dramatic improvement over the status quo. That improvement, however, will depend on intergovernmental politics and states' willingness to participate.

Machine learning for multi-jurisdictional optimal traffic corridor control

Urban traffic corridors are often controlled by more than one agency. Typically in North America, a state of provincial transportation department controls freeways while another agency at the municipal or city level controls the nearby arterials. While the different segments of the corridor fall under different jurisdictions, traffic and users know no boundaries and expect seamless service. Common lack of coordination amongst those authorities due to lack of means for information exchange and/or possible bureaucratic ‘institutional grid-lock’ could hinder the full potential of technically-possible integrated control. Such institutional gridlock and related lack of timely coordination amongst the different agencies involved can have a direct impact on traffic gridlock. One potential solution to this problem is through integrated automatic control under intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Advancements in ITS and communication technology have the potential to considerably reduce delay and congestion through an array of network-wide traffic control and management strategies that can seamlessly cross-jurisdictional boundaries. Perhaps two of the most promising such control tools for freeway corridors are traffic-responsive ramp metering and/or dynamic traffic diversion possibly using variable message signs (VMS). Technically, the use of these control methods separately might limit their potential usefulness. Therefore, integrated corridor control using ramp metering and VMS diversion simultaneously might be synergetic and beneficial. Motivated by the above problem and potential solution approach, the aim of the research presented in this paper is to develop a self-learning adaptive integrated freeway-arterial corridor control for both recurring and non-recurring congestion. The paper introduces the use of reinforcement learning, an Artificial Intelligence method for machine learning, to provide optimal control using ramp metering and VMS routing in an integrated agent for a freeway-arterial corridor. Reinforcement learning is an approach whereby the control agent directly learns optimal strategies via feedback reward signals from its environment. A simple but powerful reinforcement learning method known as Q-learning is used. Results from an elaborate simulation study on a key corridor in Toronto are very encouraging and discussed in the paper.

Automated Adaptive Traffic Corridor Control Using Reinforcement Learning

Advancements in intelligent transportation systems and communication technology could considerably reduce delay and congestion through an array of networkwide traffic control and management strategies. The two most promising control tools for freeway corridors are traffic-responsive ramp metering and dynamic traffic diversion using variable message signs (VMSs). The use of these control methods independently could limit their usefulness. Therefore, integrated corridor control by using ramp metering and VMS diversion simultaneously could be beneficial. Administration of freeways and adjacent arterials often falls under different jurisdictional authorities. Lack of coordination among those authorities caused by lack of means for information exchange or “institutional gridlock” could hinder the full potential of technically possible integrated control. Fully automating corridor control could alleviate this problem. Research was conducted to develop a self-learning adaptive integrated freeway–arterial corridor control for both recurring and nonrecurring congestion. Reinforcement learning, an artificial intelligence method for machine learning, is used to provide a single, multiple, or integrated optimal control agent for a freeway or freeway–arterial corridor for both recurrent and nonrecurrent congestion. The microsimulation tool Paramics, which has been used to train and evaluate the agent in an offline mode within a simulated environment, is described. Results from various simulation case studies in the Toronto, Canada, area are encouraging and have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the technique.

Automated Adaptive Traffic Corridor Control Using Reinforcement Learning: Approach and Case Studies

Advancements in intelligent transportation systems and communication technology could considerably reduce delay and congestion through an array of networkwide traffic control and management strategies. The two most promising control tools for freeway corridors are traffic-responsive ramp metering and dynamic traffic diversion using variable message signs (VMSs). The use of these control methods independently could limit their usefulness. Therefore, integrated corridor control by using ramp metering and VMS diversion simultaneously could be beneficial. Administration of freeways and adjacent arterials often falls under different jurisdictional authorities. Lack of coordination among those authorities caused by lack of means for information exchange or institutional gridlock could hinder the full potential of technically possible integrated control. Fully automating corridor control could alleviate this problem. Research was conducted to develop a self-learning adaptive integrated freeway-arterial corrido...

Wilsonian Crisis Leadership, the Organic State, and the Modern Presidency

In Woodrow Wilson's writings on presidential leadership, crisis serves as a solution to the grinding gears of institutional gridlock. This notion of crisis leadership is closely tied to Wilson's vision of the organic state, which posited a deep underlying and even mystical popular unity, brought to the surface by the spur of crisis and knit together by a prophetic, interpretive leader. This link between crisis leadership and the organic state undergirded Wilson's famous break with the American Founding. This article argues that the struggles with inadequacy experienced by most modern U.S. presidents come into sharper focus through the lens of Wilson's leadership theories. Since Wilson's critique of the Founding involves a rejection of Lockean limits, such a refocusing might begin by reconsidering those limits, including the limits of consensus and the limits of leadership.

Statehouse and greenhouse: the emerging politics of American climate change policy

No environmental issue triggers such feelings of hopelessness as global climate change. Many areas of the world, including regions of the United States, have experienced a wide range of unusually dramatic weather events recently. Much climate change analysis forecasts horrors of biblical proportions, such as massive floods, habitat loss, species loss, and epidemics related to warmer weather. Such accounts of impending disaster have helped trigger extreme reactions, wherein some observers simply dismiss global climate change as, at the very worst, a minor inconvenience requiring modest adaptation. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that an American federal government known for institutional gridlock has accomplished virtually nothing in this area in the last decade. Policy inertia is not the story of this book, however. Statehouse and Greenhouse examines the surprising evolution of state-level government policies on global climate change. Environmental policy analyst Barry Rabe details a diverse set of innovative cases, offering detailed analysis of state-level policies designed to combat global warming. The book explains why state innovation in global climate change has been relatively vigorous and why it has drawn so little attention thus far. Rabe draws larger potential lessons from this recent flurry of American experience. Statehouse and Greenhouse helps to move debate over global climate change from bombast to the realm of what is politically and technically feasible.

Does Incrementalism Stem from Political Consensus or from Institutional Gridlock?

Theory: Wildavsky (1992) indicated that consensual politics lead to incremental budget results and that dissensual politics result in large and rapid budget changes. Yet it is also possible that dissensual politics could result in policy gridlock with budgets changing very little. Hypotheses: By associating increased dissensus with divided governments and by measuring the long-term trend in budget volatility, we can test (1) whether the trend is toward more or less incremental budgeting, (2) whether divided government increases or decreases budget volatility, and thus infer (3) whether incremental budget results stem from political consensus or institutional gridlock. Methods: We use OLS regression to study the intersextile ranges of annual percentage changes in budget authority for the domestic subfunctions of the Budget of the United States Government from Fiscal Year 1947 through 1995. A model including the exponential decay of this robust measure of budget variability and a dummy variable for years of divided government is estimated. We then add two additional measures of dissensus: percentage of bills vetoed by the president, and the polarization of the congressional parties (based on the divergence in their respective ADA scores). A variety of alternative hypotheses are also tested. Results: Variability in relative changes in national government spending is trending downward, and divided government increases budget volatility. Neither additional measure is independently related to volatility. We infer that volatility thus indicates dissensus and that budgeting was more volatile and probably less consensual in the past than in the supposedly rancorous present.