Changes In Political Institutions Research Articles

Giovanni Sartori and the institutional reforms in the Italian ‘Second Republic’

ABSTRACTThe essay retraces and analyses critically the politics of institutional change that has characterised the so-called Italian Second Republic and the peculiar majority democracy that has taken shape in Italy since 1994. The changes are considered from the perspective of Giovanni Sartori’s thinking and in particular his theory of democracy. His thought was expressed both in scientific works and through a continuous stream of newspaper articles, most notably those published in Corriere della Sera. Examination of his thought reveals that he was an incisive and constant critic of the institutional features of the peculiar form of Italian majoritarian democracy. For twenty years Sartori’s acute and unremitting criticism, delivered in a sharply polemical style, accompanied all the major changes in the new Italian democracy, from the introduction of plurality electoral systems to the attempt to introduce the so-called strong premiership; from Berlusconi’s conflict of interests to the new personal parties, such as Beppe Grillo’s populist Five-Star Movement; from ‘mistaken ideas about democracy’ to fierce defence of the liberal features and safeguards of democracy.

Terrorist Assassinations and Target Selection

ABSTRACTThis research note examines political institutional changes in the aftermath of terrorist assassinations. Contemporary assassinations are more often a component of wider campaigns of political violence rather than a singular attack on a head of state. The Global Terrorism Database counts 16,831 terrorist assassinations from 1970–2014, indicating significant frequency of these events and includes a wide range of targets from law enforcement officials to foreign diplomats. Utilizing survival analysis, the span of time from a terrorist assassination event to a change in political institutions within states is measured between target types. Outcome differences between target types are identified.

Modi-nomics and the politics of institutional change in the Indian economy

ABSTRACTThe term ‘Modi-nomics’ gained widespread publicity across India and resonated internationally during the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) campaign for the 2014 general elections. Named after the BJP’s star campaigner and then Prime Ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, Modi-nomics refers to his success as Chief Minister in Gujarat, a state richer, with faster GDP growth, more jobs and industry than most other Indian states. The 2014 campaign promised that the ‘Gujarat model’ of clean government and economic competence, could be replicated across the country.In this article, we identify the promises and premises behind Modi-nomics. We take stock of claims and criticism, drawing on comparative development statistics to discuss a much lauded but also highly contested ‘success’ story. To assess whether Modi-nomics is guiding policy we draw upon Douglas North’s new institutionalism. In addition, we use a sociological understanding of institutions to argue that a central component of Modi-nomics is to achieve economic change by altering perceptions and images as well as policy. However, Modi-nomics remains highly contested within India’s domestic political arena and has unleashed other political entrepreneurs drawing on politics of entitlement (the Patel agitation) or religious sensibilities (the beef ban controversy). To gain resilience, Modi-nomics will have to combine ideational and institutional change and to reconcile the tensions arising in the process.

Measuring change in source of leader support

This article introduces the CHISOLS (Change in Source of Leader Support) dataset, which identifies which leadership changes within countries bring to power a new leader whose primary support is drawn from different societal groups than those who supported her predecessor. The dataset covers all countries of the world with populations greater than 500,000 from 1919 to 2008. We discuss the underlying rationale of our data collection, provide some brief information about the coding rules and procedures, and share some descriptive statistics. We find that changes in sources of leader support are more common in democracies than non-democracies, but also that changes in sources of leader support often occur without irregular leader transitions or large institutional changes, even within non-democracies. CHISOLS can be productively combined with other datasets like POLITY, Archigos, and DPI that provide information about political institutions, modes of leader transition, and placement on a left–right policy continuum, but CHISOLS also provides something new that was not previously available. These data allow researchers to study the extent to which different types of policy change are associated with all leader transitions, with changes in political institutions, or with changes in the set of interests that leaders most closely represent; CHISOLS facilitates comparing the effect of leaders, interests, and institutions on policy change across a wide spatial temporal domain.

When Do Institutions “Bite”? Historical Institutionalism and the Politics of Institutional Change

Historical institutionalist theories of endogenous change have enhanced our understanding of institutional development by providing a theoretical vocabulary for analyzing how institutions may be renegotiated over the long run by social and political actors. In these theories, however, the causal impact of institutions themselves on political outcomes, including their own change and reform, is less developed—a significant problem for an institutional research program. This article addresses this problem by proposing strategies that integrate historical institutionalism’s insights into endogenous institutional change with a systematic analysis of the institutional conditions under which “bottom-up” processes of gradual change are likely to be counteracted. In particular, the institutionalization of cultural categories and the allocation of power over the timing of reform within institutional and policy configurations are important variables for understanding how preexisting institutions may enable institutional incumbents to channel, delay, or prevent institutional change altogether.

The Rise of the People’s Bank of China: The Politics of Institutional Change, by Stephen Bell and Hui Feng. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. x+376 pp. US$55.00/£40.95/€49.50 (cloth), US$55.00 (eBook).

<i>The Rise of the People’s Bank of China: The Politics of Institutional Change</i>, by Stephen Bell and Hui Feng. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. x+376 pp. US$55.00/£40.95/€49.50 (cloth), US$55.00 (eBook).

Institutional Change and Entrepreneurship: The Impact of Political Institutional Change

In this paper we use an institutional perspective to investigate the ways in which formal political institutional change over time and controlling for informal personal characteristics of individua...

“Brasilience:” Assessing Resilience in Land Reform Settlements in the Brazilian Cerrado

This study assessed the socioecological resilience of family farms in three land reform settlements in Mato Grosso, Brazil, located in the ecologically threatened Cerrado biome. Using focus groups, a household survey, and analysis of soil samples we characterized farming systems and quantified indicators of resilience, which we contextualized with a qualitative analysis of distributions of power and access to rights and resources. In Mato Grosso, where diversified agriculture is a marginal presence in an industrialized agricultural landscape, none of the communities were achieving participant-defined threshold levels of any measured indicator of resilience. However, farmers who were members of a marketing cooperative selling produce through a federal public procurement program had significantly greater agrobiodiversity, plant-available soil phosphorus, household food self-sufficiency, and access to stable markets. Our pilot study suggests that the convergence of grassroots mobilization and political-institutional change is a central leverage point for developing more resilient food systems.

Managing Institutional Evolution to Increase the Likelihood of Success: Examples of Guidance from Chinese History

Institutions are effective means by which human societies resolve conflicts over the use of scarce resources and maintain social stability. Institutions evolve as human knowledge improves or as the situation changes. To find suitable principles to guide institutional evolution, we reviewed examples of historical institutional evolution in China to seek guidance for the evolution of other modern institutions. We found that gradualism, win–win paths, stability, neutrality, and cultural diversity are key principles for successful institutional evolution. However, fear of the uncertainty associated with institutional change and changing external conditions will affect the results of institutional change. Designers of new or revised institutions should use publicity and education, combined with gradualism (pilot tests), and measures to ensure neutrality and political stability, to increase acceptance of institutional evolution. In both politics and economics, institutional change can be a long evolutionary process, and it’s necessary to balance the changes in political institutions with economic development throughout the process.

Creating protective space for innovation in electricity distribution networks in Great Britain: The politics of institutional change

Innovation in electricity distribution networks will be an important element in the transition to a sustainable low-carbon energy system. The nature of networks as regulated monopolies means that the locus of the evolution of protective space for innovation is regulatory institutions, and that the politics of creating protective space is the politics of institutional change. In this paper I examine the case of Britain, where protective space for research, development and demonstration projects was created over the course of the 2000s in the form of funding mechanisms within the regulatory regime. The case study is used to test structural and discursive theories of gradual institutional change. I conclude that these theoretical frameworks are consistent with the evidence, but that the characterisations of change actors and of dominant policy paradigms are insufficiently flexible. I also conclude that the framework for innovation in the British regulator remains incomplete.

Devolution Plan 2000: dictatorship, democracy, and the politics of institutional change in Pakistan

Contemporary development theory and policy research puts an overarching emphasis on institution building as a key driver of change in developing countries. Over the past few decades, decentralisation reforms have played out as the linchpin of such institution building efforts, advocated by international development agencies and favoured by national governments. This article examines decentralisation reforms implemented in Pakistan under the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers initiative through a case study of the implementation and outcomes of Devolution Plan (DP) in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province. Promulgated by General Musharaf in 2000, the DP aimed to restructure and rebuild political and administrative structures, to redress key issues of governance, resource distribution, and service delivery. The Local Government System (LGS) was a key reform element within the DP, but it lost traction and was abolished in 2008/09. This article demonstrates two important factors, regime legitimisation and the preservation of clientelistic politics, that have profoundly shaped implementation of the DP. The findings demonstrate how the implementation of this large-scale internationally supported attempt at institution building ultimately succumbed to a range of particularistic interests.

Vested Interests and Political Institutions

VESTED INTERESTS ARE PARTOF THE EVERYDAY LANGUAGE of political science. But they are not part of its theories, at least not in any explicit or systematic way. My argument here is that, particularly in our efforts to understand the stability and change of political institutions, vested interests are not only substantively important—which is why political scientists cannot help but talk about them—but also have great analytic value and provide an especially productive basis for theory. If we think about political institutions in terms of the formal structures of government, including governmental programs and the structural arrangements surrounding them, a good place to begin is with a few simple but profound facts. Vested interests are present in every realm of public policy—in health care, defense, agriculture, transportation, international trade, you name it—in every part of the world. All institutions, across all policy arenas, everywhere, naturally and inevitably generate them, simply because certain people and groups reap benefits (often in very different ways) from what the institutions do. Vested interests then have strong incentives to protect those institutions when faced with threatening reforms—and in the politics of change, therefore, they have the potential to be powerful forces for stability. This is a universal phenomenon that, when built into our theories, stands to tell us a great deal about the political

Explaining the determinants and processes of institutional change

Institutions used to be treated as independent variables, explaining a number of political outcomes. Having identified sources of institutional stability, political science has made considerable progress in providing insights into the determinants and the mechanisms of institutional change in general and into change in political institutions in particular. This was made possible by the combined efforts of three fields of study: works on electoral system change, regime change and some accounts on policy change. Authors working on institutional reforms have tried to answer two broad questions: the ‘why’ (the triggers that might explain the use of reforms and their motives), and the ‘how’ (the processes that can explain the final outcome of reforms). The existing theoretical accounts have enabled to identify several sets of incentives and obstacles to change: political crisis and instability and the state of the pre-existing institutional system. Some incentives and barriers to change are exogenous to the political actors conducting the reforms, while others are the result of endogenous interactions of actors within the system. Moreover, the research in this field has confirmed the existence of several barriers to change, the role of complexity and uncertainty in explaining the final outcome of processes of institutional change, and the importance of taking into account the type of reform and process leading to reform and non-reform.

Book review: The Rise of the People’s Bank of China: The Politics of Institutional Change

Book review: The Rise of the People’s Bank of China: The Politics of Institutional Change

Coups d’état and defense spending: a counterfactual analysis

We explore how institutional set-ups, in particular changes in political institutions through coups d’etat, can affect the way military expenditures are determined. We use a counterfactual approach, the synthetic control method, and compare the evolution of the military burden for 40 countries affected by coups with the evolution of a synthetic counterfactual that replicates the initial conditions and the potential outcomes of the countries of interest before exposure to coups. Our case studies suggest that successful coups result in a large increase in the military burden. However, when no effects or a decrease in the defense burden are found, it is often the consequence of a democratization process triggered by the coup. These results are in keeping with recent theoretical developments on the bargaining power of the military in authoritarian regimes. Failed coups, by contrast, produce a smaller, and mostly positive, effect on the military burden, possibly as a result of the incumbent’s strategy to avert further challenges to the stability of the regime by buying off the military.

The Bioeconomy as Political Project

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project.

Stephen Bell and Hui Feng, The Rise of the People’s Bank of China: The Politics of Institutional Change,

Ce livre propose une histoire de la banque centrale chinoise, la Banque populaire de Chine (BPC) depuis le debut de la periode dite « de reforme et d'ouverture ». Il retrace l’importance croissante de cette institution dans la politique monetaire dans un contexte d’evolutions au sommet de l’Etat et du Parti communiste chinois (PCC). Le livre est organise en deux parties. La premiere est une presentation chronologique des evolutions de la Banque populaire de Chine distinguant deux periodes : d...

Competitive Advantage of Nations and Multilateral Trade System: How Can Lebanon Benefit from Trade Liberalization without Enhancing Its Strategic Industries?

International trade theories explain the advantage of nations to adopt a liberal trade model and to participate in the multilateral trade system via liberalizing their systems by eliminating trade quotas, tariff barriers and other forms of protectionism. The influence of international institutions on trade flow, mainly the World Trade Organization (WTO), has been important. The WTO contributed by helping and advising governments so that they would benefit from multilateral agreements by granting preferential treatments for developing countries joining the institution, and making them learn from other countries’ experiences in the accession process. Both liberalizing and protecting local production have advantages and weaknesses; how do existing theories about trade policy explain this landscape? Liberalizing the economy proved to be beneficial for some countries, while others suffered from distasting consequences on domestic production, employment and purchasing power. Some researches explained that large-scale changes in political institutions, especially in the direction of democracy, may be necessary for the kind of massive trade liberalization that has occurred. Changes in preferences cannot be overlooked in some economies while explaining the rush to free trade. The reciprocal impact of trade on domestic policies and the international political system is important. Analyzing the hypotheses about nation’s competitiveness and its dependence on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade deems indispensable. This paper will be testing the relevancy from applying Michael Porter’s diamonds theory and the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model on developing economies, mainly Lebanon, in order to gain national competitive advantages while having strong regional and international rivals. Do companies gain advantage against the world’s best competitors because of pressure and challenges? Lebanese productive companies are suffering from lack of competitiveness because of weak governmental support and absence of public planning to enhance strategic industries by developing a strong flexible export based model. With a 2.6 billons dollars deficit of its balance of payment, how can Lebanese government join the WTO and liberalize its trade system while avoiding its negative impact on national and social prosperity?

The rise of the People's Bank of China: the politics of institutional change

With $4.5 trillion in total assets, the People's Bank of China now surpasses the U.S. Federal Reserve as the world's biggest central bank. The Rise of the People's Bank of China investigates how this increasingly authoritative institution grew from a Leninist party-state that once jealously guarded control of banking and macroeconomic policy. Relying on interviews with key players, this book is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the evolution of the central banking and monetary policy system in reform China. Stephen Bell and Hui Feng trace the bank's ascent to Beijing's policy circle, and explore the political and institutional dynamics behind its rise. In the early 1990s, the PBC--benefitting from political patronage and perceptions of its unique professional competency--found itself positioned to help steer the Chinese economy toward a more liberal, market-oriented system. Over the following decades, the PBC has assumed a prominent role in policy deliberations and financial reforms, such as fighting inflation, relaxing China's exchange rate regime, managing reserves, reforming banking, and internationalizing the renminbi. Today, the People's Bank of China confronts significant challenges in controlling inflation on the back of runaway growth, but it has established a strong track record in setting policy for both domestic reform and integration into the global economy.

Endogenous institutions and political extremism

The election of extreme political leaders is often associated with changes in political institutions. This paper studies these phenomena through a model in which the median voter elects a leader anticipating that he will impose institutional constraints—such as constitutional amendments, judicial appointments, or the implicit threat of a coup—that influence the behavior of future political challengers. It is typically optimal for the median voter to elect an extreme incumbent when democracy is less fully consolidated, when the costs of imposing institutional constraints are intermediate, and when the distribution of potential challengers is asymmetric. The median voter typically elects a more right-wing incumbent when the distribution of potential challengers shifts to the left. Implications of the model for the consolidation of democracy and institutional constraints are discussed, as are several related mechanisms through which politiciansʼ ability to affect institutions may lead voters to optimally elect extremists.