Collective action and the supply of campaign contributions

Theoretical interest has recently centered on the interaction of self-interested actors in the voluntary provision of a public good. This paper tests three proposed models against each other in the process of explaining differences between firms in political campaign contributions. The Cournot model of collective action is rejected for the interaction of the observed firms.     

The Place of Indigenous Institutions in Constitutional Order

The failure of the state in Africa and elsewhere, and its attendant conflict, is rooted in the lack of correspondence between indigenous institutions and the formal structures of the state. Indigenous institutions, as have variously evolved, represent sets of practices and expectations that can be distinctive to problems of collective action faced by groups of individuals in their own exigent circumstances. By developing a community of understanding tuned to these circumstances, they provide the rules and grammar within which individuals perceive their actions and those of others. They thus each represent a facility within which a person can use his or her knowledge of time and place and his or her understanding of others in the group in resolving collective action problems. In order to overcome the pathologies of state failure, societies should be constituted with reference to these indigenous political resources. As such, constitutional rules should both link such systems of collective action and set out the terms by which they develop.     

Investigation of institutional changes in the UK housing market using structural break tests and time-varying parameter models

This paper investigates the effects of institutional changes within the UK housing market in recent decades using structural break tests and time-varying parameter models. This approach is motivated by models of institutional change drawn from the political science literature which focus on the existence of both fast-moving and slow-moving institutional changes and the interactions between them as drivers of the dynamics of asset prices. As a methodological contribution, we use several time-varying parameter models for the first time in investigations of institutional change. Our findings support the existence of both structural breaks and continuous variance in parameters. This contributes to our understanding of the housing market in two respects. Firstly, the dates of structural breaks appear to better match unexpected market shocks rather than remarkable political events, and this supports prior institutional theory. Secondly, assessment of the effect of slow-moving institutional changes shows that people’s biased expectations rather than the economic fundamentals have increasingly played an important role in driving housing prices in the short run although fundamentals continue to drive house prices to converge to their long-run equilibrium.     

A SIGNALING MODEL OF COMPETITIVE POLITICAL PRESSURES

This paper models competitive political pressures as a signaling phenomenon. People participate in collective action in support of or against the status quo, or they abstain. Their actions and abstentions inform the decision of a policymaker who may overturn the status quo in favor of a policy alternative. By providing an informational microfoundation for the widely used reduced-form "pressure production functions" and "political influence functions," the analysis allows me to reexamine the role of the free rider problem in creating a bias towards vocal special interests.
The signaling hypothesis finds empirical support with a study of pro- and anti-Gulf War demonstrations that took place in San Francisco and Kansas City (Missouri) in early 1991.     

Rethinking Political Process in Technological Change: Socio-technical Configurations and Frames

The political process perspective has done much to enhance our understanding of the organizational effects of technological change as a negotiated outcome reflecting the political and power dynamics of the adopting context. In so doing, we suggest, technology has been marginalized as an analytical category and the problem of change agency, although better understood, remains largely unresolved. This article addresses these issues through the articulation of the concepts of socio-technical configurations and technological frames and explores their utility in understanding change agency through an action research project. The project sought a novel form of 'socio-technology' transfer, taking ideas and concepts of 'human-centered' manufacturing embodied in team-based cellular manufacture from a European context into three firms in Australia.     

集体决策中的理性模型和政治模型-关于中国农地制度的案例研究

该文以中国农村为背景,试图发展一种可以检验集体决策过程是理性模型还是政治模型的方法.这一检验的新颖之处在于,它将集体决策与要素的相对稀缺性相联系.该文为两个模型推导出了不相容的假说,并用中国83个村庄的面板数据进行了经验检验.结果表明,两个模型均未被拒绝,但在更高级的检验中,政治模型略胜一筹.这表明中国农村的真实决策过程可能是理性模型和政治模型的混合体.     

Rethinking Political Process in Technological Change: Socio-technical Configurations and Frames

The political process perspective has done much to enhance our understanding of the organizational effects of technological change as a negotiated outcome reflecting the political and power dynamics of the adopting context. In so doing, we suggest, technology has been marginalized as an analytical category and the problem of change agency, although better understood, remains largely unresolved. This article addresses these issues through the articulation of the concepts of socio-technical configurations and technological frames and explores their utility in understanding change agency through an action research project. The project sought a novel form of 'socio-technology' transfer, taking ideas and concepts of 'human-centered' manufacturing embodied in team-based cellular manufacture from a European context into three firms in Australia.     

Delays of Inflation Stabilizations

In some new political economic models, delays of stabilizations result from coordination problems caused by collective choice-making mechanisms. Although several previous studies have tested the effects of political instability and fragmentation on seigniorage, deficits, or inflation, no direct tests of the influence of these factors on the delays of stabilizations have previously been undertaken. This paper reports the results of such tests. The degree of fragmentation of the political system and the level of inflation are identified as important determinants of the timing of inflation stabilizations.     

Advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation.     

Institutional transformation and the origins of world income distribution

This paper presents an attempt to quantify institutional changes and examine the respective effects of de jure and de facto political institutions on the path of long-run economic growth and development for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000. Using factor analysis, latent indices of de jure and de facto political institutions are constructed by exploiting several existing institutional datasets. The empirical evidence consistently suggests that societies with more extractive political institutions in Latin America, South Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe have achieved systematically slower long-run economic growth and failed to catch-up with the West. The evidence confirms the primacy of de facto institutional differences over de jure institutions in causing differential growth and development outcomes over time. It also explains why highly concentrated political power and extractive political regimes inhibited the path of economic growth by setting persistent barriers to the engagement in collective action. In the long run, institutional differences account for up to two thirds of within-country development path and up to 83% of between-country development gaps.     

Political ecology and ecological resilience:: An integration of human and ecological dynamics

The biosphere is increasingly dominated by human action. Consequently, ecology must incorporate human behavior. Political ecology, as long as it includes ecology, is a powerful framework for integrating natural and social dynamics. In this paper I present a resilience-oriented approach to political ecology that integrates system dynamics, scale, and cross-scale interactions in both human and natural systems. This approach suggests that understanding the coupled dynamics of human-ecological systems allows the assessment of when systems are most vulnerable and most open to transformation. I use this framework to examine the political ecology of salmon in the Columbia River Basin.     

The Political Economy of Social Pacts in the EMU: Irish Liberal Market Corporatism in Crisis

The economic crisis is a collective action problem. In the absence of currency devaluations, eurozone governments are faced with the painful social process of wage devaluations. This paper examines the strategic choices facing the government and organised labour in how they respond to this problem. It will argue that the European Monetary Union contains an implicit neoclassical assumption that labour markets will automatically adjust to downward wage flexibility. This ignores the politics of collective bargaining. Labour relations systems are the most regulated of all markets. Based on this institutional embeddedness, the paper will outline a typology of political choices facing national governments: neoliberal market adjustment, national or sectoral concertation and euro-coordination. Institutional pre-conditions of collective bargaining mediate what strategy governments adopt. It will subsequently examine the case of Ireland that tried and failed to negotiate a national pact in 2009. Social partnership was a central institution of Ireland's political economy for 20 years but could not internalise the adjustment constraints of the current crisis. The voluntary and exclusive nature of Ireland's corporatist wage pacts weakened the power resources of labour and enabled the government to pursue a neoliberal strategy of adjustment. As an institution, it was dependent upon the political executive of the state.     

An Evolutionary Theory of Collective Action: Schumpeterian Entrepreneurship for the Common Good

This paper presents the foundations of a dynamictheory of collective action. Firstly, the role of public entrepreneursin processes of institutional development is characterized. Secondly,the protagonists of social change are analyzed in regard to theirmotivation, strategic options, levels of action, and specificcapabilities. A new perspective on successful collective actionis opened up.     

Political economy with affect: On the role of emotions and relationships in political economics

This paper discusses and provides experimental evidence on the role of emotions and, in particular, the neglected role of endogenous affective relationships (bonding) in three key areas of political economy: (i) appropriation, with compliance or resistance as response; (ii) competition for access to appropriation and its potential for escalation and de-escalation of the inherent conflict; and (iii) determinants of (large scale) collective action. To that purpose, a series of experiments on power-to-take games and public good games are presented and put into perspective. Furthermore, the relevance of an affective social ties model for explaining these experimental findings is investigated. Finally, some important political economic implications are addressed.     

Economic Policy and the Progressive Idea

Abstract

Recent events in different countries suggest that institutional change is discontinuous and may lead to abrupt change. A specific case is shifts in social consensus. The article focuses on the latter. It argues that people make sense of their lives in relation to how they situate themselves within society. Their identities depend on the degree to which they are capable consciously to conduct their lives. Undesired economic change may disrupt previous identities and cause cognitive dissonance. At the collective level, it may trigger in-group versus out-group dynamics that provide a fictitious identity and either reinforce the status quo or suddenly subvert it.

Neoliberalism caused such undesired changes. A progressive alternative cannot rely just on convincing people that a change in conventional economic measures is desirable. It requires a recovery of people’s active and conscious self-identification. This involves overcoming their forced adaptation to the status quo through participation and collective action     

New Powers and the Distribution of Preferences in Global Trade Governance: From Deadlock and Drift to Fragmentation

ABSTRACT

Existing theories make divergent predictions about the impact of new powers on the global political economy. Some argue that a more even distribution of power will erode international cooperation, while others argue that cooperation can continue with the help of international institutions to overcome collective action problems. We argue that this debate overlooks a critical determinant of the shape of power transitions: the distribution of preferences amongst the major powers. It is primarily in the context of divergent preferences that power transitions are likely to give rise to conflict. Moreover, even where preferences diverge, the gains of cooperation provide a strong incentive to continue to pursue goals through multilateralism. This situation leads to forms of institutional change unanticipated by established theories. These include deadlock in expansive multilateral fora, institutional drift as old rules cannot keep up with the changing political and economic context, and fragmentation as countries seek minilateral solutions that reduce preference diversity. We develop this preference-based, institutional argument by examining the distribution of preferences and institutional change at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its Doha Round, where the power transition is relatively advanced.     

政体周期：前苏联地区各国的民主、专制与颜色革命

对前苏联地区各国的政体变更的研究,常常陷于追逐该地区发生的各种政治事件中。这些研究经常假定政体变更,如果不是简单的不稳定,则意味要么是朝向民主体制要么是朝向专制制度变化。本文提出政体“周期”的理论（类似于经济周期）,认为政体变更可能是循环性的,而不是简单的用进步、倒退或毫无规则等概念来定义。事实上,前苏联地区各国中,政体周期的现象非常常见。一些国家已经从专制制度向更加民主的制度转变,然后又回到更加专制的制度。随着最近发生的“颜色革命”,这些国家又向更加民主的方向转变。本文提出一个政治精英集体行动的制度主义逻辑,集中关注“大佬总统制”在其中的作用,十分有助于我们理解这种政体周期的规律。这一概念也有助于解释为什么2003年到2005年之间,乌克兰、格鲁吉亚、吉尔吉斯斯坦等国发生了“颜色革命”,而俄罗斯、阿塞拜疆和乌兹别克斯坦等国则未发生。     

Technology, Work Restructuring and the Orchestration of a Rational Narrative in the Pursuit of 'Management Objectives': The Political Process of Plant-level Change

In this article a narrative approach is used in the construction of a story about the political aspects of plant-level change. It is shown how different individuals may recount and reconstruct stories which reflect their own interests and how the maintenance of common organizational stories often reflects the influence and political action of certain powerful actors and groups. These dominant narrators are often actively involved in a political process by which a rational narrative is constructed, revised and modified over time and sustained within the context of other competing voices and views. In examining the uptake of cellular manufacturing, technology is not conceptualized as a determinant of outcomes but as a substance of the workplace initiative which is continually open to influence (the mutual shaping of the 'social' and 'technical') during the political process of change. Finally, a broad conceptualization of political process is adopted in order to enable the reader to critically reflect on the data in pursuing their own analysis and conclusions.     

Collective vs. individual lobbying

This paper presents a menu-auction model in which firms lobby the government to make an environmental regulation less burdensome. In this lobbying game, industrial interests are opposed by an environmental interest group. We compare political outcomes under two institutional arrangements. In the first, firms must join an organization that represents the interests of the industry. In the second, firms would lobby the government individually. The two arrangements result in strikingly different equilibrium outcomes. Only a small fraction of firms join the lobby group under collective lobbying, but all firms participate in lobbying activities when there is no such group. Thus, an attempt by firms to solve the apparent collective action problem through coordination would effectively backfire. The reason is that coordination among firms would increase the leverage available to the government, to demand high political contributions. We also evaluate the desirability of the two lobbying regimes from the private perspective of individual firms, and from the perspective of society as a whole. This permits us to evaluate possible restrictions on lobbying activities.     

Projecting from a Fiction: The Case of Denmark and the Financial Crisis

Institutional and ideational crises are characterised by fundamental uncertainty about the world, and at the same time require swift action on part of decision makers. How do political actors overcome uncertainty to enable collective action? The paper argues that actors use the ideas of the pre-crisis regime and through processes of bricolage seek to fit them to radically different circumstances. This enables action, but it also privileges the actors that benefited from these ideas before the crisis. This helps explain why so relatively few changes to financial regulation are appearing from the recent crisis. The argument is illustrated through the case of financial crisis in Denmark, demonstrating that the Danish authorities used ideas developed since the banking crisis of the 1980s concurring on the discourse that the best solution to the crisis would be a further ‘consolidation' of the sector, that is, fewer small banks and stronger large banks. This shows both the strength and weakness of using old ideas for radically new problems: it enables actors to act in concert, but changes are incremental and the weaknesses of the previous regime may thus live on in the new regime.