Party Fragmentation and Presidential Elections in Post-Communist Democracies

Despite its controversial status as a stable governmental form, many of today's societies attempting to make the transition to democracy have or will, for a variety of reasons, choose presidentialism. Meanwhile, the evidence suggests that the combination of presidentialism and multipartism is especially dangerous for democratic stability (Mainwaring 1994). The question this essay addresses, though, is whether presidential elections themselves serve to encourage a fragmented party system, at least in the initial stages of democratization. In transitional political systems presidential elections encourage party fragmentation, but in a way different from that of highly proportional purely parliamentary mechanisms. Specifically, parties proliferate to support the presidential aspirations of political elites. Multivariate regression analysis on cross-sectional aggregate electoral data, supported by extensive outliers diagnostics and assessments of the role of country-specific effects is applied. A nested model is used to discriminate among the secondary hypotheses. Controls include: parliamentary election rules (district magnitude, threshold for representation, adjustment districts, ballot structure), relative timing of presidential and parliamentary elections, and basic societal cleavage structure. Using as our data source the recent elections in East and Central Europe and the European part of the former Soviet Union, we show that presidential elections consistently significantly increase party fragmentation. At the same time, the data are consistent with the hypothesis that presidentialism does encourage the overall consolidation in party systems through voters' abandonment of some parties, akin to Duverger's 'psychological effect'.     

Does Student Loan Debt Contribute to Racial Wealth Gaps? A Decomposition Analysis

There is evidence of a large and growing student debt burden over the last decade. Previous research has shown that the presence of student debt jeopardized the short‐term financial wealth of U.S. households during the Great Recession. We examine the effects of student loan use on the wealth of U.S. households post‐recession, using recent data from the 2013 and 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that mean 2016 wealth for households with no outstanding student debt is more than four times higher than households with student debt. We find that living in a household at the 15th, 30th, 50th, 70th, and 85th percentile of the wealth distribution with student debt is associated with an 80%, 49%, 37%, 35%, and 36% wealth loss compared with a similar household with no student debt. Our decomposition results suggest that student loan use can explain between 3% and 7% of the Black‐White wealth gap across the wealth distribution but is insignificant in explaining the Hispanic‐White wealth gap.     

Varieties of CSR: Institutions and Socially Responsible Behaviour

A central concern within contemporary socio-economics has been on the relationship between national institutional configurations and societal outcomes. In this paper, we assess the relationship between legal origin and a range of correlated indicators of social responsibility, focusing on socially responsible investing and voluntary charitable giving. We found that in Common Law contexts, lower levels of social responsibility than in Civil Law contexts, other than in the area of charitable giving, where the converse was the case. We explore the reasons for this distinction, and for the different patterns encountered in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Based on the findings, we identify directions for future research.