Pricing Political Rallies

Why are political rallies free to attend? Fundraising is a central campaign activity and a perennial correlate of political victory. We argue that politicians set a zero price for rallies in order to reap a non‐pecuniary benefit: political support. An ‘allocation by waiting’ scheme selects those attendees with a lower opportunity cost of time relative to a standard ‘allocation by price’ scheme. Transactions costs mitigate Coasean bargaining by removing the secondary market, thereby altering the composition of the average rally crowd. This mechanism allows politicians to facilitate exchange with ‘general interests’: citizens who do not engage in rent seeking due to collective action costs but still stand to gain from redistributive policies.     

地方人大中的地域代表现象探析——基于五省市人大代表建议的内容分析

本文试图探析在中国地方人大中是否存在地域性代表及其相关因素。通过收集和分析2017年国内五省市人大收到的近四千条代表建议,发现在地方人大代表的履职行为中,一定范围内存在从整体资源中为选区争取利益的现象。进一步回归分析的结果显示:来自经济发展水平相对较低的地区的代表,更倾向于提出地域性建议;由代表联名提出的建议更可能是地域性建议;担任地方党政领导职务的省市人大代表,在提出建议时更倾向于提出地域性建议。上述实证发现对中国地方人大地域性代表的实现机制提供了初步启发性证据,也有助于丰富我们对非竞选体制下的政治代表性和回应性机制的理解。     

Indonesian Politics in 2014: Democracy’s Close Call

Indonesian democracy experienced a near miss in 2014, when Jakarta governor Joko Widodo (Jokowi) defeated former general Prabowo Subianto by a margin of 6.3% in the presidential election. Both candidates were populists who rose to prominence in the context of public disillusionment with incumbent president Yudhoyono; Prabowo, however, condemned Indonesia's democratic system and promised to take Indonesia in a more authoritarian direction. We trace democracy's close call through five phases: the dying months of Yudhoyono's presidency, the rise of populist alternatives, the parliamentary elections of April 2014, the July presidential campaign, and the aftermath. We attribute the strength of Prabowo's campaign to superior organisational and financial support, while Jokowi's victory rested upon strong identification with him among poor and rural voters. Also determining the outcome was the fact that public satisfaction with democracy remained strong, undermining the effectiveness of Prabowo's authoritarian-populist message. Nevertheless, democracy's future remains uncertain, given that Prabowo and his supporters now control a sufficiently large number of parliamentary seats to continue promoting a rollback of democratic reforms.     

高校公寓社区化管理背景下大学生思想政治教育路径研究——基于无锡科技职业学院的调查与分析

高校公寓不仅是学生休息生活的地方,更是学生交流思想、实行自我教育、自我管理和自我服务的重要场所。因此,对高校公寓社区化管理背景下的大学生思想政治教育途径研究就显得尤为重要。通过对无锡科技职业学院学生的调查,掌握学生对公寓社区的认知情况,分析学生对公寓社区大学生思想政治教育的一些意见,并提出了进一步加强和改进公寓社区化管理下的大学生思想政治教育的途径。     

Does higher government debt link to higher social expenditure? New method,new evidence

Scholars believe that higher social expenditures are usually linked with higher government debts, whereas higher debts reduce social expenditures. However, it is reasonable to speculate that higher government debt may contribute to higher social spending, while fiscal deficits occur during a recession, which commonly creates greater demand for social expenditure. For a deeper investigation, this paper revisits the dynamic relationship between social spending and public debts in the time-frequency domain, using the novel wavelet-coherency analysis as well as the phase-difference technique to derive the co-moved and causal relationships between social spending and public debts in 13 OECD countries. The evidence identifies a dynamic relationship between variables. While higher social expenditures increase government debts, the shocks from government debts to social expenditures are conversely uncertain. We discover that higher government debt does reduce social expenditures, but it may be linked to higher social spending. The robustness of partial coherency and phase-difference discovers the role of a political party in the decision over social welfare programmes in the sample countries.     

Political uncertainty,risk of Frexit and European sovereign spreads

Using data from a prediction market (crowd-based forecasts), we build a daily measure capturing the risk of Frexit related to the 2017 French presidential elections. We study how unexpected changes in this new measure of political uncertainty in France affect European sovereign spreads vis-à-vis Germany. We show that our uncertainty proxy drives not only the French sovereign spread but also the spreads of those EU countries deemed the most vulnerable to the risk of desegregation of the Euro Zone. These results suggest that specific political uncertainty affects short-term investor’s expectations and may outweigh other economic determinants of sovereign spreads shortly prior to high stake elections     

Reassessing the risk conditions for political instability in the light of the Arab Spring

In today’s globalized world, multinational firms contend with a diverse set of risk factors in their worldwide operations. The recent regime changes in northern African countries, also called the Arab Spring, have highlighted that political instability is one of these factors. As researchers and existing indices of political instability largely failed to predict those developments, firms had not incorporated them into their risk calculations and hence incurred losses while having to adapt their operations. This paper examines the conditions that contributed to the recent instability in North Africa using Tunisia and Egypt as case studies. It evaluates the extent to which existing measures of political instability incorporate those conditions. The analysis reveals that the main conditions contributing to the political turmoil can be seen in socio-economic factors, namely inequality, poverty, youth unemployment, a growing youth population, and especially in the case of Egypt an independent military. These findings reveal gaps in current measures of political instability, whose dominant focus is on factors describing violence and changes in the political system while neglecting the influence of a country’s socio-economic environment.     

Integration of and Deliveries among the World Zionist Organization,Israel, and Diaspora Countries: System Articulation with the Social Fabric Matrix

Abstract:

The religious economics (not economics of religion) concern here is the relationship between the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and Israel, which is known as a geopolitical power in its region and which is also known as an economic success story. Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Polanyi explained how the political economy of medieval Europe was influenced and guided by Christian morality. This paper extends the analysis of religious economics by using the social fabric matrix of original institutional economics to define and structure the integration of the WZO, Israel, and the Diaspora countries. This allows us to observe how to conduct such work and to learn how Israel is guided and influenced by the WZO. It also helps to explain Israel’s “risk of tearing itself apart” as noted in a recent article in the New York Times.