Politics and Governance

Abstract: We are proud to welcome our readers, contributors and reviewers to this inaugural issue of Politics and Governance, published by Librello Publishing House—a peer reviewed, open-source journal dedicated to the study of politics in the national, regional and global realm, and the modes and methods of governance in all its manifestations. We are thrilled to be so ably supported by an editorial board that is not only strongly international, but inherently multi-disciplinary in its academic orientations, and welcome them, and the new readership and future authors, to this new open-source journal.

Abstract: The vast literature on party identification has gradually become bogged down by disputes about how to interpret observational data. This paper proposes the use of experimental research designs to shed light on the responsiveness of party identification to short term forces such as retrospective performance evaluations. Examples of recent field experiments are used to illustrate two types of experimental designs and the assumptions on which they rest.

Abstract: International investment agreements are foundational instruments in a transnational investment regime that governs how states regulate the foreign-owned assets and the foreign investment activities of private actors. Over 3,000 investment agreements between states govern key governmental powers and form the basis for an emerging transnational investment regime. This transnational regime significantly decentralizes, denationalizes, and privatizes decision-making and policy choices over foreign investment. Investment agreements set limits to state action in a number of areas of vital public concern, including the protection of human and labour rights, the environment, and sustainable development. They determine the distribution of power between foreign investors and host states and their societies. However, the societies in which they operate seldom have any input into the terms or operation of these agreements, raising crucial questions of their democratic legitimacy as mechanisms of governance. This paper draws on political science and law to explore the political economy of international investment agreements and asks whether these agreements are potential vehicles for promoting international human rights. The analysis provides an historical account of the investment regime, while a review of the political economy of international investment agreements identifies what appears to be a paradox at the core of their operation. It then examines contract theory for insight into this apparent paradox and considers whether investment agreements are suitable mechanisms for advancing international human rights.

Abstract: Drawing on the literatures on elite transitions, factionalism and the new institutionalism, this paper hypothesizes that the stability of partially democratic and emerging democratic regimes is dependent on the willingness of elites to make credible commitments to cooperate and comply with democratic rules. That willingness (or lack thereof) can be signaled by the presence of cooperative or conflict-precipitating events and actions in the periods around elections. We identify and analyze a variety of intra-elite interactions and demonstrate that conflict-precipitating events significantly increase the odds of a democratic retreat in the months before or just after an election, while cooperative events can balance them and prevent retreat. Using event data collected from 40 low- and middle-income countries for two-year periods around national elections between 1991 and 2007 we show that the imbalance of conflict-precipitating over cooperative events is far greater in cases of retreat from democracy. Furthermore, international intervention and pressure had a negative relationship with democratic stability. A logistic regression model accurately identified democratic retreat in 79 percent of the cases examined. Factor analysis revealed several common patterns of intra-elite conflict that can lead to democratic retreat, or conversely, patterns of cooperative events that bolster democratic consolidation. Finally, the data strongly argues for a model of democratic development that depends on open-ended elite maneuvering and the emergence of elite agree­ments, rather than a model where strong prior institutional constraints determine elite actions.

Abstract: The Van Rompuy Report and also additional proposals made by the European Commission outlined steps for a 'genuine Economic and Monetary Union'. This article explains, assesses and comments on the proposals made. Moreover, it outlines what could be recommendations in order to achieve a ‘genuine Economic and Monetary Union’. For this purpose, details of the Interim Report are systematically evaluated. We also deal with different governance visions emerging from the ongoing euro area crisis and starts from different views of the ‘North and the South’ of the euro area on this issue. This contribution argues that there is an alternative option to the notion of cooperative fiscal federalism involving fiscal union, bailouts and debt mutualisation: competition-based fiscal federalism accompanied by a properly defined banking union. In order to be a successful one, any deal will have to come up with a successful recipe of how to (re-)create trust between European citizens and their elected governments.

Abstract: Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections. Using two data sources, aggregate data from U.S. House elections between 1994 and 2006 and ANES survey data from the 2002 election cycle, we find little evidence to support contentions that campaign length affects election outcomes or candidate familiarity. The results we report suggest the political consequences, intended or not, to choices about election timing are likely minimal.

Abstract: The question of the universality of human rights has much in common with the question of the universality of ethics. In the form of a multidisciplinary reflexive survey, the aim of this article is to show how human rights discourses derive from more basic principles related to basic needs. These needs are the universal grammar for moral principles, which will be distinguished from ethical norms. Ethical norms, I will argue, are rules that develop in social groups to put into effect moral principles through communicative action and therefore develop as culturally specific norms, which guide behaviour within these social groups. This will explain why ethical norms contain some universal principles, but are largely culturally specific. In order to shed some light on the universality debate, I will show how moral principles translate into ethical norms and might manifest through communicative action in human rights law. For this purpose the article develops a socio-legal account on social norm-creation that bridges moral universality and legal universality via ethical pluralism, which in effect explains why despite the universality of moral principles, the outcomes of ethical rationales can vary extremely.

Abstract: Near the end of the 2009 Term the Supreme Court decided Morrison v. Australia National Bank, Ltd., the strongest anti-extraterritoriality opinion it has produced in modern times. Not only is Congress presumed generally to prefer only territorial regulation, but lower courts that had carved out exceptions from this principle over a long period of time must now revisit their positions. Again this year in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell Co. the Court relied on an aggressive use of the presumption against extraterritoriality to cut back on an important field of private litigation. The Court appears to have embraced two related stances: The imposition of barriers to extraterritorial regulation generally advances welfare, and the lower courts cannot be trusted to determine those instances where an exception to this rule might be justified. Implicit in the Court's position are intuitions about the political economy of both legislation and litigation. I want to use the occasion of the Morrison and Kiobel decisions to consider the political economy of extraterritorial regulation by the United States. International lawyers for the most part have analyzed state decisions to exercise prescriptive jurisdiction over extraterritorial transactions in terms of a welfare calculus that determines the likely costs and benefits to the state as a whole. Fewer studies have considered the political economy of the decision whether to regulate foreign transactions. No work of which I am aware has considered the political economy of deciding the extraterritorial question through litigation. This paper seeks to fill these gaps by sketching out what political economy suggests both about extraterritoriality and the role of courts as arbiters of extraterritoriality.