0000000000083077
AUTHOR
Fernando Toboso
Electoral Rules and Proportionality in Spain: Estimating the Impact of some Swedish Rules Through the 2011 Electoral Data
In democratic countries policy making is always framed by many procedures and rules. Some of these rules are particularly critical for allowing more or less proportionality in legislative chambers, though the behavior of political actors also matter. The rules used for technically converting votes into political representatives often exercise such an important role in western countries. In this chapter we provide an estimation of the impact upon proportionality between seats and votes that might have resulted in the 2011 Spanish general elections if some Swedish electoral rules had been applied, ceteris paribus. As we are aware that electoral reforms favouring proportionality may hinder the…
Federalism, Proportionality, and Popular Will in US Presidential Elections: Did Colorado Have the Right Idea?
As is well known, the United States is a federal country composed of 50 states plus the District of Columbia, where the individual states and the country as a whole are each sovereign jurisdictions. This is reflected everywhere in its political-administrative structure, including the election of the US President, who is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the people; an issue that provokes a confrontation between abolishers of the Electoral College and supporters of the current system each time a candidate not winning the most popular votes is elected President (last time in 2000 elections). Between both extremes, there are intermediate solutions that, while continuing to r…
Institutional Arrangements Matter for Both Efficiency and Distribution: Contributions and Challenges of the New Institutional Economics
Are scholars in the New Institutional Economics tradition systematically disregarding distributive aspects when approaching policy issues as was the case during the 1970s and 1980s? Do economic and political agents usually care about distribution too? To provide an answer to these questions is the basic purpose of this chapter. The analysis carried out demonstrates that not all NIE oriented scholars disregard distributive issues. Some contributions are examined as examples, mainly in the so-called political economy branch of NIE. By means of a well-known graphical tool, the chapter also emphasizes that all of us clearly care about distribution, not just about efficiency, when participating …
Determinants of interest margins in Spanish credit institutions before and after the 2008 financial crash
As interest margins of credit institutions affect economic performance of countries, finding out which are the main determinants of their evolution is a research task of great interest at current times. This is the purpose of the present paper as regards to the Spanish case over the period 2004-2012. Based on the econometric contributions by Ho and Saunders (1981) and some of its extensions, the authors develop a model that includes as explanatory variables the factors usually examined in the literature and other singular variables that might be relevant. Particularly, the rate of leverage, the quality of their assets measured according to their risk, and the profit obtained from the sellin…
The Role the Static Maximization Approach Plays in Neoclassical Analyses
This is an article on the methodology of economic thought. The critical assessment of the neoclassical research programme contained here basically comes from the contributions of J.M. Buchanan, Nobel prize winner in Economics 1986. These comments are aimed at pointing out the role that the static maximization approach plays in neoclassical analyses since L. Robbins and P. Samuelson’s influential contributions came about after World War II. Just to complement this basic purpose, I present in section 4 the alternative methodological foundations J.M. Buchanan proposes and uses to replace the static maximization approach when building public choice analyses and I sketch in section 5 several pe…
How Much Power to Tax do Regional Governments Enjoy in Spain Since the 1996 and 2001 Reforms?
From 1979 to 1983, a new intermediate level of government was created in Spain. This article focuses on the financial aspects of political decentralization in Spain. How much power to tax do the new regional parliaments and executives enjoy? What other sources of income do they dispose of? Which rules have been settled for regulating their tax and non-tax sources of income? Has fiscal decentralization affected fiscal discipline? Are these governments now financially autonomous? These are the questions addressed. The article shows that, with the exception of the Basque Country and Navarre, regional governments were financed mainly through intergovernmental grants during the 1980s and 1990s. …
Institutional individualism and institutional change: the search for a middle way mode of explanation
After noting the lack of enthusiasm of several well-known scholars concerning the adoption of both methodological holism and methodological individualism in its several versions, this paper shows that institutional individualism is a different mode of explanation from both of these and also that it is not the same thing as the so-called Popperian programme of situational analysis. Institutional individualism is a mode of explanation that yields non-systemic and non-reductionist explanations at the same time as it allows for the incorporation into economic theories and models of the many formal and informal institutional aspects surrounding all human interactions, whether these interactions …
Key Electoral Institutions and Rules Influencing Proportionality and Partisan Bias in Spanish Politics
The current paper focuses on the Spanish electoral rules governing political competition for the central “Congreso de los Diputados”. It is well-documented that the system as a whole has traditionally favoured one or the other of the two main political parties (PP and PSOE) at the expense of proportionality and the remaining political parties. This paper focuses on some key Spanish electoral rules and investigates how much the observed biases could be altered by introducing some alternative rules taken from the Swedish electoral system, ceteris paribus. Measures of disproportionality are made through the Loosemore–Hanby index and the Gallagher index. The electoral raw data used for our esti…
Los impactos distributivos de las reformas institucionales
ResumenEl objetivo aquí perseguido es doble. Por una parte, se pretende mostrar que la afirmación de que los nuevos institucionalistas no prestan atención a los aspectos distributivos puede ser refutada. Para ello se examinarán algunos trabajos de destacados autores en esta tradición analítica. En segundo lugar, el trabajo acomete la revisión y ampliación de un instrumental gráfico muy conocido y nada heterodoxo a fin de realizar un análisis sistemático y muy persuasivo de las principales vías por las que una reforma institucional provoca impactos distributivos, además de influir sobre el volumen total de los costos de transacción que soportan los participantes en cada entorno institucional…
Asymmetric decentralisation, economic cycle, regional and local government’s borrowing in Spain
This paper investigates the evolution of sub-central government borrowing in Spain over the period 1996–2011. The arguments and figures provided show that the intense process of political and fiscal decentralisation that took place over the 1990s and 2000s did not lead to higher debt ratios in terms of GDP at these tiers of government until 2007. Although a kind of overspending bias was in effect until the late 2000s, the paper shows that the evolution of GDP and tax revenues provided regional and local governments with enough resources to vigorously pursue their devolved public policy responsibilities and still keep their debt ratios under control. However, since 2008, when the world finan…
Descentralización política y resultados económicos. Un análisis institucional del caso español
¿Cómo ha influido en el bienestar económico de los ciudadanos la nueva organización descentralizada del Estado implantada en España tras la Constitución de 1978? ¿Qué tipo de descentralización se ha llevado a cabo? ¿Existe algún riesgo derivado de esa singular estructura de gobierno multinivel? Dar respuesta a estas cuestiones es el objetivo básico del presente trabajo. Tras mostrar cómo ha influido esa nueva estructura organizativa sobre los espectaculares resultados económicos logrados y ofrecer una valoración positiva de dichas reformas, el trabajo concluye enfatizando el carácter situacional del análisis realizado y apuntando algunos desafíos a futuro. Las instituciones formales importa…
Explaining the process of change taking place in legal rules and social norms: The cases of institutional economics and new institutional economics
This paper deals with the phenomenon of institutional change and has been conceived as an attempt to answer the following question: Can we retain theimage of institutional change contained in a theory when we replace a methodological foundation on which the theory was built by a different and alternative one? For an answer to be developed, special attention is paid to the contributions made by institutional economists (IE) and those made by transaction cost—new institutional economists (NIE). The question clearly shows that it is a paper on applied methodology rather than a survey on institutional change contributions. Because of that, its main purpose is not to increase our knowledge about…
Sub-central Governments and Debt Crisis in Spain over the Period 2000–2011
This chapter studies the quantitative evolution of sub-central sovereign debt in Spain over the period 2000–2011 and compares it with the evolution of central debt. As an intense process of political and fiscal decentralization has taken place since the mid eighties, the paper examines whether this drive to decentralization has been paralleled by any fiscally undisciplined behavior on the part of Spanish sub-central governments over the period considered. Some key formal legal rules and informal behavioral norms present at sub-central politics in Spain are examined, including legal controls on borrowing by sub-central governments. The empirical analysis will be based on the internationally …