Search results for "Politics"

Strategic Responses: A Survey Experiment on Opposition to Pension Reforms*

2013

The responses given in opinion polls on future policy reforms reflect both subjective expectations and preferences. We disentangle these factors using data from a controlled survey experiment conducted in Germany. At the time of the experiment, an increased retirement age had been proposed as part of a pension reform. Thus, the survey respondents faced an incentive to give biased responses. By understating their expected work ability at the age of retirement, they could make the increase of the retirement age a less attractive policy option. We find evidence for such strategic response behavior, and this strategic bias appears to be stronger in former communist East Germany.

Causes of a Growing Judicial Litigation: Empirical Analysis of a Case

1991

In Spain, judicial litigation has grown considerably since 1959 to 1987, both in absolute and relative dimensions. This trend is especially accentuated in the criminal and in the contentious-administrative jurisdictional areas. By applying an interdisciplinary (economic, juridical, sociological political …) approach, the characteristics of this phenomenon are summarized in this paper, and their numerous and complex causes are analysed. Some of these causes can be considered socially positive, as they seem connected with a greater economic and social development in the country that allows citizens to appeal more frequently and directly to justice courts; but others show a worsening in the s…

Governance, entrepreneurship and economic growth

2012

In general terms, governance simply means how an organization is governed. It is the science of government performance and behaviour and it refers to several processes that must include historical, cultural, social and political determinants. For this reason, it is possible to establish a relationship between governance and institutions. Communities of persons, firms and institutions are essential ingredients of good governance and its analysis could be developed considering two possibilities. The first is considering the factors, such as entrepreneurship, by which government would more efficiently increase economic growth. Second is taking into account the economic results obtained by gove…

How consistent are perceptions of inequality?

2020

Abstract Despite recent empirical evidence on the importance of perceived inequality, its analysis is still underexplored. In this paper we study whether unobserved perceptions of inequality are reflected in observed individual opinions in a consistent fashion. Inconsistency is relevant to ealuate the level of agreement that individuals share with respect to different domains of inequality. Using the wave from the 2009 International Social Survey Program in the US, we show that inequality is a complicated concept prone to inconsistencies and propose a testing procedure to an empirical appraisal. We find that inconsistencies exist though they may not extend to all the domains of inequality. …

Prudential supervisors' independence and income smoothing in European banks

2019

[EN] We investigate the role of prudential supervisors' independence in affecting income smoothing behavior in European banks. Powerful national supervisors are predicted to influence the accounting practices of their supervised entities, shaping the properties of the accounting numbers they prepare. In particular, we study whether greater independence of powerful supervisors from the government and from the industry is associated with lower income smoothing. We use the mandatory adoption of a single set of accounting standards in Europe as a shock to the influence of prudential supervisors over national banks' accounting practice. Our results confirm that political and industry independenc…

Developments in Central and East European Politics – Edited by S. White, J. Batt and P. Lewis

2008

The EU's New Economic Governance Framework and Budgetary Decision‐Making in the Member States: Boon or Bane for Throughput Legitimacy?*

2021

The euro crisis has sparked changes in the EU's economic governance framework and a crisis of legitimacy across the union. While the institutional repercussions of the crisis have been studied before, the democratic impact at the national level has received much less attention. This paper aims to fill this gap, focusing on the procedural changes that the EU's new economic governance (NEG) framework has brought to national budgetary decision-making. Building upon the Varieties of Democracy framework, the paper adds empirical nuance and conceptual clarity to the notion of 'throughput legitimacy' and its components: openness, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability. Detailed case studie…

A Neofunctionalist Perspective on the ‘European Refugee Crisis’: The Case of the European Border and Coast Guard

2017

Initial literature on the ‘European refugee crisis’ discerned intergovernmental tendencies in its management. This paper examines whether neofunctionalism may be able to explain a major case of ‘European refugee crisis’ policy-making, the negotiations on the European Border and Coast Guard regulation. We argue, somewhat counterintuitively, that the theory considerably furthers our respective understanding. The crisis acted as a catalyst exposing the weaknesses of a system that pitted a supranational Schengen against a largely intergovernmental external border regime, notwithstanding a developing Frontex. These dysfunctionalities have been widely fostered by both national and supranational d…

Democracy, political risks and stock market performance

2015

We study whether the emerging stock markets’ performance is affected by direct and indirect effects of democracy level and political risk. We argue that the relationship between democracy level and the political risk is parabolic instead of a simple linear relation i.e. there exists a limit in democracy after which the political risk begins to decline and this is reflected in stock prices. Using panel data for 38 emerging markets at yearly frequency and controlling for several domestic and international factors, we find a fairly robust evidence that during the period 2000-2010, this relationship is true and after some threshold, the more democratic countries produce higher returns. Similar …

Electoral vulnerability and size of local governments: Evidence from voting on municipal mergers

2014

Abstract We analyze how anticipated changes in the electoral vulnerability of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The electoral vulnerability changes due to a merger because it changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in the next election. We use this variation for identification and find that the smaller the increase in the electoral vulnerability of a councilor, the more likely he is to vote for the merger. The documented effect is not driven by the behavioral response of the voters, or by party-line considerations. The councilors' desire to avoid personal electoral competition may lead to sub-optimally small …