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Over the past three decades, business and professional intermediaries have become key players in the governance of the global political economy. These agents, which include accounting firms, credit-rating firms, corporate law firms, business consulting firms, and financial market regulators, are omnipresent in the making of major business deals, structuring corporate governance, allocating corporate finance, and shaping the priorities and strategies of public policy-making. To this point, however, scholars have only begun the task of understanding who these intermediaries are and what they do. In this paper, I develop a framework for analyzing the contemporary role of business and professional intermediaries. This framework draws heavily on the literature on networks and norm diffusion, and provides an orientation for ongoing research on the ways in which intermediaries are implicated in the governance of the global economy, while exploring the similarities and differences in the roles played by intermediaries. My overall analysis suggests that these actors are particularly crucial in the application of norms to specific problems and contexts, and in the monitoring of business and policy practice. I apply this framework to the role of private lawyers and law firms in the global political economy, with a focus on transnational competition policy. The paper concludes with a consideration of how the study of business intermediaries can inform our understanding of the role of networks in shaping the use of power in the global system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the question: how did India?s economic liberalization affect the state?s decisions about nuclear weapons and disarmament? While it focuses on the India case which I have studied in depth, it critiques the general Liberal account of the political economy of nuclear development. This account posits that internationally-oriented actors resist nuclear ?acceleration? out of fear of adverse international reactions, or because they oppose the concentration of resources in statist and non-productive uses. The paper shows that a comprehensive conception of national security, a state-led economic strategy, the compulsions of the global market itself, and a fractured and inconsistent international sanctions regime alleviated such concerns in India. Unlike Realist accounts which argue that economic factors were irrelevant in explaining India?s decision, this argument takes the entire economic context?particularly elite beliefs?into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the enduring influence of the dirigiste traditions on contemporary French macro policymaking. Considerable evidence is found of the enduring, and enduringly distinctive, French model of policy-making, albeit of a more circumspect nature and articulated in a very different manner, in the international political economic context of the 1990s and 2000s that differs markedly from ?embedded liberalism?. Specifically, the focus of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it assesses enduring voluntarisme in French fiscal policy-making, interpreted here as evidence of the enduring power of dirigiste interventionist preferences amongst policymakers. Secondly, we explore intentional re-engineering of the supra-national fiscal policy framework of the euro in order both to expand domestic room to manoeuvre, but also as an attempt to re-articulate dirigiste policy approaches at the supra-national level, challenging a prevailing ordo-liberal orthodoxy which has shaped the architecture of the Euro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proponents of globalization contend that European countries are now converging in the model of capitalism. Contrary to this prediction, this paper will show that in Spain globalization and EMU have promoted rather that undermined coordination among economic actors. Unable to escape from economic interdependence the Spanish economic actors have developed coordinating capacities at the macro and micro levels to address and resolve tensions between economic interdependence and political sovereignty, and between monetary and exchange rate policies. In this paper I show that there is at least one more variety than the two--LME and CME--that Hall and Soskice cite and also that it is possible to develop coordination capacities in countries that lack such strong tradition. In particular, this paper analyses the resurgence of national-level social bargaining in Spain in the 1990s. This development was the result of the reorientation of the strategies of the social actors. In a new economic and political context, marked by a process of institutional learning, trade unions have supported social bargaining as a defensive strategy to retake the initiative and influence policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes issue with ?Varieties of Capitalism?s? portrayal of German employer preferences as structurally conservative. Since the mid-1990s, German employers have overcome their internal disunity and association paralysis and have been subverting existing institutions from without (politically) and from within (in the industrial relations realm). Scholars of German political economy have focused on continuity of structure and, having established this, have inferred continuity of content. Focusing on continuity in formal structures is misleading because this blinds analysts to important changes in content/practices; we see this most clearly in new management strategies which alter the very essence of workplace labor relations. In addition to new management practices, this paper examines a large-scale public relations initiative founded and funded by German employers ? the ?New Social Market Initiative.? Programmatically, the New Social Market shows that many German employers desire deregulation and liberalization ? a move towards a Liberal Market Economy. The German employer offensive is a result of severe competitive pressures, the failure of the traditional institutions of the German model to satisfy employers? needs, and a set of circumstances which enable employers to transform the existing system from within while leaving many of its formal structures intact. By chronicling how systems evolve in the absence of changing institutions, this paper demonstrates a causal pathway that?s possible and exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico, was able to institute a stabilization and adjustment program in the form of a series of tripartite agreement known as the Pactos. The pacts managed to set the context for the reform of the Mexican economy. The central objectives of this paper are to understand, first, how tripartite agreements between 1987 and 1997 came about and helped reform the economy, and second, put forward some of the factors that are impeding mechanisms of social partnership in the context of democratic politics in 2000. This paper argues that the Pactos were the result of a free trade governing coalition interests for economic reform, and a set of institutional factors (State capacities (ideas, knowledge and expertise), corporatism, and the Pacto institutions) that helped create a policy mechanism that minimized uncertainty and free-riding through an system of rules that monitored, coordinated, and sanctioned political actors. This study suggests that social partnership mechanisms can help reduce uncertainty and foster cooperation in the context of economic reform and increasing competition, yet, that the institutional arrangements of Mexican presidential regime can be an obstacle for the development of tripartite accords in todays Mexican democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ways in which supply and demand side forces influence interest mobilization and formal inclusion in the policy making process in the European Union. Drawing on an original dataset of nearly 700 civil society groups active in the EU, the paper first considers the supply-side pressures on group mobilization resulting in today’s EU interest environment; this investigation offers further insight into 1) the effect of interest group resources on mobilization and participation, and 2) the differential representation of the EU member states and candidate countries. Second, the paper turns to consider demand-side forces. This section provides new analysis of 1) the effect of the major EU treaties on the interest group community, 2) the policy areas that are the subject of the most activity by organized interests and 3) the composition of the Commission’s consultative committee system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is another unapologetic contribution to ‘the gentle art of Rational Choice Bashing.’ The debate over Rational Choice Theory (RCT) may appear to have tired out; yet RCT is as dominant in the political sciences as ever. The reason is that criticisms of RCT typically take aim its flawed predictions, while ignoring the theory’s deeper failings. The lack of methodological openness (Hausman 1992), of empirical results (Green and Shapiro, 1995), and the limits of the economic concept of rationality (Sen, 1979, Elster 1983a) have only managed to modify RCT’s ambition in its most superficial aspects. It is assumed that RCT can adapt to any circumstances merely by borrowing new hypotheses from psychology and sociology, refining existing models, adding greater detail to the concept of rationality, and applying the theory in novel ways. In this paper, however, I contend that the problem runs deeper: to the epistemology of RCT and, more specifically, to its ambition of being the ‘science of choice.’ I argue that RCT fails twice, first as a science of choice and then as a science of choice. Both failures suggest that the political sciences need an epistemologic (re)conversion away from the ideal of a deductive and universal science of choice towards a more inductive and pluralist paradigm. While advocates of RCT rightly insist that ‘you can’t beat something with nothing,’ I take their advice, with a grain of salt: in order for alternatives to appear, maybe the frame of references needs to be modified. I draw a few perspectives for the political sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the onset of ‘Big Bang’ privatization in Russia, the dominant paradigm in the West was that granting individuals the control of property would create a constituency for the rule of law, where there is protection for private property rights. But this did not happen. This paper presents a sequence of simple models to explain this. The models focus on two ‘technologies’ that can cripple the demand for the rule of law in equilibrium: (1) Asset stripping, which can give individuals a stake in prolonging the no-rule-of law state, and (2) bribery, which can lead to the protection of monopolies and so deter entry by ‘political outsiders,’ who make up the natural constituency for the rule of law. The paper draws an analogy between the political environment and public goods. We argue that the combination of rationality, the public good property of the political environment, and equilibrium leads to very weak conclusions about the emergence of a constituency for the rule of law following Big Bang privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores varieties of state intervention in corporatist political economies. Focusing on recent reforms in social policy, labor-market policy, and wage policies in Germany and the Netherlands, it suggests that the neglect of the role of the state in corporatist systems has led to a failure to capture important dimensions of how they adjust to shifting political, economic, and social challenges. Furthermore, it argues that the state’s role in promoting needed institutional and policy reforms has been particularly important during the contemporary period of fiscal austerity, slow growth, and intense pressures on inherited policy arrangements. In some policy areas, the Dutch and German states have worked within existing corporatist frameworks, while, in others, they have suspended, by-passed, or even dismantled them in order to secure urgently needed reforms. The paper concludes that the character of state intervention not only varies with the challenges posed by particular policy areas, it has also been shaped in important ways by the national institutional frameworks within which corporatist institutions are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades of neo-liberal globalization, responsibility for the governance of economic activity has been increasingly delegated to corporations and the various producer service intermediaries which support the corporate sector of the global economy. In this paper, I explore the role and importance of large, globally-operating corporate law firms as key agents of rule-making and enforcement in the contemporary political economy. These firms have an important dual role - mediating between corporate actors and public authority while at the same time mediating between different corporations and markets - that generates a degree of autonomy from the immediate interests of specific clients. Corporate law firms are best understood as agents of private and public institution-building in the global political economy. As a result of their unique position in the transnational legal field, they are also key agents in the diffusion of norms and principles of governance between and among the major private and public actors in the contemporary world. The paper provides a framework for conceptualizing the activities of these firms, explores their role in the constitution of the transnational legal field, and looks more closely at their impact on the evolving issue of global competition policy-making. I argue that global corporate law firms are now focusing on their role as institution-builders, and that they are becoming increasingly important agents in the governance of the neo-liberal transnational political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is information always beneficial - the more the better? Or does information have a dark side as well? This paper argues that information has costs as well as benefits in international politics, that having more information can increase the likelihood of inter-state conflict. I am arguing against the dominant assumption in international relations, exemplified by the work of Jervis, Keohane, and Fearon, that information is only a benefit, so that the more states know about each other the less likely they will get in conflicts. This assumption that information is only a benefit has its origins in economics, but it is not justified in the international realm. The benefits of information are not illusory, but information also carries costs by increasing instability and tensions. The study of the economics of information challenges the assumption that information is always beneficial. The effects of information are more complex and conditioned than the dominant assumption suggests. Under certain conditions more information can hurt everyone. This paper builds on these insights to argue three reasons why the dominant assumptions about information are less applicable in the international realm. First, the international realm differs from markets in the level of coercion present in the system, which changes the nature of information. Second, there is no logical or empirical reason why information should be solely a benefit. For example, states may underestimate as well as overestimate their capabilities. Disclosure of the true state of capabilities may tempt another state to attack. Third, the benefits of complete information are not the same as the benefits of gaining more information. While complete information may be beneficial to all, incomplete information, at any level of incompleteness, is potentially costly. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this argument for IR theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development economists have recently focused on ethnic diversity, or "fractionalization," as a possible cause of corruption, political instability, and poor economic performance. Political scientists have argued for years over possible links between ethnic diversity (or structure) and civil violence, democratic stability, and party systems. For its empirical evaluation in a cross-national setting, all such research requires data on ethnic groups across countries. This paper tries to do a better job of conceptually grounding, operationalizing, and constructing a list of ethnic groups across countries than is currently available. After addressing conceptual and practical problems involved in enumerating "ethnic groups," I present a list of 820 ethnic groups in 160 countries that made up at least 1% of country population in the early 1990s. I compare a measure of ethnic fractionalization based on this list with the commonly used fractionalization measure based on the Atlas Narodov Mir (1964). Finally, I construct an index of cultural fractionalization that uses the structural distance between languages as a proxy for the cultural distance between groups in a country. This latter measure may be more appropriate when testing hypotheses that assume that ethnic groups "matter" because they have diverse preferences and cultural differences that pose obstacles to cooperation. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Making governments accountable is one of the hottest issues in assessing the quality of democracy in both advanced and developing countries. Following Przeworski et al. (1999), the paper defines accountability as a mechanism in which incumbent governments are reelected when they conduct good politics but lose office when they do not conduct good politics. One problem is that the incumbents can be reelected even if they do not conduct good politics. The paper examines this problem. It hypothesizes why relevant office alternations do not occur, conducts cross-national statistical analyses, and then empirically examines several cases of selected OECD countries from the postwar era to the present. Two independent variables will be examined: (1) whether production regimes have strong or weak market coordination (Soskice, 1999), and (2) whether party systems contain sharp or moderate polarization. Political economies of advanced societies will be categorized into four groups according to the above variables. My hypothesis is that incumbent governments can be unaccountable when they have strongly coordinated market economies combined with strong party polarization because under such conditions the incumbents may well become ?gThe only game in town?h with regard to economic growth, making voters lose any other alternative. The lack of office alternation leads to electoral stalemates on the part of voters in general and eventually reveals limits of electoral democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moving beyond studies of institutional creation and specific moments of change, this paper focuses on institutional resilience and institutional development over time. It attempts to further explanation of such continuity and development by analyzing the changing nature of investments social actors make in institutions and institutional arrangements. The paper draws on the political economy literature focused on asset specificity, exploring its usefulness in the study of institutions. This literature suggests a number of mechanisms that embed institutions and that can enhance their resilience over time. Recognizing these mechanisms also allows us to infer when (and which aspects of) institutions are more or less susceptible to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complexities of the intersection of racial and gender construction(s) with respect to the public sphere and private sphere dichotomy. Through the analysis of black women’s social conditions, this paper argues that the historical constructions of race and gender and the historical period of analysis affect the applicability of the "public-private dichotomy" to black women’s experiences. Consequently, racial exclusion and gender discrimination induced black women’s consciousness and their socio-political development. Although social capital theory accounts for the importance of social networks, norms, and trust in building social relations, we need a conceptualization of social capital theory that accounts for the complexities of racial and gender construction(s) and their effect on racially "divided publics," racio-gendered spheres, and racial uncertainty. Therefore, this paper presents black socio-political capital and racio-sexual social capital as frameworks most appropriate for analyzing black women’s conditions during this era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the concept accountability as it features in discourses surrounding the global political economy and the democratization of its institutions. In the paper I argue that current uses of accountability tend to overemphasize the concept’s disciplinary and institutional dimensions. Accountability is treated as principally an instrument of efficiency, tightening the gaps that separate the one being held accountable from the one who does the holding. While I don’t reject its disciplinary modalities, indeed I want to affirm them on some level, I do attempt to draw attention to other aspects of accountability, aspects having to do with narration, listening, engagement, vulnerability and transformation. Instead of seeing accountability as something that takes place solely within institutions, I want to explore an accountability that comes from without. Instead of seeing accountability as a closing of gaps, I want to explore an accountability that perceives gaps as a resource rich with potential. And instead of seeing accountability as a mechanism of discipline and punishment, I want to explore an accountability that emphasizes dialogical engagement and receptivity to the claims of the excluded. I argue that as much as accountability is a promise of more disciplined and efficient behavior, it is also a predicament that insistently presents us with difficult and transformative questions. Who is accountable, to whom, before whom, for what, how, and according to whom? And who is excluded from these questions by the terms of the asking? The persistence of such questions - which are above all else questions about participation - should not be considered exogenous to accountability’s operation. They not only serve as accountability’s preconditions, they also animate accountability while destabilizing accountability’s operation with their potential for unresolvability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both global economic inequality and poverty are growing problems, despite decades of development efforts directed at less developed countries. The paper looks at some of the most basic assumptions of the prevailing (neoclassical) development economics of the period, asking whether some of the failure can be attributed to misconceptions at that level, as they translate into practice in policies of IFIs such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Engaging recent works by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and Brooke Ackerly, which look at development as the increase of human well-being--including freedom and functioning--and take seriously the perspectives of the world’s economically least well-off, particularly poor women, the paper also turns to more direct evidence of how those living in severe poverty see their situation and articulate their needs. Such evidence, collected during both preparations for the Fourth World Women’s Conference, 1995, and in the World Bank’s recent study, Voices of the Poor, suggests the need to re-evaluate the ways in which the problem of world poverty has been approached, such that both gender and the voices of the poor themselves are kept in the forefront of discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about counterfactual possibilities associated with financial property rights under Colonialism, prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Washington DC, in 2014 is presented. Topics discussed include property rights literature with reference to financial systems, emergence of institutionalized financial systems and Indian currency problems.

When discussing control of corruption, we know what makes successful countries differ from the rest. But how did they get there? This paper presents seven contemporary "achievers" from across the globe: electoral democracies that have reached control of corruption primarily within the last 20 years, countries in the upper third of the World Bank Control of Corruption scale or otherwise regional achievers doing significantly better than their region/continent or their modernity goodness of fit. In comparing these achievers with the rest of their continent, the elements enabling them to outperform other countries are analyzed in a three-step methodology: first, how well do these countries fit the modernization model and the model of regional (continental) corruption, comparing the country's performance against the continent as a whole; second, what were the dynamics of the change process (the political economy of change) in each country, analysis allowing for better understanding of the context, underlying agency, and drivers of change in the control of corruption; and third, which formal institutional frameworks in general and anticorruption interventions in particular took place in order to measure the significance of special anticorruption interventions. In conclusion, the paper compares all contemporary achievers across five categories. This research was conducted with support from the EU-funded ANTICORRP research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we revisit the work of James, Solberg and Wolfson (Defence & Peace Economics, 1999) that introduced an identified, simultaneous two-equation interactive system estimation of the relationship between democracy and conflict. In the decade following this research, which suggested a causal role for conflict relative to democracy, a number of theoretical and empirical advances have been made. These steps forward include an innovative statistical technique for estimating simultaneous equations with categorical dependent variables. This paper will build on these advances to update the earlier findings noted above. Additionally, the paper will use this system of equations to explore a variety of new independent variables and novel measurements of established independent variables that have emerged in the conflict processes literature. The analysis also includes a case illustration of the causal mechanisms presumed to be at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The superpowers' Cold War nuclear arsenals have been frequently mocked as "arsenals of folly" that greatly exceeded the requirements of deterrence. This paper instead demonstrates that the U.S. arsenal was principally driven by the political economy of U.S. military commitments to Europe. Ultimately the least bad option for the United States given constraints was to plausibly threaten nuclear first use, which in turn required plausible damage limitation by destroying Soviet nuclear forces. This paper demonstrates that this logic inexorably drove U.S. nuclear doctrine and posture, and in fact had the desired effect on the Soviet leadership of making nuclear first use seem plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Weber and Hannah Arendt are usually read together as theorists of the political, attacking the modern assimilation of politics to economics. They are taken to differ only in how they conceive the political: Weber, as domination, and Arendt, as action. This paper argues that readers have missed relevant differences in their thought because they have not compared Weber's neo-Kantian philosophy of value with Arendt's phenomenological method. Through such a comparison, this paper advances two claims. First, it argues that Arendt, unlike Weber, is a theorist not of the political but rather of the possibility of non-subsumptive relationships between politics and the economic. Second, it argues that Arendt has a more nuanced view of domination than either her admirers or critics admit. Against Weber's charismatic politics of the extraordinary, Arendt thus opens space for a radical democratic critique of political economy, even if she does not always pursue the implications of her insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While continuity and change have long been central in the study of politics, we do not yet fully understand the criteria by which claims of such continuity can be made. What is the dividing line between continuity with the past and change from the past? This paper addresses that question through a focus on historical legacies, and in particular what it means for characteristics of a prior political regime to feature in the politics of a latter political regime. Historical legacies are an important component of many explanations of contemporary outcomes in polities attempting to democratize after a period of authoritarian rule. Democratic failure and success are often attributed to some legacy originating in the prior authoritarian regime or in some cases the preauthoritarian regime. Yet while there is no shortage of legacies accounts, there is still no clear understanding of what a legacy is or how legacy arguments actually work. This paper establishes the criteria by which a phenomenon can be considered a legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common distinction in political economy contrasts the dynamics of free markets with the 'political' dynamics of governance. That distinction portrays 'economic' competition as separate from the deployment of private political resources to affect the terms of competition in line with agent preferences. This yields a distorted view of how real-world economic agents compete with each other, and the market-governance/state-market dichotomy creates more confusion than it clarifies, failing to account for the empirical observation that complex market systems and institutions of governance cannot be found apart. Even as an analytical distinction, the dichotomy blinds us to the ways in which states are active constituents of the market place, and the ways in which market actors and their constituencies are part of the wider process of governance shaping the terms of competition. This paper will extend the transaction cost approach and the insights of institutional economics to demonstrate that the emergence of the institutions of financial governance is endogenous to the utilitymaximising behaviour of economic agents. Utility-maximising behaviour and conflict over the terms of competition in the market generate both the formal and informal institutions and processes of governance such as regulation and dispute settlement. The paper then presents a conceptual model for understanding the essential integration of market and governance processes, the 'state-market condominium', in which markets are not just about what firms do in competition with each other, but are conceptualized as an ensemble of regulatory authority operating simultaneously through policy processes and the competitive interaction of firms. Contrasting forms of market correspond to political compromises based on the preferences of interacting agents. The model hypothesises reflexively that conflict over the terms of competition in markets generates changes in actor preferences concerning regulation and governance simultaneously, and that the outcome of conflict over divergent actor preferences concerning governance and regulation generates changes in market structures. Changes in preferences concerning governance therefore are intimately bound up with preferences concerning market structure. The theoretical model is then illustrated with a case study of international financial governance and market change related to the spread of the subprime financial crisis. By this reckoning, agents at first sought to set the terms of competition by promoting cross-border market integration and their preferences later underpinned the emerging fabric of multi-level governance in the sector. This approach brings the work of economists and political scientists closer together in revealing the nature and origins of a mix of global financial regulations that have given rise to the present economic crisis. The argument is that, in contrast to the public choice position that more market-based competition is likely to reduce the room for policy capture, financial liberalisation and the subsequent establishment of a market-based approach to financial governance constituted a process of policy-rent seeking which yielded important competitive advantages for the major international investment banks and financial conglomerates who pursued the policy in the first place. State agencies involved in financial governance also had a crucial interest in financial liberalisation and frequently made common cause with the financial sector. Basel II and its use of the advanced internal ratings based approach of "self supervision" for major banks is an example of such policy change. In turn, changes in risk management techniques and financial supervision directly contributed to the growth of leverage and product innovation associated with the outbreak of financial crisis. The crisis was a direct result of policy rent-seeking and capture: private interests simultaneously reshaped both market and governance in line with their own perceived utility functions. The real cost of risk was successfully transferred to the public domain as ultimate guarantor of financial system integrity. The model predicts that similar policy rent-seeking will dominate the reform process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a methodology for estimating the risks and consequences of possible future increases in tropical cyclone intensities due to climate change that would allow policy makers to relatively quickly evaluate the cost of different mitigation strategies. The methodology simulates future tropical cyclones in East Asia by modifying the intensity of historical tropical cyclones. It then uses a Monte Carlo Simulation to obtain the expected economic loss for a certain area due to winds of a given strength. The methodology outlined has a range of applications, and the present paper shows as an example the calculation of the expected cost of mitigation of the adverse effects of climate change in Japan. The physical or first order economic damage of tropical cyclones is evident and well documented. However, it less clear whether an increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones and the subsequent economic consequences are likely to have human security implications. There are additional economic costs when sustained wind speeds are higher than 30 knots (55.56 km/h), a level that generally will lead to a precautionary cessation of many human activities. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, the paper calculates the potential economic costs for the year 2085 under a climate change scenario with a linear one-percent yearly increase in CO2. By using a spatial distribution of economic activity in Japan, it is possible to forecast which parts of the country are likely to experience the highest non-first order loss risk. This research methodology is particularly interesting in developing countries, such as the Philippines, or Haiti, countries with resource dependent livelihoods and much more vulnerable environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the political consequences of economic openness is presented. It discusses the hypothesis of clarity of responsibility. It presents the statistical model and data used to analyze how economic openness affects the economic voting. It examines the validity of the hypothesis of clarity of responsibility.

A conference paper about the use of business economics theories in understanding failing states is presented. It explores literature on business economics with focus on theories of firm success, decline, and turnaround. It explains the four key assets of firm effectiveness. It discusses the limitations of business economics metaphors.

This paper examines the legacies of state formation on the patterns of non-state social welfare provision in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa. The paper cautions scholars about conceptualizing non-state social provision too simply as functionally filling the gaps left by neoliberal state retrenchment. First, Morris MacLean finds that neoliberal globalization is narrowing the informal, social relations of reciprocity among extended family members, friends and village neighbors in these two cases. These informal networks of social support are much less extensive and vibrant, even in rural areas, than is frequently presumed by scholars and policymakers. Second, drawing on Goran Hyden's typology of economy of affection-related institutional forms, the paper reveals how different legacies of state social and economic policies during a continuing economic crisis have transformed the mix of "pooling" versus "clientelist" forms of informal institutions of social support in divergent ways in the two cases. The analysis highlights how state institutions are capable of producing tremendous social change in what are usually considered to be quite powerful and resilient social structures, however, the direction and magnitude of these changes is often indirect and unintended. In the conclusion, Morris MacLean demonstrates the importance of analyzing the interaction between formal state and informal non-state institutions in order to understand politics and social welfare in Africa and elsewhere. Contrary to the familiar image depicted of the "weak" or "failed" African state, Morris MacLean argues that the history of state construction and particular path of economic reform powerfully shapes the extent and quality of non-state social welfare provision. Finally, the article considers the implications of these differences in the informal institutions of reciprocity for the exercise of democratic citizenship in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. The paper combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies and is based on over 18 months of fieldwork in two similar regions of neighboring Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of globalization on labor protection in general and employment protection legislations (EPL) in particular. EPL comprise a set of regulations that govern the hiring and firing process, and I investigate how these laws have changed between 1997 and 2006 in 84 countries in various parts of the world. I propose a political economy of labor market institutions in which relevant actors consider the choice between job security determined by the strength of EPL and its alternative in the form of unemployment insurance (UI) simultaneously. I argue that labor's priority is in job security, while employers prefer a flexible labor market above all else. Thus, employers who may usually oppose social policy commitments such as UI actually support the initiation or expansion of UI when they pursue labor market liberalization. This paper finds several empirical patterns which largely confirm these arguments. First, measuring globalization as trade openness and flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), trade openness has a strong and negative correlation with employment protection, while FDI surprisingly does not have any discernable impact. Second, adopting a social insurance policy aimed at stabilizing the income of the unemployed has a strong negative impact on employment protection. Third, the partisanship variable comes up insignificant, which indicates that labor market liberalization is not any more or less likely under partisan dominance. Lastly, strengthening of democratic institutions has a small but significant and negative impact on employment protection. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are few market environments in the U.S.A. today that are "free markets" in a purist sense. Regulatory administration is pervasive, even where the free market slogan reigns. For over twenty years, Wall Street has operated in what is widely viewed as "free market environment," an extensive regulatory infrastructure notwithstanding. The free market attributes of Wall Street reflect not only the relaxation of finance sector laws but also the leeway given to market players to use manipulative practices in the art of price and liquidity discovery. These same players have the opportunity to exploit the fruits of national productivity for private financial gain, their wealth generation not warranted by the facts of their marketplace contributions. The paper argues that the laissez faire approach to the regulation of the financial sector is a serious hazard to our democratic republic, and inconsistent with the objectives of the vast majority of our Constitution's Framers. Likewise, the paper advocates a new era of regulatory improvements for the financial services industry - refinements aimed at halting and recovering the transfer of wealth from workers to investors, especially when the transfer results from leverage and unfair advantage. A strong case can be made that the Bible, fairly read, is supportive of these concerns, as is rational reflection, history, and the philosophy of the Federalist Papers. As it regards evangelicals, it is argued that if evangelicals would read the scriptures objectively and systematically, they would have to draw back from their general tendency of supporting laissez faire approaches to financial markets.To arrive at these views, the paper begins by establishing that a high regard for the utility of the Bible is the distinguishing characteristic of groups commonly viewed as part of the evangelical coalition or movement. Yet, "the evangelical movement has not fleshed out the book's wisdom adequately as it pertains to governmental regulation of finance capitalism." Evangelicals' disposition toward freedom of conscience migrates into an undifferentiated commitment to free markets and limited government. But the scriptures paint a more nuanced picture of God's will in these matters, suggesting that prudent regulation is consistent with the values and methods of God's kingdom. The current regulatory regime in the financial markets is faulty, regulation being overly focused on mechanics and not sufficiently attentive to the outcomes in terms of asset distribution and the sustainable common good. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The financial markets are the crucial test for competing theories about the nature and direction of reform in contemporary advanced capitalist political economies. While some political economists see the financial markets as the drivers of convergence to one model of capitalism, others subordinate the financial markets to firms as drivers of divergence to two varieties of capitalism, and yet others deconstruct the financial markets into coalitions of capital, management, and labor driving divergence. All three downplay the role of the state. This paper argues that by not taking the state seriously, none of these approaches is able to explain the real differences in degree and kind of countries' reform trajectories. Taking the state seriously means considering it in all its complexity, not only as political economic institutional context but also as policy, polity, and politics. It also requires adding one more methodological approach to political economists' usual historical and rational choice institutionalist approaches: discursive institutionalism, which lends insight into the political dynamics of political economic change through ideas and discourse. The paper illustrates with the case of regulatory reform in the financial sector, providing in-depth analysis of recent reforms in the US and the UK. It demonstrates that even in similarly liberal market economies, policy reform trajectories differ as a result of differences in the political as well as political economic ideas and discourses communicated in different political institutional contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely argued that European leaders wishing to improve the competitiveness of their economies must emulate the harsh and regressive neo-liberal policies associated with the Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Margaret Thatcher. The choice is between neo-liberal reform and no reform. My paper challenges this gloomy understanding. Between neo-liberal reform and no reform, a number of European countries have pursued a course of what I call "progressive liberal" reform. By "progressive liberalism," I mean policies that appropriate the goals of neo-liberalism, but pursue these goals in a manner that preserves or even enhances equality and protections for the disadvantaged. After reviewing the challenges that economic liberalization poses to progressive parties, my paper examines progressive liberal reforms in three areas: reductions in social spending, tax cuts, and labor market flexibilization. For each case, I proceed in four steps: 1) I first define the traditional leftist position that opposes liberalizing reform; 2) I next present the neo-liberal position, which favors liberalizing reform with regressive distributional implications; 3) I then show that the liberalizing reform in question harbors a progressive potential; 4) Finally, I describe how the reform has been implemented in practice, in a particular European context, so as to capture many of the benefits associated with neo-liberalism, while safeguarding progressive values and the needs of low-income and disadvantaged groups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is China's growing relative economic power and reputedly rising nationalism translating into an increasing propensity to risk force to settle disputes on favourable terms? Or, is China responding to its rise by reassuring its neighbours that it does not pose a threat, thereby warding off counter-balancing? This paper tests competing hypotheses derived from offensive and defensive realism to address this question. It looks at three case studies: maritime disputes regarding the Spratly islands in the South China Sea, the Senkaku/Diayutai dispute with Japan, and China's policy toward regional multilateral security frameworks such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the Six Party Talks regarding the North Korean Nuclear Issue. This paper finds that China's rising relative capabilities has corresponded to a declining propensity to risk using force to settle disputes and an increasing emphasis on reassuring its neighbours about Beijing's benign intentions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade the primary arguments about civil war have evolved to consider the importance of greed vs. grievance in explaining human behavior (Collier 1999, 2002, 2007, Fearon and Laitin 2003, Oechslin 2006). Greed vs. grievance has been further amended to consider feasibility (economic viability) and motivation (socio-political inequality), with the caveat that greed promotes feasibility of civil war and grievance is more motivational. This paper examines both economic viability and socio-political inequality as greed vs. grievance in the examination of civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa. Creating a nexus between literature on resource wars and renewable natural resource scarcities, this paper analyzes the affect certain resources (both renewable and non-renewable) have on the occurrence, duration, and magnitude of civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper examines oil and diamonds as non-renewable resources that feed the greed and feasibility hypotheses. The paper examines freshwater, arable land, and forested land as renewable natural resource causes of civil war. Renewable natural resources are sources of inequality that lead to grievance and motivation for conflict. We look at the years 1970 to 2000 utilizing data from the Singer and Small (1994) Correlates of War, Civil War data as updated by Collier, et al. (2007). We will use cross-sectional time-series models to test the impact of greed vs. grievance hypotheses on the occurrence, duration and magnitude of civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa. Preliminary indications find a stronger case is made for grievance and motivation hypotheses in the explanation of civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a statistical technique to estimate how the effects of political institutions on economic performance vary across different sets of circumstances. Recent work using a Schumpeterian growth paradigm (Aghion and Howitt, 2005) suggests that there exist different stages of economic growth and that the effect of any given set of institutions potentially varies across these stages. Catching up to the technological frontier, for example, requires that countries absorb and implement existing technologies, while continued growth at the technological frontier requires innovation of new technologies. Countries must shift from "implementation-enhancing institutions" to "innovation-enhancing institutions" in order to sustain growth. Additionally, there exists a third set of countries where institutions are so poor that neither implementation nor innovation takes place systematically. Use of this growth paradigm thus offers a method for developing context-dependent predictions concerning the relationships between political institutions and economic performance, representing a significant departure from typical approaches that apply a single economic growth model across all countries and times. Using a dataset covering 82 countries from 1960-2000, the statistical technique developed in this paper simultaneously estimates a separate set of coefficients on the key explanatory variables for each of these three stages of growth along with a weighting function that that indicates the extent to which each model applies to a particular country-year. The result is a much fuller description of the ways in which political institutions affect economic outcomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a multi-player and multi-front Colonel Blotto game in which one player, A, simultaneously competes in two disjoint Colonel Blotto games, against two sep- arate opponents, 1 and 2. Prior to competing in the games, players 1 and 2 have the opportunity to form an alliance to share their endowments of a one-dimensional resource (e.g., troops, military hardware, money). This paper examines "non-cooperative" alliances in which only individually rational ex ante transfers of the resource are allowed. Once these transfers take place, each alliance member maximizes his payoff in his respective Colonel Blotto game, given his resource constraint and player A's allocation of its endowment across the two games. No ex post transfers are enforceable. Remarkably, there are several ranges of parameters in which endogenous unilateral transfers take place within the alliance. That is, one player gives away resources to his ally, who happily accepts the gift. Unilateral transfers arise because they lead to a strategic shift in the common opponent's force allocation away from the set of battlefields of the player making the transfer, towards the set of battlefields of the player receiving the transfer. Our result demonstrates that there exist unilateral transfers for which the combination of direct and strategic effects benefits both allies. This stands in stark contrast to the previous literature on alliances (see Sandler and Hartley, 2001), which relies on the assumption of pure or impure public goods. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to an understudied phenomenon, transnational political alliances (TPA), which occur when multinational corporations cooperate with local companies to influence public policies of the host government. The paper first explores the economic and political sources of TPAs, their structures, and the obstacles to their formation. It then examines TPAs through the context of China, a critical case because of a hostile political environment that discourages TPAs. However, the surprisingly common occurrence of TPAs in China indicates the power of economic incentives for political cooperation across national boundaries. Such alliances do not explain why China originally opened its doors to international trade and investment, but it may explain why the doors are remaining opening. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the politics of banking reform in developing countries during the 1990s. Electoral competition helps to explain whether countries were likely to implement regulatory reforms after banking crises. The potential for wide swings in electoral support in highly competitive democracies should favor consumers, who benefit from reforms, and harm vested producer groups that prefer forbearance. Where electoral competition is muted, producer groups - such as a bankers' coalition - should benefit more than consumers given their economic and political power. To evaluate these arguments, this paper examines patterns of post-crisis regulatory reform implementation in Mexico, Venezuela, and South Korea during the 1990s. Within and cross-country evidence is consistent with the arguments. Surprisingly, it indicates that in countries with low levels of intra-party electoral competition, i.e. those with disciplined political parties, governments engaged in regulatory forbearance even with fierce inter-party competition. Crony financial capitalism seems less likely in multiparty settings with undisciplined parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to provide a new perspective on postwar conservative one-party dominant regimes, this paper proposes to compare the changing allocation patterns of government credit for local governments investments in France, Japan and Italy from the 1950s through the 1970s. Before the 1980s, the three countries shared fundamental features of their political structures, including centralized center-local relations, a "statist" political economy, a major role for public financial institutions and long-term dominance by a conservative party. However, the fates of three one-party dominant regimes are considerably different. Most importantly, the Gaullist predominance ended much earlier than the others', in the mid-1970s. Why did only the Gaullists fail to perpetuate their dominance? This paper proposes to work out this puzzle by focusing on the patterns of credit allocation from the center to local governments. "Public money" (government subsidies and grants, as well as state bank loans) flowing down from the central government has the power to transform local political configurations. Just as a river conveys an accumulation of sand downstream and finally makes fertile deltas, so the constant flow of ample state credits to local governments over a long time will allow a governing party to consolidate its local electoral base. This is how we usually explain the amazingly long and stable dominance of the Japanese Liberal Democrats (LDP) and the Italian Christian Democrats (DC). However, the French Gaullists failed to establish lasting structures for local dominance during their 16-year exercise of power. The contrast implies that the Gaullist regime had a different structure and strategy for local dominance. In addition, the Japanese and Italian regimes contrast sharply with each other in terms of the degree of partisanship; the DC regime was based on extensive politicization (or colonization) of the bureaucracy and local politics, while the LDP seemingly strengthened its dominance by eliminating partisanship from both fields. In short, each of the three postwar conservative one-party dominant regimes had its own logic and structure, distinct from the others'. This paper proposes to analyze these distinctive structures by following the changing patterns of credit allocation. These credit allocation patterns had their own dynamism, which contributed to determining the course of development of each regime, including its longevity.Summary of each Section If the Gaullists failed to perpetuate their dominance, it was because of the frequent shifts in the credit allocation patterns in 20th-century France. So, using a vast amount of archival documents, Section 1 of the paper is devoted to explaining why all these changes were made to credit allocation patterns. This explanatory model is constructed around two principal factors, that is, the power balance between the bureaucracy and the parties, and the size and viability of local governments. Then, Section 2 shows how these two factors explain the development of the credit allocation patterns in the three countries, and compares the characteristics and fate of each regime. The differing credit allocation patterns meant that the structure for local dominance was completely different from one regime to another. If the Italian DC regime was essentially based on a decentralized system of local party clientelism, the French Gaullist national Majority was supported by the bureaucracy's hegemony over local politics... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can institutions survive changing power alignments? Are they - as some have suggested - mere representations of participants' capabilities at a point in time, and unable to affect state behavior thereafter? On the contrary, this paper argues that institutions are often be used to entrench existing power relationships. In particular, I suggest that previous winners - even after losing some of their power - are adamant about protecting earlier gains. States and private domestic actors, in an effort to retain or override the advantages that institutions afford them or their opponents, play an important role in their preservation or elimination.Theories of power transition abound in international relations research (DiCicco and Levy 1999; Gilpin 1981; Organski 1958), but they seldom arise in the study of international political economy and international law. If anything, changing power dynamics have been used to explain the weakness of international institutions, which are viewed as "epiphenomenal" and subject to change in light of their participants' altered capabilities (Downs, Rocke, and Barsoom 1996; Krasner 1991). In contrast, historical institutionalists have focused on the entrenchment of institutions that benefit powerful actors. This paper recognizes that change and stagnation both occur in international treaty negotiations, and it endeavors to determine why negotiators defer to existing law in some situations and not others. I hypothesize that deference is most frequent when the parties find themselves in a complex negotiating environment, particularly when the parties' capabilities have declined over time relative to other countries. In addition, this reliance on the status quo is most likely with greater involvement of private actors in the existing institution and subsequent negotiations.I test these hypotheses using an original dataset of over 200 randomly selected multilateral treaties. The results support the notion that declining powers are able to retain the status quo, particularly in complex negotiating environments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regarding the impact of the late 1990s accession of the new members (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam) on Southeast Asian economic integration, the benefits of enlargement are clearly projected in terms of economics rather than politics. As a result of the expansion, a larger regional market, with a nearly additional 300 million people and increased investment, is expected to create a higher level of intra-trade for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The overall trend of intra-ASEAN trade has been increasing since the 1990s due to a potential of economic complementarities between old and new members. However, the lack of domestic infrastructure in the new members, the lack of domestic and transnational transportation within and between members, and lack of regional standardization obviously pose barriers to economic integration. In particular, the weak structure and institution of ASEAN regionalism itself may be one of the major obstacles to regional economic integration that creates ineffective integrative policies after the enlargement. This paper will argue that even though the existing quantitative-empirical works project a trade creation and economic integration in Southeast Asian region after the enlargement, these works seem to be only a short-term result because of an ignorance of political consideration. The new ASEAN members are likely to prefer a weak and informal regional institution and to support the existing use of the 'ASEAN Way' - non-interference policy - due to constraint of their domestic politics and international relations. Also, the weak and informal institution, as we know from the existing literature on ASEAN economic cooperation since the early 1980s, has negatively influenced economic cooperation and integration in the region. Therefore, regarding (1) the preference of the new members to a weak institution and (2) the negative effect of weak institution on economic integration, the impact of ASEAN enlargement could result in maintaining a weak ASEAN institution or even weakening the institution, which leads to an impediment of economic integration in terms of policy coordination. Thus, this paper will illustrate that it is significant to place an institutional factor in the analysis of the relationship between the impact of enlargement and economic integration. In other words, the relationship of enlargement and economic integration should be bridged by an institutional factor, - reflecting a political constraint in economic integration. Enlargement issue in recent literature on Asian and ASEAN regionalism has focally conducted research in a historical-descriptive style, but lacked a systematic framework to look at the actual impact of enlargement on economic integration. My study proposes to conduct research emphasizing the deepening integration after ASEAN enlargement, and aims to examine two missing points in the literature. First, I will propose a systematic framework to study enlargement based on the institutionalism theory. Second, I will fill in the gap in Asian regionalism literature by investigating the relationships of the impact of enlargement, regional institution, and economic integration in the case of ASEAN. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper lays out an argument that, to the extent that the urban politics subfield has moved from the center to the periphery of political science, it is because the subfield has neglected to develop a contemporary, theoretically grounded version of cultural explanation to go along with its attention to institutions and political economy. The paper then introduces such a cultural theory - one that crosscuts the usual class and race divisions in urban inquiry. The paper shows how taking this form of explanation seriously could bring the study of local electoral politics closer to themes that are energizing the American politics field more broadly. It also shows that more serious attention to cultural explanation promises to enrich our efforts to understand urban development politics and policymaking and conflicts involving the politicization of routine city services by radicalized activists as well as conflicts over more purely morality issues. The paper concludes with an acknowledgment of a remaining challenge - conceptualizing how race and ethnicity relate to the new conceptualization of unconventional versus traditional sub-culture in the U.S. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper employs multilevel modeling to assess the importance of income inequality on the demand for redistribution in a sample of 22 European countries. The paper is important for two lines of research; comparative public opinion research, and research of the comparative political economy of redistribution. With regard to the latter, I find, in accordance with the Meltzer-Richard model, that income inequality is positively associated with redistribution demand. Previous research has shown that (pre-transfer) income inequality is not a strong predictor of cross-country differences in redistribution among developed countries. The results in this paper indicate that this is not because redistribution demand is insensitive to inequality levels. With regard to comparative public opinion research, the results reveal that income inequality and religious fractionalization are important country-level predictors of individual redistribution demand, whereas I find no support for the welfare state regime hypothesis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much discussion in the varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature whether currently a general move into liberal direction can be identified or that the different political economies are, because of the complementary character of their elements, more or less locked into the paths they have developed on. Other topics of discussion are which forces and mechanisms bring about change and whether the dichotomous typology of only a liberal and a coordinated variety is sufficient for adequately analyzing politico-economic reality and its processes of change. This paper wants to contribute to these discussions by taking recent changes in the Dutch political economy as point of departure. Since varieties of capitalism in the most prominent view of Hall and Soskice (2001) are conceived of as entities the parts of which are complementary the paper will also have to come to terms with change in configurations of complementarities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) literature's difficulties in accounting for the full diversity of national capitalisms and in explaining institutional change result at least in part from its tendency to downplay state action and from its rather static, binary division of capitalism into two overall systems. This paper argues first of all that by taking state action-used as shorthand for government policy forged by the political interactions of public and private actors in given institutional contexts-as a significant factor, national capitalisms can be seen to come in at least three varieties: liberal, coordinated, and state-influenced market economies. But more importantly, by bringing the state back in, we also put the political back into political economy-in terms of policies, political institutional structures, and politics. Secondly, the paper shows that although recent revisions to VOC that account for change by invoking open systems or historical institutionalist incrementalism have gone a long way toward remedying the original problem with regard to stasis, they still fail to explain institutional change fully. It is not enough to turn to rational choice institutionalist explanations focused on the micro-foundations of action, as some do, since this does not get at the dynamics behind changing preferences and innovative actions. For this, I argue, it is necessary to add discursive institutionalist explanations focused on the role of ideas and discourse. Bringing the state back into the substantive account of capitalism actually promotes this methodological approach, since an important part of politics is political communication and deliberation on the choice of policies within given institutional contexts, economic as well as political . ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of economic effects on the vote is a commonplace, but the stability of the effect across space and time is not. Particularly intriguing is the possibility that a major effect of campaigns is to prime the economy, and so increase its salience as election day approaches. The body of evidence for this claim is small, only weakly specified, and is already controverted. The paper approaches this question by examing the ten rolling cross-sectional election surveys conducted in Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and the United States since 1988. The basic approach centres on an examination of over-time changes in the impact of economic retrospections on vote choice over the course of each election, The theoretical stakes in the analysis are considerable. Economic priming is presented as a case in point for elections as mainly enlightening events, so the paper will assess the generality of the enlightenment claim. Microfoundations for economic voting remain understudied in general, a shortfall that this paper addresses by introducing real time. This attention to over-time dynamics combined with the variety in electoral settings should also help elucidate the institutional conditions for economic voting. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does public finance shape political institutions? Recent scholarship has focused on "fiscal contracts," exchanges of resources for representation, and the corollary that states obtaining revenue from resource rents are less democratic. This paper shifts the focus to liberalism. It finds good statistical support for a simplified model of "no representation without taxation." It qualifies the idea that mobile taxable assets prompt the rise of parliaments and finds strong statistical support for the notion that direct taxes promote liberal governance. It discusses ideological and structural reasons why public credit held domestically ought to be a more reliable foundation for liberal institutions than credit held abroad. Finally, it considers new "fiscal contracts" in contemporary politics: foreign aid with governance conditions and conditional worker remittances by migrants. The paper concludes by examining the organizational problem of these "contracts" historically, emphasizing the central importance, for liberalism, of the distinction between rights and privileges. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central question in the study of democratic polities is the extent to which elite opinion about public policy shapes and potentially manipulates public opinion on those issues. Existing empirical estimates of the effect of elite communication on individual opinion formation are, however, characterized by a number of serious methodological problems, and consequently, there is little in the way of compelling evidence that elites actually influence individual opinions. This paper proposes an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect of elite messages on public support for European integration employing instrumental variable estimation. The paper presents three main empirical results. First, we find that more negative elite messages about European integration do indeed decrease public support for Europe. Our analysis suggests that OLS estimates that ignore the endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement problems that typically occur in estimating the effects of elite communication are biased, underestimating the magnitude of the effect of elite messages by fifty percent. Second, we find no evidence that this effect of elite messages varies for more politically aware individuals. Third, our estimates are inconsistent with a mainstreaming effect in which political awareness increases support for Europe in those political settings in which elites have a favorable consensus on the benefits of integration. This result is in sharp contrast to the OLS analysis that incorrectly suggests a mainstreaming effect. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching abroad poses unique challenges and rewards for US-based academics. This paper provides a primer that addresses these challenges, drawing from my experience teaching a course on the political economy of international migration in Morelia, Mexico. The paper provides recommendations on how U.S.-based instructors can make their teaching abroad experiences as productive as possible for students and themselves. Challenges included housing, language, the distracting local environment and a diverse classroom drawn from universities, community colleges and the host institution. Opportunities included numerous guest speakers, fieldtrips and the first hand accounts of local students. This paper serves as a useful primer for readers unfamiliar with study abroad programs, for faculty interested in applying to such programs, or for those already preparing to teach abroad. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]