Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Institutional Design (institutional + design)
Selected AbstractsThe Life and Death of Public Organizations: A Question of Institutional Design?GOVERNANCE, Issue 3 2010ARJEN BOIN Why do some public organizations grow old and others die young? Since Herbert Kaufman first posed this question, considerable research has been devoted to answering it. The findings of that research suggest that the design of new public organizations affects, to a significant degree, their survival chances. In this article, we test whether and how "design factors" affected the durability of the so-called New Deal organizations initiated under FDR's first term. Our findings confirm that design factors do matter, but their effects change over time. We draw out some potential implications for institutional design and sketch a renewed research agenda to determine why some public organizations survive environmental pressure whereas others succumb to it. [source] Building Democratic States after Conflict: Institutional Design RevisitedINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2010Stefan Wolff First page of article [source] Policy Legitimacy and Institutional Design: Comparative Lessons for theEuropean UnionJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 1 2000David McKay Research on the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU) tends to focus on general questions of institutional design rather than the link between institutions and specific policy responsibilities. This article argues that, following EMU, a high degree of fiscal centralization is not tenable given theabsence of EU-wide citizen support for a greatly enhanced central role and European political parties operating in a genuine European legislature. Given this, it is appropriate to examine fiscal relations in existing federations to discover which, if any, approximates to the likely post-EMU pattern in the EU. The experience of five federations , Australia, Canada the US, Germany and Switzerland suggests that most can be learnt from the Swiss model which is characterized by a high degree of vertical fiscal autonomy, and state (cantonal) interpenetration of national decision-making. The article concludes that, while Switzerland cannot serve as a model for the EU, the Swiss experience does show that a modern industrial state can successfully operate in the context of a high degree of fiscal decentralization. [source] Globalization and Democratization: Institutional Design for Global InstitutionsJOURNAL OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2006Margaret Moore First page of article [source] Neo-liberalism and the Decline of Democratic Governance in Australia: A Problem of Institutional Design?POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2005Ian Marsh This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate changing patterns of democratic governance, at least in Westminster-style parliamentary settings, and possibly more generally. It has two specific purposes: first, to propose a paradigm for evaluating the empirical evolution of democratic governance; and second, to illustrate the explanatory potential of this paradigm through a mini-case study of changing patterns of governance in one particular polity. The conceptual framework is drawn from March and Olsen's eponymous study (1995) from which polar (,thick' and ,thin') forms of democratic governance are derived. Four conjectures about its evolution are then explored. First, in its mass party phase, the pattern of democratic governance approximated the ,thick' pole. Second, the subsequent evolution of democratic politics has been in the direction of the ,thin' (minimalist or populist) pole. Third, the cause of this shift was a failure to adapt political institutions to changing citizen identities, which was masked by the ascendancy amongst political elites of the neo-liberal account of governance. Fourth, the paper considers the means by which democratic governance might be renewed. The approach is applied to explain changes in Australian politics over recent decades. [source] Political Ontology and Institutional Design in Montesquieu and RousseauAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2010David Lay Williams Historians of political thought have been puzzled by Montesquieu's simultaneous appeals to the diversity of human practices and eternal norms of justice. Isaiah Berlin famously referred to this as an impassable "contradiction" burdening his work. Careful examination of Rousseau's appropriations from and developments on Montesquieu, however, reveal that these observations are not merely reconcilable,they provide a fruitful way to approach legislation and constitution drafting. This is accomplished by understanding his employment of the principle of transcendent constrained indeterminacy. [source] Practical Knowledge and Institutional Design in India's Affirmative ActionANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 2 2000Frank De Swart First page of article [source] Optimism, Pessimism, and Coalitional Presidentialism: Debating the Institutional Design of Brazilian DemocracyBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 1 2010TIMOTHY J. POWER Research on Brazil's political institutions has gone through several phases since democratisation in 1985. In the early years of democracy, pessimism prevailed with regard to governability. This view gave way in the mid-1990s to a more optimistic view that stressed two innovations of the Constitution of 1988: enhanced presidential power and centralised legislative procedure. In recent years, a third phase of research has shifted attention to the crucial role of inter-party alliances. These analytical approaches have converged into an emerging research programme on ,coalitional presidentialism', which places executive-legislative relations at the centre stage of macropolitical analysis. This article reviews the three phases of the debate and reflects on future research agendas. [source] Institutional design and the closure of public facilities in transition economiesTHE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 3 2002William Jack As part of the reforms of their systems for financing and delivering health care, many transition economies, particularly in central and eastern Europe, have adopted national insurance funds that are institutionally separate from ministries of health. Most of these countries have also grappled with the problem of restructuring the delivery system, especially the need to reduce hospital capacity. Although improving the performance of medical care providers through a shift from passive budgeting to explicitly incentive mechanisms is important, why this change in financial relations between the government and providers could not be implemented simply by reforming the role of health ministries is not obvious. This paper presents an explicit rationale for the separation of powers between the regulator (the ministry of health) and the financing body (the insurance fund), based on the inability of a single agency to commit to closing hospitals. JEL classification: L51, P20, P35, I18. [source] New policies create a new politics: issues of institutional design in climate change policyAUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL & RESOURCE ECONOMICS, Issue 2 2010Henry Ergas Institutional design focuses on the task of providing accountability and effective monitoring of decision-making by bodies vested with the coercive powers of the state in a context where information is inherently limited, costly to acquire and asymmetrically distributed. This paper focuses on issues of institutional design in the context of climate change policy. It examines proposals advanced in the June 2008 Draft and Final Reports of the Garnaut Climate Change Review (,Garnaut Reports'), and in the Government's July 2008 Green Paper and December 2008 White Paper on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (,Green and White Papers') with respect to how revenues raised by the sale of emissions permits would be used; and second, the proposed governance arrangements for the emissions trading scheme. [source] Defining Political Community and Rights to Natural Resources in BotswanaDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2009Amy R. Poteete ABSTRACT Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), once presented as the best way to protect common pool natural resources, now attracts a growing chorus of critiques that either question its underlying assumptions or emphasize problems related to institutional design. These critiques overlook connections between the definition of rights to natural resources and membership in political communities. The potential for competing definitions of political identity and rights across natural resources arises when property rights regimes differ across natural resources and these different systems of rights appeal to alternative definitions of community. In Botswana, the entangling of natural resource policy with identity politics contributed to a partial recentralization of CBNRM in 2007. [source] The Life and Death of Public Organizations: A Question of Institutional Design?GOVERNANCE, Issue 3 2010ARJEN BOIN Why do some public organizations grow old and others die young? Since Herbert Kaufman first posed this question, considerable research has been devoted to answering it. The findings of that research suggest that the design of new public organizations affects, to a significant degree, their survival chances. In this article, we test whether and how "design factors" affected the durability of the so-called New Deal organizations initiated under FDR's first term. Our findings confirm that design factors do matter, but their effects change over time. We draw out some potential implications for institutional design and sketch a renewed research agenda to determine why some public organizations survive environmental pressure whereas others succumb to it. [source] Treating International Institutions as Social EnvironmentsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2001Alastair Iain Johnston Socialization theory is a neglected source of explanations for cooperation in international relations. Neorealism treats socialization (or selection, more properly) as a process by which autistic non-balancers are weeded out of the anarchical international system. Contractual institutionalists ignore or downplay the possibilities of socialization in international institutions in part because of the difficulties in observing changes in interests and preferences. For constructivists socialization is a central concept. But to date it has been undertheorized, or more precisely, the microprocesses of socialization have been generally left unexamined. This article focuses on two basic microprocesses in socialization theory,persuasion and social influence,and develops propositions about the social conditions under which one might expect to observe cooperation in institutions. Socialization theories pose questions for both the structural-functional foundations of contractual institutionalist hypotheses about institutional design and cooperation, and notions of optimal group size for collective action. [source] Policy Legitimacy and Institutional Design: Comparative Lessons for theEuropean UnionJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 1 2000David McKay Research on the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU) tends to focus on general questions of institutional design rather than the link between institutions and specific policy responsibilities. This article argues that, following EMU, a high degree of fiscal centralization is not tenable given theabsence of EU-wide citizen support for a greatly enhanced central role and European political parties operating in a genuine European legislature. Given this, it is appropriate to examine fiscal relations in existing federations to discover which, if any, approximates to the likely post-EMU pattern in the EU. The experience of five federations , Australia, Canada the US, Germany and Switzerland suggests that most can be learnt from the Swiss model which is characterized by a high degree of vertical fiscal autonomy, and state (cantonal) interpenetration of national decision-making. The article concludes that, while Switzerland cannot serve as a model for the EU, the Swiss experience does show that a modern industrial state can successfully operate in the context of a high degree of fiscal decentralization. [source] Political Macroeconomics: A Survey of Recent DevelopmentsJOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 5 2000Manfred Gärtner The paper surveys political macroeconomics, covering its development from Rogoff's conservative central banker to the most recent discussions of monetary policy and institutional design. Topics include the inflation-stabilization trade-off, central bank independence with escape clauses and overruling with costs, inflation targets, performance contracts for monetary authorities, and the consequences of output persistence for these issues. Further topics are the political business cycle when output is persistent, the political macroeconomics of fiscal policy, the government spending bias, and the game-theoretic interaction between fiscal and monetary policy. All work is discussed within a coherent analytical framework. [source] Fragmentation of Power and the Emergence of an Effective Judiciary in Mexico, 1994,2002LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2007Julio Ríos-Figueroa ABSTRACT Legal reforms that make judges independent from political pressures and empower them with judicial review do not make an effective judiciary. Something has to fill the gap between institutional design and effectiveness. When the executive and legislative powers react to an objectionable judicial decision, the judiciary may be weak and deferential; but coordination difficulties between the elected branches can loosen the constraints on courts. This article argues that the fragmentation of political power can enable a judiciary to rule against power holders' interests without being systematically challenged or ignored. This argument is tested with an analysis of the Mexican Supreme Court decisions against the PRI on constitutional cases from 1994 to 2002. The probability of the court's voting against the PRI increased as the PRI lost the majority in the Chamber of Deputies in 1997 and the presidency in 2000. [source] Thinking Outside the (Ballot) Box: Informal Electoral Institutions and Mexico's Political OpeningLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2003Todd A. Eisenstadt ABSTRACT This article studies the development of informal bargaining tables to mitigate postelectoral conflicts in some 15 percent of Mexico's local elections between 1989 and 2000, even as formally autonomous electoral commissions and courts were being constituted. By documenting the dual institutions that resulted, the study qualifies theories of institutional design that take actor consent for granted. It argues that in the Mexican case and perhaps others, elections, particularly subnational elections, are focal points for informal bargaining over rules that are the true motors of protracted transitions. It finds electoral institutions to be critical to democratization, but for reasons beyond those given by most institutionalists. [source] On the Tasks of a Population Commission: A 1971 Statement by Donald RumsfeldPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2003Article first published online: 20 APR 200 In its most familiar form, analytic assessment of the impact of demographic change on human affairs is the product of a decentralized cottage industry: individual scholars collecting information, thinking about its meaning, testing hypotheses, and publishing their findings. Guidance through the power of the purse and through institutional design that creates and sustains cooperating groups of researchers can impose some order and coherence on such spontaneous activity. But the sum total of the result may lack balance and leave important aspects of relevant issues inadequately explored. Even when research findings are picked up by the media and reach a broader public, the haphazardness of that process helps further to explain why the salience of population change to human welfare and its importance in public policymaking are poorly understood. The syndrome is not unique to the field of population, but the typically long time-lags with which aggregate population change affects economic and social phenomena make it particularly difficult for the topic to claim public attention. A time-tested, if less than fool-proof remedy is the periodic effort to orchestrate a systematic and thorough examination of the causes, consequences, and policy implications of demographic processes. Because the most potent frame for policymaking is the state, the logical primary locus for such stocktaking is at the country level. The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future was a uniquely ambitious enterprise of this sort. The Commission was established by the US Congress in 1970 as a result of a presidential initiative. Along with the work of two earlier British Royal Commissions on population, this US effort, mutatis mutandis, can serve as a model for in-depth examinations conducted at the national level anywhere. Chaired by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the Commission submitted its final report to President Richard M. Nixon in March 1972. The background studies to the report were published in seven hefty volumes; an index to these volumes was published in 1975. Reproduced below is a statement to the Commission delivered on April 14, 1971 by Donald Rumsfeld, then Counsellor to President Nixon and in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity. (Currently, Mr. Rumsfeld serves as US Secretary of Defense.) The brief statement articulates with great clarity the objectives of the Commission and the considerations that prompted them. The text originally appeared in Vol. 7 (pp. 1-3) of the Commission's background reports, which contains the statements at public hearings conducted by the Commission. National efforts toward comprehensive scientific reviews of population issues have their analogs at the international level. Especially notable on that score were the preparatory studies presented at the 1954 Rome and 1965 Belgrade world population conferences. The world population conferences that took place in Bucharest in 1974, in Mexico City in 1984, and in Cairo in 1994 were intergovernmental and political rather than scientific and technical meetings, but they also generated a fair amount of prior research. The year 2004 will break the decadal sequence of large-scale international meetings on population, and apart from the quadrennial congresses of the IUSSP, which showcase the voluntary research offerings of its members, none is being planned for the coming years. A partial substitute will be meetings organized by the UN's regional economic and social commissions. The first of these took place in 2002 for the Asia-Pacific region; the meetings for the other regions will be held in 2003-04. The analytic and technical contribution of these meetings, however, is expected to be at best modest. National efforts of the type carried out 30 years ago by the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future would be all the more salutary. [source] Social funds and decentralisation: optimal institutional designPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2006Jean-Paul Faguet Abstract Most of the 60+ developing countries that have established social funds (SFs) are decentralising their governments as well. But the question of how to tailor SFs,originally a highly centralised model,for a decentralising context has received relatively little attention in the literature. We first examine evidence on the ability of SFs to adapt to a decentralised context. We then lay out the implications of decentralisation for SF institutional design step-by-step through the project cycle. The topic is doubly important because social funds can increase their effectiveness, and the sustainability of their investments, by reorganising internal processes to take advantage of the political and civic institutions that decentralisation creates. Local government has an informational advantage in local needs and characteristics (time and place), whereas SFs have access to better technology and knowledge of sectoral best practice. The key is to create institutional incentives that best combine these relative advantages. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] The Freedom of Desire: Hegel's Response to Rousseau on the Problem of Civil SocietyAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2010Jeffrey Church The ever-growing body of literature on civil society can benefit from a return to the original theoretical articulation and defense of the concept in the work of G.W.F. Hegel. Specifically, this article suggests that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential critique of civil society remains unanswered and argues that Hegel responded with a sweeping and sympathetic institutional design that remains relevant today. Hegel agrees with Rousseau that commercial society aggravates the dissatisfaction of its members, and that educating individual desire through institutional design is necessary to solve this difficulty. However, modern states need not adopt Rousseau's extreme and impracticable solution. Hegel's concrete, market-based associations of civil society render desires satiable and elevate them to accord with the common good, while still maintaining the freedom and distinctness of a pluralistic modern society. [source] Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative PerspectiveAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2009Frank R. Baumgartner We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment. [source] New policies create a new politics: issues of institutional design in climate change policyAUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL & RESOURCE ECONOMICS, Issue 2 2010Henry Ergas Institutional design focuses on the task of providing accountability and effective monitoring of decision-making by bodies vested with the coercive powers of the state in a context where information is inherently limited, costly to acquire and asymmetrically distributed. This paper focuses on issues of institutional design in the context of climate change policy. It examines proposals advanced in the June 2008 Draft and Final Reports of the Garnaut Climate Change Review (,Garnaut Reports'), and in the Government's July 2008 Green Paper and December 2008 White Paper on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (,Green and White Papers') with respect to how revenues raised by the sale of emissions permits would be used; and second, the proposed governance arrangements for the emissions trading scheme. [source] Payments Settlement: Tiering in Private and Public SystemsJOURNAL OF MONEY, CREDIT AND BANKING, Issue 5 2009CHARLES M. KAHN payment systems; limited enforcement; settlement risk; tiering What are the benefits provided by a payment system? What are the trade-offs in public versus private payment systems and in restricted versus open payments arrangements? Modern payment systems encompass a variety of institutional designs with varying degrees of counterparty protection. We develop a framework that allows for an examination and comparison of payment systems, and specification of conditions leading to their adoption. We relate these conditions to the design of present large-value payment systems (Fedwire, CHIPS, TARGET, etc.). [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||