Persuasion and Consensus: Dissent Management in the European Parliament

What explains the variation of dissent levels among party groups in the European Parliament and why are party group cohesion levels on the whole so high? How do party group leaders manage dissent and how does this impact the form of dissent expression by individual MEPs? To provide answers to these questions, I conducted field research consisting of eighty-four elite-centered interviews, and observations of thirty-three party group meetings. The research was divided into two phases in the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012 in Brussels, Belgium and Strasbourg, France where the parliament holds its sessions. Dissent is more broadly defined in the study to encompass outlets for expression prior to plenary (party group meetings) and options in plenary such as voting to abstain. In addition, cohesion is defined more broadly to encompass members' attitudes toward group unity (See Brown 2000) as well as the extent to which the party group is unified in roll-call votes. I find that an MEP's ideology at the individual level in conjunction with a whip structure and socialization processes at the group level explains variation in dissent levels among party groups. MEP ideology refers to the proximity of an MEP's views to those of the party group on a given subject (See Hix et al. 2007). However, ideology does not explain instances where a dissenting MEP changes their position or decides to express dissent in a less costly manner. Accordingly, party group leaders acting as legislative entrepreneurs develop strategies and construct forums to facilitate dissent management. Dissent management or whip structures function as an early alert system and consist of clearly assigned roles to group leaders (president, vice-presidents, etc.) and group forums within a communication network in which leaders (and staff) share information and collaborate to ensure maximum support for the group line. Socialization processes facilitate lobbying efforts and consist of norms governing dissent announcement by MEPs as well as a shared conceptualization of the (party) group identity. In this sense, MEPs adopt the group line or select a less costly form of dissent because it is the appropriate or norm of behavior

Bargaining in the Shadow of the Best-Interests Standard: The Close Connection Between Substance and Process in Resolving Divorce-Related Parenting Disputes

This essay, written for a Symposium celebrating the child custody scholarship of Professor Robert Mnookin, examines the close connection between changes in substantive child custody doctrine and changes in custody dispute resolution processes over the past 30 years. Part I of the article explores how the widespread adoption of an unmediated “best interest of the child” standard, and the ensuing rejection of the sole custody paradigm, precipitated a shift from adversarial to non-adversarial resolution of divorce-related parenting disputes. Part II of the essay reverses the direction of the analytic lens and considers how the shift from adversarial to non-adversarial dispute resolution has affected both the substantive legal norms that govern custody contests and the role of law and lawyers more generally in the custody decision-making process. The essay suggests that the shift from adjudication and adversary negotiation to mediation and collaboration as the preferred means of resolving divorce-related parenting disputes has delegalized custody decision-making -- initially by disaggregating the various components of child custody and ultimately by eroding the importance of custody as an essential legal concept in disputes between parents. The primary purpose of the analysis is not to evaluate the desirability of these changes, but to underscore the close connection between changes in substantive legal doctrine and changes in dispute resolution processes

The Effects of Partisan Alignment on the Allocation of Intergovernmental Transfers. Differences-in-Differences Estimates for Spain

In this paper we test the hypothesis that municipalities aligned with upper-tier grantor governments (i.e., controlled by the same party) will receive more grants than those that are unaligned. We use a rich Spanish database, which provides information on grants received by nearly 900 municipalities during the period 1993-2003 from three different upper-tier governments (i.e., Central, Regional and Upper-local). Since three elections were held at each tier during this period, we have enough within-municipality variation in partisan alignment to provide differences-in-differences estimates of the effects of alignment on the amount of grants coming from each source. Moreover, the fact that a municipality may simultaneously receive grants from aligned and unaligned grantors allows us to use a triple-differences estimator, which consists of estimating the effects of changing alignment status on the change in grants coming from the aligned grantors relative to the change in grants coming from the unaligned ones. The results suggest that partisan alignment has a sizeable positive effect on the amount of grants received by municipalities.grant allocation, alignment, electoral competition

"Moving on without the Constitution"

[From the introduction]. The Constitution would have consolidated the EP's legislative powers, extending them, in particular, to new areas such as agriculture, and ensuring that codecision would become the normal EU legislative procedure. In the continuing absence of such a Constitution, the Parliament has not been sitting still, but has continued to be highly active in both legislative and related fields. Parliament has thus responded in three principal ways, which are all explored in the present paper. Firstly, it has sought to maximize its existing legislative powers, by playing decisive roles in areas of exceptional legislative complexity such as the Services Directive and the REACH chemicals legislation and by occasionally pushing out the frontier of existing rules such as in two recent first reading “rejections” of Commission legislative proposals. Secondly, it has also been carving out a stronger role for itself in other areas which have become of ever greater importance at a time of low legislative activity by the Commission. Among these are the legislative planning process itself, cross-cutting issues such as the Lisbon Agenda and the Sustainable Development Strategy, and also the Better Regulation Agenda (simplification, impact assessment, implementation, etc) which has been so heavily pushed by the Barroso Commission. It has forged stronger links than ever before with national parliaments. It has also been seeking to improve its own internal procedures, not least through its recently established Working Party on the Reform of EP Working Methods. Finally, the Parliament has pushed for new inter-institutional agreements (IIA's) to resolve a number of practical problems that have arisen, and to help codify existing rules. In this context, it has already reached agreement with the other institutions on important new groundrules on comitology, falling short of what is in the Constitution, but still representing a significant advance on the EP's previous powers in this area. The Parliament has also reached agreement with Commission and Council on an updated joint declaration on practical codecision procedures

Structured to Fail: Lessons from the Trump Administration\u27s Faulty Pandemic Planning and Response

The Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder that poorly designed government can be a matter of life and death. This article explains how the Administration’s careless and delayed response to the crisis was made immeasurably worse by its confused and confusing reallocation of authority to perform or supervise tasks essential to reducing the virus’s ravages.After exploring the rationale for and impact of prior federal reorganizations responding to public health crises, the article shows how a combination of unnecessary and unhelpful overlapping authority and a thoughtless mix of centralized and decentralized authority contributed to the Trump Administration’s slow and ineffective effort to stem the virus’s tide. Furthermore, the Administration’s earlier dismantling of the structure built in the wake of prior outbreaks disabled a mechanism crucial to any federal response to public health threats—its ability to coordinate the efforts of public and private actions to effectively combat the crisis.The article identifies numerous valuable lessons about government organization from the COVID-19 experience that should guide policymakers’ deliberations in the likely event that they embark upon an effort to address the mistakes plaguing the Trump Administration’s dismal response. More generally, it uses the government’s response to COVID-19 to explore a number of insights about how to better think about and configure government institutions to prepare for and manage complex social problems like a pandemic

Agencies Obligation to Interpret the Statute

Conventionally, when a statute delegates authority to an agency, courts defer to agency interpretations of that statute. Most agencies and scholars view such deference as a grant of permission to the agency to adopt any reasonable interpretation. That is wrong, jurisprudentially and ethically. An agency that commands deference bears a duty to adopt what it believes to be the best interpretation of the relevant statute. Deference assigns to the agency, rather than to a court, power authoritatively to declare what the law is. That power carries with it a duty to give the statute the best reading the agency can. Notwithstanding substantial jurisprudential disagreement about what it means to give a statute its best interpretation, an agency does not abide its role when it seems to achieve anything less. An agency is legally and ethically obligated to privilege what it views as optimal statutory interpretation over what it considers to be optimal policy. If the two conflict, as they sometimes will, the agency must act consistently with the former to the detriment of the latter. To behave otherwise is to fail to adhere to principles of legislative supremacy and fidelity to law

Practice guide for fiduciary (trust) accounting: A Guide for accountants who perform fiduciary Accounting Services

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1293/thumbnail.jp