Political culture in the Holy Roman Empire

This article reviews six essay collections and one monograph on late medieval and early modern political culture in the Holy Roman Empire. Following a general survey of historiographical trends and a discussion of the specific contributions of the works under review (covering topics from international relations, state formation and the role of language to representative assemblies and the exercise of power in towns and villages), it attempts a preliminary sketch of the basic parameters of pre-modern politics. Prominent insights include shifts in the balance between oral, ritual and written communication, the significance of informal bonds and the negotiated quality of developments at all levels of government. The conclusion assesses the potential of the ‘new’ political history and calls for renewed efforts to link discourses, representations and perceptions to the norms, structures and socio-economic conditions with which they interacted

Commercial Culture, Political Culture and the Political Economy of Trade Policy: The Case of Japan

In this paper we present a model of endogenous trade-policy formation which captures crucial aspects of the Japanese commercial and political culture. We analyze the influence of the portrayed cultural traits and show that cultural idiosyncrasies are important determinants of trade policy formation; especially the complex interaction of the two types of cultures is shown to have significant consequence for the policy outcome. Contrasting our model's behavior with the stylized facts of Japanese politics, we arrive at the conclusion that the model's behavior is compatible with the observed (trade) policy positions held by Japanese politicians over the last fifty years.

Political Culture

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from WileyThis article critically discusses the field of political culture research. It reviews the historical development of the concept of political culture since the 1950s. It examines some of the key authors and approaches in political science and political sociology. Special attention is paid to the conceptual and methodological innovations of the last few decades, including neo-Tocquevillian, multi-causal and neo-Durkheimian approaches to the study of the concept

Political Culture and Discrimination in Contests

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of political culture and of valuation asymmetry on discrimination between the contestants. The weights assigned to the public well being and the contestants' efforts represent the political culture while discrimination is an endogenous variable that characterizes the mechanism allocating the prize. We consider situations under which the optimal bias of the designer is in favor of the contestant with the larger or smaller prize valuation and examine the effect of changes in the political culture and in valuation asymmetry on the designer's preferred discrimination between the contestants. Focusing on the two most widely studied types of contest success functions (deterministic all-pay-auctions and logit CSFs), we show that an all-pay auction is always the preferred CSF from the point of view of the contest designer. This result provides a new political-economic micro foundation to some of the most commonly used models in the contest literature.rent seeking, political culture, discrimination, contests, logit contest success function, All-Pay-Auction

Public sector efficiency and political culture

The capability of a country's public sector to provide high-quality goods and services in a cost-effective way is crucial to fostering long-term growth. In this paper we study the determinants of public service efficiency (PSE) and in particular the role of citizens' political values. Indeed, we argue that citizens' willingness to invest time and effort monitoring public affairs is necessary if policy-makers are to be held accountable for what they do and deterred from wasting public resources. Contrary to other papers, our empirical analysis exploits within-country variation, therefore reducing the risk of omitted variable bias and implicitly controlling for differences in formal institutions. First, we compute PSE measures for several public services (namely education, civil justice, healthcare, childcare and waste disposal) for the 103 Italian provinces; then we show that a higher degree of political engagement increases PSE. This remains true even after controlling for the possible endogeneity of political culture. In our analysis, values specifically related to the political sphere are kept distinct from generically pro-social values. Our results suggest that the latter have no independent impact on PSE.public spending, efficiency, culture

Political Culture and Monopoly Price Determination

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of monopoly price. Our proposed game of endogenous monopoly-price setting extends the literature on monopoly-price, monopoly rent-seeking contests and monopoly rent-seeking rent-avoidance contests by (i) determining the monopoly price such that it maximizes a composite utility function that depends on two components: expected social welfare and lobbying efforts. The welfare component has a positive or no effect on the utility while the lobbying efforts have a positive, negative or no effect on the utility (ii) introducing the political culture of the government and clarifying its role in the endogenous determination of monopoly price. In the proposed model the single parameter representing political culture is the weight assigned to the enhancement of social welfare. Our main concern is with the study of the relationship between this parameter and the proposed monopoly price and, in turn, the rent-seeking rent-avoidance efforts of the potential monopoly and the consumers and their aggregate expected benefit.

Political Culture and Discrimination in Contests

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of political culture and of valuation asymmetry on discrimination between the contestants. The weights assigned to the public well being and the contestants' efforts represent the political culture while discrimination is an endogenous variable that characterizes the mechanism allocating the prize. We consider situations under which the optimal bias of the designer is in favor of the contestant with the larger or smaller prize valuation and examine the effect of changes in the political culture and in valuation asymmetry on the designer's preferred discrimination between the contestants. Focusing on the two most widely studied types of contest success functions (deterministic all-pay-auctions and logit CSFs), we show that an all-pay auction is always the preferred CSF from the point of view of the contest designer. This result provides a new political-economic micro foundation to some of the most commonly used models in the contest literature.Rent Seeking, Political Culture, Discrimination, Contests, Logit contest success function, All-Pay-Auction