From Elections to Democracy: Building Accountable Government in Hungary and Poland by Susan Rose‐Ackerman

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97210/1/j.1538-165X.2006.tb01462.x.pd

Measuring changes in Vatican social policy from Papal documents

There is much debate about how, when, and why the Roman Catholic Church has changed its emphasis on secular states and social issues. Unfortunately, large-scale, systematic research on papal policy has not yet been done, despite widely available papal documents on the subject. Using automated multilingual topic modeling and other methods of automated text analysis, we analyze a large multilingual corpus of papal encyclicals, bulls and other documents spanning the past 2000 years. We aim to use this corpus to better understand the evolving posture of the Church with respect to modern states and social policy. We adjudicate between two competing propositions, 1) that the Church’s views change in response to doctrinal develop- ments only (the na ̈ıve doctrine hypothesis), and 2) that the Church emphasizes social policy when it feels threatened, as a way of reasserting its moral authority. Additionally, we investigate the hypothesis that Church and state only became dis- tinct concepts in modern history. This work, aside from adjudicating major debates surrounding the Church’s emphases on social policy in secular states, also introduces a new method of topic modeling using multilingual corpora

Post-Communist Competition and State Development. CES Central & Eastern Europe Working Paper, no. 59, December 2004

Theories of institutional development have tended to view discretion, or the leeway to act within institutional bounds, as an often unintended consequence of agency design and institutional specification. Yet the post-communist states show that discretion is a fundamental goal of institutional creation among competing elites. In turn, while political competition has been identified as a key constraint on discretion in institutional creation, widely-used indicators of political competition are inadequate. As post-communist democracies show, the number or seat share of political parties matters far less than what parties do in parliament. The key factor is a robust opposition: a clear, credible, and contentious threat to governing parties. Such opposition leads to the rise of formal institutions that both minimize the discretion necessary for rent-seeking, and favor equitable distributional outcomes