Explaining Instability in the Stability and Growth Pact

The Stability and Growth Pact clearly failed to prevent the euro crisis. We contend that the failure was due largely to the ability of the Member States to undermine the Pact’s operation. The European Commission served as a “watchdog” to monitor fiscal performance. The Member States themselves, however, collectively had the ability to change the content of the reports for individual states. We confirm the expectation that powerful Member States had the most success in undermining the role of the Commission. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find supporting evidence for our argument that governments with euroskeptic populations behind them were also more successful in weakening the Commission’s warnings. These results have broader theoretical implications concerning which mechanisms explain country-specific outcomes under a shared rule. Another contribution is the creation of a new data set of European Commission assessments of Member State economic programs and Council of Minister revisions

The timely administration of justice: using computational simulations to evaluate institutional reforms at the CJEU

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) faces a growing backlog of cases and delays in administering justice. Identifying the factors that prolong the resolution of cases is critical for designing successful institutional reforms. In this article, we use a Bayesian model to identify the characteristics of cases, judges, and the Court's internal procedures that affect the duration of cases. Then, we run computational simulations that use our model to estimate the likely effect of potential institutional reforms aimed at reducing the Court's backlog. We offer policy recommendations based on our findings. Our methodology can be tailored to study the efficiency of other domestic and international courts.</p

RV Traveler’s Pull Factors to Campgrounds in Leisure Tourism

The purpose of this study was to identify the underlying structures of RV traveler’s pull factors to campgrounds and confirm the results by using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis with multiple data sets. The results identified the following five dimensions of the campground traveler’s key attributes: Activity, Amenity, Essentials, Price, and Store. The “Essentials” factor had a grand mean of 4.47, which was the highest among the five factors. Therefore, campground owners and managers should pay extra attention to maintaining a high quality on those essential attributes first, before considering adding or promoting any other items