Commitment or expertise? Technocratic appointments as political responses to economic crises

Why do prime ministers or presidents appoint non-elected experts, also known as technocrats, during economic crises? Do they appoint them for their expertise or for their commitment to pro-market reforms? Answering this question is crucial for understanding and predicting the longer-term role of technocrats in democracies. With the aid of unique data on the political and personal background of finance ministers in 13 parliamentary and semi-presidential European democracies we show that commitment, not expertise is the primary drive of technocratic appointments during major economic crises. Technocrats are preferred over experienced politicians when the latter lack commitment to policy reform. An important implication of our findings is that technocratic appointments to top economic portfolios in West European countries are unlikely to become the norm outside economic crises, assuming economic crises are short-lived and not recurring

Internal representations and operations in the visual comparison oftransformed patterns: Effects ofpattern point-inversion, positional symmetry, and separation

Abstract. A scheme for visual pattern recognition is described. It is supposed, amongst other things, that patterns are internally represented by the visual system in terms of local features, spatial-order relations between local features, and global spatial relations specifying approximate pattern position with respect to the point of fixation. It is further supposed that there are two distinct types of internal operation that may be applied to the components of internal representations in the process of pattern comparison: typically a discrete spatial-order-reversal operation and a continuous position-shift operation. Some general predictions of the scheme are tested against data obtained in an experiment using random-dot patterns that were subjected to rigid transformations and presented at various locations along the horizontal meridian. Patterns were presented sequentially, in pairs, to subjects in a "same-different " comparison task. Pattern pairs were to be responded to as "same " if they were identical or related by point-inversion (planar rotation through 180 ~) or responded to as "different". Extending earlier findings, the present results showed that "same"detection performance for identical and point-inverted patterns depended differentially on the distance between the patterns and the symmetry of the pattern positions about the point of fixation in a manner consistent with the predictions of the scheme. * Part of the work reported in this study was carried out while DHF was on leave from the University of Keele in 1983 a