The Social Choice of EU Treaties: discrepancies between voter prefernces and referndum outcomes in Denmark

The article applies Social Choice theory to analyse new and so far undiscovered aspects of the Danish referendums on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and 1993. The article queries whether the amended Maastricht Treaty adopted in 1993 was, in fact, the most preferred alternative for a majority of Danish voters. A reconstruction of voter preferences regarding the political alternatives in the European Union — the Maastricht Treaty, the amended Maastricht Treaty and the Status Quo — reveals that the amended Maastricht Treaty, despite the fact that it was the Condorcet winner and won the 1993 referendum, may not have been preferred by a majority but was probably the most preferred alternative only for a minority of the electorate

The constitution of economic growth: Testing the prosperity effects of a Madisonian model on a panel of countries 1980‐2000

Political scientists and economists increasingly agree that institutions may influence economic growth, but there is little general agreement on what institutions tend to produce what consequences. We apply public choice insights for a theoretical analysis that may be termed “Madisonian”: Institutions that divide political power between multiple veto players and institutions that protect private property rights may be expected to have positive effects on economic growth. We analyze data from a panel of countries for the period 1980‐2000 in order to study the relationships, including a series of “extreme bounds” analyses in order to test the robustness of the statistical results. We find that particularly the presence of secure private property has a significant, positive and robust effect on economic growth and that when outliers are excluded a configuration where political power is dispersed among more veto players has a similar effect.Constitutions; democracy; economic growth; veto players; public choice; constitutional economics

Seizing political opportunity: how the European Commission becomes a ‘policy entrepreneur’

Political actors need to be nimble and respond to the opportunity to reform old policies and initiate new ones. Manuele Citi and Mogens K Justesen look at how the European Commission takes advantage of politically opportune moments (the ‘gridlock interval’) in the European Parliament to put forward new legislation. As a ‘policy entrepreneur’, it is therefore able to navigate European institutions and bring about change

Vote buying and redistribution

Vote buying is a form of political clientelism involving pre-electoral transfers of money or material benefits from candidates to voters. Despite the presence of secret ballots, vote buying remains a pervasive phenomenon during elections in developing countries. While prior literature has focused on how vote buying is enforced by parties and political candidates and which types of voters are most likely targeted, we know much less about the behavioral spillover effects of vote buying on citizens’ demand for redistribution and contributions to the provision of public goods. In this paper, we provide evidence on how vote buying causally affects voters’ candidate choice, support for redistribution, and public goods provision. Using data from a laboratory experiment in Kenya, we find that vote buying is a double-edged sword for candidates using clientelist strategies: it attracts votes from those who were offered money and accepted it, but it also leads to negative reactions from those who rejected the offer as well as those who were not offered money. In line with its effect on voting behavior, vote buying has negative effects on subjects’ evaluations of the vote-buying candidate. Vote buying significantly reduces individuals’ stated preferences for more government spending on police and law enforcement—yet, surprisingly, not on other welfare areas such as unemployment benefits or health. We also find that open ballots—but not vote-buying campaigns—reduce individuals’ willingness to contribute to public goods provisions

Empirisk analyse af kollektiv handling: Nobelprisen i økonomi 2009 til Elinor Ostrom

This article provides an introduction to the work of Elinor Ostrom, focusing on those parts of her research for which she awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. Ostrom received the Nobel Prize mainly for her analyses of how groups of individuals organize and develop institutions to handle collective action problems. Ostrom also identifies a set of conditions that affect the likelihood that individuals successfully solve collective action problems. In this way, Ostrom provides a major contribution to the study of collective action in the social sciences.

Empirisk analyse af kollektiv handling: Nobelprisen i økonomi 2009 til Elinor Ostrom

This article provides an introduction to the work of Elinor Ostrom, focusing on those parts of her research for which she awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. Ostrom received the Nobel Prize mainly for her analyses of how groups of individuals organize and develop institutions to handle collective action problems. Ostrom also identifies a set of conditions that affect the likelihood that individuals successfully solve collective action problems. In this way, Ostrom provides a major contribution to the study of collective action in the social sciences.

A Time Series Analysis of Eight Sectors, 1984-2012

Over the last three decades, EU regulation of the internal market has become highly pervasive, affecting practically all the domains of European citizens’ lives. Many studies have focused on understanding the process and causes of regulatory reform. However, these have typically been small-scale or small-n studies, with no or limited attempts to analyse the more general sources of regulatory reform. In this paper, we focus on the determinants of stability and change in EU regulation. We develop an original dataset of 169 pieces of legislation (regulations, directives and decisions) across eight different sectors, and analyse the dynamics of regulatory reform in the EU. Using time series analysis of count data, we find evidence that the number of winning coalitions in the Council and the size of EU membership have a significant impact on regulatory reform in the EU. However, the political (left-right) composition of EU’s legislative bodies has no significant impact on the process of regulatory reform