Bridging Qualified Majority and Unanimity Decision-Making in the EU

The EU has tried to bridge decision making by qualified majority and unanimity over the years by expanding qualified majorities (consensus) or by making unanimities easier to achieve. I call this decision-making procedure q-“unanimity” and trace its history from the Luxembourg compromise to the Lisbon Treaty, and to more recent agreements. I analyze the most recent and explicit mechanism of this bridging (article 31 (2) of the Lisbon Treaty) and identify one specific means by which the transformation of qualified majorities to unanimities is achieved: the reduction of precision or scope of the decision, so that different behaviors can be covered by it. I provide empirical evidence of such a mechanism by analyzing legislative decisions. Finally, I argue that this bridging is a ubiquitous feature of EU institutions, used in Treaties as well as in legislative decision-making

Partidos Políticos y Coaliciones de Gobierno en las Américas

This paper focuses on the coalition formation process in presidential systems. It shows that institutions and party positions influence the formation of government coalitions. It argues that presidents will tend to include in their cabinets parties that are politically close to their own policy positions, and will be more inclined to do so when Congress is relatively strong and made up of legislators with significant oversight authority. We corroborate our arguments with data from 13 countries with presidential systems in the Americas. Este artículo se centra en el proceso de formación de coaliciones en sistemas presidenciales. Se demuestra que las posiciones de los partidos y de las instituciones influencian la formación de coaliciones gubernamentales. Se argumenta que los presidentes tienden a incluir dentro del gabinete a aquellos partidos que tienen posiciones cercanas a él y que dicha tendencia es más fuerte cuando el congreso fuerte –compuestos por legisladores profesionales capaces de una fiscalización significativa– que cuando enfrentan instituciones más débiles. Los argumentos se corroboran con datos de 13 países con sistemas presidenciales en las Américas.

Long constitutions are not garrulous, but they are restrictive

Following the Scottish independence ‘No’ vote, many have suggested that the only way to clear up the heightening degree of incoherence that characterises the UK’s constitutional settlement is to start afresh with a constitutional convention, given its final expression through a new written Constitution. George Tsebelis and Dominic J. Nardi, Jr show that any such a constitution should aim for brevity, given that longer constitutions are both more rigid, yet in practice more often altered, according to evidence from OECD countries

International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd