Volume 9, Issue 1

Economic discourses are dominated by stylized facts and other statements of fact concerning the institutional economic order. Yet, there is still very little knowledge on how exactly facts are formed in economic discourse, how they serve as a means for rendering issues “economic”, and how they legitimize, renew and change institutions. This article introduces a theoretical model for studying the relationships between the presentation of institutional facts, institutional change and processes of economization. The model is based on John R. Searle’s theory of speech acts, on the so-called discursive institutionalism in political science and the study of institutional entrepreneurship as a political activity. The model is then applied on a limited scope to study the construction of institutional facts concerning public sector economies in three Finnish government and consultant reports. The key empirical findings conclude that the most common institutional facts are produced either by generalizing individual facts for various institutionalized activities or by combining one fact into various meanings. These facts are used to legitimize various policies, including cuts in public spending, strengthening the power of experts, increasing budgetary stability, lengthening working careers and the increase in public sector productivity.

This article deals with issues of transitional justice in selected Central European countries. The relationship between the mode of democratic transition and the mechanisms and pace of transitional justice processes is discussed. The main focus is on the analysis and comparison of transitional justice issues in three Central European countries – the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. The authors conclude that the mode of democratic transition is not as important as other political factors, such as the presence or absence of leftist parties in the government.

The purpose of this paper is to sketch an anthropology for political studies. Political science relies extensively on behavioral models borrowed from economics (taking human action to be rational and self-interested), sociology (explaining behavior in terms of norm-abidance and conformity), or even psychology (seeing actors as being motivated by their emotions, neurosis etc.). Strikingly, political science has not endeavored to develop an anthropology for its own purposes. Does it mean that there are no motivational structures that are distinctively relevant to political action? The paper argues that this is not the case. In fact, there is a distinctive conception of a human actor present in political science, even if implicitly, i.e., the conception of an actor who aims at what she perceives to be the common good, and guides her behavior along the lines of collective rationality. The paper aims at providing the first steps towards laying the theoretical and empirical foundations of such a model.

Since the 1990s, transitional justice has become almost synonymous with the concern for the rights of victims. Compared with the Nuremberg Trials – in which victims did not even appear as witnesses – this is a major change and one for which an explanation will be sought here with recourse to neo-institutional research perspective. The core argument put forward in this article is that the change in transitional justice towards a stronger inclusion of victims could be explained as the result of the expansion of a rationalist world culture in which a model of victimhood is created and diffused worldwide, primarily through international organizations and NGOs. This notion of global victimhood developed only after World War II, following the global diffusion of human rights, the change in academic conceptions of traumatic experiences and the advocacy of International NGOs, so that the development of normative pressure on national transitional justice processes placed victims at the centre of processes dealing with the past.

Since the end of the Cold War new practices of external interferences in the domestic affairs of states have revealed an unprecedented relationship between international intervention and the promotion of democracy. In fact, the new generation of peace-building missions is oriented toward the democratization of the target country. Moving from the paradoxes brought about by the goal of democratization, the paper offers an explanation of the power-sharing between international officials and local political actors in the target country. On the one hand, a democratic approach to international intervention fosters self-determination, tends to grant sovereignty and independence and considers the international mandate as temporary. On the other hand, the goal of democratization entails the establishment of enduring neo-trusteeships, violating the sovereignty and independence of the target-state. The paper focuses on three case-studies (Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor) to assess how those paradoxes lead to conflicting attitudes by international officials – who both concede and retain essential powers over local political actors – creating a power-sharing in the target country.

A great number of scholarship has been devoted to examining the impacts of domestic politics to foreign policies. Many studies have also examined the impacts of international politics to domestic politics, focusing on democracy-building or constructing political institutions within the framework of the state-building. However, such scholarship has not focused enough on the impacts of international politics to opposition forces and their relationship to political conflict in the post-conflict era. In countries that have experienced regime change, the formerly exiled opposition forces that became the ruling parties had changed their policies under the influence of the host country and other foreign actors in international politics during their exile. This paper sheds light on the two main Iraqi Islamist parties, the Da‘wa Party and the SCIRI, and clarifies their changing policies under the influence of the host countries and international politics. It also makes clear how these changes were reflected by the political conflict in post-war Iraq. Scholars of Iraqi politics have discussed the reasons of political conflict in post-war Iraq as following: (1) sectarian conflicts as a result of the artificiality of the Iraqi state; and (2) struggles for the mobilization of votes in elections. Against these arguments, this paper considers the historical and international impacts on the formerly exiled Islamist ruling parties as a more significant factor in explaining the reasons for political conflict in post-war Iraq. By analyzing primary sources on segments of the Da‘wa Party and the SCIRI after their exile, the following two facts are clarified: First, the two Islamist parties came to have differing ideology as well as policy as a result of the influences from the host country and international politics, which reflected the political conflict in post-war Iraq. The SCIRI maintained good relations with the host country, Iran, and had its original Islamist ideology, while the Da‘wa Party, not being able to maintain cooperative relations with the host country, consequently changed its Islamist ideology to a more nationalist ideology under the direct influence of Western society. In the post-war era, the SCIRI attempted to construct a regional government in the south based on a transnational Islamist ideology, while the Da‘wa Party attempted to construct a centralized government based on a nationalism that aimed to strengthen national unity. Second, the international societies’ intervention into the Iraqi opposition forces created mutual distrust, which in turn prolonged political conflict in post-war era. Therefore, an analysis of the historical and international impacts on opposition forces is necessary to understand the reasons for the political struggles in the post-conflict countries.

The empowerment of chief executives has been apparent in several parliamentary democracies in recent decades. However, few accounts have been produced of developments in recent Norwegian cabinets. The aim of this article is two-fold. First, changes regarding the concentration of decision-making power in Norwegian cabinets in the past 15 years are examined and, second, how political factors have contributed to the concentration of power is also examined. Drawing on interviews with 19 ministers from the Bondevik II and Stoltenberg II cabinets, the article finds that collegial elements of cabinets have been weakened, and there has been a centralization of power around an inner cabinet, the so-called subcommittee, consisting of the prime minister and the party leaders. The article also shows how political distances between coalition parties and the cabinet’s parliamentary basis have affected the concentration of power.

Referendum, the instrument which allows the citizens to directly decide on important public issues, is the original form of democratic decision-making procedure. It may be perceived as a welcome and necessary complement to representative democracy, especially in the current crisis of confidence in political institutions and parties. However, leaving the decisions to citizens may also cast doubt on the ability and credibility of the elected representatives; the referenda may become a public vote of confidence or distrust in the initiator(s). This article considers the implementation of the referendum in history, as well as the conception of it in political theory and political practice, and implementation of the referendum in (post-Communist) Central Europe. To this end, a comparative analysis of six Central European representative democracies is presented, from the perspective of past national experience with direct democracy, and related national issues and regulatory solutions.

This paper examines internet use as a personal political device among Members of the Knesset (hereafter: MKs). We will first describe the social and political trends which promote Israeli and worldwide parliamentarians’ use of personal internet platforms as a communication medium. Description of these trends will be accompanied by examples from 17th-Knesset MKs’ websites. We will also review the changes which took place in MKs’ use of personal internet tools, in accordance with the identified developmental phases. Finally, we will discuss the distinction between Internet use as a means of political communication during campaigns and Internet use as a platform for interaction with the public while in office.

European Impact Assessment (IA) has been in place for the last 10 years. By and large, this is deemed best practice within the context of the various endeavours in the direction of “Better Regulation” which have burgeoned in the last few years or so internationally. IA is based on common guidelines for all Commission services; the sharing of methodologies for impact analysis of the proposals; various forms of cooperation among General Directorates. In this article it is argued that IA has served to enhance the coordination role of the Secretariat-General and a more integrated decision-making process within Directorates. These outcomes have been favoured by a set of mechanisms triggered by the design of the procedure.

The quantitative strand of social policy research suffers from a double deficit: on the one hand, analyses of aggregate expenditure dominate, and on the other hand, most studies of replacement rates focus on unemployment or sickness benefits, while pensions are excluded. This paper addresses the said deficit firstly by discussing the pension sectors’ theoretical peculiarities and by proposing two hypotheses: one on the retrenchment of pension replacement rates and one on the role played by political parties in implementing it. Secondly, after a brief literature review and an outline of our methodological approach, we present regression results of replacement rate changes in 18 developed democracies. Our findings show considerably smaller cuts of pensions than of unemployment or sickness benefits, and striking differences regarding partisan effects between the sectors.

The article demonstrates that the big electoral defeat for Danish social democracy in the 2001 elections was not solely the consequence of the immigration issue, but of the welfare state reforms implemented by the Social Democratic government (1993–2001). Social democratic core voters opposed the reforms since they broke with the decommodification paradigm and turned away from social democracy. Against the arguments from the literature, the left-wing competitor Socialist People’s Party’s could not benefit from the reforms given its function as supporter party. Rather, the reforms caused the realignment of social democratic core voters with the Liberals and the Danish People’s Party having expanded their voter base in 2001 as a consequence of the welfare reforms.

Electoral institutions shape the incentive that elected representatives have to cultivate a personal vote, a geographically concentrated personal vote in particular. But are electoral institutions able to make representatives do what they would not do otherwise and to make them not do what they otherwise would have done? Using data from the cross-national partirep MP survey, it is demonstrated that electoral institutions shape elected representatives’ local orientation. That local orientation decreases as district magnitude grows – regardless of what representatives think about political representation. But representatives’ conceptions of representation do shape their uptake in the legislative arena from their contacts with individual constituents. The effect of the electoral incentive grows stronger as elected representatives think of representation as a bottom-up rather than a top-down process.

One of the features of organized Austrian capitalism is a tightly-knit corporate network (Austria Inc.) that facilitates control and coordination between companies. In the 1980s the subsidiaries of the Austrian industry-holding stock company (ÖIAG) and the largest banks were the central hubs of this network. Now, 30 years later, ÖIAG has privatized nearly all its companies and banks have not only merged and sold their equity interests, but also partly joined international business groups. Nevertheless, Austria Inc. has not eroded. By analyzing a network of personal connections between 1976 and 2000, I investigate in this article how the network has reconfigured to allow Austria Inc. to perpetuate. The analysis suggests three explanations: Despite extensive privatization of the economy, Austrian ownership continues to prevail within the network; the banking group Raiffeisen filled the gap that was opened by the withdrawal of the state from the economic sphere; members of the Austrian elite still use board meetings for social networking.

The article deals with the health systems of Lithuania and Estonia by evaluating their historical context, describing their development after regaining independence, presenting data on how the health care resources are distributed and what are the results of these systems. Although health care in these countries is financed at a similar level, the Estonian health system exceeds its Lithuanian (and Latvian) counterparts in many important aspects. It is argued that an essential impact on the differences in health care of the Baltic countries has been exerted by decisions regarding the financing and governance of the health system at the early period of the post-communist transformation.