Collaboration in a Cross-National Context

Policies as diverse as tariffs, exchange rates, and unemployment insurance vary across democratic countries. In an attempt to explain this cross-national variation, scholars have turned to the institutions that govern countries’ elections. The institutions that regulate elections, also known as an electoral system, vary significantly across democracies. Can these varied electoral institutions explain the diversity of policies observed? This question remains unanswered. Despite a growing body of research, little consensus exists as to precisely how electoral institutions affect policy. Why is it so difficult to untangle the effects of electoral institutions on economic policy? One reason for the confusion may be the imprecise manner in which electoral institutions are often measured. Better measures of electoral systems may improve our understanding of their policy effects. Improved theories that clarify the causal mechanism(s) linking electoral systems to policy outcomes will also help to clarify the relationship between electoral systems and policies. To better understand the policy effects of electoral institutions, both theoretical and empirical work must take seriously contextual factors, such as geography, which likely mediate the effects of electoral institutions. Finally, different types of empirical evidence are needed to shed new light on the policy effects of electoral institutions. It is difficult to identify the effects of electoral systems in cross-national studies because of the many other factors that vary across countries. Examining within-country variations, such as changes in district magnitude, may provide useful new insights regarding the effects of electoral institutions on policy.

Across Canada, tens of thousands of municipal politicians govern thousands of municipalities, making important policy decisions in domains ranging from policing to planning to environmental policy. Despite a recent flowering of research on municipal policy, administration, and politics, we still lack a great deal of basic information about municipal governance in Canada, including core municipal democratic institutions. In this research note, we provide a comprehensive overview of basic electoral institutions in every elected municipal government in Canada, including an estimated count of the number of municipal governments and elected municipal politicians in Canada, a description of the distribution of ward, at‐large, and hybrid systems and district magnitudes, and an overview of municipal council sizes. We then describe how these institutional features vary by province, population size, and population density. We conclude by discussing the opportunities for new research in municipal politics, policy, and public administration that are revealed by our comprehensive survey.

Louisa Garrett Anderson, daughter of Britain's first woman doctor, has been largely forgotten today despite the fact that her contribution to the women's movement was as great as that of her mother. Recognized by her contemporaries as an important figure in the suffrage campaign, Anderson chose to lend her support through high-profile action, being one of the few women doctors in her generation who risked their professional as well as their personal reputation in the fight for women's rights by becoming a suffragette - in her case, even going so far as to spend a month in prison for breaking a window on a demonstration. On the outbreak of war, with only the clinical experience she had gained as outpatient surgeon in a women's hospital, Anderson established a series of women-run military hospitals where she was a Chief Surgeon. The most successful was the Endell Street Military Hospital in London, funded by the Royal Army Medical Corps and the only army hospital ever to be run and staffed entirely by women. Believing that a doctor had an obligation to take a lead in public affairs, Anderson continued campaigning for women's issues in the unlikely setting of Endell Street, ensuring that their activities remained in the public eye through constant press coverage. Anderson's achievement was that her work played no small part in expunging the stigma of the militant years in the eyes of the public and - more importantly - was largely instrumental in putting women doctors on equal terms with their male colleagues.

Coordination failure and the politics of tribes: Jordanian elections under SNTV

Methodological problems associated with selection bias and interaction effects have hindered the accumulation of systematic knowledge about the factors that explain cross-national variation in the success of extreme right parties. The author uses a statistical analysis that takes account of these problems to examine the effect of electoral institutions, unemployment, and immigration on the support for these parties. The data set used in this analysis is new and spans 19 countries and 165 national elections. There are four substantive conclusions. The first is that it is important to distinguish between neofascist and populist parties on the extreme right because their fortunes depend on different factors. The second is that populist parties do better in countries where the district magnitude is larger and more seats are allocated in upper tiers. The third is that although immigration has a positive effect on populist parties irrespective of the unemployment level, unemployment only matters when immigration is high. Finally, there is evidence that the permissiveness of the electoral system mediates the effect of immigration on populist parties.

How Electoral Institutions Change the Influence of World Trade Integration on Trade Policies

This research investigated the proposition that variation in the structure of the political party can account for variation in the type of policy produced. The conditions under which legislators of the governor's party supported his legislative requests in sixteen sessions chosen for different degrees of party cohesion were investigated. The findings indicate that there is very little correlation between the legislator's district primary or election competition and his support for the governor's requests. The Democratic governor is supported by legislators from the districts in which he himself has strong party support as measured by his primary vote. The Republican governor's support cannot be geographically located in this manner. With respect to socioeconomic legislation, the pattern of support for a successful governor does not depend upon socioeconomic variables within the legislators' districts, but if the governor cannot control his legislators, socioeconomic variables provide the major basis for the factions which develop.

The potential usefulness of research on women's issues to the policymaking process is discussed in the context of the arguments both for and against trying to increase the policy utility of social science research in general. J. Weiss's concepts of “intrinsic,” “intellectual,” and “political usefulness” are presented and applied to specific policy issues of importance to women. The paper examines ways in which researchers could enhance the policy relevance of their research and ways in which the psychology establishment could encourage the development of policy-relevant research. The middle section of the paper describes the large array of roles and settings for social scientists in the federal policy structure, treating the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in turn. The history of and dilemmas created by the “Brandeis brief” are presented. The last section of the paper presents some important policy issues affecting women in the next five years and illustrates how one particular area of research could be made more useful.

Collaboration strategies entail information sharing and other varied forms of cooperation that are mutually beneficial to the company and stakeholder groups. This study addresses the specific types of collaboration used in the fashion industry while also examining strategies that have been most successful for fashion companies and perceived benefits of collaboration from the customer perspective. In the present study we define fashion companies and brands as collaborators and their partners or stakeholders as collaboratees. We define collaboration as a cooperative relationship where more than two companies, brands or individuals provide customers with beneficial outcomes utilizing their own competitive advantages on an equal basis. Collaboration strategies entail information sharing and other varied forms of cooperation that are mutually beneficial to the company and stakeholder groups. Through collaboration, fashion companies have pursued both tangible differentiation, such as design and technology applications, and intangible differentiation such as emotional and psychological benefits to customers. As a result, collaboration within the fashion industry has become an important, value creating concept. This qualitative study utilized case studies and in-depth interview methodologies to examine customers' attitudes concerning collaboration in the fashion industry. A total of 173 collaboration cases were identified in Korean and international markets from 1998 through December 2008, focusing on fashion companies. Cases were collected from documented data including websites and industry data bases and top ranked portal search sites such as: Rankey.com; Naver, Daum, and Nate; and representative fashion information websites, Samsungdesignnet and Firstviewkorea. Cases were collected between November 2008 and February 2009. Cases were selected for the analysis where one or more partners were associated with the production of fashion products (excluding textile production), retail fashion products, or designer services. Additional collaboration case information was obtained from news articles, periodicals, internet portal sites and fashion information sites as conducted in prior studies (Jeong and Kim 2008; Park and Park 2004; Yoon 2005). In total, 173 cases were selected for analysis that clearly exhibited the benefits and outcomes of collaboration efforts and strategies between fashion companies and stakeholders. Findings show that the overall results show that for both partners (collaborator and collaboratee) participating in collaboration, that the major benefits are reduction of costs and risks by sharing resource such as design power, image, costs, technology and targets, and creation of synergy. Regarding types of collaboration outcomes, product/design was most important (55%), followed by promotion (21%), price (20%), and place (4%). This result shows that collaboration plays an important role in giving life to products and designs, particularly in the fashion industry which seeks for creative and newness. To be successful in collaboration efforts, results of the depth interviews in this study confirm that fashion companies should have a clear objective on why they are doing the collaboration. After setting the objective, they should select collaboratees that match their brand image and target market, make quality co-products that have definite concepts and differentiating factors, and also pay attention to increasing brand awareness. Based on depth interviews with customers, customer benefits were categorized into six factors: pursuit for individual character; pursuit for brand; pursuit for scarcity; pursuit for fashion; pursuit for economic efficiency; and pursuit for sociality. Customers also placed more importance on image, reputation, and trust of brands regarding the cases shown in the interviews. They also commented that strong branding should come first before other marketing strategies. However, success factors recognized by experts and customers in this study showed different results by subcategories. Thus, target customers and target market should be studied from various dimensions to develop appropriate strategies for successful collaboration.

Understanding clientelist practices is one of the core issues to unravel to ensure the proper functioning of electoral institutions. This article focuses on the decision of patrons/brokers on who to target, introducing a new norm into the picture – authoritarianism. Building on the theories of norm-based compliance, I argued that authoritarian individuals should be more frequently targeted, as they should be more likely to comply with brokers demands without external monitoring. I posit that this is true because authoritarian individuals should be more willing to submit to the will and demands of authorities (brokers), and because they are likely to evaluate clientelism as morally acceptable and a legitimate electoral strategy. Furthermore, the rate of authoritarian targeting should be higher in institutional settings that limit the overall reach of clientelism. Utilizing Afrobarometer (2011-2013) data for 34 countries, through multilevel regression modelling I show that authoritarian individuals do have a higher chance of being targeted with the strength of this association increasing as the district magnitude rises. This article opens a new avenue of research that introduces individual level authoritarianism into the literature on clientelist targeting and complements the norm-based compliance approach with a focus on a new and potentially influential norm.

Does district magnitude matter? The case of Taiwan

If we follow the reasoning from Chapter 2, a strong party system requires that parties are cohesive, in other words that the elected members of the same party vote in a disciplined way, following the position reached by their party leaders in the parliament. A political party will attract support by making commitments to particular policies or goals that are distinct from the commitments of other parties. If a party is able to work as a highly organised team, it will be able to turn these promises into policy outcomes. If a party is not able to ‘rally its troops’, it will have little chance of shaping policy outcomes, and so will leave its supporters disappointed. Scholars of the EU have hence argued that for transnational parties to increase the democratic accountability of the EU they must be able to act cohesively to implement the policy platforms they announce (e.g. Attinà, 1992; Andeweg, 1995; Hix and Lord, 1997). If voting in the European Parliament breaks down along national lines rather than party lines, the transnational political groups cannot claim to be able to articulate the classic ideological viewpoints in the EU policy-making process with any real degree of effectiveness. Testing for the cohesiveness of parties is the first natural step towards understanding the effectiveness of parties. As in the previous chapter, where we looked at the long-run and short-run determinants of participation, we analyse in this chapter the long-run determinants of cohesion.