Pierre Salmon - Böcker

Measuring government effectiveness is essential to ensuring accountability, as is an informed public that is willing and able to hold elected officials and policy-makers accountable. There are various forms of measurement, including against prior experience or compared to some ideal. In Yardstick Competition among Governments, Pierre Salmon argues that a more effective and insightful approach is to use common measures across a variety of countries, state, or other relevant political and economic districts. This facilitates and enables citizens comparing policy outputs in their own jurisdictions with those of others. An advantage of this approach is that it reduces information asymmetries between citizens and public officials, decreasing the costs of monitoring by the former of the latter -along the lines of principal-agent theory. These comparisons can have an effect on citizens' support to incumbents and, as a consequence, also on governments' decisions. By increasing transparency, comparisons by common yardsticks can decrease the influence of interest groups and increase the focus on broader concerns, whether economic growth or others. Salmon takes up complicating factors such as federalism and other forms of multi-level governance, where responsibility can become difficult to disentangle and accountability a challenge. Salmon also highlights the importance of publics with heterogeneous preferences, including variations in how voters interpret their roles, functions, or tasks. This results in the coexistence within the same electorate of different types of voting behavior, not all of them forward-looking. In turn, when incumbents face such heterogeneity, they can treat the response to their decisions as an aggregate non-strategic relation between comparative performance and expected electoral support.Combining theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, Salmon demonstrates how yardstick competition among governments, a consequence of the possibility that citizens look across borders, is a very significant, systemic dimension of governance both at the local and at the national levels.

The essays in this volume, written by well-known economists and other social scientists from North America, Europe and Australia, share to an unusual degree a common concern with the competitive mechanisms that underlie collective decisions and with the way they are embedded in institutional settings. This gives the book a unitary inspiration whose value is clear from the understanding and insights its chapters provide on important theoretical and practical issues such as the social dimension and impact of trust, the management of information in bureaucratic settings, the role of political parties in constitutional evolution, inter-level rivalry and reassignments of powers in federal and unitary systems of government, the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on federal institutions or arrangements, and the response of governments and overarching institutions of globalization. The essays were written in honour of Albert Breton, a pioneer in this field of investigation.

Democracy has moved to the centre of systemic reflections on political economy, gaining a position which used to be occupied by the debate about socialism and capitalism. Certitudes about democracy have been replaced by an awareness of the elusiveness and fluidity of democratic institutions and of the multiplicity of dimensions involved. This is a book which reflects this intellectual situation. It consists of a collection of essays by well-known economists and political scientists from both North America and Europe on the nature of democracy, on the conditions for democracy to be stable, and on the relationship between democracy and important economic issues such as the functioning of the market economy, economic growth, income distribution and social policies.

Why is nationalism so widespread? How does the phenomenon arise? How can its negative consequences be controlled? This collection of essays by economists, sociologists, and political scientists from North America and Europe tries to answer these questions at the forefront of political discussion. The work differs from others in that the authors' responses are not based on avowed ideological perspectives, but are rather drawn from rational-choice analysis, the foundation of social science. Although each of the contributors to Nationalism and Rationality takes a distinctive point of view, the collection as a whole focuses on three subjects - the origins of nationalism, whether and why it promotes good or evil, and how to deal with its occasional destructive consequences. Readers will find provocative insights into nationalism through the contributors' diverse diagnoses and prescriptions.

Political extremism is widely considered to be the product of irrational behavior. The distinguishing feature of this collection by well-known economists and political scientists from North America, Europe and Australia is to propose a variety of explanations which all insist on the rationality of extremism. Contributors use variants of this approach to shed light on subjects such as the conditions under which democratic parties take extremist positions, the relationship between extremism and conformism, the strategies adopted by revolutionary movements, and the reasons why extremism often leads to violence. The authors identify four core issues in the study of the phenomenon: the nature (definition) of extremism and its origins in both democratic and authoritarian settings, the capacity of democratic political systems to accommodate extremist positions, the strategies (civil disobedience, assassination, lynching) chosen by extremist groups, and the circumstances under which extremism becomes a threat to democracy.

Democracy is widely accepted today, perhaps as never before, as the most suitable form of government. But what is democracy, and does it always produce good government? Democracy is often associated with the existence of competitive elections. But theory and experience suggest that these are not sufficient for democracy to function reasonably well. In this book, which was originally published in 2003, a number of experts from North America and Europe use a rational choice approach to understand the 'foundations' of democracy - what makes democracy successful, and why. In doing so, they consider diverse problems of democratic governance such as the importance of morals or virtue in political life, negative advertising, the role of social capital and civil society in sustaining democracy, the constitutional and cultural prerequisites of democracy, and the interaction of democracy and markets.

Why is nationalism so widespread? How does the phenomenon arise? How can its negative consequences be controlled? This collection of essays by economists, sociologists, and political scientists from North America and Europe tries to answer these questions at the forefront of political discussion. The work differs from others in that the authors' responses are not based on avowed ideological perspectives, but are rather drawn from rational-choice analysis, the foundation of social science. Although each of the contributors to Nationalism and Rationality takes a distinctive point of view, the collection as a whole focuses on three subjects - the origins of nationalism, whether and why it promotes good or evil, and how to deal with its occasional destructive consequences. Readers will find provocative insights into nationalism through the contributors' diverse diagnoses and prescriptions.

Democracy has moved to the centre of systemic reflections on political economy, gaining a position which used to be occupied by the debate about socialism and capitalism. Certitudes about democracy have been replaced by an awareness of the elusiveness and fluidity of democratic institutions and of the multiplicity of dimensions involved. This is a book which reflects this intellectual situation. It consists of a collection of essays by well-known economists and political scientists from both North America and Europe on the nature of democracy, on the conditions for democracy to be stable, and on the relationship between democracy and important economic issues such as the functioning of the market economy, economic growth, income distribution and social policies.

The essays in this volume, written by well-known economists and other social scientists from North America, Europe and Australia, share to an unusual degree a common concern with the competitive mechanisms that underlie collective decisions and with the way they are embedded in institutional settings. This gives the book a unitary inspiration whose value is clear from the understanding and insights its chapters provide on important theoretical and practical issues such as the social dimension and impact of trust, the management of information in bureaucratic settings, the role of political parties in constitutional evolution, inter-level rivalry and reassignments of powers in federal and unitary systems of government, the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on federal institutions or arrangements, and the response of governments and overarching institutions of globalization. The essays were written in honour of Albert Breton, a pioneer in this field of investigation.

Political extremism is widely considered to be the product of irrational behavior. The distinguishing feature of this collection by well-known economists and political scientists from North America, Europe and Australia is to propose a variety of explanations which all insist on the rationality of extremism. Contributors use variants of this approach to shed light on subjects such as the conditions under which democratic parties take extremist positions, the relationship between extremism and conformism, the strategies adopted by revolutionary movements, and the reasons why extremism often leads to violence. The authors identify four core issues in the study of the phenomenon: the nature (definition) of extremism and its origins in both democratic and authoritarian settings, the capacity of democratic political systems to accommodate extremist positions, the strategies (civil disobedience, assassination, lynching) chosen by extremist groups, and the circumstances under which extremism becomes a threat to democracy.

At one level of generality, multijuralism is the coexistence of two or more legal systems or sub-systems within a broader normative legal order to which they adhere, such as the existence of civil and common law systems within the EU. However, at a finer level of analysis multijuralism is a more widespread or common phenomenon and a more fluid reality than the civil law/common law distinction suggests. The papers in this study are therefore rooted in the latter frame of reference. They explore various types of multijural manifestations from the harmonizing potential of international treaties to indigenous law and the use of hard and soft pluralism. In addition, the authors consider the external events which are not part of the processes of multijural adjustment but which serve to influence these processes. Included among these important external events are European integration, the growing importance accorded to human rights, the international practice of law, the growth of the Internet, the globalization of markets and the flow of immigrants. This volume represents some of the most current thinking in the area of multijuralism and is essential reading for anyone interested in the coexistence of legal systems or sub-systems.

At one level of generality, multijuralism is the coexistence of two or more legal systems or sub-systems within a broader normative legal order to which they adhere, such as the existence of civil and common law systems within the EU. However, at a finer level of analysis multijuralism is a more widespread or common phenomenon and a more fluid reality than the civil law/common law distinction suggests. The papers in this study are therefore rooted in the latter frame of reference. They explore various types of multijural manifestations from the harmonizing potential of international treaties to indigenous law and the use of hard and soft pluralism. In addition, the authors consider the external events which are not part of the processes of multijural adjustment but which serve to influence these processes. Included among these important external events are European integration, the growing importance accorded to human rights, the international practice of law, the growth of the Internet, the globalization of markets and the flow of immigrants. This volume represents some of the most current thinking in the area of multijuralism and is essential reading for anyone interested in the coexistence of legal systems or sub-systems.