John T. Woolley

Democracy and National Economic Performance: The Preference for Stability

appear to arise because democracies ameliorate the effects of social cleavages, another mechanism that might explain democratic stability. When growth and volatility are jointly examined, democracies reveal highly favorable economic results. oes democracy affect national economic performance and, if so, how? No question is more central to the study of political economics. Almost all previous work on democracy and economic performance has focused exclusively on growth rates, with contradictory and confusing results. In this article, we argue that, to reveal the impact of democratic institutions on economic performance, scholars must consider two dimensions of economic performance-growth rate and volatility. We begin with a novel hypothesis: economic policy in democracy is risk avoiding relative to policy in nondemocracies. 1 Because voters are riskaverse, they penalize incumbent governments for economic volatility, and democratic governments respond accordingly. In nondemocracies, we posit that elites are more likely to seek risk that voters would reject. Consequently, autocracies produce systematically more economic volatility than

The Conflicting Discourses of Restoration

The last two decades have seen an explosion of philosophical, scientific, and technical discussion of restoration. However, scholars have given little systematic attention to the empirical study of the place of values in restoration activity. This article is an initial effort to fill the empirical gap, and to suggest how an understanding of the values of individuals involved in restoration projects can advance the development of restoration theory and practice. We employ Q-methodology to identify four restoration discourses held by restorationists. We show that restorationists value restoration in different ways, and that these discourses reflect the scholarly debates over the utility of restoration.The last two decades have seen an explosion of philosophical, scientific, and technical discussion of restoration. However, scholars have given little systematic attention to the empirical study of the place of values in restoration activity. This article is an initial effort to fill the empirical gap, and to suggest how an understanding of the values of individuals involved in restoration projects can advance the development of restoration theory and practice. We employ Q-methodology to identify four restoration discourses held by restorationists. We show that restorationists value restoration in different ways, and that these discourses reflect the scholarly debates over the utility of restoration.

Institutions, the Election Cycle, and the Presidential Veto

Despite the large number of analyses of vetoes in recent years, many puzzles persist. This paper treats vetoes as a form of institutional conflict. This conflict is analyzed as being jointly determined by congressional and presidential behavior. The role of elections, partisan conflict, institutional change, and variation in presidential resources are examined as determinants of the likelihood of institutional conflict. Veto conflicts are disaggregated into conflicts over major and minor issues. Minor vetoes are shown to reflect pure institutional conflict and the electoral cycle; their frequency is, substantially, a reflection of the frequency of institutional interaction. Major vetoes reflect a more complex form of institutional conflict; in this conflict, partisanship and presidential resources are central, and conflict is no more likely in election years.

Partisan Manipulation of the Economy: Another Look at Monetary Policy with Moving Regression

This research addresses a paradox: While there appears to be a significant partisan effect on economic outcomes, there is little or no persuasive evidence of partisan differences in the manipulation of policy instruments. This paradox appears to result from uncertainties about the specification of reaction functions for policy instruments. One implication of these uncertainties is that studies of policy instruments are biased against finding partisan differences. The proposed remedy for this situation is further empirical and theoretical work that could improve reaction function specifications. An example of this is moving regression. Results presented here from moving regressions are consistent with a model of partisan policy that does not involve large average differences in policy instruments.

Reaction Functions, Optimization, and Politics: Modelling the Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policy

A central concern of policy research is to disentangle the consequences of discretionary acts of authorities from the constraints under which they operate. In economic policy research, reaction functions, a broad class of single-equation models, appear to offer insights into this problem. However, reaction functions share many of the pitfalls of the empirical use of optimizing models of policy, and particular difficulties attach to disentangling the results of preferences from constraints. Using reaction functions in comparative research magnifies this problem. Even so, the reaction function approach provides an attractive framework incorporating many of the traditional concerns of research into the politics of economic policy, provided due caution is exercised in selecting hypotheses to test.

The Politics of Monetary Policy: A Critical Review

The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is a pre-eminent banking institution, and an institution that has been subject to scrutiny from a wide variety of scholarly perspectives. The object of this article is to review prominent works dealing with the politics of the Federal Reserve, particularly its relations with other institutions and their effects on monetary policy. The review shows that the formal legal independence of a central bank such as the Fed does not mark the end of monetary politics, and its record suggests a greater measure of modesty and caution on the part of enthusiasts for independent central banks.

After Dodd-Frank

The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical and scholarly attention. We find that recent reforms in U.S. financial markets hinge on intellectual resources and new organizational actors that are missing from existing concepts of regulatory capture or business power. In particular, small advocacy groups have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial services industry than existing theories predict. By maintaining the salience of reform goals, elaborating new analytic frameworks, and deploying specialized expertise in post-enactment debates, smaller organizations have contributed to a diffuse but often decisive network of pro-reform actors. Through the rule-writing process for macroprudential supervision and derivatives trading, these small organizations coalesced with other groups to form a new stability alliance that has so far prevented industry groups from dominating financial regulation to the degree that occurred in earlier cases of regulatory reform.

Growing firms in declining fields: Unanticipated impacts of oil development

In a study of off‐shore oil development in the Santa Barbara Channel, we found that many local oil‐related firms adapted to declines in the oil industry by diversifying into other realms, thus forestalling their expected demise. We provide case instances of how such adaptation occurs. Firms’ success at self‐transformation alters the type of environmental impacts caused by the oil industrys coming to the region. This mitigates the boom‐bust cycle often associated with extractive industries but sets in motion other long‐term consequences. Environmental assessments of industrial projects are incomplete unless they consider how firms, once in place, themselves evolve.

The effect of “sunshine” on policy deliberation: The case of the Federal Open Market Committee

Abstract How does an increase in transparency affect policy deliberation? Increased government transparency is commonly advocated as beneficial to democracy. Others argue that transparency can undermine democratic deliberation by, for example, causing poorer reasoning. We analyze the effect of increased transparency in the case of a rare natural experiment involving the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). In 1994 the FOMC began the delayed public release of verbatim meeting transcripts and announced it would release all transcripts of earlier, secret, meetings back into the 1970s. To assess the effect of this change in transparency on deliberation, we develop a measure of an essential aspect of deliberation, the use of reasoned arguments. Our contributions are twofold: we demonstrate a method for measuring deliberative reasoning and we assess how a particular form of transparency affected ongoing deliberation. In a regression model with a variety of controls, we find increased transparency had no independent effect on the use of deliberative reasoning in the FOMC. Of particular interest to deliberative scholars, our model also demonstrates a powerful role for leaders in facilitating deliberation. Further, both increasing participant equality and more frequent expressions of disagreement were associated with greater use of deliberative language.

Measuring Deliberative Conditions An Analysis of Participant Freedom and Equality in Federal Open Market Committee Deliberation

Drawing from the literature on deliberative conditions, we analyze thirty years of verbatim transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The transcripts provide a rare opportunity for the systematic empirical analysis of deliberative conditions. The importance of the FOMC, and its recent policy failures, makes the case particularly interesting. Deliberative scholars argue that deliberation should occur in a setting where participants are free and equal. Using a unique set of deliberative measures, our model shows that FOMC members do enjoy deliberative freedom. In contrast, we find inequalities in rates of participation. Some deviation from equality may be reasonable. However, we demonstrate a sustained pattern of gender inequality in participation that could in turn influence the FOMC’s policy choices and which is difficult to justify on any grounds.