Ken Kollman

The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States

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Party Aggregation and the Number of Parties in India and the United States

We rely on data from India and the United States to show that political and economic centralization can influence the number of national parties in single-member simple-plurality electoral systems. Historically, in both countries the number of parties in local electoral districts has been near two, but the number of national parties has fluctuated. Periods of a small number of national parties in both countries correspond to periods of centralization. We argue that, as national governments centralize power and make policies that affect local areas, candidates have greater incentives to associate with national organizations, and voters have greater incentives to abandon locally competitive but nationally noncompetitive parties.

Introduction—Authority Migration: Defining an Emerging Research Agenda

In every modern political system, power is shared to a greater or lesser extent between levels of government. These power sharing arrangements are perhaps most explicit in formal federal systems like the United States and Canada, where federal constitutions define the relative powers of central and subnational governments. They may be no less important, however, in unitary democracies and even authoritarian regimes where central governments require local actors to implement policy on the ground and often delegate significant authority to them. Indeed, in any large and complex modern society, effective governance requires some sharing of power between higher levels of government, capable of coordinating many disparate actors and interests, and lower levels of government, capable of responding to local conditions.

The Rotating Presidency of the European Council as a Search for Good Policies

The rotating presidency of the European Council is a curious, and unusual, institutional feature. I propose a formal theoretic model that compares a variety of decision-making procedures, including rotating the leadership position in a decision-making council, referendums on each policy issue, and electing a Council president. From the results of the model I conclude that the current version of the rotating presidency has a lot to recommend it. Rotating agenda-setting authority allows for the exploration of new mixtures of policies that might not be discovered or tried under other kinds of procedures. However, I also argue that, once the European Union expands to over 20 members, the procedure may no longer be sustainable.

Chapter 29 Computational Methods and Models of Politics

In this chapter, we assess recent contributions of computational models to the study of politics. We focus primarily on agent-based models developed by economists and political scientists. These models address collective action problems, questions related to institutional design and performance, issues in international relations, and electoral competition. In our view, complex systems and computational techniques will have a large and growing impact on research on politics in the near future. This optimism follows from the observation that the concepts used in computational methodology in general and agent-based models in particular resonate deeply within political science because of the domains of study in the discipline and because early findings from agent-based models align with widely known empirical regularities in the political world. In the process of making our arguments, we survey a portion of the growing literature within political science.

A formulation of path dependence with an empirical example

We develop the empirical implications of Pages (2006) definition of path dependence as a process where the sequence of historical events affects the final outcome. A critical necessary condition for path dependence in common dynamic models is a time-varying autoregressive parameter whose value becomes 1 at some point. Failure to meet this condition results in a path independent process whose equilibrium outcome is only a function of the current exogenous conditions. This condition is illustrated with a discrete Markov Chain model and with a computational model with continuous variables, which are illustrated with models of partisan change. A Monte Carlo simulation shows how non-linear least-squares estimation can recover the parameters that distinguish path dependence from path independence. This integration of modeling and an estimation strategy is illustrated with data on civil rights attitudes and macropartisanship. The results have implications for discussions of path dependence in a wide range of social science fields.

Party system structure and its consequences for foreign direct investment

Studies of foreign direct investment’s (FDI’s) determinants focus on irreversibility as the main source of governments’ credibility problems. Here, we highlight an underexplored source of time-inconsistency dilemmas: geographic agglomeration within a country. FDI’s tendency to agglomerate creates visible inequalities in the country and generates demands for geographic income redistribution. Unchecked, such redistributive pressures can dissuade investors from entering the country altogether. Not all political systems are equally vulnerable, however. Countries with regionalized party systems are relatively unattractive to investors because regionalism increases the probability that investment returns from one region will be appropriated by the national government and used for geographic-based income redistribution. Countries with national parties, however, are less likely to engage in such behavior. Thus, we predict higher FDI inflows in countries with nationalized party systems and lower inflows in countries characterized by regional parties. Evidence from democracies between 1975 and 2007 supports our argument and its posited causal mechanisms.

Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science by Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech

doned organized labor. He also tolerated racial discrimination in government, in contrast to his successor, Harry Truman. Instead of offering a nuanced account of FDR’s political strategy, the book offers an apologia. Bold Relief offers a useful and often insightful overview of the origin of and limits to U.S. social policy. But by taking the reformist policies of the late 1930s as the benchmark for U.S. social policy, the author marginalizes the relevance of his own analysis for a broader understanding of U.S. social policy.