Klaas Staal

War with Outsiders Makes Peace Inside

This article presents a new theoretical perspective on the diversionary use of force. Players are partitioned into groups and choose how to allocate their resources to production, fighting against other groups, and fighting internally. The model gives a rationalist explanation of the group cohesion effect: when there is a lot of fighting between groups, there is less internal fighting. In equilibrium, players choose sufficiently high external conflict in order to avoid internal conflict. In contrast with the existing literature, this diversionary use of force takes place even though there is no asymmetric or incomplete information.

Country Size and Public Good Provision

The paper studies the equilibrium size of countries. Individuals in small countries have greater influence over the nature of political decision making while individuals in large countries have the advantage of more public goods and lower tax rates. The model implies that (i) there exists excessive incentives to separate, though this need not be the case for all sets of secession rules studied; (ii) an exogenous increase in public spending decreases country size; (iii) countries with a presidential-congressional democracy are larger than countries with a parliamentary democracy. Unlike previous papers, a rise in public spending thus does not increase the equilibrium country size, which is consistent with the increase in the size of government and the number of countries observed in the last century. The discussion on secession rules puts the excessive incentives result widely found in the literature in a different perspective, and also has implications for organizations like the European Union.

Alliance-Building to Influence the EU: Measuring the Geography of Mutual Support

We assess a country’s influence on decision-making in the EU Council of Ministers not merely on the basis of the number of its votes, but based on a more refined measure that takes into account the voting behavior of other countries. A country that is likely to receive support from other countries will be more influential than a country with more votes, but which tends to be isolated in its policy preferences. We set out a novel quantitative methodology, which integrates the voting weight and the degree of support enjoyed by each country in one single measure, and we apply the methodology to a data set that is richer than existing data sets. We further use this measure (i) to assess whether the changes in voting weights from the Nice to the Lisbon Treaty have an influence on the odds whether countries get what they want when decisions are taken in the Council; and (ii) to study how these odds are affected by actor alignment in the Council.

National Interference in Local Public Good Provision

We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a country consisting of a large number of heterogeneous regions, each comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighbouring district, there is underprovision of public goods in both the city and the village. When districts unite, underprovision persists in the village (and may even become more severe), whereas overprovision of public goods arises in the city as urbanites use their political power to exploit the villagers. From a social welfare point of view, inhabitants of the village have insufficient incentives to vote for unification. We examine how national transfers to local governments can resolve these problems.