Party Members’ Preferences and the Changing Nature of Party Representation: Does Representation Change when Parties become Mini-Republics?

Giovanni Sartori famously wrote that political parties do not need to be mini-republics, yet today parties in many parliamentary democracies are moving in this direction by giving their members direct votes over important decisions, including selecting party leaders and settling policy issues. This paper explores some of the implications of these changes. It asks whether the addition of membership rights affects the types of members who are attracted: do we find a bigger gap between the preferences of party members and of party voters in parties that are more plebiscitary, as literature on members' motivations might lead us to expect? The paper examines this question both cross-sectionally and longitudinally using opinion data from the European Social Survey and newly-available party organizational data from the Political Party Database project.

Policy impacts on Vietnam stock markets: a case of anomalies and disequilibria 2000-2006

Vietnam launched its first-ever stock market, named as Ho Chi Minh City Securities Trading Center (HSTC) on July 20, 2000. This is one of pioneering works on HSTC, which finds empirical evidences for the following: Anomalies of the HSTC stock returns through clusters of limit-hits, limit-hit sequences; Strong herd effect toward extreme positive returns of the market portfolio;The specification of ARMA-GARCH helps capture fairly well issues such as serial correlations and fat-tailed for the stabilized period. By using further information and policy dummy variables, it is justifiable that policy decisions on technicalities of trading can have influential impacts on the move of risk level, through conditional variance behaviors of HSTC stock returns. Policies on trading and disclosure practices have had profound impacts on Vietnam Stock Market (VSM). The over-using of policy tools can harm the market and investing mentality. Price limits become increasingly irrelevant and prevent the market from self-adjusting to equilibrium. These results on VSM have not been reported before in the literature on Vietnam’s financial markets. Given the policy implications, we suggest that the Vietnamese authorities re-think the use of price limit and give more freedom to market participants.