The resilience of democratic institutions in Britain, Australia and the United States under conditions of total war

To what extent are democratic institutions resilient when nation states mobilise for war? Normative and empirical political theorists have long argued that wars strengthen the executive and threaten constitutional politics. In modern democracies, national assemblies are supposed to hold the executive to account by demanding explanations for events and policies; and by scrutinising, reviewing and, if necessary, revising legislative proposals intended to be binding on the host society or policies that have been implemented already. This article examines the extent to which the British and Australian parliaments and the United States Congress held their wartime executives to account during World War II. The research finds that under conditions approaching those of total war, these democratic institutions not only continued to exist, but also proved to be resilient in representing public concerns and holding their executives to account, however imperfectly and notwithstanding delegating huge powers. In consequence, executives—more so British and Australian ministers than President Roosevelt—were required to be placatory as institutional and political tensions within national assemblies and between assemblies and executives continued, and assemblies often asserted themselves. In short, even under the most onerous wartime conditions, democratic politics mattered and democratic institutions were resilient.

How Formal and Informal Institutions of Middle Eastern Countries Influence Managerial Discretion: An Empirical Investigation

Managerial discretion is the focal theme bridging the clash between two schools of thoughts; whether executives have greater influence on their firms’ outcomes or other factors restrain their actions (Hambrick & Finkelstein, 1987). It is argued that constraints come from inertial, normative and environmental forces (e.g. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Of these restraints is the institutional environment in which a firm is headquartered. Our paper falls within this research stream and provides an extension for Crossland and Hambrick (2007, 2011) work. We investigate the national level of discretion in new cross-cultural contexts, provide deeper understanding of its concept, and shed the light on undiscovered discretion’s antecedents and consequences. We adopt a quantitative approach in which questionnaires represent our data collection instrument. We anticipate that in high discretion countries firms tend to follow what Miles & Snow (1978) labeled ‘Prospector’ strategy as opposed to low discretion countries in which firms incline to implement a ‘Defender’ strategy.