On the origins of electoral systems and political parties. The role of elections in multi-member districts

The old, understudied electoral system composed of multi-member districts, open ballot and plurality rule is presented as the most remote scene of the origin of both political parties and new electoral systems. A survey of the uses of this set of electoral rules in different parts of the world during remote and recent periods shows its wide spread. A model of voting by this electoral system demonstrates that, while it can produce varied and pluralistic representation, it also provides incentives to form factional or partisan candidacies. Famous negative reactions to the emergence of factions and political parties during the 18th and 19th centuries are reinterpreted in this context. Many electoral rules and procedures invented since the second half of the 19th century, including the Australian ballot, single-member districts, limited and cumulative ballots, and proportional representation rules, derived from the search to reduce the effects of the originating multi-member district system in favor of a single party sweep. The general relations between political parties and electoral systems are restated to account for the foundational stage here discussed.

Assesing the political viability of labour market reform: The case of employment protection

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation.Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot ofattention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process.In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employeestrade off lower living standards (because employment protectionmaintains workers in less productive activities) against longer jobduration. The support for employment protection will then depend onthe value of the latter relative to the cost of the former. Wehighlight two key deeterminants of this trade-off: first, the workers'bargaining power, second, the economy's growth rate-more preciselyits rate of creative destruction.

Betting on Hitler: The value of political connections in Nazi Germany

This paper examines the value of connections between German industry andthe Nazi movement in early 1933. Drawing on previously unused contemporarysources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns,we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the biggest companies,had substantive links with the National Socialist German Workers Party. Firmssupporting the Nazi movement experienced unusually high returns, outperformingunconnected ones by 5% to 8% between January and March 1933. These resultsare not driven by sectoral composition and are robust to alternative estimatorsand definitions of affiliation.

The political economy of employment protection

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in agrowing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use toanalyze the political support for employment protection legislationssuch as the ones that are observed in most European countries.We analyze the possibility of Condorcet cycles due to the fact thatworkers about to become unemployed prefer both an increase and areduction in firing costs over the status quo. Despite this problem, we show the existence of local, and sometimes global majority winners.In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employeestrade off lower living standards (because employment protectionmaintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. We show that the gains from, and consequently the politicalsupport for employment protection (as defined by maximunjob tenure) are larger, the lower the rate of creative destruction and the largerthe worker's bargaining power. Numerical simulations suggest a hump-shaped response of firing costs to these variables, as well as negative impact of exogeneous turnover on employment protection.

Increasing political returns and rural-urban migrations

This paper analyzes the different equilibria in rural-urban migrationsand political redistribution that result from the interaction betweenincreasing political returns, the distribution of land, and creditmarket imperfections. Governments that put a special weight on thewelfare of urban workers when setting agricultural prices generate apolitical externality in the urban sector, giving peasants anincentive to migrate in anticipation of policy determination. Ifcredit markets are imperfect, land ownership confers higherproductivity to peasants, who require large price changes to migrate.In this context, land inequality would lead to large migrations and tolarge policy change, while an egalitarian land distribution would leadto no migration and to a small policy change. This interaction shedslight on the contrasting experience of Latin America and East Asia atthe outset of World War II.

Going Public in the European Union: Action Repertoires of Western European Collective Political Actors

As a result of the Europeanization of politics and the increasing role of the public sphere, political actors in Western Europe are currently facing a double strategic challenge. Based on data from seven West European countries and the European Union, the authors analyze how state actors, political parties, interest groups, and social movement organizations cope with this double challenge at both the national and the supranational level. Results indicate that the classic repertoire of inside strategies at the national level is still the most typical for all actors, but media-related strategies are also prominent at the national level. The Europeanization of repertoires is mainly determined by institutional factors and by the actors' power, whereas the public arena plays an equally important role for all types of actors, in all countries and at both the national and the EU level.

Why did modern trade fairs appear?

According to our interpretation, modern trade fairs started in Europe during the FirstWorld War and in its immediate aftermath. With the closing of trade movements duringthe war, many cities had to resort to the old medieval tradition of providing especialpermits to traders to guarantee them personal protection during their trade meetings.During the tough post war crisis many more cities typically industrial districts-discovered in the creation of trade fairs a powerful competitive tool to attract markettransactions. We compare these developments with the remote origins of fairs, as, inboth cases, trade fair development is a reaction to the closing of free markets under thepressure of political violence.

Social security in theory and practice (I): Facts and political theories

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forcescreate and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply, pay-as-you-go features, intergenerational redistribution, benefits which areincreasing functions of lifetime earnings and not means-tested. We partition theories of Social Security into three groups: "political", "efficiency" and "narrative" theories. We explore three political theories in this paper: the majority rational voting model (with its two versions: "the elderly as the leaders of a winning coalition with the poor" and the "once and for all election" model), the "time-intensive model of political competition" and the "taxpayer protection model". Each of the explanations is compared with the international and historical facts. A companion paper explores the "efficiency" and "narrative" theories, and derives implicationsof all the theories for replacing the typical pay-as-you-go system with a forced savings plan.

The political consequences of unemployment

We analyze the channels by which an ill-functioning labor market changes the preferences of the people for public policy and therefore the decisions that are made. We not only discuss labour market reform but other important aspects of policy making such as the size and structure of government spending. Theclass of mechanisms that we highlight can be summarized as the very existence of unemployment generating political support for "sclerosis". This may help to explain the timid pace of reform, in particular the fact that any recovery sends them at the backfront of the political agenda, and the sometimes violent opposition generated by some measures, as we have seen mostly in France.

Electoral competition under the threat of political unrest

We study elections in which one party (the strong party) controls a source of political unrest; e.g., this party could instigate riots if it lost the election. We show that the strong party is more likely to win the election when there is less information about its ability to cause unrest. This is because when theweak party is better informed, it can more reliably prevent political unrest by implementing a ``centrist'' policy. When there is uncertainty over the credibility of the threat, ``posturing'' by the strong party leads to platform divergence.