Do PES Improve the Governance of Forest Restoration?

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are praised as innovative policy instruments and they influence the governance of forest restoration efforts in two major ways. The first is the establishment of multi-stakeholder agencies as intermediary bodies between funders and planters to manage the funds and to distribute incentives to planters. The second implication is that specific contracts assign objectives to land users in the form of conditions for payments that are believed to increase the chances for sustained impacts on the ground. These implications are important in the assessment of the potential of PES to operate as new and effective funding schemes for forest restoration. They are analyzed by looking at two prominent payments for watershed service programs in Indonesia-Cidanau (Banten province in Java) and West Lombok (Eastern Indonesia)-with combined economic and political science approaches. We derive lessons for the governance of funding efforts (e.g., multi-stakeholder agencies are not a guarantee of success; mixed results are obtained from a reliance on mandatory funding with ad hoc regulations, as opposed to voluntary contributions by the service beneficiary) and for the governance of financial expenditure (e.g., absolute need for evaluation procedures for the internal governance of farmer groups). Furthermore, we observe that these governance features provide no guarantee that restoration plots with the highest relevance for ecosystem services are targeted by the PES

Does partisan alignment affect the electoral reward of intergovernmental transfers?

[spa] En este trabajo analizamos la hipótesis que las transferencias asignadas a los municipios políticamente alineados generan un mayor apoyo político que las transferencias asignada a los municipios gobernados por la oposición. Para contrastar esta hipótesis utilizamos datos de las transferencias recibidas por 617 municipios españoles procedentes de dos niveles de gobierno superiores (Regional o Autonómico y Supra-Local o Diputaciones) durante el período 1993-2003, así como datos de los votos obtenidos en las tres elecciones celebradas en los diferentes niveles de gobierno durante este período.

Can PR voting serve as a shelter against declining turnout ? : Evidence from Swiss municipal elections

To assess the impact of electoral systems on voting turnout, cross-national studies can be usefully complemented by studies of turnout in local elections in countries using more than one electoral system at that level. In this article, we look at data from a 1998 survey of Swiss municipalities to revisit the findings of our earlier study. This previous study, based on a 1988 survey, concluded, in particular, that there exists a positive relationship between proportional representation elections, party politicization, and voter turnout. The moment is opportune since, in the interval, turnout has markedly declined in Swiss municipalities, as elsewhere. By testing whether municipalities with proportional representation voting were more or less successful in stemming the decline, we learn more about the relationship among these three phenomena. We use the results for those Swiss municipalities which participated in both surveys as our primary source.

Policy Change and the Politics of Expertise. Economic Ideas and immigration Control Reforms in switzerland

This article analyses the varying influence across time of the "epistemic community" of free-market economists on immigration policy making in Switzerland. To this end, a framework for the analysis of the impact of economic expertise is provided, and then used in an historical analysis comparing the 1960s with the 1990s. Whereas this influence can be considered to have been weak in the 1960s, it gained significantly in importance in the 1990s, when a period of economic unrest seriously challenged previous immigration policies. It is argued that economic experts played an important role in framing the reforms undertaken during this latter period, notably by providing a "credible causal story" about the links between the existing immigration policy and the social problems which arose in the country in the 1990s. As compared to the 1960s, economic expertise in the 1990s enjoyed more credibility, more political support and took full advantage of a more uncertain social and economic context

Putting the Special Case in Its Place: Switzerland and Small-N Comparison in Policy Research

This research note presents a set of strategies to conduct small-N comparisons in policy research including the Swiss case. Even though every country can be considered "special" to some extent, the Swiss political system is often viewed as a particularly difficult case for comparison because of the impact of its idiosyncratic institutional features (most notably direct democracy). In order to deal with this problem, our note sets out two possible strategies - the use of functional equivalents and of counterfactual reasoning - and explains how to implement them empirically through process tracing and the establishment of causal chains. As an illustration, these strategies are used for a comparison of the process of electricity market liberalisation in Switzerland and Belgium.

La teoría de los clivajes y el conflicto social moderno

This article was delivered as an area-paper to the Critical Political Science Meeting of Bilbao, November the 15th 2008, which was organized by the Political Science Department of the UPV (University of the Basque Country). The paper introduces an updated and synthetic version of the model designed by S.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan in 1967 in order to identify the confrontational divides distinctive of European modernization and, in this way, trace the origins of modern party systems. The expanded model proposed is applied, on the one hand, to a variety of empirical cases, prominently the postransitional Spanish case; and on the other, shows its usefulness in order to better understand the distinctive structure of the social conflict of the globalization era.

Documentació: localització i gestió de fonts d'informació

Referència del llibre complet a: http://cataleg.ub.edu/record=b2012692~S1*cat

Pieces of Iowa’s Past, March 14, 2012

Pieces of Iowa’s Past, published by the Iowa State Capitol Tour Guides weekly during the legislative session, features historical facts about Iowa, the Capitol, and the early workings of state government. All historical publications are reproduced here with the actual spelling, punctuation, and grammar retained. March 14, 2012 THIS WEEK: The Functions of Government BACKGROUND: The text and documents presented here were taken from the book The Government of Iowa by Frank Edward Horack, A.M., Ph.D. Dr. Horack was assistant professor of political science at the University of Iowa and secretary of the Iowa State Historical Society. The book was published in 1911 and 1915 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Documentació: localització i gestió de fonts d'informació

Referència del llibre complet a: http://cataleg.ub.edu/record=b2012692~S1*cat

Typologien und Wandel : Die kantonalen Parteiensysteme im letzten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts

Die bisherigen Versuche die kantonalen Parteiensysteme zu typologisieren kommen zu ganz unterschiedlichen Ergebnissen. Der Grund dafür liegt darin, dass sie sich auf nur wenige und unterschiedliche Parteiensystemmerkmale abstützten. Vernachlässigt wird dabei zudem der Aspekt eines allfälligen Wandels der Parteiensysteme. Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, ausgehend von einer Typologisierung, welche möglichst alle wichtigen Eigenheiten der kantonalen Parteiensysteme berücksichtigt, den Wandel der Parteiensysteme zu analysieren und mögliche Entwicklungen aufzuzeigen. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass bei gewissen Systemmerkmalen trotz einer Annäherung in nächster Zeit nicht davon auszugehen ist, dass die kantonalen Parteiensysteme auf das nationale Parteiensystem hin konvergieren.

Citizen participation and the Lisbon Treaty : A legal perspective

How to "bring the [European] Union closer to its citizens" is a vexed and vital problem of European integration. Article 11 TEU on participatory democracy, recently introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, is meant to be part of the solution. The EU Economic and Social Committee has gone so far as to define this provision "a milestone on the road to a people's Europe that is real and feasible". This appears to be an overly optimistic assessment - partly because art. 11 relies heavily on the involvement of civil society organisations, which political science literature suggests is conceptually and/or practically irrelevant to citizen involvement; partly because it largely formalizes participatory practices that have been in existence for years without cognizable effects on citizen participation; and partly because even its most innovative element - the European citizens' initiative (ECI) - does not bring significant changes to the Union's constitutional arrangements in terms of redistributing decision-making power. In addition to that, secondary legislation places significant hurdles on the submission of ECIs and might prevent or delay their becoming a standard democratic practice. This is not to say that art. 11 TEU has no potential at all. Its insertion in the Treaty might provide impetus to rethink and develop past participatory practices, such as horizontal civil dialogue. Moreover, the effects of "popular input" in the form of ECIs on EU institutional dynamics is as yet unknown - and perhaps not negligible, to judge from the keen interest that the European Parliament and other bodies have demonstrated in "appropriating" it as a political asset. Finally, art. 11 raises the stakes of the Union's democratic challenge and might pressure EU institutions to make full use of its potential. Or, if eventually proved inadequate, art. 11 might constitute a constitutional experiment on the way to meaningful forms of direct democracy at EU level.