The impact of the summer 2007 forest fires in Greece: Recent environmental mobilizations, cyber-activism and electoral performance

This report circumambulates around the environmental issue, examining mobilizations in favour of public access to the seafront and protest events against the recent devastating forest fires. By framing this discussion within existing scholarly contributions on related dimensions of the environmental issue (environmental consciousness, grassroots environmental contestation) in Southern Europe in general and Greece in particular, it suggests that the environmental mobilization dynamic in Greece has been infused with a new, global, mobilizing resource that offers new avenues to evaluate the potency of Greek civil society. Finally, the article discusses the results of the 2007 national elections and ponders the chances of political ecology becoming a permanent feature of Greek parliamentary politics.

Hiring Incentives and Labour Force Participation in Italy

A long-standing economic tradition maintains that labour supply reacts to market tightness; its sensitivity to job quality has received less attention. If firms hire workers with both temporary and open-ended contracts, does participation increase when more permanent jobs are available? We investigate this relationship within a policy evaluation framework; in particular, we examine how labour supply reacted in Italy to a recent subsidy in favour of open-ended contracts. This subsidy increased labour force participation by 1.4% in 2001 and 2.1% in 2002. This increase was concentrated on males aged 35-54, with a low or at most a secondary schooling level.

Deconstructing national leadership: Politicians’ accounts of electoral success and failure in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda

The Self Categorization approach to national leadership proposes that leaders rhetorically construct national identity as essentialized and inevitable in order to consensualize and mobilize the population. In contrast, discursive studies have demonstrated how national politicians flexibly construct the nation to manage their own accountability in local interactions, though this in turn has neglected broader leadership processes. The present paper brings both approaches together to examine how and when national politicians construct versions of national identity in order to account for their failure as well as success in mobilizing the electorate. Eight semi-structured conversational style interviews were conducted with a strategic sample of eight leading Irish politicians on the subject of the 2008/2009 Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda. Using a Critical Discourse Psychology approach, the hegemonic repertoire of the ‘settled will’
of the informed and consensualized Irish nation was identified across all interviews. Politicians either endorsed the ‘settled will’ repertoire as evidence of their successful leadership, or rejected the repertoire by denying the rationality or unity of the populace to account for their failure. Our results suggest national identity is only constructed as essentialized and inevitable to the extent that it serves a strategic political purpose.

Increasingly ‘Irrational’ Party Systems: Evidence that There Are Increasingly More Than Two at the District level

Recent work has noted an increase in the number of parties at the national level in both proportional and majoritarian electoral systems. While the conventional wisdom maintains that the incentives provided by the electoral system will prevent the number of parties at the district level from exceeding two in majoritarian systems, the evidence presented here demonstrates otherwise. I argue that this has occurred because the number of cleavages articulated by parties has increased as several third parties have begun articulating cleavages that are not well represented by the two larger parties.

Looking for free riding: Energy efficiency incentives and Italian homeowners

We examine the effect of energy efficiency incentives on household energy efficiency home improvements. Starting in February 2007, Italian homeowners have been able to avail themselves of tax credits on the purchase and installation costs of certain types of energy efficiency renovations. We examine two such renovations—door/window replacements and heating system replacements—using multi-year cross-section data from the Italian Consumer Expenditure Survey and focusing on a narrow period around the introduction of the tax credits. Our regressions control for dwelling and household characteristics and economy-wide factors likely to influence the replacement rates. The effects of the policy are different for the two types of renovations. With window replacements, the policy is generally associated with a 30 % or stronger increase in the renovation rates and number of renovations. In the simplest econometric models, the effect is not statistically significant, but the results get stronger when we allow for heterogeneous effects across the country. With heating system replacements, simpler models suggest that the tax credits policy had no effect whatsoever or that free riding was rampant, i.e., people are now accepting subsidies for replacements that they would have done anyway. Further examination suggests a strong degree of heterogeneity in the effects across warmer and colder parts of the country, and effects in the colder areas that are even more pronounced than those for window replacements. These results should, however, be interpreted with caution due to the low rates of renovations, which imply that the effects are estimated relatively imprecisely.

Electoral Systems, Ethnic Cleavages, and Experience with Democracy

Recent studies show the effects of electoral systems and ethnic cleavages on the number of parties in emerging democracies differ from those effects observed in more established democracies. Building on recent arguments maintaining the quality of democracy improves with experience, we argue the reason for the differences in the findings between established and emerging democracies is that the effects of these variables on the number of parties differ according to a country’s experience with elections. To test this argument, we analyse party system fragmentation in 89 established and emerging democracies and the conditioning effects experience with elections have on the effects of district magnitude, ethnic cleavages, and variables relating to the presidential party system. The results show the effects of institutional and social cleavage variables differ substantially between emerging and established democracies, but these effects begin to approximate those seen in more established democracies with additional experience with elections.

Holding parties responsible at election time: Multi-level, multi-party government and electoral accountability

This paper highlights the crucial role played by party-specific responsibility attributions in performance-based voting. Three models of electoral accountability, which make distinct assumptions regarding citizens' ability to attribute responsibility to distinct governing parties, are tested in the challenging Northern Ireland context - an exemplar case of multi-level multi-party government in which expectations of performance based voting are low. The paper demonstrates the operation of party-attribution based electoral accountability, using data from the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly Election Study. However, the findings are asymmetric: accountability operates in the Protestant/unionist bloc but not in the Catholic/nationalist bloc. This asymmetry may be explained by the absence of clear ethno-national ideological distinctions between the unionist parties (hence providing political space for performance based accountability to operate) but the continued relevance in the nationalist bloc of ethno-national difference (which limits the scope for performance politics). The implications of the findings for our understanding of the role of party-specific responsibility attribution in performance based models of voting, and for our evaluation of the quality of democracy in post-conflict consociational polities, are discussed. 

The incentives of a resource owner: Evidence from a private oyster fishery

European flat oyster Ostrea edulis fisheries were once abundant around the UK coastline. The sole remaining productive O. edulis fishery in Scotland is in Loch Ryan. This fishery has been privately owned and managed by a single family since 1701. Economic theory predicts that ownership, whether public or private, is a necessary condition for rational fishery management. In this paper, a series of four leases and a licence are examined, covering an 85-year period over the 20th and 21st century, to examine whether the management of the Loch Ryan fishery conforms to the expected norms of rational management. The leases show that, over this period, the owners appear more willing to expend resources on regulating tenant behaviour, supporting the conclusion that successive generations of owners developed an evolving sense of what "rational management" might require. The results of this study could inform the management of other fisheries - both public and private - by emphasising the importance of learning from experience.