The GOVERNANCE blog

In the current issue of Governance, Darren Halpin of the University of Aarhus examines the behavior of organized interests in Scotland, and asks whether they are prone to the same kind of bandwagon behavior observed elsewhere.  They are: most issues attract little attention, while a few issues gain the most attention.  Halpin advances the literature by examining the reasons for this.  It is not simply that some issues are more important than others, he says.   A large number of actors cannot monitor the policy environment directly and rely instead on cues from “keystone groups.”  This process of cue-taking frequently generates “cascades of attention,” and thus bandwagons.  Read the article.

Wiley, publisher of Governance, reports that article downloads for the journal increased by twenty percent in 2010.  There were 85,220 downloads in 2010, compared to 70,951 the previous year.  In absolute terms this is the biggest annual increase ever.  Compared to other leading journals, Governance‘s readership is geographically diverse: 46 percent of downloads went to the United States and Europe, while 54 percent went to the rest of the world.

The African Governance Institute is sharing the January 2011 commentary by Nathalie Delapalme in its current newsletter.  Read the AGI Newsletter.  AGI was created in 2003 with the endorsement of the African Union and is a center of excellence responsible for conducting cutting-edge research on all forms of governance, and contributing to the advancement of developmental governance in Africa.  Nathalie Delapalme is Director of Research and Policy at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.  Her January commentary argued for better data on governance reform.

Governance is seeking nominations for the 2011 Levine Book Prize. Download announcement: LEVINE Announcement 2011.  Read about previous Levine winners here.

Many observers and leading politicians thought that the role of South Africa’s “traditional leaders” or chiefs would decline as a consequence of democratization and economic modernization.  But this underestimates the “shape shifting quality” of traditional leadership, write Thomas Koelble and Edward LiPuma in the current issue of Governance (24.1, January 2011).  In Traditional leaders and the culture of governance in South Africa, Koelble and LiPuma argue that chiefs have have seized on opportunities presented by South Africa’s integration into the global neoliberal order, which has constrained the activism of the state itself, and encouraged decentralization of power.  Chiefs “have carved out an important niche as intermediaries between the state and their subjects,” the authors say, adopting a role that sometimes complements and sometimes challenges democratic rule.  Open access to the article for the month of January.

Wiley is providing open access to all content in new issue of Governance for the month of January.  Read the table of contents.

Laurent Gbago, Ivory Coast’s incumbent president, was apparently defeated in a UN-monitored election held in November 2010.  But Gbago is clinging to power and demanding that the opposition candidate, Alassane Ouattra, enter into a power-sharing arrangement.

In the current issue of Governance (24.1, January 2011), A. Carl LeVan examines the use of power-sharing agreements as a device for managing the aftermath of flawed elections, such as those in Kenya and Zimbabwe.  The results can be quite different from cases in which power-sharing agreements are used as a road map out of civil war.  When adopted after flawed elections, such agreements “undermine vertical relationships of accountability, increase budgetary spending, and create conditions for policy gridlock,” LeVan says.  But there are several ways to manage these drawbacks.

Ivory Coast may not be the only country in which power-sharing is debated in the coming year.  LeVan says there are thirteen presidential and eight parliamentary elections looming in Africa in 2011.  Open access to the article: Power sharing and inclusive politics in Africa’s uncertain democracies.

In the current issue of Governance (24.4, October 2010), Jason Sharman of Griffith University examines the global diffusion of tax haven blacklists, a process which Sharman says has tended to replicate errors because of the thoughtless copying of lists of “usual suspects” from abroad.  In one extreme example, Venezuela replicated the Mexican blacklist, which included Venezuela, and thereby blacklisted itself.  There has been little “learning from abroad” in this area, says Sharman.  Rather, the pressure on stressed policymakers to act decisively in a complex field has led to a process of dysfunctional “policy plagiarism.”  Read the article.

The G20 summit in Seoul on November 11-12 will trigger more debate about the representation of emerging economies in the institutions that shape global economic policy.  In Rethinking Fundamental Principles of Global Governance: How To Represent States and Populations in Multilateral Institutions (22.3, July 2009),  three authors — Vijaya Ramachandran, Enrique Rueda-Sabater and Robin Kraft — suggest a new way of thinking about “the constitutional foundations of an effective global governance system.”  They propose a model in which countries in the “Two Percent Club” — having either two percent of global GDP or global population — have their own seat at the table, while other countries are represented indirectly by regional representatives.   The authors call this a principled formula that draws on experience with federal constitutional arrangements.  UPDATE: This article is discussed in the October 21 issue of the Financial Times.

Vivienne Schmidt, Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration at Boston University, discussed her forthcoming commentary in the October issue of Governance at Suffolk University Law School in Boston today.  Schmidt’s commentary examines the reforms needed to European Union institutions following the crisis triggered by the threat of Greek default earlier this year.