Linkage Institutions

8 Key excerpts on "Linkage Institutions"

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  The Economic Structure of International Law

  • Joel P. Trachtman, Joel P. TRACHTMAN(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Therefore, this chapter does not take a position on particular linkage claims. However, it is hoped that by showing how analysis should proceed, this chapter will help decision makers to resist arguments based on incomplete analysis. Political Linkage and Institutional Linkage Linkage, as a political fact, is pervasive. States bargaining with one another in the international relations market use whatever tools are at hand: secu-rity matters are linked to trade, finance is linked to environmental protec-tion, and membership in regional organizations is linked to human rights. This is a natural, and a presumptively efficient, phenomenon. In these con-texts, states find themselves in a barter economy, trying to make deals by seeking to identify “bilateral coincidences of wants.” Until the days of greater use of techniques such as internationally tradeable pollution per-mits, or more direct monetization of jurisdiction, barter will continue. In barter economies, the greater the breadth of subject matters available, the greater the possibilities for making a deal. As an example of linkage as a political fact, consider the linkage between trade and intellectual property rights. This political linkage evolved into an institutional linkage. Beginning in the mid-1980s, at the urging of U.S. pharmaceutical and other intellectual property–dependent companies, the United States began to link trade to intellectual property protection. The U.S. policy was later incorporated in a number of unilateral U.S. policy in-struments, including conditionality for application of zero-tariff treatment for imports from developing countries under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) 2 and so-called Special 301 trade sanctions. What did the United States seek? The explicit goal was to influence do-mestic regulation of other states in terms of the level of intellectual prop-198 The Economic Structure of International Law

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  Introduction to Comparative Politics

  The State and its Challenges

  • Robert Hislope, Anthony Mughan(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Generally speaking, governments will enjoy greater decision-making autonomy in times of crisis or in areas about which their citizens are not knowledgeable or in which they have little interest or involvement. Those in power will enjoy a much freer hand, for example, in regulating nuclear power stations than they will in setting taxation levels. Linkage exists, then, in all political regimes, but what does it look like in practice? Put differently, who or what mediates the relationship between governors and governed, and how? Distinguishing again between democratic and authoritarian regimes, this chapter will address this question by examining two distinct dimen-sions of linkage politics. The first of them concerns mechanisms of inter-mediation, focusing in particular on elections because they are a large, inclusive, and politically important exercise in linkage politics. The sec-ond focuses on the political institutions that act as intermediaries between governments and their people. Two such institutions are identified and explored: (1) political parties and (2) interest groups. MECHANISMS OF INTERMEDIATION The term “mechanism” is used here to denote a structured pattern of behavior by means of which governors and governed routinely interact 136 INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE POLITICS with each other. In the diverse world of politics, mechanisms of inter-mediation can take many forms, with some operating primarily from the bottom up and others primarily from the top down. In democracies, for example, bottom-up efforts by citizens to influence governments and hold them accountable for their actions in office take the form of popular participation in politics, but this participation is itself a multifaceted phe-nomenon. To vote in elections so as to take part in the basic democratic act of choosing one’s government is its minimal and most widespread form.

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  Linkage Politics In The Middle East

  Syria Between Domestic And External Conflict, 1961-1970

  • Yaacov Bar-siman-tov(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9

  An important aim of linkage politics is to establish a synthesis between international relations and political science. Without saying so explicitly, Rosenau also seems to believe that the concept of linkage politics can be extended to the two research levels of international relations, that of the state and of the system. On the state level, Rosenau tries to identify formation of a state’s foreign policy as a function of the interactions between internal political actors who are not within the ruling elite of a given state and the government or other internal political actors of another state. On the system level, Rosenau tries to identify how interactions between actors within the internal political environment of a given state and either the government itself or non-governmental internal political actors within other states in the system affect interactions within the international system.

  Conflict Linkage

  “Conflict linkage” is an extension of linkage politics that focuses on the more limited aspect of the relationship between conflicts in the internal political environment of a given state and those of the international system. We can differentiate among three main approaches that deal with the relationship between internal and external conflict: the socio-psychological; the traditional; and the quantitative approach. These approaches are examined below in greater detail.

  The Socio-Psychological Approach

  Many researchers in sociology and psychology have dealt with the connections between internal and external conflicts. In fact, most of the accepted hypotheses of conflict linkage research are derived from socio-psychological studies dealing either with individuals or various social groups. The present study is particularly indebted to Georg Simmel’s work, Conflict , and to Lewis Coser’s reformulation of that work.10

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  Networks and Institutions in Europe's Emerging Markets

  • Roger Schoenman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  By includ- ing network features as an independent variable, this book takes networks seriously as part of the political process. In particular, it seeks to understand how networks affect institutional function and development. What, then, is the relationship between networks and institutions? Insti- tutions provide a set of rules that govern political and economic life. Networks provide a social structure to supplement incomplete rules and indeterminate institutional outcomes. Institutions determine who has the authority to make decisions and who can benefit from and dispose of material goods. Networks enable their members to influence decisions, and sometimes the nature of the institutions themselves. For this reason, the period during which institutions are being chosen has been of particular interest to social scientists; during such times the participants in the process of institutional development cannot know fully the effects of the institutions they are choosing. Nevertheless, they often have strong beliefs about their likely distributional consequences. Hence, they jockey for individ- ual advantage, form coalitions, strike bargains, share information, and engage in open conflict to arrive at their desired outcome. Ties between businesspeople and politicians are one place where networks and institutional development meet. Newspaper headlines resonate in the popular imagination when they refer to visible or alleged ties between the economy and the polity. The political goals of businesspeople affect elections, shape legislation, and impact the institutional landscape. Businesspeople lobby, make private deals with politicians, create organizations, and sometimes use violence. Precisely in the middle ground when institutions are not yet fully developed, social groups – networks of individuals – fill in the gaps, influencing the process by which institutions are built through formal and informal means.

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  Networks and Institutions in Europe's Emerging Markets

  • Roger Schoenman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  42 Foundations This relational perspective has the advantage of drawing attention to the internal con fi gurations and external connections of interest groups. By includ-ing network features as an independent variable, this book takes networks seriously as part of the political process. In particular, it seeks to understand how networks affect institutional function and development. What, then, is the relationship between networks and institutions? Insti-tutions provide a set of rules that govern political and economic life. Networks provide a social structure to supplement incomplete rules and indeterminate institutional outcomes. Institutions determine who has the authority to make decisions and who can bene fi t from and dispose of material goods. Networks enable their members to in fl uence decisions, and sometimes the nature of the institutions themselves. For this reason, the period during which institutions are being chosen has been of particular interest to social scientists; during such times the participants in the process of institutional development cannot know fully the effects of the institutions they are choosing. Nevertheless, they often have strong beliefs about their likely distributional consequences. Hence, they jockey for individ-ual advantage, form coalitions, strike bargains, share information, and engage in open con fl ict to arrive at their desired outcome. Ties between businesspeople and politicians are one place where networks and institutional development meet. Newspaper headlines resonate in the popular imagination when they refer to visible or alleged ties between the economy and the polity. The political goals of businesspeople affect elections, shape legislation, and impact the institutional landscape. Businesspeople lobby, make private deals with politicians, create organizations, and sometimes use violence.

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  The Chain of Representation

  Preferences, Institutions, and Policy across Presidential Systems

  • Brian F. Crisp, Santiago Olivella, Guillermo Rosas(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  We treat policies regarding privatization and the freedom of capital flows as bridges to questions posed to citizens and politicians about their preferences over these same policies. With this final innovative assumption – some might say, leap of faith – we have the measures we need to calculate citizen-to-politician, politician-to-policy, and citizen-to- policy congruence. 2.4 institutional linkages Our chain of representation is held together by two sets of institutional linkages. Citizens are linked to politicians by the electoral rules that govern the choice of the latter. Politicians are linked to policy by the powers deputies, senators, and presidents bring to the struggle to craft policy. For both institutional linkages, we start with detailed information about their component parts and then develop a theoretically justified means of aggregating them into a single, linkage-specific score. District magnitude is the number of seats to be awarded in a given district in a single election. We average this number across districts – not always as easily as this simple statement suggests – to obtain one part of our system-level indicator of permissiveness (many seats to hand out) or constraint (few seats to award). The seat allocation formula – the formula used to translate votes into seats – furnishes a second indicator. The permissive formulas reward relatively low vote-getters, while the constraining ones reward relatively high vote-getters. Finally, electoral thresholds in place in some systems provide a third indicator. They establish a floor, in terms of percentage of the vote won, to obtain even a single seat. The higher the threshold, the stronger the system. As we will show later, some systems are uniformly constraining, some are uniformly permissive, and most send a mixed signal to entering elites and voting citizens about how coordinated their behavior must be.

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  Institutional Theory in Political Science

  The New Institutionalism

  • B. Guy Peters(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Especially in the sociological versions of network analysis the outcome of the interaction between public and private organizations is indeterminate, with pub-lic sector organizations enjoying little or no special position in these structures. Further, these interactions are definitely conceived of as structural relationships, with the several participants interacting on a predictable and regularized basis (Carrington et al., 2002). Indeed, the sociological interpretations of networks tend to utilize structural analogies very heavily, with mathematical models being used to represent the structural relationships among the actors involved in the network (Knoke, 1990). What Is an Institution? As we have noted above, these bodies of literature on parties and interest inter-mediation contain only limited original and independent theoretical perspectives on institutions and organizations. That having been said, however, there are some interesting questions that arise concerning the nature and definition of these enti-ties as institutions. In the first place, there is the question of what sort of political organizations constitute a political party. The contrast between political parties and interest groups has been articulated for some time in terms of the difference between INSTITUTIONS OF INTEREST REPRESENTATION 151 organizations that attempt to capture political office and those that only attempt to influence policy. The growth of social movements from the 1970s onward has, however, made the distinction between parties and interest groups somewhat less clear (Della Porta and Diani, 2006). These organizations attempt to influence policy in the way that interest groups traditionally have, but they also at times will engage in electoral politics. The Greens in European politics, for example, have remained ideologically committed to goals beyond simply holding office while at the same time running candidates for elective office (Thaa, 1994).

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  Bringing Down the Educational Wall

  Political Regimes, Ideology, and the Expansion of Education

  • Dulce Manzano(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  18 1 8 2 The Institutional Link A political economy explanation of educational expansion requires a comprehensive theory based on the interaction between political insti- tutions and the factors that shape policy preferences. These two ana- lytical pieces need to be explored simultaneously in order to determine the expected educational outcomes of countries. Given the distribu- tional consequences of policies, individuals are unlikely to converge toward the same ideal policy. The resulting conflict of interests must be resolved by the political method in place. Political institutions exert a central role in the explanation precisely because they alter the bal- ance of power among competing societal actors, settling the question of what preferences prevail in the decision-making process. But we still need to know the specific policy choice of dominant political groups to predict government policy. I argue that this choice may vary with dif- ferent economic conditions since they change the distributional effects of policies. Therefore, to derive testable predictions about human capital programs and, accordingly, about educational outcomes, it is necessary to take the combined influence of the two dimensions into consideration. In other words, the hypothesis we elaborate regarding the impact of one of these explanatory dimensions, say political insti- tutions, will have to be a prediction shaped by the abovementioned economic conditions. In this chapter, I discuss the potential explanatory power of this approach and its contribution to the existing literature. Section 2.1 examines the explanations linking the level and distribution of wealth to aggregate educational outcomes. I argue that these accounts fail to offer a complete account of human capital accumulation because an important A Political Economy Rationale 19 1 9 factor, political institutions, is missing.

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