Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Bawn and Rosenbluth (2006) and Persson, Roland, and Tabellini (2007) examine the difference between coalition governments and single-party government to explain the positive relationship between PR systems and public spending. They find that government spending increases in the number of parties in government. However, their models rely on the questionable assumption, Laver and Shepsle’s ministerial government. Many studies in parliamentary politics have recently cast doubt on the ministerial government model. They show that coalition parties create several mechanisms to circumvent or diminish the ministerial autonomy which may lead to sub-optimal outcome. Following them, I hypothesize that 'tight' coalition agreements and the prime minister will moderate the ministerial autonomy and thus the effect of government fragmentation on government spending. Conducting a time-series-cross-section analysis of 17 Western European countries’ data, I find that the positive effect that the number of parties in government has on central government spending exists only under specific conditions: when a coalition government does not have 'tight' coalition agreements or when the ideological position of the prime minister’s party is left.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The studies using the type of city government as a dummy variable lead to the wrong conclusion. Mayor-Council and Council-Manager governments are consistently government efficiency and political supports simultaneously.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Governance emerged as the latest style for management reform; the wave of governance initiatives is sweeping state administrations, corporate headquarters, and civil society organizations. In this paper, I comment on the historical process of institutionalization of governance and to reflect on the way this field defines the current mode of governmentality and tracks the process of global rationalization. I focus on three dimensions of the processes: (a) timing of institutionalization of governance, (b) carriers of the emerging notion and (c) the content of the new discourse that is contained in this new notion of governance. These issues are revealed through bibliographic and organizational analyses, highlighting governance in academic discourse (coding bibliographic sources) and transnational action (coding UIA directories). Based on these analyses, I argue that governance is a product of a world steeped with rationalization and with the primacy of individual actorhood. It is this cultural atmosphere which privileges notions that reflects rationalization and actorhood, which also leads to the translation of �management� into �governance.�

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This article analyses the current state of international development discourse and its associated practices. It discusses the radicalization and securitization of development, arguing that these processes can be best comprehended through the study of governmentality. In this sense, the fact that development has become increasingly worried with the transformation of societies as a whole reflects the “governmentalization of government” and a related mutation in the logic of social government. The “security-development nexus” arises in this context as part of a “new racism” that situates underdevelopment and the underdeveloped subject as threats to security.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper speaks directly to the conference theme ‘bridging multiple divides’. It does so by addressing issues that are salient in current debates on governance among scholars in international relations while exploring those ideas with the help of transdisciplinary research on sustainable transport and mobility. It also speaks to environmental and sustainability scholars who stress that in order to mitigate climate change, entire sectors of society have to be radically transformed. The transport sector is highly implicated in the climate change problem and the key concern is to govern transport and mobility toward something more sustainable. In democracies it means that all social actors need to be part of that transformation. How to mobilize societal actors to take steps that oftentimes run against their short term interest, is something which both transport researchers and governance scholars are grappling with. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by looking for examples of new governance in the sustainable transport and mobility research (in the TransportMistra project). Interesting examples tried in the European context are strategies like; congestion charging, mobility management and sustainable transport planning. Themes salient in the new governance debate like: transparency, participation, stakeholder involvement and deliberation, are crucial in the sustainable transport and mobility debate. Questions addressed in the paper are: How are ambitions like increased transparency and participation by stakeholders mirrored in practice? Are there examples of new forms of engagement and deliberation in this research and which forms do they take?