Conclusions

This chapter summarizes the book’s main findings, in particular the existence of “tunnels of attention” constraining campaign agendas and their implications with regard to mandate responsiveness and its institutional determinants. Coalition partners, as well as opposition parties, emerge as key forces incentivizing governments to stick to their progamme. Majoritarian systems provide governments with unique powers to shape policy, but excessive majoritarianism seems to limit their incentives to respect their mandate. In contrast, counter-majoritarian institutions generate hurdles on executive capacity, but also incentives to respond to ‘tunnel’ incentives. These conclusions have important implications for party competition, democratic representation, public policy and comparative institutions. They point to multiple intriguing directions for future research.

Clubs, Coase, and the Role of Government

As Ronald Coase and others have shown, deducing the appropriate role of the government in the economy requires a comparative institutions approach. Trying to generalize from oversimplified specifications regarding transaction costs, according to whether exclusion is possible or not, is a futile exercise. An alternative to the Ostrom matrix is to distinguish private, club, and collective consumption goods according to their technical characteristics, specifically their degree of congestabiilty. The other box of the Ostrom matrix, “common pool” resources, can also be usefully analyzed from a club perspective. Spillover goods are spatial clubs. Lastly, a version of the Coase theorem is offered, which provides the foundation of comparative institutional analysis.

Clubs, Coase, and the role of government

As Ronald Coase and others have shown, deducing the appropriate role of the government in the economy requires a comparative institutions approach. Trying to generalize from oversimplified specifications regarding transaction costs, according to whether exclusion is possible or not, is a futile exercise. An alternative to the Ostrom matrix is to distinguish private, club, and collective consumption goods according to their technical characteristics, specifically their degree of congestabiilty. The other box of the Ostrom matrix, “common pool” resources, can also be usefully analyzed from a club perspective. Spillover goods are spatial clubs. Lastly, a version of the Coase theorem is offered, which provides the foundation of comparative institutional analysis.

The Comparative Institutions Approach to Wildlife Governance

This Article develops a comparative institutions approach to wildlife governance by examining the property rights to the habitat and the stocks of wild populations. The approach is based on the transaction cost and property rights approach and lies primarily in the traditions of Coase, Barzel, Ostrom, and Williamson. The approach recognizes the often-extreme costs of delineation and enforcement of property rights to wild populations and their habitats; thus, all systems are notably imperfect compared to the typical neoclassical economics approach. These costs arise because wildlife habitat and wildlife populations are part of the land which has many attributes and uses—most notably, residential and agricultural uses. In turn, the optimal ownership sizes (and shapes) vary across land uses (e.g., farming, urban, ranching, wildlife, parks). The organizations that govern wildlife tend to be ridden with transaction costs and imperfect property rights, and the most efficient system is one that maximizes the total value of the package less the enforcement and administrative costs. This Article develops a framework for considering different governance regimes for both the wild stocks and the habitats they require. A series of cases—focused especially on bison and caribou—show the range of governance regimes that have been used and how those governance regimes depend on history and on law.

States and Power in Africa by Jeffrey I. Herbst: A Review Essay

Herbst argues that Africa is plagued by “state failure” to provide certain public goods in society, such as law and order, defense, contract enforcement, and infrastructure. Herbst has provided a bold, historically informed theoretical analysis, essential reading for economists interested in comparative institutions and development.

Parchment, Equilibria, and Institutions

Institutions are rules that constrain political behavior. Although there is consensus that being written down is neither necessary nor sufficient for an institution to be effective, much research on comparative institutions focuses on formal, parchment, institutions. This article argues that parchment can contribute to the generation of shared mutual expectations among political actors, which are essential to the effectiveness of institutions. Next, the article distinguishes between research that emphasizes the role of institutions in aggregating preferences into political decisions and research that relies on coordination models to identify conditions favoring certain equilibrium outcomes when multiple equilibria are possible. The article notes the increasing prominence of such coordination models in research on comparative institutions and concludes with some reflections about the prospects for this trend to foster connections between institutional analysis and the field of comparative politics more broadly.