International Comparisons- Week 13
Examples of other countries having stronger social saftey nets, where is the US an outlier
- military spending - healthcare (we spend a lot but have the lowest life expectancy) - prision (we have more people incarcerated) - tax rates (we tax less and have a less robust social saftey net)
Sources of how free and fair a democracy is
VDEM, Economist, Freedom House - scandinavia is the highest on scale
Constitutional comparisons, how many rights is enough? Compare constitutions internationally
about 116 unique rights in constitution distribution of rights in constitution (majority have 30-70) argument that rights hold guidance to what we should aspire to be as a democracy - constitutional rights have proliferated after WW2 1st amendment is written in all constitutions most of rights in place today (US) have been in place since the begining
Decision-making costs
any number of institutional frictions (seen in policymaking)
Multi Party system cons
coalition governments - a more complicated two party system - come about because no majority party wins, so parties team up to control votes in legislative - altruism that it is difficult for voters to understand or know the outcome of it if it just ends up being a two-party system
Theory testing for the rest of the world
data on non democracies is scare, so testing is harder theoretically, we would expect much of the same (distributional analysis and punctuations)
What are the 3rd party challenges to the distribution of voters
don't win elections (typically) but cost elections (for parties on the same side of the distribution)
Distributional analysis definition
highly punctuated distributions of policy change are everywhere - match with PET
Measures of historical index of human development
key dimensions: - a long healthy life - being knowledgeable - having a decent standard of living trends are positive for countries with a democracy
Multi Party system benefits
less polarization (because voters have more options, less us vs. them duality) more parties (voters can select a party that is closer to them) equity (fairness) - vote goes toward something - difficult in close elections (ex: 49% of district didnt want X person as prez) and is a symptom of winner take all
By reducing decion-making costs how would that affect distributional analysis
less punctuated policy output - working toward solving disproportionate information processing - less of ignoring problems until they surface
What is PET missing that is a goal
medium level change
Governments around the world: comparisons of democracies
no strong correlation of democracies and governmental systems just because some countries are calling themselves democracies or having elections doesn't mean they are having fair elections driven by: - elections (and weather they are fair and competitive)
Distributionally, how does PET fall
on a histogram... - very little outliers for no change and radical change - median is no change which would be small, incremental change in policymaking
why do other democracies have more parties
partial representation multimember districts
Based on incentives to response and information processing...
policy making in democracies does appear to deliver better outcomes, on average
If you look internationally, what mitigates the functions of distributional analysis
reducing decision-making costs preserving information flows preserving incentives to respond
How is the PET true for democracies and non-democracies
subject to shift on attention urgency attached to issues change
In what way is the US a blueprint for democracies
the 1st amendment - many countries use this in their constitution
Reasons contributing to why the U.S. has weaker executives
the power of the president has grown dramatically over time - size and responsibility - assume government power in other systems the president is elected by own party , meaning that a party can recall a prime minister if they arent doing well
How are the fundamentals the same across the democratic world
theories of policy making have been tested in a variety of democratic contexts to varying degrees, we find that policy follows the same pattern of change (PET)
Comparisons to other countries
there is a wide variety of institutional forms (systems of gov institutions within in Gov) most other democracies have more parties the U.S has weaker executives than other countries most democracies have stronger social safety net, somewhat weaker "freedoms"
Democracies over time
we see a dramatic rise in demoracies at the demise of autocrat after WW2 - its a positive trend if you think democracies are good for policymaking fall of autocratic governments around 1986 due to fall of soviet union growth of democracies stops in 2017 as we start to see countries moving toward flawed or fixed democracy models