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