Pierre Salmon

Yardstick Competition Among Governments

Accountability and Policymaking When Citizens Look Across Borders

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Yardstick competition among governments, a consequence of the possibility that citizens look across borders, is a very significant, systemic dimension of governance both at the local and at the national levels.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press, USA
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. Juni 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 160mm x 28mm
• Gewicht: 635g
• ISBN-13: 9780190499167
• ISBN-10: 0190499168
• Artikelnr.: 56869703

Autorenporträt

Pierre Salmon is Professor, Emeritus, at the Université de Bourgogne-Franche Comté. He has also been professor of economics at the European University Institute and is past-president of the European Public Choice Society. He is the author of "Decentralisation as an Incentive Scheme", a seminal article on yardstick competition among governments.

Inhaltsangabe

* Acknowledgements
* Chapter 1: Introduction
* Chapter 2: A characterization of political yardstick competition
* 2.1. Electoral agency
* 2.1.1. From 'normal' agency to 'political agency'
* 2.1.2. From 'political agency' to 'electoral agency'
* 2.1.3. Voters and performance: the principle
* 2.1.4. Ambiguities in the meaning of governmental performance
* 2.1.5. Conflicting views among voters
* 2.1.6. Incumbents and performance
* 2.2. Yardstick competition in electoral agency
* 2.2.1 Voters' comparative assessments
* 2.2.2 The comparisons-based support function
* 2.2.3. The S-shaped response of voters to comparative performance
* 2.2.4. Explained variable
* 2.2.5. Selection and incentives
* 2.3. Conclusion
* Chapter 3: Accountability, information, and yardstick competition
* 3.1. Accountability
* 3.1.1 Definitions
* 3.1.2 Accountability and other dimensions of elections
* 3.1.3 Is accountability asymmetric?
* 3.1.4 Elites
* 3.1.5 Clientelism
* 3.1.6 Accountability and other ingredients of good governance
* 3.2. Information asymmetry as an obstacle to downward accountability
* 3.2.1. Biased information on general policy issues
* 3.2.2. Biased information on citizens' special interests
* 3.2.3. Obstacles to assessments of outcomes
* 3. 3. Yardstick competition to the rescue of accountability
* 3.3.1. Tournaments and yardstick competition in their original
habitat
* 3.3.2. Transposition
* 3.3.3. Mimicking versus outperforming
* 3.4. Conclusion
* Chapter 4: Yardstick competition and its cousins
* 4.1. Mobility-based competition
* 4.1.1. Policy-induced mobility and mobility-based competition
* 4.1.2. Compared strengths of the two competition mechanisms
* 4.1.3. The locus of interaction
* 4.1.4. Immobile citizens and mobility
* 4.1.5. Policymaking autonomy
* 4.1.6. The exit-voice nexus
* 4.1.7. Mobility-induced diversity and comparability
* 4.2. Policy learning
* 4.2.1. The pure case: comparisons by incumbents
* 4.2.2. On the relation between policy learning and yardstick
competition
* 4.3. Other mechanisms
* 4.3.1. Peer approval and emulation
* 4.3.2. Out-of-jurisdiction public opinion
* 4.3.3. Incumbents' career concerns
* 4.3.4. Neo-Austrian institutional competition
* 4.4. Conclusion
* Chapter 5: The virtue of narrowing: the fiscal federalism setting
* 5.1. Yardstick competition as a systemic dimension
* 5.2. Yardstick competition as an empirical fact
* 5.2.1. Strategic spatial interaction
* 5.2.2. Identifying yardstick competition
* 5.2.3. Neighborhood
* 5.2.4. Other issues addressed within the internal discussion
* 5.3. Queries
* 5.3.1. Status of the empirical results
* 5.3.2. Beyond neighborhood
* 5.3.3. Empirical implications of non-linearity
* 5.3.4. Alternative approaches
* 5.4. Conclusion
* Chapter 6: The challenge of extending: the international setting
* 6.1. Circumstantial evidence
* 6.2. Obstacles
* 6.2.1. Ideological obstacles
* 6.2.2. Sociological obstacles
* 6.2.3. Technical obstacles
* 6.3. The few empirical results obtained so far
* 6.4. Dealing with complexity and diversity
* 6.5. Conclusion
* Chapter 7: Two heuristic models
* 7.1 First model: yardstick competition and the allocation of effort
* 7.1.1. The framework
* 7.1.2. Differential information asymmetry
* 7.1.3. Constitutional remedies
* 7.1.4. Empirical predictions
* 7.1.5. Yardstick competition and international political relations
* 7.2. Second model: the impact of comparative underperformance
* 7.2.1. The framework
* 7.2.2. Discussion
* 7.2.3. A check-list of reasons for ineffectiveness
* 7.3. Conclusion
* Chapter 8: Vertical interactions
* 8.1. Horizontal yardstick competition in multilevel settings
* 8.1.1. Shared responsibility for outcomes
* 8.1.2. Split principals
* 8.2. Vertical competition among governments
* 8.2.1. Competition for what? Three approaches
* 8.2.2. Breton's theory of vertical competition
* 8.2.3. The protection of vertical competition in unitary states
* 8.3. The EU context
* 8.3.1. Vertical relationships: the centralization process
* 8.3.2. Horizontal yardstick competition in the EU context
* 8.4. Conclusion
* Chapter 9. Final comments: perverse effects, advice, and arguments
* 9.1. Perverse effects
* 9.1.1. Incompetent voters
* 9.1.2. Incumbents' incentives
* 9.2. Advice (or the absence thereof)
* 9.3. A methodological epilogue
* 9.3.1. Models
* 9.3.2. Mechanisms
* 9.3.3. Arguments
* 9.4. Conclusion
* References