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Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (Paperback, New Ed)
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Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (Paperback, New Ed)
Series: Comparative Politics
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of
political science that deals with contemporary issues in
comparative government and politics. The General Editors are Max
Kaase, Professor of Political Science, Vice President and Dean,
School of Humanities and Social Science, International University
Bremen, Germany; and Kenneth Newton, Professor of Comparative
Politics, University of Southampton. The series is published in
association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Today, parliamentarism is the most common form of democratic
government. Yet knowledge of this regime type has been incomplete
and often unsystematic. Delegation and Accountability in
Parliamentary Democracies offers new conceptual clarity on the
topic. This book argues that representative democracies can be
understood as chains of delegation and accountability between
citizens and politicians. Under parliamentary democracy, this chain
of delegation is simple but also long and indirect. Principal-agent
theory helps us to understand the perils of democratic delegation,
which include the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard.
Citizens in democratic states, therefore, need institutional
mechanisms by which they can control their representatives. The
most important such control mechanisms are on the one hand
political parties and on the other external constraints such as
courts, central banks, referendums, and supranational institutions
such as those of the European Union. Traditionally, parliamentary
democracies have relied heavily on political parties and
presidential systems more on external constraints. This new
empirical investigation includes all seventeen West European
parliamentary democracies. These countries are compared in a series
of cross-national tables and figures, and seventeen country
chapters provide a wealth of information on four discrete stages in
the delegation process: delegation from voters to parliamentary
representatives, delegation from parliament to the prime minister
and cabinet, delegation within the cabinet, and delegation from
cabinet ministers to civil servants. Each chapter illustrates how
political parties serve as bonding instruments which align
incentives and permit citizen control of the policy process. This
is complemented by a consideration of external constraints. The
concluding chapters go on to consider how well the problems of
delegation and accountability are solved in these countries. They
show that political systems with cohesive and competitive parties
and strong mechanisms of external constraint solve their democratic
agency problems better than countries with weaker control
mechanisms. But in many countries political parties are now
weakening, and parliamentary systems face new democratic
challenges. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary
Democracies provides an unprecedented guide to contemporary
European parliamentary democracies. As democratic governance is
transformed at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it illustrates
the important challenges faced by the parliamentary democracies of
Western Europe.
General
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