The Cost of Doing Business: Congressional Requests, Cost, and Allocation of Presidential Resources

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 813-825
Author(s):  
Brandon Rottinghaus ◽  
Philip D. Waggoner
Keyword(s):  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Doing Business ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
The Cost

Executive-legislative interactions operate with cost-benefit trade-offs. Presidents possess several material options in granting Congressional requests to leverage Congressional support but must also marshal these scarce resources. We argue presidents should strategically grant requests from members of Congress for a range of executive actions based upon the cost of the request and the political context. Using an original data set of nearly 4,000 internal Congressional requests made during the Eisenhower, Ford, and H. W. Bush administrations, we find that presidents are strategic in granting requests, where the cost of the request is an important consideration when deciding whether or not to approve a legislator request, especially on executive appointments but not on legislative matters. Ideological proximity to the president matters more than partisanship in granting requests. Presidents are sensitive to cost when ideology is concerned but less so when granting requests to committee chairs. We conclude by highlighting the implications for interbranch bargaining.

Contingent technocracy: bureaucratic independence in developing countries

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel P. Teodoro ◽  
M. Anne Pitcher
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Policy Implementation ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
The Political ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Established Democracies ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis study investigates the effects of formal bureaucratic independence under varying democratic conditions. Conventional accounts predict that greater formal independence of technocratic agencies facilitates policy implementation, but those claims rest on observations of industrialised, high-income countries that are also established democracies. On the basis of research in developing countries, we argue that the effects of agency independence depend on the political context in which the agency operates. Our empirical subjects are privatisation agencies and their efforts to privatise state-owned enterprises in Africa. We predict that greater independence leads to more thorough privatisation under authoritarian regimes, but that the effect of independence declines as a country becomes more democratic. Using an original data set, we examine the relationship between formal agency independence and privatisation in Africa from 1990 to 2007. Our results modify the conventional wisdom on bureaucratic independence and culminate in a more nuanced theory of “contingent technocracy”.

Demographic life history traits of reproductive natterjack toads (Bufo calamita) vary between northern and southern latitudes

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Delfi Sanuy ◽  
Christoph Leskovar ◽  
Neus Oromi ◽  
Ulrich Sinsch
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Life History Traits ◽  
Large Female ◽  
Breeding Period ◽  
Female Size ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Bufo Calamita ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Age Variation ◽  
The Cost

AbstractDemographic life history traits were investigated in three Bufo calamita populations in Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate: Urmitz, 50°N; 1998-2000) and Spain (Catalonia: Balaguer, Mas de Melons, 41°N; 2004). We used skeletochronology to estimate the age as number of lines of arrested growth in breeding adults collected during the spring breeding period (all localities) and during the summer breeding period (only Urmitz). A data set including the variables sex, age and size of 185 males and of 87 females was analyzed with respect to seven life history traits (age and size at maturity of the youngest first breeders, age variation in first breeders, longevity, potential reproductive lifespan, median lifespan, age-size relationship). Spring and summer cohorts at the German locality differed with respect to longevity and potential reproductive lifespan by one year in favour of the early breeders. The potential consequences on fitness and stability of cohorts are discussed. Latitudinal variation of life history traits was mainly limited to female natterjacks in which along a south-north gradient longevity and potential reproductive lifespan increased while size decreased. These results and a review of published information on natterjack demography suggest that lifetime number of offspring seem to be optimized by locally different trade-offs: large female size at the cost of longevity in southern populations and increased longevity at the cost of size in northern ones.

Sustainable Distribution Design: Contrasting Disposable, Recyclable, and Reusable Strategies for Packaging Materials Using a Total Cost Analysis With an Illustration of Milk Distribution

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sri Satya Kanaka Nagendra Jayanty ◽  
William J. Sawaya ◽  
Michael D. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Packaging Materials ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Specific Product ◽  
Cost Structures ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Total Cost Analysis ◽  
Plastic Containers

Engineers, policy makers, and managers have shown increasing interest in increasing the sustainability of products over their complete lifecycles and also from the ‘cradle to grave’ or from production to the disposal of each specific product. However, a significant amount of material is disposed of in landfills rather than being reused in some form. A sizeable proportion of the products being dumped in landfills consist of packaging materials for consumable products. Technological advances in plastics, packaging, cleaning, logistics, and new environmental awareness and understanding may have altered the cost structures surrounding the lifecycle use and disposal costs of many materials and products resulting in different cost-benefit trade-offs. An explicit and well-informed economic analysis of reusing certain containers might change current practices and results in significantly less waste disposal in landfills and in less consumption of resources for manufacturing packaging materials. This work presents a method for calculating the costs associated with a complete process of implementing a system to reuse plastic containers for food products. Specifically, the different relative costs of using a container and then either disposing of it in a landfill, recycling the material, or reconditioning the container for reuse and then reusing it are compared explicitly. Specific numbers and values are calculated for the case of plastic milk bottles to demonstrate the complicated interactions and the feasibility of such a strategy.

scholarly journals Embedding Undersampling Rotation Forest for Imbalanced Problem

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huaping Guo ◽  
Xiaoyu Diao ◽  
Hongbing Liu
Keyword(s):  
Imbalanced Data ◽  
Feature Space ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Training Set ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Minority Class ◽  
Rotation Forest ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
Individual Classifier ◽  
The Cost

Rotation Forest is an ensemble learning approach achieving better performance comparing to Bagging and Boosting through building accurate and diverse classifiers using rotated feature space. However, like other conventional classifiers, Rotation Forest does not work well on the imbalanced data which are characterized as having much less examples of one class (minority class) than the other (majority class), and the cost of misclassifying minority class examples is often much more expensive than the contrary cases. This paper proposes a novel method called Embedding Undersampling Rotation Forest (EURF) to handle this problem (1) sampling subsets from the majority class and learning a projection matrix from each subset and (2) obtaining training sets by projecting re-undersampling subsets of the original data set to new spaces defined by the matrices and constructing an individual classifier from each training set. For the first method, undersampling is to force the rotation matrix to better capture the features of the minority class without harming the diversity between individual classifiers. With respect to the second method, the undersampling technique aims to improve the performance of individual classifiers on the minority class. The experimental results show that EURF achieves significantly better performance comparing to other state-of-the-art methods.

Design Trade-Offs Under Power Asymmetry: COPs and Flexibility Clauses

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Jean-Frédéric Morin ◽  
Benjamin Tremblay-Auger ◽  
Claire Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Design Feature ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Environmental Agreements ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Power Asymmetry ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Environmental Agreement ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Insurance Mechanism ◽  
Important Design

Abstract Negotiating parties to an environmental agreement can manage uncertainty by including flexibility clauses, such as escape and withdrawal clauses. This article investigates a type of uncertainty so far overlooked by the literature: the uncertainty generated by the creation of a Conference of the Parties (COP) in a context of sharp power asymmetry. When negotiating an agreement, it is difficult for powerful states to make a credible commitment to weaker states, whereby they will not abuse their power to influence future COP decision-making. Flexibility clauses provide a solution to this credibility issue. They act as an insurance mechanism in case a powerful state hijacks the COP. Thus we expect that the creation of a collective body interacts with the degree of power asymmetry to make flexibility clauses more likely in environmental agreements. To test this argument, we draw on an original data set of several specific clauses in 2,090 environmental agreements, signed between 1945 and 2018. The results support our hypothesis and suggest that flexibility clauses are an important design feature of adaptive environmental agreements.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Bilateral Bailouts

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina J. Schneider ◽  
Jennifer L. Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Trade Offs

AbstractIMF loans during times of financial crisis often occur in conjunction with bilateral financial rescues. These bilateral bailouts are substantial in size and a central component of international cooperation during financial crises. We analyze the political economy of bilateral bailouts and study the trade-offs that potential creditor governments experience when other countries find themselves in financial distress. Creditor governments want to stabilize crisis countries by providing additional liquidity, particularly if the crisis country is economically or politically important to them, but they are constrained by domestic politics. Politicians aim to balance these countervailing pressures. They provide bailouts when their own economy is exposed to negative spillover effects and when the crisis country is important for geostrategic, military, or political reasons. Domestic economic and political constraints, on the other hand, limit their ability to bail out other countries. We test our hypotheses using an original data set on bilateral bailouts by the G7 countries to countries that experienced financial crises between 1975 and 2010. The findings of our statistical analysis support our theoretical argument and contribute to a deeper understanding of international cooperation's complex structure during financial crises.

scholarly journals Brain size is correlated with endangerment status in mammals

2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1825) ◽  
pp. 20152772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric S. Abelson
Keyword(s):  
Brain Size ◽  
Extinction Risk ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Metabolic Cost ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Extant Species ◽  
Body Sizes ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Relationship

Increases in relative encephalization (RE), brain size after controlling for body size, comes at a great metabolic cost and is correlated with a host of cognitive traits, from the ability to count objects to higher rates of innovation. Despite many studies examining the implications and trade-offs accompanying increased RE, the relationship between mammalian extinction risk and RE is unknown. I examine whether mammals with larger levels of RE are more or less likely to be at risk of endangerment than less-encephalized species. I find that extant species with large levels of encephalization are at greater risk of endangerment, with this effect being strongest in species with small body sizes. These results suggest that RE could be a valuable asset in estimating extinction vulnerability. Additionally, these findings suggest that the cost–benefit trade-off of RE is different in large-bodied species when compared with small-bodied species.

Cooperation and Collaboration Using Computer-Mediated Communication

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley G. Hathorn ◽  
Albert L. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Computer Mediated Communication ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Collaborative Groups ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Cost

This study operationally defined and measured collaboration and compared the products and structure of collaborative groups that used computer-mediated communication. Key characteristics of collaboration selected from the literature were interdependence, synthesis, and independence, and a model for evaluating these characteristics was developed. All communication in this study occurred via asynchronous computer-mediated communication, using a threaded Web discussion. Participants in the study were graduate students, studying the same course with the same instructor at two venues. The students were divided into small groups from one or both venues, and four of these groups were studied. All students were given a problem to solve involving the cost-benefit trade-offs of distance education. The groups received different instructions. Two of them were told to collaborate on a solution, and the other two were told to select a role and discuss the problem from that point of view. Groups that were instructed to collaborate were more collaborative, but they produced a solution of a lower quality than the other groups. No conclusions could be drawn from the results on the structure of the groups. The role of collaboration in problem solving is discussed along with methods for creating more effective collaboration.

Beyond the Fiction of Federalism: Macroeconomic Management in Multitiered Systems

2002 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rodden ◽  
Erik Wibbels
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Fiscal Decentralization ◽  
Original Data ◽  
The Political ◽  
Budget Balance ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Federal States ◽  
The World ◽  
Macroeconomic Management ◽  
Economic Experiences

Recent research on federalism is extremely divided. While some tout the benefits of “market-preserving” federalism, others point to the fragmentation and incoherence of policy in federal states. This research bridges the divide by analyzing the political andfiscalstructures that are likely to account for the highly divergent economic experiences of federal systems around die world. To test these propositions, the authors use an original data set to conduct analyses of budget balance and inflation infifteenfederationsaround the world from 1978 through 1996. The empirical research suggests that the level of fiscal decentralization, the nature of intergovernmental finance, and vertical partisan relations all influence macroeconomic outcomes. The find- ings have broad implications for the widespread move toward greater decentralization and for the theoretical literatures on federalism and macroeconomics.

The Challenge of State-Building in Africa

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herbst
Keyword(s):  
Political Geography ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
European Experience ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Domestic Power

This chapter examines three sets of issues that present a challenge to state-building in Africa: the cost of expanding the domestic power infrastructure; the nature of national boundaries; and the design of state systems. Understanding the decisions made regarding each is critical, and there are profound trade-offs inherent to different approaches. Africa’s political geography helped structure the responses that leaders adopted to each set of issues just as European decisions were influenced by the structural features of that region. The chapter first compares the political geographies of Europe and Africa, focusing on the European experience of state consolidation and the nature of African politics, before discussing the extension of power in Africa. It also explores continuities in African politics and concludes with an overview of the analytic tools that are central to this study.

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