A Spatial Modeling Framework

This chapter proposes a simple spatial modeling framework to analyze how variations in interdependence and ideology shape incentives for cooperation and competition. The goal is to present a framework that is as simple as the prisoner's dilemma, coordination dilemma, battle of the sexes, and other two-by-two games that have served as mental models for rationalist analyses of cooperation. The spatial model easily accommodates multiple actors and distributive conflict and allows for analyses of how institutions structure choices. It starts from the assumption that actors have ideal points in a common low-dimensional ideological space. Yet their utilities are determined not just by their own policies but also by the policies of other actors. This interdependence creates incentives for cooperation. In this context, institutions may help actors achieve mutually beneficial outcomes, but they also have distributive implications. Institutions help shift policy status quos in particular directions.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's argument that much, though not all, distributive conflict over multilateral institutions takes place in a low-dimensional ideological space. Even if distributive conflict over institutions is not always about ideology, the geopolitical implications often are. The point of this book is not just to argue that ideological contestation matters but also to offer measures, a modeling framework, and empirical illustrations. The theoretical framework helps in better understanding how institutional commitments hang together and may unravel together as challenges to the liberal institutional order mount. If multilateralism is distinct because it advances general principles, then one must understand challenges to the multilateral order in terms of domestic and international challenges to those principles. The chapter then presents a brief illustration of the World Trade Organization.

Distributive Conflict and Interest Group Preferences in Deficit Countries

The politics of adjustment in deficit countries were characterized by strong domestic discontent, leading to significant political upheaval. Why did policymakers in these countries nonetheless implement unprecedented austerity and painful structural reforms? Zooming in on the domestic drivers of this adjustment choice, this chapter highlights mechanisms by which internal adjustment grew more politically feasible in deficit countries. The chapter draws on original survey data on the policy preferences of 359 economic interest groups in Ireland, Spain and Greece. It finds that while groups were consistently negative to a full range of scenarios by which external adjustment could be achieved in deficit countries, their preferences toward austerity measures and structural reforms varied much more widely. This variation, it is argued, facilitated the formation of pro-internal adjustment coalitions in deficit country contexts. Moreover, the chapter shows that opportunity costs mattered. While opposed to internal adjustment in absolute terms, a large majority of interest groups in deficit countries grew pliable to the prospect of it when faced with a choice between this and the alternative of abandoning the euro; even if internal adjustment programs were comprised of policies that groups themselves distinctly opposed.

Distributive Conflict and Interest Group Preferences in Surplus Countries

A key characteristic of the Eurozone crisis is that the burden of adjustment was carried almost exclusively by crisis countries. Surplus countries did not contribute to the necessary rebalancing, even though internal adjustment likely would have reduced some of the pressure on deficit states. The chapter argues that surplus countries’ resistance to internal adjustment is rooted in domestic distributive struggles about the design of possible adjustment policies. To explore this argument, original survey data is leveraged from 357 economic interest groups from Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands and qualitative interviews with interest group representatives. The chapter shows that although there is general support for internal adjustment among economic interest groups, they disagree heavily about how exactly to achieve this goal. Together with a broad consensus to avoid a breakup of the Eurozone, the resulting deadlock turned interstate financing—such as bailouts to crisis countries—into a politically attractive strategy. Rather than being rooted only in ordoliberal ideology or export orientation, distributive conflicts thus contributed significantly to surplus countries’ resistance to adjust.

Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change

Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite interviews, we review empirical support for this model and find that the evidence for its claims is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. We find, first, that the strongest collective action claims appear empirically unsubstantiated in many important climate politics cases. Second, collective action claims—whether in their strongest or in more nuanced versions—appear observationally equivalent to alternative theories focused on distributive conflict within countries. We argue that extant patterns of climate policy making can be explained without invoking free-riding. Governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do, and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not. Without an empirically grounded model for global climate policy making, institutional and political responses to climate change may ineffectively target the wrong policy-making dilemma. We urge scholars to redouble their efforts to analyze the empirical linkages between domestic and international factors shaping climate policy making in an effort to empirically ground theories of global climate politics. Such analysis is, in turn, the topic of this issue’s special section.

DIFICULDADES INSTITUCIONAIS E ECONÔMICAS PARA O ORÇAMENTO PARTICIPATIVO EM MUNICÍPIOS BRASILEIROS

<p>Este artigo faz parte de uma agenda de pesquisa que tem origem na abordagem institucional e na economia política do orçamento público para a construção de modelo de análise da governança orçamentária em cidades brasileiras. O objetivo do artigo é analisar o processo de participação e conflito distributivo inerente ao orçamento público partindo de evidências dos municípios brasileiros no período de 2005 a 2018. Este texto apresenta reflexões iniciais sobre os limites para a realização do Orçamento Participativo decorrentes da crescente setorialização de gastos, da estrutura de receitas municipais e da crise de financiamento nos municípios, principalmente, a partir de 2014, que têm infligido dificuldades para a construção de uma arena coletiva para participação e negociação do conflito distributivo.</p><p> </p><p>INSTITUTIONAL AND ECONOMIC DIFFICULTIES FOR PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING IN BRAZILIAN MINICIPALITIES</p><p>This article is part of a research agenda based on the institutional approach and the political economy of public budgeting to develop an analyticalframeworkfor the budgetary governance in Brazilian cities. The article aims to understand the participatory and distributive conflict inherent to the public budgeting,based on evidence from Brazilian municipalities from 2005 to 2018. This paper presents initial remarks on the limits to the Participatory Budgeting arising from the growing sectorization of spending, the structure of municipal revenues and the fiscal crisis in the municipalities, especially since 2014, which have complicated the construction of a collective arena for participation and negotiation of distributive conflict.</p><p>Keywords: Public budgeting, Local government, Distributive conflict, Participatory budgeting, Municipalities.</p><p> </p><p>DIFFICULTÉS INSTITUTIONNELLES ET ÉCONOMIQUES POUR LA BUDGÉTISATION PARTICIPATIVE DANS LESMUNICIPALITÉS BRÉSILIENNES</p><p>Cet article a pour origine un programme de recherche issu de l’approcheinstitutionnelle et de l’économie politique du budget public pour la construction d’un modèled’analyse de la gouvernancebudgétaire des villesbrésiliennes. L’objectif de cet article est de comprendre le processus de participation et les conflits de répartition intrinsèques au budget public à partir des informations financières des municipalités brésiliennes entre 2005 et 2018. Cet étude présente des réflexions initiales à propos des limites de la budgétisation participative suite à la croissante spécialitébudgétairedes dépenses, à la structure de recettes municipales et à la crise du financement municipal, en particulier depuis 2014, qui brident la construction d’un espace collectif de participation et de négociation des conflits distributifs.</p><p>Mots clés: Budget public; Gouvernement local, Conflit distributif, Budget publique, Budgétisation participative, Municipalités.</p>

State Segmentation and Democratic Survival in Latin America

Popular models portray that high inequality induces elites to sponsor coups and reverse democratization as a means for repressing redistributive demands. Challenging this prediction, Latin America shifted from a historical pattern of systematic democratic breakdowns to one characterized by the resilience of democracy despite extreme levels of inequality. This article argues that the reminiscence of state-led repression under democracy explains why elites more regularly waive coups as solutions to distributive conflict in Latin American democracies. I call this state segmentation, a concept that describes the asymmetries between the enforcement of citizenship rights for those in privileged positions and for the poor. Wherever state segmentation is high, the odds of democratic breakdown should be lower. I test the argument using logistic regression models to predict the probability of coups and mandate interruptions considering different levels of state segmentation in Latin America using V-Dem data. Results show that asymmetries in access to citizenship rights indeed prevent democratic breakdowns.

Class, Power and the Structural Dependence Thesis: Distributive Conflict in the UK, 1892–2018

Can political parties, social movements and governments influence market outcomes and shape the functioning of a capitalist economy? Is it possible for social democratic parties, and the labour movement in general, to promote a significant redistribution of income in favour of labour? According to proponents of the structural dependence thesis, the answer to both questions is negative, because the structural dependence of labour upon capital severely constrains feasible income distributions. This article provides a long-run analysis of the UK, which casts doubts on the structural dependence thesis. There is some evidence of a short-run profit-squeeze mechanism, but income shares are much more variable in the long-run than the structural dependence argument suggests, and the power resources available to social classes are among the key determinants of distributive outcomes.

Domestic Outsourcing and Workers’ Bargaining Power in a Simple Production System

Outsourcing is normally conceived as the result of a cost-minimizing choice of a new technique that also implies a redefinition of the boundaries between firms and sectors. In this paper, we will argue instead that many outsourcing activities do not necessarily imply technical change and that the phenomenon can be explained by placing it in connection with the radical modification of the way in which wages are set for workers in a wide range of poorly regulated firms and industries. More than as an aspect of the spread of technical progress, outsourcing will be analyzed as an important mechanism through which workers are divided and their bargaining power is weakened, thus changing the outcome of the distributive conflict between profit and wages.

Protests of Abundance: Distributive Conflict Over Agricultural Rents During the Commodities Boom in Argentina, 2003–2013

Whereas the scholarship on rural contention mostly focuses on austerity and busts, we study protests by agricultural export producers in times of high agricultural prices. Aware of price volatility, farmers seek to take advantage of cycles’ upswings to maximize their income and resist sharing the rents generated by higher prices. When farmers lack the formal political influence to avert redistribution, they are more likely to protest as their tax burden increases although they benefit from higher prices. Their strongest protest tool is lockouts, which halt commercialization activities and have significant economic consequences, but require coordination by farmer associations. Membership homogeneity and lower exposure to state retaliation by these organizations heightens contention. We test this argument using a local-level data set on rural lockouts across Argentine departments between 2003 and 2013, a time of high prices for Argentina’s key export commodity: soybeans. We complement our empirical strategy with in-depth, semi-structured elite interviews.