NIGERIA: POWER-SHARING AND THE RESURGENCE OF SEPARATIST AGITATION. THE PROSPECT OF A CONSOCIATIONAL MODEL

The theory of consociationalism has been extensively discussed in literature; however, its feasibility in managing conflicts in deeply divided societies is heavily contested. The few studies that have examined how the theory applies in real-world situations remain inconclusive. The present work, therefore, explored the prospect of consociational power-sharing model in addressing the problem of under-representation, political exclusion, and marginalization in Nigeria. This is against the backdrop of the incessant separatist agitations in Nigeria, which has undermined the peace, stability, and unity of the country. Using qualitatively analyzed data from secondary sources, this study argues that even though Nigeria does not meet any of the favorable conditions of consociationalism set out by Lijphart (1985), it would still benefit from consociational power-sharing. The study proposes the adoption of semi-presidentialism based on the principle of grand coalition and proportionality and gives an assessment of how it could work for Nigeria. It contends that the rotation of power among the six geo-political zones in the country and the adoption of proportional sequential mechanism would facilitate elite cooperation and inclusion of all segments of the society in the political process, thereby easing the fear of sectional domination in Nigeria. Keywords: power-sharing, consociationalism, separatist agitation, under-representation, political exclusion, Nigeria.

Long-Term Climate Treaties with a Refunding Club

We show that an appropriately-designed “Refunding Club” can simultaneously solve both free-riding problems in mitigating climate change—participating in a coalition with an emission reduction target and enduring voluntary compliance with the target once the coalition has been formed. Countries in the Club pay an initial fee into a fund that is invested in assets. In each period, part of the fund is distributed among the Club members in relation to the emission reductions they have achieved, suitably rescaled by a weighting factor. We show that an appropriate refunding scheme can implement any feasible abatement path a Club wants to implement. The contributions to the initial fund can be used to disentangle efficiency and distributional concerns and/or to make a coalition stable. Making the grand coalition stable in the so-called “modesty approach” requires less than 0.5% of World GDP. Finally, we suggest ways to foster initial participation, to incorporate equity concerns with regard to developing countries, and ways to ease the burden to fill the initial fund.

Austria: Phasing-Out Grand Coalition Government

Grand coalition government of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) had been the hallmark of post-war Austria but the historic ‘grand coalition’ formula seems exhausted. The rationale for maintaining this cooperation vanished, electoral changes undermined the former duopoly of these parties, and party system changes brought new players into the game. Yet at the government level alternatives involving the Freedom Party (FPÖ) have proved unstable as in each case an FPÖ event brought down the government or prevented its renewal. The chapter shows how routine formateur-led processes of coalition formation resulting in anticipated outcomes contrast with a few instances which significantly deviate. Coalition governance is characterized by the use of an elaborated set of rules and instruments and great continuity over time and different types of coalition. Accordingly, the underlying principle of coalition politics has been the ‘coalition compromise’ model, with government policies to be largely agreed between the coalition partners. In practice, ministerial discretion tends to shift government policy output towards the model of ‘constrained ministerial government’. Most coalitions terminated early because of inter-party conflict.

On the fuzzy interval equal surplus sharing solutions

PurposeThis paper deals with cooperative games whose characteristic functions are fuzzy intervals, i.e. the worth of a coalition is not a real number but a fuzzy interval. This means that one observes a lower and an upper bound of the considered coalitions. This is very important, for example, from a computational and algorithmic viewpoint. The authors notice that the approach is general, since the characteristic function fuzzy interval values may result from solving general optimization problems.Design/methodology/approachThis paper deals with cooperative games whose characteristic functions are fuzzy intervals, i.e. the worth of a coalition is not a real number but a fuzzy interval. A situation in which a finite set of players can obtain certain fuzzy payoffs by cooperation can be described by a cooperative fuzzy interval game.FindingsIn this paper, the authors extend a class of solutions for cooperative games that all have some egalitarian flavour in the sense that they assign to every player some initial payoff and distribute the remainder of the worth v(N) of the grand coalition N equally among all players under fuzzy uncertainty.Originality/valueIn this paper, the authors extend a class of solutions for cooperative games that all have some egalitarian flavour in the sense that they assign to every player some initial payoff and distribute the remainder of the worth v(N) of the grand coalition N equally among all players under fuzzy uncertainty. Examples of such solutions are the centre-of-gravity of the imputation-set value, shortly denoted by CIS value, egalitarian non-separable contribution value, shortly denoted by ENSC value and the equal division solution. Further, the authors discuss a class of equal surplus sharing solutions consisting of all convex combinations of the CIS value, the ENSC value and the equal division solution. The authors provide several characterizations of this class of solutions on variable and fixed player set. Specifications of several properties characterize specific solutions in this class.

Harsanyi support levels solutions

We introduce a new class of values for TU-games (games with transferable utility) with a level structure, called LS-games. A level structure is a hierarchical structure where each level corresponds to a partition of the player set, which becomes increasingly coarse from the trivial partition containing only singletons to the partition containing only the grand coalition. The new values, called Harsanyi support levels solutions, extend the Harsanyi solutions for LS-games. As an important subset of the class of these values, we present the class of weighted Shapley support levels values as a further result. The values from this class extend the weighted Shapley values for LS-games and contain the Shapley levels value as a special case. Axiomatizations of the studied classes are provided.

Epic

As the son of Zeus, accomplisher of great tasks, and civilizing agent, Heracles appears an archetypal hero, central to any number of myths and whose deeds dominate artistic representation. Yet his appearances in extant early Greek hexameter poetry are fleeting and carefully circumscribed. In this chapter we survey the references to an epic Heracles in order to establish common elements (his “fabula”); consider what picture emerges from the (fragmentary) epics devoted to him; and examine his role in the foundational epics of Hesiod and Homer. Heracles comes across as a quintessential hero who metes out and endures suffering, while simultaneously appearing outlandish, excessive, and one of a kind. His extreme individualism marks him out as a problematic figure in Homer’s grand coalition narratives that represent and interrogate political participation.

NEGOTIATION ON NATURAL RESOURCES

The host government (HG) of resource-rich countries (RRC) dealing with multiple International Oil Companies (IOCs) faces a choice between making a simultaneous multilateral offer and a sequential bilateral offer on equity shares from resource value. Provided that the HG treats all its foreign partners in a simultaneous negotiation as a single entity, it is argued that the HG is predicted to gain a higher equity share from a simultaneous multilateral bargaining deal than from a sequential bilateral one with each player. Furthermore, we argue that in case of positive weak externality from a sequential bilateral game, HG would still prefer a simultaneous multilateral game due to superadditivity and efficiency properties of grand coalition.

Losers together? Grand coalitions in the EU member states

Over the last two decades, the formation of grand coalitions has grown in the European Union (EU), even in countries with no previous political experience with them. Alongside a significant rise in both new and radical parties, grand coalitions signal the increasing fragmentation of contemporary European politics. We, therefore, investigate the electoral performance of both mainstream and new parties entering and leaving grand coalitions. We find that mainstream parties do not appear to enter grand coalitions after negative election results. They are, however, punished in the following elections, albeit not as heavily as previous findings have shown. This post-grand coalition electoral penalty is true for both major and minor grand coalition members. These findings contribute to the literature on party competition and provide insights into the choices mainstream parties' have been making in response to recent and rapid changes in the electoral landscape of the EU.

Heterogeneous coalitions and social revolutions

We have explained the presence of heterogeneous winning coalitions in social revolutions. In an overcrowded agrarian society, two almost identical non-productive enforcers, the landed political elite, collude and bargain over transfers with one of the two peasants to contest over a piece of land, as property rights for land are not well defined. In any other scenario, neither the grand coalition nor the coalition of two peasants and one enforcer forms, thereby deposing the other enforcer with positive probability. So, social revolutions never occur. If foreign wars weaken an enforcer, such as in China (1911), France, and Russia, adding one unit of capital makes the coalition of the peasant, the now worker, and one of the enforcers (now an industrial political elite) attractive: The excess labor can work with it; the weaker enforcer retaliates less and the stronger one more, if excluded. However, if the weaker one (the still-landed political elite) proposes first, a grand coalition forms in which he or she gets less than the other members do (desertion). There is conflict among peasants and among landed elites; thus, the concept of a coalition is more appropriate than that of a class.