Time is of the essence: Explaining the duration of European Union lawmaking under the co-decision procedure

The article explores factors affecting the duration of the co-decision procedure (currently the ordinary legislative procedure), the main procedure for adopting legislation in the European Union. Drawing from rational choice institutionalism, it expects the speed of co-decision to be determined by three attributes: the impatience of legislators, issue linkage and the characteristics of Council and European Parliament negotiators ( relais actors). The hypotheses are tested using survival analysis on a dataset of 599 controversial legislative acts submitted and enacted under co-decision between 1999 and 2009. The results show that co-decision proposals are decided faster when they are urgent, negotiated prior to the European Parliament elections and concluded through single proposal logrolls. By contrast, multi-proposal packages and the ideological distance between relais actors prolong decision-making. Overall, the article contributes to the literature by showing that the impatience of legislators, package deals and the properties of negotiators are relevant drivers of co-decision duration.

Vote Buying dalam Pemilihan Kepala Desa dan Upaya Penangkalannya : Studi Kasus di Kabupaten Tabanan

This article aims to analyze the potential for the practice of buying and selling votes or vote buying in the election of village heads or Perbekel in Tabanan Regency, Bali. This article explores regulatory aspects, views, and variations that occur in society, including efforts to reduce the practice of buying and selling votes. In recent years, in every holding of village head elections or perbekel in several areas, there are always vote buying practices and various activities. To answer this question, the study in this article uses empirical legal research which analyzes the implementation of the law regarding village head elections regulation in reality in the community with a focus on two villages in Tabanan Regency, Bali. This article uses interview and documentation for data collection techniques and uses a rational choice institutionalism framework. With this theoretical framework, it tells the empirical facts that the calculated practice of buying votes is determined by calculations that are all profitable for the candidates and the voters. The opportunity for this practice to occur is considered to be large, carried out by perbekel officers with incumbent status. There are several offers to reduce this problem, namely by using a special website that manages the election of perbekel by loading the profile of the perbekel candidates specifically to ensure the accountability of the election. Artikel ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis potensi terjadinya praktik jual beli suara atau vote buying dalam pemilihan kepala desa atau perbekel di Kabupaten Tabanan, Provinsi Bali. Artikel ini mengeksplorasi aspek regulasi, pandangan, dan ragam benturan yang terjadi di masyarakat termasuk upaya-upaya pereduksian praktik jual beli suara tersebut. Pada beberapa tahun belakangan, pada setiap penyelenggaraan pemilihan kepala desa atau perbekel serentak pada beberapa wilayah senantiasa di ikuti oleh adanya praktik-praktik jual beli suara atau vote buying dengan beragam bentuk aktifitasnya. Untuk menjawab persoalan tersebut, studi pada artikel ini menggunakan penelitian hukum empiris dimana menganalisis implementasi hukum terkait pelaksanaan regulasi pemilihan kepala desa dalam realitasnya di masyarakat dengan fokus dua desa di Kabupaten Tabanan, Bali. Artikel ini menggunakan teknik pengumpulan data wawancara dan dokumentasi serta dianalisis menggunakan frame teoritik rational choice institusionalism. Melalui frame teoritik ini memperlihatkan fakta empirik bahwa praktik vote buying dianggap turut ditentukan oleh kalkulasi-kalkulasi yang serba menguntungkan baik bagi kalangan kandidat maupun masyarakat pemilihnya. Peluang terjadinya praktik ini dianggap berpotensi besar dilakukan oknum perbekel yang berstatus incumbent. Terdapat beberapa tawaran mereduksi persoalan ini , yaitu dengan pemanfaatan website khusus yang mengelola pemilihan perbekel dengan memuat profil perbekel secara khusus untuk menjamin akuntabilitas pemilihan.

Analisis Institusionalisasi Kebijakan Dana Kelurahan di Kecamatan Tempe Kabupaten Wajo

Abstrak Institusionalisasi kebijakan dana kelurahan merupakan studi yang mempelajari tentang proses pelaksanaan terhadap kebijakan dana kelurahan yang telah ditetapkan pemerintah. Dana kelurahan dialokasikan pemerintah melalui Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 17 Tahun 2018 tentang Kecamatan dengan melihat keberhasilan yang dicapai dana desa dalam pembangunan dan pemberdayaan masyarakat. Penelitian ini bertujuan mengkaji dan menganalisis model institusionalisasi kebijakan dana kelurahan di Kecamatan Tempe Kabupaten Wajo. Tipe penelitian yang digunakan adalah kualitatif yang memberikan gambaran faktual mengenai tujuan penelitian. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan: pelaksanaan kebijakan dana kelurahan di Kecamatan Tempe Kabupaten Wajo sesuai dengan model institusionalisasi, yakni Rational Choice Institusionalism, Historical Institusionalism, Sosiologis Institusionalism, Discursive Institusionalism, dan Political Game. Kata Kunci: Institusionalisasi, Dana Kelurahan, Kebijakan, Wajo Abstract The Institutionalization of urban village fund policy is a study to learn about the implementation of the urban village fund policy process. The fund was allocated by the government through Government Regulation Number 17 of 2018 about Sub-Districts for the development of urban village/village facilities, infrastructure, and community empowerment by referring to the success of urban village/village funds. This study aimed to examine and analyze the institutionalization model of urban village fund policy in Tempe District of Wajo Regency. This research used qualitative approach to provide a factual picture of the research objectives. The results showed that the implementation of urban village fund policy in Tempe District of Wajo Regency fulfilled the institutionalization models namely Rational Choice Institutionalism, Historical Institutionalism, Sociological Institutionalism, Discursive Institutionalism, and Political Game. Keywords: Institutionalization, Village Fund, Policy, Wajo

Habits and Policy: The Social Construction of Foreign Policymaking Processes

This article offers an alternative explanation for the processes by which foreign policy is made. It does so across three different countries, across different governments, across issues that had real “blood and treasure” at stake, across different domestic and international contexts, and while holding the target of policy, the United States, constant. Available theories argue that formal political institutions or norms determine who will influence the making of policy and how they will do so. However, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—countries with strikingly similar formal rules for making foreign policy—have been following, for decades, fundamentally different foreign policymaking processes, and they have been doing so without resorting to any normative justifications. The article contrasts the theoretical expectations of rational choice institutionalism and norm-based arguments on foreign policymaking with a logic of habit not captured by the logics of consequences or appropriateness of rational choice institutionalism and norm-based explanations. The article makes two contributions. First, it furthers the theoretical development of the concept of habit in international relations and offers a means of studying habits empirically. Second, it challenges the assumption that the power of domestic actors in foreign policy is a function of formal institutions or prevailing norms.

IDEATIONAL INSTITUTIONALISM: EXPLAINING INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS DURING A CRISIS

The role of agents' ideas in determining the direction of institutional transformations is often underestimated; this is especially true if one is analyzing the formation and/or reformation of institutional design during a crisis when the significance of other factors may decrease. Institutional approaches of historical institutionalism and rational choice institutionalism are not always able to adequately measure the impact that agents' ideas have on institutional transformations. Ideational institutionalism, on the contrary, allows one to focus on these ideas, as well as to analyze both ideas’ effect on emerging institutions and the impact of an agent’s ideas on ideas of other agents. Furthermore, ideational institutionalism in the form presented in the article proposes to move away from the perception of ideas exclusively as intersubjective and to separately study the ideas of each decision-maker; this allows one to assess the role of a particular agent in the formation of institutions. This approach is promising, in particular, for the analysis of the institutional changes that occurred in the post-Soviet countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The article discusses the main characteristics of the ideational approach and the framework of its use on the example of institutional changes in the Republic of Belarus in the 1990s.

RATIONAL CHOICE INSTITUTIONALISM, CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM, AND CONSTITUTION MAKER IN INDONESIA

Most political literature argues that outcomes in Indonesian constitutional reform 1999-2002 were determined mainly by the political actors. Notwithstanding the existing research providing insightful evidence, there is still a gap in which those literature discount the role of the party system in shaping and constraining the way the political actors within a party behave. Drawing on one of the new institutionalism concepts – ‘rational choice institutionalism' – the argument puts forth here is that Indonesian multi-party system (independent variable) forced the political parties (intermediary variable) to form a winning-coalition which finally produced a compromised outcome (dependent variable) of constitutional reform on the articles about relations between president and legislature.

Institutionalisation and implementation of the selected participatory instruments. The case of Poland

The article traces the process of the institutionalisation of selected elements of the mechanisms of public participation, whose consequence was the unification of the rules of implementation and formalisation. The process, however, did not result in an increase in civic engagement on the part of the citizens of all the territorial units under consideration. The article presents the outcome of both quantitative and qualitative (in-depth interviews) research conducted by the author in Polish municipalities. The theoretical framework of the article is provided by ‘new institutionalism’, and especially by ‘rational choice institutionalism’. The structure of the article is as follows: the first part focuses on the principles of new institutionalism with reference to the mechanisms of public participation. The second part presents a succinct analysis of the step-by-step institutionalisation of selected participatory mechanisms that have ensued in recent years. The third part contains a methodological overview of empirical research, while the fourth, and final, part includes the outcome of the research and its interpretation.

Institutionalism of rational choice: theoretical and methodological foundations and Ukrainian political science

It has been substantiated that the use of a research strategy of rational choice institutionalism was one of the factors that contributed to a return to the institutional theory of policy analysis individual dimension in the paper. Possibilities to achieve utility and distribution of resources in society at the political process micro-level began to be considered as sufficiently important resultants of functioning of the institutional system alongside macro-politics. In addition, it is specified that application of the methodology of the STEM subjects has allowed characterizing the activities of political institutions using the terms of effectiveness, which led to a reorientation of the study of their informal varieties as real regulators of political behaviour. However, the interest in empirical development has created the danger of rationalizing the politics up to its dehumanization, whereof avoiding, according to foreign political scientists, is possible adhering to ethical constraints that arise from the peculiarities of complex human nature.As a result of the analysis held, it has been found that, unlike the studies of foreign experts who distinguish various substantive areas of analysis in the theory of rational choice institutionalism, the applied potential of implementation of elements of its methodology in the works of Ukrainian scientists is rather instrumental. The general conclusion is that the research strategy of this version of new institutionalism in the practical plane is used mainly as one of many methodological approaches to the study of different political phenomena and processes. To some extent, similar to the particular area of research that reveals the analytical resource of rational choice institutionalism is to study the peculiarities of formation and functioning of parliament and the related processes (electoral strategies and coalition arrangements).It is emphasized that the most interesting for us may be the segment of scientific works, which are based on the theory of rational choice institutionalism, and related to the analysis of those factors that may impede democratic transformations in transitional political systems. It can be argued that inefficient political institutions, despite their irrational nature, continue to function in the political system because they are the product of a rational choice of influential political actors. In this case, the understanding of the very concept of rationality is distorted, which from an absolute category is transformed into a relative one, not only because of the limitations associated with the action of moral and ethical factors, but mainly due to maintenance of an inefficient institutional equilibrium, i.e. an institutional trap.