Analyzing the Politics of Legislative Debate

This chapter considers why we should be interested in the politics of legislative debate. What does the analysis of legislative debate contribute to our understanding of politics more generally? This is particularly important given that legislative debate is not actually “debate” in any meaningful sense of the word, and that most legislators are not even present when most legislative speeches are made. The answers offered here rest on the assumption that speeches in the legislature allow legislators to commit to policy positions on the official record. If the main concern is politics between parties, debate speeches tend to concern actual policy implementation, likely closer to “true” preferences than electoral aspirations and promises. If the prime concern is politics within parties, debate speeches can give insight into internal party policy divisions, even in settings where the final legislative party vote is tightly whipped.

Samia’s foreign policy will buy goodwill for Tanzania

Significance Samia’s administration appears markedly more open on foreign policy issues, although there are growing concerns this may not be matched by any greater openness towards domestic democratic freedoms. Impacts Samia’s charismatic diplomacy may help restore previously damaged foreign relations and build new ties too. The economic benefits of improving foreign relations may prove limited as shifting geopolitics dampens enthusiasm for new investments. Despite a shift in tone regarding COVID-19, actual policy may still prioritise economic considerations over public health.

Personalising cultural policy: The influence of Tom O’Regan

This article offers a personal commentary on the influence of Tom O’Regan, my Honours supervisor in the 1990s. Among many other things, he was a major contributor to the ‘cultural policy debate’ in Australia. More than offering an explanation about the subject, O’Regan had warned of the need to strike a balance when debating culture and critiquing cultural policy, and not fall into polemical traps. Making a case for policy independence, he urged academics to participate collaboratively and cooperatively in cultural policy-making processes, instead of primarily engaging in cultural criticisms. I write as well of my firsthand experience of how his cultural policy writings transcended scholarly rationale into the actual policy domain during my time as a media policy professional in Singapore. His ability to apply policy thinking beyond academia underscores why he was – and will remain – a giant of media and cultural studies in Australia and beyond.

The symbolic uses of platforms: The politics of platform governance in the United States

Unlike many other countries around the world, the United States has taken relatively little substantive action in the realm of platform governance, despite the United States being directly impacted by occurrences such as Russian interference in the 2016 election, domestic disinformation related to the 2020 election, the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal and the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation that has accompanied the Coronavirus pandemic. Yet the past four years have involved numerous Congressional hearings on various aspects of platform governance and a multitude of bills have been introduced addressing a similarly wide range of platform governance issues. With so many indicators of potential government action over the past half-decade, but so few actual policy interventions, platform governance appears to be a prime example of a policy-making context in which symbolic actions are taking precedence over substantive actions. This article illustrates this dynamic through an analysis of recent platform governance developments in the United States.

Populism as a ‘corrective’ to trade agreements? ‘America First’ and the readjustment of NAFTA

The past few years have seen an upsurge in populist politics around the globe. Yet, its potential impact on the liberal international order has been analyzed mainly from a discursive perspective, and much less is known about actual policy implications. Adopting an ideational approach to populism and taking the case of the NAFTA renegotiation process as a building block in the liberal economic order, this article studies the populist imprints of the revised agreement. First, we demonstrate how the populist division of society between ‘the corrupt elite’ and ‘the honest people’ and the emphasis on popular sovereignty were used as narrative frames in criticizing NAFTA. In a second step, through selected provisions, we show how alterations to NAFTA are considered as ‘populist corrections’ to guarantee greater representation for ‘the people’ and better safeguards for popular sovereignty under the USMCA. The article concludes with a discussion of potential implications for global trade.

Dating Structural Changes in UK Monetary Policy

The UK historical monetary policy experience is rich of institutional changes, but it remains unclear which of these many events dominated the policy actions and what timing characterised the inception of different policy regimes. We develop a new empirical approach to answer these questions and we identify in particular the historical institutional events that effectively translated into a shift of the systematic actions of the UK monetary authorities. We find that not all institutional events triggered a contemporaneous change in the actual policy conduct, although a coherent evolution in phases is evident since 1978, when a significant monetary policy rule emerges. These occasional but not sporadic regime changes explain a considerable share of the movements in the official interest rate, as well as an overstatement of the importance of policy inertia.

Leveraging Policy Steer? Industrial Policy, Risk-Sharing, and the European Investment Bank

This chapter focuses on the European Investment Bank and the Juncker Plan in terms of its impact on industrial policy and state-market relations. Showing the growth of both the EIB and the EIF over the past two decades, the chapter highlights the increasing importance of engaging private investors in their financial operations. By proposing an analytical distinction between “economic” and “financial” risk, it argues that operating on risk-sharing arrangements has led the EIB—and the Juncker Plan—to effectively accumulate the latter at the expense of the former, which has resulted not only in a trade-off between actual policy steer as envisaged by the Commission and increased leverage as a developmental strategy, but also in political tensions within the field of development banking.

Designing Context-Based Marketing: Product Recommendations Under Time Pressure

We study how to design product recommendations when consumers’ attention and utility are influenced by time pressure—a prominent example of the context effect—and menu characteristics, such as the number of recommended products in the assortment. Using unique data on consumer purchases from vending machines on train platforms in Tokyo, we develop and estimate a structural consideration set model in which time pressure and recommendations can influence attention and utility. We find that time pressure reduces consumer attention but increases utility. Time pressure moderates the effect of recommendations for the attention of both recommended and nonrecommended products and utility for recommended products. Moreover, the number of total recommendations increases consumer attention in general, but in a diminishing way. In our counterfactual simulations, we find that the revenue-maximizing number of recommendations decreases with time pressure and that optimizing recommending products to accommodate time pressure by a greedy algorithm increases total sales volume by 3.7% relative to the actual policy, 0.6% points more than traditional consumer-segment-based targeting policy. This effect is larger than 10% price discounts, which increases the revenue only by 0.4% at the margin. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.

Subsidies or Tax Breaks Versus Intellectual Property Rights: Dual Markets

Intellectual property rights are monopoly rights, which have undesirable welfare properties. Therefore, several studies suggest to use rewards as incentives for innovation instead. However, these studies have thus far had little effect on actual policy, possibly because such rewards may be difficult to implement in practice. We suggest a way of providing incentives to originators that is easy to implement. This is possible if there is an additional market in which the originator operates, where copying is not easily possible. Taking the music industry as example, copyrights in the records market could be replaced by subsidies or tax breaks in the market for live performances. We provide a modeling framework that can be used to analyze in which cases the replacement of intellectual property rights in one market with subsidies in another market is welfare improving or even pareto efficient.

Hybrid challenges to democracy: some cases of Russia’s foreign interference in elections

Contemporaneous wars are subjected to some profound changes regarding applied means and sometimes goals of the confronting parties. It is becoming clear with the cases of special operations, launched by Russia against its strategic rivalries and countries, which have been proclaimed by the latter sphere of Russia’s geopolitical interests. Kremlin tries to undermine the electoral process and distort their results. They serve very important tools of Russia’s actual policy. For instance, they aim at distortion of the election agenda settings, spreading fake news and false perception of main topics for a public discourse into targeted countries. USA, France, Great Britain seem to be only a few examples of those actions. Most of all, the vulnerability towards Russia’s interference into democratic elections are attributed with Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and some other post-soviet counties. The article characterizes some cases of such intrusion and points out at the urgent necessity to set in forth counter-policy against this kind of the interference.