The Limits Of Institutional Engineering

By using a method called process tracing to scrutinize institutional engineering in Iraq, it becomes clear why intensified violence followed the drafting and ratification of the Iraqi constitution. It is not surprising that institutional engineering did not forestall violence; therefore, we can conclude that the Iraqi experience does not support theories of institutional design--Publisher's description.

Political accountability is a crucial element of any democracy since it is a safeguard against power abuse and corruption, both urgent problems of many political systems in Southeast Asia. Based on social science theories, the author analyses from a comparative perspective the ways institutional engineering concerning different dimensions of political accountability influenced the quality of democracy in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. By highlighting the successes and shortcomings, this book evaluates the degree these institutional reforms resulted in the deepening, stagnation, or regression of the respective democratization processes in these three Southeast Asian countries.

This is the first volume in a series of books on democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe. The series focuses on three major aspects of democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe: institutional engineering, transnational pressures and civil society. This first volume analyses constraints on and opportunities of institutional engineering in Eastern Europe: to what extent and how elites in Eastern Europe have been able to shape, if not manipulate, the politics of democratic consolidation through institutional means. The aim is to contrast a set of democracy theories with empirical evidence accumulated in Eastern Europe over the last ten years. The volume tries to avoid complex debates about definitions, methods and the uses and misuses of comparative research. Instead it tries to establish what has really happened in the region, and which of the existing theories have proved helpful in explaining these developments. The volume starts with a presentation of conceptual and comparative frameworks, followed by in-depth empirical analyses of the thirteen individual countries undergoing democratic consolidation. The first conceptual and comparative part contains three chapters. The first chapter explains what institutional engineering is about and describes our experiences with institutional engineering in former transitions to democracy. It also focuses on the import and export of institutional designs. The second chapter analyses the utility of constitutions in the process of democratic consolidation. The third chapter compares constitutional designs and problems of implementation in Southern and Eastern Europe. The empirical case studies deal with the following countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary and Poland. And the conclusions evaluate the enormous impact of institutions on politics in Eastern Europe and show how central constitutional designs are to the institutional engineering in the societies undergoing transitions to democracy.

The Handbook is a virtual encyclopedia of public financial management, written by topmost experts, many with a background in the IMF and World Bank. It provides the first comprehensive guide to the subject that has been published in more than ten years. The book is aimed at a broad audience of academics/students, government officials, development agencies and practitioners. It covers both bread-and-butter topics such as the macroeconomic and legal framework for budgeting, budget preparation and execution, procurement, accounting, reporting, audit and oversight, as well as specialist subjects such as government payroll systems, local government finance, fiscal transparency, the management of fiscal risks, sovereign wealth funds, the management of state-owned enterprises, and political economy aspects of budgeting. The book sets out numerous examples and case studies describing good practice in public financial management, and is highly relevant for use in both advanced and developing countries.

Developing countries commonly adopt reforms to improve their governments yet they usually fail to produce more functional and effective governments. Andrews argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.

Electoral Systems and Political Context illustrates how political and social context conditions the effects of electoral rules. The book examines electoral behavior and outcomes in countries that use 'mixed-member' electoral systems – where voters cast one ballot for a party list under proportional representation (PR) and one for a candidate in a single member district (SMD). Based on comparisons of outcomes under the two different rules used in mixed-member systems, the book highlights how electoral systems' effects – especially strategic voting, the number of parties and women's representation – tend to be different in new democracies from what one usually sees in established democracies. Moreover, electoral systems such as SMDs are usually presumed to constrain the number of parties irrespective of the level of social diversity, but this book demonstrates that social diversity frequently shapes party fragmentation even under such restrictive rules.