The publication of an interim report from the Giovannini Commission on the costs of politics has raised quite a stink.

The report confirms that Italian deputies are grossly overpaid in relation to comparable parliamentarians in France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria.

Yet the Chamber of Deputies press office has put out a press release claiming, in essence, that Italian deputies have to pay lots of taxes, poor things, and that the total “cost per deputy” is lower than in other countries. The first claim is disingenuous unless taxation in other countries is also taken into account, and the second claim seems to me to be wrong.

Can anyone help me understand this?

Here’s a paper I’ve been working on. Abstract is below; data and Sweave source [rename to .Rnw] also available.

One important characteristic of justice, and a fortiori of our judicial system, is impartiality. One type of impartiality in judicial practice is impartiality between litigants who command status and material resources — the `haves’ — and litigants who lack resources, the `have-nots’. Investigation of relative status advantage in litigation outcomes, which springs from the work of Marc Galanter, has talked past a particularly British tradition emphasizing the conservative bias of the judiciary, and in particular its defence of property owners. In order to investigate these charges, I investigate the success of appeals to the House of Lords between 1969 and 2003 using logistic regression. I build both on general theories of relative status advantage and the advantages of `repeat players’, and on more particularly British interpretations of the judiciary. I find partial support for theories of relative status advantage, insofar as governmental actors have significant advantages over all other actors, but businesses and associations have no advantages over individual litigants. Contrary to expectations of a uniformly conservative judiciary, appellants challenging liberal outcomes were less likely to succeed rather than more.

Comments welcome.

Mark Pack asked about the trade union vote. Here’s a weighted table pulled from the BES pre-electoral polling, the only wave that included a question about trade union membership.

Weighting was done in R with the survey package using the standard YouGov weights.

I was very struck recently by the FT’s ranking of EU finance ministers.

It’s a rare venture into rating ministers other than Presidents or Prime Ministers. And, it’s been repeated over time.

I thought it might be useful to gather data on rankings over time, and construct a measure of finance minister “greatness” comparing across time. To do this, I turned these ranks into a series of pairwise contests, and then estimated a Bradley-Terry model using these 1632 different contests over 5 years, assuming that ministers’ ability remains constant over time, and ignoring ties. The results are shown below.

Note that this figure is based on the FT’s rankings for ministers’ political skills, not their economic ranking (surprisingly, the two sets of rankings are not correlated).

The top two finance ministers are both one-shot wonders: the FT must really regret rating George Papaconstantinou so highly last year. Eduard Janota we can know less about since he died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and was in any case a minister in a caretaker government.

The full data is available, and the R source code used to create the graphs is here.

Obviously the next step is to try and model the ability of “players” in the model using a range of covariates, perhaps the ones included in this interesting paper.

I’m quite surprised that Monti wants to stay until 2013.

That’s a long time for a technocratic government. Assume that elections in 2013 take place exactly five years after those of 2008, on the 13th and 14th. By that time, Monti would have been in office for 514 days.

That’s a month longer than Dini who, IMHO, had a firmer parliamentary base than Monti. And it’s longer than any technocratic government I can find except the Berov government that led Bulgaria between late 1992 and 1994.

Is Italy as a polity really as badly-off as Bulgaria in the early nineties?
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It is a good thing that Berlusconi has resigned as Prime Minister. Hallelujah.

Some people are upset about the way in which Berlusconi was forced to leave office. Those who are upset fall into two camps. One left-leaning camp is upset that Berlusconi was forced out by bond traders. One right-leaning camp (at least the version I read today in the Telegraph) is upset that Berlusconi was forced out by `Europe’, broadly defined.

I think it’s broadly correct to say that Berlusconi had to leave because the cost of servicing Italian debt had grown to unsustainable levels. But I think that saying baldly that the markets made Berlusconi resign is too simplistic.

First, had it not been the markets, it might well have been something else. At the beginning of Berlusconi’s tenure, I tried to predict how long his government would last, based on certain universal characteristics well-known to predict government duration. I predicted that his government was 95% certain to fall before January 2012. I later thought that he was close to resigning when he was charged for abuse of office and for paying for an under-age prostitute. He wasn’t, and didn’t. But the point still stands. Had the credit crisis not erupted, another parochial crisis might have done Berlusconi in.

Second, Berlusconi reaped a whirlwind of his own sowing. A lot of things had to happen for Berlusconi to be forced out. Not the least of these is the fact that Italian debt had to grow to considerable levels. Berlusconi has some responsibility for this. The second-most important relationship in Italian politics has been between Berlusconi and Giulio Tremonti (the most important is the relationship between Bossi and Berlusconi). Tremonti has always been on the side of fiscal probity. Berlusconi has consistently opposed him (not, I believe, because of any ideological differences, but simply because he resents being beholden to someone who is not disposable, who understands his brief and who commands some respect in the markets).

Third, Berlusconi was already politically weakened. Berlusconi started this legislature with 344 deputies in his majority, 28 more than he needed for a majority. He has frittered away that majority by consistently marginalizing Gianfranco Fini, causing supporters of the latter to leave the PdL and form their own party. Some of those people Berlusconi won back. That’s consistent with the idea of Berlusconi as a great salesman, and a great tactician but poor strategic. His utter neglect of strategy means that he has put himself at the mercy of a number of centrists who have little idea of loyalty. Berlusconi should know this well — he tried to bribe many of these people to bring about the fall of the second Prodi government in 2008.

Bond markets have a lot of influence in politics. It’s right for people to follow them, and their effects. But we shouldn’t ignore the effects of domestic factors. Markets might have pushed Berlusconi over the cliff. But politically, no one was there to catch him when he fell.

I have a new paper out.

It’s called “Measuring the formal independence of regulatory agencies”, it’s written together with Christel Koop, and it’s available online through JEPP.

The argument we make is quite simple, even if the graphs and models we use aren’t.

We take an existing index of independence, and we test whether all the items in the index fit, and whether the different item response categories are correctly ordered.

We find that items on method of appointment and the powers of the regulator aren’t related to the rest of the items, and so should be dropped.

Unfortunately, the article is a bit hard to understand unless you’ve read the original Gilardi article and have an idea of what the different response categories are. To see the different response categories, and full descriptives for the data we used, check out our previous report.

I’m writing a grant application.

Some of the documents in support of the application have an upper limit on the number of characters; some have an upper limit on the number of pages.

I find limits on the number of pages annoying. The quantity of pages of a document has no relationship to the quantity of content contained therein. They do have a relationship with font size, and line length.

I don’t want my grant application to fail because I didn’t mention x, y, or z. So I’ll try and meet the limit that’s been set me. I’ll decrease page margins, increase line length, and — by consequence — decrease legibility. (Thankfully, I’m barred from decreasing font-size).

This is not good for me, and it’s not good for reviewers. Why can’t grant bodies set limits in terms of characters or words?

I got tired of waiting for the ECPR printed programme, and got frustrated with the ECPR website.

So I made my own PDF programme for Reykjavik 2011. It’s in A5 format, and is optimized for e-readers, so very thin margins. Other formats on request.

Peter Mair died earlier this month.

I knew of Peter by reputation from the moment I started studying European politics; I knew him personally at the European University Institute.

Peter had three cardinal virtues of a scholar: first, a fine appreciation for the written word, in whichever language; second, a certain wanderlust, which led him from Ireland to the UK, to Leiden, and eventually on repeat postings in Florence; and third, the confidence and determination to identify really important questions, be they fashionable or not — and then try to answer them.

His work on political parties addressed fundamental questions about the relationship between state, society, and political parties.
More recent work on the travails of representative democracy was an attempt to grapple with perhaps the biggest and most important question in the study of politics.

His death at such an early age is a tragedy for the study of politics, and my thoughts are with his friends and family.