Chris Hanretty » academic

Want to hear why we have public broadcasters?

Chris — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:26:13 +0000

Then come hear me at the very first media@uea symposium on the 24th June 2011. Details are here. Quick descriptor:

media@uea is an initiative which brings together the schools of Economics,
Film & Television Studies, International Development, Law, Political, Social &
International Studies and others from across the University of East Anglia.
We are pleased to invite you to the first media@uea symposium, taking place
in Norwich on 24 June 2011. We hope to bring together experts from across
UEA schools who are engaged in media-related research with scholars from
other institutions and a range of external “stakeholders”, including speakers
from the media industries, activist and pressure groups and political parties.

The Coalition at One

Chris — Mon, 16 May 2011 11:42:51 +0000

Is the title of this excellent looking conference at which I’ll be presenting.

New paper, “Is Ed Red? Candidates and Electors in Labour’s 2010 Leadership Elections”

Chris — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:56:03 +0000

I’ve missed out on this year’s PSA, but in my defence I’ve been hard at work.

I’ve just finished a very preliminary draft of a paper on the Labour leadership elections. It draws on the same data I noted earlier.

The abstract is as follows:

I analyse the preference data of Labour MPs and MEPs in that party’s leadership election of 2010. I show that the primary dimension of competition is a left-right dimension, and that the second dimension of competition is a valence dimension, separating ‘nice’ (unthreatening) from ‘nasty’ (electorally competitive, potentially divisive) candidates. In both cases, the eventual leadership winner, Ed Miliband, is located close to the (dimension-by-dimension) median voter in the Labour party.

The article is available here, and here are the results for the two-dimensional solution.

Principals and agents

Chris — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 07:06:05 +0000

Here’s my review of Jan-Erik Lane’s book Comparative Politics: the principal-agent perspective. Hat-tip to Peter Kenneally for the epigraph.

Prima facie, there seem to be few reasons to believe that the same framework can explain politics in both representative democracies and feudal regimes, or in Westphalian states and their precursors. Indeed, there seem to be strong reasons to suppose the contrary. The choice to focus on these regime types is even more surprising when one considers the content of Lane’s framework. The idea of a principal and an agent engaging in a contractual relationship is a very modern idea. It presupposes independent dispute resolvers of the kind found in modern states governed by the rule of law and equipped with a functioning judicial system (Laffont and Martimort, 2002: 32). It implies that inequalities prior to contract result only from the resources available to each actor and the value of their ‘exit option’ – that is, their non-contractual alternative.

It is surprising to suppose that either of these conditions is true in the kind of patrimonial states that Lane discusses, such as the Egyptian kingdom, or the Mongol empire. Nor can it even be considered as a useful metaphor in these circumstances. Strictly speaking, they are also false in modern democracies, although some enterprising types have tried to enforce the provisions of various ‘contracts’ offered by electioneering politicians. The idea of contract is therefore a metaphor that is at the heart of Lane’s
framework. This is very different from principal-agent theory as applied in economics, where contractual relations are
common.

I fought the law, and the law won (bleg)

Chris — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:48:40 +0000

Two more things:

Why do legal journals insist on this bizarre referencing style of Article Author (Year), “Title”, Vol(No) Journal ppp ? And more to the point, does anyone have a bibtex (.bst) or biblatex (.bbx) file that will replicate it, with proper block punctuation?
Wasn’t the Supreme Court’s decision on the Terrorism Order interesting? Partial dissent by Lord Brown, could have hoped for more there. (I like dissent).

Ideal points for the 16th Camera dei Deputati

Chris — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:03:06 +0000

I’ve been scraping voting records for the 16th parliament (lower chamber only). That’s part of my continued (quixotic) interest in trying to get credible ideal point estimates out of situations (western European parliaments) where the assumptions of most estimation techniques (i.e., legislators vote sincerely) are violated.

There’s an article coming out by Luigi Curini and Francesco Zucchini (Italy:Government alternation and legislative agenda setting. In: Bjorn-Erik Rasch and George Tsebelis (eds.) The Role Of Governments in Legislative Agenda Setting) which assumes that ideal points can be estimated by only using final votes on bills.

Now, that works for previous parliaments — and I though I’d test that on the current parliament. The current parliament is interesting largely because of one opposition party — Italia dei Valori — which is centrist in its economic policy, and on many other issues, but is vociferously opposed to Berlusconi. So, it tends to oppose whatever it sees as compromise. As you can see from the graph, that pulls them to roughly the same position as the Partito Democratico.

Ideal points from the 16th Camera

What you can’t see from the graph is that the median Italia dei Valori legislator is slightly to the left of the Partito Democratico. That’s not the result you would expect if legislative rollcalls were determined by left-right positions instead of government-opposition. So, IMHO, we can’t get credible ideal points by restricting the analysis to final votes only.

Presentation at the Schuman centre today

Chris — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:24:58 +0000

Later today I’ll be presenting some of the results from my paper with Christel Koop at the Robert Schuman Centre at the EUI. Slides are here for those interested. I’ve gone for the white-on-black look with a very pared-down Beamer template.