Bulletin n. 1-2/2014
November 2014
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Isa Camyar
    Institutions, information asymmetry and democratic responsiveness: A cross-national and multi-level analysis
    in Acta Politica , Volume 49, Issue 3 ,  2014 ,  313–336
    This study probes the institutional mechanism of democratic responsiveness and elite–public policy agreement in particular. The theoretical idea is that institutions impact policy agreement via information asymmetry built into elite–public relations. As institutions concentrates public authority and hence increase clarity of responsibility, the information asymmetry in elite–public relations gets lower which, in turn, enhances the public’s ability to sanction elites and, as a result, makes elites more responsive to the public. Relying on the 1996 Top Decision Makers Survey on European integration, a cross-national and multi-level analysis confirms the information asymmetry hypothesis. In particular, the results show that elite–public policy agreement on European integration is stronger in countries with greater clarity of responsibility. However, evidence also reveals that the horizontal clarity of responsibility induces greater agreement between elites and the public than the vertical clarity of responsibility.
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