{"id":911,"date":"2015-09-07T10:24:11","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T01:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/?p=911"},"modified":"2017-05-31T15:44:59","modified_gmt":"2017-05-31T06:44:59","slug":"%e3%80%90tgu-empirical-analyses-of-political-economy%e3%80%91international-workshop-casal-bertoa-nottingham-university-cross-national-research-on-party-systems-and-party-finances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/news-en\/2015\/09\/07\/911\/","title":{"rendered":"\u3010TGU Empirical Analyses of Political Economy\u3011International Workshop: Casal B\u00e9rtoa, Nottingham University \u201cCross-National Research on Party Systems and Party Finances.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On August 5th, Waseda University\u2019s Center for Positive Political Economy as a Top Global University Project hosted an international workshop entitled \u201cCross-National Research on Party Systems and Party Finances.\u201d Dr. Fernando Casal B\u00e9rtoa from Nottingham University was invited to talk about his latest research. Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa holds Ph.D from European University Institute in Florence under the supervision of late Peter Mair \u2013famous comparativist\u2013, and publishes many articles. The workshop consisted of the following two sessions.<\/p>\n

\"6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

1st<\/sup> Session<\/b><\/p>\n

In the first session, Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa reported how political finance regulation could hamper political corruption. His research motivations derive from a gap in the literature on \u201cPolitics and Money\u201d. Based on a new dataset which has coded electoral laws in a large number of countries, he and his colleagues found that none of the hypotheses put forward in the literature were found significant. For example, the relationship between a higher reliance on public funding and a lower political corruption did not find any support. Neither was the relationship between a higher regulation on private funding and a lower political corruption turned out effective. Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa also showed that small parties are more likely to survive in countries with generous public subsidies to political parties.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Discussant, Dr. Jeyong Sohn from Rikkyo University, made comments on the presentation in three ways. First, he suggested that an inclusion of change in independent variables would allow Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa to test the hypothesis in a more dynamic way with temporal differences. Second, he also suggested that Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa would gain more robustness of results by conducting supplementary analyses by changing the cases to be analysed. Third, Dr. Sohn suggested that Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa include the years of democratic experiences to avoid a possible endogeneity problem.<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

2nd Session<\/b><\/p>\n

In the second session, Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa made a presentation on electoral \u201cvolatility\u201d, an index widely used in political science in the last three decades. \u201cVolatility\u201d refers to a net change of votes\/seats between two consecutive elections. Yet, some limitations have been pointed out as the index tends to be inflated when parties split and merge over the two elections. To tackle this problem, Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa has developed as a joint work with his collaborative colleagues a new way to calculate and correct for the volatility scores. He suggested that one should collect information on the number of party members, media, etc. to assess the \u2018capital\u2019 of political parties to better reflect the size of the political forces between the two elections.<\/p>\n

Discussant Professor Airo Hino (Waseda University) congratulated him for an innovative idea of correcting for the index of electoral \u201cvolatility\u201d. He welcomed the approach by illustrating an inflated tendency of the index with the example of the Japanese party system in the 1950s. Professor Hino discussed that an alternative way to correct for the electoral \u201cvolatility\u201d is to look at changes of parliamentary members. It was suggested that there are advantages and disadvantages in each index in terms of validity and reliability as well as speediness to arrive at an index score.<\/p>\n

Lively discussions followed in both sessions and the workshop went on for four hours. \u201cOhkuma Bear\u201d, the university mascot, was given to Dr. Casal B\u00e9rtoa, at the end of the workshop to thank his visit in the midst of the record consecutive \u2018very hot\u2019 days in Tokyo and to commemorate the successful workshop.<\/p>\n

\"8\"<\/a>\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On August 5th, Waseda University\u2019s Center for Positive Political Economy as a Top Global University Project ho […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":904,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[99],"class_list":["post-911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en","tag-en-eape"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/sgu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}