{"id":32138,"date":"2015-09-10T10:34:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T01:34:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/?p=32138"},"modified":"2015-09-11T14:45:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T05:45:44","slug":"tgu-empirical-analyses-of-political-economy-international-workshop-casal-bertoa-cross-national-research-on-party-systems-and-party-finances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/_import\/32138","title":{"rendered":"International Workshop: Casal B\u00e9rtoa, Cross-National Research on Party Systems and Party Finances"},"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. Casal B\u00e9rtoa actively publishes articles and obtained his Ph.D from the European University Institute in Florence under the supervision of late Peter Mair, the famous comparativist.<\/p>\n

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

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

Casal B\u00e9rtoa discussed 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 had any evidence to support them. For example, the correlation between a higher reliance on public funding and lower political corruption was not supported. Neither was the correlation between a higher regulation on private funding and lower political corruption. Casal B\u00e9rtoa demonstrated that small parties are more likely to survive in countries with generous public subsidies towards political parties.<\/p>\n

Dr. Jeyong Sohn from Rikkyo University made three major comments regarding the presentation. First, he suggested that by introducing changes in independent variables Casal Bertoa could test the hypothesis dynamically with temporal differences. He also suggested that Casal B\u00e9rtoa could gain more robust results \u00a0by conducting supplementary analyses with different case studies. Third, Sohn suggested that 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, Casal B\u00e9rtoa presented 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 have pointed out limitations such as index inflation when parties split and merge over two elections. To address this problem, Casal B\u00e9rtoa \u00a0created a \u00a0joint project with colleagues to develop a new way to calculate and correct volatility results. He suggested one 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

Professor Airo Hino (Waseda University) congratulated Casal B\u00e9rtoa\u00a0for his innovative plan to correct the \u201cvolatility\u201d index. He welcomed the approach by illustrating an inflated tendency of the index using the Japanese party system of the 1950s as an example. Professor Hino discussed that an alternative way \u00a0to correct electoral \u201cvolatility\u201d is to look at changes of parliamentary members. He suggested there are advantages and disadvantages of each index in terms of validity, reliability, and speed when arriving at an index score.<\/p>\n

Lively discussions followed both sessions and the workshop clocked in at four hours. Casal B\u00e9rtoa was awarded an\u00a0\u201cOhkuma Bear,\u201d the university mascot, for visiting Waseda amidst the Tokyo heat wave and conducting a 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":32150,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,117,80],"tags":[115],"class_list":["post-32138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-topic","category-_import","tag-area_studies-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32147,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32138\/revisions\/32147"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/top\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}