Political Science Commons^™

Minority Vetoes In Consociational Legislatures: Ultimately Weaponized?, Devin Haymond

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In societies emerging from or at risk for conflict, dividing power among rival groups—called power-sharing—can be an appropriate arrangement to maintaining peace. But how can groups, who are often emerging from violent conflict, trust sharing a government with rival groups that were just recently shooting at them?

A potential solution is the minority veto, which is allows minority groups to block the government from harming those groups’ vital interests. But what sorts of change blocking mechanisms constitute a minority veto? Who gets the veto power, and when can they be used? Do minority vetoes function as effective incentives for ensuring …

Reviewing Intergovernmental Institutions In Federal Systems: Opportunity For Cooperation, Harrison Schafer

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

This Article surveys intergovernmental institutions across federal states. Generally, these institutions offer meaningful cooperation for the different levels of government when addressing state problems. These institutions, however, often lack political authority to bind institutional members or implement authoritative state actions.

This Article proceeds in two general parts. First, this Article taxonomizes intergovernmental institutions across federal systems. Though few intergovernmental institutions are constitutionally mandated bodies, several federal states have enacted legislation to formalize these institutions while others simply utilize informal arrangements. This taxonomy will primarily discuss contemporary institutions within federal systems and focus exclusively on executive institutions. The taxonomy categorizes these …

Legislative Committee Systems: A Design Perspective, Chase Stoddard

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

Committees are the defining characteristic of the modern legislature. While the centrality and study of party politics goes back further than committee politics, the focus on committee systems emerged over the course of the twentieth century, and legislatures could not function as we understand them without this mechanism. The United States Congressional committee system is the most studied system, yet virtually every country utilizes a committee system of some sort within its legislature. Despite their ubiquity in and centrality to the operations of legislatures, committees remain insufficiently studied, especially outside of the United States. The existing body of work tends …

Introduction: Imagining Post-Neoliberal Regulatory Subjectivities, Mika Viljanen Dr, Mikko Rajavuori, Tal Kastner

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

To explore these tentative diagnoses and conceptualizations we called for papers engaging different aspects of law's subjectivity turn. A selection of papers that map the possible genealogies for the emergence of post-neoliberal law, address the implications of anthropomorphic corporate regulation, or analyze transformations in sovereign subjectivities is now published in this symposium issue. The papers take up and make salient an array of the big questions of our day.

While overlapping, the papers can be broadly divided into two categories. The first category consists of papers that explore the internal make-up of legal and regulatory subjectivities. Drawing on history, queer …

Judicial Incentives: Some Evidence From Urban Trial Courts, Greg A. Caldeira

IUSTITIA

In the following pages, I shall outline the basics of a method for studying the motivations of trial judges - or any public officials, for that matter - that I find particularly interesting and fruitful - "incentive theory". The use of incentive theory is, in my view, a preliminary contribution to an ongoing movement to fill glaring gaps in the literature on judicial motivation and trial judging.