The Reform Capacity of Governments

Objective

This project examines the effects of political institutions on the ability of political parties and interest organizations to resolve distributional conflicts that prevent governments from adopting policies that would increase overall welfare. The three specific objectives of the project are: (1) To develop a new theoretical analysis of the problem of reform capacity, generating testable propositions about the conditional effects of political institutions on the ability of governments to adopt policies that would, at least in principle, make everyone better off (especially when such policies are associated with distributional conflicts among political parties and interest groups). (2) To collect pooled time series data on policy reforms in selected policy areas, and to analyze these data with statistical methods, in order to test the theoretical propositions. (3) To analyze qualitative evidence on decision-making processes in the same set of policy areas, in order to increase the understanding of the causal mechanisms by which institutions influence the reform capacity of governments, and to suggest new hypotheses for future research. The main contribution of the project is that it will develop a new account of the relationship between institutions and reform capacity, offering an alternative to the dominant theoretical approach to institutions in contemporary political science: the veto player approach. According to veto player models, institutionalized power sharing (that is, having many veto players) limits the set of policy changes that are feasible at any given point in time, rendering governments less decisive than they would be if power were concentrated in a smaller number of political parties and institutions. This project, in contrast, is based on the idea that power sharing may enable governments to do things they would not otherwise be able to do.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

• social sciences political sciences

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• ERC-SG-SH2 - ERC Starting Grant - Institutions, values, beliefs and behaviour

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2011-StG_20101124
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

Beneficiaries (1)