Goods and Services

Goods and Services

life goods; government goods; public goods/commons/private property:

the provision and production of goods and services are radically affected by the kind of rules or political regimes we are examining, as well as by the preferences or interests of individuals in their capacities

the experiment of Communism was the abolition of private property, and it failed

look at public goods as essentially those goods or policies which control the indirect negative consequences of personal actions; i.e. pollution is a consequence of personal actions, and the public service is to control the actions of others (negative externalities); as such the function of government is to control these negative externalities

public goods are not produced on a voluntary basis; governments engage in multiplicity of decisions along with the multiplicity of creation of goods (public goods exist within government goods, alongside institutions, etc.)

Multiple Decision Situations

- these arise due to the multiplicity of goods created by the government

Policy Outcomes

the outcomes of policies vary depending on the governments as well as the goods in question

Policy Impact

the outcome of the legislative process and the implementation of a certain policy

what is the impact of certain policies? i.e. educational policy; it always takes time in order to view the impact, and there is rarely a standard across states as these policies will have different impacts depending on the government regimes in place;

Time and Place Contingencies

governments necessarily function within these constraints, and cannot afford to act as they wish and when they wish; time is an important factor (history aside) and the place is crucial as well, as essentially governments have a territorial base, and it becomes a very important dimension and attribute of the actions of governments

against this backdrop, it is easier to move towards a theory of comparisons as the chapters in S-J, Allen and Sabetti note:

distinguishing types of political orders (unitary and federal systems; human beings create a large number of regimes)

the problem of incommensurability (Ostram; there are political arrangements that are based on different principles of government to such an extent that they are not the same, i.e. dictatorship and liberal democracy, the incommensurability that exists between these regimes)

emergence of self-governing states (people govern themselves through a variety of political arrangements, human beings have organized themselves through polycentric centers of authority, vs. monocentric federal systems which are fewer, are directed by a single center of authority; self-governing societies are closer to monocentric, i.e. Africa; international policies have impinged on domestic authority due to these polycentric centers of authority

how can you compare these political systems? Nazi Germany vs. Fascist Italy vs. Liberal France? autocratic regime vs. liberal regime?

Common Method of Normative Inquiry

the golden rule: as a way of making interpersonal comparison about right and wrong, justice and injustice and all other kinds of norms that get built into systems of institutions and laws

The Problem of Positive Inquiry

something that is not normative, typical situations that occur in all human societies (i.e. exchange relationships, teamwork including order of teams, use and management of common pool resources like irrigation systems, provision of goods subject to collective use and consumption, conflict and conflict resolution, rules/rulers/ruled relationships, the structure of incentives may be counterintentional and counterintuitive

The Challenge of Evaluation

Kitschelt: what accounts for a good cause? tries to account for post-Communist regimes; in E Europe it was governed by a single ideology, its collapse opened the door for a highly diverse range of political regimes, from democracy to authoritarianism; how do we account for the diversity of political regimes that developed? 2 questions, why is there no uniform Communist legacy? and what has led to the appearance of great variance in modes of dismantling of Communist rule and what has led to the variance in the resulting political systems? differential in economic wealth cannot account for this disparity, so what can? religious diversity, geographic location, post-Stalinist reforms, modes of transition, winners and losers in the new regimes; all are plausible causes; one problem with these varied explanations is that there is an overlap, and it is