Institutional Choice

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a “new institutionalism” in the study of authoritarian regimes that takes seriously previously neglected pillars of non-democratic governance: nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures, multiple parties, and elections, that form integral parts of most authoritarian regimes. Drawing together previously disconnected pieces of research, the paper provides an analytical topography of new institutionalist studies of dictatorship. It discusses four central issues: (a) institutional imperatives: the fundamental challenges authoritarian institutional designers address, (b) institutional landscapes: the fundamental institutional choices authoritarian rulers face, (c) institutional containment: the strategies of control they may deploy in various institutional arenas, and (d) institutional ambivalence: the tension between regime-supporting and regime-subverting roles authoritarian institutions tend to introduce.

Mesmo após ter completado 25 anos, a Constituinte de 1987/88 suscitou até agora, no campo da Ciência Política, relativamente poucos trabalhos acadêmicos de fôlego. Apesar de alguns estudos evidenciarem a importância e centralidade do debate entre presidencialismo e parlamentarismo na Constituinte, nenhum deles se aprofundou no tema, evidenciando como se deu o processo decisório em torno da questão, quais grupos defenderam certas posições, quais eram seus interesses, quais propostas foram feitas e porque uma delas sagrou-se vitoriosa ao final. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo o estudo do processo decisório da Assembleia Nacional Constituinte brasileira de 1987/1988, no que diz respeito a escolha do sistema de governo, questão central do debate institucional na época. A pretensão e analisar quais as linhas de força que, ao longo do processo constituinte, manifestaram-se a esse respeito, e quais os meios que foram vislumbrados para torná-los efetivos. Para isso, torna-se necessário identificar e analisar os atores relevantes, a natureza de suas preferências políticas, a interação desenvolvida e as opções por eles gestadas e postas em prática, em meio a um processo deliberativo de tipo especial, aquele que geralmente marca as assembleias constituintes.

If there is, as is now largely acknowledged, a general trend towards setting up EU-level regulatory agents in order to palliate the lack of EU regulatory capacity, how can we explain that the type of regulatory agent created varies between sectors and changes over time? Focussing on expert committees, regulatory networks, and EU regulatory agencies, this paper makes two conjectures. It first argues, in a functional institutionalist approach, that the type of regulatory agent depends on the distribution of implementing competences between the member states and the Commission. While national competences, spurring a need for coordination, would lead to the establishment of regulatory networks (coordination pattern), a significant delegation of competences to the Commission would lead the latter to suffer from a lack of expertise and resources, which would be filled through the creation of expert committees (expertise pattern). In a second step, the paper conjectures that the subsequent replacement of regulatory networks and expert committees by EU regulatory agencies is best explained by policymakers’ willingness to improve the effectiveness and quality of EU regulation. Two in-depth case studies on the regulation of food safety and electricity confirm the plausibility of the conjectures by providing good illustrations of the causal mechanisms at play in the expertise and coordination patterns, respectively. Besides taking a first step towards identifying the determinants of the many faces of the EU regulatory space, this paper underlines the need to refine the conceptualization of functional pressure and colouring the study of institutional choice, otherwise dominated by distributional and institutional factors, with a revamped functional approach.

Higher education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has expanded significantly over the previous two decades, largely shaped by the dynamics of internationalization. The higher education sector in the UAE includes federal/regional governments, and domestic and foreign private institutions. This study, conducted in 2016, aims to explore the implications of the internationalization of higher education for students’ institutional choice at postgraduate level. I collected quantitative data from 160 students and qualitative data from 40 students, all of whom were undertaking undergraduate programmes in the UAE. The results of the study indicate undergraduate students had mixed reasons for choosing an institution for their postgraduate studies; however, these reasons were more specific in relation to foreign universities and universities offering foreign curricula, including the presence of international faculty members, the opportunity to study foreign curricula, to gain international/joint degrees and the belief that these institutions offered greater global opportunities. This study highlights the potential challenges for federal and non-federal public institutions in attracting postgraduate students, particularly international students. In addition, the study indicates that the emergence of foreign and private higher education institutions in the UAE enhances the quality of higher education by raising competition between institutions.