A common feature of contemporary political systems is the increasing amount of delegation from governments to non-majoritarian institutions. Governments may decide to delegate authority to such institutions for reasons relating to credible commitments, political uncertainty, and policy complexity. This article focuses on Independent Administrative Authorities (Autorités administratives indépendantes) in France. We demonstrate that these institutions enjoy varying degree of independence. We find that the degree of independence varies as a function of two factors: the need to make a credible commitment in areas subject to market opening and the complexity of policy in particular areas.

Do business contributions to political parties convey different messages in different countries, and, if so, why? This article presents a pioneering cross-national study of firm behavior in political finance. It argues that motivations for contributions to parties are either ideological or pragmatic. The author infers motivation by quantitatively relating the payments of 960 firms to various political parties in Australia, Canada, and Germany over periods of between seven and seventeen years. In coordinated market economy Germany, a small number of firms made ideological payments; in liberal market economy Australia and Canada, large numbers of firms made pragmatic payments. Australia's left-right party system creates an awareness of policy risk, which motivated ideological payments, but in Canada's unusually nonideological party system no ideological bias in business financing of politics was found. The statistical analysis is supplemented by a qualitative investigation of discrete and reciprocal exchanges between businesses and political parties.

Common-pool resource problem, Fiscal deficit, Political fragmentation, Institutionalisation,

This article tests systematically the effect of political structures on the credibility of sovereign debtors in advanced economies. It argues that power‐sharing and party system polarization have important effects on long‐term interest rates. Where collective responsibility is high and polarization is low, the market perceives a more credible commitment on the part of sovereign debtors. These arguments derived from the theory of credible commitments perform much better than alternative accounts of the politics of sovereign debt, namely a market preference for right‐wing governments and more flexible polities. The principal data consist of a panel of 23 rich countries between 1970 and 2009. There are tests for robustness to a wider sample and a variety of different measurements.

Party institutionalisation is a central problem in political science. The literature tends to understand it as a syndrome and therefore has difficulty explaining variations. This article suggests a new approach based on the transaction between a legislative party and its deputies, the failure of which is observable in party switching. Three routes to institutionalisation are identified by appealing to the vote‐seeking, office‐seeking or policy‐seeking motivations of deputies. Poland has had a large volume of party switching, along with wide variation in the incentives facing differently‐motivated deputies. Survival analyses of switching in four Polish parliaments find that vote‐seeking is the most likely route to institutionalisation for Polish parties. Moreover, in this article a concrete hypothesis is established for comparative testing: legislative parties can survive as long as their popular support exceeds 40 per cent of their share in the previous election.