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Adopts the conceptual tools of agency theory to rethink the challenge of federal governance under conditions of broad concurrency in the allocation of competences by examining the relations between states and the union as instances of principal–agent relationships, and considering the different kinds of ‘mechanisms of control’ available to the agents. After exploring the theoretical implications of principal–agent theory for issues of intergovernmental structures, an examination is made of the different tiered regimes of the USA and the EU for evidence of the mechanisms suggested by the theoretical analysis. It is argued that these tiered regimes feature several characteristic mechanisms that may help sustain the legitimacy of allocations of authority between different levels, and that the policy debate surrounding federalism should include attention to these mechanisms, along with the discussion of the appropriateness of centralization or decentralization. The different sections of the chapter are: Allocation and Legitimacy from a Principal–Agent Perspective; Mechanisms for Securing Allocational Legitimacy; and Federalism and Allocational Legitimacy.

The regular and effective settlement of disputes by a third‐party dispute resolver leads to the evolution of a set of behavioural norms, which become authoritative in society. In turn, normative evolution shapes how interests are formed and power operates. In the context of constitutional law and politics, this system of reciprocal influence has led to the judicialization of European politics and the constitutionalization of European law. The final section of this chapter surveys a variety of perspectives on European constitutional politics, including a principal‐agent framework, the legislative politics approach, judicial decision‐making and conceptualizing legal normative autonomy.

Human rights obligations and administrative law obligations are, in practice, rarely extended to private delegates. This chapter assesses the extent to which private law can provide an appropriate substitute for these obligations, focusing on contract and tort. Given that contract is one of the primary mechanisms through which private delegation is achieved, commentators, and particularly those writing from an economic perspective, have often embraced contract law as ‘a critical source of accountability’, while tort law requires consideration as it is an area of private law that is frequently modified to accommodate governmental concerns. It is argued here, however, that tort law and contract law do not provide sufficiently extensive mechanisms of holding private delegates accountable, particularly, for example, given the difficulties of recognising third party beneficiaries to contracts. Proposals for improving the drafting of government contracts are presented.

This chapter looks at underdevelopment as arising from multiple failures of collective action. Unless development aid addresses the reasons for these collective action problems, it will likely be ineffective or even counterproductive. An institutional analysis and development framework is used to analyze these problems. A central challenge of development assistance is the “Samaritan’s dilemma,” meaning that the provision of assistance creates incentives for the recipients of aid to underperform. This problem is examined from the perspective of the “Aid Octangle,” a description of the incentive structures that shape the relationships among the core development actors. The chapter points to ways in which perverse incentives of development assistance can be reduced or overcome.

Dragons' Den is a reality television series in which entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of rich venture capitalists in the hope of securing investment finance. This chapter explores the economics of Dragons' Den by setting up a model in which an entrepreneur decides how detailed preparations to make before pitching their business idea to a venture capitalist dragon. Basically the model is of a principal—agent problem with possible shirking and costly state verification. If the dragon (the principal) wants to find out whether the entrepreneur (the agent) is well prepared then they must spend time questioning the entrepreneur. The preparation of the entrepreneur depends both on the generosity of the financing terms offered by the dragons and, crucially, on the number of dragons relative to entrepreneurs in the venture capital market. An example of the insights from Dragons Denis investors wanting a financial adviser to undertake due diligence on any new investment opportunities they propose.

Chapter 12 introduces Part IV which builds on the methodological discussion by showing how the Manifesto estimates can be used in conjunction with linked data to study representation. The estimates are particularly useful here because they provide information about party and government positions and that of the median voter. Now that various comparative surveys, notably the CSES, have been corrected for bias and are linked directly to the Manifesto estimates, they can be brought into the multi-level analysis too. The chapter addresses the question of how far parties in 28 countries at the turn of the century represent the policy positions of their supporters. These positions are measured independently of the manifesto data and so provide a severe test of the proposition that parties are representative. The analysis shows broadly that they are but this depends strongly on how long parties have been around and the degree to which they have established themselves. These multi-level estimates can thus be exploited to study representation comparatively.

Chapter 10 continues the survey of criminal justice in 1997–2018. It notes important changes in the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedural Law, including the abolition of class struggle as the guide to criminal justice and “counterrevolutionary” as a criminal category, and the introduction of “harming national security” as a criminal category in the 1997 Criminal Code. Other changes include a series of amendments in recent years to the 1997 Criminal Code and the 1996 Criminal Procedural Law, providing more safeguards of the rights of the accused and reducing the number of capital offenses, and the abolition of the “reeducation through labor” (laojiao) system in 2013. Another area of legal responses to societal changes in the period is prosecution of corrupt party-state officials at high levels. A law-enforcement program called Heavenly Net was launched in early 2015 to capture corrupt officials and white-collar criminals who fled to other countries.

The conclusion points out the multidimensional interactions of many factors in the functions of Chinese law and justice in the past and present and delineates four overlapping historical contexts for an understanding of such functions. These are the indigenous traditions in the long history of China; Western influences from the nineteenth century and especially on the transformations in the twentieth century; interactions between lawmakers and state agents, and between state actions and societal responses; and the reality of justice being done in relative and imperfect ways under the best circumstances, due to human fallibility.