Showing papers in "Politics & Society in 2010"

Institutionalizing Dualism: Complementarities and Change in France and Germany

Abstract: The French and German political economies have been significantly reconfigured over the past two decades. Although the changes have often been more piecemeal than revolutionary, their cumulative effects are profound. The authors characterize the changes that have taken place as involving the institutionalization of new forms of dualism and argue that what gives contemporary developments a different character from the past is that dualism is now explicitly underwritten by state policy. They see this outcome as the culmination of a sequence of developments, beginning in the field of industrial relations, moving into labor market dynamics, and finally finding institutional expression in welfare state reforms. Contrary to theoretical accounts that suggest that institutional complementarities support stability and institutional reproduction, the authors argue that the linkages across these realms have helped to translate employer strategies that originated in the realm of industrial relations into a stable, new, and less egalitarian model with state support.

Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States:

Abstract: The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: (1) they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality –namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; (2) they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this “winner-take-all” pattern; and (3) they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway (or lack thereof) of the “median voter” in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change –one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those 1

The Political Economy of Active Labor-Market Policy:

Abstract: Active labor-market policies (ALMPs) have developed significantly over the past two decades across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, with substantial cross-national differences in terms of both extent and overall orientation. The objective of this article is to account for cross-national variation in this policy field. It starts by reviewing existing scholarship concerning political, institutional, and ideational determinants of ALMPs. It then argues that ALMP is too broad a category to be used without further specification, and it develops a typology of four different types of ALMPs: incentive reinforcement, employment assistance, occupation, and human capital investment. These are discussed and examined through ALMP expenditure profiles in selected countries. The article uses this typology to analyze ALMP trajectories in six Western European countries and shows that the role of this instrument changes dramatically over time. It concludes that there is little regular...

Strengthening Labor Standards Enforcement through Partnerships with Workers’ Organizations

Abstract: Structures of employment in low-wage industries, a diminished wage and hour inspectorate, and an unworkable immigration regime have combined to create an environment where violations of basic workplace laws are everyday occurrences. This article identifies four “logics” of detection and enforcement, arguing that there is a mismatch between the enforcement strategies of most federal and state labor inspectorates and the industries in which noncompliance continues to be a problem. In response, the authors propose augmenting labor inspectorates by giving public interest groups like unions and worker centers a formal, ongoing role in enforcement in low-wage sectors. In three case studies, the authors present evidence of an emergent system—one that harkens back to a logic proposed by the drafters of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) but never implemented—of empowering those closest to the action to work in partnership with government.

Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the Liberal State

Abstract: This article explores the possibility of resistance under conditions of extreme state power in liberal democracies. It examines the strategies of migrants without legal status who, when threatened with one of the most awesome powers of the liberal state—expulsion—shed their legal identity in order to escape the state’s reach. Remarkably, in doing so, they often succeed in preventing the state from exercising its sovereign powers. The article argues that liberal states are uniquely constrained in their dealing with undocumented migrants. Not only are they forced to operate within the constraints of the international legal order—making repatriation contingent on the possession of identity documents—but the liberal state is also constitutionally limited in its exercise of coercion against the individual. The article concludes that it is those individuals who have the weakest claims against the liberal state that are most able to constrain its exercise of sovereignty.

From Peasants to Farmers: Peasant Differentiation, Labor Regimes and Land-rights Institutions in China’s Agrarian Transition

Abstract: The development of factor markets has opened Chinese agriculture for the penetration of capitalism. This new round of rural transformation—China’s agrarian transition— raises the agrarian question in the Chinese context. This study investigates how capitalist forms and relations of production transform agricultural production and the peasantry class in rural China. The authors identify six forms of nonpeasant agricultural production, compare the labor regimes and direct producers’ socioeconomic statuses across these forms, and evaluate the role of China’s land-rights institution in shaping these forms. The empirical investigation presents three main findings: (1) Peasant differentiation : capitalist forms of agricultural production differentiate peasants into a variety of new class positions. (2) Market-based stratification: producers in capitalist agriculture are primarily stratified by their positions in labor and land markets; their socioeconomic statuses are linked with their varying degrees of prolet...

Decommodification and Egalitarian Political Economy

Abstract: This article contends that decommodification is an appropriate concept for understanding diverse initiatives such as fair trade, microfinance, open source, social enterprises, and the environmental...

The Politicization of Religion: Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparative Perspective

Abstract: While religious politics have been a widely discussed topic in the social sciences in recent decades, few studies develop general explanations based on systematic and detailed comparative analysis. This article seeks to explain when and how successful religious parties rise. To that end, I comparatively analyze the politicization of German Catholicism in the second half of the nineteenth century (1848—1878) and Turkish Islam in the post-1970 period (1970—2002) and briefly examine the negative case of nineteenth-century German Protestantism. According to the theory of revival-reaction-politicization I propose, successful religious parties rise when major religious revivals confront social counter-mobilization and state repression, provided that existing political parties do not effectively represent religious defense. The study's findings challenge the pervasive tendency to treat Christian and Islamic politics as incommensurable.

Counterinsurgency in El Salvador

Abstract: Contemporary U.S. policy makers often characterize the U.S. counterinsurgency experience in El Salvador as a successful model to be followed in other contexts. This article argues that these characterizations significantly overstate the positive lessons of El Salvador, and ignore important cautionary implications. During the first part of the conflict, neither the Armed Forces of El Salvador (FAES) nor the U.S. followed the tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine. The FAES killed tens of thousands of non-combatants in 1979 and 1980, before the civil war even began. This repression may have preempted an incipient popular insurrection, but it also locked in a determined social base that enabled the armed left to build a highly effective and sustained insurgency. In 1984, the U.S. had to save the FAES from likely defeat through a major increase in military aid, especially airpower. When the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) switched to a classical guerrilla strategy, the FAES, despite considerabl...

Footprints in the Sand: British Colonial Counterinsurgency and the War in Iraq

Abstract: Recent attempts to revive counterinsurgency strategies for use in Afghanistan and Iraq have been marked by a determination to learn lessons from history. Using the case of the campaign against the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya of 1952-60, this article considers the reasons for this engagement with the past and the issues that have emerged as a consequence. The article disputes the lessons from British colonial history that have been learned by military planners, most obviously the characterization of nonmilitary forms of British counterinsurgency as nonviolent. Although it contests some of these supposed precedents for successful counterinsurgency in British military history, the article also identifies more generalizable elements of the Kenyan case. Particular emphasis is given to the effects on the nature of counterinsurgency, a reliance on locally recruited allies, and the decentralization of command.

Dirty Wars: Counterinsurgency in Vietnam and Today

Abstract: Counterinsurgency doctrine emerged in the early 1960s as the Kennedy administration sought a politically progressive alternative to “pacification” campaigns waged by the French against the Vietnamese revolution. But its architects could not come up with a substitute for the conventional military reliance on massive firepower, which brought devastation to the Vietnamese people and failed to crush the “Viet Cong.” The Americans were again unsuccessful in transferring legitimacy to their allies in Saigon. After the war, the notion of counterinsurgency was kept alive among military writers. Rechristened as “COIN,” it has been given the task of providing cover for further “dirty wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Averting "disruption and reversal": Reassessing the logic of rapid trade reform in Latin America

Abstract: This study revisits the debate on trade reform in Latin America, focusing specifically on what combinations of conditions were necessary and sufficient for very rapid trade liberalization. It departs significantly from two types of studies that have been previously used to examine Latin American trade reform: (1) those using large samples and linear statistics to test the mean effects of variables on levels of trade protection and (2) those isolating necessary conditions for rapid reform but using a small number of case studies. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and short case studies, the study considers trade policy in sixty-one administrations. It finds that a key motivating factor for rapid trade opening is potential resistance from protected industry; it further identifies several other important enabling conditions, such as hyperinflation, devaluation, and an unconstrained executive. In combination, these enabling conditions are sufficient to account for a high percentage of rapid ref...

Déjà Vu, All Over Again: A Comment on Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Winner-Take-All Politics”:

Abstract: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s article makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics of income distribution in the United States. The authors use data from Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty to dismantle the claims that the United States’s shifts result from technological or economic imperatives, and they argue effectively that a plutocratic distribution of income has grown steadily worse through the political interventions of powerful economic actors. Along the way, they advance a valuable critique of the way that other political scientists have grappled with this phenomenon. Our admiration for their intellectual achievement is, however, combined with a sense of déjà vu as we consider their theoretical argument. Hacker and Pierson argue that they are advancing a view of “politics as organized combat,” which allows them to recognize the systematic exercise of power by business interests. But this is hardly the first time that political scientists have recognized the centrality of business power to American politics. This was, after all, the central theme advanced by critics of political pluralism such as C. Wright Mills, Grant McConnell, and William Domhoff in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Public’s Role in Winner-Take-All Politics

Abstract: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue here and elsewhere that political science needs to return seriously to the study of policy. They assert that the rise of the behavioralist and rational choice strands of inquiry have led to an emphasis on elections as the central phenomenon of interest, but that policy is what really matters, both to politicians and to societal outcomes. Their essay in this volume does indeed forcefully demonstrate the profound effects of policy on society, here the extraordinary growth in economic inequality in the United States in recent decades. And yet while this return to policy-centered analysis would both bring political science back to its roots and lay bare a number of momentously consequential changes in the polity, there is still much to learn from these other approaches. It is undoubtedly important to study organized groups and the activities in which they engage. However, it is just as important to understand the limitations of ordinary citizens as political actors and the resulting ability of organized groups to do such an effective end run around them. Hence I do not dispute Hacker and Pierson’s findings but rather argue that their account would be enriched with an appreciation not just for organized interests’ rise but also the failings of citizens to act as an effective counterweight.

Winner-Take-All Politics and Political Science: A Response:

Abstract: In the past few years, the relative silence of political science on the crucial subject of rising inequality in the United States has given way to a welcome hum of new scholarship. The thoughtful commentaries in this issue, many of them written by pioneers in this reopened scholarly territory, testify to how fruitful this attention has been. They also provide acute reactions to our own effort to link the rise in economic inequality to changes in American politics and policy. Many of these reactions usefully fill out our own account, which necessarily was limited to a broad-brush portrait of a vast and varied landscape. Others valuably point toward important explorations that still remain to be done. Our account is neither the first nor the last word on this enormous matter, and no doubt a more complete account will also be more nuanced, multifaceted, and complex. Taken as a whole, however, the commentaries bolster our analysis on three key points: (1) that it makes sense to focus on the “winner-take-all” economic gains at the very top and that this focus restricts the universe of plausible explanations; (2) that policy has, through new laws and through the politically imposed failure to update policy to reflect changing social circumstances, or “drift,” played a critical (if far from exclusive) role in generating winner-take-all inequality; and (3) that a marked change in the distribution of organized political power has played a central (if, again, far from exclusive) role in promoting these policy changes.

Economic Ideas and the Political Process: Debating Tax Cuts in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1962-1981

Abstract: While sociologists and political scientists have become interested in the role of ideas in the political process, relatively little work looks at how ideological claims are actually deployed in political discourse. This article examines the economic claims made in two pairs of Congressional debates over tax cuts, one (in 1962 and 1964) generally associated with Keynesian economic theories, and one (in 1978 and 1981) tied to supply-side ideas. While these bills were indeed initiated by groups subscribing to different economic ideologies, subsequent debates look surprisingly similar. The bills were closer in substance than one might expect, and while their proponents came from opposite political camps, in both cases supporters focused more on supply-side than demand-side effects and emphasized tax cuts’ ability to pay for themselves through economic stimulation. The authors propose that politically acceptable economic claims may evolve more slowly than the economic theories that inspire policy entrepreneurs...

Xenophobia and Left Voting

Abstract: In this article, the authors set out to evaluate two competing mechanisms that may account for the negative relationship between xenophobia and left voting. Xenophobia may red ...

Democracy and Capitalism: Structure, Agency, and Organized Combat:

Abstract: Charles Lindblom devoted his 1982 address as president of the American Political Science Association to the “seriously defective” approach of conventional scholarship toward American politics—an endeavor that he pioneered during the half century after World War II. The flaw, Lindblom charged, was the presumption that the “political system called democratic in the West is [a] mutual-benefit society [that] provides some degree of social order, as well as widespread benefits.” He urged scholars of American politics to take seriously political economy approaches that study the “relation between polity and economy” and “analyz[e] the state or government as . . . an institutional form of struggle between advantaged and disadvantaged.” He challenged his colleagues to focus their research on the neglected but critical questions regarding the “tense conflict between popular demands and the needs of business” and “the viability and efficacy of democracy.”

Fundamentos do institucionalismo na teoria social de Thorstein Veblen

Abstract: The text highlights the central terms present in the work of the American economist-sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), pointing to the scope and limits of his explanatory concepts. We look at terms such as instinct, habits of life and thought which support his argument and enable us to get a clearer picture of his theoretical effort to build a model of analysis for understanding the social and economic dynamics of the Second Industrial Revolution, also meant to counter the neoclassical economics of his time. The salient feature of his work is its multidisciplinary character - typical of the social sciences- which has served as the basis for an approach that came to be known as Veblenian institutionalism

Business Political Capacity and the Top-Heavy Rise in Income Inequality: How Large an Impact?:

Abstract: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s article significantly advances the debate on the topheavy rise in income inequality in the United States. Their account of that rise is the most compelling I have seen. Yet I’m not sure it is right. Their explanation is depicted in Figure 1. Both steps in this hypothesized causal chain are plausible. And Hacker and Pierson are correct that the over-time correlations between business political capacity and policy and between policy and the income share of the top 1 percent are quite strong. Moreover, I am convinced that these correlations reflect causal effects. For each step, however, I have some doubts about the magnitude of the causal impact. Figure 2 offers an alternative hypothesis. Business political capacity plays a role here too, but in this explanation the increase in that capacity is not what matters. Instead, American political institutions and a shift in perceptions of U.S. economic strength amplify the impact of corporate mobilization and political effort on policy. Shifts in the political culture and strategy of the Republican party also have an important effect on policy. Changes in technology, economic competition, and corporate governance practices contribute, together with changes in policy, to the rise in winner-take-all economic outcomes.

Class as a Normative Category: Egalitarian Reasons to Take It Seriously (With a South African Case Study)

Abstract: Race and sex/gender are commonly argued to deserve equal priority with class oppression in egalitarian politics. However, placing race and sex in the same list as what is here termed “standard-of-l...

Political Economy and the Mechanics of Politics

Abstract: It is by now widely accepted that economic inequality has been growing in the United States for about thirty years. However, according to Hacker and Pierson, what is in need of an explanation is that it has been “winner-take-all, with the gains at the top highly concentrated, sustained for a generation, and accompanied by few trickle-down benefits for the rest of the population.” This claim builds on the influential work by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who have revitalized and developed an approach that in the United States goes back to Simon Kuznets. Piketty and Saez constructed a long time series on the income shares of top income recipients from tax returns. Income tax records are not readily usable as they do not cover individuals with incomes below tax thresholds and are typically published by coarse income classes, so that a number of assumptions are to be made to calculate distributive statistics; they also suffer from underreporting of certain types of income, though a proper adjustment for tax avoidance and tax evasion is rarely possible. On the other hand, household surveys like the Current Population Survey (CPS) have also shortcomings, being subject to errors caused by sampling, nonresponse, and underreporting, and are “notoriously poor at capturing trends at the top of income ladder,” as Hacker and Pierson put it. As both sources have pros and cons, it is important to check whether they provide consistent evidence and account for discrepancies, if any, especially as some commentators have questioned the correctness of the Piketty and Saez estimates.

A Model in the Desert: Modernization, Advanced Liberalism, and Child Protection Reform in Postcommunist Romania

Abstract: In this article, the author examines Romanian child protection reforms during European Union (EU) accession as a case of externally facilitated modernization aimed at solving acute social problems. The data for this case study came primarily from fifty-three unstructured interviews with civil servants, civil society representatives, and EU officials. The author finds that in a similar manner to other externally driven modernization projects, the belief according to which Western institutions constituted a universal blueprint, applicable regardless of particular contexts and historical legacies, led to unintended consequences. What is more, because the reformers did not envisage that Western institutions might carry their own pathologies, they ended up replicating some of these pathologies. The study suggests that the goal of externally facilitated public policy should not be to create replicas of Western institutions but to spur local innovation that takes advantage of successful Western institutional logics.

Politics, the Reorganization of the Economy, and Income Inequality, 1980—2009:

Abstract: Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s article “Winner-Take-All Politics” presents a sophisticated take on exactly how much income inequality has increased in the United States and how political processes were involved in the increasing redistribution of income toward the top 1 percent of the income distribution. They do a great job dissecting the existing statistics and show quite clearly how the real changes in the income distribution took place at the very top, above 1 percent. They also show how the timing of these changes coincided with the early part of the Reagan administration (ca. 1980–82) and mostly continued unabated for the past thirty years. My comment will focus on two aspects of their argument. First, I consider the degree to which the forces they view as pivotal will remain in play now that Obama is in power and now that we have had a financial meltdown. My basic argument is that their whole article may be fighting the last war. That is, many of the political and economic forces underlying this great run-up in income inequality are about to change. Second, I supplement their story about what happened in order to nail down the role of politics in that process more tightly. Here, they fail because their analysis of the linkages between the changes in the economy and political processes are not developed enough. They make the provocative argument that students of the income distribution have focused too narrowly on policies closely tied to taxation. But as soon as one acknowledges that a diverse set of policies has effects on the income distribution, then

Juventude, boemia e movimentos sociais: culturas e lutas estudantis na universidade de Coimbra

Abstract: This text takes up some of its author’s recent work on student youth in Coimbra. Centered around the Coimbra university environment and an academic tradition of over 700 years of history, its primary objective is to question some current tendencies among university students, through the acute gaze of a professor who has been involved in the student and daily life of the city for over 20 years. It attempts to identify subjectivities, participatory logics and attitudes of indifference/demarcation among different segments of the student population. More than a phenomenological register of daily life in academia, the text is meant to capture of the past and the ways in which they can (or cannot) be appropriated by the current generation of students. On the other hand, the profound changes of recent decades, both in Portugal itself and within the Portuguese higher educational system, have reoriented behavior, expectations and forms of action of the current university population, encouraging its distancing with regard to this past and a ‘forgetting’ of the meaning of the social movements which during the 1960s contributed to undermining the Salazar and Caetano dictatorship. The reflections that are proposed here attempt to explain this phenomenon, while at the same time looking at this particular context as an expression of other more general phenomena that affect Portugal and the European democracies as a whole today. Keywords: youth, university, Coimbra, students, student movement, social movements, tradition, bohemia.

Apelos discursivos em campanhas proporcionais na televisão

Abstract: Nas eleicoes proporcionais, a utilizacao do Horario Gratuito de Propaganda Eleitoral (HGPE), pulverizada entre dezenas ou centenas de candidatos, torna-se menos efetiva. Ainda assim, ele cumpre importante funcoes: avisa aos eleitores que tal individuo e candidato e relembra a candidatura aqueles que ja foram atingidos por outras formas de campanha, reforcando intencoes de voto que, de outra forma, poderiam ser esquecidas. Alem disso, pressupoe-se que, no tempo reduzido do HGPE, cada candidato buscara reforcar os elementos centrais de seu discurso de campanha. A pesquisa, realizada com base no horario eleitoral televisivo das eleicoes proporcionais do Distrito Federal (candidatos a Câmara Legislativa), buscou entender quais sao as estrategias de utilizacao do HGPE por partidos e candidatos.

Democratização ou assimetria da representação: notas sobre os Conselhos Estaduais de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional DOI:10.5007/2175-7984.2010v9n16p115

Abstract: Councils are a key institutional innovation within the Brazilian post-1988 constitutional framework. They are structured so as to include representatives of civil society and the State within the same arena. The aim of this article is to engage in critical discussion on the representation of social organizations within these arenas. Our hypothesis suggests that representatives often distance themselves so much from their social base that they actually become a sort of elite. Thus, we raise the issue of whether the formal democratic structure and mechanisms that these councils incorporate are enough to guarantee a diversity of representatives and representational practices, or if, through the social and political resources that representatives hold, gaps between constituents’ demands and representatives’ actions re-emerge, notwithstanding the normative precepts of equality that the councils themselves advocate. Keywords: councils, elites, representation.