Politics

About: Politics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 263762 publications have been published within this topic receiving 5388913 citations.

Political Institutions and Policy Choices: Evidence from the United States

Abstract: A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This Paper has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules, political representation and policy outcomes. It aims to place the literature into a broader context of theoretical and empirical work in the field of political economy. Second, it develops a parallel empirical analysis that updates studies in the literature and re-examines some of the claims made, in a setting unified both in terms of policy outcomes and the period under study. Third, the paper develops some new directions for research, presenting a small number of novel exploratory results.

The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

Abstract: Introduction 1. The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions 2. The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions 3. The revolutionaries: anti-colonial politics and transformations 4. Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution 5. The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges 6. The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa 7. The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn 8. The Islamist defiance 9. The 1980s: the Reagan offensive 10. The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions and Great Power collapse.

The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics

Abstract: In 1998, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 per cent of the US population, they account for more than 55 per cent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained. This book explores the social, political and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates. More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues - of class, gender, and sexuality - challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness. The book examines the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, and aims to teach about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers insight into how the politics of the African-American community - and other marginal groups - will evolve in the 21st century.

The Impact of Corruption on Regime Legitimacy: A Comparative Study of Four Latin American Countries

Abstract: Economists have long warned about the pernicious impacts of corruption, arguing that it increases transaction costs, reduces investment incentives, and ultimately results in reduced economic growth. Political scientists, on the other hand, ever the realists, have had a much more ambivalent view of the problem. Indeed, much classic literature focusing on the Third World saw corruption as functional for political development, enabling citizens to overcome intransigent, inefficient bureaucracies while increasing loyalty to the political system. More recent research, however, points in the opposite direction toward an erosion of public support for corrupt regimes. A series of serious methodological problems has prevented the testing of these contradictory assertions about the impact of corruption. This article uses national sample survey data, with a total N of over 9,000, from four Latin American countries to test the effect of corruption experiences on belief in the legitimacy of the political system. It fi...

The expediency of culture : uses of culture in the global era

Abstract: The Expediency of Culture is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly globalized world. George Yudice explores critically how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends. Through a dazzling series of illustrative studies, Yudice challenges the Gramscian notion of cultural struggle for hegemony and instead develops an understanding of culture where cultural agency at every level is negotiated within globalized contexts dominated by the active management and administration of culture. He describes a world where “high” culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain) is a mode of urban development, rituals and everyday aesthetic practices are mobilized to promote tourism and the heritage industries, and mass culture industries comprise significant portions of a number of countries’ gross national products. Yudice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean that today’s increasingly transnational culture—exemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizations—is necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. Yudice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art event— in site a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on the city of Miami as one of a number of transnational “cultural corridors” and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.