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Politics

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


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the developing world, uneven capitalist development, resilient social cleavages and various forms of bureaucratic authoritarianism have blunted lower class collective action as discussed by the authors, leading to a lack of social and economic empowerment.
Abstract: Over the past decade, a large number of developing countries have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The rebirth of civil societies, the achievement of new freedoms and liberties have all been celebrated with due enthusiasm. But now that the euphoria of these transitions has passed, we are beginning to pose the sobering question of what difference democracy makes to development, or to be more precise, whether democracy can help redress the severe social and economic inequalities that characterize developing countries. Two separate problems are involved here. The first parallels the western European literature on the rise of the welfare state and is centrally concerned with patterns of interest aggregation, and specifically the dynamics and effects of lower class formation. This literature has convincingly argued that political rights can be translated into social rights, and procedural democracy becomes substantive democracy, only to the extent that lower class demands are organized and find effective representation in the state. In the developing world however, uneven capitalist development, resilient social cleavages and various forms of bureaucratic authoritarianism have blunted lower class collective action. The three cases examined here, however, break with this pattern. In South Africa, Brazil, and the Indian state of Kerala, working-class

585 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors found that policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public's political judgments.
Abstract: In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.

585 citations

Book
01 Jan 1981
TL;DR: Pauline Gregg as mentioned in this paper has drawn heavily on original documents, letters, and speeches to show how Charles's heritage, upbringing, and personality, as well as his relationships with friends, advisors, and favorites, all took place against a background of social and political upheaval that gradually enveloped him and his whole family.
Abstract: This is a lucid, fair-minded account of a difficult and tragic man. Pauline Gregg has drawn heavily on original documents, letters, and speeches to show how Charles's heritage, upbringing, and personality, as well as his relationships with friends, advisors, and favorites, all took place against a background of social and political upheaval that gradually enveloped him and his whole family.

585 citations

12 Aug 2011
TL;DR: A political dependence model is developed that explains how different types of dependency on the government lead firms to issue corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and how the risk of governmental monitoring affects the extent to which CSR reports are symbolic or substantive.
Abstract: This study focuses on how and why firms strategically respond to government signals on appropriate corporate activity. We integrate institutional theory with research on corporate political strategy to develop a political dependence model that explains (a) how different types of dependency on the government lead firms to issue corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and (b) how the risk of governmental monitoring affects the extent to which CSR reports are symbolic or substantive. First, we examine how firm characteristics reflecting dependence on the government—including private versus state ownership, executives serving on political councils, political legacy, and financial resources—affect the likelihood of firms issuing CSR reports. Second, we focus on the symbolic nature of CSR reporting and how variance in the risk of government monitoring through channels such as bureaucratic embeddedness and regional government institutional development influences the extent to which CSR communications are symbolically decoupled from substantive CSR activities. Our database includes all CSR reports issued by the approximately 1,600 publicly listed Chinese firms between 2006 and 2009. Our hypotheses are generally supported. The political perspective we develop contributes to organizational theory by showing that (a) government signaling is an important mechanism of political influence, (b) different types of dependency on the government expose firms to different types of legitimacy pressure, and (c) firms face a decoupling risk that makes them more likely to enact substantive CSR actions in situations in which they are likely to be monitored.

584 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors suggest how the application of certain sociological and anthropological concepts may facilitate systematic comparison among the major types of political systems operative in the world today and suggest that there are more musical forms of psalmody than sociological jargon.
Abstract: W A f HAT I PROPOSE to do in this brief paper is to suggest how the application of certain sociological and anthropological concepts may facilitate systematic comparison among the major types of political systems operative in the world today. At the risk of saying the obvious, I am not suggesting to my colleagues in the field of comparative government that social theory is a conceptual cure-all for the ailments of the discipline. There are many ways of laboring in the vineyard of the Lord, and I am quite prepared to concede that there are more musical forms of psalmody than sociological jargon. I suppose the test of the sociological approach that is discussed here is whether or not it enables us to solve certain persistent problems in the field more effectively than we now are able to solve them. Our expectations of the field of comparative government have changed in at least two ways in the last decades. In the first place as American interests have broadened to include literally the whole world, our course offerings have expanded to include the many areas outside of Western Europe Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Secondly, as our international interests have expanded and become more urgent, our requirements in knowledge have become more exacting. We can no longer view political crises in France with detached curiousity or view countries such as IndoChina and Indonesia as interesting political pathologies. We are led to extend our discipline and intensify it simultaneously. It would simply be untrue to say that the discipline of comparative government has not begun to meet both of these challenges. As rapidly as it has been possible to train the personnel, new areas have been opened up to teaching and research; and there has been substantial encouragement to those who have been tempted to explore new aspects of the political process both here and abroad and to employ new methods in such research. It is precisely because

583 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202448
202329,771
202265,814
20216,033
20207,708
20198,328