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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.


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TL;DR: The authors of When States Fail: Causes and Consequences as mentioned in this paper argue that without strong government, society devolves into chaos, and they argue that the United States and other nations have a positive role to play in helping at-risk governments become strong.
Abstract: Do weak governments around the globe merit assistance? The premise of When States Fail: Causes and Consequences is that without strong government, society devolves into chaos Sponsored by the Harvard University Failed States Project, this edited volume contains fourteen chapters, most of them written by political scientists Not all authors come to the same conclusions, but they agree on most issues Thus, I will treat the arguments collectively The writers argue that the United States and other nations have a positive role to play in helping at-risk governments become strong That most contributors are mainstream political scientists rather than Austrian economists becomes evident quickly As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail In the case of these political scientists, they clearly believe that scientifically designed government institutions are needed to solve all of the world’s problems A small minority of the contributions are interesting and thoughtful; of the remainder, the best chapters are the ones that do not say much The arguments will be convincing to those who believe in increasing state power and those who believe that groups such as the United Nations should be involved in governmental affairs around the globe The arguments will be unconvincing to anyone with the slightest appreciation for free markets or self-governance Although these academics pay some lip service to the importance of markets, they argue that society crucially relies on strong states As such, they want to find ways to make states strong The arguments rest on certain basic assumptions that the authors unfortunately never justify Nowhere in the book do they offer evidence that having a failed state or a weak state is bad At a few points the authors try to provide evidence for this hypothesis, but rather than attempting to create an objective measure of the strength of states and then attempting to correlate that with measures of results, they simply choose countries with bad outcomes and then define those countries as having weak states When high mortality, low literacy, and low life expectancy rates plague a country, the cause, according to these authors, is that the government is not strong enough Never do they consider the possibility that these bad outcomes could be due to overly strong states The Soviet Union was certainly a very strong state, and it effectively killed millions of its citizens (Rummel 1994) If the authors of this book wish to defend their simple hypothesis that strong states are good, they would need to ignore the evidence

577 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the proposition that political freedom promotes peace, as suggested by R. J. Rummel, in its monadic form, and show that this proposition tends to be contradicted or unsupported, if we focus only on monadic relationships, if they refer to wars from a more distant past, if I include wars of an extrasystemic nature, or if we assess political freedom cross-sectionally (i.e., comparing a country's political conditions with those of its contemporaries).
Abstract: This analysis compares the incidence of war involvement by countries with comparatively more and less political freedom. It examines the proposition that political freedom promotes peace, as suggested by R. J. Rummel, in its monadic form. Its results indicate that this proposition tends to be contradicted or unsupported, if we focus only on monadic relationships, if we refer to wars from a more distant past, if we include wars of an extrasystemic nature (i.e., colonial and imperialist wars) or if we assess political freedom cross-sectionally (i.e., comparing a country's political conditions with those of its contemporaries). On the other hand, it is suggested that this proposition tends to be confirmed, if we focus only on dyadic relationships, if we refer to the more recent past, if we exclude extrasystemic wars, or if we assess political freedom longitudinally for each country (i.e., comparing a country's freedom status in terms of its own present or past political conditions). Thus some of the discrepa...

576 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world and find that almost universally the largest media firms are controlled by the government or by private families, and the adverse effects of government ownership on political and economic freedom are stronger for newspapers than for television.
Abstract: The authors examine patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world. They find that almost universally the largest media firms are controlled by the government or by private families. Government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media. Government ownership is generally associated with less press freedom, fewer political and economic rights, inferior governance, and, most conspicuously, inferior social outcomes in education and health. The adverse effects of government ownership on political and economic freedom are stronger for newspapers than for television. The adverse effects of government ownership of the media do not appear to be restricted solely to instances of government monopoly. The authors present a range of evidence on the adverse consequences of state ownership of the media. State ownership of the media is often argued to be justified on behalf of the social needs of the disadvantaged. But if their findings are correct, increasing private ownership of the media--through privatization or by encouraging the entry of privately owned media--can advance a variety of political and economic goals, especially those of meeting the social needs of the poor.

575 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others, focusing on political parties' access to resources and voters' dependence on fiscal largesse.
Abstract: Why do some parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork-ridden political systems? This article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others. We explain such differences by focusing on political parties’ access to resources (supply side) and voters’ dependence on fiscal largesse (demand side). We show how these differences affect the patron’s choice of public sector wages and employment. We use subnational level data to show different electoral returns from patronage for the two major political coalitions in Argentina—Peronism and the UCR-Alianza—and their effect on preferences over public sector wages and employment. W hy do some political parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork-ridden political systems? This article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others. We explain returns to patronage by highlighting differences in the political parties’ access to resources (supply side) and the voter’s dependence on public sector jobs (demand side). We propose that, just as political parties cater their policies to particular groups of voters, they pursue different strategies when allocating pork in exchange for support. On the supply side, we highlight the importance of partisan biases in the fiscal and electoral institutions that regulate the access and distribution of public resources. On the demand side, we show that patronage is a distributive mechanism that provides different returns to voters with different skills and labor market expectations.

575 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the course of their empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted the importance of policy communities/networks/subsystems involving actors from numerous public and private institutions and from multiple levels of government as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Any theory of the manner in which governmental policies get formulated and implemented, as well as the effects of those actions on the world, requires an understanding of the behavior of major types of governmental institutions (legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, chief executives), as well as the behavior of interest groups, the general public, and the media. The dominant paradigm of the policy process, the stages heuristic popularized by Jones (1970), Anderson (1975), and Peters (1986), has outlived its usefulness and must be replaced, in large part because it is not a causal theory. In the course of their empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena that need to be incorporated into theories of the policy process. The development of such theories requires an integration ‘of both political scientists’ knowledge of specific institutions and behavior and policy scholars' attention to policy communities, substantive policy information, etc.Innovations by Policy Scholars in Understanding the Policy ProcessAt least since World War II, most political scientists have tended to focus on either a specific type of institution (legislatures, the presidency, courts, interest groups, administrative agencies, local governments, political parties) or on specific types of political behavior outside those institutions (public opinion, voting, political socialization). These have become the standard subfields within the discipline.In contrast, scholars interested in public policy have not been able to stay within these subfields because the policy process spans all of them. In the course of empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena often neglected by political scientists without a policy focus:a) The importance of policy communities/networks/subsystems involving actors from numerous public and private institutions and from multiple levels of government;b) The importance of substantive policy information;c) The critical role of policy elites vis-a-vis the general public;d) The desirability of longitudinal studies of a decade or more;e) Differences in political behavior across policy types.

575 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