Showing papers on "State (polity) published in 2016"

Strong Societies And Weak States State Society Relations And State Capabilities In The Third World

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The New Paigrave Dictionary of Money and Finance

Abstract: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance is a successor to the 1987 work The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. Both dictionaries claim descent from Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, published as a summary of the state of economics during the 1890s. The same team of three editors is responsible for both New Palgrave dictionaries,1 and there are many similarities in approach. Indeed, about 20 percent of the essays in the New Palgrave Money and Finance are reprinted from the New Palgrave Economics (and ten essays are reprinted from the original Palgrave). There are also some obvious differences between the two New Palgrave dictionaries. The New Palgrave Economics had a much broader scope, aiming to cover all of modern economics. It was considerably larger than the New Palgrave Money and Finance, with four volumes rather than three, 3500 pages rather than 2500, and almost 2000 essays rather than 1000 or so. The New Palgrave Economics included biographical essays, which took up about a third of the work; the New Palgrave Money and Finance has no biography but includes many short definitions of technical terms. Last but not least, the New Palgrave Economics omitted empirical topics to concentrate on economic theory and history of economic thought, while the New Palgrave Money and Finance covers much empirical material.

Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship

Abstract: Treating the ‘state’ as a finished product gets in the way of understanding it. The state is always in the making. This article, which acts as the Introduction to a special issue, argues that political authority is (re-)produced through the process of successfully defining and enforcing rights to community membership and rights of access to important resources. Claims to rights prompt the exercise of authority. Struggles over property and citizenship are therefore as much about the scope and constitution of political authority as they are about access to resources and membership of a political community. The ability to entitle and disenfranchise people with regard to property, and to establish the conditions under which they hold property — together with the ability to define who belongs and who does not, and to establish and uphold rank, privilege and social servitude in its many forms — is constitutive of state power. Thus this essay argues that various moments of rupture (following periods of conflict, of colonial domination, of socialist, liberal, or authoritarian regimes, et cetera) allow us to see that rights do not simply flow from authority but also constitute it. Authority and rights are conceptually tied together by recognition. This article demonstrates how contracts of recognition unfold. It proposes an approach to the systematic investigation of the constitution of authority through the social production of property and citizenship as the recognition of claims to resources and membership. It thereby develops a way to study concrete dynamics of authority or state formation.

Performance Funding for Higher Education

Abstract: Since the 1970s, federal and state policy-makers have become increasingly concerned with improving higher education performance. In this quest, state performance funding for higher education has become widely used. As of June 2014, twenty-six states were operating performance funding programs and four more have programs awaiting implementation. This article reviews the forms, extent, origins, implementation, impacts (intended and unintended), and policy prospects of performance funding. Performance funding has become quite widespread with formidable political support, yet it has also experienced considerable implementation vicissitudes, with many programs being discontinued and even those that have survived encountering substantial obstacles and unintended impacts. Although evidence suggests that performance funding does stimulate colleges and universities to substantially change their policies and practices, it is yet unclear whether performance funding improves student outcomes. The article concludes by...

An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Abstract: Chinua Achebe is probably Africa's most widely read novelist. Achebe, the sins of Conrad are deeply connected to a desire in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest. Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world', the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality. The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe and America. Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria.

Greening Leviathan: the rise of the environmental state?

Abstract: ‘Bringing the state back in’ to research on comparative, inter-, and trans-national environmental politics and policy will contribute to better understanding of the limits and prospects of contemporary approaches to environmental politics and the overall evolution of contemporary states once environmental issues become central. The rationale for the state as an analytical perspective in environmental policy and politics is explained, and an empirically oriented concept of the environmental state is introduced, along with a tentative sketch of its evolution in historical perspective. A research agenda on the environmental state is mapped out, centring around variation and convergence in environmental states across space and time; the political/economic dynamics of contemporary environmental states; and inter-linkages among environmental problems, the constitution of political communities, and the functioning of the public power. In conclusion, the ways in which the contributions to this volume address that...

Inequality from Generation to Generation: The United States in Comparison

Abstract: To understand the degree of intergenerational mobility in the United States, and the differences between Americans and others, it is important to appreciate the workings and interaction of three fundamental institutions: the family, the market, and the state. But comparisons can also be misleading. The way in which families, labor markets, and government policy determine the life chances of children is complicated; the result of a particular history, societal values, and the nature of the political process. It might be one thing to say that the United States has significantly less intergenerational mobility than Denmark or Norway, but it is entirely another thing to suggest that these countries offer templates for the conduct of public policy that can be applied on this side of the Atlantic. There is no way to get from here to there.It is helpful to focus on a particularly apt comparison, that between the United States and Canada, in order to illustrate how the configuration of the forces determining the transmission of inequality across generations differs in spite of the fact that both of these countries share many other things in common, particularly the importance and meaning of equality of opportunity and the role of individual hard work and motivation.

State Capacity, Minority Shareholder Protections, and Stock Market Development

Abstract: We investigate how state capacity—the administrative ability to formulate and implement policy—affects the institutional adoption of new policies and the decoupling of those policies from their original purpose in the face of pressures from professions, multilateral agencies, and imitation among countries. We expect state capacity to reduce the effect of professional and imitation influences, to increase the impact of coercive effects by multilateral agencies, and to lessen decoupling between policies’ adoption and desired outcomes. We tested these predictions using a unique longitudinal dataset on the adoption of minority shareholders’ legal protections and the development of the stock market in 78 countries between 1970 and 2011. We found evidence consistent with the moderating effects of state capacity on institutional adoption and on lessening policy–practice decoupling. Our findings suggest that the strength of state capacity influences which policy models policymakers select and adopt, whether they implement them effectively, and what the consequences of such adoption are.

Revisiting territories of relegation: Class, ethnicity and state in the making of advanced marginality

Abstract: In the postindustrial city, relegation takes the form of real or imaginary consignment to distinctive sociospatial formations variously and vaguely referred to as “inner cities,” “ghettos,” “enclaves,” “no-go areas,” “problem districts,” or simply “rough neighborhoods.” How are we characterize and differentiate these spaces, what determines their trajectory (birth, growth, decay and death), whence comes the intense stigma attached to them, and what constellations of class, ethnicity and state do they both materialize and signify? These are the questions I pursued in my book Urban Outcasts (2008) through a methodical comparison of the trajectories of the black American ghetto and the European working-class peripheries in the era of neoliberal ascendancy. In this article, I revisit this cross-continental sociology of “advanced marginality” to tease out its broader lessons for our understanding of the tangled nexus of symbolic, social and physical space in the polarizing metropolis at century’s threshold in particular, and for bringing the core principles of Bourdieu’s sociology to bear on comparative urban studies in general.

New online ecology of adversarial aggregates: ISIS and beyond.

Abstract: Support for an extremist entity such as Islamic State (ISIS) somehow manages to survive globally online despite considerable external pressure and may ultimately inspire acts by individuals having no history of extremism, membership in a terrorist faction, or direct links to leadership. Examining longitudinal records of online activity, we uncovered an ecology evolving on a daily time scale that drives online support, and we provide a mathematical theory that describes it. The ecology features self-organized aggregates (ad hoc groups formed via linkage to a Facebook page or analog) that proliferate preceding the onset of recent real-world campaigns and adopt novel adaptive mechanisms to enhance their survival. One of the predictions is that development of large, potentially potent pro-ISIS aggregates can be thwarted by targeting smaller ones.

The Habsburg Empire: A New History

Abstract: In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans. Across divides of language, religion, region, and history, ordinary women and men felt a common attachment to their empire, while bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, and academics devised inventive solutions to the challenges of governing Europe s second largest state. In the decades before and after its dissolution, some observers belittled the Habsburg Empire as a dysfunctional patchwork of hostile ethnic groups and an anachronistic imperial relic. Judson examines their motives and explains just how wrong these rearguard critics were.Rejecting fragmented histories of nations in the making, this bold revision surveys the shared institutions that bridged difference and distance to bring stability and meaning to the far-flung empire. By supporting new schools, law courts, and railroads, along with scientific and artistic advances, the Habsburg monarchs sought to anchor their authority in the cultures and economies of Central Europe. A rising standard of living throughout the empire deepened the legitimacy of Habsburg rule, as citizens learned to use the empire s administrative machinery to their local advantage. Nationalists developed distinctive ideas about cultural difference in the context of imperial institutions, yet all of them claimed the Habsburg state as their empire.The empire s creative solutions to governing its many lands and peoples as well as the intractable problems it could not solve left an enduring imprint on its successor states in Central Europe. Its lessons remain no less important today."

Civil war violence and political trust: Microlevel evidence from Nepal:

Abstract: Exposure to violence can shape people’s political and social perceptions. War-time effects on trust in state institutions are particularly relevant for political stability in the aftermath of viole...

Control and Discretion in the Modern Administrative State

Abstract: The development of the administrative state and the growth of political *democracy constitute two of the most distinctive tendencies of modern government. The development of an advanced administrative apparatus carries with it claims to the values of continuity, professionalism, expertise, and effectiveness. The other development, that of political democracy, encompasses claims to the values of responsiveness, direction, and revitalization. Notwithstanding the desirability of each set of values, the means for meshing them in an optimal mix are hardly obvious. Even though it is widely accepted in democratic settings that the permanent ad

State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism is Transforming the World

Abstract: The end of the Cold War ushered in an age of American triumphalism best characterized by the 'Washington Consensus': the idea that free markets, democratic institutions, limitations on government involvement in the economy, and the rule of law were the foundations of prosperity and stability. The last fifteen years, starting with the Asian financial crisis, have seen the gradual erosion of that consensus. Many commentators have pointed to the emergence of a powerful new rival model: state capitalism. In state capitalist regimes, the government typically owns firms in strategic industries. Not beholden to private-sector shareholders, such firms are allowed to operate with razor-thin margins if the state deems them strategically important. China, soon to be the world's largest economy, is the best known state capitalist regime, but it is hardly the only one. In State Capitalism, Joshua Kurlantzick ranges across the world-China, Thailand, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and more-and argues that the increase in state capitalism across the globe has, on balance, contributed to a decline in democracy. He isolates some of the reasons for state capitalism's resurgence: the fact that globalization favors economies of scale in the most critical industries, and the widespread rejection of the Washington Consensus in the face of the problems that have plagued the world economy in recent years. That said, a number of democratic nations have embraced state capitalism, and in those regimes, state-backed firms like Brazil's Embraer have enjoyed considerable success. Kurlantzick highlights the mixed record and the evolving nature of the model, yet he is more concerned about the negative effects of state capitalism. When states control firms, whether in democratic or authoritarian regimes, the government increases its advantage over the rest of society. The combination of new technologies, the perceived failures of liberal economics and democracy in many developing nations, the rise of modern kinds of authoritarians, and the success of some of the best-known state capitalists have created an era ripe for state intervention. Leviathan Inc. offers the sharpest analysis yet of what state capitalism's emergence means for democratic politics around the world.

Making Autocracy Work: Representation and Responsiveness in Modern China

Abstract: Can meaningful representation emerge in an authoritarian setting? If so, how, when, and why? Making Autocracy Work identifies the trade-offs associated with representation in authoritarian environments and then tests the theory through a detailed inquiry into the dynamics of China's National People's Congress (NPC, the country's highest formal government institution). Rory Truex argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engineering a system of 'representation within bounds' in the NPC, encouraging deputies to reflect the needs of their constituents, but only for non-sensitive issues. This allows the regime to address citizen grievances while avoiding incendiary political activism. Data on NPC deputy backgrounds and behaviors is used to explore the nature of representation and incentives in this constrained system. The book challenges existing conceptions of representation, authoritarianism, and the future of the Chinese state. Consultative institutions like the NPC are key to making autocracy work.

The Ethnic Army and the State Explaining Coup Traps and the Difficulties of Democratization in Africa

Abstract: Military coups have posed a persistent threat to political stability in Africa, undermining democratization efforts, igniting insurgencies, and leading to years of devastating military governance. ...

Paths to Inclusive Political Institutions

Abstract: In this paper we present a new approach to thinking about the circumstances under which inclusive political institutions, consisting of a state with capacity and a broad distribution of political power, emerge. Different scholars have emphasized different paths towards such institutions, with some emphasizing modernization, and others emphasizing the necessity of state building as a prerequisite for democracy. We argue however, using the examples of Ancient Athens and Early Modern England, that inclusive political institutions emerge from a balanced increase in state capacity and the distribution of power. This path emerges in a particular basin of attraction. Though this basin depends on many parameters, we emphasize the crucial nature of informal institutions and social norms which put Athens and England onto this path. Outside of this basin a number of things may occur; social norms may be such as to stop a state forming, an outcome we illustrate with the Tiv of pre-colonial Nigeria; or when society is weaker a form of state formation can occur which creates a ‘Paper Leviathan’ which we illustrate with Colombia; finally when civil society is prostrate ‘Despotic Leviathans’ can be created, an outcome we illustrate with contemporary Rwanda. None of these latter paths lead to inclusive institutions or sustained prosperity.

The State of African Cities 2014

Abstract: After an unprecedented and notable delay, the State of African Cities Report 2014 has been published. It makes a bold claim for re-imagining urban sustainability in Africa, continuing two earlier a...

Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa: The Logic of the Coup-Civil War Trap

Abstract: Why are some African countries trapped in vicious cycles of ethnic exclusion and civil war, while others experience relative peace? In this groundbreaking book, Philip Roessler addresses this question. Roessler models Africa's weak, ethnically-divided states as confronting rulers with a coup-civil war trap - sharing power with ethnic rivals is necessary to underwrite societal peace and prevent civil war, but increases rivals' capabilities to seize sovereign power in a coup d'etat. How rulers respond to this strategic trade-off is shown to be a function of their country's ethnic geography and the distribution of threat capabilities it produces. Moving between in-depth case studies of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo based on years of field work and statistical analyses of powersharing, coups and civil war across sub-Saharan Africa, the book serves as an exemplar of the benefits of mixed methods research for theory-building and testing in comparative politics.

Fair? What Has Fairness Got to Do with It? Vagaries of Election Observations and Democratic

Abstract: THE observation and monitoring of elections and referenda has become a 'growth business' in Africa since external and internal pressures have forced the leaders of one-party states to test their political legitimacy. The closely monitored 199I presidential and parliamentary elections in Zambia heralded the first peaceful transition from a single to a multi-party system of governance with a change of leadership in English-speaking Africa. It marked the beginning of an era of confidence in the possibilities of democratic change, and confirmed the positive influence that international observers can have on such processes. Their presence was henceforth considered an essential pre-condition for acceptable transitional multi-party elections. The hopes that Zambia would indeed 'set a standard for Africa',1 and offer encouragement to nascent democratic movements on the continent have, however, remained elusive. More recent elections have been replete with controversy, intimidations, and violence. Despite being certified to varying degrees as free and fair by observers, the losers have contested the results - in Angola with arms, in Kenya and Ghana with threatened and actual boycotts. Doubts about the commitment of African leaders to democratic standards, and the real possibility that they use the state machinery in their own favour, are perceived as major threats to free and fair elections. In these precarious and volatile situations observers were likened to a 'democracy police',2 who by their mere presence were expected to deter blatant fraud and by their mandate to witness and expose irregularities. Recently, however, the commitment of the international observers themselves has come under fire from among the

The Lebanese–Syrian crisis: impact of influx of Syrian refugees to an already weak state

Abstract: BACKGROUND Lebanon, a small Middle Eastern country facing constant political and national unity challenges with a population of approximately 300,000 Palestinian and Iraqi refugees, has welcomed more than 1.2 million Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)-registered Syrian refugees since 2012. The Government of Lebanon considers individuals who crossed Lebanese-Syrian borders since 2011 as "displaced", emphasizing its long-standing position that Lebanon is not a state for refugees, refusing to establish camps, and adopting a policy paper to reduce their numbers in October 2014. Humanitarian response to the Syrian influx to Lebanon has been constantly assembling with the UNHCR as the main acting body and the Lebanon Crisis Response Plan as the latest plan for 2016. METHODS Review of secondary data from gray literature and reports focusing on the influx of Syrian refugees to Lebanon by visiting databases covering humanitarian response in complex emergencies. Limitations include obtaining majority of the data from gray literature and changing statistics due to the instability of the situation. RESULTS The influx of Syrian refugees to Lebanon, an already weak and vulnerable state, has negatively impacted life in Lebanon on different levels including increasing demographics, regressing economy, exhausting social services, complicating politics, and decreasing security as well as worsened the life of displaced Syrians themselves. CONCLUSION Displaced Syrians and Lebanese people share aggravating hardships of a mutual and precarious crisis resulting from the Syrian influx to Lebanon. Although a lot of response has been initiated, both populations still lack much of their basic needs due to lack of funding and nonsustainable program initiatives. The two major recommendations for future interventions are to ensure continuous and effective monitoring and sustainability in order to alleviate current and future suffering in Lebanon.

Border militarisation and the re-articulation of sovereignty

Abstract: This paper identifies a global trend towards hardened, militarised borders through the use of military technologies, hardware and personnel. In contrast to claims of waning state sovereignty, drawing on detailed case studies from the United States and European Union, we argue the militarisation of borders represents a re-articulation and expansion of state sovereignty into new spaces and arenas. We argue that the nexus of military-security contractors, dramatically increased security budgets, and the discourse of threats from terrorism and immigration is resulting in a profound shift in border security. The construction of barriers, deployment of more personnel and the investment in a wide range of military and security technologies from drones to smart border technologies that attempt to monitor, identify and prevent unauthorised movements are emblematic of this shift. We link this increasing militarisation to dehumanisation of migrant others and to the increasing mortality in border spaces. By documenting this trend and identifying a range of different practices that are included under the rubric of militarisation, this paper is both a call for nuanced interpretation and more sustained investigation of the expansion of the military into the policing of borders.

The Dream Is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr's California Idea of Higher Education

Abstract: The Dream Is Over tells the extraordinary story of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by visionary University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries. The Master Plan’s equality of opportunity policy brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s leading system of public research universities. The California idea became the leading model for higher education across the world and has had great influence in the rapid growth of universities in China and East Asia. Yet, remarkably, the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. Universal access is faltering, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face new challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader, lags far behind. Can the social values embodied in Kerr’s vision be renewed? “The Dream Is Over is an outstanding contribution to the literature on higher education. It should be read not only by a large American audience of scholars, teachers, students, and policy makers, but also by a wider international audience interested in higher education, its successes, its shortcomings, and the policies that have driven both.” JUDITH C. BROWN, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Minerva, and former Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Wesleyan "The Dream is Over is a tour de force by Simon Marginson, whose scholarship is essential for understanding the role of higher education in society today. Through an archeology of the “Californian idea,” Marginson analyzes the intellectual and political work that established the Master Plan and the University of California as the city of intellect. He shows how the California model influenced the design of higher education around the world and identifies the forces that have brought it to the brink of ruin. Marginson convincingly argues that higher education in the United States now contributes to the reproduction of social inequality but also provides practical suggestions for how to re-charter the pact between higher education and society." DR. BRENDAN CANTWELL, Michigan State University and Coordinating Editor of Higher Education SIMON MARGINSON is Professor of International Higher Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, and Director of the ESRC/HEFCE Centre for Global Higher Education. He is also joint editor of the journal Higher Education.

On the People's Terms

Abstract: According to republican political theory, people’s freedom as persons requires that they be publicly protected against subjection or domination in the exercise of basic liberties. But there is no public protection without a coercive state and that raises a problem since, by all accounts, coercion takes away from the freedom of the coerced. In addressing this problem, Philip Pettit argues that state coercion does not involve subjection or domination if people share equally in democratic control of the direction it takes. He proposes a normative theory of democracy under which the goal is to ensure that political coercion is non-dominating and, linking philosophy with policy, he supplements the theory with a realistic model of institutions that might promote that goal. On the People’s Terms is an original account of the rationale and organization of democracy, offering a new direction for democratic thought. It fully lives up to the high ideals of the Seeley Lectures.

The Righteous and the Rightful: The Technomoral Politics of NGOs, Social Movements, and the State in India

Abstract: Civil society groups today are honored and relied on by governments, as well as tightly regulated and scrutinized for challenging state policies and agencies. In contemporary India, political dynamics of collaboration and confrontation between state and nonstate actors increasingly unfold in legal-social fields, taking “technomoral” forms. Mixing technocratic languages of law and policy with moral pronouncements, these actors assert themselves as virtuous agents, marking their political legitimacy as keepers of the public interest. Using ethnographic research with Indian NGOs, social movements, and a political party, we show that as civil society groups interact with state bodies, they redefine institutional boundaries and claim moral authority over public stewardship. Technomoral strategies are neither depoliticized nor antipolitical, but constitute a righteous and rightful form of politics. [NGOs, state, India, morality, activist politics, neoliberalism, law]

State mindfulness, self-regulation, and emotional experience in everyday life.

Abstract: Mindfulness is associated with a host of beneficial outcomes. Increasing evidence has suggested that mindfulness may support adaptive self-regulation. The present research investigates fluctuations in state mindfulness in everyday life and links these with desire experiences and self-regulation. When high in state mindfulness, participants experienced less conflict between desires and other goals, tried to resist desires less, and enacted desires to a greater extent than when less mindful. This was accompanied by less use of self-regulatory strategies, including suppression, self-stopping, distraction, and avoidance. In addition, state mindfulness was associated with greater happiness, less guilt, and less regret after enacting desires. It is important to note that when conflict between desires and other goals was high, participants exerted as much restraint when reporting low as when reporting high state mindfulness. These findings suggest that state mindfulness goes along with wise self-regulation as opposed to strictly higher restraint: enjoying the benefits of indulgence without risking important long-term goals.

Contesting neoliberal urbanism in Glasgow's community gardens: The practice of DIY citizenship

Abstract: In this journal, it has been suggested that citizens practising community gardening “can become complicit in the construction of neoliberal hegemony”. Such hegemony is maintained, it is argued, through the day-to-day work of neoliberal citizen-subjects, which “alleviates the state from service provision”. In this paper we acknowledge that community gardens are vulnerable to neoliberal cooptation. But, even where neoliberal practices are evidenced, such practices do not define or foreclose other socio-political subjectivities at work in the gardens. We contend that community gardens in Glasgow cultivate collective practices that offer us a glimpse of what a progressively transformative polity can achieve. Enabled by an interlocking process of community and spatial production, this form of citizen participation encourages us to reconsider our relationships with one another, our environment and what constitutes effective political practice. Inspired by a range of writings on citizenship formation we term this “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) Citizenship.