State (polity)

About: State (polity) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 36954 publications have been published within this topic receiving 719822 citations. The topic is also known as: state (polity).

Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics

Abstract: The author is concerned to reveal flaws in the assumptions on which much of modern economic analysis is based, while showing how economists can still contribute to the management of an economy subject to social and political pressures.

Legitimacy, Power, and the Symbolic Life of the UN Security Council

Abstract: The Charter of the United Nations gives the Security Council enormous formal powers, but it. does not give it direct control of the tools with which to enact those powers. As many have noted, much of the power of the Council is contingent on the voluntary coop eration of states, measured in variables such as the contribution to peacekeeping missions and the national enforcement of sanctions re gimes.1 It is often also noted that this voluntary compliance depends also on states' perceptions of the legitimacy of the Council and its ac tions.2 However, the central role that legitimacy plays in supporting the power of the Council is rarely investigated. After Inis Claude's state ment of the matter in 1966, the issue has not been revisited.3 The contingent nature of Council authority means its effect in the international system is both broader and narrower than the formal pow ers of the UN Charter?narrower because the Cold War stunted the de velopment of the four-policemen idea, but broader because the high so cial status of the Council signals a deep pool of "social capital" that it can draw on to induce compliance by states. This article expands the traditional emphasis of international organization (IO) studies from the black letter of treaties and charters to a perspective that takes into ac count actual practices and the power of symbols around the Security Council. Taking seriously the symbolic power of the Council helps us to see the reasons behind certain otherwise inexplicable phenomena in in ternational relations (IR) and allows us to ask questions regarding the legitimacy of the Council that were previously hidden from view. Most political conflicts have symbolic payoffs at their root, which a concern only with studying material gains will inevitably misunderstand. This is an important problem with respect to the Security Council because so much of what makes the Council a significant actor in international pol itics is a result of the informal development of its role in international society. This is both a cause and a consequence of the distribution of material rewards and costs. We miss much that is interesting in social 35

Who Owns the State? Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Post-Colonial Societies

Abstract: . This article aims to integrate different explanatory approaches to ethnic conflicts: studies on ethnic clientelism and discrimination, on political mobilisation by minority elites, on unequal relations between ethnoregions, and on the effects that different political systems have on the dynamics of ethnic conflicts. For each of these approaches, the relevant research is reviewed and illustrated by selected examples from post-imperial societies. Propositions that seem empirically plausible are integrated into a comparative model which is in turn based on a specific theory of political modernity. The premise holds that the politicisation of ethnicity is to be interpreted as a central aspect of modem state-building. For only when ‘people’ and state are mutually related within the ideal of a legitimate order does the question arise for which ethnic group the state has to act, who is regarded as its legitimate owner, and who is entitled to have access to its services. Ethnic conflicts can thus be interpreted as struggles for the collective goods of the nation-state. Within this paradigmatical frame, a step-by-step analysis at a medium level of abstraction tries to show under which conditions state-building leads to an ethnicisation of political conflicts and in some cases to an escalation into rebellions and wars.

The Political Economy of Neoliberalism: Britain and the United States in the 1980s

Abstract: If ever a scholarly claim for Anglo-American exceptionalism received empirical support, it was during the ascendant New Right administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. During the 1980s, these governments embarked on a systematic and comprehensive project of fiscal retrenchment, financial and labor market deregulation, and erosion of the Keynesian assumptions that had underpinned postwar economic and social policy. The ideological bases of the New Right agenda have been examined in detail, as have the policies attempted in their name (Cooper, Kornberg, and Mishler 1987; King 1987; Hoover and Plant 1988; Jordan and Ashford 1993; Marsh and Rhodes 1992; Palmer and Sawhill 1984; Palmer 1986; Campbell and Rockman 1991; Heclo and Salamon 1982). But theories of political economy have yet to be satisfactorily applied to these two cases. This chapter employs recent work in the study of the relationship between organized interests and the state to cast light on features of the policies pursued in the 1980s. The United States and Britain were not the only two countries that swung electorally to governments espousing neoliberal principles. A bourgeois coalition government came to power in 1976 in Sweden, ending over six decades of social democratic hegemony, while in the early 1980s coalition governments with a similar ideological complexion came to power in Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. But the impulse toward retrenchment and deregulation under these administrations was never strong, perhaps surprisingly so given the neoliberal rhetoric that preceded their arrival in power (for the German case, see Esser 1986).

Constructing the Nation-State: International Organization and Prescriptive Action

Abstract: Foreword by John W Meyer Abbreviations A World of Nation-States The World Polity in Perspective Transnational Agencies and Forces: International Organizations and the World Polity The Determination of Statehood: Conceptual Challenges and Empirical Shifts Prescribing State Practice: Accounting for Progress Policy Prescriptions: Ideology in State Structure and Practice An Institutional Profile: Constructing the Nation-State Appendix: Coding Schemes and Categories References Index