This paper uses household data from India to examine the economic and social status of village politicians, and how individual and village characteristics a®ect politician behavior while in o±ce. Education increases the chances of selection to public o±ce and reduces the odds that a politician uses political power opportunistically. In contrast, land ownership and political connections enable selection but do not a®ect politician opportunism. At the village level, changes in the identity of the politically dominant group alters the group allocation of resources but not politician opportunism. Improved information °ows in the village, however, reduce opportunism and improve resource allocation.

Kurdish political parties in the Middle East are more important political actors than ever before. Yet whether they prefer mere autonomy or a nation state remains unclear as LSE PhD candidate and Emirates PhD Award winner Zeynep Kaya considers.

It’s easy to assume – as if it were somehow a simple matter of stimulus and response – that a big defeat will, or at least should, automatically lead a mainstream, electorally-driven political party to big changes, be they in personnel, in organization or in policy. But what if we are wrong? Political scientists have long been interested in the question of what drives parties to change who represents them, how they run themselves and what they stand for. Until now, however, their work has been confined to fairly abstract cross-national comparisons, on the one hand, and very brief country-case studies on the other. Even so, it casts doubt on the idea that change is always, or even mainly, driven by the ‘external shock’ of defeat and/or loss of office. It finds that leaders and, to a lesser extent, factional shifts make a big difference too

The study of welfare capitalism is concerned with a founding question of political economy, namely how capitalism and democracy can be combined. Ever since the publication of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990, the answer was sought in identifying ideal types of welfare states that support a class compromise. The Varieties of (Welfare) Capitalism literature is increasingly used as a complementary theory of production systems although its rationale for social policies is largely incompatible with the Worlds typology. This article argues, first, that popular regime typologies have degenerated as a research programme, notwithstanding their many achievements. The main reason for this lies in a simplistic notion of the relationship between politics and economics in modern society. Secondly, the article outlines an alternative for analysing welfare provisions and their evolution, drawing on insights of the new politics and the new economics of welfare. This framework can give a systematic account of welfare program restructuring that undermines regime typologies. It suggests a different question for the political economy of welfare, namely how capitalism and democracy can be kept distinct.

"China’s Political Economy in Modern Times: Changes and Economic Consequences, 1800-2000." Kent Deng. Routledge. October 2012. --- This book aims to make an important contribution to the study of changes in China’s institutions and their impact on the national economy as well as ordinary people’s daily material life from 1800 to 2000. China’s Political Economy in Modern Times serves as a useful reference for readers who are interested in Chinese modern history and how China became the country it is today, writes Yan Yun.

"The Political Power of the Business Corporation." Stephen Wilks. Edward Elgar. March 2013. --- Thanks to successful wealth generation and ideological victories, the large business corporation has become an effective political actor and has entered into partnership with government in the design of public policy and delivery of public services. In this book Stephen Wilks argues that governmental and corporate elites have transformed British politics to create a ‘new corporate state’ with similar patterns in the USA, in competitor economies – including China – and in global governance. Reviewed by Nizar Manek.

USApp Managing Editor, Chris Gilson, looks at the best in political blogging from the Beltway. Our round-up of state blogs will follow on Saturday afternoon.

This dissertation is concerned with a road in the Colombian region of Putumayo. The history of this road spans from the mid nineteenth century up to the present, and encompasses a wide range of characters and events, from nineteenth and twentieth century statesmen and missionaries’ ambitious colonization projects to ongoing peasant land conflicts regarding the road’s future. Together, these characters and events could be conceived or read as many different fragments and voices, past and present, of the same story. My main aim, however, is not to assemble these voices and fragments into a single narrative of the road, as much as to place them in the broader historical geography of state and frontier. I focus primarily on the multiple dialectical entanglements, conflicts, and encounters through which the state and the frontier have been discursively and materially constructed in this specific region. In doing so, I will argue that this historical geography of state and frontier has been primarily shaped by a relation of “inclusive exclusion”, or a relation where the assimilation or incorporation of the frontier to the spatial and political order of the state has historically depended on its exclusion from the imaginary order of the nation. Through a historical and ethnographical approach to the road...

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the role of European Union policy in national level governance of the audiovisual media sectors in small states in South East Europe. It compares the Republics of Slovenia and Macedonia, two countries of similar size and population that emerged from the same former-Yugoslav media system. Slovenia is a new EU member state and Macedonia is a candidate country, therefore both are formally bound by EU audiovisual media policy. Europeanization research, particularly in new Member States and candidate countries, has focused on compliance with transposition deadlines and the implementation of specific EU Directives. This study takes a bottom-up approach, making media governance its object of study based on a conceptualisation of governance by Jan Kooiman (2003), but still focused on identifying the role of the EU within that national level governance. It draws on interviews with stakeholders in both countries, examination of secondary data available on the respective media markets, and accounts from civil society actors and regulators to arrive at an overall picture of media governance. It finds that in these two cases the role of Europeanization, defined in this thesis in relation to the EU...

The central claim of this work is straightforward: if one endorses cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice, then one ought also to be a world statist. This is not the generally held view. Institutionally, cosmopolitans have tended to endorse – when they have endorsed any particular institutions at all – either modified and enhanced versions of today's domestic state system, or ‘intermediary’ institutional constructs that are conceptualised as sitting apart from both the domestic state system and a world state. I aim to demonstrate that, from a cosmopolitan perspective, these are inferior alternatives, and to make the case for a federal world state. The point of such a project is to confront cosmopolitan moral theory with its radical institutional implications, which its proponents have often ignored or resisted. In making this argument, after underlining conceptual and empirical difficulties for the idea of ‘cosmopolitan law’ without strong central government, I pay extended attention to what has been described as cosmopolitanism’s ‘solidarity problem’, which recognises that there is currently little appetite among the global population for distributing resources or otherwise changing behaviours and practices so as to realise cosmopolitan distributive principles. I consider three approaches to this problem: the possibility of the principled transformation of domestic states; the development of a sense of global community; and an emphasis upon the harnessing of self-interested motivations. In each case I demonstrate the importance of the transcendence of the domestic state system...

This thesis addresses the question of why, when almost everyone says they wish it would end, suffering such as that in northern Uganda continues. I argue that, contrary to popular presentations, the situation is not primarily one of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda, but instead a form of mass torture, which I call Social Torture. The principal victims are the population within the ‘war zone’, particularly in ‘protected villages’ for the internally displaced, where tactics and symptoms typical of torture, including violation, dread, disorientation, dependency, debilitation and humiliation, are widespread. The most visible perpetrators are the Government and LRA, but a range of less visible actors are also involved, not least donor governments, multi-lateral organisations, academics, churches and NGOs. In many instances these can be regarded as complicit bystanders; like doctors in a torture situation, they appear to be there to ease the suffering of victims, but in reality they enable the process to be prolonged by keeping the victim alive for further abuse. This serves a number of interlinked economic, political and psychological functions for perpetrators and bystanders alike, and is underpinned by psychological and discursive processes of justification...

The dynamics of inter-state relations and state sovereignty have been disturbed by late-20th century globalisation. Yet the literature on the international system, globalisation and international political economy gives scant attention to the most vulnerable sovereign entities, the small and micro states. One significant exception has been the Commonwealth, with its many small state members. Another is the area of financial crime, and the role of the offshore financial centre (OFC) within global finance. This thesis analyses the efforts of several small Commonwealth states from the Caribbean to maintain their OFCs in the face of an OECD-directed campaign against tax competition. It demonstrates both the contribution made to economic development by an OFC and the successful assertion of sovereignty achieved by these small states. The case study focuses on Caribbean OFCs and the OECD campaign against harmful tax competition during 1998 - 2003. First, the argument that tax competition is a global problem is deconstructed. Three main points from the small states’ response to the OECD position are explored, along with the OECD’s rebuttal. Because the small states are individually at a disadvantage, the thesis provides an exposition of the collective response facilitated by the Commonwealth. The OFC is justified by its material contribution to the small state economy. Specific contributions made to the economies of the Bahamas...

National minorities, who claim autonomy and self-government rights, have always been a controversial problem in the fields of international law, political theory and nationalism. Multiculturalism and egalitarianism are two approaches that have long been discussed in all of these fields and implemented in various contexts. The success of policies that seem to be associated with these two approaches, however, has varied from one case to another. This study asks if failures of these approaches have anything to do with the contexts in which they take place. If so, what is the context in which these approaches prove to be futile? Theorists themselves explain aspects of an ideal context under which their theories can become fruitful. These ideal contexts and circumstances are, however, unrealistic; and their assumptions about the nature of social relationships do not always correspond with the reality. This study aims to find a more reliable criterion to assess the applicability of multiculturalism and egalitarianism. The thesis explains the relationship between national minorities and the state through a phenomenological paradigm. In this paradigm national minorities, the thesis argues, vary according to the state nationalisms they have experienced in the past. The thesis analyses the relational nature of minority and state nationalisms from this inter-subjective perspective. Within this framework...

Practices commonly termed participatory or citizen journalism, such as blogging and publishing content in participatory news media, have triggered interest in academic and media discourses alike. The discussion has centred on the significance of participatory journalism and whether it leads to democratisation of media and to redefining journalism and its ethics. This thesis examines online participatory journalism practices and what enhances or impedes them by drawing on a close and systematic analysis of qualitative interviews with reporters and facilitators of participatory media. The research considers both the meso level of media organisations in their socio-cultural context and the micro level of reporters, and is comparative and transcultural in scope. The focus is on the international edition of the South Korean news organisation OhmyNews and on two Indymedia collectives, namely, Indybay in California in the USA and the no-longer active Vaikuttava Tietotoimisto in Finland. The study employs Dahlgren’s (2009) analytic frame of civic cultures that, although it downplays skills and somewhat problematically assumes equal weight of all dimensions, proved valuable in addressing several key aspects to participatory journalism as a mode of civic engagement. The research demonstrates how reporters’ journalistic activities do not exist in a vacuum...

This thesis deals with leadership and political allegiance in three Yemeni communities in Israel. The general question which is raised is this: what are the main factors which affect the form and functioning of leadership in these three immigrant, ethnic communities? The answer which is elaborated in the body of this thesis is as follows : there are two main sets of influences which are interrelated in different ways in each one of the three cases. The first set of influences derives from the internal structure of the community and from the structure of its relations with the wider society; the second set derives from conceptions of leadership, authority and allegiance, which have been moulded by the past. The first community, Shaarayim - now a Yemeni quarter of a town - is examined in detail with respect to its internal structure, organization and composition, its relations with other sections of the local community and the wider society, and its history; the functioning of leadership and allegiance is analysed against this background. The other two communities - Rosh iia'Ayin, a Yemeni township, and Zellafon, a cooperative village - which are of more recent origin than the first community, are considered in lesser detail...

For a long time, the European Parliament (EP) was viewed as a lobbying sideshow mainly to be targeted if interest groups were unsuccessful at getting their demands included in the European Commission’s proposal. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have a reputation for being particularly open to diffuse interests who, due to their limited resources, use ‘friendly’ MEPs to put pressure on the European Commission and the Council. The notion of the EP representing diffuse interests conflicts with the broader political science literature on interest groups, which dwells on business bias. There are, however, good reasons to doubt the EP’s reputation as a defender of diffuse interests. Much of our current knowledge about the EP’s interest group politics stems from a time when the EP’s legislative powers were more limited. Within the last twenty years, the EP has evolved from a ‘multilingual talking shop’ to a genuine co-legislator with the Council. The increased powers of the EP raise the question of whether EP interest group politics has normalised, whereby the assumptions of the interest group literature would seem to reflect the reality of the EP. A common assumption in the interest group literature is that diffuse interests carry limited weight in decision-making because their resources and interests remain subordinate to that of business. However...

This thesis examines the American policy of ‘dual containment’: the assumption by the US of a predominant role in the security system of the Persian Gulf in the 1990s, necessitating the simultaneous ‘containment’ of both Iran and Iraq. American policy towards Iran receives special attention thanks to its more unusual aspects, including the vehemence of American attempts to isolate it. While other scholars have sought to explore the empirical aspects of this policy, this thesis seeks to place it within an overarching theoretical framework derived from neoclassical realism (NCR). Additionally, the thesis integrates insights drawn from Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) to explain the impact of domestic variables on the formation of American policy towards Iran and Iraq during this era. In terms of domestic factors, the thesis identifies three key ‘intervening variables’ and their role in the adoption and evolution of dual containment: perceptions of threat on the part of policymakers, domestic political structures, and the operation of policy coalitions. In terms of the external, the role of the idiosyncratic ‘tripolar’ dynamics of the Persian Gulf region in shaping American policy is examined, as is the longstanding American interest in the Persian Gulf as an area of important national interest and key importance in the global economy...

The thesis explores everyday resistance in post-conflict statebuilding. Despite the turn in peace and conflict studies to study everyday forms of resistance, the concept and the account of its practices remain limited. In addressing these limitations, the thesis develops an alternative account of both resistance and post-conflict statebuilding. Following the framework of James Scott, resistance is understood as the pattern of acts of individuals and collectives in a position of subordination against the everyday experience of domination. What is resisted is not an externally driven liberal intervention, but the coercive and extractive practices fostered by statebuilding. These dynamics are examined through the case of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing on the provinces of North and South Kivu. Generally studied as a paradigmatic case of state-failure, the DRC provides an insight into post-conflict statebuilding as a plural, improvised and contradictory process. In the thesis, this is linked to historical and sociological practices of statebuilding more generally, and to the specificities of the African political space. Although statebuilding claims to be a strategy to restore state authority, peace, and democracy, the result has so far been a militarised environment...

As a mode of global sustainability regulation, private participatory governance first emerged in the forestry sector in the early 1990s and from there spread rapidly and widely in the global economy. The literature on the topic points to a good fit with democratic norms, neoliberal norms, social movement pressure, and the entrepreneurial activities of civil society actors and progressive firms as the main drivers behind this process of institutional diffusion. Today, multi-stakeholder initiatives operate in many industry sectors, ranging from apparel manufacturing and diamond mining to aquaculture production and soybean farming. Drawing on new developments in the philosophy of democracy, some see these arrangements as part of a ‘deliberative turn’ in sustainability politics with the potential to democratise global governance institutions. However, the legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives remains contested, and there is evidence to suggest that the diffusion of private participatory governance in the global economy has introduced variation in a key dimension of institutional design: whereas some schemes involve a wide range of actors in their governance and standard-setting activities, others are significantly less inclusive. In order to explore this puzzle...

Germany’s support for the Eastern enlargement of the European Union was a key factor in the successful completion of this idea in 2004. Germany’s policy towards the enlargement was, however, ambivalent and for this reason perceived as controversial. This thesis examines and explains the reasons of this paradox. German policy makers endorsed the idea of the Eastern enlargement of the EU for the reasons deriving from the national identity, based on a history-related narrative, and from the fact of the successful unification of Germany. As Chancellor Helmut Kohl captured it — the unification of Germany and the unification of Europe were two sides of the same coin. Eastern enlargement was, however, a novel idea and was changing the existing European order and concepts of the European integration. It faced therefore powerful constraints both in the shape of still existing, though declining, Cold War structural grip, as well as of the conflicting with the enlargement interests of other member state of the EU and domestic economic preferences and interests. It caught German policy makers between powerful and mutually conflicting challenges and faced them with a need to choose strategic priorities for the foreign policy. The choice was continuity of multilateralism...