A dissertação de mestrado “O Impacto das Novas Biotecnologias no Pensamento Político – A problemática das células estaminais embrionárias” partiu do pressuposto basilar de que a Humanidade se depara com uma ruptura de modelo de pensamento sem paralelo na História. O Homem detém hoje um conhecimento científico sem precedentes e vê-se perante o potencial das novas biotecnologias que, pela primeira, vez podem alterar a forma de olhar sobre si próprio, não apenas enquanto ser social mas sobretudo como entidade biológica. Todo o enquadramento da dissertação tem em consideração os diferentes momentos da História em que certos homens levados pela inevitabilidade do progresso intelectual e científico contribuíram decisivamente para alterar profundamente os modelos de pensamento. Modelos que, surgidos em determinado contextos históricos, foram considerados de ruptura e revolucionários. Em sentido contrário, numa espécie de reacção conservadora, foram surgindo forças de autoridade e de poder, rejeitando novos modelos e paradigmas que, de uma maneira ou de outra, pudessem pôr em causa o sistema de sociedade instituído. As grandes rupturas na História da Humanidade resultaram desse confronto de ideias, entre um modelo de pensamento vigente e um novo paradigma proposto. Ao longo da dissertação apresentada são analisados vários períodos de ruptura...

Democracy and efficiency: hard relations between politics and economy. Many economists see politics as an irrational activity. They also think state action usually generates market inefficiencies and democratic institutions, such as elections, often work as obstacles to sound economic measures. Showing that vision has been embedded into the main currents of economic thought since the last century, we also argue those ideas are exported to great part of contemporary political science, including the area of public policies. Examining the literature, we show that rational choice political scientists, as the economists, claim governability and effective decisions will be guaranteed mainly through concentrated arenas or through insulated arrangements able to protect policy makers from political interference. In other words, governability depends on the reduction of the political arenas. On the contrary, we reject this technocratic solution of splitting politics from economy. With the support of classical pluralist thinkers, we stand another conception, arguing politics is the privileged social space for building interests and values in an institutionalized way. The difficulties to surpass current international crises since 2008 reveal this is a crucial problem: reducing politics would prevent societies from improving institutional solutions which are the only ones able to give space to emerging conflicts and...

This project defines a concept, “attention to quality,” and proposes that legislative attention to quality is a dependent variable that political science can use to evaluate the content of representation the political system offers, specifically to trace a means by which politics may influence household exposure to financial risk and possibly income inequality. Upstream of regulation or other formal policy solutions, attention to quality is observable consideration of the possibility that a good poses risk, or fails to shield consumers from risk, due to features of its own design. The project studies congressional attention to quality for three privately-vended, middle-class goods with the capacity to impact household risk exposure: health insurance, home loans, and prescription drugs. It also examines attention to quality in risk-modulating pieces of the welfare-state, taking Medicare as an example. The project explicitly contrasts attention to quality with attention to access for each good. Second, based on original datasets, this project reports robust evidence that legislative attention to access exceeds legislative attention to quality for the privately vended goods, particularly insurance and loans. It finds the reverse true of welfare-state goods. In doing so...

A premier distinction of liberal democracy is its praise of novelty and change, in the form of technological innovations and new expressions of personal liberty. To understand and critique our dedication to innovation, I study classical, medieval and early modern views on what the most important changes are for human beings—the changes of political regime and the changes of the soul. The philosophers from Plato to Machiavelli studied the desirability and possibility of political preservation, the effects of conversion and its relationship to notions of divine providence, and the changes brought by new religious institutions of a quasi-political character. The classical philosophers emphasize the importance and the difficulty of political preservation. In the Republic, Plato shows that a defensive conservatism results in political change. In the Symposium, while making human desire a major cause of change, he shows the human longing for preservation, as well. The attempt to make a lasting city is an effort to resist the tide of change which overtakes all things. In the fifth book of his Politics, Aristotle shows his expectation that political change will always occur, and that its many different causes make it difficult to master. The Christian revelation praises newness as the quality of conversion...

Depuis quelques années, les femmes deviennent de plus en plus présentes dans les hautes sphères du pouvoir politique. Cela a encouragé de nombreux scientifiques à s’intéresser à la question des femmes en politique, notamment en ce qui concerne leur traitement médiatique. Nous avons choisi d’observer le cas de Pauline Marois, qui a été la première femme d’un grand parti, en 2008, à se présenter aux élections provinciales. En étudiant les chroniques et les éditoriaux de La Presse et du Devoir, nous avons cherché à savoir si la chef du Parti québécois avait été traitée différemment par rapport à ses adversaires, Jean Charest, chef du Parti libéral du Québec et premier ministre sortant et Mario Dumont, chef de l’Action démocratique du Québec. Nous avons découvert entre autres que Pauline Marois avait été associée davantage aux enjeux sociaux alors que Jean Charest et Mario Dumont avaient été rapprochés à l’économie. En outre, les commentateurs ont beaucoup plus abordé la question de l’apparence dans le cas de la chef du Parti québécois, alors que cela a été minime chez les autres chefs. Même si plusieurs nuances s’appliquent, notamment le contexte de la campagne électorale, nous avons conclu que Pauline Marois avait eu une couverture médiatique différente...

Ce mémoire cherche à comprendre un paradoxe : les États-providence les plus généreux, façonnés par des partis sociaux-démocrates, sont financés par des taxes beaucoup plus régressives que les États-providence les moins généreux où les partis de droite, plus souvent au pouvoir, mettent en place une taxation plus progressive. Pour comprendre ce paradoxe, ce mémoire débute en analysant les pressions induites par la mondialisation des capitaux sur la taxation. Ensuite, le mémoire explore les causes institutionnelles des régimes fiscaux en effectuant une revue de la littérature analytique. Ces contraintes institutionnelles et fonctionnelles sur le comportement et les préférences des acteurs politiques permettent de définir trois idéaux-types de régimes fiscaux. Ces idéaux-types cadrent avec la typologie des régimes d’État-providence d’Esping-Andersen. En regroupant des typologies sur les régimes fiscaux et les régimes d’État-providence, ce mémoire souligne que le financement des politiques publiques représente une composante cruciale de l’économie politique de l’État-providence.; This thesis is about a paradox: the most generous welfare states, built by social-democratic parties, are financed by more regressive taxes than residual welfare states...

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Political Science, 2010; Despite the fact that European Union member-state politicians are committed by Treaty of Rome obligations to make intra-EU freedom of production factor movement a central goal of their economic development plans, many of those same politicians have reacted negatively in the past to the anticipated waves of poorer-country workers who they believe would shift residences once their economies have joined the EU. During the enlargement round of the 2000s, many EU15 governments insisted upon and took advantage of derogations in the new member-states' accession treaties that allowed the older members to delay the free movement of CEEC10 workers for up to seven years. This action was taken despite several reputable studies sponsored by the European Commission and various think tanks that indicated that the size of CEEC10 worker movement would be modest at most. The goal of this analysis is to test the plausibility of these forecasts and to determine whether the EU15 governments should have expended the political capital necessary to negotiate and implement this derogation. Using the generalized least squares statistical technique, this research establishes that while economic factors and certain policies do influence migration rates...

Since 2000, the number of living wage ordinances has steadily increased throughout the country. While most of the current research has focused on the beneficial outcomes of living wages, little has been published on their administrative practices. To address this shortcoming, this study focused on the identification of key administrative and political factors involved impacting the implementation of living wage ordinances in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. ^ The study utilized a triangulation of interviews, surveys, and direct observation. The author conducted interviews of administrators and members of the living wage oversight boards in both counties and observed the monthly meetings held by each county's oversight board from January 2006 to June 2007. These findings were buttressed with a national survey of senior staff in other living wage communities. The study utilized descriptive statistics, Chi Square, Cronbach's Alpha, and Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient (Spearman's rho). ^ Interviews indicated that administrators in Dade and Broward are seriously under-staffed and budgeted. Ambiguities in the enabling ordinances have lead to loopholes that undermine implementation and accountability for participating contractors. Survey results showed that policy ambiguity...

Despite massive oil rent incomes since the early 1970s, the economic performance of oil-exporting countries-with notable exceptions-is poor. While there is extensive literature on the management of oil resources, analysis of the underlying political determinants of this poor performance is more sparse. Drawing on concepts from the comparative institutionalist tradition in political science, the authors develop a generalized typology of political states that is used in analyzing the political economy of fiscal and economic management in oil-exporting countries with widely differing political systems. In assessing performance, the authors focus on issues of long-term savings, economic stabilization, and efficient use of oil rents. The comparisons of country experiences suggest that countries with strong, mature, democratic traditions have advantages in managing oil rents well because of their ability to reach consensus, their educated and informed electorates, and a high level of transparency that facilitates clear decisions on how to use rents over a long horizon. Yet even these systems...

Why do politicians distort public investments? And given that public investments are poor because presumably that is what is politically rational, what types of reforms are likely to be both efficiency improving and compatible with the interests of politicians? This paper explores these two questions in the context of Mongolia. It argues that Mongolian members of parliament have an incentive to over-spend on smaller projects that bring benefits to specific geographical localities and to under-spend on large infrastructure that would bring economic benefits to Mongolia on the whole. The incentive for the former is that members of parliament internalize the political benefits from the provision of particular, targeted benefits to specific communities. The disincentive for the latter is that large infrastructure carries a political risk because the political faction in control of that particular ministry would have access to huge rents and become politically too powerful. The identity of these "winners" is uncertain ex ante...

Este artículo analiza el estado actual de la ciencia política como disciplina universitaria en Colombia. A partir del concepto de institucionalización presenta una visión de conjunto de cinco componentes de la disciplina: la expansión de la docencia, los profesores, la investigación, las publicaciones y el reciente proceso de surgimiento de agremiaciones y realización de los primeros congresos nacionales. El argumento central es que Colombia presenta un proceso de institucionalización reciente, con fortalezas y debilidades y un desarrollo desigual entre universidades. Se trata de una disciplina desarrollada especialmente en instituciones privadas y con limitaciones de acceso y alta concentración de la investigación, la formación doctoral y las publicaciones consolidadas.; This paper analyzes the current state of political science as an academic discipline in Colombia. Considering the concept of institutionalization as a departure point, the author examines five discipline components, namely, the development of teaching, educators, research, publications, and the recent emergence of a profession association as well as the implementation of the first national congress. The author identifies strengths and weaknesses of the Colombia’s recent institutionalization process and shows that the process has been uneven with regard to different Colombian universities. As it turned out...

Since the 1980s, the American federal government has devolved a wide array of crucial policy decisions - from transportation to welfare initiatives - to the state and local levels. With a decrease in federal aid and an increase in the number of tools available to lower tiers of government, scholars of American urban politics have suggested that cooperation among metropolitan jurisdictions could help address critical political and policy challenges, including inequities in municipal resources and unfettered suburban sprawl. This dissertation argues that metropolitan political segregation|that is, geographically-based political divisions - represents a serious obstacle to these partnerships and remains poorly understood. This project thus has two goals: to explain variations in metropolitan political segregation and explore their consequences for regional coalition-building. I first present a theory connecting America's unique racial geography to political segregation. I contend that racially segregated metropolitan areas with large minority population concentrations will experience more political segregation than their more homogenous peers. These political divisions will in turn hinder coalition-building surrounding critical metropolitan policies. Marshaling 1988 and 2000 precinct-level electoral data for every metropolitan area in the country...

Social information is particularly prominent in digital settings where the design of platforms can more easily give real-time information about the behaviour of peers and reference groups and thereby stimulate political activity. Changes to these platforms can generate natural experiments allowing an assessment of the impact of changes in social information and design on participation. This paper investigates the impact of the introduction of trending information on the homepage of the UK government petitions platform. Using interrupted time series and a regression discontinuity design, we find that the introduction of the trending feature had no statistically significant effect on the overall number of signatures per day, but that the distribution of signatures across petitions changes: the most popular petitions gain even more signatures at the expense of those with less signatories. We find significant differences between petitions trending at different ranks, even after controlling for each petition's individual growth prior to trending. The findings suggest a non-negligible group of individuals visit the homepage of the site looking for petitions to sign and therefore see the list of trending petitions, and a significant proportion of this group responds to the social information that it provides. These findings contribute to our understanding of how social information...

The politics of Thatcherism reflects a political and economic project rooted in the ideology of the New Right. While subject to the interplay of opportunity and circumstance, chance and fortune, the Thatcher and Major governments of 1979-1997 did pursue and largely enact a coherent political agenda. Thatcherism is best understood as a process enacted over time. At its very heart was an anti-statist commitment to roll back the frontiers not of the state per se but of the pre-existing 'social democratic' state. As a project simultaneously informed by an ideological doctrine and constrained by the dictates of statecraft, Thatcherism was an agent of political change, one which reconfigurated state and society at the same time it was responsive to political realities and electoral pressures. Rather than spring from nothing, Thatcherism was constructed over time and through experience. As a result, modem politics has seen a dramatic shift in favour of right-reformist neo-liberal politics at the expense of left-reformist social democratic politics. Through developing a theory of party competition driven party change this thesis explores the much remarked transformation of the Labour Party since 1983. It offers a theory of consensus politics that suggests consensus does not simply reflect a policy coincidence but implies a broad association on general principles which inform the policy decisions parties make. Policy is enacted within a consensual settlement reflecting implicit and unstated 'guiding assumptions' shared across parties...

This is a study about political participation and the influence that local contexts have on citizens' participatory habits. The question of why some people participate in politics while others do not has spawned a rich body of research. While varied in its scope and focus, the bulk of the empirical studies of political participation, and indeed the major theoretical accounts of participation, center on individual-level characteristics. Previous research has illustrated the importance of factors such as income, education and other sociodemographic and attitudinal variables in explanations of political participation. However, even after controlling for these, there still exists significant variation in participation across communities. That is, beyond the effect that the characteristics of individuals have on participation, different aspects of the social and political environment in which individuals operate, have an effect on their behavior. In this thesis it is argued that the social and political environment structures incentives for participation in several ways. The institutional and social character of a person's community has a direct effect on their political behavior. Community-level factors also affect political participation indirectly. While there is good evidence that individual-level characteristics in the form of resources...

This study of the Nigerian Political Communications examines the patterns of mass media ownership and their impact on the coverage of selected national issues - the census controversy, ethnic problems and the general elections of 1979 and 1983. The contents of 21 newspapers of variegated ownership pattern involving governments, partisan and private interests are analysed and "live" illustrations of stories are given. This is to demonstrate empirically the thesis argument that the criterion of ownership is the key factor which determines how the Nigerian mass media are used for moulding the citizens' perception of political reality. The thesis seeks to answer questions such as: (a) what role have the Nigerian mass media played in promoting and/or compounding the problems of national integration in the Nigerian society since independence. (b) what role should the Nigerian mass media play to promote national integration and political stability. (c) what changes are necessary and desirable with the present situation to allow the mass media perform such integrative and stabilizing functions. Located within a comparative political communication approach to the study of mass media and politics in developing countries, this thesis seeks to contribute to knowledge in the areas of the theory...

The news media and the political public relations industry are linked in numerous ways and any change in their relationship has many repercussions, not just for those in the political news industry, but for society and democracy in the UK as a whole. Neither political PRs nor journalists can function effectively without the other and each relies upon the other to enhance their importance. They are both powerful groups but without the other their power is impaired and their ability to succeed is significantly reduced. The extent of this relationship on public life and society in the UK means that an analysis of these relationships is essential to understand just who the political gatekeeper is in the early 21st century. This thesis utilises interviews with professional practitioners in the political news industry to investigate the role of political journalists within the news media and the role of political PRs in the political public relations industry. It then establishes the extent and nature of the relationship between these two groups. The implications of this relationship are then analysed to determine whether it is possible for the news media to facilitate their role in democratic life in the UK. The thesis concludes that, as a result of all the changes in the news media and the dramatic growth in size and power of the political public relations industry...

This thesis explores the relationship between political awareness and engagement and the content and structure of Political Belief Systems. Specifically, the role of information in determining the inter-relatedness, temporal stability and preference direction of political attitudes is evaluated using data from the British General Election Study, the British Household Panel Study and the SCPR Deliberative Poll on Political Issues. The first two chapters provide a review of theorising and research on the political sophistication of the general public, setting this debate within the context of theoretical discussions of democracy. It is argued that perspectives which seek to discount the need for an equitably informed public are both theoretically unsound and empirically unsubstantiated. The empirical chapters of the thesis comprise three inter-related conceptual and empirical investigations. First, the contention that the less politically informed have labile and ephemeral attitudes toward political issues is evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling on data from political attitude surveys. In the second section a longitudinal factor model is fitted to panel data in order to examine how the over-time stability of political attitudes is affected by an individual's political awareness. The third section uses deliberative poll data and regression modeling to make a more causally focused appraisal of the effect of information on both the content and structure of political attitude systems. It is concluded that the uneven distribution of political awareness within the general public is the cause of the systematic differences in the properties of the belief systems of the groups examined and that such differences are likely to hinder the attainment of individual and group interests within a modern democratic polity.

In April 2003, Peru’s cocaleros broke into the national spotlight by mobilising a six thousandstrong March of Sacrifice from their coca-producing valleys to the capital city of Lima. In 2006, cocalero leaders ascended to several political positions at the municipal and national level. However, their political impact has been limited and divisions amongst coca-producing valleys have prevented cocaleros from articulating a unified agenda on the coca issue itself, let alone on wider issues. The experience of Bolivia’s cocaleros presents a very different picture. In 2005, cocalero leader Evo Morales was elected president with the highest margin of victory in the country’s electoral history. He was re-elected in 2009 by a greater margin. Morales and his political party mobilised a broad coalition as they developed an identity of ‘excluded’ that challenged Bolivia’s unrepresentative democracy, neoliberal economic model and relationship with the United States. How do we explain the political ascent of these unprecedented actors that stand on the border of illegality? Why has the empowerment and impact of these actors on their national political landscapes varied so significantly? This work aims to explain the different experiences of the Bolivian and Peruvian cocaleros in gaining political empowerment through contentious action that originated in defence of coca—an issue that is both de-legitimising and divisive. This work presents the political ascent of these actors as cases of identity-formation. It argues that their ability to construct identities that deterred disunity...