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State Resources (state + resource)
Selected AbstractsWomen's Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from AfricaDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2001Aili Tripp Women's movements in Africa represent one of the key societal forces challenging state clientelistic practices, the politicization of communal differences, and personalized rule. In the 1980s and 1990s we have witnessed not only the demise of patronage-based women's wings that were tied to ruling parties, but also the concurrent growth of independent women's organizations with more far-reaching agendas. The emergence of such autonomous organizations has been a consequence of the loss of state legitimacy, the opening-up of political space, economic crisis, and the shrinking of state resources. Drawing on examples from Africa, this article shows why independent women's organizations and movements have often been well situated to challenge clientelistic practices tied to the state. Gendered divisions of labour, gendered organizational modes and the general exclusion of women from both formal and informal political arenas have defined women's relationship to the state, to power, and to patronage. These characteristics have, on occasion, put women's movements in a position to challenge various state-linked patronage practices. The article explores some of the implications of these challenges. [source] Rewarding Lula: Executive Power, Social Policy, and the Brazilian Elections of 2006LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2007Wendy Hunter ABSTRACT This article analyzes Luiz Inácio da Silva's resounding reelection victory in the wake of corruption scandals implicating his party and government. Voters with lower levels of economic security and schooling played a critical role in returning Lula to the presidency. Least prone to punish the president for corruption, poorer Brazilians were also the most readily persuaded by the provision of material benefits. Minimum wage increases and the income transfer program Bolsa Família expanded the purchasing power of the poor. Thus, executive power and central state resources allowed Lula to consolidate a social base that had responded only weakly to his earlier, party-based strategy of grassroots mobilization for progressive macrosocietal change. Although Lula won handily, the PT's delegation to Congress shrank for the first time, and the voting bases of president and party diverged. The PT benefited far less than the president himself from government investment in social policy. [source] Substitution Is in the Variance: Resources and Foreign Policy ChoiceAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2008David H. Clark This article argues that foreign policy substitution arises as a result of the costs of foreign policies relative to state resources. States with few resources are constrained in foreign policy choice compared to states with an abundance of resources. As a result, states with few resources will, on average, select, lower-cost policies than will resource-rich states. Resource-rich states, by virtue of their abundant resources, have greater discretion over policy choice and thus behave less uniformly than do resource-poor states. Our empirical results provide evidence of this and support the argument that substitution is in the variance. [source] First Politics, Then Culture: Accounting for Ethnic Differences in Demographic Behavior in KenyaPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2001Alexander A. Weinreb Ethnic differences in demographic behavior tend to be disguised behind analytically opaque labels like "district" or "region," or else subjected to simplistic cultural explanations. Drawing on new political economy, sociological theory and the political science literature on sub-Saharan Africa, this article proposes an alternative explanatory model and tests it empirically with reference to Kenya. Access to political power and, through power, access to a state's resources,including resources devoted to clinics, schools, labor opportunities, and other determinants of demographic behavior,are advanced as the key factors underlying ethnic differences. District-level estimates of "political capital" are introduced and merged with two waves of Demographic and Health Survey data. The effects on models of contraceptive use are explored. Results confirm that measures of political capital explain residual ethnic differences in use, providing strong support for a political approach to the analysis of demographic behavior. [source] | ||||||||||