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Political Authority (political + authority)
Selected AbstractsA GIFT HALF UNDERSTOOD: REDISCOVERING AN INCARNATIONAL VIEW OF POLITICAL AUTHORITYTHE HEYTHROP JOURNAL, Issue 4 2010DAVID HENRECKSON First page of article [source] The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590,1615) , By Eric NelsonTHE HISTORIAN, Issue 3 2007Robert Bireley SJ No abstract is available for this article. [source] The politics of action on AIDS: a case study of UgandaPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2004James Putzel This article examines the political dimensions of Uganda's progress in bringing a generalised HIV/AIDS epidemic under control. The article documents the history of the political processes involved in Uganda's battle against HIV/AIDS and analyses the complexities of presidential action and the relation between action at the level of the state and that taken within societal organisations. By the mid-1980s, Uganda was experiencing a full-blown epidemic, the virulence of which was connected with social dislocation and insecurity related to economic crisis and war. Political authorities faced the same challenge as other regimes experiencing the onslaught of AIDS in Africa. The epidemiological characteristics of HIV and AIDS,transmission through heterosexual activities, with a long gestation period, affecting people in the prime of their productive life,meant that action required wide-reaching changes in sexual behaviour, and the educational activities to achieve this, as well as relatively complex systems to monitor the virus and control medical practices (blood supplies, injection practices, mitigating drug delivery). The centralist character of the Museveni regime was crucial not only to mobilising state organisations and foreign aid resources, but also to ensuring significant involvement from non-state associations and religious authorities. The Ugandan experience demonstrates that there is a tension between the requirements for systematic action that a strong public authority can deliver and the need to disseminate information requiring a degree of democratic openness. The President was able to forge a coalition behind an HIV/AIDS campaign in part because the virus largely ignored the privileges of wealth and political power. With the development of antiretroviral therapy and the access that the wealthy can gain to these drugs, this basis for the broadest possible coalition to fight HIV/AIDS may be weakened in the future. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF OVERLAPPING JURISDICTIONS AND THE FRENCH/DUTCH REJECTION OF THE EU CONSTITUTIONECONOMIC AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2006Jean-Luc Migué In seeking to protect their failed social model by rejecting the EU constitution, French and Dutch voters ironically contributed to promoting the very ,liberal' order they misunderstand and despise. When, as in federalist politics, functions overlap, two levels of government compete for the same votes in the same territory in the supply of similar services. Not unlike the tragedy of the commons in oil extraction, it is in the interest of both political authorities to seek to gain votes in implementing the programme first. The overall equilibrium supply of public services is excessive and both levels of government have a tendency to invade every field. Short of effective constitutional limits on the powers of the central government, a more decentralised EU offers an opportunity to overcome the common-pool problem of multi-level government. [source] Resources, techniques, and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500,20001ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 3 2008GARETH AUSTIN This article seeks to revise and re-apply the factor endowments perspective on African history. The propositions that sub-Saharan Africa was characterized historically by land abundance and labour scarcity, and that the natural environment posed severe constraints on the exploitation of the land surplus, are broadly upheld. Important alterations are suggested, however, centred on the seasonality of labour supply, Ruf's concept of ,forest rent', and, for precolonial economies, the role of fixed capital. This revised endowments framework is then applied in order to explore the long-term dynamics of economic development in Africa, focusing on how the economic strategies of producers and political authorities created specific paths of change which shifted the production possibility frontiers of the economies concerned, and ultimately altered the very factor ratios to which the strategies had been responses. [source] RELIGION, PACIFISM, AND THE DOCTRINE OF RESTRAINTJOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 2 2006Christopher J. Eberle ABSTRACT The doctrine of restraint is the claim that citizens and legislators ought to restrain themselves from making political decisions solely on religious grounds. That doctrine is normally construed as a general constraint on religious arguments: an exclusively religious rationale as such is an inappropriate basis for a political decision, particularly a coercive political decision. However, the most common arguments for the doctrine of restraint fail to show that citizens and legislators ought to obey the doctrine of restraint, as we can see by reflecting on those arguments as they bear on the Agapic Pacifist's rationale for denying that even legitimate political authorities may use lethal military force. [source] OF POLITICS AND PURPOSE: POLITICAL SALIENCE AND GOAL AMBIGUITY OF US FEDERAL AGENCIESPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 3 2009JUNG WOOK LEE As scholars have observed, government agencies have ambiguous goals. Very few large sample empirical studies, however, have tested such assertions and analysed variations among organizations in the characteristics of their goals. Researchers have developed concepts of organizational goal ambiguity, including ,evaluative goal ambiguity', and ,priority goal ambiguity', and found that these goal ambiguity variables related meaningfully to financial publicness (the degree of government funding versus prices or user charges), regulatory responsibility, and other variables. This study analyses the influence of the external political environment (external political authorities and processes) on goal ambiguity in government agencies; many researchers have analysed external influences on government bureaucracies, but very few have examined the effects on the characteristics of the organizations, such as their goals. This analysis of 115 US federal agencies indicates that higher ,political salience' to Congress, the president, and the media, relates to higher levels of goal ambiguity. A newly developed analytical framework for the analysis includes components for external environmental influences, organizational characteristics, and managerial influences, with new variables that represent components of the framework. Higher levels of political salience relate to higher levels of both types of goal ambiguity; components of the framework, however, relate differently to evaluative goal ambiguity than to priority goal ambiguity. The results contribute evidence of the viability of the goal ambiguity variables and the political environment variables. The results also show the value of bringing together concepts from organization theory and political science to study the effects of political environments on characteristics of government agencies. [source] Managerialised patterns of political authority: partners, peddlers and entrepreneurial peopleCRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2002Hans Krause Hansen First page of article [source] THE FACE OF MONEY: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto IndonesiaCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2009KAREN STRASSLER ABSTRACT In the period of transition following Suharto's resignation as president of Indonesia in 1998, the image of the 50,000Rp bill bearing his face became a visual shorthand for the corruption and abuse of power that had characterized his regime. Accessible, decentralized consumer technologies enabled people to alter money's appearance, transforming it from a fetish of the state into a malleable surface available for popular reinscription. As the medium of money was "remediated",absorbed into other media, refashioned, and circulated along new pathways,it became a means by which people engaged questions of state power, national integrity, political authenticity, and economic relations opened up by the crisis of Reformasi (Reform). The essay argues that remediations of public forms play a crucial role in times of political transition by enabling people to materialize alternative visions of political authority and authenticity. Moreover, remediated forms have become a characteristic modality of political communication in the post-Suharto period under conditions of democratization and an increasingly diversified media ecology. [source] Civil Society Development Versus the Peace Dividend: International Aid in the WanniDISASTERS, Issue 1 2005Vance Culbert Donors that provide aid to the Wanni region of Sri Lanka, which is controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), are promoting initiatives that seek to advance the national peace process. Under the rubric of post-conflict reconstruction, the actions of political forces and structural factors have led to the prioritisation of two different approaches to peace-building: community capacity-building projects; and support for the ,peace dividend'. Both of these approaches face challenges. Cooperation with civil society actors is extremely difficult due to intimidation by the LTTE political authority and the authoritarian nature of its control. Peace-building successes with respect to the peace dividend are difficult to measure, and must be balanced against the negative effects of misdirected funds. Aid organisations must be careful not to consider the tasks of peacebuilding, humanitarian relief and community empowerment as either interchangeable or as mutually reinforcing endeavours. [source] Global Transformations and New ConflictsIDS BULLETIN, Issue 2 2001Mary Kaldor Summaries The central argument of this article is that a central feature of post-Cold War conflicts has been the delegitimisation of public authority, interacting with globalisation, through a process which is almost the reverse of state and nation-building. The political economy of the ,new wars' involves a mix of state and non-state, national and international violence. It creates vicious cycles, reinforcing the decline in the formal sector, breaking down the distinction between public and private spheres, and mobilising identity cleavages through strategies of fear and hate directed against civilians. These vicious cycles can only be broken by peace strategies, whose centrepiece, over the longer run, is the restoration of legitimate authority and the democratisation of politics. These strategies cannot, in a world in which the state has been eroded, be confined just to the state, but must also involve many other layers of political authority, from the local to the global. [source] The Globalization of Taxation?INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2003Electronic Commerce, the Transformation of the State The anticipated growth of new communications technologies, including the Internet and other digital networks, will make it increasingly difficult for states to tax global commerce effectively. Greater harmonization and coordination of national tax policies will likely be required in the coming years in order to address this problem. Given that the history of the state is inseparable from the history of taxation, this "globalization of taxation" could have far-reaching political implications. The modern state itself emerged out of a fiscal crisis of medieval European feudalism, which by the 14th and 15th centuries was increasingly incapable of raising sufficient revenues to support the mounting expenses of warfare. If new developments in the technology of commerce are now undermining the efficiency of the state as an autonomous taxing entity, fiscal pressures may produce a similar shift in de facto political authority away from the state and toward whatever international mechanisms are created to expedite the taxation of these new forms of commerce. [source] An Institutional Framework for Japanese Crisis ManagementJOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2000Shun'ichi Furukawa This paper discusses an institutional framework and inter-governmental relationships pertaining to crisis management in Japan. While the current law shifts most responsibility to local governments, the compartmentalized and fragmented nature of the central government and a lack of viable organization therein to oversee crisis management, hinder decisive and responsive action. Crisis management is inherently local in nature and numerous examples from the local level highlight this nature of crisis management. Three features of crisis management are identified: the decentralized nature of centralized government and centralized leadership in local government, fused inter-governmental relationship and lack of political authority. [source] Decentralization's Nondemocratic Roots: Authoritarianism and Subnational Reform in Latin AmericaLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2006Kent Baton ABSTRACT This study challenges the common view of authoritarianism as an unambiguously centralizing experience by investigating the subnational reforms that military governments actually introduced in Latin America. It argues that the decision by military authorities to dismiss democratically elected mayors and governors opened a critical juncture for the subsequent development of subnational institutions. Once they centralized political authority, the generals could contemplate changes that expanded the institutional, administrative, and governing capacity of subnational governments. This article shows how cross-national variation in the content and consistency of the generals' economic goals led to quite distinct subnational changes; in each case, these reforms profoundly shaped the democracies that reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s. [source] Fungibility: Florida Seminole Casino Dividends and the Fiscal Politics of IndigeneityAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2009Jessica R. Cattelino ABSTRACT In this article, I examine Florida Seminoles' governmental distributions of tribal-gaming revenues that take the form of per capita dividends. Dividends reveal the political and cultural stakes of money's fungibility,its ability to substitute for itself. From tribal policy debates over children's dividends to the legitimization of political leadership through monetary redistribution, Seminoles selectively exploit the fungibility of money to break or make ties with one another and with non-Seminoles. They do so in ways that reinforce indigenous political authority and autonomy, and they thereby challenge structural expectations in U.S. public culture and policy that would oppose indigenous distinctiveness to the embrace of money. [Keywords: money, tribal gaming, American Indians, Florida Seminoles] [source] MAKING METAL AND FORGING RELATIONS: IRONWORKING IN THE BRITISH IRON AGEOXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 4 2007MELANIE GILES Summary. This article explores the social significance of metalworking in the British Iron Age, drawing ethnographic analogies with small-scale, pre-industrial communities. It focuses on iron, from the collection of ore to smelting and smithing, challenging the assumption that specialized ironworking was necessarily associated with hierarchical chiefdoms, supported by full-time craft specialists. Instead, it explores more complex ways in which social and political authority might have been associated with craftwork, through metaphorical associations with fertility, skill and exchange. Challenging traditional interpretations of objects such as tools and weapons, it argues that the importance of this craft lay in its dual association with transformative power, both creative and destructive. It suggests that this technology literally made new kinds of metaphorical relationships thinkable, and it explores the implications through a series of case studies ranging from the production and use of iron objects to their destruction and deposition. [source] AUTHORITY, POLITY, AND TENUOUS ELITES IN IRON AGE EDOM (JORDAN)OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 4 2004BENJAMIN W. PORTER Summary. The strategies political elites implement to garner political authority and legitimacy in emergent polities are scrutinized in a case study from Iron Age Edom, located in modern southern Jordan and the south-east corner of the State of Israel. Edom provides a productive context in which to conduct this investigation as local elites managed a fractious polity consisting of unstable segmentary identities, while at the same time, remaining loyal to the successive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires that dominated them. This tenuous position required elites to maintain a flexible elite identity while promoting broader metaphors of attachment (e.g. Edomite) among their disparate constituents. This case study ultimately moves toward an understanding of political polities, not as disembodied entities (e.g. States), but as embedded phenomena within the societies they comprise. [source] "Moo U"and the 26th Amendment: Registering for Peace and Voting for Responsive City GovernmentPEACE & CHANGE, Issue 1 2004Clyde Brown In July 1971 the 26th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution. As a result, over eleven million eighteen- to twenty-year-olds gained the right to vote. Among them were a group of Iowa State University students in Ames, many of them active opponents of the Vietnam War. Starting with a statewide weekend Register for Peace conference in August 1971 as part of Allard Lowenstein's "Dump Nixon" movement, they engaged in an extensive voter registration drive on campus. Motivated by perceived excesses of local political authority during the May 1970 Cambodian invasion and Kent State,Jackson State protests and mistreatment of counterculture youth, they organized a broad coalition and endorsed a slate of candidates in the November municipal election. They conducted a comprehensive voter education and get-out-the-vote effort, modeled on anti-Mayor Daley aldermanic campaigns in Chicago, which resulted in victory for their candidates and in a city government more responsive to their concerns. [source] Keeping Public Officials Accountable through Dialogue: Resolving the Accountability ParadoxPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 6 2002Nancy C. Roberts How can public officials be held accountable, and yet avoid the paradoxes and pathologies of the current mechanisms of accountability? The answer, claims Harmon (1995), is dialogue. But what exactly is dialogue, and how is it created? More importantly, how can dialogue ensure accountability? To address these questions, I begin with a brief description of dialogue and its basic features, distinguishing it from other forms of communication. An example illustrates how dialogue occurs in actual practice. Not only does dialogue demonstrate the intelligent management of contradictory motives and forces, it also supports Harmon's claim that it can resolve the accountability paradox and avoid the atrophy of personal responsibility and political authority. I suggest that dialogue's advantage outweighs its cost as a mechanism of accountability under a particular set of conditions: when public officials confront "wicked problems" that defy definition and solution, and when traditional problem,solving methods have failed, thus preventing any one group from imposing its definition of the problem or its solutions on others. [source] On NCATE Standards and Culture at Work: Conversations, Hegemony, and (Dis-)Abling ConsequencesANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2007Hervé Varenne Many are unaware of the power of the NCATE standards for the accreditation of schools of education. In this article, I first trace the development of the political authority of these standards, and their imposition on hundreds of schools of education. I then focus on the discourse of these standards, particularly the emphasis on "knowledge, skills and dispositions" as personal properties to control. I conclude with a call to highlight the struggles in which all involved are engaged. [source] Magnetic survey in the investigation of sociopolitical change at a Late Bronze age fortress settlement in northwestern ArmeniaARCHAEOLOGICAL PROSPECTION, Issue 1 2010Ian Lindsay Abstract The construction of large stone fortresses across much of northern Armenia during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500,1150 BC) represented a shift away from centuries of nomadic pastoralism, and also marked a profound transformation in the constitution of political authority and how social orders were mediated through the built environment. To date, however, little archaeological attention has been given to Late Bronze Age (LBA) settlements located outside the fortress citadels, partly due to the difficulty in detecting them from the surface. In this report we highlight results and observations from a magnetic gradiometry survey in northwestern Armenia where we test the hypothesis that an extensive LBA domestic complex existed at the base of the fortified hill at the site of Tsaghkahovit. The study surveyed four grids in the settlement area at the base of fortress. Three test units were excavated in three of the four survey areas to test selected anomalies. Two of the test units confirmed the presence of subsurface LBA deposits, including basalt stone walls, burned features, and a storage pit, appearing in the data as large dipoles. The spatial configurations of buildings revealed by the gradiometry surveys elucidate the extent of the Tsaghkahovit settlement and the formal differentiation of domestic and institutional spaces as new architectural traditions emerge during the Middle to Late Bronze Age transition. However, targeted subsurface tests also hint at the ephemeral nature of the domestic constructions suggesting the retention of mobility among subject populations under the authority of settled fortress elites. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] State,society relations in contemporary Vietnam: An examination of the arena of youthASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 3 2006Phuong An Nguyen Abstract: This paper offers an analysis of the relations between youth and the socialist state in contemporary Vietnam, which sheds light on the wider state,society relations. Amid rapid social changes brought about by economic liberalisation, the Vietnamese Communist Party and socialist state may no longer be the sole driving force that motivates young people. As they seek to be both in control of and in touch with youth, the leaders of the Party and state find themselves negotiating between maintaining their ideological integrity and accommodating the changing needs and desires of youth. An analysis of recent events demonstrates that youth are no longer merely a subject of political propaganda and mass mobilisation, but instead they have evolved to become an important social actor urging the leadership to further reform itself. As young people express a desire to embrace socioeconomic and cultural changes wrought by processes of marketisation and globalisation, the Party and state are actively reforming themselves not only to respond to young people's desires and aspirations, but also to strengthen their political authority and leadership, and to consolidate their control and management of youth amid the new conditions of a market-oriented society. Overall, this paper sheds light on the changes in what is considered to be the ,strategic' relationship between the state and youth, and the wider process of sociopolitical transformation in present-day Vietnam. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||