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Political Outcomes (political + outcome)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences81%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting18%

Selected Abstracts

The ,Neoliberal Turn' and the New Social Policy in Latin America: How Neoliberal, How New?

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2008
Maxine Molyneux
ABSTRACT The term neoliberal is widely used as shorthand to describe the policy environment of the last three decades. Yet the experience of the Latin American region suggests that it is too broad a descriptor for what is in fact a sequenced, fragmented and politically indeterminate process. This article examines the evolution of social protection in the region, and argues for a more grounded, historical approach to neoliberalism, and for some analytic refinement to capture the different ,moments' in its policy evolution, its variant regional modalities, and its co-existence with earlier policies and institutional forms. It suggests that totalizing conceptions of neoliberalism as imposing an inexorable market logic with predetermined social and political outcomes fail to capture the variant modalities, adaptations and indeed resistance to the global diffusion of the structural reforms. This article outlines the systems of social welfare prevailing in Latin America prior to the reforms, and then examines the principle elements of what has been termed the ,New Social Policy' in Latin America, engaging three issues: the periodization of neoliberalism; the role of the state; and the place of politics in the neoliberal reform agenda. [source]

Militarization of the Market and Rent-Seeking Coalitions in Turkey

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2005
rat Demir
This article analyses the role of historically-determined institutional and political characteristics in determining both the nature of the adjustment process, and its economic and political outcomes, in Turkey. In particular, the author explores the degree to which the formation of rent-seeking coalitions has contributed to the failure of neo-liberal economic reforms in the country. The analysis suggests that the Turkish experience since the early 1980s offers a unique case for studying the relationships between the state bureaucracy, the military, the business sector, civil society, and international economic actors. Unlike previous research in this area, this article focuses especially on the role of the military as an interest group in the process of economic liberalization in Turkey. [source]

ON THE ROLE OF THE PRIMARY SYSTEM IN CANDIDATE SELECTION

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2006
MANDAR P. OAK
How does the type of the primary system affect political outcomes? We address this issue by constructing a simple model that accounts for intra-party as well as inter-party political competition. Our model suggests that allowing non-partisan voters to participate in the primaries (i.e. a semi-open primary system) indeed improves the chances of a moderate candidate getting elected. However, this need not necessarily happen in the case of a completely open primary system. Under such a system there arise multiple equilibria, some of which may lead to a greater degree of extremism than the closed primary system. Thus, our model contributes to the current debate on the choice of primary systems from an analytical perspective and helps explain some of the empirical findings. [source]

Intra-executive Conflict and Cabinet Instability: Effects of Semi-presidentialism in Central and Eastern Europe

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 4 2010
Thomas Sedelius
Comparing eight post-communist semi-presidential systems (Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Russia), comprising a total of 65 instances of intra-executive coexistence between 1991 and 2007, this article asks to what extent and in what ways president,cabinet conflicts increase the risk of cabinet instability. Previous studies of intra-executive conflicts in semi-presidential regimes have mainly been occupied with explaining why conflicts occur in the first place, and have neglected the question of how such conflicts are actually related to political outcomes. The present empirical investigation demonstrates that the occurrence of intra-executive conflict in transitional semi-presidential systems is likely to produce high rates of cabinet turnover. [source]

The Rise of the New South Governmentality: Competing Southern Revitalization Projects and Police Responses to the Black Civil Rights Movement 1961,1965

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 4 2009
RANDOLPH HOHLE
This article examines the southern response to the civil rights movement and its relationship to the broader struggle for southern influence and control. Drawing from governmentality studies and the concept of "security", I trace the correlation of two competing southern revitalization projects with distinct southern policing styles to consider the importance of normative political cultures, rather than the instrumental and immediate political outcomes of each local movement, on the southern response to the civil rights movement. Despite the development of new south police practices that curtained civil rights protest and produced a politically modern and racially tolerant idealized new south image, the old south project, in its failures, gained influence on the county, statewide, and regional levels. Although the conflicting revitalization projects differed in their objectives, the linkages between them set the stage for subsequent southern revitalization and development that started in the 1970s. [source]

Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2008
Kathryn Hochstetler
ABSTRACT This article takes up the question of whether civil society organizations (CSOs) can and do act as mechanisms of representation in times of party crisis. It looks at recent representation practices in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, three countries where political parties have experienced sharp crises after several decades of mixed reviews for their party systems. At such moments, any replacement of parties by CSOs should be especially apparent. This study concludes that the degree of crisis determines the extent that CSOs' representative functions replace partisan representation, at least in the short term. Where systems show signs of re-equilibration, CSOs offer alternative mechanisms through which citizens can influence political outcomes without seeking to replace parties. Where crisis is profound, CSOs claim some of the basic party functions but do not necessarily solve the problems of partisan representation. [source]

Presidential Saber Rattling and the Economy

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2009
B. Dan Wood
Saber rattling is a prominent tool of the U.S. president's foreign policy leadership. Yet there has been no study of how presidential saber rattling affects international or domestic political outcomes. This study evaluates how presidential saber rattling affects U.S. economic behavior and performance. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that presidential rhetoric affects the risks that economic actors are willing to take, as well as the consequences of these resulting behaviors for U.S. economic performance. Using monthly time series running from January 1978 through January 2005, vector autoregression methods are applied to show that increased presidential saber rattling produces increased perceptions of negative economic news, declining consumer confidence, lower personal consumption expenditures, less demand for money, and slower economic growth. More broadly, the study demonstrates an important linkage between the president's two most important roles: foreign and economic policy leadership. The president's foreign policy pronouncements not only impact other nations, but also affect domestic economic outcomes. [source]

Misconceptions and political outcomes*

THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 484 2003
David Romer
A large literature shows that strategic interactions among actors with conflicting objectives can cause the political process to produce outcomes that lower welfare. This paper investigates an alternative explanation of such outcomes: if individuals' errors in assessing the likely effects of proposed policies are correlated, democratic decisionmaking can produce welfare-reducing outcomes even in the absence of conflicting objectives. Under plausible assumptions, choosing candidates from among the best informed individuals does not remedy the problems created by such errors, but subsidising information and exposing representatives to information after their election do. Concentration of power has ambiguous effects. [source]

Discourse rights and the Drumcree marches: a reply to O'Neill

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2002
Glen Newey
In a recent BJPIR article Shane O'Neill uses Habermas' discourse theory of rights to argue that the conflicts over marches in Drumcree can be resolved rationally in the nationalist residents' favour. I question this conclusion via a critique of Habermas' theory. Habermas' apparently unexceptionable requirement that political outcomes win universal acceptability is bought at the cost of vagueness: it fails to specify how acceptability is secured, or how the requirement itself is derived. So it cannot justify the exceptions to equal civil rights which O'Neill wants, such as exceptions to rights of freedom of expression or movement. Unionists can claim that their position respects Habermas' universal acceptability requirement. This exposes the limitations of attempts to impose abstract principles such as Habermas' on real political conflicts. A possible alternative to this is a form of Schmittian decisionism, in which rules either prove indeterminate, or are confronted with exceptional cases that call for executive intervention outside the framework of rules. Sensitivity to political context requires not derogations from rights, but respect for the autonomy of political processes. [source]

Contested Discourse, Contested Power: Nationalism and the Left in Paraguay

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 3 2007
PETER LAMBERT
Nationalism has been a key, but generally overlooked, component of twentieth-century Paraguayan politics and an important explanatory factor in the country's political outcomes. Indeed, it has been central to the struggle for political power, most significantly to the continuing hegemony of the Colorado Party. This article traces the development of the Paraguayan Left, highlighting its structural and functional weaknesses, and analyses its relationship with nationalism, in particular with the dominant Colorado nationalist discourse. It argues that an important failure of the Left , and indeed other political parties and movements , has been its inability to produce a successful challenge to this hegemonic discourse. [source]

Professionalism and the Millbank Tendency: The Political Sociology of New Labour's Employees

POLITICS, Issue 1 2003
Paul Webb
This article analyses party employees, one of the most under-researched subjects in the study of British political parties. We draw on a blend of quantitative and qualitative data in order to shed light on the social and political profiles of Labour Party staff, and on the question of their professionalisation. The latter theme is developed through a model derived from the sociology of professions. While a relatively limited proportion of party employees conform to the pure ideal-type of professionalism, a considerably greater number manifest enough of the core characteristics of specialisation, commitment, mobility, autonomy and self-regulation to be reasonably described as ,professionals in pursuit of political outcomes'. [source]