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Political Relationships (political + relationships)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

From ,welfare without work' to ,buttressed liberalization': The shifting dynamics of labor market adjustment in France and Germany

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2008
MARK I. VAIL
Scholars blame this disease on dysfunctional political arrangements, deep insider-outsider cleavages and failed systems of social partnership. As a result, the two countries are said to be more or less permanently mired in a context of high unemployment that is highly resistant to remediation. This article departs from this conventional wisdom in two important respects. First, it argues that France and Germany have undertaken major reforms of their labor market policies and institutions during the past decade and remediated many of their longstanding employment traps. Second, it shows that the political arrangements that adherents of the ,welfare without work' thesis identify as reasons for sclerosis have evolved quite dramatically. The article supports these arguments by exploring some of the most significant recent labor market reforms in the two countries, as well as the shifting political relationships that have driven these changes. In both countries, recent labor market reforms have followed a trajectory of ,buttressed liberalization'. This has involved, on the one hand, significant liberalization of labor market regulations such as limits on overtime and worker protections such as unemployment insurance. On the other hand, it has entailed a set of supportive, ,buttressing' reforms involving an expansion of active labor market policies and support for workers' efforts to find jobs. The article concludes that these developments provide reasons for optimism about the countries' economic futures and offer important lessons about how public policy can confront problems of labor market stagnation. [source]

Buying peace or fuelling war: the role of corruption in armed conflicts

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2003
Philippe Le Billon
Although corruption may have a corrosive effect on economies and rule-based institutions, it also forms part of the fabric of social and political relationships. This endogenous character means that conflict may be engendered more by changes in the pattern of corruption than by the existence of corruption itself. Such changes, frequently associated with domestic or external shocks, can lead to armed conflict as increasingly violent forms of competitive corruption between factions ,fuel war' by rewarding belligerents. Controversially, ,buying-off' belligerents can facilitate a transition to peace; but ,sticks' such as economic sanctions, rather than ,carrots', have dominated international conflict resolution instruments. While ,buying peace' can present a short-term solution, the key challenge for peace-building initiatives and fiscal reforms is to shift individual incentives and rewards away from the competition for immediate corrupt gains. This may be facilitated by placing public revenues under international supervision during peace processes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Integrating evaluation units into the political environment of government: The role of evaluation policy

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION, Issue 123 2009
Eleanor Chelimsky
Most discussions of evaluation policy focus on the substance and process of doing evaluations. However, doing evaluations in government requires careful consideration not only of evaluation but also of the larger political structure into which it is expected to fit. I argue in this chapter that success for evaluation in government depends as much on the political context within which evaluation operates as it does on the merits of the evaluation process itself. For convenience, I divide the contextual governmental pressures on evaluation into three kinds: those stemming from the overarching structure of our democracy, those stemming from the bureaucratic climate of a particular agency, and those stemming from the dominant professional culture within that agency. I then examine how those three kinds of pressures have, in my experience, affected the independence, credibility, and ethical position of the evaluation units and evaluators concerned. Finally, I offer some suggestions for evaluation policy in the hope of avoiding a repetition of past evaluative failures that resulted either from unawareness of political relationships in government or from the inability of small evaluation units to protect their work in the face of much more powerful political forces. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

The Messiness of Everyday Life: Exploring Key Themes in Latin American Citizenship Studies Introduction

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2004
Lucy Taylor
This section seeks to provide a brief theoretical framework for the study of citizenship in Latin America by focusing on two characteristics which are of relevance to the essays collected here: belonging and political agency. It then goes on to discuss some key themes which emerge from a reading of the collected articles: methodology; civilisation and deviation; citizenship as the organisation of subordinate inclusion; popular ideas of citizenship as ,fairness'; role of public performance in defining political relationships. [source]