Search

Contemporary debates on the relationship between migration and development focus extensively on how migrant remittances affect the economies of sending countries. Yet remittances also produce dynamic political consequences in migrants’ origin communities. Income earned abroad creates political opportunities for migrant groups to participate in the provision of public services in their hometowns. Focusing on organizational variation in partnerships across time and space, this article examines the conditions under which the transnational coproduction of public goods between organized migrants and public agencies at origin shapes democratic governance. I argue that local citizen inclusion and government engagement interact to determine four different types of coproduction: corporatist, fragmented, substitutive, and synergetic. Using four comparative case studies based on fieldwork in three Mexican states, I trace central mechanisms to organizational forms of coproduction and describe how emergent variation affects democratic governance and state–society relations. I show how transnational forces, when collaborating with local social and political institutions, can profoundly affect democratic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do historically contingent political accounts help explain the growth in family income inequality in the United States? We use time-series regressions based on 60 years to detect such relationships by assessing interactive associations between the neoliberal departure coincident with Ronald Reagan’s election and the acceleration in inequality that began soon after Reagan took office. We find evidence for this and for a second contingent relationship: stronger unions could successfully resist policies that enhanced economic inequality only before Reagan’s presidency and before the neoliberal anti-union administrations from both parties that followed Reagan. Politically inspired reductions in union membership, and labor’s diminished political opportunities during and after Reagan’s presidency, meant unions no longer could slow the growth in U.S. inequality. Coefficients on these two historically contingent interactions remain significant after many additional determinants are held constant. These findings indicate that political determinants should not be neglected when researchers investigate the determinants of U.S. inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]