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The article presents a list of several papers discussed at the Midwest Political Science Association 74th Annual Conference held from April 7-10, 2016 including Public Radicalization, European Immigration Policy, and Impact of Democracy on Trade Debt and Financial Flows.

Three types of political participation could currently be distinguished, representative, consumer, and direct participation, and it has been argued that there is considerable variation in the levels of these different forms of participation in different countries. Within this paper, it is aimed to (partly) explain variance in levels of different forms of participation through one institutional character of a system: public administration. The past decades, a wave of administrative reforms has occurred which was aimed to increase access, accountability and transparency through representation or direct participation in administrative affairs. This aim would lead to the expectation that (certain forms of) participation has increased. These administrative reforms, or New Public Management (NPM), imply generally a liberalization of the public sphere. However, these reforms have been implemented to different degrees in different countries. The questions that guide this paper are: Does more liberalization of the public sector lead to higher levels of political participation, and, if so, which form of participation is affected most? Cases that will be included are established democracies, and the analyses are at the country-level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper use the raids on the polygamous communities of Short Creek, Arizona (1953) and Eldorado, Texas (2008) as lenses to establish the inextricability of monogamy and democracy in both historical and contemporary American political tradition. It argues that both government interventions brought to the fore similar questions about religious behavior's acceptable limits as well as the limits of American political culture generally. This paper will examine polygamy's sordid history in the American tradition and argue that liberal feminism has offered an unsatisfying explanation for why polygamous, religious subjects are unintelligible in the American political tradition. Ultimately, the April 2008 raid requires that we revisit some of these old questions. I argue that we must transcend a liberal democratic ethos if we aim to understand polygamy's illegibility in America. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders Jefferson’s critique of constitutionalism in light of recent debates on the paradox of democratic founding. The paradox of a democratic founding suggests that neither the people nor a founding can be ontologically prior to the other, but rather that they are mutually constitutive. This mutual constitution, however, has placed dominant approaches in a position to displace the problems of one, the other or both. But does this displacement result from the conceptual architecture of dominant conceptions of both? In this paper I contend that Jefferson’s writings on the subject, traditionally read as a critique of constitutionalism, provide insightful answers to this question. Against the traditional reading, I suggest that Jefferson offers a distinctive understanding of the problem, one that brings to light what I call the problem of democratic recognition, that of the people’s changing composition in relation to founding authority. Rather than a wholesale critique of constitutional authority, I suggest that Jefferson provides a more nuanced understanding of the process of founding and re-founding from a radically democratic perspective, one which can offer important insights to guide contemporary theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution and characteristics of the Polish party system in the period 1991-2007, using the framework of institutionalization. Key moments in the development of the party system are identified by analyzing the results of six consecutive parliamentary elections. At the onset of the development of democratic politics, the party system was characterized by instability and under-institutionalization. By the end of the second decade, it displayed strong signs of structural stabilization and some evidence of the stability of interparty competition and party institutionalization, implying that the Polish party system is quasi-institutionalized. Moreover, the paper attempts to explain the results by focusing on elite behaviour and institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the relevance of the study of Tocqueville's classic commentary, Democracy in America. While its status as a classic is generally accepted, it does not necessarily follow that the commentary is relevant to contemporary politics. As a classic piece of literature, it may simply reflect observations of a bygone era. From this point of view, studying Democracy in America would be beneficial for gaining a historical perspective; it would not be relevant to contemporary political discourse. Thus, the question is whether Tocqueville can be read only as a historical narrative or if it can substantively address contemporary political issues. In order to evaluate the relevance of Tocqueville's commentary, the paper examines portions of the commentary relating to the issues of equality, industrialization, religion, freedom, federalism, rights, and other elements germane to contemporary politics. In sum, this paper is not an effort to discern if Tocqueville's commentary should be read, but how it should be read regarding contemporary politics. There are three main challenges to reading Tocqueville as applicable to contemporary politics: selective usage, apparent contradictions, and an appeal to circumstance. Some scholars have selectively used various aspects of the text to attempt to connect Tocqueville's analysis to modernity or, alternatively, have rejected any use of Tocqueville by arguing that his assumptions and projections are fundamentally flawed. Setting aside selective usage issues, Tocqueville's commentary has apparent contradictions and an assumption that much of America's success is due to circumstance and good fortune. By assessing each of these three challenges, this paper evaluates whether or not Tocqueville is relevant to contemporary politics. In the end, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Tocqueville's work is still relevant based upon the questions that it raises. Tocqueville's commentary may be imperfect, but its challenges to our modern assumptions about politics seems to warrant its continued use. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses how our conceptions of community and citizenship should be transfigured on account of the theoretical and ethical concerns revealed by statelessness. Taking my point of departure from the work of Arendt, I show how the phenomena of statelessness reveals tensions in our conceptions of political membership and human rights, while highlighting the dilemmas that any approach must address. The paper then shifts from a diagnostic to a prescriptive focus, turning to the Habermasian notion of discourse ethics as a means to theorize the issues raised by statelessness and the idea of a claim to community. While discourse ethics offers a useful framework, I argue that we need a supplementary orientation toward openness, given that statelessness has at its core the problem of inclusion. In addressing this more fundamental question of inclusion, I turn to contemporary theorists of agonistic democracy whose focus on the contestability of terms and the fundamentally unsettled nature of the political provide resources for conceptualizing more open notions of political membership. I conclude by showing how discourse ethics and agnostic theory can be used to imagine communities that eschew the exclusions that create statelessness. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the assumption in recent democratization literature that economic inequality declines after democratization. Existing research fail to address theoretical and methodological problems. The theoretical problem is the similar treatment of different levels of democracy. There is no reason to believe that the relationship between democratization and inequality is linear. This paper tests the relationship between different levels of democratization and inequality. It also addresses two methodological problems in previous studies: unobserved heterogeneity and missing data. By relying on cross sectional regressions, earlier studies produce biased results. I construct a panel analysis using and updated dataset and employ a fixed-effects model. Existing research employs list-wise deletion to deal with missing data. I use multiple imputations to eliminate bias and get more tractability from the data available. The finding of this paper is that the assumption in the democratization literature that upon transition to democracy the majority will benefit from greater income equality does not hold. This paper finds a non-monotonic relationship: low levels of democracy are associated with higher levels of income inequality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of democracy around the world raises important theoretical questions. What affects the process of democratization? Some countries have started this process from similar experiences. They have broken with the authoritarian regime at the same time, and implemented the same type of reforms, but still, some are more successful than others. The answer to this question will allow officials to take better measures and implement better reforms to speed up the process of democratic consolidation. This paper investigates if corruption has a negative effect on the process of democratization. Corruption can slow down the process of democratic consolidation by creating economic inefficiencies, increasing income inequality, and perpetuating obstacles to participation and competition, thus diminishing the legitimacy of the political regime by negatively affecting people’s trust. Using a two stage least squared regression model, this paper controls for endogeneity in the relationship between corruption and democracy by using the level of tariffs in one country as an instrumental variable for corruption. The results are significant supporting the hypothesis that corruption negatively affects the level of democracy in one country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political science field has developed a good understanding of how political institutions shape policymaking incentives. This paper investigates whether these incentives differ given underlying societal preferences. Analyzing the provision of public goods, I begin capturing preferences with a measure of ethnic fractionalization. However, I modify this rudimentary conceptualization by adding a measure of how ethnicity is distributed amongst income groups, what I call ethnic-income cross-cuttingness (in reference to the term cross-cutting cleavages). The paper first introduces this new measure and accompanying cross-national dataset. It then builds a socio-institutional theory of the policymaking process. Specifically, following the Horowitz school, I argue that when society is highly ethnically fractionalized and lowly cross-cutting, that small, majoritarian districts generate better incentives for politicians to cater to broader segments of society and provide more broadly-targeted public goods. This stands in contrast to the traditional institutional wisdom (Lijphart school) that large, PR districts are always best for public goods provision. I test my theory with a dataset of 40-odd developing democracies between 1970-2000. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last few years have witnessed a minor explosion literature in political theory seriously considering the problems of designing constitutions in the light of democratic ideals, including works with both domestic and trans-national ambitions. This paper explores the theses that a) three importantly different methodological approaches can be discerned in the literature, b) that the three approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses, and c) that a modified approach can draw on the strengths while avoiding most of the weaknesses. Serially examining and critically evaluating ‘imaginative institutional reaction’ (e.g., Levinson (2006) or Sabato (2007)), ‘rational optimization’ (e.g., Vermeule (2007)), and ‘Aristotelian comparativism,’ (e.g., Lutz (2006)), the paper concludes that a comparative approach is recommended, but that it ought dispense with an Aristotelian orientation in favor of reference to the ideal of constitutional democracy understood as regulative ideals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the new European Union (EU) member states' bilateral aids with a specific accent on democracy assistance, which is an integral component of their aids. Specifically, using Poland as a case, this paper seeks to answer what drives Polish aid, who has priority in receiving Polish aid, and to what extent the Polish Government, in giving foreign aid, is motivated by the desire to spread democracy. More importantly, the paper investigates how the Polish Government engages in democracy assistance to democratizing and authoritarian countries on the example of Poland's two neighboring states—Ukraine and Belarus. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the sweeping (re) introduction of multiparty systems in the early 1990s almost all sub-Saharan countries have introduced legal provisions to ban ethnic or other identity-based particularistic parties. Altogether 11 countries have actually banned political parties on these grounds. Given widespread fears that identity-based party politics increase the risk of inter-communal conflict, these bans may work for peace. However, up to now this link has remained almost ignored by research, and this paper engages in a first systematic analysis whether or not ethnic and other identity-related party bans do facilitate peace and how they influence the development of democracy. The paper draws on data from various sources as well as on our own survey, a unique inventory on ethnic party bans in Africa, and uses both quantitative and macro-qualitative methodologies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on the problem of the proper constitution of the war powers has narrowly focused on legal reforms to promote inter-branch dialogue on the use of military force. The 2008 National War Powers Commission Report is a primary example of this approach and this paper will highlight its limitations and uncover alternatives. Instead of legal reforms - which have failed in the past - what is needed is a view towards the political regime as a whole; one that looks to material rather than legal checks on the use of force. This democratic approach works to develop and maintain a mobilized citizenry that constrains and directs military policy by serving as a check on elites. This paper demarcates the outlines of a theory of democratic war powers through the application of a range of political and legal theory to the proposals of the Commission. A regime approach provides a means to reestablish democratic accountability for the use of force through the political constitution of a tension between the people and their nation's use of arms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our contemporary world is one of global power relations based on increasingly deeper interrelations among peoples, governments, a transnational governance structures. Such a context requires new ways of thinking about politics and democracy. In service of this necessity, this paper offers a reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism on political, rather than a moral, grounds. Such a conception is rooted in a multi-dimensional ontology of power. Politics are where the power is and when people are subject to power relations they become members in a community of political actors. This paper argues that cosmopolitanism signifies a specifically contemporary condition whereby power relations are ubiquitous, interconnecting, and overlapping around the globe. This cosmopolitan condition indicates that people need not only be subject to the state, but can possibly be subject to power as it is exercised on levels above and below state capacities. For those concerned with democratic theory and practice, this calls for a renegotiation of popular sovereignty and political community with respect to this cosmopolitan condition. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism has tended to be understood as being perfectly compatible with the Rawlsian conception of liberal democracy, whereby individual rights and liberties mediate but do not discriminate between competing conceptions of the good life. This has facilitated the development of ‘thick’ theories of liberal democracy, where the liberal democratic state is conceptualized as needing to have a rich variety of basic conditions (such as a set number of individual rights, reasonable levels of social and economic equality, and the like) so as to ensure that each member of the polity is able to pursue his or her own conception of the good life. This paper will re-examine Berlin’s value pluralism and argue that the implications of value pluralism are much more subversive to the liberal democratic project than has commonly been assumed, as it forces us to question the inviolability of precisely those facilitating and mediating conditions. But contrary to what some of Berlin’s detractors have argued, confronting the full implications of value pluralism â€" as this paper will try to show â€" facilitates the development of a liberal democratic theory more attune to its own core values. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Liberalism against Populism, William Riker attempts to discern which of two accounts of democracy, that of Madison or that of Rousseau, better serves individual liberty. Riker sees in Rousseau the champion of a tyrannical version of democracyâ€"populismâ€"which asserts the intrinsic morality of any majoritarian decision. In this paper I underline the limits of Riker's interpretation of populism and propose to substitute his dualistic reading of Madison and Rousseau as representing liberal and populistic strains of democracy with a twofold reading of Rousseau himself. Presenting the two faces of Rousseau- the "bad" and the "good" - I examine Rawls’s Political Liberalism as an example of Rousseauism, though not necessarily the best kind. I investigate Rawls's unstable position between liberalism and populism, and hold that the philosophical "abstinence" (Raz 1990) of his political liberalism is prone to shifting towards "bad" Rousseauism. In the name of stability liberalism as a political doctrine claims to disinvest from metaphysical commitments to win agreement. However the argument of this paper is that a political justification of liberalism becomes dogmatic when it casts out metaphysics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, the Chinese government adopted a law granting individuals the right to control their property. This is a major change in Chinese law as land had formerly been considered the property of the state. The law was an attempt to increase the market oreintation of the economy. However, increased individual control of land has come into conflict with government efforts to speed commercial development through the power of eminent domain. This paper tells the story of one such conflict in Hubei Province, where a property owner sued the government when it tried to deprive him of his land rights, in order to make way for development. The surprise in this case comes not only from the access the individual had to the courts, but from the more remarkable fact that, when the land owner won his case, the government has respected complied with the court's decision. The point of the paper is to explore the democratic potential of judicial support for rights in the "new China." Comparison will also be made to the use of courts to resist eminent domain in the US and other democracies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a lot of interest in how party primaries affect the characteristics of candidates, most work has focused on U.S. presidential candidates, limiting scholars’ ability to compare the effects of primaries across large numbers of candidates. The gap is understandable, as it is rare for parties to use different selection methods simultaneously across districts. In new democracies, more experimentation takes place. One such case is Mexico, where the two largest parties used a variety of selection procedures to choose their 2006 candidates for plurality district seats, from open primaries to designation by the national leadership. Since re-election is prohibited, there were no unopposed incumbents. This paper looks at how selection methods affect the candidates chosen, drawing on two surveys, of congressional candidates prior to the 2006 election and of congressional deputies in March 2008. Since the decision to hold a primary is separate from who wins the primary election, I use a Heckman two-stage model to control for selection sample bias. The paper analyzes whether candidates selected in primaries are systematically more moderate or more extreme than the median candidate for each party. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic theorists continue to engage with populismâ€"whether understood as a disruptive or dangerous force in democracy or as embedded in the logic of democracy itself. This paper adds to the exploration of the relationship between populism and democracy by juxtaposing the mass anger often attributed to populist movements in general (and to 19th century American populism in particular) with the “discontent” which drove the American progressive movement of the early 20th century (a discontent that Theodore Roosevelt referred to as “fierce” and Herbert Croly called “aggressive”). The paper would fit well on a panel on American political thought, as it will draw both on populist and progressive rhetoric and writings and on scholarly evaluations of both movements. But the theoretical underpinnings of the project come from contemporary democratic theory and, in particular, from Jacques Ranciere’s description of democracy as a rupture in the logic of arche and his related analysis of the wrong or grievance which gives rise to and constitutes politics. Put most simply, my aim in the paper is to think about populist anger and progressive discontent as possible manifestations of that grievance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s hosting of Olympic Games has caused great controversy. Facing criticisms and pressure from international community, Chinese government must defend China’s national interests on the one hand and demonstrate its respect for human rights and democracy, its commitment to the improvement of human rights conditions and the promotion of democracy, and its responsiveness to international public opinions on the other hand. Chinese government assigns different priorities to different national interests and adopts different foreign policies accordingly. This paper is aimed to explore the foreign policies taken by Chinese government toward issues of different importance. Yet Chinese government is by no means the sole actor on the arena. Driven by patriotic enthusiasm, Chinese people not only exert great pressure on Chinese government to make it take hard-line foreign policies, but also take action to defend China’s national interests themselves. Consequently, Chinese government must react to domestic demands when making foreign policies. This paper is also designed to investigate the interaction between Chinese government and Chinese people in “Olympic Diplomacy”. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a new democracy, with evolving norms about representation, Ukraine provides an ideal setting to investigate legislative activity. According to Ukraine's constitution, legislators have the right to file formal requests for information or action to other institutions. In the paper, we assess several hypotheses about deputy advocacy. Our data set covers deputies in three parliaments (2002, 2006, and 2007) and includes electoral, party, and personal data, as well as variables addressing requests. We evaluate if constituency-based deputies make more requests than their counterparts in party list seats, if deputies who served in multiple parliaments change their behavior as electoral incentives change, and whether deputies focus their requests on national- or local-level concerns. This paper contributes to our knowledge about representation by analyzing how electoral rules, party affiliation, and legislator characteristics affect elected officials' level of policy advocacy once they are in office. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research identifies sources of interpersonal trust in Latin America by exploring why the most developed countries in the Americas, namely Canada and the United States, show higher levels of interpersonal trust than their neighboring countries. The findings of this paper suggest that Latin America's high economic inequality poses a challenge to democracy because it triggers interpersonal mistrust. This paper also finds that in Latin America interpersonal trust, rather than civic participation, ideology or trust in government, promotes citizens' support for the implementation of public policies aimed to close the gap between rich and poor. Taken together, the results suggest a vicious circle between Latin America's historically high economic inequality, low interpersonal trust, and low support for redistributive policies within certain segments of the population, especially the well-off. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses original public opinion data of 607 households and 6 political leaders to assess how clientelism, in its many forms, influences dyadic policy representationâ??the degree to which leaders and citizens have shared policy positionsâ??in the area of social welfare policy. Results indicate a positive and significant relationship between the receipt of a clientelist benefit and dyadic policy representation. When citizens report experience with clientelism they are more likely to share the policy positions of their elected leader. This paper discusses the theoretical implications of this finding on the quality of democratic life in Bangalore. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines democracy as an international norm, and the problems encountered establishing it in Africa. The paper argues that each country's unique characteristics act as filters through which international norms are implemented. Uganda is used as a case study to generate hypotheses that can be untilized to study ways in which democracy is defined, or ways in which its institutions are adopted.Three hypotheses that we can use to explain democracy in Uganda are presented in this paper. First, it is hypothesized that countries with a history of violent ethnic conflicts are more likely to prefer no-party/one-party democracy. Second, it is suggested that the meaning of democracy in African countries is defined by the dominant elite faction. Third, it is hypothesized that African leaders who are capable of providing security are more likely to succeed in framing a norm differently from the international standards. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political science literature on the subject of transitional justice processes refers to a range of approaches that societies undertake to address legacies of widespread or systematic human rights abuse as they move from a period of violent conflict or oppression towards peace, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for individual and collective rights (ICTJ). Most of the literature on transitional justice mechanisms focuses on trials, truth commissions, reparations and the construction of memorials. Currently, however, there is a dearth of information regarding the transitional justice measure known as vetting. The central purpose of vetting is institutional reform as a means to prevent the recurrence of abuse. Reforms are often aimed at bodies that are responsible for past human rights violations or other forms of repression, such as the military, police or security forces. While trials, reparations and truth commissions tend to be the transitional justice mechanisms most commonly adopted by states, the number of countries that have employed vetting during transitions to democracy is worthy of attention. Thirty-one states, in regions as diverse as South America, Africa and Eastern Europe, have implemented vetting in various forms since World War II. Why has vetting been implemented by some states and not others? This paper seeks to address this question by investigating the causal mechanisms that influence state decisions to implement vetting after a democratic transition. I propose four hypotheses: first, I argue that previous regime type, specifically the nature of regime repression and the type of regime leadership, are important variables that influence whether a state transitioning to democracy will implement vetting. Authoritarian regimes with hierarchically-led militaries tend toward a focus on individual responsibility and typically seek to implement trials when confronting past repression, while authoritarian regimes with non-hierarchically-led militaries and totalitarian regimes tend to focus on collective responsibility which manifests in purges of public institutions. Second, this paper asserts that while historically the most common form of vetting has been purges, in recent decades, increased attention has been given to the importance of incorporating due process in vetting procedures. Many Eastern European states were criticized by human rights organizations and other states for the absence of due process in the lustration (vetting) processes conducted at the end of the Cold War. Since that time, states that have opted to employ vetting have increasingly focused on individual responsibility for human rights violations and ensuring the rights of those targeted by the vetting process. Third, this paper argues that the clustering of vetting states within a similar time frame in Eastern Europe can be explained by Florini's theory of horizontal norm reproduction. Fourth, this paper asserts that international actors, including the UN and non-profit organizations such as the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), are increasingly playing a role in directing or influencing the transitional justice mechanisms post-conflict states employ. A growing awareness of the need to incorporate due process into vetting in order to consolidate democracy, and the codification of this notion into international law and case law has led international actors to initiate, consult on, and, at times, participate in various vetting processes.The paper is divided into three sections: definitions and explanations of vetting, a discussion of theories concerning democratic transitions and norm emulation and the integration of these theories into an explanation of the vetting cases... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the journey of political parties in Nigeria so far through the murky and turbulent waters of politics. In doing this,the paper seeks to examine the impact of the party system,as practised in Nigeria, on the current political engineering taking place in the country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper was to reflect and identify the agents of the demise of multiparty politics and democratization in Côte d'Ivoire between 1990 and 1999. Following a historical and paradigmatic approach, the paper articulated two points: 1) that multiparty politics and democratization caused political instability in Côte d'Ivoire and 2) that the political parties, political leadership, and masses failed to re-invent a new political consensual culture to deal with the post-1990 exigencies of multiparty politics. Taking the political behaviors, discourses, and ideologies that prevailed between 1990 and 1999 as variables of analysis, the paper concluded that the transformation of political institutions and structures was achieved without political actors committing to provide a political education that would empower the masses and erase the impact of ethnicity, corruption, and militarization. In fact, the paper concludes that the multiparty and democracy project failed in Côte d'Ivoire because of the prevalence of the one-party culture. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to lay the foundations for conceptualizing a normative conception of "the political" in a manner that is consistent with the prospects for the democratization of transnational organizations. In order for theories of transnational justice to establish themselves as critical theories concerned with issues of political justice, they must contain an explicit theory of the political. Without a coherent conception of the political that takes into account transnational relations, claims for political justice lodged on transnational levels cannot be adequately defended. This leaves theories of transnational justice open to criticism by statist theories that privilege a conception of the political that is bound to the sovereign nation-state alone. In this paper, I will argue for a concept of the political that is decoupled from the concept of the sovereign state. This does not mean to say that the sovereign state is not political, but that within the contemporary context, the sovereign state is no longer, if it ever was, the sole site of political struggle. Such a concept of the political would have normative implications for democrats. If the political exists with relation to transnational organizations, democrats must inquire into the condition and prospects for democratic politics beyond the frame of the nation-state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature has employed the principal-agent framework to conceptualize parliamentary democracy as a chain of delegation running from voters via elected representatives and the Prime Minster with his or her cabinet to civil servants. Empirical cases deviate from this ideal type in various ways, one of which is the presence of external constraint institutions such as strong presidents, constitutional courts, independent central banks, audit institutions, and ombudsmen. While the comparative literature has studied the institutional powers of these institutions, it has paid little attention to the question of whether external officeholders have incentives to use these powers to constrain the cabinet. The paper argues that we have to analyze both institutional powers and incentives for their use to obtain an unbiased estimate of the effective constraint we can expect from officeholders external to the parliamentary chain of delegation. I propose to measure the incentives dimension via the mode of selecting external officeholders and develop the "Incentives to Constrain Index" to capture the likelihood that such officeholders have incentives to constrain the cabinet. Analyzing original data on five external constraint institutions in 25 European democracies the paper shows major variation in these incentives both across offices and countries. Furthermore, I demonstrate that institutional powers and incentives for their use are also empirically independent dimensions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper is concerned with how a political science inquiry may gain by taking seriously public discussions that occur outside formal deliberative settings as the mortar from which politics is fashioned. Specifically, I examine how we might understand the public discourses of gurus in contemporary Gujarat and Gandhi in colonial India as types of political deliberation that reflect and shape the politics of their times. I juxtapose the deliberative style of gurus with an earlier historical mode of deliberation used by Gandhi, to depict two distinct exemplars of deliberation, both of which invoke religion to talk about politics. I argue that the discursive activities of Gandhi and the gurus produce two divergent conceptions of the Hindu subject and Indian polity that do important political work for authorizing radically different political projects. By focusing on gurus as political deliberators who participate in the production of an exclusionary political consensus within the prominent space they occupy in Gujarat's civic life, the paper elucidates how the discursive processes and civic spaces that social scientists consider to be constitutive of democracy have become implicated in a non-democratic politics of exclusion and marginalization in Gujarat today. Finally, the comparison between Gandhi and the gurus leads me to raise important questions about the possibilities and limits of deliberative politics and its contradictory relationship with democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent research demonstrates that the structural conflict between the propertied and the poor in non-communist authoritarian states affects the likelihood, timing, and outcome of democratization. In highly unequal societies, democratization has a strongly redistributive effect.The effect of transition in postcommunist democracies was quite different. Given the absence of private property in most means of production, the deliberate policies of wage compression, the widespread availability of income-support mechanisms, and the importance of collective consumption funds in such social goods and services as housing, healthcare, education, transportation, cultural goods and recreation, both income and consumption differentials were narrow compared with democratic capitalist societies at similar development levels. The transition, therefore, brought substantial increases in aggregate income inequality to the post-communist countries, with some post-communist countries reaching levels higher than those of some West European countries.Much political economy literature suggests that democratization is expected to make government more responsive to wider segments of society, more inclined to supply universal collective goods and services such as security of person and property, health care, education, and infra-structure, as well as to provide some minimum level of social insurance against the hazards of catastrophic income loss. These public goods and services should foster productive behavior on the part of economic agents, and thus growth, as well as the mitigation of extremes of poverty and inequality.However, collusion in rent-extraction by post-transition elites might be consistent with high rates of economic growth under some circumstances. If the elites take advantage of the new institutional environment of a post-communist state and capture control over productive assets for themselves, they might well use them to increase their own incomes, yielding rapid aggregate growth the benefits of which are concentrated in a narrow elite. The institutional advantages of democratization and property rights might be restricted to those holding monopolies over property, and not broadly shared. Their policies would lead to higher growth rates after an initial period of disorganization was overcome. But the benefits of the growth would be distributed unequally. An oligarchic democracy would complement an oligarchic form of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of the dual political and economic transition on income inequality trends, taking Russia's subnational regions (the subjects of the federation) as the units of observation. Noting that the regions differed widely both in their starting conditions and in the increase in income growth and differentiation as a consequence of the transition, it seeks to identify the political mechanisms that explain variation in income and inequality growth following the transition. Using both direct and instrumental measures of democracy by region, the paper finds evidence consistent with the "oligarchic democracy" model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to a long held belief in post-authoritarian Taiwan in the omnipotence of democracy to ensure the island's autonomy in the face of China, this paper argues that toward the end of the second Chen Shui-bian administration the 'marginal utility' of Taipei's use of democracy in garnering international sympathy has been drastically decreasing; recent examples include its failure to persuade major members of the 'liberal democratic community', the United States in particular, to support or at least acquiesce in its proposed referendum on joining the United Nations under the name of Taiwan held alongside the presidential election in March 2008. The underlying reason, however, is not found in the blame game between Taipei and Washington as to whether the United States is bowing to Chinese pressure at the expense of Taiwan's democratic deepening, or Taiwanese ruling elites' tactic of mobilising mass support is unnecessarily provocative which could end up drawing the US into an unwanted conflict with China. Rather, this paper suggests that the quarrel is indicative of the emergence of a new standard of civilisation based on the degree of democratic-ness in world politics. While mainstream security discourse in Taiwan has been deeply embedded in the binary structure of a democratic, peace-loving Taiwan versus an authoritarian, war-like China, in urging Taiwanese leaders to 'responsibly' strike a balance between promoting their political values and protecting their people's vital interests, senior US officials too unwittingly reproduce the rhetoric of democracy as civilisation. Unable to comprehend the operation of this civilised/barbarian trope in which Taiwan as a 'maturing' democracy (meaning potentially trouble-making) has been located between the West and the rest for the purpose of strategic appropriation, Taipei mistakenly believes that it has occupied the moral high ground vis-a-vis the great powers to 'go it alone' as seen in the UN referendum. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By making the spread of democracy a foreign policy goal, the U.S. is assuming that external factors influence the process of democratization. This paper examines this assumption more closely, looking at how the international system, and specifically conflict within the international system, affects the spread of democracy both regionally and globally. A number of studies have documented a relationship between democracy and the international system both spatially and temporally. Although these studies pose a number of explanations for temporal and spatial trends, none of them test their hypothesized causal mechanism. They only provide evidence of aggregate trends at the global and regional levels. This paper seeks to go beyond analysis at the aggregate level to test one of the hypothesized casual mechanisms, namely emulation. Drawing on Waltz's argument that competition in an anarchic environment leads states to emulate the most successful states in the system, I argue that the success of democracies in the international system prompts other states to emulate them. According to Waltz the driving force of emulative behavior is conflict and so a test of this mechanism begs the broader question: What is the impact of international conflict on the likelihood that a state will become a democracy? I test three sets of hypotheses. The direct emulation hypothesis suggests that states should imitate their competitors: thus nations that have lost wars to democracies should democratize. The indirect emulation hypothesis posits that nations should imitate the most successful states in the system: thus the likelihood of a democratic transition should be a function of the United States relative power and the regime type of the most militarily powerful state in a country's region. The socialization hypothesis predicts that countries imitate states they interact with on a more amiable level: thus states with democratic allies should be more likely to democratize. I use a logit estimator to test these hypotheses. Contrary to Waltz's expectations, I find that emulation prompted by military conflict does not play a major role in the democratization process, with one exception. I find some evidence indicating that countries are more likely to undergo democratic transitions if the most powerful country in their region is democratic. The more powerful the leading country, the greater the influence of its regime type on the likelihood that a country in its region will experience a democratic transition. Thus, if the leading country is a democracy, the more powerful it becomes the more likely countries in the region will democratize. If the leading country is an autocracy, the more powerful it becomes the less likely countries in the region will democratize. I also find support for the socialization hypothesis: the more democratic allies a state has the more likely it is to undergo a democratic transition. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to introduce, discuss, and empirically test transportation and communication infrastructure as important elements of international political economy and more specifically as important determinants of interstate trade. This paper is part of a larger research program which has developed a quantitative measure for these two forms of infrastructure for each state in the international system from 1840 until 1993. More specifically, this paper will examine two research questions: 1)What makes states more or less likely to build transportation and communication infrastructure? 2)How does transportation and communication infrastructure influence interstate trade? I will argue that the construction and development of infrastructure should play an important role in shaping the trade relations between states in the international system. These systems reduce transportation costs and coordination difficulties, thereby reducing the costs of goods and increasing profits, ceteris paribus. My findings support these claims; more transportation and communication infrastructure do increase the amount of bilateral trade between states. In addition, I argue that regime types, resources, and state population also play an important role in shaping how much transportation and communication infrastructure a state possesses. My findings indicate that there are significant regime and resource relationships at work in the construction of communication infrastructure. However, it initially appears that transportation infrastructure is largely determined by its previous values, and is largely unaffected by political or resource decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: Social movement scholars generally view movements as existing outside of government, and even interest group scholars, who acknowledge the revolving door between interest groups and government, have only explored how previous government experience influences outside lobbying. This paper examines feminist activists while they work for the government bureaucracy using historical documents and in-depth interviews with 40 government employees who were also activists in the women's movement. Feminist activists can be found within the federal government bureaucracy throughout the second wave of the women's movement from 1965-2000. This paper asks the question of how their access to government positions and their activism was affected by changes in presidential administrations. Social movement scholars focusing on political opportunities have generally argued that movements have greater access under sympathetic presidents. This paper explores that claim by asking three questions about feminist activists who work for the federal government: 1) when do these activists enter government service (that is, which presidential administrations gave feminist activists greater access to government positions); 2) what happens to bureaucrats who are feminist activists when an administration hostile to feminism takes over; and 3) does location within the bureaucracy influence the degree to which feminist activists must respond to presidential administrations? The results suggest that feminist bureaucrats below the appointment level often remain in hostile administrations. Several case studies explore how their activism changes under hostile administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposed here aims at unraveling the effects of political institutions on public’s support for democracy. Many students of democratization have regarded public support for democracy as one of the quintessential elements leading a country to democratic consolidation. Countries without substantial level of public support for principles and practices of democratic politics has been degraded as merely “electoral” or “delegative” democracies even though they have competitive elections. Consolidated democracy can stand only on the culture in which ordinary citizens habitually believe in and behave according to the norms and rules of democracy. Some students of new institutionalism argue that certain institutions can encourage breeding higher levels of public support for democracy than others (Anderson and Guillory 1997; Norris 1999). Focusing upon how institutions make winners and losers, their analyses show that more inclusive and consensus oriented institutions are better to produce more democratic support than majoritarian institutions. It is a very interesting finding broadening topics and knowledge of institutional engineering. However, previous studies have several problems. (1) Their cases are usually limited in western and matured democracies. (2) More significantly, they do not consider the recent achievement of the studies of democratic support: Public support for democracy is multidimensional and multidirectional. (3) Measuring institutional variable is very limited and too simplified. In this paper, using World Value Survey data and other the most recent datasets, not only do we increase the number of cases significantly including old and new democracies, but also we compose new indicators measuring institutions: executive systems, electoral systems and levels of decentralization. More importantly, we conceptually divide public support for democracy into four dimensions: supports for democratic principles, performance of democracy, democratic institutions and personnel in democratic government. Following Lijphart works (Lijphart 1999), we believe consensus oriented institutions due to their nature of inclusiveness are better tools to raise public support. Unlike previous works, however, we hypothesize that not only do each institution make diverse influences on public support but also they are differently embodied in each dimension of democratic support. Our project will reveals more complicated patterns of institutional impacts on democratic support, which has been hidden in the previous studies. Ultimately, it will contribute to enrich current theory and knowledge of institutional designing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a project in which I examine the impacts of economic globalization on democratic thought and practice and the predominant responses among democratic theorists to the changes produced by globalization. Among these responses, those which exhibit pronounced nostalgic streaks are the least analyzed and least well understood. Nostalgic responses can be seen in academics concerned with community and social capital (e.g., Bellah et al, Sandel, and Putnam), in popular writing (e.g., Wendell Berry and Michael Shuman), and in political movements, both right (e.g., those of Haider, Le Pen, and Buchanan) and left (e.g., some progressive elements of the ‘anti-globalization’ movement). The role of local politics and the spaces in which citizens live and work is of particular concern for many of these nostalgics. In contemporary political theory, labeling someone’s thought or politics as nostalgic is a rhetorical strategy for dismissing the seriousness of a person’s ideas. Liberal and postmodern thinkers are the most conspicuous in their employment of this rhetorical tactic of dismissal. As Peter Euben points out, “too often the critique of nostalgia is too impatient with the sense of loss that makes it attractive to many and compelling to a few.” Those of us troubled by nostalgic politics need to better understand that, even if manifested in ways we find unsavory, there are real concerns, needs, issues, and justice claims being expressed in much nostalgia. Further, we dismiss nostalgic politics at our own peril. We must address the real losses that provoke nostalgic political responses, especially the more xenophobic, racist, and reactionary of them. Nostalgia can also uncover some valuable political insights, needs, and resources. To neglect these nuggets through the dismissal of nostalgic politics forecloses possibilities of enriching our own political projects. We also need to recognize that even when we disagree with another’s thinking, we may still share with some nostalgics many of the same intentions and aims. Some contemporary nostalgic thinkers are genuinely committed to promoting a just polity of free people who have the resources needed to attend to and nurture that freedom and efficacy. Those of us troubled by aspects of nostalgic politics may find that we can be tense allies who need each other if we hope to rescue from some of the consequences of economic globalization aspects of the democratic project we may both cherish. At the same time, much democratic nostalgia—they are not alone—suffers a kind of utopianism by neglecting to realistically consider the causes of lost institutions and practices, and how we may retrieve the attractive fragments of those loses in ways relevant to today’s political economic conditions. This paper explores some of the attractive resources, institutions, and practices that have degraded or been lost, attempts to see if we can rescue those fragments from some of the more troubling aspects of past socio-economic and political arrangements and practices in manner which might realistically work in contemporary conditions, and considers mitigating institutions and practices as partial alternatives when this is not possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an effort to understand the implications of the opposition strategies to Eastern European totalitarianism for our contemporary view of a democratic, free society. Vaclav Havel’s views are indispensable to any analysis of the Eastern European opposition to totalitarianism for at least one essential reason: the road he charted seems to have been the one taken by events in most of the 1989 revolutions. By elucidating the terms of the opposition strategy proposed by Vaclav Havel in the context of the post-totalitarian system” (the variety of totalitarianism specific to Eastern Europe until 1989) I endeavor to identify Havel’s profile of the independent individual - the necessary precondition for a free society. Havel’s insights are not only a map for opposition, they also contain valuable prescriptions for what should be, in his view, the authentic basis of society. It is thus necessary to correctly identify the foundation of his opposition strategy in order to truly understand the implications of his outlook for civic and political life. The main question this paper tries to answer is how can the condition of the introspective, moral individual can be reconciled, in Havel’s view, with the condition of citizen, of participant in collective political action? The thesis of this essay is that such reconciliation calls, in Havel’s perspective, for resurrecting individual freedom from within and projecting it into daily actions - by living within the truth. Havel’s strategy for effective opposition calls for individual self-emancipation that is both aimed at breaking the vicious circle of apathy and at avoiding the morally damning effect of violent action. Havel presents this strategy as one logically deducible from his particular understanding of the post-totalitarian system. This essay will subsequently endeavor: 1. to present Havel’s understanding of the unique features of the Eastern-European communist system, which he labels the post-totalitarian order; 2. to account for what Havel sees as their effect on individuals in the post-totalitarian society; 3. (and on these basis)to explain what Havel considers the only promising strategy for overturning the post-totalitarian system and 4. to explain how that leads to the necessary basis for a society of free individuals. Understanding all these elements rescues Havel’s view of opposition from the standard criticisms of idealism and philosophical speculation, and depicts it, for any “friend of civil society”, as a thoroughly consistent and convincing one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of America’s increasing diversity, research into the impact of community heterogeneity on civic and political participation has burgeoned in recent years. To date, the literature on the subject has revealed an intriguing inconsistency about the participatory consequences of heterogeneity In his recent book Democracy in Suburbia, Oliver finds that people who live in communities with greater economic diversity have higher levels of engagement in localized political action, like voting in local elections and contacting local elected officials. Likewise, a forthcoming book by Gimpel et al argues that heterogeneity leads to greater political engagement. In contrast, a number of economists have found that economic, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity all lead to a decrease in participation. However, in a recent review essay surveying this literature, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn note that fifteen recent papers by economists on the subject of community heterogeneity all conclude that heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. While at first glance the economic and political science literatures appear to be empirically incompatible, a closer look reveals that they are actually theoretically consistent with one another. It is important to note that these apparently divergent studies have examined different forms of participation. Mistakenly, the literature on participation often indiscriminately groups disparate activities together, notwithstanding considerable evidence that various forms of participation are qualitatively different from one another. Recently, Scott Keeter and his colleagues have conducted a massive study of participation in the United States, and upon analyzing an array of different activitiesconcluded that there are essentially three participatory dimensions (Jenkins et al. 2003). “Civic” activity, by which they mean non-political efforts like volunteering in the community, is a different dimension of participation than activity that communicates political preferences. This paper reconciles the seeming contradiction regarding the effect of heterogeneity on participation. It shows that civic activity, like volunteering, is facilitated in homogeneous places, while people are more likely to express political voice in communities that are heterogeneous. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most theoretically coherent and analytically consistent type of heterogeneity is not racial or economic (the focus of the current literature). Instead, it is ideological heterogeneity. The analysis employs the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, which consists of representative samples drawn in 40 communities across the U.S. Because of the study’s hierarchical design, it is possible to construct aggregate measures of heterogeneity for each community in the sample, including the dispersion of political ideology (operationalized simply as the standard deviation of political ideology within the community). These data, however, also require attention to the statistical complexities of hierarchical data, and are thus modeled using hierarchical linear modeling. This method of estimation simultaneously accounts for individual- and contextual-level variables, ensuring that each of the model’s parameters is measured with the appropriate standard errors. In sum, this paper offers a theoretically-grounded explanation for an apparent contradiction in the literature on community heterogeneity and participation, thus helping to illuminate the impact of diversity on America’s civic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative Politics: Cooperatives as an Institutional Vehicle for Social Transformation The purpose of this paper is to consider whether, and in what form, the cooperative movement has political salience as a vehicle for transformative social change. Currently, cooperatives, with some 750 million members in over 100 countries worldwide, comprise the largest and most extensive existing alternative to traditional capitalism. But while cooperative principles embody such central theoretical concerns as utility and democracy, cooperatives have received very little attention within the discipline, especially in the U.S. This paper is an attempt to begin to address that lack. The central question of this paper is whether the theoretical basis for cooperatives is such that they may be considered a vehicle for fundamental social change. Indeed, from a theoretical perspective, the basic premises of cooperatives?common interest and common property?are attractive to ideological approaches that seek to extend democracy into economic and social realms, and that are opposed to the individualistic and inegalitarian tendencies of capitalism. By definition, a cooperative is an organization that ?has for its object the economic and social betterment of its members by means of an enterprise based on mutual aid . . . an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.? Cooperatives in their modern form developed out of the cooperative socialist movement in Britain that was active in the first third of the 19th century. This paper focuses on the work of William Thompson, who has been recognized (by those who recognize him at all) as the principal theorist of cooperative socialism. Thompson was a friend and associate of Jeremy Bentham, and while Thompson asserts that utility?the greatest good for the greatest number?is the fundamental normative principle on which his work is based, the implications which he draws from it are fundamentally different from Bentham?s. Whereas Bentham assumes an opposition between security (as he refers to liberty) and equality, Thompson attempts to reconcile them. His conclusion?the ?natural laws of distribution??leads him to assert that the only rational economic system, that unites security and equality and that affords the distribution of wealth most in conformity with the principle of utility, is one that is based on mutual cooperation. Besides examining the theory of cooperative socialism as articulated by Thompson, the paper seeks to make connections between Thompson?s theory and cooperatives today. While many aspects of the cooperative movement have assimilated themselves within capitalism, the fundamental principles to which all cooperatives must agree (in order to be members of the International Cooperative Alliance) retain at least the flavor of cooperative socialism, and therefore rest on a base that is antithetical to traditional capitalism. This paper seeks to identify an ideological approach to cooperatives that would allow us to politicize them in such a way that they may be engaged in a project of fundamental social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral institutions in democratic states produce incentives for politicians to manipulate economic policy for electoral gain. A growing literature on political institutions in non-democratic states has begun to focus on the effects of these institutions on political and economic systems. Recently, Gandhi and Przeworski (2001) have argued that democratic institutions function by giving support to the autocratic regimes in which they are embedded. If non-democratic institutions are functional, the natural question is whether or not they are consequential. Do democratic institutions have political and economic consequences in non-democratic states that are analogous to those of democratic institutions in democratic states? I argue that the answer to this question is yes, and build on the literature on political business cycles (PBCs) to explain how. Elections in non-democratic regimes bestow legitimacy on the ruling government by purportedly demonstrating its widespread popular support. Ruling parties in non-democratic regimes are interested in maximizing their perceived legitimacy among the population, as such legitimacy gives them free reign to pursue their policy objectives with a minimal amount of domestic opposition. Whereas some authoritarian regimes with a tight control over the press and the exchange of information can create the illusion of a wide popular mandate, other non-democratic regimes must resort to more subtle political means to garner high levels of popular support. I focus on the latter group, which Levitsky and Way (2002:53) refer to as “competitive authoritarian regimes,” where conditions are ideal for the manipulation of economic policy for electoral gain. With the significant informational asymmetry regarding macroeconomic policy in the government’s favor, I predict that non-democratic regimes manipulate fiscal policy to create popular support for the incumbent regime. I demonstrate the applicability of this reasoning with a study of fiscal decision-making accompanying the 1982 presidential elections in Mexico. Turning to a longitudinal study, I develop a more rigorous test of the hypothesis through a time-series analyses of the political and economic correlates of national account balances in Malaysia. Employing an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model and adjusting for seasonal effects, I find a robust association between elections and lower quarterly budgetary surpluses from the years 1967 to 1997. At least in Malaysia, non-democratic regimes are characterized not simply by an unresponsive government, but rather by a dynamic political process. This paper contributes to comparative politics in two ways. By focusing on some of the more observable implications of economic policy manipulation in a well-defined population of states, this model lends itself to empirical verification, often difficult in the study of non-democratic states. My study also demonstrates ways in which researchers might conceive of the relationship between authoritarian regimes and the populations that they govern, illuminating directions in which the study of non-democratic governance might proceed in the future. References Gandhi, Jennifer, and Adam Przeworski. 2001. “Dictatorial Institutions and the Survival of Dictators.” Paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 13(2). pp. 51-65. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first in a series of papers that investigate whether certain patterns of elite interaction reinforce or undermine democracy. In this paper, we compare actors bargaining across series of crises in stable democracies and new democracies. Do actors learn to cooperate across time, as the crisis unfolds? How can elite interaction lead to crisis resolution and a stronger democracy? We began our investigation by focusing on elite behavior in four countries: two stable democracies (Italy and India) and two countries that successfully transition from autocracy to democracy (Mali and Portugal). In particular, we followed actors bargaining during crises where the government has incomplete information and the opposition is working to change the political system from within, rather than trying to overthrow it. We found that crises are more likely to be resolved if the government shows its willingness to negotiate with the opposition, in two ways. First, the crisis is more likely to be resolved to the extent that the government makes a non-zero offer to its opponent. Any concession, no matter how small, shows the opposition that the government is willing to enter into negotiations. Second, the government learns with which type of opponent it is negotiating, based on whether the opposition accepts or rejects its offer. If the government?s offer is rejected, the crisis is more likely to be resolved if the government counters by increasing its offer, even by a small amount. Again, this action shows the opposition that the government is willing to continue to negotiate. In future papers, we will expand our research from four to twelve countries. First, this widening of the sample will allow us to compare across five types of countries: stable democracies, cases that experience a transition to democracy, unstable countries, cases that experience a transition to autocracy, and stable autocracies. Second, we will compare actors bargaining during crises not only within the system, where elites are demanding reforms, but also crises against the system, where the opposition is trying to overthrow the government. The final paper in this series will give us a fuller understanding to how elite interaction can reinforce or undermine democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the protest literature, the effects of governmental structures have been largely ignored even by structural approaches mainly because of the implied assumption that democracy suffers less contentious politics. However, the frequency and size of protest varies among different forms of democratic government. The empirical evidence shows that the number of protesters in democratic countries with Semi-Presidential systems is greater than what we find in pure presidential or parliamentary systems. This paper identifies the variation of the scale of protests in democratic regimes including European countries and South Korea using daily interval data, and explains the variation by focusing on political institutions. Through theoretical reviews and data analysis this paper argues that citizens in democratic countries with semi-presidential systems find it more difficult to deliver their demands to government than citizens in other states. Presidents in semi-presidential system exercise relatively unchecked power due to the weakness of legislature and the presidential influence on judicial branch, which limit citizens’ access to political processes. Therefore, they are more inclined to protest than their counterparts in democratic countries without semi-presidential systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will use an aesthetic interpretation John Dewey’s conception of the schoolroom as a model for an association in civil society that encourages liberal-democratic political characteristics in citizens. Although many have noted the implications of John Dewey’s work for contemporary civil society theory, this paper assumes a two unique positions. First, it not only makes the common claim that Dewey felt the democratic benefits of face-to-face association accrue from discussion among diverse participants that cultivates tolerance and encourages creative problem solving, but also it emphasizes how he stressed that associational discourse must occur with specific spatial and temporal characteristics. Dewey noted that such political talk must follow a particular pace, with a particular developmental direction, or it will devolve into a mire of unrelated assertions with no political benefit. Furthermore, the paper asserts that in order to maintain such a conversation, Dewey recommended that the actual structure of the discourse must occasionally limit freedom and discourage certain points of view. In contradiction to most understandings of Dewey’s progressive education, he actually foresaw the effective classroom as under the control of an assertive teacher who regulated the aesthetic-pedagogic characteristics of student discussion. When theorizing the implications of this fact for theories of civil society, it becomes clear that if Dewey’s classroom is used as model for face-to -face discussion that encourages democratic skills, in distinction to many contemporary writers, the associations where this discussion occurs need not exhibit a “logic of congruence”* with the characteristics they hope to encourage. This understanding depends upon a specific interpretation of Dewey. Although Dewey as a pragmatist possesses a reputation for a prosaic liberalism, his work is actually laced with aesthetic themes. And although most fully developed in his Art As Experience, even his earlier pedagogic work possesses these elements. It is through Dewey’s conception of the aesthetic, or spatial and temporal dimension of everyday physical and mental experience, that I interpret his work. In this paper I focus primarily upon two texts, his well-known School and Society (1900) and his lesser-known Educational Lectures Before Brigham Young Academy, (1900-1901) as exemplars of the aesthetic aspects of Dewey’s pedagogic work. Through these texts I demonstrate Dewey’s assertion that students need to experience the diverse subject matter constituent of an effective liberal education in a manner that encourages not only retention of material but also construction of connections between seemingly incommensurate disciplines and unrelated facts. The implication for theories of civil society should be clear: Just as students must make connections between varied disciplines for understanding, citizens must be able to build relationships with other individuals and political positions in face-to-face dialog that cultivates tolerance and effective political knowledge. And if Dewey is to be used as a model for discourse in small scale association, then the aesthetic characteristics of this conversation remains as important as its diverse substance. * I take this phrase from Nancy Rosenblum’s Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norms of publicity and free expression are crucial to the process of autonomous reason-giving that anchors the normative core of theories of deliberative democracy. Yet the extent and nature of these norms is a heavily contested issue. Although all theories of deliberative democracy seem to prescribe or presuppose strong presumptions in favor of an unhindered flow of knowledge and communication, a close examination reveals numerous knowledge control imperatives that arise from these theories’ deep commitments. Most prominently, many of these theories postulate that procedural rules of order or constraints on public reason may be desirable or even necessary to allow deliberation to occur in a coherent and constructive manner. Other imperatives include restrictions on exclusionary speech necessary to realize the norm of universal inclusion at the heart of the deliberative ideal, as well as privacy rights that are necessary for individuals to maintain the autonomy required to deliberate as free and equal beings. Just as any coherent analysis of liberty recognizes that any social system that aims to maximizes the liberty of all must include structures that constrain certain liberties, a system that aims to maximize free communication must also include structures that restrict the flow of knowledge in certain situations. My paper aims to explore the contours of such structures that are implied by deliberative democracy. My paper first investigates the norms of openness implied by the principles of deliberative democracy, which for the purposes of this project, I define as communicative rationality, inclusive self-government, political autonomy, and revisability. I then consider a commonly proposed type of deliberative imperative for closure--altering the structure of incentives to encourage political actors so as to improve the quality of deliberation. I reject the justification as deeply in tension with the principles of deliberative democracy. Instead, I propose that openness is important enough to deliberation that restrictions for the sake of democracy can only be justified if they are necessary for deliberation to continue at all. I tentatively sketch 6 such imperatives: rules of order, domains of the sacred, compensation for power asymmetries, protection of inclusion, irreversibility safeguards, and privacy. If my sketch is roughly accurate, then together with the imepratives of openness, these imperatives of closure form the general structure of information control directly implied by the norms internal to deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does public opinion respond to the production of major legislation? A central pillar of representative democracy is that elected officials are held accountable for their actions. There is a rich literature exploring the electoral effects for legislators who deviate from their district’s opinions, and there are numerous anecdotal arguments about the consequences of scandals and foibles for both legislators and executives. However, public policy is neither made by individual Members of Congress nor exclusively by executive actions. The most significant policies are enacted through laws passed by Congress and signed by the president. Scholars have very little understanding of how the public assigns credit or blame for the net output of the legislative system. This paper addresses this question directly. As part of a larger project, this paper will examine the impact of the passage of major legislation on congressional approval. Because approval ratings are collected from individuals but legislation is produced over time, the paper employs hierarchical statistical techniques to answer this question. This method has enjoyed some popularity in education and psychological research, but has not seen frequent use in political science. Concurrent research by the author indicates that while presidential approval is responsive to the production of the system, congressional approval is unaffected. Credit and blame for the joint activities of the political system are laid at the feet of the president, not Congress. This has implications for interbranch power dynamics as well as research on public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of public funding in party competition is currently debated in the literature that focuses on more established democracies the debate is rarely extended to new democracies, theoretically or empirically. The argument developed in this paper is that public funding limits new party entry, which in turn limits voter options with the effect of stabilizing relationships between parties and voters. The paper then tests this argument on a sample of all contemporary democracies and a sub-sample of established democracies. Contrary to Kitshelt’s proposition (2000) that public effect has little effect on party competition, I find strong support for the argument that public funding for political parties limits new party entry everywhere. Where party systems have stabilized prior to the advent of funding, public monies do not significantly affect the relationship between parties and voters. In new democracies, however, public funding strengthens the ties between parties and voters. Both findings run contrary to implications of the Cartel Party argument about party and voter relationships advanced by Katz and Mair (1995). Moreover, both findings have significant policy implications. If public funding stabilizes new party systems it can be used to mediate some of the expected political turbulence associated with transition to democracy. Furthermore, if funding does not affect the relationship between voters and parties in established democracies the idea of equality of opportunity as a reason for funding may need reconsideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toward A Coherent Global Economic Governance Strategy Globalization is at the center of public debate throughout the world. It reflects the growing interdependence of economies, which goes far beyond the expansion of international trade and capital flows, to the diffusion of technology, culture, even democracy. It has also become entwined with the policy agenda of deregulation and liberalization in which governments have retracted from their legitimate and necessary roles to regulate markets at the national and international levels to ensure that economic development does in fact lead to social progress. The strategy of sustainable development allows these issues to be discussed coherently from a public management perspective. Unfortunately, efforts to make free trade and sustainable development policies more compatible have faced significant obstacles over the years: the two communities have distinct goals, traditions, operating procedures, and languages; the ultimate goods for advocates of sustainable development (equity, environmental protection) have often been the consummate bad for advocates of free trade. A divergence in the value systems between proponents of free trade and sustainable development would occur in the absence of world trade and investment; however, ethical questions have become more difficult and urgent in an international context as economic decisions in one country impinge on environmental, health, and labor conditions in other countries. Ethical questions also arise in allocating the costs of development in an intergenerational context. Who is to bear the cost of employee health and safety? Will market regimes shift more significant costs of environmental protection to future generations? Are such regimes more effective than government regulation? Are they more equitable? The need to collapse efficiency, equity and the related issue of stewardship may be most acute in discussions revolving around the issues of climate change, species decline, population growth, immigration and other problems in which the international and intergenerational distribution of costs and benefits is central. Economics and politics cannot answer purely ethical questions associated with these and the growing number of issues with global implications, but a public management perspective can greatly help in sorting out the issues, identifying more or less efficient and effective trade measures, and tracing through the equity implications of development, trade, environmental and labor policies. The central theme of this study is that the current economic paradigm supporting free trade and multilateralism needs to be viewed in the broader context of trade-economic growth-environment and sustainable development. In the absence of such integration trade is unlikely to be sustainable. Moreover, the greater awareness of the tradeoffs in this regard, the greater will be the potential for a sustainable world trade system. The paper proceeds as follows: First, a discussion of the role of trade liberalization in promoting current global development patterns is presented. This is followed by a discussion of the general approach of trade law to environmental and labor issues, noting the most important shortcomings in this regime. Based on the above, what are the implications of this for the public sector? The paper suggests that the erosion of effective public regulation or “governance” results in high social costs that pose the most serious threat from globalization. Moreover, the erosion of public authority reflects the shortcomings of the present paradigm of international economic governance (i.e. a growing “governance-gap”). Finally, an alternative model for reconciling trade, labor, environmental, and other developmental concerns is presented which is more sensitive to unique economic, social, political, and administrative conditions in developing regions. Its deployment suggests that supranational organizations, not free trade agreements, are the most viable structures for reconciling global trade, development and environmental needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political participation is a key ingredient for a solid democratic system. Politicians respond consistently to their constituencies, thus it is important to understand who votes in order to assess the responsiveness of a particular democratic system. The analysis of the socio-economic composition of the electorate can help us elucidate the mechanics of prevailing political biases in societies. Scholars studying consolidated democracies in the industrialized world have long concluded that there exists a significant bias in favor of the more privileged citizens. In those democracies, higher electoral turnout is positively correlated with higher socio-economic status. Patterns of electoral participation in the United States and Western Europe have extensively been examined, but they appear to be less understood in emerging democracies such as Mexico. The aim of this paper is to show that, in Mexico, as electoral competition became more acute, the poorest groups in society started voting more in comparison to other socioeconomic groups. Since the late seventies, opposition parties in Mexico started gaining power at the local and national level. The climax of such liberalization process came in the 2000 presidential election when the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) lead by Vicente Fox, defeated for the first time after seven decades, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI). The profile of the electorate drastically changed during the nineties. For instance, in the 2000 election, the electoral participation fell at the national level and in particular for the richer municipalities. Yet, the electoral participation of the poorest municipalities increased substantially. The relationship between higher socio-economic status and electoral turnout at the municipality level seems quite clear for the 1994 election. Interestingly, once electoral competition increased, this pattern changed. In the 2000 election, the turnout of the richest municipalities decreased while the poorest municipalities registered the highest level of electoral participation. On average, participation fell more than 10 percent in 39 percent of the municipalities when comparing the 2000 presidential election to the previous one. Yet participation fell more than 10 percent in almost 60 percent of the richest municipalities while only 29 percent of the poorest municipalities experienced such a drop. Similarly, turnout increased by more than 10 percent in 27 percent of the poorest municipalities while only 8 percent of the richest municipalities experienced an increase in turnout of this magnitude. These results clearly reveal that between 1994 and 2000, the socioeconomic composition of the Mexican electorate experienced a drastic change. The findings of this paper challenge the common idea that poor constituencies are less active in electoral terms than rich constituencies. A detailed analysis of the socioeconomic composition of the Mexican electorate in the two past presidential elections clearly reveals that marginalized municipalities are increasingly decisive. This change will have a profound implication on the representative nature of the democratic system in Mexico, by creating a bias in favor of the unprivileged groups. This paper will contribute to our understanding of the public policy implications of this electoral dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]