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This article reviews the leading exponents of Latin American thought on underdevelopment, emphasizing their importance amid the dominant theories being systematically proposed worldwide. It also highlights their transcendence in generating a vernacular line of thought on the region's development in relation to the patterns of capitalist power established as the structural basis on which the unequal course of Latin America has been perpetuated. Thus, the objective is to retake their theoretical approaches, proposing that we can find cues in their analytical suggestions that contribute to the forced exercise of thinking from a Latin American point of view and move towards other alternatives for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political economy arguments on party behaviour usually address parties of the left and the right. This article introduces a novel argument that portrays house price changes as an economic signal that right‐wing parties disproportionately respond to in their programmatic positioning. This asymmetric partisanship effect is driven by homeowners' importance for right‐wing parties as a core voter group. Increasing house prices improve homeowners' economic prospects. Right‐wing parties thus have some flexibility to reach out to undecided voters by targeting the centre of the political spectrum. Falling house prices, however, signal worsening economic outlooks for homeowners. Right‐wing parties thus have a strong incentive to send out signals of reassurance and prioritise their core voters. For a sample of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from 1970 to 2014, the findings support this argument. Right‐wing parties move programmatically leftwards with booming house prices and rightwards when house prices fall, while parties of the left do not respond systematically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autocratic governments hold a preference for opacity. Autocracies are less transparent than democracies and a closed informational environment preserves autocratic regimes from mass unrest. Yet, autocracies vary widely in the extent to which they disclose economic information. In this article, we offer an explanation for why some autocrats choose to disclose. We contend that, paradoxically, some autocratic leaders may benefit from increasing the capacity of the populace to mobilize. In so doing, autocratic leaders threaten rival members of the elite, reducing the risk of elite challenges and increasing their freedom of maneuver. We contend that transparency acts as one mechanism toward these ends. We formalize these intuitions and demonstrate empirically that leaders in transparent autocracies enjoy a reduced hazard of removal via coup relative to their opaque counterparts. Personalistic dictators and entrenched autocrats—who suffer the smallest risk of sanctioning by their elites—are particularly unlikely to disclose information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we show the historical development of different conceptions of political economy, criticizing the hegemonic pretention of neoclassical economics, and highlighting what we call the "new political economy": the study of the social, political and moral constitution of the economy in history. We describe this interpretation's current disciplinary insertion in political science, and offer two analytical keys to orient future investigations. Finally, we survey recent works in Latin America that echo this interpretation, especially the revisions of the 'political economy of policy reform' literature and the widening of studies on varieties of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to much of the political economy literature, this article explores acts of refusal that obstruct attempts to impose austerity measures on advanced industrial democracies. It thereby complements a literature that has thus far focused far more upon the (apparently unobstructed) imposition of austerity. In doing so, it uses two typically 'low-resistance' countries – Japan and the UK –as least-likely cases and finds that austerity is rarely uncontested. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it highlights the 'causal recipes' sufficient for both (1) anti-austerity activity to have a significant impact on austerity proposals and (2) the smooth (unobstructed) imposition of austerity. The politics of austerity is shown to be better understood as an iterative interaction between proposals for austerity and the acts of refusal they encounter. These obstacles to austerity appear more straightforward to activate effectively in Japan's coordinated model of capitalism, whilst the UK's liberal market economy tends to generate more innovative forms of dissent that (if they are sufficiently militant) provide an alternative route towards the obstruction of austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a review essay of Gareth Stedman Jones's biography Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. It begins by situating the book in relation to existing biographies before outlining Stedman Jones's approach, which is to conceive of Marx's works as interventions within contexts which the historian of ideas must reconstruct. I argue that although the book provides an excellent account of the political contexts within which Marx lived and worked, its interpretations of his writings are frequently ungenerous, unbalanced, and misleading. I defend Marx against charges that his work was economically confused, politically naïve, and overly abstract, using the Grundrisse in particular for illustrative purposes. I also take issue with Stedman Jones's methodology, questioning whether it is desirable or possible to separate Marx from Marxism and return him to his nineteenth-century context. I end by suggesting that Stedman Jones's attempt to return Marx to his context brings into focus the contexts of Stedman Jones's own intellectual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster recovery efforts form an essential component of coping with unforeseen events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and typhoons, some of which will only become more frequent or severe in the face of accelerated climate change. Most of the time, disaster recovery efforts produce net benefits to society. However, depending on their design and governance, some projects can germinate adverse social, political, and economic outcomes. Drawing from concepts in political economy, political ecology, justice theory, and critical development studies, this study first presents a conceptual typology revolving around four key processes: enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment. Enclosure refers to when disaster recovery transfers public assets into private hands or expands the roles of private actors into the public sphere. Exclusion refers to when disaster recovery limits access to resources or marginalizes particular stakeholders in decision-making activities. Encroachment refers to when efforts intrude on biodiversity areas or contribute to other forms of environmental degradation. Entrenchment refers to when disaster recovery aggravates the disempowerment of women and minorities, or worsens concentrations of wealth and income inequality within a community. The study then documents the presence of these four inequitable attributes across four empirical case studies: Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in the United States, recovery efforts for the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, and the Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand. It next offers three policy recommendations for analysts, program managers, and researchers at large: spreading risks via insurance, adhering to principles of free prior informed consent, and preventing damage through punitive environmental bonds. The political economy of disaster must be taken into account so that projects can maximize their efficacy and avoid marginalizing those most vulnerable to those very disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes an understudied and contested form of government taking, transfer restriction, which has supplanted expropriation as the most ubiquitous and costly type of international property rights violation. Veto-player-type constraints curtail governments’ ability to engage in outright and (nontransfer related) creeping expropriation but have little impact on their ability to generate wealth via transfer restrictions. We use a formal model to derive testable implications regarding the effect of political institutions and domestic politics on governments’ ability to collect these two types of rent. Empirically, we use novel time-series cross-sectional data to show that while veto-player-type political constraints diminish expropriation risk, transfer risk is much less affected: even constrained governments impose transfer restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at contributing to study the stock market's reaction up to the point of generating significant abnormal returns or cumulative abnormal returns within the Brazilian impeachment period. By means of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), in its semi-strong form, the purpose was verifying whether the presidential impeachment that took place in Brazil in 2016, in 3 different dates, brought the expected reaction from the stock market on the Brazilian Stocks, Commodities and Futures Exchange (BM&FBOVESPA). The theme is relevant, as it addresses aspects of politics and economic theory and their interactions in stock markets. It impacts in the area of capital markets, because this suggests that economic players can, through their expectations and information, see adverse reactions in the market. The methodology analytically employed encompasses a brief literature review as a theoretical basis about the institutions involved and it refers historically to impeachment events. Quantitatively, the methodology consists in the study of events, so that the expectations are observed by means of time-series regression models based on the autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA) models. The result found, under three major events that culminated in the 2016 Brazilian presidential impeachment, was that no significant statistics has been determined, at a 5% level, in all estimated windows and in all events. Statistically, it was not possible to reject the hypothesis that the abnormal returns and the cumulative abnormal returns equal zero. So, the markets have been considered to be well-informed regarding the events, in this specific situation, i.e. according to the EMH, in its semi-strong form, the markets have reacted as expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has become the leading country to develop wind and solar energy industries. By presenting the institutional arrangement and interest constellations of China's regulatory system of renewable energy sectors, this paper argues that the reasons for China's swift expansion of wind and solar energy investment go beyond the notion of a state-led model. It also reveals that due to a series of internal power struggles and external shocks, the current regulatory system is undergoing significant restructuring. A new policy paradigm is emerging that is largely different from the previous decades of policy orientation that centred on capacity expansion and instrumental interests for renewable energy development. The new paradigm would face tremendous challenges from existing institutions and vested interests, and it requires new set of ideologies that can help renewable energy sector to truly competing with the energy incumbents in order to bring about meaningful lowcarbon energy transition in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annette Weiner used the term 'inalienable possessions' to describe a category of property of fundamental importance in Oceania, and in Europe, from Roman times until the eighteenth century. The archetypal form of this inalienable wealth is the landed estate - the 'immovable property' of Romano-Germanic law. This type of wealth, inherently political and carrying functions we associate with the state, has been historically produced by aristocratic social orders. I argue that classical anthropology missed the opportunity to explore aristocracy as a comparative analytical category. A reexamination of classic ethnographies reveals the importance of both aristocracy and this inalienable power-wealth, even in iconic accounts of 'egalitarian society' such as Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer. Further consideration of inalienable property shows it to be central to the early-modern state (Commonwealth) just as it was to the Roman republic (Res Publica), and suggests the possibility of a productive new comparative frame of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the state of Sonora, the 2009 Hermosillo ABC Day Care Center fire and the 2014 Cananea copper mine spill highlighted how deregulation and divestiture of state services by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN) served the interests of a few elites, who maintained rule through mechanisms of impunity: in other words, through actions undertaken without concern about the law or repercussions. Although impunity produces a seemingly incoherent set of policy and politics, results from dozens of semi-structured interviews by our team also suggest that exercising power through impunity is part of the culture of governance in Mexico, relying on global ties, but not necessarily requiring any specific individual or party leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freedom is a core value centralized in Marxism. When applied to the study of political economy, Marxist freedom focuses, in its ontological sense, on the elimination of all forms of class coercion so that public coordination of individual preferences will proceed in a cooperative way to improve material living standards, reduce the working day, and promote all-round development of personality for all members of society. In its epistemological sense, Marxist freedom stresses the importance of developing thorough theories of social class and the state, so that meaningful post-revolutionary institutional innovations can be implemented to facilitate the ontological task of eliminating all forms of class coercion. While classical Marxist theories of social class and the state provide great insights into the class bias of bourgeois approaches to political economy and the adverse impact of capitalist market economy on human freedom, they tend to be ambiguous about the distinction between the state class and privately propertied class. This theoretical deficiency in classical Marxism was evidenced by a lack of consistent effort to build workers’ democratic institutions in post-revolutionary Russia to thwart the rise of the state class in face of objective adversities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De Ville and Siles-Brügge (2016) argue that the politics of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations are entirely new and that it will lead to 'regulatory chill'. We think these two statements are untenable from a logical and empirical standpoint. While distributive political conflict is relatively absent because of firms' integration into global value chains, civil society organizations voice value-based opposition to the prospective agreement, just like in the past. TTIP is also unlikely to undermine contracting parties' ability to regulate the market to promote fundamental social values, because regulatory convergence is generally decided upon in a piece-meal fashion, and is subject to a super-majoritarian (dis)approval threshold in the Council, the European Parliament and national parliaments. Moreover, we show why it is plausible to expect TTIP to result in an upgrading of world trade rules, a benign development on the global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of economic downturns for states’ redistributive politics. We track state policies from 1980 through 2010 and illustrate how economic downturns led states to adopt budget-balancing policies by suppressing both the increased spending on programs benefiting the poor otherwise expected under Democratic Party control and the tax cuts for the wealthy otherwise expected under Republican Party control. We also undertake a natural experiment case study—comparing the forty Democratic and Republican governors in office right before (2007–2008) and after (2009–2010) the onset of the Great Recession. We find that Republican governors were less likely to propose spending and increased calls for spending cuts; yet, no similar shift in tax proposals was evident with continued calls for tax cuts to the wealthy. Democratic governors exhibited a similar pattern, but were less responsive and more likely to maintain their earlier policy proposals even after a significant downturn in the national economy. Together, these findings highlight how economic and political conditions interact with one another to shape “who gets what, when, and how from government,” as well as clarify that we must ask and answer these questions separately for taxing and spending to capture the complex politics of redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent episodes of massive student protests in countries in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, raise the question of whether we are witnessing to a new surge of student protests. This profile offers an interpretation of the socio-economic and political processes that have caused contentious reactions among students, paying special attention to changes in the major characteristics of the higher education sector. In last decades, governments of all colors have enacted laws promoting the outsourcing of personnel, the managerialization of governing bodies, and the introduction of tuition fees as well as cuts to public funding. These changes are inspired by a new paradigm, which promotes the ‘discipline of the market place, the power of the consumer and the engine of the competition.’ In this context, various forms of resistance and opposition can be observed. Here, we focus on three dimensions: (1) financing and autonomy of universities; (2) governance and managerialization; (3) precarization of labor conditions. The profile shows how recent protests in Chile and England are related to changes in the afore-mentioned dimensions. We conclude that the reappearance of students as political actors is related to the emergence of a range of distributional conflicts stemming from the implementation of the neoliberal agenda in the field of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Borders constitute the international system of states. Accordingly, states will, from time to time, take assertive measures to secure the border, with among the most aggressive strategies being the construction of physical barriers, which we refer to as "border walls." Using original data on man-made border wall construction from 1800 to 2014, we theorize and find that in many cases, wall construction is about economic security. Significant economic disparities between the states will create incentives to illegally transport people or move goods readily available in the poorer country but highly regulated in the richer country. We find that economic disparities have a substantial and significant impact on the presence of a physical wall that is independent of formal border disputes and concerns over instability from civil wars in neighbors. In other words, "prominent examples such as the Maginot Line", constructed largely out of fear of attack, is an exception, not the exemplar, of the reasons states construct border walls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional differences in economic growth have been observed within many countries. Our story emphasises three region-specific factors driving growth—capital, labour and political factors. Conditional on differences in production factor ( i.e. , labour and capital) variations across democratic states, what role do differences in underlying “political factors” across regions play in accounting for regional growth disparities? We build a political economy model of endogenous growth where regions have the same political institutions, but experience different (and estimable) distributions over voter political biases ( i.e. , our “political factors”). In our model, political factors affect regional productivity as a consequence of politico-economic equilibrium . We discipline our regional growth accounting exercises by calibrating/estimating each model to American state-level economic and political-survey data. We show that the capital factor is the predominant driving force behind growth in American states. Nevertheless, regional variations in distributions of voter's political biases also account a great deal for regional growth disparities. We also evaluate how much politics would have distorted agents' welfare and regional growth, were regional economies given the opportunity to live under an efficient social planner's allocation system; and, if agents were to live under the same democratic system but where all voters have equal voting influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public architecture has proven its utility as a metric for the materialization of religious authority; however, archaeologists have been less successful at identifying how ideology is materialized outside formal ritual settings. Here we address the question of how religious laws that dictated separation of people and activities – known as thekapusystem – influenced the way homes were built in pre-European contact era Hawai‘i. On the landscape scale, we consider three variables that could be correlated with the influence of religious authority: distance to a local temple marking a district boundary, the degree of daily interaction within the community and investment in household architecture. Our findings suggest religious authority was materialized with a high degree of ubiquity across all house sites without regard to any of these factors, a pattern consistent with pervasive religious authority across daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we review the EU's significance for social policies in the UK. The EU has a limited legal role or institutional capacity to directly regulate the social policies of its member states. This role is even more limited in the case of non-eurozone countries. There are a handful of EU policy measures which have had effects on social policy in the UK. However, these effects have not changed the institutional arrangements for making, organising and delivering social policy, which remain firmly in the hands of UK governments. In consequence, a 'Leave' or 'Remain' result has relatively limited implications for social policy, except in the case of specific social groups: notably for UK and other EU nationals who have lived and worked in at least one other EU country. Other EU legislation and regulation is compatible with the current and historical policy preferences of UK governments and political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the materiality of cities has been criticized by critical urban scholars for being overly descriptive and failing to account for political economy. We argue that through the conceptualization of urban metabolisms advanced by ecological economists and industrial ecologists, materialist and critical perspectives can be mutually enriching. We focus on conflict that has erupted in Delhi, India. Authorities have embraced waste-to-energy incinerators, and wastepickers fear that these changes threaten their access to waste, while middle class residents oppose them because of their deleterious impact on ambient air quality. We narrate the emergence of an unlikely alliance between these groups, whose politics opposes the production of a waste-based commodity frontier within the city. We conclude that the materiality and political economy of cities are co-constituted, and contestations over the (re)configuration of urban metabolisms span these spheres as people struggle to realize situated urban political ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spatial competition, public infrastructure plays a crucial role in determining product market outcomes. In our model, consideration of infrastructure's impact on the product market drives the preferences of consumers in their dual role as voter/taxpayers. The spatial heterogeneity of consumers produces conflicting political interests and in many cases inefficient outcomes. However across both exogenous and endogenous market environments product market competition consistently leads to higher levels of publicly funded infrastructure than monopoly/collusion. Furthermore, competition's boost to the popular support for infrastructure investment is often excessive while monopoly leads to underinvestment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A popular approach over the past twenty years has been to rely upon voluntary standards as a means to make claims, measure, and judge whether a number of social-equity concerns exist in private-sector practices. But can voluntary standards deliver gender equity? This contribution responds to this question by exploring how standards and gendered division of labor interact in certifiedtea value chains (for example, Ethical Tea Partnership, Fairtrade, Organic, and Rainforest Alliance) in Tanzania. The results of this mixed-method study (2008-10, 2013) contribute to the literature on gender equity and standards by building on the gendered value-chain approach to analyze these complex and contextual interactions. The study proposes that there is a need tofocus on the interactions between men and women with different skills and training that contribute to how equitably their roles are distributed in the certified-tea value chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the re-emergence of populism in Poland. With an all but absent left, the anti-neoliberal position in Poland emerged from the right. The article explores the processes associated with this and critically evaluates the populist turn asking if this is a rejection of neoliberalism or whether recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with contemporary neoliberalism. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with post-communist transition, first through Shock Therapy, second through Europeanization, and more recently through the so-called global financial crisis, former dissidents have been co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. In the absence of a more forceful left response in Poland, the population has proclaimed its outrage with the hardships of post-communism by discovering a captivating message from the populists. The emergence of populist social forces has become one of the mechanisms for the disenfranchised to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalization. Populism, nationalism and neoliberalism can happily co-exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses an important source of variation within democracies — the degree of institutionalization. The concept of institutionalization describes the extent to which politics takes place, and is believed to take place, via formal political institutions. Countries vary in their degree of institutionalization, hence, in the degree to which political actors pursue their goals via conventional politics or via “alternative political technologies”. This paper postulates that if politics is conducted largely outside of formal channels, the structure of the formal channels should not matter much as a determinant of policy outcomes. To address this issue this paper proposes a new index of institutionalization and with it revisits seminal work regarding the impact of constitutions on public spending. The findings show that the effect of constitutional rules on policy outcomes is conditional on the degree of institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global financial and more widely economic crisis which began in 2007–2008 has been a crisis indelibly of political economy. This fact has led scholars of finance ‘back’ to political economy, where geographers’ interest in finance first materialized in the 1980s. In this light, this article reviews recent work on the geographical political economy of the crisis, highlighting such work’s main themes, contributions and lacunae. It shows that this work has been powerfully influenced by developments in geographical political economy, and by the latter’s engagement with alternative intellectual traditions, over the past three decades. But it argues also that the attempt to theorize and document the place of finance within geographical political economy remains very much an ongoing project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highly centralised countries like Italy and Spain have devolved fiscal power to regions in an asymmetric way. Some well-off regions get transfers that turn them into net recipients of the fiscal system. We demonstrate in a political economy model of fiscal federalism that, in centralised countries, side-payments are used to compensate regions that are set back by the fiscal system and can credibly threaten to secede. Compensation blocks political negotiation on alternative--more efficient--fiscal systems. We study two regions, Valle d'Aosta in Italy and Pais Vasco in Spain, as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a political economy analysis of the evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or ‘drones’ in the USA. Focus is placed on the interplay between the polity and private economic influences, and their impact on the trajectory of political, economic, and military outcomes. We identify the initial formation of the drone industry, trace how the initial relationships between the military and the private sector expanded over time, and discuss present relationships. Understanding the historical evolution of UAV technology, as well as the major players in the industry today, is important for ongoing policy debates regarding the use of drones both domestically and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian economy suffered a balance of payment crisis in 1991, which provided the context for the rolling out of neoliberal policies, also referred to as the New Economic Policy in India. This paper examines the national and global causes and context of India's economic crisis and adoption of neoliberal policies. While grounding my analysis in historical-geographical materialism, I argue that India's economic crisis was a product of certain contingent conditions. I draw attention to India's pre-neoliberal economic regime and analyse how the earlier-established relationship between revenue generation and expenditure ran into trouble; what changes occurred in the organization and management of revenues and capital; nature of interventions of the state in the circulation of capital; changes in the physical aspects of circulation of commodities, together with foreign trade and the formation of the 'world market'; and the rise of the United States as the only global superpower. I conclude that India's economic crisis of 1990-91, and the neoliberal policies that followed, are products of contingent historical and geographical conditions. A teleological approach towards examining global capitalism and production of economic crisis often neglect such contingencies and provide a set of causalities that may, at best, be classified as incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the levels of owner influence in 211 different print and broadcast outlets in 32 different European media markets. Drawing on the literature from industrial organization, it sets out reasons why we should expect greater levels of influence where ownership of individual outlets is concentrated, where it is concentrated in the hands of individuals or families and where ownership groups own multiple outlets in the same media market. Conversely, we should expect lower levels of influence where ownership is dispersed between transnational companies. The article uses original data on the ownership structures of these outlets and combines it with reliable expert judgements as to the level of owner influence in each of the outlets. These hypotheses are tested and confirmed in a multilevel regression model of owner influence. The findings are relevant for policy on ownership limits in the media and for the debate over transnational versus local control of media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of institutionalisation of political economy has become of increasing interest in tracing the evolution of economic thought. This paper presents a comparison of the development of these processes in Italy and Spain, through the analysis of the presence of political economy in some institutions in both countries between 1860 and 1900: universities, economic associations, economic journals and national parliaments. This essay aims at supplying new insights to the consolidation of economics as a scientific and socially appreciated field of knowledge, and exploring the influence of the form of institutionalisation on the economic ideas diffused in a particular country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Voting rights, however, were not won by force or threats thereof, a fact leading political economy theories find hard to explain. Studying the timing of suffrage extensions in US states between 1869 and 1919, we find that a scarcity of women strongly promoted early transitions to women's suffrage. Such scarcity significantly reduced the political costs and risks for male grantors of the suffrage. It might also have made women's suffrage attractive as a means to attract more women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an account of rent-seeking in relation both to economic policies and political practices in South Africa. The article draws attention to continuities and similarities in this regard between the two distinct periods of nationalist rule from 1948 to 1994 and from 1994 to 2012. The economic dimensions that are specifically addressed are industrial policy, the labour market, state administration and tenders and service delivery and welfare. The more specifically political dimensions addressed include the electoral system, the relationship between constitutionalism and the judiciary, and the rule of law. The article highlights the dangers posed by excessive rent-seeking and especially its negative implications for redistribution, economic growth and the consolidation of democracy in a highly unequal society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The collection and dissemination of data on human and nonhuman organisms has become a central feature of 21st-century biology and has been endorsed by funding agencies in the United States and Europe as crucial to translating biological research into therapeutic and agricultural innovation. Large molecular data sets, often referred to as “big data,” are increasingly incorporated into digital databases, many of which are freely accessible online. These data have come to be seen as resources that play a key role in mediating global market exchange, thus achieving a prominent social and economic status well beyond science itself. At the same time, calls to make all such data publicly and freely available have garnered strength and visibility, most prominently in the form of the Open Data movement. I discuss these developments by considering the conditions under which data journey across the communities and institutions implicated in globalized biology and biomedicine, and what this indicates about how Internet-based communication and the use of online databases affect scientific research and its role within contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Guillermo O'Donnell drew attention to "brown spots" in Latin America's political topography, which he defined as peripheral regions where the presence of the republican state is attenuated and more arbitrary forms of power hold sway. Similarly uneven projections of state authority are visible across sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reviews three ways of explaining such unevenness in the state's reach: (a.) a geographic, economic, demographic determinism perspective, (b.) a historical-sociological perspective, (c.) a political perspective centered on strategic bargaining between social actors and state actors. We propose that unevenness in state quality is often an artifact of state-building, rather than evidence of state failure. An analysis of statebuilding in modern Africa, focusing on Côte d'Ivoire, explores some of these dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper argues that Milonakis and Fine, in their book From Political Economy to Economics, offer an account of history that systematically omits discussion of how economics has been shaped by the political and social context in which it developed. This contrasts with work by intellectual historians who have argued that such factors were crucial to understanding the history of economic ideas. It is ironic given that Milonakis and Fine are criticising economists for excluding the political and the social from economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers a commentary on Marion Maddox’s and Nicolas de Bremond d’Ars’s articles in this journal. He suggests that taking into account macro-level changes in political economy is the key to understanding many current debates in the sociology of religion. He situates the Maddox and de Bremond d’Ars texts in the context of contemporary scholarship on religion and economy and discusses whether a new political economy of religions is emerging with reference to a growing economic reasoning among religions, new forms of religion and Church–State relations. The author raises many questions on the nature of contemporary religious change and the specific role of global capitalism and neoliberalism. He also suggests that religions will both adapt to and take advantage of the new state of affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wrestling with basic problems of causal inference between institutions and outcomes has been a central focus of political science over the last decade, and as elsewhere in the discipline, scholars of postcommunism have begun to make some headway on these problems. Their efforts have not only advanced important debates about postcommunism, but also in many cases addressed long-standing concerns in political science. This is in itself a sign that after years on the periphery of political science prior to 1989, the study of politics and economics in postcommunist Eurasia has come in from the cold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have carbon markets been rapidly adopted as policy solutions to climate change in the last decade? Perhaps surprisingly, this question has attracted virtually no attention in the large literature on such markets. The standard arguments given for why carbon markets are good ways to respond to climate change do not explain why such markets have flourished as governance mechanisms in relation to climate. Carbon markets have spread and become taken-for-granted because of the potential they give to certain powerful actors (financiers, specifically) to create new cycles of investment, profits and growth. As a consequence, they make possible a political coalition combining financiers with environmentalists. This coalition has considerable potential to legitimize substantial cuts in carbon emissions in the face of continued opposition from other interests. It is the combination of these two elements – the promotion of specific growth sectors and the construction of a political coalition – that constitutes the principal political virtue of carbon markets. In order to demonstrate this claim, the history of emissions trading is traced and the implication of this analysis is explored for the further building of climate governance centred on carbon markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Asia-Pacific region is home to a large and rapidly growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). These agreements differ widely in design, scope and purpose. The “noodle bowl” that has resulted runs the risk of distorting investment and trade. Neither global institutions (the WTO) nor regional institutions such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping have successfully addressed these issues. Amidst this increasingly messy situation, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement stands out for a range of important economic and political reasons, not least of which is its potential to take existing PTAs in the Asia-Pacific region in a new direction. The aim of the TPP negotiators is to produce a comprehensive, high quality, multi-party agreement to tame the tangle of PTAs and be a potential stepping stone to achieving the goal of liberalizing regional trade on a non-discriminatory basis. The economic gains from removing border barriers among the countries involved in the initial TPP negotiations are likely to be limited, however, given the small size of many of the economies and the existing PTAs among them. To date, the US has been unwilling to offer a single set of arrangements for all TPP partners, preferring to build on existing bilateral agreements. Pessimism about the immediate results from the TPP should be tempered, however, by considerations of the dynamics that it might set in train; on the other hand, it has the potential to divide the region and exacerbate China's concerns about “containment”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]