Political Science

Between 1998 and 2010, an unprecedented wave of left-of-center candidates reached power in Latin America. In spite of a shared concern for social inequality and opposition to the Washington Consensus, their governments pursued dramatically different economic policies. Why did some governments reverse neoliberal economic policies amid the supremacy of market orthodoxy? Why did others embrace market orthodoxy after denouncing it for decades from the opposition? Why were nationalizations, price controls, and trade barriers implemented in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, but not in Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, and Uruguay? More generally, what are the conditions that make the initiation and maintenance of economic reforms likely? In answering these questions, this book conducts a theoretical and empirical study of economic reforms in Latin America. It takes stock of the left’s economic transformations in the region and challenges widely held views that resource dependence, economic crises, or strong executives are responsible for them. Instead, it argues that party systems are crucial in explaining reform: when institutionalized, party systems are likely to preserve the prevailing market orthodoxy; when in disarray, they are conducive to drastic economic changes. Marshalling evidence drawn from ten countries and case studies of the governments of Ricardo Lagos in Chile, Lula in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, this study not only sheds light on one of the most puzzling aspects of contemporary Latin America, but also advances our general understanding of the left as a political ideology, economic reforms, and party systems beyond the region.

Does globalization erode the nation state's capacity to act? Are nation states forced to change their policies even if this goes against the democratic will of their electorates? How does government action change under conditions of globalization? Questions like these have not only featured highly in political debates in recent years, but also in academic discourse. This book contributes to that debate. The general question it addresses is whether globalization leads to policy convergence — a central, but contested topic in the debate, as theoretical arguments can be advanced both in favour of and against the likelihood of such a development. More specifically, the book contains detailed empirical case studies of four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland) in a policy area where state action has been particularly challenged by the emergence of world-wide, around-the-clock financial markets in the last few decades, namely that of the regulation and supervision of the banking industry. Based on careful analysis of historical developments, specific challenges, the character of policy networks and institutions, and their interaction in the political process, this book argues that nation states still possess considerable room for manoeuvre in pursuing their policies. Even if they choose supranational coordination and cooperation, their national institutional configurations still function as filters in the globalization process.

We live in an increasingly prosperous world, yet the estimated number of undernourished people has risen, and will continue to rise with the doubling of food prices. A large majority of those affected are living in India. Why have strategies to combat hunger, especially in India, failed so badly? How did a nation that prides itself on booming economic growth come to have half of its preschool population undernourished? Using the case study of a World Bank nutrition project in India, this book takes on these questions and probes the issues surrounding development assistance, strategies to eliminate undernutrition, and how hunger should be fundamentally understood and addressed. Throughout the book, the underlying tension between choice and circumstance is explored. How much are individuals able to determine their life choices? How much should policy-makers take underlying social forces into account when designing policy? This book examines the possibilities and obstacles to eliminating child hunger. This book is not just about nutrition, it is an attempt to uncover the workings of power through a close look at the structures, discourses, and agencies through which nutrition policy operates. In this process, the source of nutrition policy in the World Bank is traced to those affected by the policies in India.

To what extent and in what ways have European integration redrawn the boundaries of national welfare states? What are the effects of such redrawing? These questions are interesting and relevant because boundaries “count”: they are a pre-requisite for bonding individuals, groups, and territorial units, and for activating or strengthening their dispositions to share. Historically, welfare state formation can be read as a process of boundary-building — essentially through the establishment of compulsory public insurance schemes. European integration has prompted a reversal of this process: free movement and competition rules have in fact started to challenge the traditional bounding prerogatives of the nation-state in the social sphere. Today, the EU constrains not only the scope and content of bounding decisions (who is entitled to share what), but also the very “right to bound” in the first place. Such constraints have far reaching economic and financial implications. But their social and political implications may be even greater, given the importance of nation-based social sharing for material life chances, cultural identities and legitimation dynamics. As shown by the chapters in this book, reshuffling the “boundaries of welfare” can destabilise the basic architecture of Europe’s national societies and political systems. In order to counter this destabilisation, a carefully designed strategy of institutional reform is needed, capable of reconciling “solidarity” and “Europe” through stronger citizenship rights and more socially friendly regulatory instruments.

How are soldiers able to fight together in combat and why are they willing to do so? The phenomenon of small-group cohesion on the battlefield has long fascinated social scientists, philosophers, and historians. Examining the evolution of infantry platoon tactics from the First World War to current operations in Afghanistan, this book proposes a provocative sociological thesis. It challenges many existing presumptions about military cohesion and combat performance by highlighting the fundamental difference between cohesion displayed by the citizen soldiers of the twentieth century and today’s professionals. Against widely accepted myths, this book demonstrates that, in fact, the combat performance of the citizen infantry was poor. Although modern forms of fire and movement tactics were identified by 1917, the citizen soldiers which fought in the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam more often relied on costly mass bayonet charges or individual heroism, motivated by appeals to their masculinity and common national, ethnic, or racial identities. In the professional armies which began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, small-group cohesion has taken a quite different form. Professional soldiers are no longer primarily motivated by political ideology or common social identities but are united around refined collective drills which they learn to perform instinctively together through intensive training. In the twenty-first-century army, cohesion is now primarily based on professional competence. Not only has professionalism transformed combat performance but it has allowed groups once excluded from the army and the infantry to fight as soldiers; ethnic minorities, gays, and, finally, women can now fight on the front line. The book concludes by exploring the wider implications of professionalization in society.

This book introduces an innovative ‘3C’ framework of city, creativity, and cosmopolitanism to analyze why and how the forces of neoliberal economic restructuring processes, and people’s responses to them, encourage women’s migration for sex work from global city to global city. Based on original fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur (KL), the study begins by examining KL’s transformation into a global city. Despite the state’s creatively repressive responses to ‘illegal foreign prostitutes’, women from within and beyond the region find ways to enter for sex work. They travel on migratory pathways created from inter-global city collaboration and competition. Women’s decisions to migrate for sex work are based on and shaped by socioeconomic strategies crafted in the larger context of intersecting forces from the personal and household to the global levels. They migrate independently, with assistance from friends or from syndicates. This book offers an unprecedented examination of one KL syndicate specializing in non-trafficked migrant women. ‘Syndicate X’ arranges migrant women’s transportation, housing, security and sex work in exchange for monthly board and lodging fees and ‘taxes’ on their incomes. Analysis of migrant women’s and syndicate personnel’s encounters with difference in the global city at once evince emerging cosmopolitan subjectivities and affirm colonial-like ascriptions and ensuing worldviews and treatments of the Other. In the three dimensions of city, creativity, and cosmopolitanism, we find the common denominator of classed, gendered, and racialised-ethnicised forces that shape, and are shaped by relationships between state policies, public discourse, migrant women and syndicate personnel.

The delegation of functions and responsibilities to quasi-autonomous bodies operating with a significant degree of autonomy arguably empowers governments to address a wide range of social issues simultaneously without having to be involved with the minutiae of day-to-day socio-political interactions. Delegation therefore provides a structural and esoteric capacity beyond the cognitive and physical limits of politicians. There is nothing wrong with delegation as such. The problem relates to the failure to manage delegation in Britain. And yet we actually know very little about how the state beyond the core actually operates, how many bodies exist, what they do, how they are recruited, or why they were created. These gaps in our knowledge are all the more problematic in light of recent pronouncements by politicians at the national and European levels that ‘depoliticization’ is a central strand of their approach to governing. This book seeks to fill these gaps in our knowledge while at the same time cultivating a more balanced or sophisticated approach to the study of delegation. Delegated public bodies as they have been used as a tool of governance in the past should not be confused with how they might be used in the future. This book draws upon research conducted within the very core of the British political system during a Whitehall Fellowship within the Cabinet Office. It argues that the British state is ‘walking without order’ due to a general acceptance of the logic of delegation without any detailed or principled consideration of the administrative of democratic consequences of this process.

Policy dismantling is a distinctive form of policy change, which involves the cutting, reduction, diminution, or complete removal of existing policies. The perceived need to dismantle existing policies normally acquires particular poignancy during periods of acute economic austerity. However, scholars of public policy have been rather slow to offer a comprehensive account of the precise conditions under which particular aspects of policy are dismantled, grounded in systematic empirical analysis. Although our overall understanding of what causes policy to change has accelerated a lot in recent decades, there remains a bias towards the study of either policy expansion or policy stability. Dismantling does not even merit a mention in most public policy textbooks. Yet without an account of both expansion and dismantling, our understanding of policy change in general, and the politics surrounding the cutting of existing policies, will remain frustratingly incomplete. This book seeks to develop a more comparative approach to understanding policy dismantling by looking in greater detail at the dynamics of cutting in two different policy fields: one (social policy) which has been subjected to study before, and the other (environmental policy) which has not. On the basis of a systematic analysis of the existing literatures in these two fields, it develops a new analytical framework for measuring and explaining policy dismantling. Through an analysis of six, fresh empirical cases of dismantling written by leading experts, it reveals a more nuanced picture of change, focusing on what actually motivates actors to dismantle, the strategies they use to secure their objectives and the politically significant effects they ultimately generate. Dismantling Public Policy is essential reading for anyone wanting to better understand a hugely important facet of contemporary policy and politics. It will inform a range of student courses in comparative public policy, politics, social and environmental policy.

This book examines the role played by the parties themselves in two-party systems. It rejects the argument that the behaviour of the parties is determined largely by social forces or by the supposed logic of the electoral market. Instead, it shows that both structure and agency can matter. It focuses on three major aspects of change in two-party systems: why occasionally major parties collapse; why collapsed parties sometimes survive as minor parties, and sometimes do not; and what determines why, and how, major parties will ally themselves with minor parties in order to maximize their chances of winning. With respect to the first aspect it is argued that major parties are advantaged by two factors: the resources they have accumulated already, and their occupying role similar to that called by Thomas Schelling a ‘focal arbiter’. Consequently, party collapse is rare. When it has occured in nation states it is the result of a major party having to fight opposition on ‘two separate fronts’. The survival of a collapsed party depends largely on its internal structure; when a party has linked closely the ambitions of politicians at different levels of office, party elimination is more likely. The main arena in which agency is significant – when leadership is possible, including the politician acting as heresthetician – is in the building of alliances with minor parties. This is necessary for maximizing the chances of a party winning, but, for various reasons, coalitions are usually difficult to construct.