Attempts at diversification: Mexico and Pacific Asia

This article aims to explain the development of Mexico's relations with Pacific Asia. Based on the historical background of Mexico's relations with Asia and on internal and international transformations, we identify the interests of Mexican political actors in Pacific Asia. We provide an overview of the existing political and economic relations between Mexico and Pacific Asia, demonstrating that the success of diversification has been very limited. By trying to explain the gap between the strategic goals and the existing relations we focus on the domestic politics in Mexico. We conclude that intra-elite conflicts had a negative effect on the diversification attempts, since those conflicts prevented Mexican policy-makers from establishing the institutional basis for successfully implementing their foreign policy goals.     

Mexican Intellectuals and Policy Alternation (2000–2004)

The political and intellectual landscape of Mexico has been changed by two dramatic events: a new democratic experience, with the triumph of Vicente Fox in the presidential elections of the year 2000; and the relevant role that intellectuals are playing in public opinion. Soon, the democratic experience turned from illusion to deception, basically because Mexican political culture still is authoritarian, and this is something Mexican intellectuals could not accept. Their critics point out that democracy in Mexico is as new as it is weak, and Fox's government has been attacked in the media as no other president in recent history.     

Scotland's Future Political System

Debates on Scottish constitutional reform go hand in hand with discussions of political reform. Its reformers use the image of ‘old Westminster’ to describe ‘control freakery’ within government and an adversarial political system. Many thought that the Scottish political system could diverge from the UK, to strengthen the parliamentary system, introduce consensus politics and further Scotland's alleged social and democratic tradition. Yet the experience of devolution suggests that Holyrood and Westminster politics share key features. Both systems are driven by government, making policy in ‘communities’ involving interest groups and governing bodies, with parliaments performing a limited role and public participation limited largely to elections. The Scottish government's style of policy‐making is distinctive, but new reforms are in their infancy and their effects have not been examined in depth. In this context, the article identifies Scotland's ability to make and implement policy in a new way, based on its current trajectory rather than the hopes of reformers.     

'The Possible as the Art of Politics': Understanding Consensus Politics

Drawing on the Kuhnian model of scientific paradigms, this article suggests consensus politics should be conceptualised not as an agreement or a settlement but as a political framework that derives from an ideationally informed policy paradigm. Such a consensus constrains the auto-nomy of governing elites, encouraging them to conform to an established policy agenda that defines the 'mainstream' wherein 'the possible is the art of politics'. In Britain, as demonstrated by the replacement of a post-war social democratic paradigm by a contemporary neo-liberal successor, periods of policy continuity and incremental reform have been matched by occasions of dramatic political change. Any appreciation of consensus politics has therefore to explain change as well as account for stability, something considerably under emphasised in the existing literature. Consensus politics are therefore best defined as a constrained space within which politics is conducted and political actors differ, a paradigmatic framework from which political outcomes emerge, and never as an agreement freely entered into. Looking at consensus politics beyond the much commented upon post-war example, this article uses British politics since 1945 as an exemplar of consensus politics and an illustration of how a consensus can be forged, how it can endure and how it may change.     

“Like Butter Scraped over Too Much Bread”: Animal Protection Policy in Mexico1

Over the past fifteen years Mexico has developed a string of comprehensive animal protection regulations designed to address the serious problems that affect both wild and domestic animals in the territory. Yet for all their detailed coherence and despite serious government efforts, the regulations continue to lack effective enforcement and authorities are increasingly overstretched. This study discusses three key areas that obstruct the effective implementation of Mexican animal protection policy, but where advances could be feasibly initiated. The first concerns deficiencies at the political level. The second addresses the awkward relation between government and civil society on the issue. The third examines the scope of the problem in Mexico and some implications this has for international involvement. Finally the study suggests a more collaborative approach for implementing the policy that attempts to address central concerns in each of the three areas considered.     

Japan's military research and development: A high technology deterrent

Abstract

This article examines the increased linkage between domestic and foreign policy that has been a consequence of democratization and globalization in Korea. It argues that while prior to 1987 foreign policy-making saw very little public input, and while democratization did not lead to a weakening of domestic political institutions nor a rise in nationalism, it did open up domestic political space where foreign policy-making increasingly became part of the contentious electoral competition. The globalization policy, initiated with the purpose of raising Korea's international status, which has remained a goal of succeeding administrations, created a complex interdependency which led to a breakdown in the separation between the domestic and international, and that often brought with it a domestic backlash. As a consequence foreign policy-making, in the absence of a tradition of political compromise, increasingly runs the risk of either inconsistency, or even deadlock.     

Global Democracy: A Symposium on a New Political Hope

The idea that the values and norms of democracy can also be applied to global politics is increasingly debated in academe. The six authors participating in this symposium are all advocates of global democracy, but there are significant differences in the way they envision its implementation. Some of the contributors discuss if and how substantial changes undertaken by states, mostly in their foreign policies, may also generate positive consequences in global politics. Other contributors address the nature of the international arena and the possible reforms it should undergo starting with the reform of international organizations. The debate combines theoretical aspects with normative proposals that could also be advanced in the political arena and offers a wide range of perspectives on the attempts to achieve a more democratic global political community.     

Internationalization and Parliamentary Decision-making: The Case of Sweden 1970–1985

In this essay we discuss effects of growing interdependence and internationalization upon national political institutions. More exactly we address the question of how these processes are reflected in matters handled by the Standing Committees of the Swedish Parliament. Generally speaking, the proportion of international issues has increased continuously during the 1970s and the early 1980s. The internationalization of parliamentary work has mainly taken place outside the area of 'traditional' foreign policy. Even though internationalization is a general phenomenon in the Swedish parliament, the enhancement of international issues is particularly evident in subject areas linked to economic life in general, but issues concerning environmental policy, communications and energy policy also bear the stamp of internationalization. In spite of this internationalization of domestic politics the pattern of relations with actors on the international scene seems to be rather stable. The picture is dominated by international organizations in the Scandinavian region and Western Europe. Traditionally, the principle of consensus has governed Swedish security and defence policy. Our data support this notion. However, international issues outside the area of 'traditional' foreign policy do not bear the hallmark of consensus. The level of conflict is considerably higher and has risen, especially during the 1980s. Generally speaking, patterns of conflict in international issues do not deviate from those in 'pure' domestic policy. Thus, internationalization has also involved domestication regarding the level of conflict.     

The Influence of News Media on Political Elites: Investigating Strategic Responsiveness in Congress

News media play a central role in democratic politics, yet we know little about how media affect the behavior of policy makers. To understand the conditions under which news media influence political elites, we advance a theory of strategic responsiveness, which contends that elected representatives are more likely to heed their constituents' preferences when voters are attentive. Accordingly, news media's influence on legislative behavior should be most apparent near elections and dependent on the partisan composition of the constituency. We capitalize on the incremental rollout of the conservative Fox News Channel in the late 1990s to evaluate our theoretical predictions. Fox News caused both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to increase support for the Republican Party position on divisive votes, but only in the waning months of the election cycle and among those members who represent districts with a sizable portion of Republican voters.     

The 2012 Elections in Mexico: The Birth of a Consolidated Federal Democracy?

In 2012, the simultaneous elections at the federal, state and municipal levels in Mexico reopened the debate about the path of democratic consolidation in the country. With the return of the Revolutionary Institutional Party to the presidency in 2013, there are renewed signs that Mexican democratic consolidation is underway. Particularly important in this process is that the 2012 gubernatorial and mayoral elections have been more competitive, resulting in higher political alternation in power between political parties. Under a changing subnational political context, there are indications that subnational politicians are no longer under the shadow of a dominant party system. As a more consolidated federal democracy, the political landscape in Mexico has become more complex.     

国外妇女参政政策及对我国的启示

妇女参政是衡量一个国家文明程度和民主建设进程的重要尺度,目前,国外的妇女参政,无论从数量和比例上还是从任职结构和质量上来说,都取得了令人瞩目的成就。总结梳理世界各国近年的政策和实践经验,以期对提高我国妇女参政水平以启示。     

POLICY EVALUATION. DEMOCRATIC THEORY. AND THE DIVISION OF SCHOLARLY LABOR

The implicit priorities of political science have been inhospitable to policy evaluation as a scholarly endeavor. Political science, at least as practiced in the West, draws from a philosophic tradition that views political life, and especially democratic political life, as a public objective, not principally as instrumental for other social ends. Comparative policy analysis deviated from that tradition by treating political conditions as independent variables. Policy evaluation, which assesses the social consequences of governmental actions, deviated even further, adopting an explicitly and totally instrumental approach. The argument ofthis essay is that the tactics of policy evaluation should be adopted for assessing the impact of policy patterns on democratic institutions and citizenship. This recommendation flows from a diagnosis of the division of labor in policy evaluation and an identification of the optimum entry points for political science.     

Mexican Democracy and Its Discontents

This article describes the first stage of a major research project on public opinion and democratic consolidation in Mexico. That project, the Mexico 2006 Panel Study, comprises approximately 7,000 in‐depth interviews with ordinary Mexicans over the course of the upcoming presidential campaign. Its purpose is two‐fold: (1) to assess the degree to which Mexican political attitudes are supportive of democratic governance, and (2) to understand the role played by voters, politicians, party leaders, and the mass media in shaping Mexico's political agenda. Ultimately, the project aims to assess how faithfully Mexico's new political system can be expected to respond to the desires and beliefs of ordinary citizens.     

An Examination of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and New Political Participation

The mobilisation of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on New Years Day 1994 in Mexico attracted considerable attention from those concerned with the democratic deficits of neoliberal globalisation and the increasing sense of individual powerlessness as states synchronise economic and public policy with the ideas and institutions of global capital. The paper argues that as a critical social movement the EZLN explores the meaning and practice of economic, political and social democracy. The EZLN practises a politics of radical democracy that incorporates a variety of strategies for enriching the democratic project. However, the EZLN's democratic project has little in common with the inclusive democracy project and yet the EZLN's project of radical democracy does cultivate a useful way of rethinking the site and nature of democracy in an age of globalisation when such institutions seem so increasingly inept.     

Modern Politics in an Age of Global Terrorism: New Challenges for Domestic Public Policy

Much has been written about the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and their ramifications for international politics. This article contends that, nearly five years on, the type of terrorism which emerged that day has not only altered the way liberal democracies define and execute their foreign and defence policies, but that it has also affected their ability to attend to policy objectives domestically. Global terrorism, and the governmental policy responses to it, are not subjected to the same reciprocal balance checks that tend to limit the ferocity and lethality of domestic terrorist conflicts. Consequently, as policy-makers attempt to find responses appropriate to contain the new global threat, four values that democratic societies have come to uphold over the past two centuries are increasingly challenged: security, liberty, equality and efficiency have become fundamental principles that guide the formation of domestic public policy and constitute the criteria by which policy success is judged. Yet, our account of the political developments in the United Kingdom and the United States reveals that aspiring to those values is meeting unprecedented constraints.     

A Question of Time: Responsive and Responsible Democratic Politics

Since 2008, European crisis politics have thrown the importance of time in democracy into sharp relief. The need for rapid action by national authorities, the EU and international organisations conflicts with the time-consuming nature of democratic deliberation; short-term political firefighting has given little consideration to the long-term sustainability and time consistency of policies; and decentralised decisions threaten effective synchronisation within multi-level governance systems. This article suggests that democratic politics requires a balance between the temporal characteristics of responsive and responsible politics. The timeframe for responsive politics is shaped by electoral cycles that encourage speedy action; short-term lags between political choices and their effects; and temporal discretion of decision-makers. The timeframe for responsible politics is characterised by time-consuming procedures; solutions that take time to unfold and are sustainable in the longer term; and the purposive synchronisation amongst actors and across policy domains and levels of policy-making. The finely balanced temporal constitution of democracy has been challenged in two fundamental ways. First, as the ability of decision-makers to work within the time limits of their mandates and to respond to the temporal expectations of the electorate decreases, the temporal ties that ensure the responsiveness of political authority to the electorate weaken. Second, the distinct temporal qualities of majoritarian and non-majoritarian institutions that encourage responsibility are called into question. Consequently, political time in Europe runs the risk of becoming both less responsive and less responsible.     

The Foreign Relations of European Regions: Competences and Strategies

The article traces the foreign relations of 81 European regions by looking first at the constitutional competences which these regions enjoy within their nation-states. We discover that the regions in federal states have expanded their competences in two directions: conducting autonomous foreign activities and influencing national foreign policy. How far the Belgian regions, as well as the German and the Austrian Länder go in both directions depends very much on the scope of their competences in domestic politics. In non-federal states (France, GB, Italy), regionalisation brought rather more leeway to conduct a certain level of autonomous foreign activity than regional influence in national foreign policy. When we – in a second step – trace the strategies or directions of international activities which the regions pursue it becomes obvious that setting up an office in Brussels in order to adapt to political integration is very common among West European regions. In contrast, much more variety can be observed when examining the regions' strategies to adapt to fundamental economic and cultural transformations. Some European regions invest heavily in economic promotion offices and in transnational partnerships while others lack the motivation or ability to invest in these forms of foreign relations.     

Mexican migration policies after IRCA

The evolution since 1964 of Mexican government policy regarding migrant workers in the US is discussed. For a decade after the "bracero" program was terminated by the US, the Mexican government attempted to encourage creation of another legal framework for migration, regarded as inevitable whether legal or clandestine. Around 1974-75, a more distant attitude, termed the "policy of no policy," acquired considerable support in Mexican government and academic circles. The no-policy strategy allowed Mexico to achieve certain objectives regarding migration without prompting US intervention in its internal affairs, as for example by a linkage of US migration policy to specific Mexican government actions. The 1986 passage of the US Immigration Reform and Control Act effectively ended the no-policy strategy that had allowed the Mexican government to count on the continued emigration of Mexican workers without compromising its position of promoting respect for migrant rights. The unilateral change in the status quo by the US led to substitution of the "policy of dialogue," a clear signal of the Mexican government's search for a new migration agreement. The policy of dialogue has entailed greater discussion of the two traditional Mexican objectives regarding migration. Some progress has apparently been made concerning migrant rights, but the second and less explicit objective, that of preventing abrupt changes in US immigration policy and in migratory flows, is harder to judge. The atmosphere of freer public debate in Mexico is politicizing migratory policy.     

Recasting German federalism? The politics of fiscal decentralization in post-unification Germany

Why did the ideas of fiscal decentralization gain such political currency in Germany in the late 1990s but meet such a relatively dismal political fate by the Summer of 2001? In answering this question, I propose a framework centered around the interaction of ideas and state institutions to study the politics of fiscal decentralization in advanced democratic nation-states. First, I show that the new set of politically-charged ideas of fiscal decentralization which gained political weight in Germany in the late 1990s were driven by economic problems associated with German unification, the increasing popularity of “fiscal federalism” in German policy circles, and a centerperiphery conflict within German political parties. Second, my analysis explains the political failure of these ideas despite their apparent popularity among political and policy elites. Here, I focus on the role of the upper house of the German parliament in order to explain why these ideas have had such little policy success. After demonstrating that the long-standing tradition of “cooperative” federalism has largely survived German unification, the paper concludes by discussing the potential impact of the European Union’s 1997 Growth and Stability Pact on German federalism.     

Governmental policy preferences and foreign capital allocation: The case of China

This paper compares the determination of foreign direct investment and World Bank loans in China, with a focus on the role of its government. The statistical analysis reveals that World Bank loans responded sensitively to the major regional policy changes since the mid-1990s, but foreign direct investment did not. These findings pose an analytic challenge to the “strong” version of the state-centered approaches to the politics of economic development represented by the developmental state literature. However, they lend support for a “weak” version of the state-centered approaches developed by American political scientists Stephen Krasner and Theda Skocpol. He has taught comparative and international politics in Nankai University, China, Kent State University, and Walsh University. He is currently working on his dissertation about the political economy of foreign aid in China. The author wishes to thank Dr. Dennis Hart and Dr. Steven Hook and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on early versions of this paper. The author also wishes to thank Brian Juliao for his linguistic help.