The political implications of popular support for presidential term limits in Russia

With Vladimir Putin having commenced his second term, the issue of the constitutional limit of two successive terms for the president has again become politically salient in Russia. In this article, two specialists of Russian politics investigate public support in 2018 for term limits. They address three questions. Why does the issue of term limits matter? To whom in Russia does it matter? Is opposition to abolishing terms limits likely to be politically divisive? Their findings point in general to a shift in the level and character of support for term limits since 2012. Opposition to term limits has grown over time, and while in 2012 support for term limits was drawn from supporters of more authoritarian leadership, today it includes engaged democrats with negative views of the economic situation. They also find that supporters of term limits remain more likely to support political protest.     

Considering the Orange legacy: patterns of political participation in the Euromaidan Revolution

The proximity of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) andEuromaidan Revolution (2014) provides an opportunity to considerwhy some individuals remain active across protest cycles whileothers defect. Many social movement scholars explain differentialparticipation in terms of micro-structural, biographical, or cognitivefactors. Others rely on rational choice theories of collective actionbased on coordination. Testing competing explanations arecomplicated because the variables included in structural andagency-based models are often the same, although the underlyingcausal mechanisms are different. In this article, I argue that thekey to understanding the role of agency and structure in protestparticipation is to relax strong assumptions about the unified natureof society and consider the multiple paths to participation. Thisapproach suggests that both structural and agency-based causalmechanisms can influence political engagement depending onindividual experiences, identities, and perceptions of events.     

Critical social media information flows: political trust and protest behaviour among Kazakhstani college students

ABSTRACT

In political regimes where traditional mass media are under state control, social networking sites may be the only place where citizens are exposed to and exchange dissident information. Despite all the attempts, complete control of social media seems to be implausible. We argue that the critical information that people see, read and share online undermines their trust in political institutions. This diminishing trust may threaten the legitimacy of the ruling regime and stimulate protest behaviour. We rely on original survey data of Kazakhstani college students to confirm these expectations. The data are unique in that they directly measure exposure to critical/dissident information, as opposed to simply assuming it. The analysis leverages Coarsened Exact Matching to simulate experimental conditions. This allows us to better identify the consequential mechanism and the attitudinal precursor by which social media influence protest in an authoritarian context.     

Industrial restructuring in CEE regions: determinants of regional growth in the accession and in the crisis period

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, intense processes of industrial reconversion occurred in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Adopting a territorial perspective, the aim of this paper is to assess the impact of industrial restructuring on the economic growth of CEE regions, classified according to the typology of the industrial reconversion that occurred. Results point out that those areas able to reconvert their productive specialization to both new sectors and higher value functions achieved the best economic performance. These findings provide interesting insights on the past mechanisms of growth in CEE countries and they convey relevant policy implications for their future industrial strategies.     

The Attachment of Demonstrators to Institutional Politics: Comparing LGBTIQ Pride Marches in Argentina and Chile

Focusing on LGBTIQ demonstrations in Argentina and Chile, we study protesters' attachment to institutional politics, defined as their emotional and attitudinal connection with the political system. We show that Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators are on average more attached to institutional politics than Chilean ones. This can be explained neither by differences between Argentines and Chileans in general, nor by demonstrators' individual characteristics. Instead, expanding the political process model, we argue that achieving a substantial part of the LGBTIQ agenda in Argentina, and limited success in Chile, contributed to build a stronger attachment to the political system among Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators than their Chilean counterparts.     

Elections and political parties in Hong Kong's political development

This article seeks to explore the influence of social capital on the decision to hire Chinese professionals to work for Taiwanese companies in Vietnam. We argue that this employment and migration pattern is mainly determined by the social capital of the Chinese professional transient, and is not based solely on economic calculation as push-pull economic theory describes.     

Local democracy in a hybrid state: pluralism and protest in Volzhskiy,Russia

The standard narrative of Russia's “authoritarian backsliding” fails to grapple with the tremendous variation in subnational politics that emerged over the past two decades. This article offers a case study of the industrial city of Volzhskiy, which, although once a stalwart supporter of the Communist Party (KPRF), has evolved into a highly pluralistic system with democratic municipal institutions. Drawing upon analysis of local publications, protest data, and interviews with local politicians, this article traces the interplay of formal institutions and informal political processes in Volzhskiy's local-level transition to democracy. Volzhskiy's pluralism and local democratic outcome can largely be explained by (1) the emergence of a more diverse set of economic and political interests and constituencies, and (2) a KPRF organization that was strong and provided robust competition that created the conditions for cooperation among the competitors to form fair and open local political institutions, which fostered the city's pluralism.     

Foreign investment,industrial restructuring and dependent development in Singapore

Singapore's industrial development and restructuring are very much dependent on foreign investment. Despite the apparent benefits of foreign investment and Singapore's success in export-oriented manufacturing, there are worrisome aspects arising from the large and growing dependency on such investment in the manufacturing sector as Singapore moves toward a developed country status. This article explores some of the consequences of such dependency. In terms of industrial pattern, foreign investment has created and maintained a dualistic industrial structure in manufacturing. Foreign firms and government industrial policies have suppressed and marginalized local entrepreneurship. Export-oriented industrialization has opened the employment doors for women in manufacturing. However, women are predominantly found in low pay, dead end jobs in the assembly line of Singapore's new industrial order. With the implementation of a new wave of industrial restructuring strategies, new capital and technological intensive foreign investments are welcomed and solicited. However, the local labour supply is unable to meet the increased demands. Foreign labour has been called in to fill the gaps. This inevitably distorts labour market outcomes and heightens the income inequality index.     

The political economy of the dollar and the yen in East Asia

From the early 1980s until 1997 large amounts of Japan's current account dollar surplus were invested in U.S. Treasury securities. This economic relationship developed into an “alliance” sustained by the economic policies of U.S. and Japanese authorities. The U.S.-Japanese alliance indirectly promoted East Asian export-led growth during 1985–95. However, policies associated with the U.S.-Japanese alliance also contributed significantly to the 1997 Asian financial crisis. During the past years Japan has launched a number of initiatives for aid and regional monetary co-operation with the aim of internationalising the yen and redirecting regional current account surplus flows to go within the region, rather than being invested in the United States. The article assesses the viability of this regional challenge to U.S. monetary hegemony.     

The transition in the political economy of South Korean development

This article analyzes the current transition in the political economy of South Korea in the context of political democratization and economic development. Because South Korea can be regarded as a case in which successful economic growth preceded political democratization, the article reviews the advantage and the disadvantage of late industrialization and its limitations. It discusses rising conflicts of interest among economic agents, labor disputes, and the erosion of international competitiveness. The article also reviews the sociopolitical reform program advanced by the new administration and its ramifications for the economic prospects. The article concludes that the Korean economy will continue to grow but not as fast as it had grown in the past and that the new political environment will play a critical role in determining the characteristics of capitalism in South Korea. The success of future economic development will depend on the stability of the political system and the national capacity to resolve conflict of interests.     

Social Struggles in Present Day Argentina

Since the mid 1970s, Argentine society has gone through a period characterised as counterrevolutionary. The conservative social forces, led by the financial oligarchy, seized power and government by means of the coup d'état of 1976, and imposed an economic and social policy towards the working class, based on wage cuts and a lengthening of the working day. When the military governments were replaced by civilian ones, physical coercion was replaced by economic coercion, through market laws with unemployment and wage cuts reaching unprecedented levels. Although the popular forces were weakened by the unfavourable development of social struggles since the mid–1970s, during the 1990s government policies were confronted by the people through different forms of struggle.
This article presents the results of research on the different forms of social struggle carried out by the working class and other popular classes since the end of the 1980s until today. It aims to conceptualise the forms of rebellion (foot riot, riot, strikes and roadblocks), to determine the different moments of social struggle and the likely trends of its development.     

The semi‐formal sector and the Turkish political economy

The general dichotomy in developing economies between the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economic sectors needs to be refined to account for the ‘semi‐formal’ sector: one whose activities appear to be governed by formal rules and procedures but are, in fact, largely unregulated and unrecorded by the state. Using Turkey as an example of a transitional, developing economy, the paper situates the semi‐formal sector in relation to the other two. Also important to examine is the level of autonomy which the semi‐formal sector enjoys in relation to the state and other economic sectors. Autonomy depends on access to resources, and the use of these resources in pursuit of economic, political, or socio‐cultural agendas. Three comparative lessons can be drawn: 1) despite state endeavours, a sizeable portion of seemingly formal economic activities go unreported and unregulated; 2) the semi‐formal sector helps the perpetuation of a mutually beneficial relationship of mutual neglect between state and society; and, 3) the sector's political agendas may best be characterised as one of ‘oppositional pragmatism’.     

Procedure over substance? CETA and the political economy of subsidiarity

ABSTRACT

Competing notions of subsidiarity can help to understand the intricacies of new types of trade deals as concluded between Canada and the European Union. From this perspective the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) balances two fundamentally different models of economic distribution and decision making authority either giving priority to private actors and their domestic communities or to political institutions aiming for a social embedding within global markets. Examining CETA as an unusual compromise in international regulatory cooperation, this article focuses on the settlement of highly contentious issues through complex procedural innovation. While this eventually made a final agreement between trading partners with two different polities possible, it could not settle widely diverging assessments about the long-term economic effects of the new deal. As a consequence, and to build bridges between distinct spaces of subsidiarity, the final agreement represents a flexible and open-ended approach to future trade relations.     

Social capital and support for the welfare state in Russia

Few tasks are more important in a post-communist setting than rebuilding the welfare state. We study individual preferences for increasing social welfare spending to reduce inequality. Using two surveys of about 34,000 and 37,000 Russians, we show the great importance of the “bridging” type of social capital for redistribution preferences in Russia, as it precludes possibilities of cheating and free-riding on the welfare state. Instrumenting social capital with education, climate, and distance from Moscow, we deal with endogeneity concerns and also contribute to our understanding of the deep roots of social capital in Russia. We claim that social capital in post-socialist countries could help mobilize public support for redistribution even where institutions are weak.