Utopias Re-imagined: A Reply to Panizza

This article is a reply to Panizza's recent article, 'Unarmed Utopia Revisited: The Resurgence of Left-of-Centre Politics in Latin America'. It contests the claims that there are no alternatives to market economies and liberal democracy in contemporary Latin America. It does this by disentangling the conceptual assumptions that underlie the analysis presented, which, it argues, construct a loaded dice that makes the conclusions of the arguments seemingly inevitable and objective. It also explores the internal contradictions within the alternative presented. This analysis is developed through the use of critical social theory and with reference to the 'movements from below' engaged in the struggle to re-imagine and reconstruct utopias. This involves bringing to the heart of analysis a theoretical orientation in which structures become a series of concrete social relations, not objects, and power is mediated at a variety of spatial levels. It necessitates a conceptualisation of politics, structure and the agents and nature of structural change that expand the boundaries of traditional political science categories. Such conceptual expansion and theoretical repositioning make visible, and politically central, the movements from below normally categorised as marginal in political analysis.     

Cultural Authenticity and Liberal Democracy: A Reply to Colin Tyler

This paper takes issue with Colin Tyler's critique of Bhikhu Parekh's work on liberalism and cultural pluralism in his 'The Implications of Parekh's Cultural Pluralism', Politics 16(3). I argue that Tyler subscribes to an overly monolithic view of cultural identity, that democracy can be a procedural or practical ideal not a cultural understanding, and that in any case the existence of deep-seated cultural pluralism is a good reason for rethinking democratic values and endorsing a republican, rather than liberal, conception of democracy.     

A Soiled Password: Democracy,the Word and Democracy,the Thing

The word‘democracy’ to be distinguished from the thing‘democracy.’ Removal by the Italian parliament of a corrupt and scandalous Premier for a respected, honest technician and a form of civil service government does not infringe the second category. Referendums give strength to a handful of already overmighty rich men controlling media outlets. Witness Fox Radio and TV and the poison of Glen Beck, also the virulent nationalism of the Murdoch and Desmond papers. Note the fifty plus year lag in enfranchising women in Switzerland, a self‐evident democratic advance held back by ‘the voice of the people’ in successive referendums. Government should be free from populism and be run by educated, intelligent people both in parliament and the Civil Service. ‘Yes Minister,’ however amusing, has done us a disservice. I would trust a senior civil servant above a press lord any day of the week. Witness the good sense of the Upper House in its current informed and experienced composition. The Lords blocked Tony Blair's plans to by‐pass Habeas Gorpus, refusing authoritarian government to an elected Premier with no sense of the rule of law or constitutional principle.     

Central Governing Incapacity and the Weakness of Political Parties: Russian Democracy in Disarray

Political parties can be an important mechanism by which tobetter integrate states in the developing world. Despite this,in Russia parties continue to penetrate provincial politicsonly weakly and thus do not help to integrate the state andenhance its abilities to govern in the periphery by extension.Drawing on evidence of weak central-state capacity to governin the Russian provinces and correspondingly weak politicalparty penetration, emergent political and economic actors havelittle interest in building political parties and increasingstate integration and capacity as a result. The article concludeswith a discussion of the implications of the argument and analysisfor the future of Russian political and economic development.     

Representative Bureaucracy: A Lever to Enhance Social Equity,Coproduction, and Democracy

Scholars and practitioners have long questioned whether the race, ethnicity, and gender of public bureaucrats matter to the efficacy and legitimacy of public services. Representative bureaucracy theory and research provide a growing body of empirical evidence that it does. This article examines some of the rich scholarly work that has been generated on representative bureaucracy and its implications for practice. A significant aspect of recent research focuses on the notion of symbolic representation, whereby the mere existence of a passively represented bureaucracy can itself improve outcomes by influencing the attitudes and behaviors of clients, regardless of bureaucratic actions or results. This article is intended to help both students and public managers understand the importance of representativeness in public organizations for a broad spectrum of practices and goals, from the coproduction of services to democratic rule.     

Democracy, Markets and Capital: Are there Necessary Economic Limits to Democracy?

This article reviews the neo-liberal case for economic limits to democracy, assesses the counterposed argument of socialists and social democrats and considers why the latters' practical experience in 'democratizing economic life' has been so unsatisfactory. The second half of the paper considers the claim that some form of market socialism can overcome these limitations. While the market socialists have some success in undermining the claims of the neo-liberals, there are acute difficulties in transforming their agenda for economic democracy into a practicable politics. At the same time, it is suggested that while there may indeed be some economic limits to democracy, we are still very far from reaching them.     

Citizenship and Democracy: A Journey to Europe's Past

The relationship between citizenship and democracy is poorly understood, and the two notions are often used synonymously. Governing is obviously the central issue, but whereas citizenship seems to require self-limitation by calling on civic virtues, democracy is actually enlarging citizens' power. The Polish and Dutch Republics from the seventeenth and eighteenth century present an interesting mirror image of how citizenship and democracy relate to each other in political practice.     

Parties and Partisanship: A Brief Introduction

Political Behavior -     

Parties in Elections, Parties in Government, and Partisan Bias

Adam Meirowitz Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: ameirowi{at}princeton.edu Thomas Romer Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: romer{at}princeton.edu Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidatesin elections and when winning candidates choose among policyalternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions,incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choicesare substantively complex and analytically unwieldy, particularlyif modeled explicitly and considered in total, from citizenpreferences through government outcomes. To strike a balancebetween complexity and tractability, we modify standard spatialmodels of electoral competition and governmental policy-makingto study how components of partisanship—such as candidateplatform separation in elections, party ID-based voting, nationalpartisan tides, and party-disciplined behavior in the legislature—arerelated to policy outcomes. We define partisan bias as the distancebetween the following two points in a conventional choice space:the ideal point of the median voter in the median legislativedistrict and the policy outcome selected by the elected legislature.The study reveals that none of the party-in-electorate conditionsis capable of producing partisan bias independently. Specifiedcombinations of conditions, however, can significantly increasethe bias and/or the variance of policy outcomes, sometimes insubtle ways.