What Determines Foreign Policy in Latin America? Systemic versus Domestic Factors in Argentina,Brazil, and Mexico, 1946–2008

Is it domestic politics or the international system that more decisively influences foreign policy? This article focuses on Latin America's three largest powers to identify patterns and compare outcomes in their relations with the regional hegemon, the United States. Through a statistical analysis of voting behavior in the UN General Assembly, we examine systemic variables (both realist and liberal) and domestic variables (institutional, ideological, and bureaucratic) to determine their relative weights between 1946 and 2008. The study includes 4,900 votes, the tabulation of 1,500 ministers according to their ideological persuasion, all annual trade entries, and an assessment of the political strength of presidents, cabinets, and parties per year. The findings show that while Argentina's voting behavior has been determined mostly by domestic factors and Mexico's by realist systemic ones, Brazil's has a more complex blend of determinants, but also with a prevalence of realist systemic variables.     

Radical Neglect? The “War on Terror” and Latin America

The rise of leftist governments in the Americas and the adoption of policy initiatives contrary to U.S. interests highlight a disconnect in interamerican relations, which cannot be understood simply as U.S. "neglect" of Latin America. In contrast to arguments that attribute the deteriorating relations to U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East, the article examines whether the "War on Terror" acted as a guiding paradigm for the George W. Bush administration in Latin America. Opposition to this "War on Terror" paradigm was evident following Colombia's 2008 air strike in Ecuador. Justified as a preemptive strike against a terrorist threat, Colombia's action met regional condemnation. The article argues that this Colombia-Latin America division reflects a larger geostrategic disconnect, whereby the "War on Terror" is challenged, causing the increasing marginalization of Washington and resistance to U.S. policy.     

“Corporatism With Adjectives”? Conceptualizing Civil Society Incorporation and Indigenous Participation in Latin America

Ethnodevelopment is a relatively new type of participatory policy that targets the poverty of marginalized ethnic groups with a focus on identity and self‐management. While observers have recognized the empirical significance of this new paradigm, little has been done to conceptualize ethnodevelopment. This article argues that national‐level ethnodevelopment implementation is a form of corporatism. Examining ethnodevelopment institutions in Ecuador, it shows that the state has structured, subsidized, and partially controlled the indigenous sector through ethnodevelopment policies and agencies. However, certain components of classical corporatism, such as monopolies of representation, do not characterize this paradigm. This article therefore classifies ethnodevelopment as a diminished subtype of corporatism. It challenges corporatism's long association with a particular historical period in the region and finds that Latin American states and social groups have called on historical institutional repertoires in responding to the newly salient ethnic cleavage in the region.     

What Explains President Joseph Kabila’s Quest for a Third Term until Pressured to Reluctantly Relinquish Power,late in 2018?

Abstract

The era of Congolese political, socio-economic instability that has affected the central African region has returned, yet again. Nearly two decades after Joseph Kabila was installed as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo by the Southern African Development community (SADC), at the height of the regional central African war, following the assassination of his father, Laurent Desire Kabila, he has not shown any willingness to relinquish power. This is even so after the lapse of his constitutional mandates in December 2016, secured in 2006 and 2011. This continued reign, which is dependent on the repressive use of force by the state, has elicited spirited attempts by the political opposition, including the influential Catholic Church, calling for his immediate resignation. In response, the state has unleashed repression, which has resulted in fatalities and uprooted communities, resulting also in forced migration that destabilised the Great lakes sub-region. This article argues that the state reconstruction of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, following the hurried departure of Mobutu Sese Seko, engineered by Laurent Kabila, and his son Joseph, has failed to take root, resulting in sub-regional instability that has engulfed, not only the Great lakes region, but also southern Africa as a whole.     

Is there a Common Path that could have Conditioned the Degree of Welfare State Development in Latin America and the Caribbean?

The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine from a multidimensional perspective the possible existence of a single path that could have conditioned the degree of welfare state development (WSD) in Latin America. Economic/industrial development, trade‐openness, democracy and the strength of leftist parties‐labour movement are used as explanatory variables in the qualitative comparative analysis. In contrast to previous findings, this paper shows that there is no evidence of a common path followed by countries with a relatively high/medium WSD. Nevertheless, countries that experienced a low economic/industrial development combined with a low democratic experience were conditioned to have low WSD.     

Voting Advice Applications and the Estimation of Party Positions – A Reliable Tool?

Data contained in Voting Advice Applications (VAA s) is not only a prerequisite for the vote recommendations they provide but can also be used for estimating party positions in low‐dimensional spaces. Given that VAA s can be designed differently in terms of their number of items and their measurement level, how much can one trust the party positions obtained from this source? We tackle this question by exploiting relevant variation in a real‐world setting: three VAA s offered at the 2017 Lower Saxony election. Despite substantial design differences, the policy spaces extracted through an inductive scaling approach are highly convergent. Simulated random item removal from the pooled dataset of all three VAA s furthermore suggests that about 40 items yield satisfactory reliability of the party positions. Finally, we find that a priori assigning VAA ‐items to ideological dimensions is potentially problematic as the interpretation of resulting party spaces may differ from the ones derived inductively.     

Developing the North,Defending the Nation? The Northern Australia Development Committee, 1945–1949*

The Northern Australia Development Committee (NADC) was established in late 1945 to coordinate the efforts of the Commonwealth, Queensland and Western Australian governments in developing the north of the continent. At the outset, defence considerations were uppermost. However, the NADC soon became entangled in disputes among Commonwealth departments and personalities over the relevance of northern development to national defence. Some — notably the Department of Defence — insisted that northern Australia no longer possessed special strategic significance. Others — notably the Department of External Affairs — argued that northern development must be conceived within a broader geo‐political context. This paper examines the NADC's entanglement in these disputes, and explains how this entanglement contributed crucially to the committee's ineffectualness and early demise.     

“A New Hope for Asia”? Australia,the United States and the Promotion of Economic Development in Southeast Asia

The Colombo Plan and Point Four program were programs that provided technical and economic assistance to the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia. They represented Commonwealth and American attempts to promote economic development in the region. This paper will investigate how these policies, which were framed by US policy‐makers and academics, were adopted in Australia. In so doing, it will demonstrate the ways that development was perceived as an important consideration in the foreign policies of both Australia and the United States. It will also examine the place of these programs in the Cold War and postcolonial world of the 1950s. As this paper will show, the interaction of these factors would affect Australian foreign policy for decades to come, revealing much about the complex nature of the Australian‐American relationship.     

Changes in the Partisan Composition of the Swiss Government. 1891, 1919, 1929, 1943, 1959, 2003, …?

After almost half a century of an unchanged distribution of seats among political parties in the federal government (Federal Council), the Swiss executive has experienced a new change in 2003. This change follows up on other changes in the past which occurred at irregular intervals. The question we wish to address in this paper is how these changes related to the electoral fortunes of the political parties. We find that electoral success does not translate directly into seat gains in the executive. A lag of up to two elections provides the best predictor. Thus, the rapid concession of a second seat to the SVP in 2003 is an outlier compared to the previous changes in the partisan composition of the Swiss government.     

The Regulatory State in Developing Countries: Can It Exist and Do We Want It? The Case of the Indonesian Power Sector

Abstract

In the rush for development, the regulatory state has assumed the mantle of a new panacea: the instruments and mechanisms necessary for better government, better governance, and better lives. This paper poses two basic questions in response to the rise of the regulatory state and its increasing diffusion into developing countries. First, can regulatory states exist in developing societies or, more accurately, can effective regulatory states emerge and hope to function in a manner similar to their counterparts in developed countries and deliver the types of benefits and outcomes they promise? And second, do regulatory states offer the most effective modalities for delivering enhanced social well-being? By unpacking the concept of the regulatory state and addressing its underlying assumptions and implicit normative values, it is suggested that the modalities of governance entailed in the regulatory state model may not be well suited to developing countries, hurting rather than enhancing governance outcomes. These issues are explored in relation to the Indonesian energy sector, specifically the upstream electricity generation, transmission and distribution sectors, and the machinations involved in governing the sector.     

“Super” Debates within the Antipodes? Explaining Differing New Zealand and Australian Retirement Policies in the late Twentieth Century

As others have shown, for much of the twentieth century, “although to different degrees in different periods and to different degrees in the two countries”, New Zealand and Australia shared a peculiar approach to social protection internationally. In particular, Francis Castles has published widely on the Antipodean “wage earners’ welfare state”. He has also shown, however, that New Zealand and Australia took quite dissimilar paths in refurbishing each welfare state in the last two decades of the twentieth century, significantly over superannuation. Most commentators attribute the distinction to dominant political personalities. New Zealand's Robert Muldoon's “election bribe” in 1975, meant a compulsory paid‐work based superannuation system, akin to the one Australia came to develop, was replaced by a universal pension scheme. Australia's Paul Keating implemented the compulsory Australian superannuation scheme in 1992 confirming the trajectory begun in the 1970s. In this paper I put the spotlight on the 1970s corporatism and Australasian industrial cultures to explain the varying New Zealand and Australian superannuation pathways. Such an approach emphasizes multilayered historicity, agency and contingency outside leadership‐driven models. It points to variance and its limits rather than convergence, despite, and because of, common origins and welfare foundations.