Is Inequality Really Declining in Malaysia?

ABSTRACT

Official statistics report rapidly declining household income inequality in Malaysia during the 2000s. However, this phenomenon has passed unnoticed and unexplained, while public discourse widely asserts that inequality has either risen or remained high. In particular, salaries and wealth are perceived to be increasingly concentrated at the top. Difficulties in accessing national income survey data necessitate exploration of other data sources, which permit this article to investigate trends in personal earnings and wealth inequality. Recent information on retirement savings, as well as public sector employment and car sales, indicate earnings rising moderately or holding steady, marked by higher growth in the uppermost segments. On wealth ownership, housing sales record high growth at the top and lagging growth in the bottom half; while unit trust fund ownership suggests similar trends, particularly within the majority Bumiputera population. Our findings, while exhibiting gaps, shed some light on the state of inequality and broadly concur with public perceptions of rising or persistently high inequality. This study also underscores the multi-dimensionality of inequality and the importance of researching structural inequalities in labour and asset markets.     

Was heißt Pragmatismus? Boltanski meets Dewey

Within sociological academia, Luc Boltanski is supposed to be one of the leading figures of neo-pragmatism. However, his references to the classics of the American philosophical movement at the beginning of the twentieth century are rare and unsystematic. Is Boltanski a pragmatist? But what does it mean to be a pragmatist? Facing the actual rebirth of pragmatism and its inherent heterogeneity, a more precise definition is needed. The paper addresses the works of Boltanski through the lenses of the philosophy of John Dewey and puts it to a pragmatist test which comes to a positive conclusion: Boltanski indeed reanimates central principles of pragmatism and translates them towards an experimental methodology. But he meets his normative limits considering the connection between sociology and social critique. The paper concludes with a proposal for a sociological experimentalism following Dewey which includes the question of critique.     

Switzerland – Really Europe's Heart of Darkness?

Immigration is a prominent and contested global topic of contemporary politics. Several recent popular votes targeting migration such as the minaret initiative, the automatic deportation initiative, and most recently the vote on “mass immigration”, evoke however the impression that Switzerland sets particularly harsh standards in migration policy. Based on historical evidence on Swiss migration policy making and comparative analyses on current cantonal integration policy outputs, I argue that ‐ while far from being a new phenomenon ‐ immigrant scepticism has become a more relevant factor of Swiss migration policy making than ever. Yet, immigration and immigrant scepticism do not only challenge direct democratic Switzerland, but all destination countries of immigration.     

Libya's Qadhafi and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, 1969–2002

CROSS ROADS TO ISRAEL by Christopher Sykes, 479 pp., maps, illustrations, index. Collins. 42s.

EDWIN MONTAGU by S. D. Waley, 333 pp., index, Asia Publishing House, 45s.     

Why are public offices sold in Kyrgyzstan?

Why are public offices for sale in Kyrgyzstan? To address this question, this article attempts to set out a new logic for understanding the motives, nature, and consequences of corruption in the country. Rather than securing access to a single favor through bribery, officials invest in political and administrative posts in order to obtain access to stream of rents associated with an office. Political and administrative corruption is organically linked in this system, and corruption stems not so much from weak monitoring as from being a franchise-like arrangement, where officials are required to pay continuous “fees” to their bosses. The key is to be the public official influencing the redistribution of rents as well as participating in the informal market where “public” goods are privatized and exchanged for informal payments. Thus, instead of control over the pure economic assets of the state, influence over the state's institutional and organizational framework is the dominant strategy for earning and investing in the country.     

The Great Strike of 1917 — Was Defeat Inevitable?

The Great Strike of 1917 was, arguably, the greatest class confrontation in Australian history. For five weeks, the eastern states of Australia were paralysed by a mass strike, driven from below by a rank and file paying little heed to their reluctant leaders. Strike action involved nearly 100,000 workers and was only defeated by mass scabbing masterminded by conservative state and federal governments. Historians have tended to dismiss the Great Strike as mindless militancy. Central to this negative assessment has been the belief that the strikers could not win because “there was too much coal at grass”. But this may be a wrong assumption to make. A careful investigation of the actual situation with coal stocks in 1917 demonstrates that the strikers came much closer to winning than generally has been accepted.     

Was there a rule of law in the late Ottoman Empire?

The rule of law is a widely used term in scholarship on Ottoman legal reforms. Nevertheless, the actual meaning of this notion is rarely clarified in the writing on the late Ottoman Empire although theorists of law have discussed the ambiguity of this term. This article aims at examining the value of the rule of law as an analytical category when discussing socio-legal change in the late Ottoman Empire. The article demonstrates that the rule of law can be a meaningful category for historical analysis when conceived through a ‘cultural perspective’ to the law.     

Is Japan Really Back? The “Abe Doctrine” and Global Governance

Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has emerged as the “comeback kid” of Japanese politics and in his second term of office is now widely regarded as a rare example of strong leadership as he seeks to arrest and reverse his country’s perceived decline. The strategy to achieve these objectives has come to be known as the “Abe Doctrine,” which represents a radical but risky shift in foreign policy. This article outlines the tenets of the evolving Abe Doctrine and then applies them to the Abe administration’s behaviour in the mechanisms of global governance, a highly pertinent but overlooked example. It argues that although a more strategic and coherent approach to global governance has emerged under Abe than had been previously evident, this has been at the expense of the norm of internationalism that has traditionally shaped Japan’s role.     

Was It Worth It? The Territorial Reform in the Canton of Glarus

This paper examines the financial impact of the 2011 reform of the local governments and jurisdictions in the canton of Glarus. After a popular vote 70 public entities were reorganized to form three large uniformed communes. Previous research showed that amalgamations do not automatically lead to savings in public expenditures and economies of scale. We empirically apply the synthetic control method and show that the territorial reform realized some savings in public expenditure. However, the effect of the reorganization of tasks and responsibilities between the canton and the communes was more influential. The reform must be understood as a horizontal and vertical venture that encompasses both the communes and the canton, much more far‐reaching than a pure local territorial reform.     

Why Do Citizens Vote Against Their Basic Political Values?

The literature on correct and consistent voting has focused on issue‐opinions and argument‐positions when examining whether vote decisions correspond to individual political preferences. However, the question whether vote decisions align with basic political values has largely been neglected so far. This paper introduces a novel measure named value consistent voting. It finds that, in Switzerland, around 25% jettison their basic political values when deciding on proposals. Using multilevel regression analysis of survey data, this paper investigates the determinants of value consistent voting. Three theoretical approaches are tested; the sophistication, identification and ambivalence hypotheses. The results show that political sophistication and identification foster value consistent voting. Moreover, there is an interaction between education and adhering to the preferred party’s vote recommendation. This finding supports the thesis that highly educated citizens use heuristics most efficiently. However, the more ambivalent people are, the more often they vote against their basic political values.     

Why Are There So Many Hereditary Politicians in Japan?

As will become clear from the text below, this paper is heavily based on the author's article published in Japanese in March 2009 by Nikkei BP, titled What Breeds Hereditary Politicians? The content of this work was first presented in a lecture that the author delivered in March 2008: Inequality in the Value of Votes and the Future of Japan. The author entreats the reader to bear in mind that although a certain amount of reference information which has subsequently come to light has been added to this paper, for the sake of simplicity, the results of the general election held at the end of August 2009 have not been incorporated (for example, throughout the text the Liberal Democratic Party is cited as the ruling party, as was the case before the general election). However, where appropriate, minimal footnotes have been added regarding the results of the general election and other points judged worthy of note, based on current available information as of September 3, 2009.     

Why Triangular Development Cooperation? Germany and the Emerging Powers

Triangular development cooperation (TriCo) is a relatively new form of technical cooperation (expert advice), which includes, besides the traditional actors of the donor and the receiver, a third country: the new provider. At first sight, OECD donors' engagement in TriCo cannot be explained by any of the traditional explanations for aid provision. On the one hand, donors pass on their strategically favourable position to the new providers, whereas on the other hand, from a practitioners' view, TriCo is not necessarily beneficial for receiving countries. Therefore, donors' participation in TriCo constitutes a stunning puzzle of international politics. An in-depth case study assesses why Germany has recently engaged in TriCo. Exploring this empirical riddle does not only contribute to understanding this specific cooperation modality, but it also reveals insights for the general study of international cooperation: emerging powers are changing the landscape of international relations.     

Does “Real-Freedom-for-All” Really Justify Basic Income?

We here examine Philippe Van Parijs's concept of "real freedom" which justifies in his view the introduction of a basic income. What we call into question is whether this concept can be understood, as Van Parijs argues, as the counterfactual freedom to do what one might want to do, that is as a notion of freedom based on the idea of potential desire. We oppose to it an alternative conception of "real freedom" related, first, to a notion of basic needs which a well-ordered society can satisfy by means of compensation, second, to a notion of social mediation in the evaluation of individual preferences. In this way we restore the relationship between freedom and desire, which allows us to take into account the conception the social actors have of their own freedom, more than does the too abstract conception of freedom based on the idea of potential desire.     

Really ‘Two Deeply Divided Electorates’? German Federal Elections 1990–2013

It has become both a tradition and a key feature of electoral studies after 1990 to frame the debate about German voting behaviour in terms of East and West. To study national voting patterns has become a synonym for comparing both parts of the country. The corresponding findings are frequently interpreted as an answer to the recurring question whether the Germans (still) form a disunited electorate or not. However, the comparative look at electoral results in East and West conceals regional fragmentation within both areas – the key for evaluating the relevance of East–West frictions. By analysing those aspects, which are widely believed to yield deep East–West gaps, the article shows that only left-wing voting and electoral turnout indicate two unchangingly distinct voting habits for the complete post-unification time. Right-wing voting (divergence) and volatility (convergence) in turn were subject to major shifts.     

Was Jerusalem Part of Palestine? The Forgotten City of Ramla, 900–1900

When the Muslims conquered the Levant in the seventh century they at times changed the meaning of ‘Palestine’. They preserved its erstwhile sense as a region but also came to see Palestine as synonymous with the city of Ramla. From the tenth to the early twentieth century, dozens of Muslim exegetes, travellers and chroniclers explained that Ramla and Palestine were the same place. Others thought Palestine was a small region based around Ramla, one that did not include Jerusalem, or that Palestine had much more to do with Ramla than it did Jerusalem. The association had much to do with the cultural tendency in the Arab Middle East to conflate cities and regions as well as the critical role Ramla played in Palestine for much of its history: it served as the capital of the District of Palestine for more than three centuries, its economic hub for many more and its imagined geographical centre up until the early nineteenth century.