The Impact of Power and Civic Engagement in the Decentralized Management of Natural Resources: The Case of Turkey

Decentralization is an extensively discussed topic within academic and institutional circles worldwide. While a common argument for decentralization is that it fosters democratic deepening, counterarguments cautiously point to unequal access to resources and distribution of power as factors that inhibit democratization. This study contributes to the literature on the relationship between decentralization and democratization through a comparative study of Water User Associations in two provinces of Turkey and shows in line with the literature that resource and power inequalities hamper the link between decentralization and democratization. However, as this article shows, civic engagement can generate “countervailing power” that can overcome the negative impact of such inequalities. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Old Dogs,New Tricks? The Role of Regional Organizations in the Mediterranean after the Arab Revolts

Taking its point of departure in how specific regional organizations function and interact in the Mediterranean, this article attempts to show to what degree this institutional setup has influenced the developments in the Arab Mediterranean states after the Arab revolts. The analysis of the organizational and institutional setup in the Mediterranean is theoretically founded in the new institutionalism tradition. Furthermore, a regionalism perspective is applied, touching on discussions related to European normative ambitions. It is demonstrated that the regional organizations only to a limited degree have contributed to democratization processes or to democratic consolidation in a post–Arab Spring context, and it is argued that it seems unlikely that these organizations in the future will develop into tools for democratization in the Mediterranean region.     

Democracy and distributiveness: patterns of transition from hegemony in divided societies

Many culturally heterogeneous societies with functioning democratic regimes nonetheless fail to grant equal status to different ethnic and cultural groups within their borders. To a great extent, scholars discuss such inequalities within the analytical boundaries of the discourse on democracy and democratization. We argue that such discussions overstretch the concept of democracy. In this research, we offer a novel axis of inquiry, namely distributiveness. We define distributiveness as the egalitarian distribution of resources – political, material, cultural-symbolic, institutional, and territorial – among different ethnic, religious, or cultural groups which self-identify as collectives within society. The aim of this new conceptualization is to (1) restore conceptual clarity to the literature on democracy, (2) enhance our capacity to assess the allocation of resources within a given polity, and (3) elucidate the processes that lead to change in patterns of allocation.     

Hong Kong's political influence over China: institutional,informative, and interactive dynamics of sovereignty

Abstract

This article explores how Hong Kong has exercised political influence on China since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, and tries to comprehend such seemingly impossible influences by reinterpreting the concept of sovereignty. It argues that the British Hong Kong existed as a ‘reference society’ for China's modernization and helped to change Chinese perceptions of capitalism. As this resulted in Chinese recognition of the legitimacy of Hong Kong's colonial institutions, which were featured with political legacies of civic freedom and the rule of law, it also reveals the institutional dimension of sovereignty. Secondly, the information flow from Hong Kong to China reflects a communicative (in contrast to coercive) nature of sovereignty, which highlights Hong Kong's central position in the Chinese world of information. Thirdly, Hong Kong's ongoing democratization challenges Chinese authoritarianism through societal interactions that are beyond state control. Conceptually, in this article, state sovereignty is argued as being something fluid and constantly reshaped in everyday practice with institutional, informative, and interactive dynamics; practically, it attempts to find some remaining ‘silver lining’ to the growing authoritarian Chinese clouds above Hong Kong as reversing the logic of examining external factors in democratization.     

Institutional Reforms and Democratization in Korea: the Case of the Kim Young Sam Administration, 1993–1998

This article examines the nature of political and institutional reform initiatives that have been carried out under former president Kim Young Sam. How effective have they been in consolidating democracy in Korea? Specifically, we examine why the Kim Young Sam government's political reform campaigns have been limited, and explore the impact of this limitation on his institutional reform initiatives and the process of consolidation of democracy in Korea. We argue that Kim Young Sam's initial political reform campaigns have contributed to creating a favorable environment for his institutional reform efforts. However, limitations of these initial political reform campaigns such as political funding and bribery scandals have hampered institutional reforms. We also argue that these difficulties were intensified by public dissatisfaction with Korea's poor economic performance and International Monetary Fund (IMF) financial assistance. As a result, Kim Young Sam's moral legitimacy as a civilian and reform-oriented leader toward the public has totally evaporated. Therefore, experiences under the Kim Young Sam administration are just trials and errors of democratization that show another failure in presidential leadership in Korea. These experiences will negatively affect the consolidation process of democracy in Korea by increasing the public's distrust of government as a whole. As a result, democratic consolidation in Korea is being delayed.     

Terminating Taiwan's Fourth Nuclear Power Plant under the Chen Shui-bian Administration

This article integrates the termination literature with the Punctuated‐Equilibrium (P‐E) model of policy change into a broader framework of policy termination to examine the Chen Shui‐bian administration's abrupt decision to terminate Taiwan's fourth nuclear power plant (FNPP) as well as to explore the evolution of agenda‐setting for the FNPP's termination over a decade. The termination of the FNPP may be viewed as a result of interactions among the nuclear policy image, the institutional venue, and the political or policy strategy over time, as indicated in the integrated framework. Nevertheless, changing nuclear policy image is not sufficient to automatically change the institutional venue in the process of Taiwan's transition from an authoritarian regime to a pluralist political system. Before venue shopping for policy termination, antinuclear activists had to ally with the Democratic Progressive Party to struggle for opening up Taiwan's political institutions along with Taiwan's democratization. On the other hand, as a consequence of Taiwan's recent democratization, antinuclear activists were unsuccessful in terminating the FNPP in the absence of sufficient political resources, notwithstanding a major venue change from the Kuomintang (KMT) government to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government under President Chen's leadership. Furthermore, besides domestic venues, international institutions also appear to be important to the creation and maintenance of the nuclear policy system, as well as to the dramatic reversal of the Chen administration's termination decision in this case.     

Social Context,Institutional Capacity,and Police Services: A Local Public Economies Perspective

This article examines levels of policing services, focusing on an assessment of resources and their measurement for municipalities. Two measures of policing levels assess the reliability of the findings across alternative measurements. Social and institutional characteristics are explored to evaluate alternative explanations in policing efforts. The article presents four decades of census data for municipalities in metropolitan areas. The central finding is that unequal levels of policing are prevalent across American municipalities. An additional finding is that social and institutional contexts affect policing, based on a pooled time‐series analysis of municipal governments. Although its main contribution is to local public economies research, the research also integrates the social and institutional literatures to identify factors in the allocation of resources to policing.     

Uncivil society and social policies in Brazil: The backlash in the gender,sexual, and reproductive rights and ethnic and racial relations fields

This paper analyzes how dynamics between Brazil's right-wing populist government and civil and uncivil organizations affected the role of civil organizations, especially rights-based ones, and Brazil's democratization process. These dynamics contributed to stripping policies of their progressive nature and rejecting the values of diversity, freedom, and equality. Our analysis relies on the inhabited institutions approach to comprehend the role of action, interaction, and meaning in institutionalized spaces. We analyzed two policy fields—gender, sexual, and reproductive rights, and ethnic and racial relations—through documents and in-depth interviews. Our analysis shows that Bolsonaro's government mobilized mechanisms related to institutional changes, the replacement of actors, and their interactions to inhibit civil society organizations' influence in policy formulation and provision and strengthen the participation of uncivil groups, thereby legitimating conservative ideas and discourses, and closing civic space for NGOs with rights-based agendas.     

Social capital in the Japanese youth labor market: Labor market policy,schools, and norms

This paper develops the concept of institutional social capital and discusses its importance in the labor market. Institutional social capital is constituted by the resources inherent in an organization (such as a school) and thereby available to members of that organization. This is contrasted with the social capital available to individuals through their own personal networks. In the labor market context, an example of institutional social capital is the ties that schools have with employers who recruit a proportion of their new employees as they prepare to graduate. The paper examines how these ties and the norms governing the important labor market screening role played by the high school developed in post-WWII Japan. I also discuss an important positive externality – social control over students – generated by schools institutional social capital. Finally, I examine current challenges to Japanese high schools institutional social capital.     

Terrorism, democratization, and US foreign policy

Members of the American foreign policy establishment argue that the United States should combat transnational terrorism by encouraging democratization. Yet, empirical studies indicate that democratization may increase political violence, thereby raising the question: why would American policymakers favor democratization when the empirical record shows that this course of action is so dangerous? This study develops a game theoretic model to analyze the effect of democratization on terrorism. The model demonstrates that the United States uses the commitment problems created by democratization to solve the moral hazard problem created by supporting autocratic hosts. These empirical implications are tested using a combination of two datasets.     

Trust but verify? Voluntary regulation programs in the nonprofit sector

In this article we examine how information problems can cause agency slippages and lead to governance failures in nonprofit organizations. Drawing on the principal–agent literature, we provide a theoretical account of an institutional mechanism, namely, voluntary regulation programs, to mitigate such slippages. These programs seek to impose obligations on their participants regarding internal governance and use of resources. By joining these programs, nonprofit organizations seek to differentiate themselves from nonparticipants and signal to their principals that they are deploying resources as per the organizational mandate. If principals are assured that agency slippages are lower in program participants, they might be more likely to provide the participants with resources to deliver goods and services to their target populations. However, regulatory programs for nonprofit organizations are of variable quality and, in some cases, could be designed to obscure rather than reveal information. We outline an analytical framework to differentiate the credible clubs from the “charity washes.” A focus on the institutional architecture of these programs can help to predict their efficacy in reducing agency problems.     

Regionalization,administrative reform and democratization: Nicaragua 1979–1984

The article discusses the major events and debates that have taken place during the reform and democratization of subnational government in Nicaragua from the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship to late 1984. Developments during this period highlight five distinct areas of reform that must be addressed as part of any process of state democratization: (a) selection and maintenance of local officials; (b) integration of popular participation; (c) definition of the range of local authority; (d) resources for local development; and (e) relation to other levels of government. These issues are addressed through a discussion focusing heavily on local government during the first 3 years, then on the experience of the newly created regional governments and decentralization beginning in mid—1982, and finally on the early—and quite divergent—experience with the development of zonal government between the municipal and regional levels. The specific resolution of these five sets of issues is part of the development of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, and will strongly shape the political and developmental significance of the resulting local government.     

The Level of Democratization Related to Socioeconomic Variables in 147 States in 1980-85

It is argued in this article that democratization is causally related to socioeconomic variables indicating the distribution of economic and intellectual power resources among competing groups. This assumption has been deduced from an evolutionary theory of politics, according to which politics is principally a struggle for scarce resources. Consequently, democracy is assumed to emerge in conditions in which power resources have become so widely distributed that no group is any longer able to suppress its competitors or to maintain its hegemony. Empirical variables were formulated to measure hypothetical concepts 'democracy' and 'power resources'. The hypothesis is tested by empirical data covering 147 states of the period 1980–85. The results of correlation analysis show that the principal explanatory factor, the Index of Power Resources, statistically explains about 70 percent of the variation in the Index of Democratization. Regression analysis is used to disclose how well the general relationship applies to single countries and which countries deviate from the general pattern. High negative residuals are interpreted to mean that the level of democratization should be much higher than it actually is, and high positive residuals can be interpreted to mean that the level of democratization is much higher than expected on the basis of the country's social conditions.     

Individual characteristics, institutional incentives and electoral abstention in Western Europe

Abstract. This article examines the interaction between individual characteristics and institutional incentives in non–voting, with a special focus on the interaction between these two types of explanatory variables. The analysis of survey and contextual data for parliamentary elections in 15 Western European countries shows that the effect of individual resources and motivations on abstention is not constant across different countries. Conversely, the effect of institutional incentives (compulsory voting, voting facilities, electoral thresholds of representation and preference expression) on non–voting depends on the elector's level of resources and motivations. One of the four institutional incentives considered has even opposite effects for citizens with different individual characteristics. The analysis also shows that when analysing interactions it is fundamental to distinguish between magnitudes and consequences of the effects of explanatory variables. This has important implications for the interpretation of the results of logistic regression analysis.     

Reflections on Scientific Inquiry,Academic Freedom,and Enlightenment

This paper explores the connections between scientific inquiry, scholarly reflexivity, and enlightenment. I argue that the free intellectual inquiry essential to the practice of science is a fundamental constituent and enactment of human dignity, freedom, and democracy. The expansion and diffusion of these values are both unavoidable in the modern age and immensely valuable, even if there are of course many obstacles to their expansion and no guarantees of their ultimate realization. This process of scientific inquiry also contains the seeds of a discourse ethic with broader ramifications for public enlightenment and perhaps even democratization. I develop these themes through a dialogue with some of the writings of Professor Yu Keping on the topics of Chinese political science and “incremental democracy.”     

Defending the organisation,not the members: Unions and the reform of job security legislation in Western Europe

European labour markets are often described as rigid with comparatively high levels of job protection that do not allow for the flexible adjustment of employment to economic fluctuations. This interpretation overlooks important sources of flexibility, however. Research has shown that recent labour market policy reforms have allowed for the creation of two‐tier labour markets consisting of insiders in standard employment relationships and outsiders in non‐standard employment. This outcome has typically been explained by pointing to the representational interests of unions or social‐democratic parties. It has been argued that rather than protecting all labour market participants, unions and social‐democratic parties focus on the interests of their members and their core constituency, respectively, most of whom are in standard employment relationships. In contrast, it is argued here that unions' institutional power resources are the crucial variable explaining this outcome. In difficult economic times, when unions are asked to make concessions, they will assent to labour market reforms, but only to those that do not fundamentally threaten to undermine their organisational interests. In the context of job security legislation, this means that unions defend the protection of permanent contracts while they compromise on the regulation of temporary employment. This ‘second best solution’ allows them to protect their organisational interests, both by retaining their institutional role in the administration of dismissals and by living up to their institutional role as one of the organisations responsible for the direction of labour market policy reform. Using fsQCA this article shows that unions' institutional power resources are more apt to explain the observed two‐tier reform pattern than the unions' or the social‐democratic parties' representational interests.     

Multinationals and institutional competitiveness

This article discusses how institutional competitiveness and multinationals are mutually enriching concepts. Multinationals transfer capital, technology, and knowledge into new settings. They allow subsidiaries access to new markets, new resources, and new processes. Potentially, therefore, institutional competitiveness can be increased by the presence of multinational corporations (MNCs) and their subsidiaries. However, this depends on the type of multinational and the type of institutional context. By differentiating two types of MNC in terms of short‐term and long‐term orientations to investment, and two types of host institutional setting in terms of strength of institutional complementarities and interconnectedness, we develop a typology of four types of interaction between MNCs and institutional settings. We then analyze how each type influences institutional competitiveness. We conclude that these outcomes, while structurally shaped, are still dependent on how actors (individuals, firms, collective organizations, and governments) strategize to develop institutional frameworks in the context of highly competitive global markets.     

Land and Water Institutions in the Blue Nile Basin: Setups and Gaps for Improved Land and Water Management

This study undertook an assessment and gap analysis of the institutional arrangements for improved land and water management in the Tana and Beles Sub‐basins highlands of the Blue Nile Basin. We explored the mandates and design features of the major land‐ and water‐related institutional arrangements. Focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and a literature review were used in the analysis. The results of our work reveal that a lot of progress has been made in creating an institutional framework for improved land and water management and the policies and laws hitherto developed reflect global policy changes consistent with the widespread adoption of the integrated water resources management (IWRM) principles. There are also cases where informal institutions replace formal institutions. Judged by their enforcement, the water resources management, pollution control standards, and regulations and land use rights are not enacted effectively because of poor enforcement capacity. Overall there is a tendency to focus on command‐and‐control type policies. There is a need to strengthen traditional institutions by drawing lessons from their strengths and establish the legitimacy of these institutions. There is also a need to improve formal policy design, developing policies with specific objectives, goals, targets, and overall institutional changes and resources through active adaptive management to maximize the level and effectiveness of institutional learning. Finally, more focus needs to be given to incentive‐based policies through increased use of positive incentives and more emphasis needs to be given to self‐enforcement rather than third‐party enforcement.     

政府控制、制度环境与信贷资源配置

将政府控制内部结构与制度环境纳入统一分析框架,深入研究了政府控制内部结构对银行信贷资源配置的影响,以及在不同制度环境下政府控制内部结构对信贷资源配置发挥的作用是否有所不同。研究表明:政府行政级别越低,越有动机干预银行信贷资源配置,帮助其所控制公司获得银行贷款,公司银行借款水平就越高。与通过实业主体控制的公司相比,在政府通过国有资产管理机构控制的上市公司,政府通过干预银行信贷资源配置帮助公司获取银行贷款的行为更为便利,该类公司具有较高的银行借款水平。与制度环境较差的地区相比,在制度环境较好的地区,政府控制内部结构对银行信贷资源配置发挥的作用相对较小。研究有助于深入理解信贷资源配置行为的制度根源。