“Institutions and Economic Performance: The Use and Abuse of Culture in New Institutional Economics”: A Response to Heydemann

Applications of institutional analysis to the explanation of economic performance come in many flavors. Some economists have made use of an economics-oriented flavor in treating culture as one component of that analysis. Steven Heydemann uses a more political flavor of institutional analysis to argue that two of these economists, Douglass North and Avner Greif, have overly simplified and homogenized the concept of culture and the way in which it affects economic performance. He goes on to identify several instances in both the economic history and contemporary experience of the Middle East where he claims that such over-simplification has led to shortcomings in the analysis. This paper suggests that while some of Heydemann’s claims have merit, several others are exaggerated.

Institutions and Development in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis

We review the theoretical literature on the concept of institutions and its relationship to national development, propose a definition of the concept, and advance six hypotheses about institutional adequacy and contributions to national development. We then present results of a comparative empirical study of existing institutions in three Latin American countries and examine their organizational similarities and differences. Employing the qualitative comparative method (QCA) proposed by Ragin, we then test the six hypotheses. Results converge in showing the importance of meritocracy, immunity to corruption, absence of “islands of power,” and proactivity in producing effective institutions. Findings strongly support Peter Evans’ theory of developmental apparatuses.

Policy Experimentation in China’s Economic Rise

Policy experimentation is frequently highlighted as a potent means to facilitate institutional innovation, and avoid reformist leaps in the dark by injecting bottom-up initiative and local knowledge into the national policy process. Yet experimentation remains a surprisingly vague concept in the debate over variants of economic governance. This article contributes to the study of experiment-based policymaking by examining the distinctive tools, processes, and effects of experimental programs in major domains of China’s economic reform. China’s experience attests to the potency of experimentation in bringing about transformative change, even in a rigid authoritarian, bureaucratic environment, and regardless of strong political opposition. Large-scale experimentation stimulated policy learning and economic expansion effectively in those sectors in which political elites could benefit from supporting new types of private and transnational entrepreneurial activity. Conversely, experimental programs largely failed in generating an effective provision of social goods which would require a combination of active societal supervision and strict central government enforcement to make it work. Though the impact of reform experiments varies between policy domains, China’s experimentation-based policy process has been essential to redefining basic policy parameters. At the heart of this process, we find a pattern of central–local interaction in generating policy—“experimentation under hierarchy”—which constitutes a notable addition to the repertoires of governance that have been tried for achieving economic transformation. The research for this article was supported by the German National Research Foundation and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. The author is especially indebted to Elizabeth Perry, Steven Goldstein, Rolf Langhammer, Dani Rodrik, Victor Shih, Ezra Vogel, and Rudolf Wagner for their encouragement and comments. Nancy Hearst made a crucial contribution by bringing precious sources from the Fairbank Center’s library to my attention that I otherwise would have overlooked.

---

Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-national Examination of Local Governments and Natural Resource Governance in Latin America

There has been increased emphasis in the last three decades on the decentralization of natural resource governance decisions to local government in developing countries as a means of improving environmental quality, public service delivery, and the accountability of local officials. We examine the performance of decentralization of natural resource management services in a large sample of municipal governments in four Latin American countries. Our analysis includes a variety of factors discussed in the literature as important in influencing the responsiveness of government officials to local needs. We provide a nested institutional model in which local officials respond to incentives created by the structure of formal political institutions at both the local and national level. The results provide support for the importance of considering local and national institutional arrangements as these co-determine the political incentives within decentralized systems.

Chainmaking: A Note on Ornament, Intelligence, and Building

For the past fifteen-odd years, I’ve investigated the mutual influences of thinking and making, and their impact on design and learning. This article reflects on the traditional role of architectural ornament in equipping a mind with metaphors for wisdom and methods for learning. It then considers the reappearance of an ancient memory technique as an organizational metaphor in the design of a new, forward-looking university building, as foreshadowing to the companion article “Chainbuilding.”

Exchange Rate Regime,Central Bank Independence,and Political Business Cycles in Brazil

This article examines policy consequences of electoral cycles and exchange rate regime choices in Brazil. The literature on opportunistic political business cycles maintains that governments adopt expansionary economic policies before elections to mobilize voters’ support. However, research findings in Latin America based on the theory has been inconclusive. I argue that the lack of conclusive evidence in Latin America stems from measurement errors common in the use of cross-national aggregate data. Using Brazil’s monthly data from 1985 to 2006, this article shows that there are electorally induced fiscal cycles under fixed and crawling peg exchange rate regimes and electorally induced monetary cycles under floating exchange rates only when the nation’s central bank is not independent. Indeed, accounting for Brazil’s unique economic contingencies and longitudinal variations in the de facto central bank independence, its public policy behavior remarkably resembles that of the more affluent, economically stable OECD countries.

The Ur-History of Media Space: Walter Benjamin and the Information Industry in Nineteenth-Century Paris

This essay is primarily concerned with Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the newspaper as a media space with reference to privatization of urban space, industrialization of public communication, and mediazation of public space in nineteenth-century Paris. I seek to show how the information industry brought about the fundamental changes in literary practice, intellectual activity, and the formation of a new social subject. I also demonstrate how Benjamin’s rich illustration of the complex dynamics of media space in the nineteenth century largely avoids the shortcomings of oversimplification embedded in the analysis of the bourgeois public sphere. In doing so, I argue Benjamin’s critical analysis that the newspaper provides a systematic framework by which to examine the intersection between the media space and the urban experience in a digital age.

Divergent Outcomes of Labor Reform Politics in Democratized Korea and Taiwan

This article seeks to explain the conditions that determine the divergent fates of union actors under democratic governments by examining union activism around four labor reform episodes (union rights recognition, wage increases, workweek reductions, and job protection/anti-privatization) in democratized Korea and Taiwan. This study first describes that labor reform politics in these two new democracies involved contrasting processes and produced divergent outcomes. Korean unions that have resorted to contentious mobilization have been more successful in areas where their sheer mobilizing strength matters (such as company-level bargaining of wages and other material benefits), but less successful in national policy reforms. On the contrary, Taiwanese unions have been more effective in securing labor policy concessions, while obtaining less drastic changes at the company-level gains. This article contends that these divergent outcomes for unions’ gains would not have been possible without the differences they faced in the degree of permeability within their respective formal political institutions and partisan interests that draw these unions into these labor reform politics.

Institutions and Economic Performance: The Use and Abuse of Culture in New Institutional Economics

Important research programs within New Institutional Economics advance culturalist arguments to explain failures of economic development. Focusing on the work of Douglass C. North and Avner Greif, this article argues that such arguments rely on an essentialist conception of culture that is both historically inaccurate and analytically misleading. Greif’s work in particular rests on a selective use of empirical data that ultimately distorts the deductive models that are at the core of his work. As a result, both scholars use culture to account for outcomes that are more adequately explained as the product of social conflict and political struggles—struggles in which culture plays a far more contingent and destabilizing role than the one they attribute to it. What is needed, I argue, is to link arguments about the persistence of inefficient institutions with a sociologically informed conception of culture as an ensemble of resources that enhance rather than constrain the scope of individual agency. To come to terms with the effects of culture on institutional formation and change it is necessary to replace the essentialism articulated by North and Greif with a strategic-instrumentalist view in which culture is compatible with a wide spectrum of economic behaviors, individual actions, and thus institutional trajectories.

The Theory of International Media Diffusion: Political Socialization and International Media in Transitional Democracies

Despite the long-standing normative assumption that, for individuals in transitional states, exposure to Western media cultivates stronger attachments to Western political and economic values, the evidence presented here suggests otherwise. Using mass public survey data from the mid-1990s in five Central and Eastern European countries, this article demonstrates a general lack of support for international media’s positive contributions to individuals’ democratic attitudes and preferences for market economies. This finding is particularly unexpected because the countries under investigation represent ideal cases based on their proximity to Western democracies and international (Western) media sources’ capacities for extensive transnational media penetration into the region. Yet this failure to find persuasive evidence of the influence of international media diffusion on the development of Western political values sharpens our understanding of the process of political socialization in democratizing countries by eliminating an assumed source and is thus relevant to students of democratization, international development, and mass media.

Institutions and Caribbean Economic Performance: Insights from Jamaica

We explore the impact of social institutions on economic performance in Jamaica through a reinterpretation of the plantation economic model. In its original form, the plantation model fails to develop a causal link between the plantation legacy and persistent underdevelopment. Despite its marginalization, the model remains useful for discussions on growth and development. Consequently, we offer a reappraisal using the causal insights from Kenneth Sokoloff and Stanley Engerman. We use two examples to demonstrate how inequality encourages the formation of institutions that are inconsistent with growth, and an empirical analysis to confirm the hypothesized relationship between inequality, institutions, and economic development. Since inequality is expected to influence growth indirectly, we use a structural specification, which follows William Easterly’s recent test of Sokoloff and Engerman’s argument. Our reliance on a time-series specification is unique. We demonstrate that the expectation that, on average, inequality and growth is negatively related and that institutions may compromise growth are accurate for Jamaica, the most cited Caribbean nation in the current discourse. Our results carry several policy implications, including support for the recent calls in Jamaica for political restructuring. However, both the paucity of similar studies and the importance of the implications for sustainable growth and development demand further analyses.

Beyond Boom and Bust: External Rents,Durable Authoritarianism,and Institutional Adaptation in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Drawing on recent critiques and advances in theories of the rentier state, this paper uses an in-depth case study of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to posit a new “supply and demand” approach to the study of external rents and authoritarian durability. The Jordanian rentier state is not exclusively a product of external rents, particularly foreign aid, but also of the demands of a coalition encompassing groups with highly disparate economic policy preferences. The breadth of the Hashemite coalition requires that the regime dispense rent-fueled side payments to coalition members through constructing distributive institutions. Yet neither rent supply nor coalition demands are static. Assisted by geopolitically motivated donors, the Hashemites have adapted institutions over time to tap a diverse supply of rents that range from economic and military aid to protocol trade, allowing them to retain power through periods of late development, domestic political crisis, and neoliberal conditionality.

Islamism, Nationalism, and Western Modernity: The Case of Iran and Palestine

The rise of Islamic politics in the Middle East, particularly since the Iranian revolution, is the most cited example that supposedly testifies to the “clean” separation between “Islam” and the “West.” In this essay, I argue that it is not Islamic movements and ideology that confirm this separation. Rather, it is their incorporation into the scheme of Western modernity, with its binary distinctions and evolutionary reading of history, which constructs this separation. Using examples from Iran and Palestine, I show how Islamic ideology indeed defies the basic premises of Western discourse on modernity, expose its limitations, and question the constitution of Islam and the West as allegedly distinct, even opposing, categories.

Cultural Trauma as a Potential Symbolic Boundary

Using the case of the Holocaust as a cultural trauma in the Jewish-Israeli context, some insights are suggested as to the ways younger members of collectives view cultural trauma as a symbolic boundary. The findings obtained from three groups of students, each expressing their views on a different facet of the Holocaust as a symbolic boundary, suggest that the major contributing factor that turns cultural trauma into a symbolic boundary is the way in which members of the collective categorize the modes through which others, within and outside the collective, relate to that cultural trauma.

Democracy and Gender Equality

This article examines the relationship between democracy and gender equality. In particular, it contrasts the impact of long-term stocks of democracy with the contemporary level of democracy and the participation of women in democracy. It contends that democracy should be thought of as a historical phenomenon with consequences that develop over many years and decades and that women’s participation should be included as an important component of democracy. The main argument is that long-term democracy together with women’s suffrage should provide new opportunities for women to promote their interests through mobilization and elections. A cross-national time-series statistical analysis finds that countries with greater stocks of democracy and longer experience of women’s suffrage have a higher proportion of the population that is female, a greater ratio of female life expectancy to male life expectancy, lower fertility rates, and higher rates of female labor force participation.

The Day the Sun Rises in the West—Ethnography of a Peace Process

Both politicians and academic researchers have focused on the Oslo peace agreements, generally emphasizing the “New Middle East” and “Transnationalism.” Less attention has been paid to social and economic changes affected by the process of peace-making. This paper examines the reality that was created from below and asks what the peace process meant to migrant Palestinian workers in Israel. Three years of ethnography challenge accepted theories of borders and borderland in the case of Israel and Palestine by asking what can be learned about the cultural identity of people from the ways they cross, understand, and move between geopolitical and cultural boundaries. In the last years of the Oslo Agreements, it became clear to the workers that “peace” meant preserving national borders: it involved a policy of separation, whereas their very livelihood depended on their ability to move between Tel Aviv and the Gaza Strip. Torn between their national identity and their class–cultural identity, they formulated a demand for a dialectical reorganization: a state without borders. This demand stood in opposition to the national aspirations of Israel and the Palestinian state-in-being alike.

Speechlessness: In Search of Language to Resist the Israeli “Thing Without a Name”

This paper criticizes the words used to critique Israeli repression of Palestinians as ineffective for political struggle and not critical enough. It argues that there is no single word able to comprehend the phenomenon of constant dispossession, violent repression, and righteous blaming of Palestinian resistance as terror. Unable to suggest one comprehensive concept that can at once describe, analyze, and criticize the phenomenon, scholars use inappropriate existing terms—like occupation, Apartheid, colonialism, and Zionism—or invent new words like ethnocracy, politiciside, Bantustine, spaciocide, sociocide, or symbolic genocide. All the concepts are discussed in the paper; it is argued that they are partially correct, but not totally comprehensive. The paper aims to uncover the sophisticated regime that can co-opt every critical word, and present always Israel as a democratic and enlightened regime, a victim of Palestinian violence. It claims that the incapacity to create a critical language is one of the obstacles to develop effective resistance to the regime.

Chainbuilding: A New Building for the New New School

Until a souring national and local economy led them to scale back their plans in 2008, The New School in New York City had been designing a new, 500,000-ft² “signature building” intended to embody what administrators were calling The new New School, a university committed to progressive, interdisciplinary, urban, global education. The building was to offer glimpses of the horizon of academic infrastructure and media and their potential impact—structural, pedagogic, and symbolic—on the university and its communities. Although the building will not be realized in the form presented to the public in spring 2008, the design deliberations that generated that proposal offer valuable insights into how a university might reembody its ideals in a time of intense globalization and mediatization. Complementing Robert Kirkbride’s paper on the pedagogical practice of chainmaking and its historical relationship to learning spaces, we examine in this paper how media can be instrumental in wayfinding, how they can help to organize a building into various “processual” paths that reflect different approaches to learning, and how their presence in learning spaces can enhance teaching and learning. We also discuss how the building can serve as a mediator within the community, reflecting the institution’s identity and its pedagogical philosophy.

Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification

This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if through someone else’s eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative. By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian social goals.

Export-Oriented Populism: Commodities and Coalitions in Argentina

A new form of populism, combining broad-based benefits for urban workers with export promotion, emerged in Argentina under Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007). This article argues that changes in agricultural production created the conditions for this “export-oriented populism.” Historically, Argentina’s main exports, beef and wheat, were also the primary consumption goods of urban workers. Scholars such as Guillermo O’Donnell have argued that this linkage increased rural-urban conflict, resulting in shifting coalitions and recurring crises. Today, soybeans have replaced beef and wheat as the country’s leading export. Because soybeans are not consumed by the working class, Kirchner could both promote and tax their export, generating fiscal revenue for populist programs while not harming the effective purchasing power of urban workers or provoking a balance-of-payments crisis. Export orientation thus provided the basis for a new variant of Argentine populism. This study offers a new argument within the classic research tradition on the interaction between politics and various types of export growth. It likewise provides an additional basis for arguing that populism, as a form of politics, can arise in diverse economic circumstances. Furthermore, this article contends that, rather than uniformly promoting political stability, the effect of export booms is conditioned by the nature of economic linkages between the export sector and the domestic economy.