Rock The Vote: popular culture and politics

Rock the Vote was founded in 1996 as an attempt to exploit popular culture to boost political participation. Using pop musicians and comedians, it attempted to encourage young people to take part in politics. This article examines the formation of Rock the Vote, and explores its implications for the character of contemporary politics. It argues that Rock the Vote has to be understood not only as part of a larger shift in the nature of political campaigning and communication, but also as a response to the mutual needs of political parties and the popular culture industry. Rock the vote is both a symptom of new forms of campaigning and also a pragmatic solution to particular political problems.     

Markets and politics in France's declining regions

France has adopted an explicit policy of countering the decline of its old industrial areas, by encouraging a process of reindustrialization in those regions. The French experience illustrates the challenge that such an approach encounters, including dificulties arising out of policies of the European Community, the efforts of the government to achieve national growth targets, the locational preferences of potential “replacement” industries, and political and financial constraints on regional governments when they assume an entrepreneurial role. In the end, the effect of government intervention proves complex. Although the principal effort is directed at cushioning the pressures of market forces, the net result of public policy is often to transmit such forces more directly than in the past.     

Political culture, alternative politics and foreign policy: The case of Israel

This article analyzes how sociopolitical dynamics within a state can help explaining foreign policy. We show that under certain conditions, the public can be involved in ways that extend beyond expressing opinions that act as constraints on policy makers, and also takes active initiatives that eventually shape foreign policies. The article explains how sociopolitical processes in Israeli society, which transformed the nature of citizen–politician relations from a top-down to a bottom-up orientation, gradually led to shifts in foreign policy regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. The Israeli public has adopted an approach to solving social problems by unilateral initiatives, as part of its attempts to shape foreign policy from the bottom up, due to continuous government failure to provide public services, combined with blocked influence channels. As long as Israeli politicians ignored these changes, they failed to mobilize support for policies imposed from the top down and lost their positions of power.     

The politics of the culture of control: undoing genealogy

The third volume of David Garland's trilogy attempts to characterize recent developments in the field of crime control and criminal justice in terms of the emergence of a ‘culture of control’. For these purposes the author claims to use the genealogical method developed by Michel Foucault. This essay argues that Garland's selective reliance on this method amounts to an undoing of the Foucauldian ‘project’ insofar as it re-introduces the objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy which Foucault had tried to subvert throughout his work. This undoing entails profound consequences for the politics of The Culture of Control, which concludes on a reformist proposition that forsakes a form of resistance grounded on the awareness of its own, intrinsic limitations.     

Congressional distributive politics and state economic performance

States that were represented by very senior Democratic congressmen grew more quickly during the 1953–1990 period than states that were represented by more junior congressional delegations. States with a large fraction of politically competitive House districts also grew faster than average. The first finding is consistent with traditional legislator-based models of distributive politics, the second with partisan models. We cannot detect any substantively important association between seniority, state political competition, and the geographic distribution of federal funds, so higher district- specific federal spending does not appear to be the source of the link between state economic growth and congressional representation.     

Implementing management tools in Turkish public hospitals: the impact of culture,politics and role status

The government of Turkey has attempted to substantially improve the management of its public hospitals. However, an analysis of the performance of the quality certified hospitals finds only minor improvements. This study seeks to explain these disappointing results by interviewing 46 hospital managers and employees about the successes and failures of the management reform effort. The interviews suggest that traditional Turkish organisational culture often hinders attempts to decrease hierarchy, but, more positively, it also encourages the use of frontline teams and group rewards. Moreover, Turkey's hybrid system of allowing public doctors to maintain private practices has provided doctors with both the resources and the incentives to fight management reform efforts. Finally, organisational decentralisation in Turkey has evoked fierce political opposition, ironically even from many pro‐modernising forces that fear it could increase the power of Islamic fundamentalists. Turkey's experience suggests a number of broader points about management reform in non‐western societies. It suggests that decentralisation can often impede, rather than strengthen the other aspects of management reform; that a hybrid market organisation is often harder to move toward market efficiencies than a purely governmental one; and that national cultures should help guide the order in which reform tools are implemented. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political competition and economic performance: evidence from the Italian regions

We verify the predictions of the theoretical literature on the relationship between political competition and economic performance, holding that, when the predominance of an ideological dimension creates a political rent, the party exploiting it selects lower quality politicians whose policy choices worsen economic performance. We examine the sample of 15 Italian Regions from 1980 to 2002 that exploits the institutional reforms of 1995 as an exogenous shock to pre-existing rents. We find evidence that higher political competition improves economic performance, through the choice of more efficiency-oriented policies.     

Occupations,mediations, subjectifications: fabricating politics

The revolutions and protests that have spread across the globe since 2008 have been seen as a watershed moment. In this article we examine the relationships between urban space and politics that have emerged across these events. We draw upon the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière to provide a framework to understand some events of this period as political moments and, in addition, attempt to build upon Rancière's work to trace out the geographical dimensions of politics. The paper concludes with a consideration of the counter-revolutionary projects enacted by current social orders.     

The price of personalizing politics: Political distrust and economic performance in Latin America, 1996–2006

While research has provided evidence that culture and institutional performance shape individual level trust in political institutions, scholars have neglected to adequately estimate the effect of political institutions and macroeconomic conditions on trust. Using data from the World Value Surveys for eleven Latin American cases, we test if countries with “partyizing” electoral systems - those with rules that encourage voters to hold the party, not individuals, accountable for government performance - experience lower levels of distrust in political parties and the legislature in times of poor economic conditions than those countries with “personalizing” electoral rules. Our analysis shows that the macro political and economic context largely conditions the impact of culture and institutional performance on political trust.     

Libya: fragile security,fragmented politics

A year and a half after the fall of Muammar Gadhafi, militia violence continues to plague Libya and the economy is in a moribund state. The country's development prospects are being thwarted by the fragmented nature of its government, which lacks constitutional legitimacy.     

The remarkable quango: Knowledge,politics, and walfare reform

This paper describes the passage of the Family Support Act of 1988 (FSA), focusing on the politics of welfare reform. It considers especially the role played by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation's assessments of experimental state programs designed to move welfare recipients out of dependency. The paper argues that those assessments were pivotal to the passage of FSA and that they demonstrate the growing potential power of policy research. It also argues that achieving that potential required conditions not often found together: timely and clearly relevant findings based on convincing research methods employed by an organization regarded as impartial, and the lucid and persistent presentation of those findings in many forms and at many forums.