What About Syria?

The following is the edited text of the presentations at the September 30, 1999, meeting of the Sadat Forum at Brookings, cohosted by Richard Haass, vice-president and director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chairfor Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.     

Cuba Just Yesterday and Today: Negotiating Toward What,Exactly?

Elise Andaya, Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post‐Soviet Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Notes, bibliography, index, 169 pp.; hardcover $80, paperback $26.95, ebook. Carmelo Mesa‐Lago and Jorge Pérez‐López, Cuba Under Raúl Castro: Assessing the Reforms. Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2013. Notes, tables, bibliography, index, 310 pp.; hardcover $65, ebook $65. Archibald R. M. Ritter and Ted A. Henken, Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape. Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2015. Notes, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index, 384 pp.; hardcover $79.95, ebook $79.95. Paolo Spadoni, Cuba's Socialist Economy Today: Navigating Challenges and Change. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2014. Notes, tables, bibliography, index, 252 pp.; hardcover $65.     

“What Guarantees Do We Have?” Legal Tolls and Persistent Impunity for Feminicide in Guatemala

Guatemala has one of the highest levels of killings of women and impunity for violence against women in the world. Despite laws created to protect women, Guatemala, like other countries, generally fails at implementation. This article examines justice system obstacles in contemporary Guatemala to processing cases of feminicide—killings of women because they are women in a context of impunity—comparing two recent feminicide cases. It argues that the sociopolitical context in Guatemala, including structural violence, widespread poverty, inequality, corruption, and normalization of gender violence against women, generates penalties, or “legal tolls,” that are imposed on victims' families and contribute to impunity through undermining victims' attempts to navigate the justice system. The analysis focuses on the tolls of fear and time: the need to overcome fear of retaliation and the extraordinary time and effort it takes to do so in a corrupt and broken system.     

The ‘Feminisation of Poverty’ in Costa Rica: To What Extent a Conundrum?

Quantitative data from Costa Rica suggest that poverty is 'feminising', especially in respect of female-headed households, who, since the early 1990s, have constituted a progressively greater share of the population classified as poor. This presents something of a conundrum given significant attempts on the part of the state to promote gender equality and to direct public expenditure to low-income women. Some light on this apparent paradox is shed by qualitative fieldwork undertaken in Guanacaste province where female headship seems to have become a more viable, and sometimes, preferred, option among women on account of its role in enhancing well-being. This is largely on account of social and legal changes that have contributed to making women less inclined to tolerate gender inequalities at the domestic level. The findings underline the importance of embracing gendered subjectivities in analyses of the 'feminisation of poverty' and invite caution about the latter being a unilaterally negative phenomenon.     

A Kingdom in Crisis – What’s All the Fuss About?

This article reviews Andrew MacGregor Marshall’s A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, a book on how Thailand’s political challenges relate to the Thai monarchy. The review draws comparisons between the excitement surrounding the publication of the acclaimed book The King Never Smiles in 2006 and the recent reaction to the publication of A Kingdom in Crisis. It argues that the book is an important contribution because it informs a wide audience about the damaging political role of the monarchy, but it repeatedly ignores an already existing corpus of literature that deals critically with Thailand’s monarchy. Moreover, its focus on the succession as the key factor in the ongoing political crisis is unnecessarily narrow and should have been complemented by an analysis of structural forces as drivers of change.     

Political Economists and Political Scientists ‐ What Are the Benefits to Economists From Closer Interaction?

This paper discusses how a closer interaction with Political Scientists could impact on Swiss Political Economists by concentrating on four specific hypotheses. The first thesis evaluates how increased interdisciplinary interaction affects the incentives of Swiss Political Economists. It somewhat pessimistically posits that interdisciplinary interaction does not necessarily inseminate the work of Political Economists. The second thesis is more optimistic and discusses some aspects of the politico‐economic process which have been neglected so far in Political Economics but could be integrated thanks to the interaction with Political Scientists. The third thesis proposes that Swiss Political Economists should learn from Political Scientists to be more critical of present Swiss institutions. The fourth thesis proposes that Political Economists and Political Scientists should not only discuss the application of economic reasoning to politics. They should also investigate which governance mechanisms can be transferred from the polity to the economy.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Is Brazil becoming a “boring” country?

The article looks at the condition of Brazil's political system in light of the 1998 electoral results. It critically examines arguments that electoral volatility, political fragmentation and weak institutionalisation have produced a highly unstable political system unsuitable for sound policy‐making and processing change. While not underestimating the influence of electoral rules, it argues that given the combination of political, institutional and economic turmoil of the 1980s, it is not surprising that electoral volatility over the period was amongst the highest in the world. Arguably, however, these factors are now having a diminished impact on the political system, lessening volatility and allowing the emergence of a more institutionalised party system.     

Starker Steuerwettbewerb – starke Reformen? Ein neuer Blick auf Unternehmenssteuerreformen in 15 EU‐Staaten (1998‐2011)

Although many EU‐countries have reduced corporate taxes in the recent years, there is still a substantial variance between the 12 oldest EU‐member states. This contribution revisits this variation and analyses the determinants of corporate tax reforms and their magnitude from a perspective which is new in two respects: First, we combine logistic panel regression and fsQCA analysis allowing for an integration of qualitative assessments of tax reforms in the QCA analysis. This adds to the existing studies on tax reform which almost exclusively rely on regression techniques. Second, we focus on the time period 1998‐2011 where we expect tax competition to be especially intense. The results of our analyses confirm the major impact of tax competition on national corporate tax policies. This relationship dominates the regression analyses as well as the fsQCA. Furthermore, our findings allow nuancing the existing results on the influence of institutional constraints and partisan politics.     

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.