Die argumentative Logik der Tabakmandate des Alten Bern: Eine historische Policy‐Analyse

Zusammenfassung: Die Analyse dynamischer sozialer Phänomene stellt sowohl für die Sozial‐ als auch die Geisteswissenschaften eine Herausforderung dar. Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, einen auf Dunn (2004) aufbauenden Analyseraster auf seine Durchführbarkeit anhand einer Analyse von Policy‐Argumenten in historischen Dokumenten zu testen. Ein Längsschnittvergleich von Struktur und Form der Policy‐Argumente in den Tabakmandaten der Stadt Bern von 1659 bis 1723 zeigt einen Wandel der Tabakpolitik des Alten Berns in der Ortung der gesellschaftlichen Probleme, ihrer Ursachen, den damit festgelegten Massnahmen und derer Legitimation auf. Insgesamt impliziert dieses Resultat, dass unsere Methode für die Analyse historischer Policy‐Argumente geeignet ist.     

Behind the ‘Miracle’: Non‐Traditional Agro‐Exports and Water Stress in Marginalised Areas of Ica,Peru

Expansion in the non‐traditional agricultural export sector following neoliberal reform has precipitated an economic transformation in Peru. Non‐traditional agricultural export growth has brought environmental, social and distributive costs. This article critically examines the Peruvian asparagus boom and the impact of this on water availability among marginal groups. Based on primary case study fieldwork, the paper asserts that the agro‐export model is causing the over‐exploitation of important groundwater supplies in the Ica Valley where almost all of Peru's fresh asparagus is produced. This reveals wider issues concerning neoliberal development and the political economy of natural resource allocation in Latin America.     

E‐Informality in Venezuela: The ‘Other Path’ of Technology

The study explores arguments concerning the concept of the informal economy and makes the case that new media technologies, or more broadly, information and communication technologies (ICTs), as a socio‐economic phenomenon, tend to be exploited in the same way as other economic activities by those actors that operate in the informal economy. Moreover, this exploitation tends to show similar patterns in terms of growth and ownership concentration. In this context, the study analyses the patterns and tendencies that transpire when informal actors exploit ICTs. It aims to question the validity of the neoliberal paradigm that portrays informality and new media technology as a creative process that requires deregulation. The article is based on a field study carried out in Venezuela between 2003 and 2004.     

Dueños,Duendes, Bichos: Non‐Human Agents and the Politics of Place‐Making in a Bolivian Guaraní Community

The article looks at the interactions between the inhabitants of a community of Guaraní people in the Bolivian eastern lowlands and spirit entities found in the forest that forms part of the community's lands. Understanding these interactions as a form of intra‐communal politics, the article engages with the issue of landownership as an ongoing process of negotiation between two different sets of owners. This presents a vision of the political relations between people and spirit beings that is opposed to the currently dominant ontological vision which would put these distinct entities into defined (apolitical) places within a unified cosmovision.     

National and Local Vulnerability to Climate‐Related Disasters in Latin America: The Role of Social Asset‐Based Adaptation

The Latin American region is particularly prone to climate‐related natural hazards. However, this article argues that natural hazards are only partly to blame for the region's vulnerability to natural disasters with quantitative evidence suggesting instead that income per capita and inequality are main determinants of natural disaster mortality in Latin America. Locally, the region's poor are particularly susceptible to climate‐related natural hazards. As a result of their limited access to capital, adaptation based on social assets constitutes an effective coping strategy. Evidence from Bolivia and Belize illustrates the importance of social assets in protecting the most vulnerable against natural disasters.     

Contra‐Associational Strategy in a Hybrid Regime: Ecuador, 2007–2015

Over the last decade, political scientists have identified Ecuador as one of Latin America's hybrid regimes. This article examines how President Rafael Correa combined legal reforms, bureaucratic controls and other policies in a contra‐associational strategy aimed at extending executive control over civil society. While the strategy significantly altered the operational environment for civil society groups, it did not completely strip them of their capacity to oppose the regime. Ecuador's experience underscores the ambiguity at play in hybrids; in pursuit of regime legitimation, regimes must cede some space to opponents while simultaneously sabotaging civil liberties.     

Between Maternalism and Feminism: Women in Nicaragua's Counter‐Revolutionary Forces

To date very little scholarship has focused on the experiences of women who fought or collaborated with Nicaragua's counter‐revolutionary forces (known as the Contra) in the 1980s. Based on qualitative research conducted in Waslala, this paper examines the circumstances which led a group of women to become positioned as Contra supporters. It then explores how these women constructed their gender identities in the light of their collaboration with the Contra. It argues that despite their participation in a right‐wing political organisation and despite their tendency to draw upon understandings of themselves as mothers, widows and victims of war, these women should not be seen as inherently conservative and reactionary, given that they have also been inspired by forms of political organisation that are indicative of an emergent feminist identity.     

The Making of the Informed Voter: A Split‐Ballot Survey on the Use of Scientific Evidence in Direct‐Democratic Campaigns

Literature claims that scientific evidence makes better democracies. This paper analyses whether and which voters choose empirical evidence in the form of policy evaluation results when informing themselves about issue‐specific votes. The analysis is based on a split‐ballot survey where participants chose media items with different content to make a decision on a specific issue. Results show that voters do indeed choose evidence‐based information, especially if their involvement with the issue is high and if they are well educated and that they choose a higher amount of such information if they are also politically engaged. In a setting that fosters political engagement and provides policy‐relevant information, the findings imply that voters want to be informed when making a democratic issue choice. Involved and engaged voters might be a solution to sceptics against direct democracy out of fear of uninformed decisions and post‐factual populism.     

Metropolitan Governance in Deutschland: Normative,utilitaristische, kommunikative und dramaturgische Steuerungsansätze

Der Aufsatz beschreibt die historische Entwicklung und die jüngsten Formen politischer Steuerungsansätze in sechs westdeutschen Großstadtregionen. Es sind dies die Regionen Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, Frankfurt, Stuttgart und München. Zu diesem Zweck wird im theoretischen Teil eine zweidimensionale Typologie von Formen der Metropolitan Governance entwickelt. In der ersten Dimension werden Governance‐Formen nach dem Strukturmuster der Interaktion unterschieden, in der zweiten Dimension werden die Governance‐Formen aufgrund der zugrundeliegenden Handlungstheorie (normatives, utilitaristisches, kommunikatives und dramaturgisches Handeln) differenziert. Mit Hilfe der dadurch gewonnenen acht Idealtypen wird im darauf folgenden empirischen Teil gezeigt, dass bis in die 1970er Jahre normative Steuerungsformen die Diskussion beherrschten und diese in den 1980er Jahren durch ein utilitaristisches Paradigma in Frage gestellt wurden. Seit Beginn der 1990er Jahre wurde verstärkt auf kommunikative und dramaturgische Governance‐Formen gesetzt, auf deren Grundlage können sich aber ganz unterschiedliche Governance‐Schwerpunkte und z.T. auch ausdifferenzierte “Governance‐Landschaften” in den verschiedenen Stadtregionen etablieren.     

Alpine Troubles: Trajectories of De‐Consociationalisation in Austria and Switzerland Compared

For all their differences, both Austria and Switzerland have long been considered to represent key examples of consociational democracy. Since the 1990s, both countries have however faced major challenges to their respective consociationalist regimes. One of the shared features of regime evolution and change in Austria and Switzerland, which can be meaningfully referred to as ‘de‐consociationalisation’, concerns the successful exploitation of external shocks by powerful populist parties. Taking stock of the developments in four different areas (the electoral, the parliamentary and the executive arena as well as interest group/state relations), we identify a complex dynamic which has made the two countries more similar in some respects, but more different in others. Overall, two decades into the twenty‐first century, Austria is significantly less of a consociationalist regime than Switzerland.     

Imagined Races: From Environmental Determinism to Geographical Authenticity in Twentieth‐Century Argentina

This article explores how Argentine intellectuals incorporated the natural environment into their accounts of the racial, cultural and political features of the nation. In the late nineteenth century environmental determinism, based on the assumption of a cause–effect relationship between geographical and racial factors, entered Argentina through three main routes: Lamarckism, Darwinism and Spencerianism. By the mid twentieth century, however, anti‐positivist philosophies had been fully incorporated into a body of work that analysed Argentina's socio‐historical foundations. This article examines the shift that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in how those seeking to define race incorporated the environment into their arguments. The raza was commonly taken to be synonymous with nation. Selected works by sociologist and legal scholar Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875‐1918) and by writer and ensayista Bernardo Canal Feijóo (1897‐1982) will be analysed as influential yet overlooked examples of how ‘the problem of Argentine culture’ could not be separated from the question of nature understood in terms of both physical and human geography. The goal will be to reveal, firstly, the extent to which the notion of the interior as geographical and anthropological desert deeply informed the political vision of the early national period in relation to race and nation and, secondly, how later interpretations of the nation recast American nature as a foundational element of cultural authenticity based on a sentiment of geographical belonging.     

Politics of Trade in Post‐neoliberal Latin America: The Case of Bolivia

Deploying a two‐level perspective, this article analyses the regional and domestic space that the Morales administration has in which to implement the vision of trade articulated in its Plan Nacional de Desarrollo (PND; National Development Plan). Regionally the Morales administration has attempted to combine the solidarity principles of the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA; Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) with the market‐oriented growth possibilities provided by more orthodox integration projects such as the Comunidad Andina de Naciones (CAN; Andean Community of Nations) and the Mercado Común del Sur (Mercosur; Southern Common Market). Domestically the Movimiento al socialismo (MAS; Movement Toward Socialism) government must negotiate the destabilising effects of its trade strategy in a polarised national context where business and civil society actors are critiquing from their respective positions both the solidarity principles and market‐oriented elements of the PND trade strategy.