The prospects of egalitarian capitalism in the global South: Turkish social neoliberalism in comparative perspective

Abstract

This paper studies the transformation of economic and social policy in Turkey during the 2000s. The policy mix that has emerged can be usefully conceptualized as social neoliberalism, combining relatively orthodox neoliberal economic policies and retrenchment of the protective welfare state (e.g. labour market institutions) with a significant expansion, both in terms of public spending and population coverage, of the productive welfare state (e.g. public health care). Therefore, social neoliberalism as a development model is distinct both from social democracy and orthodox neoliberalism. Its rise in Turkey during the 2000s is arguably best understood with reference to the interests of the AKP's support coalition, the salience of inequalities in access to public services, and the disconnect of social policy-making from civil society mobilization. Turkey's experience with social neoliberalism provides an important reference point for theorizing the ‘social turn’ that since the 2000s has occurred in many late-developing countries with now maturing welfare states, including Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and Chile.     

Institutional design and organisation of the civil protection national system in Mexico: the case for a decentralised and participative policy network

Mexico established the Civil Protection National System (CPNS) following the disastrous 1985 earthquake that killed nearly 10,000 people and devastated large sections of Mexico City. The institutional design and structure of the CPNS embraced citizen demands for greater participation in the Federal government's disaster prevention and response programmes. The authors examine the Federal government's response to disasters since 1985 and conclude that the CPNS operates in a manner that is contrary to the precepts that shaped its design and structure. The authors conclude that orthodox beliefs and assumptions about disasters rationalise the current operations of the CPNS. They argue that a holistic perspective of disasters, rather than a change in institutional design and organisation, is required in order to operationalise intergovernmental cooperation and citizen participation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Consolidating authoritarian rule: calibrated coercion in Singapore

Abstract

Despite the persistence of authoritarian forms of rule, studies of state domination have seen little need to analyse the use of force against citizens. This essay argues that, while state violence is elemental, it is not straightforward. States have a range of repressive tools at their disposal, which they need to deploy rationally and with finesse if they are to consolidate their authoritarian systems. As a step towards problematizing state violence, this essay suggests the concept of calibrated coercion, which represses challengers with minimum political cost. Calibrated coercion is illustrated through an in-depth case study of press controls in Singapore, where one of the world's most successful hegemonic parties has governed continuously for four decades. Behind the stability of the press system, the Singapore government has made fundamental changes to its modes of control, with less frequent recourse to blunter instruments such as newspaper closures or arbitrary arrest. Instead, less visible instruments are increasingly used, with the media's commercial foundations turned against themselves.     

Digital diasporas and governance in semi‐authoritarian states: the case of the Egyptian Copts

This article explores the potential role of diasporas and information technology (IT) in fostering good governance in semi‐authoritarian states. Following a review of the literature on good governance and information technology, the case of the Egyptian Copt community and its diaspora is explored, focusing on the activities of the U.S. Copt Association. It is argued that, whether or not it is an explicit objective, the U.S. Copt Association is supporting improved and more democratic governance in Egypt. The case confirms that heterogeneous networks of communication and people can promote good governance, even for the socially excluded and disempowered in a weakly penetrated state. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A local money to stabilize capitalism: the underestimated case of the WIR

As a result of the current financial crisis, economists have paid increased attention to local monies designed in an effort to create a new kind of economy, as well as new ways to develop social links. This paper seeks to shed light on the WIR money, a local money that has been in existence in Switzerland since the 1930s. We argue that it provides a shield against crises for two significant and connected reasons. First, from a ‘horizontal’ perspective, the WIR is a coherent economic, as well as social, project that relies on the ‘melting money’ principle. Second, from a ‘vertical’ perspective, it is based on a banking model that is anchored to a specific ‘attitude’ designed to manage the monetary common good. The mix between these ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ perspectives is likely to be insightful for other projects like the WIR.     

Re-thinking urban citizenship for immigrants from a policy perspective: the case of Barcelona

This article proposes that the role of cities in immigrant integration be reconsidered through the prism of urban citizenship, looking at how local policies co-regulate immigrants’ status, rights and identity. It argues that urban citizenship connects two dominant understandings of citizenship, as city governments are under pressure to reconcile the normative perspective of formal membership of the state with the claims for rights expressed by excluded parts of the urban citizenry. A case study of an inclusive way of regulating citizenship in Barcelona illustrates how a citizenship perspective can cast light on the specific ways in which cities regulate immigrant citizenship in interaction with higher levels of government, and highlights some of the levers cities possess to modify the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion of immigrants locally.     

Detecting manipulation in authoritarian elections: Survey-based methods in Zimbabwe

This paper explores the feasibility of using social surveys to detect electoral manipulation in authoritarian regimes. It compares official results from the July 2013 elections in Zimbabwe with findings from a nationally representative pre-election survey. The comparison confirms that the dominant incumbent party won the elections but by far smaller margins than officially reported. This discrepancy provides analytic leverage to identify the possible presence of coercive mobilization and vote suppression and to pinpoint their geographic location. The election results are re-estimated using a set of voting simulations based on novel proxy indicators and an original list experiment designed to reveal the political preferences of fearful voters. The paper concludes by discussing why autocrats manipulate elections and whether or not they succeed in their objectives.     

Black knights and elections in authoritarian regimes: Why and how Russia supports authoritarian incumbents in post‐Soviet states

In the last decade, studies have documented how autocrats use elections as a way of legitimising and stabilising their regimes. Simultaneously, a literature on negative external actors (also known as ‘black knights’) has developed, emphasising how various international actors use anti‐democracy promotion strategies to undergird authoritarian regimes. In this article, these two literatures are fused in an attempt to shed light on the external dimension of authoritarian elections and what is termed ‘black knight election bolstering’. First, five mechanisms are elucidated, through which external assistance increases the chances of ‘winning’ elections in authoritarian settings (signaling invincibility, deterring elite defection, undermining opposition activities, dealing with popular protests, and countervailing pressure from foreign democracy promoters). Second, it is argued that external actors are most likely to offer election bolstering when they face a particularly acquiescent partner or when electoral defeat is perceived to lead to radical and undesired regime change. The relevance of both factors is augmented when uncertainty of the electoral outcome is high. Finally, four cases of Russian intervention during elections in three authoritarian neighbour countries (Ukraine in 2004, Belarus in 2006, and Moldova in 2005 and 2009) are analysed. The case studies corroborate the theoretical arguments: not only does Russia engage in all five types of black knight election bolstering, but it does so only when one or more of the three explanatory factors are present.     

Remembering Vincent Ostrom: unhorsing a dominant paradigm

This essay is a memorial piece about Vincent Ostrom (September 25, 1919–June 29, 2012). I start by reviewing his academic history and then turn to Professor Ostrom’s major intellectual legacy—his effort to overturn the dominant paradigm in public administration and political science on metropolitan government reform. The three most important contributions of his work are discussed, including the introduction of public goods theory into the study of public administration and his work on quasimarkets and the Tiebout model. Three controversies or conundrums raised by his work are then discussed. Finally, the essay considers whether Professor Ostrom was ultimately successful in his effort to overthrow the traditional approach to the production and delivery of public goods at the city government level.     

The power of policy networks in authoritarian regimes: Changing environmental policy in China

In this article, I examine how civil society organizations (CSOs) in China created policy networks among government officials to change environmental policies. I contend that these networks work in similar ways to those in democracies, despite the focus in the literature on how policymaking in authoritarian regimes lacks societal participation. China adopted strict regulations to control CSOs by requiring registration with a supervisory agency. However, CSOs exploit the regulations to use the supervisory agency as an access point to policymakers whom they otherwise could not reach. I use case studies to demonstrate how the strategies used to construct policy networks determined their success in changing policy. This finding represents an initial step in theorizing bottom‐up sources of policymaking in authoritarian regimes given that these regimes all create mechanisms for government control over CSOs, have difficulty accessing good information for policymaking from society, and a policy process formally closed to citizen participation.     

Deictic use as a threshold for imaginative thinking: a Peircean perspective

This investigation traces the ontogeny of the use of “I” and how its symbolic use promotes imaginative thinking. Peirce's triadic system is contrasted with Vygotsky's binary system to highlight the import of Thirdness in characterizing the ontogeny of person deictics within conversational roles. Person deictics, such as “I”, are first indexes. Later when their social function/meaning is apprehended, they serve as symbols as well; still later they are used psychologically in self to self monologues, and acquire distinctive interpretants when used unconventionally. Early indexical uses of “I” are non-symbolic – “I” referring to self only absent recognition of conversational roles. “I” is employed symbolically when its referent shifts and when its invariant meaning (speaker) is apprehended. Person deictics enhance the emergence of imagination when the symbolic use transcends their inter-psychological regulation through human to human conversation to their intra-psychological function in self to self discourse. Extension of functional roles (speaker/listener) to dolls/puppets (in representational play scenarios) constitutes an extended use of the symbolic function because inanimates cannot assume conversational roles; and such use triggers the association of different interpretants to the category of deictic use. The symbolic use of “I” as speaker facilitates apprehension of self as object, which is a major determinant of when in ontogeny children extend the use of person deictics from Dynamic to Final interpretants.     

Towards an organisational perspective on party funding: Explaining financial transfers from MEPs to their national parties

Which parties represented in the European Parliament (EP) are able to extract regular donations from their MEPs' salaries and, if they extract donations, how great are they? In the literature on party finances, there has been a lack of attention paid to the use of salaries of elected representatives as a source of funding. This is surprising given that the national headquarters of many parties in Europe regularly collect ‘party taxes’: a fixed (and often significant) share of their elected representatives' salaries. In filling this gap, this article theoretically specifies two sets of party characteristics that account for the presence of a taxing rule and the level of the tax, respectively. The presence of a tax depends on the basic ‘acceptability’ of such an internal obligation that rests on a mutually beneficial financial exchange between parties' campaign finance contributions to their MEPs and MEPs' salary donations to their parties. The level of the tax, in contrast, depends on the level of intra‐organisational compliance costs and parties' capacity to cope with these costs. Three factors are relevant to this second stage: MEPs' ideological position, the size of the parliamentary group and party control over candidate nomination. The framework is tested through a selection model applied to a unique dataset covering the taxing practices in parties across the European Union Member States.     

Innovation for a steady state: a case for responsible stagnation

The proponents of responsible innovation (RI) have often opened their discussions with the reassurance that while they are against irresponsible innovation, they are not advocating irresponsible stagnation. In the two-by-two matrix generally used to illustrate this model of innovation, the quadrant for responsible stagnation has so far gone largely unmentioned, let alone explored. This paper draws on existing real-world cases to examine what arguments drawn from ecological economics might contribute to the discussion of RI. It questions the present growth-driven paradigm and asks whether opening the black box of ‘responsible stagnation' might also open the door for a reasoned discussion about resource consumption and pace of development in over-productive or too-risky sectors and technologies, as an intrinsic part of responsible innovation, rather than its opposite.