Evaluating development policies and programmes in the third world

The issues and methodologies of programme evaluation have largely been developed within the North American context of an open and competitive political process. The policy cycle in Third World nations, especially authoritarian regimes, is a closed system with little consultation with affected target groups, suppression of criticism of government officials and policies, and a severe weakness in policy implementation. Third World governments prefer evaluation methods such as cost-benefit analysis which will not undermine fragile regimes by indicating problems in the policy formulation and implementation process. However, the most useful form of evaluation is implementation analysis, which can pinpoint the reasons why policies succeed or fail.     

Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950–1992

What are the most important sources of institutional variation among authoritarian regimes, and how do such institutions influence these dictatorships' propensity to initiate military disputes? This article argues that most existing studies in both comparative politics and international relations employ a flawed conceptualization of authoritarian institutions. Excessive focus on the personalization or institutionalization of authoritarian regimes' decision‐making procedures has distracted attention from the more critical issue of what institutions these regimes deploy to enhance social control and secure political incumbency. Since military regimes are systematically less effective than single‐party regimes at developing these types of authoritarian institutions, they more frequently resort to desperate measures to fend off domestic challenges to their power. In particular, we find compelling empirical support for our hypothesis that military regimes are more likely than single‐party regimes to initiate military disputes, irrespective of whether those regimes are highly personalized or not.     

Refugees: The security dimension

In the 1990s doors have been closing in the Western world against refugee claimants. Although there are multiple causes for declining generosity towards refugees, arguments that refugees pose security problems to host nations have been particularly prominent. An historical analysis reveals that the so‐called ‘golden age’ of postwar refugee settlement from the 1940s to the mid‐1970s was a by‐product of Cold War security and propaganda considerations. The end of the Cold War and the pressures of refugee movements generated by Third World and former Communist bloc conflicts has restructured Western refugee discourse. Refugees now tend to be seen as importers of external political conflicts into the West. At the same time growing European and North American resentment of ‘foreigners’ competing for declining job opportunities and reduced social services have encouraged anti‐immigrant political movements. By tightening barriers and controls over refugees on security grounds, Western governments are able to respond in part to these pressures. The Cold War policing and security alliance in Europe has been retooled to form the basis of a new post‐Cold War cooperation over immigration and refugee security, without the necessity of creating a new framework of supranational institutions.     

Foreign Direct Investment,Regime Type,and Labor Protest in Developing Countries

We explore the relationship between FDI, regime type, and strikes in low‐ and middle‐income countries. We argue that FDI produces social tensions and opportunities for protest that can result in higher levels of industrial conflict. However, the effect of FDI is moderated by regime type. While democracies tend to have higher levels of protest overall, they are better able than authoritarian regimes to cope with the strains arising from FDI. We cite two reasons. First, political competition forces regimes to incorporate workers, which shifts conflict from industrial relations to the political arena. Second, democracies provide workers with freedom of association rights, which facilitate institutionalized grievance resolution. We test the argument using a new dataset of labor protest in low‐ and middle‐income countries for the period 1980–2005.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

SOCIAL PROBLEM-SOLVING IN A REVOLUTIONARY SETTING: NICARAGUA'S PESTICIDE POLICY REFORMS

Pesticide related health problems and environmental contamination have plagued the Third World for several decades. This study explores the efforts to resolve pesticide problems within the context of the Nicaraguan revolution. Through a case study of Nicaragua's pesticide policy reforms the opportunities afforded by Third World revolutions to address specific social problems are analyzed. The study then explores the array of obstacles to implementation of such reforms generated by political and military opposition to revolutionary change and concludes with an assessment of prospects for social problem-solving in a revolutionary setting.     

Neoliberalism,Nationalism and the Decline of Political Traditions

The three great Western political traditions (conservatism, liberalism, social democracy) incorporate three of the four possible combinations of the core political axes: traditional, unchanging authority versus the challenge of change, and egalitarianism versus inegalitarianism. The fourth possibility—egalitarian conservatism—has appeared in various guises, but has usually become submerged within the right, including its most authoritarian forms. Current xenophobic movements claiming to represent those suffering from excessive change—for example, those involved in the UK 's EU referendum and Donald Trump's victory in the USA —are seeing an apparent resurgence of this neglected tradition. What are its implications for politics in general?     

The limits of authoritarian solidarity: The Gulf monarchies and preserving authoritarian rule during the Arab Spring

Scholars have recently begun to examine how authoritarian rulers cooperate with each other in order to fend off popular challenges to their power. During the Arab Spring the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) supported fellow authoritarian regimes in some cases while backing opposition movements in others. Existing theoretical approaches fail to explain this variation. Advancing the study on authoritarian cooperation, this article develops a theoretical approach that sets out to explain how authoritarian regimes reach their decisions. Drawing on poliheuristic foreign policy analysis, it argues that perceptions of similarity serve as a filter for estimating threats to regime survival at home. If regimes perceive the situation in other countries as similar to their own, supporting other authoritarian regimes becomes the only acceptable strategy. In contrast, if perceptions of similarity are low, regimes also consider other options and evaluate their implications beyond the domestic political arena. Applying this framework to the example of the GCC states during the Arab Spring, the analysis reveals covariation between perceptions of similarity and threat among GCC regimes, on the one hand, and their strategies, on the other.     

Political Efficacy through Deliberative Participation in Urban China: A Case Study on Public Hearings

Since the early 2000s, local governments in China have been holding public hearings to solicit opinion from state, city and township residents about legal and administrative issues. Having begun with a relatively small participation rate, in the last 10 years public hearings have achieved sustainable growth in their frequency and visibility in mainstream and social media. Given that public hearings do not offer decision-making power, the increased participation rate reveals an influence not necessarily on public policy making, but on urban citizens’ attitudes towards available participatory and deliberative mechanisms. This article refers to three bodies of literature: political efficacy, deliberative democracy, and social movements. The literature on political efficacy reveals the link between political attitudes and behaviors. The literature on deliberative democracy is an important part of the analysis because Chinese public hearings are based on deliberative designs imported from North America and Western Europe. The literature on social movements complements the deliberative analysis undertaken in an authoritarian context by providing it with conceptual tools to adapt to this new setting. The public hearings held in Guiyang (Guizhou), Wuhan (Hubei) and Qingdao (Shandong) in 2010 and 2011 are used as case studies to demonstrate participation demographics and the impact of public hearing participation on city dwellers. This article investigates the impact of participation in public hearings on the political efficacy of Chinese citizens, and, based on the results, contends that such participation equips the participants with an increased level of political efficacy, and enables the development of political networks and citizen strategies that help to constrain local officials.     

The weakness of postcommunist civil society reassessed

During the last two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have argued that civil society is structurally deficient in postcommunist countries. Yet why have the seemingly strong, active and mobilised civic movements of the transition period become so weak after democracy was established? And why have there been diverging political trajectories across the postcommunist space if civil society structures were universally weak? This article uses a new, broader range of data to show that civil societies in Central and Eastern European countries are not as feeble as commonly assumed. Many postcommunist countries possess vigorous public spheres and active civil society organisations strongly connected to transnational civic networks able to shape domestic policies. In a series of time‐series cross‐section models, the article shows that broader measures of civic and social institutions are able to predict the diverging transition paths among postcommunist regimes, and in particular the growing gap between democratic East Central Europe and the increasingly authoritarian post‐Soviet space.     

The World Bank and social capital: Lessons from ten rural development projects in the Philippines and Mexico

Social capital is widely recognized as one of the few sources of capital available to the poor, yet the processes by which development policies affect the accumulation of that social capital are not well understood. The World Bank, through its funding of development projects, affects the institutional environments for the accumulation of such social capital. The question is how to determine whether that institutional context is enabling, and to what degree. This paper compares ten recent World Bank-funded rural development projects in Mexico and the Philippines to explore how the processes of project design and implementation influence the institutional environments for the accumulation of horizontal, vertical, and intersectoral forms of pro-poor social capital. The findings have conceptual and policy implications for understanding the political dynamics of creating enabling environments for social capital accumulation by the poor.     

The Difficult Art of Classifying Regimes: The Case of Paraguay

This article deals with the difficult art of classifying political regimes. Such classifications are important since they lay the ground for a central field of research in political science, namely the causes and consequences of regime changes. The article focuses on Paraguay. which has experienced a process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule over the past five years. Four criteria of democracy are used to evaluate the state of democracy in this country in early 1994: competitive elections and universal suffrage. broad and autonomous political participation. political freedoms and accountability of elected organs. The investigation of the Paraguayan case highlights the problems involved in using a dichotomous regime variable in empirical research. Paraguay is a democracy when it comes to freedom of speech, but hardly in term of the political situation in the countryside. It also demonstrates that the widely used Schumpeterian definition of democracy is risky in the sense that it may conceal more than it reveals about the regime under study. Finally, the article sheds light on the need for in-depth case studies for the classification of political regimes.     

The political economy of distribution in developing countries: A rent-seeking approach

Economic development in many Third World countries after independence has been biased in the sense that some, mainly urban, social groups have gained much more than the majority of the population who lives in rural areas or urban shantytowns. That bias is to a large extent caused by government policy and, accordingly, by an uneven distribution of political influence. This paper contains an analytical model reflecting the bias in the distribution of the benefits and costs of public sector activities, where those activities are determined by the distribution of political influence. The main elements of the distribution of political influence are determined in a rent-seeking game between society' different social groups.     

高校思想政治理论课社会实践教学初探

这是高校思想政治理论社会实践教学改革的一个总结报告。以社会调查为形式,以调查对象为窗口,鼓励学生跨出校园,深入社会。在我们的精心组织、悉心督导下,社会实践教学在一定程度上提高了学生运用所学理论分析社会实际问题的能力,并使其在亲身经验中加深对理论的理解与消化,同时,增强了学生对国情的认识及社会责任感,锻炼了综合素质,取得了较好的教学效果。     

Civil Society and Political Transition in Mexico

This article analyzes the current political transition in México from the vantage point of civil society. It departs from a definition of the Mexican authoritarian regime, now the oldest in the world, as a model of fusion between the state, the market and society. The crisis of the developmental model and the regime's increasing inability to incorporate the new social actors created by industrialization and urbanization opened up a long period of political crisis whose main content was a process of societal differentiation. The failure of President Salinas' project of neo-liberal reconstruction of the authoritarian regime deepened the crisis and led to the formation and consolidation of strong national political parties, the beginning of a still unequal, but effective electoral competition and especially to the emergence of several civic groups that are struggling for a democratization that goes beyond electoral politics. The collective identity as civil society of these civic groups has been instrumental for the critique of the regime's gradualist strategy of "permenent electoral reform".     

Referendum Policies across Political Systems

This article compares the use of referendums across political regimes over time in Europe. It does so on the basis of a new typology that differentiates between policy domains and degrees of abstraction. The analysis shows different patterns in referendum use between authoritarian regimes, countries in transition and democracies. In addition to the variation in policy domains, the findings indicate different institutional features within the polity types: the process of initiation, the turnout in referendums and the rate of approval. The empirical evidence draws on an original dataset of 620 referendums organised at national level in Europe between 1793 and 2017.     

Civil Society and the Authoritarian State: Cooperation,Contestation and Discourse

Contemporary authoritarian regimes frequently coexist with a range of non-governmental associations, while resisting any trajectory towards democratization. This article reviews three major explanations for such political interactions, before proposing an alternative explanatory framework, using Young's dualistic approach to civil society. This approach stresses that the discursive role of civil society needs to be understood in order to explain the dynamics of coercion and cooperation faced by civil society organizations under authoritarian rule.     

The range and limitation of sub-national regime variations under electoral authoritarianism: The case of Russia

ABSTRACT

As has been demonstrated by scholars, different levels of a polity may encompass different political regimes. In this study we examine variations in regional political regimes which have developed under Russia's system of electoral authoritarianism. Comparing the results of two cycles of regional assembly elections (2008–12 and 2013–17) we analyse and compare elections results and levels of electoral contestation in both the party list (PL) and single member district (SMD) contests. This allows us to identify the range of sub-national regime variations: ‘hegemonic authoritarian’, ‘inter-elite bargain authoritarian’, ‘clearly-competitive authoritarian’, and ‘moderately-competitive authoritarian’ regions. Approximately half of the regions demonstrate stable electoral patterns across both cycles. At the same time, none of the regions go beyond the authoritarian limitations imposed by the Russian regime. The variation is explained by a combination of structural and agency factors with a prevalence of the latter.     

Political Support: Social Capital, Civil Society and Political and Economic Performance

This article assesses two main theories of the decline of political support that is found in many western democracies. The first is society centred and built on the concepts of social capital, trust and civil society. The second is politics centred and focuses on the performance of government and the economy. The two theories are not necessarily incompatible, but they are usually treated in a mutually exclusive way. In this article they are tested against a combination of aggregate cross-national comparative data and detailed case studies of four countries that have suffered exceptional decline of political support for politicians, political institutions and the systems of government. The puzzle is that cross-national comparative evidence about a large and diverse number of nations supports social capital theory, whereas in-depth study of four countries that have experienced substantial decline of political support does not. The erosion of support coincides in all four with poor economic and/or political performance. A way of reconciling the two theories and their supporting evidence is suggested, arguing that while social capital is a necessary foundation for democratic support, it is not a sufficient cause.     

Intellectuals, Political Culture and the Roots of the Authoritarian Presidency in Latin America

Curiously, few studies of the Latin American chief executive lend shape to the corpus of scholarly journals. What does exist concerning the presidency in Latin America consists largely of chapters in country studies covering formal-legal aspects of presidential power. Missing are examinations of the philosophical, intellectual, cultural and historical bases of presidential power. The paucity of research concerning the executive as it relates to the intellectual history and cultural milieu of Latin America is more confounding when it is readily apparent that Latin American pensadores have thought and written extensively about the presidency. Intellectual elites have played a major role as the vanguard of political and social movements in Latin America. This survey explicates and analyzes the intellectual and cultural roots of presidential power in Latin America in order to understand the institution's authoritarian propensities.