The Mass Media as Sentinel: Why Bad News About Issues is Good News for Participation

This article argues that negative news coverage of politically relevant social issues stimulates political participation by shaping citizen awareness of collective problems and interest in politics. By drawing citizen attention to social problems that government may attend to, the press acts as a sentinel for the mass public, cuing them to periods when participation is more important. Drawing on an analysis of the 1974 National Election Study in combination with the Center for Political Studies' content analysis of newspapers, I find evidence that bad news about issues is good news for participation.     

Party Strategies and Administrative-Territorial Reforms in Poland

How well do electoral competition, ideological divides and territory-based cleavages explain the strategies of administrative-territorial reform chosen by political parties in Poland? The role of these logics is explored in the creation of regions and regional self-governments (1999), local electoral reform (2002), rules of adopting regional development projects (2006) and the creation of metropolitan regions (2008). The paper provides evidence supporting the significance of vote- and office-seeking strategies, the rise of a national conservative opposition to decentralisation associated with the weakening of the post-communist divide, and parties representing distinct eastern and western constituencies. Since its creation, subnational government has become more dominated by state-wide parties and has stabilised the emerging bloc party system on the central level.     

Spaces for community involvement: Processes of disciplining and appropriation

Over the past two decades, Mexican society, economics and culture have undergone a dramatic set of transformations. Accordingly, certain historical narratives that underpinned Mexican national identity formation throughout the 20th century have begun to unravel. As a result of this process, some scholars posit that a ‘post-national’ political culture is emerging in Mexico. This paper seeks to examine these trends through a critical examination of the narratives around national identity found in interviews conducted in Mexico in 2000. As a theoretical frame, this paper begins by examining the concept of post-nationalism. It then turns to an overview of 20th-century national formation in Mexico to provide a contextual basis for the interpreting the interview excerpts. The resulting analysis demonstrates the co-presence of national and post-national narratives in Mexico, both of which display hegemonic and subaltern dimensions. The particular discursive contours of these narratives have roots, this paper argues, in the contemporary intersection of state authoritarianism and neo-liberal globalisation.     

Health Care Reform in China: An Analysis of Development Trends and Lack of Implementation

ABSTRACT

China's health care system, under the direction of the central government, has undergone continuous reform in recent decades. Many problems have been encountered, with successive measures attempting to deal with shortcomings and failings of previous reforms. To what extent can implementation failures account for the recurring problems, and what explains these failures? The analysis adopts the theoretical lens of structural-instrumental and cultural-institutional perspectives, respectively, and draws also on recent developments in implementation theory. The historical trajectory of health reform is described, with particular reference to why health policies formulated by the central government during different periods repeatedly failed to achieve their objectives. The empirical analysis finds that structural factors, such as departmentalism and regional separation resulting in complex, overlapping horizontal and vertical actor patterns, have been a primary reason for implementation failures and suggests that they will continue to dog future reform efforts.     

The theory of the state and politics: a central paradox of Marxism

It is commonplace to observe that while Marx saw the withering away of the state as necessary for communism, the state in ‘Communist’ societies has done anything but wither away. This seems to indicate a paradox in the Marxian theory, whose resolution would probably tend to undermine the theory itself. It is, however, argued that the expansion of the state in ‘Communist’ societies is only apparently contradictory to the Marxian theory, and that the theory in fact provides the basis for a most adequate account of this phenomenon. But the theory does have a genuinely paradoxical quality which lies in the tension between the political and its social basis, in the socialist movement. The fundamental component of the Marxian theory is its demonstration of the dependence of the state and politics on society; the problem then is the very status of ‘the political’ as a category, and especially the meaning of a ‘marxist politics’. Marxism itself demonstrates that the very existence of ‘politics in the direct and narrow sense of the word’ is the product of an alienated society, and yet it posits a politics which necessarily exists partly in this very sense. This paper considers the Marxian theory and the problems it tries to deal with, and attempts to show that the solution to its paradox lies in resolving the real tension between the social movement and its political expression. It will be argued that terms of the dilemma are being modified by changes in the relations between the state and society. These changes make a political solution of social contradictions more possible, precisely because they reduce the abstraction of politics from society.