Policymaking in Multiparty Presidential Regimes: A Comparison between Brazil and Ecuador

This paper explores why two countries with similar electoral, partisan, and presidential institutions, have produced significantly different policy outcomes in Latin America. Brazil and Ecuador are conventionally known as having highly fragmented party systems, where legislators have great incentives to cultivate a personal vote. Presidents are perceived to be strong and to make large use of government resources in order to advance their agenda. Yet, policies in Brazil are more likely to respond to shocks and to be more stable over time than policies in Ecuador, where policies remain vulnerable to political changes and realignments. We argue that this variation is explained by the different nature of political coalitions formed in each country. We identify three factors that increase the executive's ability to craft governing coalitions in congress: the availability of valuable coalition currencies, the influence of long‐term political horizons, and the extent to which political transactions are credibly and effectively enforced.     

Democracy without choice: Citizens’ perceptions of government autonomy during the Eurozone crisis

In this article it is argued that citizens take into account the degree of a government's political autonomy to implement particular policies when expressing their views on satisfaction with democracy (SWD) but, in order to do so, they need to perceive it. When citizens directly observe the external constraints that reduce their government's autonomy, then variations in levels of regime satisfaction may no longer be exclusively about government performance – as widely argued by political economists – but also about democratic choice. The argument develops after comparing the existing scenarios in the Eurozone before and after the Great Recession. Citizens only began to perceive their own lack of choice to decide between policy alternatives when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in May 2010, the date of the first Greek bail‐out. It is then when citizens started to update their beliefs about the functioning of democracy as a system in which alternative policies can be adopted as bail‐out deals were signed between national governments from the Euro periphery and the Troika. This updating process towards the way democracy works explains the increasing gap in the levels of SWD between bailed‐out economies and the rest of the countries in the Eurozone. Empirical confirmation for this claim is found after analysing Eurobarometer surveys from 2002 to 2014 and using a two‐step difference‐in‐difference analysis that combines individual and aggregate data.     

Sexual violence issues in eastern DRC: processes of global and local co-constitution

According to Séverine Autesserre, there is a dominant culture within the field of international peacebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo that excludes any action at the local level. This dichotomy between the local and the global is also noticeable in terms of women's rights, where international human rights law and local customs are opposed. But in order to grasp the complexity of the emancipation movements of the female victims of violence in North Kivu, we must consider the multiplicity of the semi-autonomous social fields that regulate the lives of individuals on the local and global spheres, as well as the social actors’ interactions within these spaces. Using the results of an ethnography study carried out in North Kivu between 2011 and 2012, we will see that these actors not only construct law, but they also inhabit normative systems built and maintained by them.     

God and the Political Planet

The resurgence of political Islam and the endurance of broad religious belief in the most modern of societies—America—has created a crisis of faith among secularists. If modernity no longer implies a secular outlook, and secularism, by definition, cannot generate any values beyond an indifferent tolerance of all belief, what role will religion play in the 21st century? In an interesting confluence of reflection, Jürgen Habermas, one of Europe's leading secular liberal thinkers, argues that secular citizens must be open to religious influence, especially since the very identity of Western culture is rooted in Judeo‐Christian values. In his political afterlife, Tony Blair has converted to Catholicism and established a Faith Foundation to press for religious literacy because “you can't understand the modern world unless you understand the importance of religious faith.” Similarly, when Pope Benedict XVI visited secular France in September, President Nicholas Sarkozy scandalized the lay establishment by saying, like Habermas, that “rejecting a dialogue with religion would be a cultural and intellectual error.” He called for “a positive secularism that debates, respects and includes, not a secularism that rejects.” Despite the flurry of controversy over a recent spate of books extolling the virtues of atheism in the wake of Islamist terrorism, the more interesting issue by far is the emergence of post‐secular modernity.     

Are Judges Street‐Level Bureaucrats? Evidence from French and Canadian Family Courts

Although judges were included in the street‐level‐bureaucracy (SLB) group by Lipsky (1980), sociolegal scholars have barely used this theoretical framework to study them. This article aims to specify their position with respect to SLB in order to bridge the gap between public administration and sociolegal research. Specifically, using a cross‐national ethnography of judicial institutions, it compares family trial judges' practice on the ground in France and Canada. General conditions separate them from the core SLB group: encounters with clients are less direct; discretion is more legitimate. However, French judges are far closer to the SLB group than their Canadian counterparts regarding public encounters and case processing. As such, the accuracy of the SLB framework depends on professional and cultural patterns that combine differently in these two national contexts.