Unity and Disunity in the FMLN

Problems of unity can affect an armed opposition group at many stages of its existence—during the war, in peace negotiations, and in its transition to political party. This article assesses how internal divisions affected the performance of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. It finds that while the FMLN suffered significant internal divisions in the early years of the war, it remained remarkably unified from 1983 on. Significant divisions began to appear during the later war years but were not exacerbated until after the war's conclusion, when repeated fracturing occurred. The FMLN began to present itself as a programmatically coherent party only in 2005, and this ideological homogeneity allowed it to establish a series of partnerships with moderate, non‐revolutionary sectors of Salvadoran society and to achieve victory in the 2009 presidential elections.     

Between EU Constitution and Individuals' Self: European Citizenship

Law and Philosophy -     

Tools of digital innovation in public affairs management: A practice-oriented analysis

While the literature on digital transformation is growing in several fields, research on the effects of digital innovation in the practice of public affairs is still scattered and unsystematic, mostly focusing on interest groups' social media strategies. However, digital innovation has begun to change the practice of public affairs management in many areas, especially in the form of datafication, AI analytics, and cloud-based knowledge management platforms. Growing possibilities in the use of data science and evidence-informed strategic decision-making have arisen in domains traditionally shaped by intuitions and non-codified professional experience. Based on desk research of case studies and hands-on analyses of three increasingly popular public affairs management software platforms (FiscalNote, Quorum, KMIND), this article develops a practice-oriented analysis of various digital tools and functionalities available to public affairs practitioners today, tackling a gap in the literature on how digital innovation can impact the management of several activities along the different phases of a public affairs campaign (monitoring and analysis, strategy design, action, assessment). The article thus highlights how digital innovation goes way beyond the sheer use of social media in communication activities, impacting the practice of public affairs on a deeper and more strategic level.     

当前古巴的社会主义建设

首先,我要祝贺会议的组织者正确选择了本次论坛的主题--多样性与挑战.这个主题意味着他们对拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的现实有十分透彻的了解.拉美和加勒比地区从未像今天这样具有如此的多样性,面临如此深刻的挑战.     

Private regulatory capture via harmonization: An analysis of global retailer regulatory intermediaries

Studies using the Regulatory–Intermediary–Target (RIT) framework have examined a variety of forms of regulatory capture, including how targets capture intermediaries (T?I) and how intermediaries capture regulators (I?R). Little attention has been paid to why and how regulators themselves might engage in capture. Yet such a scenario is likely in transnational governance settings characterized by regulatory competition and conflict, as well as power differentials between different types of private regulators (non‐governmental organizations, multinational corporations, and business associations). This paper elucidates why and how a private regulator might capture another private regulator via a regulatory intermediary: R1?I?R2. Drawing on interview and archival data, I examine three industry‐driven regulatory intermediaries created to harmonize private labor codes of conduct and ethical audit processes. These are founded and governed by a small group of retail trade associations and global retailers who also fulfill the role of private regulators (R1). My analysis reveals that the creation of these intermediaries is driven by global retailers’ reliance on standardization, low transaction costs, and regulatory harmonization across all aspects of their operations. It further reveals how the harmonization platforms are designed to leverage global retailers’ market power and evolve from regulatory intermediaries into de facto regulators that supplant existing private regulators (R2), and thereby capture transnational governance of consumer product supply chains. The article concludes by discussing contributions, implications, and avenues for future research.     

Legitimacy of Inequality in a Highly Unequal Context: Evidence from the Chilean Case

Economic inequality is usually assumed to be a threat to social cohesion and democracy. Nevertheless, this opposition of inequality and democracy is based on further assumptions such as (a) that people perceive economic inequality accurately, and (b) that, by and large they consider inequality unjust. Research into distributive issues has not found consistent support for neither of these assumptions. Quite the contrary, empirical evidence indicates that economic inequality is widely misperceived and that inequality is to some extent considered legitimate. So far most of the empirical evidence in the area of legitimacy comes from experimental studies in the developed world. The present research aims at widening the scope of legitimacy studies by focusing on Chile as a case country, one of the societies with the highest economic inequality worldwide, guided by the question to what extent is economic inequality considered legitimate in a context of high economic inequality? In addressing this question, and based on previous evidence, the article proposes a way to evaluate (a) the legitimacy of inequality at a country level via survey research, and (b) the role of inequality perception and justice ideologies in the justification of economic inequality. The data to be analyzed is the public opinion survey International Social Justice Project (ISJP), implemented in Chile in the year 2007 (n = 890). Multivariate analysis results reveal signs of legitimacy of inequality in Chile, opening a series of issues regarding the acceptance and stability of unequal distributions.     

The simple economics of class action: private provision of club and public goods

This article uses economic categories to show how the reorganisation of civil procedure in the case of class action is not merely aimed at providing a more efficient litigation technology, as hierarchies (and company law) might do for other productive activities, but that it also serves to create a well defined economic organization ultimately aimed at producing a set of goods, first and foremost among which are justice and efficiency. Class action has the potential to recreate, in the judicial domain, the same effects that individual interests and motivations, governed by the perfect competition paradigm, bring to the market. Moreover, through economic analysis it is possible to rediscover not only the productive function of this legal machinery, but also that partial compensation of victims and large profits for the class counsel, far from being a side-effect, are actually a necessary condition for reallocation of the costs and risks associated with the legal action.