Okun's Law in the Visegrád Group Countries

Abstract

The article assesses the empirical validity of Okun's law on the relationship between a country's unemployment and its output with a focus upon the Visegrád Group economies and upon the post-transition period from the first quarter of 2000 until the first quarter of 2016. The study also accounts for cyclical fluctuations in male and female unemployment and applies different approaches to the estimation of Okun coefficients. Fixed long-run Okun coefficients are compared to the trajectories identified under the state space approach based on the Kalman filter in an attempt to capture their possible time non-constancy. The findings cast doubt about the universal validity of Okun's law in the Visegrád countries in the investigated period.     

Assessing Candidates at Home and Abroad: A Comparative Analysis of Colombian Expatriates in the 2010 Presidential Elections

This article examines candidate favorability among Colombian expatriates and Colombians in the home country in the 2010 Colombian presidential elections. It analyzes the influence of several socioeconomic, migratory, mobilizing, and contextual factors on candidate appraisal using a large exit poll conducted at Colombian consulates in five cities in the United States and Europe and five cities with high emigration rates in Colombia. Aside from differences in candidate favorability stemming from socioeconomic variables (education, income, and religious affiliation), Colombians living abroad largely evaluate candidates in ways similar to Colombians living in the country.     

Authorizing the Production of Urban Moral Order: Appellate Courts and Their Knowledge Games

Using some appellate courts' reviews of projects to maintain moral order in the city as the main source of data, this article shows that an analysis of legal knowledge production that (1) is dynamic and (2) refuses to treat people and texts as totally different entities, one studied by social scientists and the other studied by lawyers, can tell us much about such familiar but seldom theorized legal maneuvers as judicial review and constitutional challenges. Choosing to analyze the dynamics of knowledge processes is inspired by Actor Network Theory (ANT), Bruno Latour's work in particular. This methodological choice is particularly appropriate because judicial review tends to avoid making judgments about the content of impugned laws or ordinances, focusing instead, as Latour does, on form and process. But insofar as legal processes in general privilege form and process to a greater or lesser degree, a more general argument is made about the appropriateness of using tools from ANT to study legal and quasi-legal knowledge networks.     

Challenging Bipolarity: The Socialist International and the ‘Chilean Democratic Cause’ during the Cold War

This article analyses, the Socialist International's (SI) new international positioning strategies from a transnational perspective, through its relationship with the Chilean cause in the context of the Cold War détente. Focus will be placed on the SI's strong commitment to the Chilean democratic cause after the coup and its sustained activism during the military regime. Drawing from primary sources in various international archives, this article's main goal is to shed light on the SI's positioning regarding Latin America as a way to challenge the bipolar order.     

Exploring Perceptions of Portuguese Police about Human Trafficking Victims and Perpetrators

Crime, Law and Social Change - The present study uses a qualitative approach to explore how Portuguese police perceive human trafficking and the individuals involved. Three hundred and twenty-five...     

Men Victims of Stalking in Portugal: Predictors of Help-Seeking Behaviours

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - Stalking is commonly perceived as a gendered crime, predominantly affecting women as victims. However, males can also be victims of this crime....     

Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance

Studies of urban governance, as well as the overlapping literature on law and space, have been heavily influenced by critical analyses of how spatial techniques helped constitute modern disciplinary powers and knowledges. The rise of land‐use control and land‐use planning seem at first sight to be perfect examples of the disciplining of populations through space by the kind of governmental gaze dubbed by Scott (1998) as “seeing like a state.” But a detailed genealogical study that puts the emergence of the notion of “land use” in the broader context of urban governance technologies reveals that modernist techniques of land use planning, such as North American zoning, are more flexible, contradictory, and fragile than critical urbanists assume. Legal tools of premodern origin that target nonquantifiable offensiveness and thus construct an embodied and relational form of urban subjectivity keep reappearing in the present day. When cities attempt to govern conflicts about the use of space through objective rules, these rules often undermine themselves in a dialectical process that results in the return to older notions of offensiveness. This article argues that the dialectical process by which modernist “seeing like a state” techniques give way to older ways of seeing (e.g., the logic of nuisance) plays a central role in the epistemologically hybrid approach to governing space that is here called “seeing like a city.”     

Informal interference in the judiciary in new democracies: a comparison of six African and Latin American cases

This article focuses on the efforts of power holders – at the executive or the legislative level – to influence or curb court activity informally or extra-legally, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. We first define informal judicial interference and operationalize the concept; we then explain how we collected information on the topic through systematic cross-country interviewing. Our concept focuses on judicial intervention actions exercised by political actors once judges are on the bench. We distinguish these actions according to type – direct or subtle – and further differentiate each type according to six different modes. We provide new empirical data on informal interference in six third-wave democracies, three in Africa (Benin, Madagascar, and Senegal) and three in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay). Our empirical findings, first, confirm the importance of informal practices in shaping political-judicial relations. Second, they point to long-standing legacies and to the level of socio-economic development as possible explanations for different performances in terms of the prevalence and severity of informal interference in the judiciary in these newly established democratic regimes