Hedging in search of a new age of non-alignment: Myanmar between China and the USA

Abstract

The American ‘return’ to East Asia is currently characterized by a particularly high degree of competition with Beijing among the small and medium powers of Southeast Asia, where the recent Chinese ‘charm offensive’ achieved its most significant outcomes.

This article, hence, aims to explore the nature and patters of this ongoing process of strategic repositioning put into practice by Myanmar within the political triangle with Washington and Beijing. Against this backdrop, we will draw upon the conceptualization of ‘hedging strategy’, which identifies a set of multidimensional ‘insurance policies’ adopted by small actors in their relations vis-à-vis great powers.     

The Brazilian Association of Regulatory Agencies: Integrating levels,consolidating identities in the regulatory state in the south

This article discusses a unique organization in the regulatory world, the Brazilian Association of Regulatory Agencies (ABAR), which brings together federal, state, and municipal regulatory agencies across different policy sectors. The paper argues that as a regulatory policy network, ABAR has been crucial to the professional socialization, capacity building, and institutionalization of regulators in Brazil. Moreover, it has promoted their identity as professionals and differentiated them from politicians, regulatees, and societal actors. Thus, while ABAR raises the shield of expertise to secure independence from political and social interference, it has itself become a relevant actor in the country's regulatory political dynamics, contributing as such to the strengthening of the Brazilian regulatory state.     

Games borrower governments play: the implementation of economic adjustment programmes in Cyprus and Portugal

Research on the Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAPs) for Eurozone crisis countries has so far acknowledged the role of creditor countries and Troika institutions or has examined the economic effects or structural determinants of domestic implementation processes. The role of borrower governments as strategic actors within the ‘Troika complex’ has been neglected. Taking Cyprus and Portugal as cases in point, the article shows how reform-oriented borrower governments used the interaction with the Troika to overcome veto player opposition to programme implementation. Drawing on the two-level game and on negotiation theory, the study discusses borrower strategies in response to opposition from the court or parliament, and the costs of no agreement. Reform-oriented governments mostly used commitments to the international level or Troika pressure to pursue coercive strategies vis-à-vis domestic opponents. High costs of no agreement seem to be a necessary means to pass on political and market pressure through coercion.     

Horses and hippos: Why Italian government bills change in the legislative arena, 1987–2006

Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis‐à‐vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long time the rational choice literature has focused more on the formal rules regulating amendatory activity than on amendatory activity itself. Hence, very few studies have tried to explain how much government bills are altered in parliament and why. This article investigates the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and original arguments are discussed and tested. This also allows the identification of some usually unobserved aspects of the decision‐making process within the cabinet. The findings can also be relevant for comparative research since Italy has been characterised during the period under scrutiny (1987–2006) by two distinct electoral systems, two extremely different party systems (pivotal and alternational), governments with various ideological orientations and range, and both partisan and technical ministers.     

Putting the ‘rights‐based approach’ to development into perspective

This paper seeks to unravel some of the tangled threads of contemporary rights talk. For some, the grounding of rights‐based approaches in human rights legislation makes them distinctively different to others, lending the promise of re‐politicising areas of development work—particularly, perhaps, efforts to enhance participation in development, that have become domesticated as they have been ‘mainstreamed’ by powerful institutions like the World Bank. Others complain that like other fashions, the label ‘rights‐based approach’ has become the latest designer item to be seen to be wearing, and has been used to dress up the same old development. We pose a series of questions about why rights have come to be of interest to international development actors, and explore the implications of different versions and emphases, looking at what their strengths and shortcomings may come to mean for the politics and practice of development.     

Seniors’ Motivations for Participation in Local Governance: Evidence from an Australian Study

Increasing expectations of citizen involvement as well as demographic changes brought by population ageing make evidence about the factors impacting on seniors’ participation increasingly important for local governments. In particular, knowledge about motivations for involvement can assist local governments in attempting to attract input from more than just the usual suspects, and to determine whose interests are represented. This article reports on an Australian study exploring seniors’ motivations for participation in governance processes, using a two-phase mixed method approach. Findings from this study suggested that seniors’ participation was motivated by both self- and other-directed, and both practical and abstract factors. Comparison of the sources highlighted nuances in the data which reflect questions about representation, representativeness and inclusion. Findings are discussed in relation to these questions, and implications for local government engagement practices are addressed.     

The effects of cognitive distance in university-industry collaborations: some evidence from Italian universities

Universities have long been involved in knowledge transfer activities and are increasing their efforts to collaborate with industry. However, universities vary enormously in the extent to which they promote, and succeed in commercializing, academic research. In this paper, we focus on the concept of cognitive distance, intended as differences in the sets of basic values, norms and mental models in universities and firms. We assess the impact of cognitive distance on university-industry collaborations. Based on original data from interviews with 197 university departments in Italy, our analysis determines whether cognitive distance is perceived as a barrier to university-industry interactions, and estimates its effects on the frequency of their collaborations. Our results confirm that cognitive, albeit not affecting the probability of departments to collaborate with firms, significantly hinders the frequency of interactions.     

The devil is in the shadow. Do institutions affect income and productivity or only official income and official productivity?

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative impact on the size of the underground economy. However, once output is corrected for the shadow economy, the relationship between institutions and output becomes weaker. The impact of institutions on total (“corrected”) factor productivity becomes insignificant. Differences in corrected output must then be attributed to differences in factor endowments. These results survive several tests for robustness.     

Psychopathy and instrumental aggression: Evolutionary, neurobiological, and legal perspectives

In the study of aggression, psychopathy represents a disorder that is of particular interest because it often involves aggression which is premeditated, emotionless, and instrumental in nature; this is especially true for more serious types of offenses. Such instrumental aggression is aimed at achieving a goal (e.g., to obtain resources such as money, or to gain status). Unlike the primarily reactive aggression observed in other disorders, psychopaths appear to engage in aggressive acts for the purpose of benefiting themselves. This is especially interesting in light of arguments that psychopathy may represent an alternative life-history strategy that is evolutionarily adaptive; behaviors such as aggression, risk-taking, manipulation, and promiscuous sexual behavior observed in psychopathy may be means by which psychopaths gain advantage over others. Recent neurobiological research supports the idea that abnormalities in brain regions key to emotion and morality may allow psychopaths to pursue such a strategy—psychopaths may not experience the social emotions such as empathy, guilt, and remorse that typically discourage instrumentally aggressive acts, and may even experience pleasure when committing these acts. Findings from brain imaging studies of psychopaths may have important implications for the law.     

Technological diversity,scientific excellence and the location of inventive activities abroad: the case of nanotechnology

Our contribution to the expanding literature on the globalization of research and innovation is to investigate the extent to which sector-specific developments in an emerging technology (such as increasing interdisciplinarity and complexity) affect inventive activities developed abroad. We look at how technological diversity and scientific excellence of host countries in the field of nanotechnology affect the development of inventive activities by US multinational companies (MNCs). We identify the most active US-based MNCs in nanotechnology-related patenting and examine location decisions of these companies and their international subsidiaries. Econometric results confirm our hypothesis that the technological breadth of host countries positively influences the expected number of inventions developed abroad by US MNCs. Science capabilities of countries also have a positive impact on the decision to invent abroad, while the influence of market specific factors is less clear. We interpret these results as suggesting that host country science capabilities are important to attract innovative activities by MNCs, but as the interdisciplinary and convergent nature of nanotechnology evolves, access to a broadly diversified knowledge base becomes important in increasing the relative attractiveness of host locations.