Political Competition and Policy Adoption: Market Reforms in Latin American Public Utilities

This article shows that political competition generates incentives that affect the pace of adoption of market reforms in the context of policy convergence. Previous work shows the effect of financial and technological pressures in promoting policy convergence and the impact of institutional constraints on shaping the pace of policymaking. Controlling for these effects, this article demonstrates the policy effects of political competition and ideological polarization even at a time when ideological policy differences seem to be fading due to policy convergence. This article studies policy adoption using duration analysis for the 18 countries of Latin America during the 1985–2000 period when most of the market reforms in public utilities were adopted.     

Perceived Relative Deprivation and Risk: An Aspiration-Based Model of Human Trafficking Vulnerability

While human trafficking often conjures up images of victims being taken by force, in reality, a minority of today’s slave population are physically abducted. Rather, a significant share of human trafficking victims are “pushed” (e.g., trying to escape crisis conditions) or “pulled” (e.g., pursuing the prospect of economic opportunities) into situations of high risk. This study focuses on those who are “pulled” into risky scenarios, assessing when individuals make decisions that may put themselves at risk. I assume that individuals are boundedly rational, and propose an aspiration-based model of decision-making, which predicts that increased salience in relative deprivation can lead individuals to be more risk-seeking, putting themselves and their children at greater risk for exploitation. Using both an original survey experiment and nationally-representative data in Nepal, I find that consistent with the theoretical model, perceptions of relative deprivation induce more risk-seeking behavior. This result speaks to the interaction between inequality and risk tolerance, and how economic and social forces that alter perceived relative deprivation can increase vulnerability to exploitation.     

Monarchical Manoeuvres: Gender,Nation and the Boundary Problem in Post-War Swedish Constitutional Development

In the years following the end of the cold war in 1989, Western feminist scholars and activists expressed disappointment in the failure of the newly democratic Eastern and Central European countries to sustain mainstream women's rights movements and achieve a marked increase in women's participation within the new political parties and political life in general. The authors, historians of Hungarian women's movements with a broad East-West perspective, offer a novel explanation for this phenomenon. Following an outline of the main stages of Hungarian women's movements and women's political participation, they focus on two instances in twentieth-century Hungarian history that resulted in a rapid transition from anti-democratic regimes to liberal, parliamentary systems: the 1918 bourgeois democratic revolution and the 1990 re-introduction of free parliamentary elections. Examining these two turning points in recent Hungarian history, separated by 70 years, as case studies of women's activism, the authors propose a new, critical re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres, offering a timely if co-incidental comment on the recent debate in the Journal of Women's History.² Research for this article had been completed by the time of the publication of the Spring 2003 issue of the Journal of Women's History, 15 (1), devoted to "Rethinking Public and Private".     

Building Support for the Asad Regime: The Syrian Diaspora in Argentina and Brazil and the Syrian Uprising

ABSTRACT

Brazil and Argentina are hosts to two of the largest populations of Syrian descent in Latin America. While Syrian immigrants and their descendants have usually defined their identities based on broad Arab nationalistic references, creating and affiliating themselves to Syrian-Lebanese and/or Arab institutions, the ongoing civil war in Syria has triggered an unprecedented mobilization around specifically Syrian issues. Most diasporic organizations have shown an unconditional support for the Ba?thist regime. This article aims at understanding the political mobilization of the Syrian diaspora in Argentina and Brazil, as well as unveiling how Bashar al-Asad's government has tried to build on their support.     

Labour Law in a Service World

Drawing on the genealogy of the theoretical thought about services in economic and geographical economic literature, I argue in this article that in today's Service World it is highly important to develop an integrated approach that sees both consumption and production as impacting work relationships within legal thought. The current structure of labour law, which is based on the Fordist model of employment, is centred mainly on the production side, thus creating an incongruity between labour law and services. I propose thinking about work relations through a new framework –‘the nexus of service work’– that incorporates consumerism into the legal thought of work relationships, detaching it from the Fordist model of employment to achieve a more attuned approach to today's Service World.