A House Divided? Roll Calls,Polarization, and Policy Differences in the U.S. House, 1877–2011

The study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict—not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.     

Coercive Leadership

We develop a model of leadership in which an informed leader has some degree of coercive influence over her followers (agents). Agents benefit from coordination but face two distinct challenges: dispersed information and heterogeneous preferences. The leader's coercive power facilitates coordination by weakening the effect presented by both of these challenges through “binding” agents to a strategically chosen policy. The leader's policy choice becomes more informative to the agents about the leader's privately held information as her coercive capacity increases. By adjusting her policy choice in response to available private and public information, the coercive leader achieves her preferred average of agents' actions, and in so doing, neutralizes the possibly deleterious coordinating influence of public information. We develop implications of our analysis for understanding autocratic leadership in different political and organizational contexts.     

“Civilization” and “Mission”

““Civilization” and the Self-Critical Tradition” argues that the word “civilization” in Europe comprises intrinsically the idea of progress contrary to the negative portrayal that prominent theorists have associated to this term. I argue that skepticism will remain about this idea, especially for the formerly colonized people who associate the term with two other words “mission” and “colonialism.” However, exploring a cultural perspective could serve to make the point about the cyclic dimension of the evolution of all “civilization.     

Governance and disorder: neoliberalism and violent change in Jamaica

Structural adjustment policies (SAPs) facilitate the hollowing out of the traditional roles performed by states. As a consequence, private entities (some perverse) offer services the state is incapable of or unwilling to provide. Beginning in the 1980s, SAPs plunged neighbourhoods in Latin America and the Caribbean into socioeconomic, and political disorder. This paper assesses the relationship between neoliberal reforms to the Jamaican state and the metamorphosis of violence since the mid-1980s. Neoliberalism transformed violence in Jamaica by increasing inter-gang conflicts, shootings and gang-related murders in Kingston’s garrisons. It also transformed political enforcers into community dons who use violence as a tool for business transactions in the international drug trade, and as a method of gaining local respect and authority.     

The Resource Curse Reconsidered: Cash Crops and Local Violence in Kyrgyzstan

It is often noted in resource curse literature that agricultural economies are less conflict-prone than countries managing mobile, high-value resources. In the vast literature linking resource endowment and conflict, cash crop economies are often considered immune to civil violence, believed to stand apart from the many horrific episodes of violence and civil war centered on “lootable” wealth (such as alluvial diamonds, tin, tungsten, or other conflict minerals). But many incidents of violence—especially local violence—are in fact occurring in cash crop economies. Drawing on newspaper accounts, policy analyses, ethnographic interviews, and in-depth reports by international organizations, I examine an episode of local violence in 2010 in Kyrgyzstan. Through this case study, the article provides a better understanding of local violence in cash crop economies that can apply to other weak states.     

Rules of Procedure as a Cause of Legislative Paralysis: The Case of Costa Rica, 2002–2012

Research on executive‐legislative relations in Latin America has focused on the impact of minority presidents and multiparty legislatures on legislative productivity. But an additional deadlock scenario, the blocking of a majority president by a minority through filibustering, has been understudied. This article analyzes filibustering in Costa Rica and explains the legislative paralysis in the wake of the nation's transition to a multiparty system in 2002. Legislative paralysis is seen as a product of the interaction between increased legislative fragmentation and polarization and the legislature's preexisting rules of procedure, which enable legislators easily to block bills they oppose, even when those bills are supported by supermajorities. This argument is tested through a comparison of major economic reforms in the 2000s to the reforms tackled in the 1990s. The role of filibustering, well acknowledged in U.S. politics, should also be studied in comparative politics.     

Loyalty and Disloyalty in the Mexican Party System

Why do politicians in Mexico switch parties? The party‐switching literature suggests that politicians generally switch parties for office‐seeking or policy‐seeking motives, whereas literature on the Mexican party system suggests that switching may be related to party system realignment during the democratic transition. Using data on party switching across the political careers of politicians who served as federal deputies between 1997 and 2009, this study argues that party switching in Mexico can primarily be explained by the office‐seeking behavior of ambitious politicians. Only in rare instances do politicians switch parties because of policy disagreements, and party system realignment fails to explain a large number of party switches. This article also suggests that the ban on consecutive re‐election encourages party switching; after every term in office, Mexican politicians have the opportunity to re‐evaluate their party affiliation to continue their careers.     

Multicultural Institutions,Distributional Politics,and Postelectoral Mobilization in Indigenous Mexico

Contrary to the predictions of “power sharing” to mitigate ethnic conflicts, multicultural rights recognition can actually increase the frequency of local postelectoral mobilizations. This article demonstrates that the adoption of an ethnic rights regime for electing local government representatives may actually increase conflict if these multicultural laws are not carefully circumscribed to avoid violating human rights. Focusing on the 1995 multicultural rights reforms in Oaxaca, it presents evidence that legal changes purportedly implemented to recognize indigenous rights actually increased postelectoral disputes due to conflicts between county seat communities and peripheral population hamlets over access to funding by the central government. Based on this finding, the article addresses normative implications of “power‐sharing” multiculturalism, recommending that multicultural laws be implemented only together with legal mechanisms to solve postelectoral disputes.     

Incumbency,internal processes and renomination in Indian parties

This paper analyses a critical aspect of the internal functioning of five major Indian political parties, namely the nomination of candidates for parliamentary elections, focusing on the pattern of renomination of former candidates and incumbents. The data are analysed against the literature on the structure and functioning of Indian parties, and interview material on the process of nomination in the 2009 and 2004 elections. From the perspective of a six-fold typology of centralisation of nomination processes drawn from the comparative literature, it is found that all the parties analysed are in either the second-most centralised, or even most centralised categories, and that for the three major national parties, Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party and Communist Party of India (Marxist), past performance plays a role in nominations, the majority of incumbents being renominated in the post-1989 period.