Clerics, Exiles, and Academics: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States, 1969–1974

Virtually no one in the United States raised objections to the 1964 military takeover of the Brazilian civilian government. In the early 1970s, however, the Brazilian regime had become associated with torture and the arbitrary rule of law. By the end of that decade, compliance with human rights standards had developed into a yardstick for measuring U.S. foreign policy initiatives in Latin America. This paper argues that between 1969 and 1974, a small group of dedicated church activists, exiled Brazilians, and academics introduced the issue of human rights in Latin America into the U.S. national body politic. A network of concerned activists fashioned a systematic campaign to educate journalists, government officials, and the public about the abuses taking place under the generals' rule. Their activities helped isolate the military regime and laid the groundwork for a broader solidarity movement with Latin American popular struggles in the late 1970s and 1980s.     

Of Citizenship, Virtue, and the Administrative Imperative: Deconstructing Aristotelian Civic Republicanism

Over the years, the public administration literature has generated many different strands in the definition and conceptualization of citizenship. In theory and in practice, our understanding of what it means to be a citizen is in danger of being muddled amid the diversity of perspectives and the epistemological confusion generated in the contemporary discourse on the subject. My aim in this article is to clarify and elaborate a common thread that runs through our contemporary understanding of citizenship and to advance the general thesis that our brand of theorizing reflects an earlier tradition that embodies the conservative ethos of Aristotelian republicanism. Can such a tradition survive in modern American society?     

Wholesaling in Electricity: Inching Along

This article discusses the incremental but increasingly assertive efforts by federal policy makers toward encouraging deregulation of the electric utility industry. Focusing on the efforts of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), we conclude that the federal government is involved in a sort of two‐sided experiment. On the one hand, efforts to deregulate the electric power industry attempt to establish a competitive market pose the question: Can government provide rational guidance in the formation of markets in a complex industry? On the other hand, it asks whether the democratic process can permit agencies such as FERC to impose and implement an economically rational design on a self‐interested pubic that is mostly interested in cheap, reliable power. In a sense, FERC is auditioning for a new role for regulatory agencies—as designers and overseers of markets. This is a dramatic shift from the traditional role of “regulator as policeman.” Whether regulators are up to the task remains to be seen.     

Cross-National Concepts in Supranational Governance: State–Society Relations and EU Policy Making

The emergence of multiple and shifting modes of governance both intranationally and supranationally has posed difficulties for analysts accustomed to refining or testing singular types of politics. When confronted with this changing complexity, a comprehensive framework can be a very useful diagnostic and organizational tool. This article devises one such conceptual framework to clarify and systematize varieties of state autonomy and state–society relations. By combining fundamental conceptions of action, elemental control mechanisms, and basic types of interaction, a comprehensive framework is constructed for characterizing and comparing governance modes in a conceptually coherent manner. Many of the abstract spaces within this conceptual field share affinities with types of state autonomy and state–society relations depicted in major theoretical approaches to national politics (i.e., authoritarianism, statism, pluralism, corporatism, institutionalism, and Marxism). This article uses this conceptual framework to systematize these major governance modes and to illuminate their coexistence in supranational governance by examining the European Union policy process.     

A Public Choice Analysis of Endangered Species Listings

Sizable economic consequences may resultfrom listing under the Endangered SpeciesAct (ESA). Potentially adversely affectedparties will attempt to use the politicalprocess to protect their interests. Thequestion is, “are listing determinationssubject to political manipulation?” Inthis paper, we explore empirically thepossibility that implementation of the ESAis determined, in part, by politicalconsiderations. Specifically, weinvestigate whether states with strongcongressional representation are able touse their political muscle to reduce thenumber of listings in their states, ascompared to states with weak congressionalrepresentation. Controlling for otherfactors, we find that states with greaterrepresentation on the U.S. Fish andWildlife Service’s budgetary oversightsubcommittee in the U.S. House ofRepresentatives have significantly fewerESA listings than states with weakerrepresentation on that subcommittee.     

Tinpots,Totalitarians (and Democrats): An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Economic Growth on Civil Liberties and Political Rights

Ronald Wintrobe (1990, 1998) has recently provided atheoretical foundation for estimating equations that attemptto explain the dependence of civil liberties and politicalrights in non-democratic regimes on the history of economicgrowth. This theory suggests that data from different kinds ofnon-democratic countries should not be pooled without allowingcoefficients to vary with regime type. It also placesinteresting restrictions on the signs of the coefficients ofeconomic growth in equations explaining freedom in the typesof regimes Wintrobe identifies. In this paper, we employ theserestrictions to test Wintrobe's theory. Some additionalhypotheses about the difference between democratic andnon-democratic regimes and about the role of education, notconsidered by Wintrobe, are also investigated.The results indicate clearly that the relationship between thedegree of freedom – as measured by the sum of the Gastilindexes of civil liberties and political rights – andeconomic growth varies significantly across all types ofregimes. Totalitarians (that attempt to maximize power) areclearly different than tinpots (that just attempt to maintainpower) in this respect, and non-democratic regimes differ fromdemocracies. Other aspects of the theory are partiallyconfirmed. In particular, in totalitarian regimes, positivegrowth reduces freedom, and negative growth increases it insome specifications. The theory predicts the opposite patternfor tinpots, and we do find that negative growth reducesfreedom in tinpot regimes. However, positive growth in tinpotsalso appears to reduce freedom in some cases, which is not inaccord with the theory. Secondary schooling has a positive effect on freedom, as inprevious empirical work, a result that is shown here to holdeven when each type of regime is considered separately. Butthe effect of primary schooling is different: in tinpot andtotalitarian regimes, but not in democracies, primaryschooling is associated with reduced freedom.     

Conceptualising State Capacity: Comparing Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

Strengthening the state is central to the post-communist reform agenda. Here, state capacity combines organisational, material and social resources and is conceptualised along four dimensions: ideational, political, technical and implementational. This conceptualisation is applied to a comparative, survey-based analysis in 2002 of 125 medium-ranking officials in two post- communist Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The findings reveal that although Kazakhstan's controlled economic reform programme and natural resources have placed it in a stronger position to develop its state capacity, important ideational, political and implementational problems pose long-term obstacles for reform. In turn, Kyrgyzstan's early liberalisation in the absence of economic and social resources may be serving to undermine its state capacity.     

Whether one votes and how one votes

The aim of this paper is to determine if whether one votes effects the vote that is cast. Using an economic model of voting and observed voting results on nuclear power referenda, the answer is a resounding yes. Overcoming registration, turnout, and “roll off” hurdles dramatically increases the odds of voting against nuclear power. Indeed, participation swamps both economic and preference variables in the explanation of nuclear power voting outcomes. The lesson is that there is a structure to participation at the polls that should not be ignored by those interested in analyzing voting outcomes.     

Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses

Despite the vast coalition literature, pre-electoral coalitions have never been at the center of any systematic, cross-national research. Given their prevalence and potential impact on government composition and policies, this represents a serious omission in our knowledge of coalitions. I begin to remedy this situation by testing two hypotheses found in the literature on party coalitions. The first is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form in disproportional systems if there are a sufficiently large number of parties. The second is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form if voters face high uncertainty about the identity of future governments. These hypotheses are tested using a new dataset comprising legislative elections in 22 advanced industrialized countries between 1946 and 1998. The results of the statistical analysis support the first hypothesis, but not the second.