Fighting for the rule of law: civil resistance and the lawyers' movement in Pakistan

Pakistan, sometimes referred to as ‘the most dangerous place on earth’, is not typically thought of as a place where popular nonviolent resistance could take root, much less succeed. Citizen apathy, poor governance, and fear of regime repression and terrorist violence are barriers to effective civic activism inside Pakistan. Yet, over the past two years, Pakistan's authoritarian ruler was ousted and its independent judiciary restored following a massive grassroots campaign led by lawyers. The ‘men in black’, whose insistence on the rule of law and embrace of nonviolent struggle captured the hearts and minds of millions of Pakistanis, helped transform the country's political landscape in unexpected ways. The successes tallied by this nonviolent movement, this article will argue, can be attributed to the large-scale non-cooperation and civil disobedience that pressured two successive Pakistani regimes – one authoritarian and one democratic – to yield to its demands. Unity and mass participation, nonviolent discipline, and the creative use of nonviolent tactics were three key ingredients of success. While instability and Islamist extremism continue to plague Pakistan, the lawyers' movement highlights the steadily growing strength of Pakistani civil society have a potential to influence democratic change in the country.     

The Electoral Connection and Legislative Committees

This article examines whether the career needs of legislators – to be re-elected or to move on to another political post – allow us to explain the rules governing committee structures and the committee assignments individual legislators obtain. It uses the institutional variations provided by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to test hypotheses about committee assignments and committee assignment mechanisms. It finds that incentives created by candidate selection procedures and electoral rules show some relationship to committee assignments, but with a good deal of variation across national cases and individual careers.     

Discouraging Disadvantaged Fathers’ Employment: An Unintended Consequence of Policies Designed to Support Families

Substantial declines in employment and earnings among disadvantaged men may be exacerbated by child support enforcement policies that are designed to help support families but may have the unintended consequence of discouraging fathers’ employment. Disentangling causal effects is challenging because high child support debt may be both a cause and a consequence of unemployment and low child support order compliance. We used childbirth costs charged in unmarried mothers’ Medicaid‐covered childbirths, from Wisconsin administrative records, as an exogenous source of variation to identify the impact of debt. We found that greater debt has a substantial negative effect on fathers’ formal employment and child support payments, and that this effect is mediated by fathers’ prebirth earnings histories.     

House organ

“I live in a country which is said to have a strong ecological opposition, one which includes the Green Party, a great variety of citizen's initiatives, and a network of alternative institutions and communications media, and where public opinion is especially sensitive to ecological problems. This is not entirely false. The so‐called ecological movement, in fact, has been quite successful in the last two and a half decades. But there is also the other side of success: Now that everybody drives a car with a catalytic converter, talks about ecological modernization, and advocates an ecological ethics, the willingness of people to accept a fundamental reorientation in science, politics, and economy is much less apparent today.”     

The residential preferences of blacks and whites: A four‐metropolis analysis

Abstract

Three hypotheses seek to explain the persistence of residential segregation between blacks and whites in the United States: economic differentials, discrimination in housing and lending markets, and neighborhood preferences. The preferences hypothesis posits that both races wish to live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods. This article examines the preferences hypothesis by using recent interview data from metropolitan Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

Race continues to be significant in the residential decision‐making process. Whites’ willingness to move into a neighborhood is inversely related to the density of blacks living there. Blacks prefer integrated neighborhoods, but ones with a substantial representation of blacks. Preferences differ significantly from one metropolis to another, with Detroit representing the extreme. In the other three metropolises, the preferences of blacks and whites do overlap sufficiently to offer hope for a decline in segregation, provided that the influence of other forces, particularly discrimination, also declines.     

The Chinese Ideology: Reconciling the Politics with the Economics of Contemporary Reform

Political scientists and economists fundamentally disagree in their assessment of ideology in contemporary Chinese reform. Whereas the former emphasize its functional value legitimizing the overall course of reform, the latter warn of indoctrination and negative welfare effects. We argue that ideology is pervasive in China’s political economy of reform—past, present, and future. Moreover, a common assessment is both necessary and feasible. The presented case studies (loyalty signaling, message control, policy learning, and anti-corruption) underline the highly ambiguous role of ideology oscillating between alignment and adaptation. In the end, ideology can unite or divide Chinese society as well as increase or diminish economic efficiency.     

Judicial policy‐making in Italy: The constitutional court

This study focuses on the Italian Constitutional Court, the newest and most prestigious addition to a judicial tradition that can be traced as far back as the Roman Empire. This court has indeed been an effective policy‐making body, particularly in matters of civil liberties and church‐state relations, as well as in compelling the legislative branch, where it has been so charged, to complete the drafting of the Constitution. The Court has faltered at times in defending its independence, and this account argues that life appointments might be a viable means of achieving the goal of a constitutional body that serves ‘nee spe nee metu’     

Finding Out the Hard Way: Uncovering the Structural Foundations of Political Dissatisfaction in Italy, 1973–2013

In economic voting models, the electorate punishes governments associated with bad economic results and rewards those who provide prosperity. However, citizens do not always place the same weight on economic considerations when deciding their vote. This weight, it is argued, is a function of the degree to which governments can be deemed responsible for domestic economic outcomes. More precisely, the article hypothesises that when the economy is highly vulnerable to external economic conditions (and thus less controllable by the national government), voters will value less the information they receive on the state of the economy, and, as a consequence, electoral behaviour will be less influenced by economic performance. This conjecture is tested empirically using survey data from 15 European countries. Consistently with the prediction, it is found that employment expectations matter more the greater the degree of economic closeness of the country. General economic expectations have an impact on voting regardless of the level of economic openness, and no sign of pocketbook voting is detected. Also, the evidence seems to suggest that the internationalisation of the economy plays an exonerating role only under left-wing governments.