Setting the agenda: Social influence in the effects of the Human Rights Committee in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe

Analyzing original data from Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, this article explores the influence of the Human Rights Committee (HRC) of the United Nations (UN) in the configuration of states' normative agendas and the roles they seek to play. Focusing on the HRC's reporting procedure, the article investigates whether states adjust the substantive content of their periodic reports to mimic the human rights agenda explicitly set by the HRC through its concluding observations reports. The article finds that states take the HRC seriously and play the role of “good,” committed members of the human rights regime, following in their periodic reports the agenda of rights previously set by the HRC. The article, therefore, offers a specific theoretical argument and systematic, original evidence on the potential and the limits of the influence of the organs of the international human rights regime.     

The Explosive Combination of Inefficient Local Bureaucracies and Mining Production: Evidence from Localized Societal Protests in Peru

Although numerous scholars have analyzed the effects of natural resource extraction at the national level, few have explored it systematically at the local level. Focusing on Peru, where both mining production and local social protests have greatly increased in recent years and where a new tax has required mining companies to transfer revenue to subnational governments, this study explores the resource curse at the local level. In particular, why do protests arise mostly in the areas of natural resource extraction? Employing subnational data for Peru for the period 2004–9 and LAPOP survey data from 2010, the research confirms previous findings that social conflict is provoked by both the negative externalities of mining and the revenues from the new tax. The article further demonstrates that local bureaucratic capacity is a significant independent variable. Greater subnational bureaucratic capacity can ameliorate the pernicious societal effects of a local resource curse.     

University–Industry Linkage Framework to Identify Opportunity Areas

Although there are many studies of the collaboration between academia and industry in developed countries explaining the phenomenon and prescribing best practices, the findings cannot be extrapolated to developing countries. This article fills the gap by studying these interactions for the case of Mexico. To study these interactions, we performed a state‐of‐the‐art matrix analysis to obtain internal, structural, and environmental factors from literature. Then, an interpretative structural framework was built as a model to identify opportunities in the collaboration process. The results are presented in a map that describes how each element influences the others and highlights opportunities for improvement. The model shows that industry triggers collaboration and presents a highly complex internal organization for the academy. This study helps decision makers in government, the academy, and industry to understand the elements and how the system works to develop strategies that promote more effective collaboration.     

Bezeichnung eines Polizeibeamten als “Oberförster”

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Who Gives? Partisan Donations in Europe

Party finance reformers often call for European parties to increase their financial reliance on small donors, but researchers have made few efforts to establish the feasibility of such strategies. This study examines partisan giving in Europe, investigating the potential for parties and policymakers to increase this type of political participation. It also asks whether there are national-level factors that make such efforts more likely to succeed in some countries. The research uses data from the European Social Survey to examine patterns of contributions to political parties in 16 European countries. It finds that the strength of partisanship predicts political giving independent of party membership, which suggests that European political parties may have some scope to increase their number of individual donors. On the other hand, existing tax policies to encourage political giving do not seem to be effective in increasing this type of partisan political participation.     

Election through complaint and controversy for political power in Chile, 1874–1925

SUMMARY

This article offers reflections on the power relations between the executive and legislative branches of the Chilean state by examining the way political parties leveraged the electoral system to balance the weight of each branch in the configuration of government. The period from 1874 to 1924 is framed by a cycle of reforms to Chile’s 1833 constitution that were pushed through by liberal sectors to limit the power of the executive under the country’s presidential regime, efforts that contributed to a final breakdown of the presidential regime following civil war in 1891. That year the victorious revolutionary forces implemented a parliamentarian system that remained in place until it was overthrown by a military coup. The literature on this process has studied the use of legislative manoeuvres such as obstruction, accusation and filibuster by political parties to weaken the executive power. Little has been written, however, about the way parties exploited the rules and procedures of the electoral system and, specifically, the use of official complaints and the process known as calificación (qualification) by which congress audited final election results. This article will help fill that void, focusing on understanding how both practices worked and the effects that the election reforms of 1874, 1884 and 1890 had on them.     

Verstoß gegen das Tierschutzgesetz

Ohne Zusammenfassung