A Concurrent Analysis of Three Institutions that Transform Health Technology‐Based Ventures: Economic Policy,Capital Investment,and Market Approval

Drawing on institutional theory, this article articulates qualitative insights from a program of research on Canadian health technology‐based ventures to examine the rules that characterize economic policy, capital investment, and regulatory approval as well as the way these institutions enable and constrain the development of ventures at an early stage. Our findings clarify how economic policy integrates these ventures into the entrepreneurial domain, how capital investment configures them for economic value extraction, and how regulatory approval fully releases their market value. These findings help to revisit current policy modernization initiatives by calling attention to the convergence among the three institutions. Rather than operating solely as a source of constraints, these institutions provide a highly integrated market‐oriented space for health technology‐based entrepreneurial activities to unfold.     

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.     

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.     

Hooking Workers and Hooking Votes: Enganche,Suffrage, and Labor Market Dualism in Latin America

Labor market dualism—the segmentation of workers between formal, legally protected employment and informal, unprotected status—has long drawn attention from scholars and policymakers in Latin America. This article argues that lasting patterns of economic and political segmentation of workers arose earlier in the region's history than has previously been understood, well before the classic “incorporation” period. Late‐nineteenth‐century practices for the recruitment and retention of workers shaped Latin America's first sets of labor laws, most notably those governing union organization and individual worker job stability. Subsequently, these first laws served as important templates for development, constraining and conditioning the labor codes adopted under mass‐based politics. Using historical data drawn from Chile, Peru, and Argentina, this article shows how differing recruitment practices and variation in the extension of effective suffrage rights and electoral participation shaped early legal labor market segmentation and inequality in Latin America.