Economic performance and turnout at national and local elections

This paper analyzes the impact of economic performance on voter turnout. We estimate an economic turnout model in which local economic variables are included in quadratic form, so that non-linear effects can be taken into account. We use panel datasets covering municipalities, from 1979 to 2005, and cross-sections of parishes (freguesias) to analyze the determinants of turnout at Portuguese municipal and legislative elections. The empirical results indicate that the performance of the national economy is important only in legislative elections and that the regional and local unemployment rates tend to have non-linear relationships to turnout. The results obtained for Flemish municipalities also provide evidence in favor of a non-linear effect of unemployment on turnout.     

The Push and Pull of Ministerial Resignations in Germany, 1969–2005

When and why are cabinet ministers forced out of office? We argue that ministerial resignations cannot be understood as mechanistic consequences of serious personal or departmental errors as the classical responsibility hypothesis implies. Rather, they follow a systematic political logic. Cabinet ministers have to resign whenever the prime minister perceives the political costs of a minister staying in office to be higher than the benefits of keeping the status quo. We test this argument with resignation events in Germany in the period 1969 to 2005. Based on detailed data collection, we find 111 resignation events, i.e. serious public discussions about a cabinet minister's future, 14 of which ended in resignation. These data are analysed employing statistical as well as Qualitative Comparative Analysis based on Boolean algebra to detect patterns of ministerial resignations.     

The architecture of risk management

Abstract

Power's book examines how organizations are designed through risk-based science, law and managerial techniques. As organizations have come to think of, reform and govern themselves through the vague but powerful notion of risk, both the fortunes of the managers who conceive of these designs and the behaviour of the organizations themselves have been affected. Power develops four themes as he analyses the consequences of these moves towards risk management as governance. First, he notes the tensions that have emerged as risk management systems take in information about uncertainty in the operational environment and process it into risk, while simultaneously producing yet more uncertainty. Second, he offers an account of developments in the system of professions as the abstractions of mathematical risk analysts have lost ground to managerial approaches to the processing and uses of risk. Third, he applies neo-liberal notions of the individual to organizational behaviour in an analysis of the conflict between risk-embracing profit motives and risk-averse precautionary instincts. Fourth, he argues that the uptake of risk management techniques and discourses in organizations has fundamentally changed the way they view themselves and operate in the world. As better risk management through internal self-control has become the obvious solution to every problem, enterprise values and trust have imploded. We close our review with a critique of this implosion thesis, suggesting directions for future research for socio-legal, governance and organizational behaviour scholars.     

The Baden-Württemberg State Election of 2011: A Political Landslide

After 58 years in the position of dominant political party, the Christian Democrats suffered from an electoral defeat in the Baden-Württemberg state election of 27 March 2011 and, as a result of the election, the first Green prime minister was elected and headed a state government formed by the Green and the Social Democrat parties. The main reasons for this political landslide were the unique constellation of political issues and the voters' attitudes towards the candidates for the office of prime minister. Instead of economic issues traditionally ‘owned’ by the Christian Democrats, the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima and the bitter conflict over the reconstruction of the Stuttgart railway station brought ‘new politics’ issues to the top of the agenda. Moreover, never before in the history of German state elections was a prime minister running for re-election as unpopular as the leading candidate of Christian Democrats. Finally, many voters were convinced that it was just time for a change.     

On the Relationship between Violent Conflict and Wages in Colombia

We analyse how forced displacements caused by violent conflict are related to the wages of workers in Colombia. Using data from the Quality of Life Survey (2011–2014), we analyse the differences in wages between those forced by violence to move to other regions, and those who moved for other reasons. We apply Propensity Score Matching techniques to compare workers from the two groups, finding that forced displacement is related to decreases of between 10 and 29 per cent in the wages of males, and between 18 and 37 per cent in the wages of females, relative to their counterparts. Thus, forced displacements are related to poorer labour market outcomes in terms of wages.     

The Ideologies of Informality: informal urbanisation in the architectural and planning discourses

This paper discusses how urban informality in the developing world has been understood in the West, and how it has been incorporated in the discourse of urban architects and planners in the developed world. It proposes a genealogy of this understanding through the identification of discourses with major ideological currents. It explains the evolution of the relationship between the understanding of urban informality and anarchism; the empowerment of the urban poor and finally the role of this understanding as a neoliberal discourse against state intervention. It finds that, although the incorporation of urban informality in urban architectural discourses is presented as a relative novelty, it is in reality at least 60 years old, dating from John Turner’s writings about the barriadas of Lima. From a progressive and empowering understanding of how the grassroots are able to take their lives into their own hands, it has become a tool for neoliberal discourses defending the dismissal of the state as a valid articulator of urban development.     

Demobilization of Paramilitaries in Colombia: Transformation or Transition?

Historically, Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reinsertion (DDR) has provided a useful means to terminate conflicts. Since being catapulted to office in August 2002 with 53 percent of the vote of 46.45 percent of the voters, ¹ 1. IFES Election Guide, available at (http://www.electionguide.org/results.php?ID=1011). Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has vigorously pursued a demobilization program, both individual and collective. However, despite the fact that over 40,000 combatants have demobilized under these programs, evidence is growing that this latest round of Colombian DDR is merely transitioning, rather than terminating, violence in that Andean country.