China's Monetary Reform: The counterrevolution from the countryside

Until the late 1990s, the rapid development of rural cooperative funds as semi-formal financial institutions in the countryside attracted little attention. In many provinces, these funds took over large swathes of rural finance, before the State Council in March 1999 issued a secret decree requesting that they be immediately dissolved. This paper explores the reasons for the rapid development of rural cooperative funds in many localities, examines why this has been an issue of contention, and explains why it has taken the central government such a long time to come up with a coherent—and, furthermore, drastic—response. Although rural cooperative funds are now being dissolved across the country, they may already have achieved their purpose of revolutionizing financial intermediation in the countryside.     

Making and Mobilizing Moderates: Rhetorical Strategy,Political Networks,and Counterterrorism

Studies of counterterrorism have argued for the importance of bolstering, or “mobilizing,” moderates in the confrontation with violent extremists. Yet the literature has not elucidated when states seek to mobilize moderates and marginalize extremists, how they do so, or when they prove successful. The received wisdom is that states should cultivate and strengthen moderate allies by reaching out to them. This approach, however, fails to grasp the political challenges confronting potential moderates, whose priority is to build and retain legitimacy within their political community. Inspired by network approaches, we maintain that moderates can more easily emerge when their political interactions with the authorities are relatively sparse. We further argue that the state's strategies, including crucially its rhetorical moves, can bolster the moderates' local legitimacy. At times, this will entail not reaching out to moderates but isolating them. Before moderates can be mobilized, they must be made, and the state's criticism, more than its love, may do much to help moderate political forces emerge. This article explains why mobilizing moderates is critical, when it is difficult, and how authorities can nevertheless play a productive role in moderates' emergence. We establish our theoretical framework's plausibility by examining two cases—India's ultimately triumphant campaign against Sikh extremists and Spain's gradual marginalization of Basque extremists. We then suggest what lessons these campaigns against ethnonational terrorism hold for the so-called War on Terror.     

Local News Media and Voter Turnout

A reasonably high turnout is a quality of a local democracy. In this article, we investigate whether media coverage of politics leads to increased or decreased voter turnout. Based on a unique data set, our analysis shows that local news media coverage has a positive effect on voter turnout, but only if the news media provide politically relevant information to the voters and only at local elections. Both findings are in accordance with the Information Model, which states that rising levels of political relevant information increases the probability of voting.     

Modernization,ethnic fractionalization,and democracy

In recent years, a number of studies have examined the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and democracy – so far with inconclusive results. We argue that the lacking robustness of existing findings is due to a theoretical and empirical misspecification of how ethnic fractionalization may influence the level of democracy. Ethnic fractionalization does have an impact on the regime form because it moderates the well-established positive effect of modernization on democracy. In other words, at low levels of ethnic fractionalization, modernization has a strong positive effect on democratization, but with increasing levels of ethnic fractionalization, the positive effect of modernization decreases. This relationship is documented empirically by using data on 167 countries since 1972.     

Are powerful presidents always popularly elected? Implications for separating semi-presidentialism from parliamentarism

The traditional conception of semi-presidentialism stipulates that powers are shared by a popularly elected president and a prime minister, who is responsible to parliament. In recent years, an increasingly popular strategy has become to disregard the power dimension and define semi-presidentialism only with regard to whether the president is popularly elected or not. Based on a principal-agent framework the present study sets out to test the relationship between the mode of election and the powers of the president in democratic republics where the government is dependent on the legislature for survival. Findings indicate that although powerful presidents most often are popularly elected there are also instances where a non-popularly elected president shares executive powers with the prime minister. This makes it difficult to define semi-presidentialism only with regard to how the president comes to power.     

Promises made,promises broken: a political economic perspective on German unification

The article provides an overview of the state of the East German economy after more than ten years of unification. It demonstrates that, contrary to what had been promised in 1990, the situation is far from ‘flourishing landscapes’. We argue that a number of policy mistakes, based in the desire of the then government to maintain electoral support, is responsible for this. In addition, the behaviour of West German labour market participants is held responsible for the dismal record of unemployment in East Germany. Hence, political and distributional conflicts lie at the root of the still present East German problem.     

How liable should an exporter be?: The case of trade in hazardous goods

This paper analyzes liability issues in the context of internationally traded goods like hazardous waste. It focuses on waste disposers of a small open economy that are judgement-proof due to either wealth constraints or regulatory liability limits. In this case, the extension of liability to waste exporters distorts the factor allocation and may reduce disposal care. Hence the optimal extension is partial at most. However, extending liability increases incentives of the waste importing country to hold domestic disposers liable. Interaction through the price system and through contracts that condition payments for disposal services on the occurrence of an accident yield identical outcomes if disposers are judgement-proof.