When the slaves go marching out: indignatio,invisible bodies,and political theory

In January 2010, hundreds of illegal migrants took to the streets of Rosarno in Italy for a violent protest against the acts of racism which they had routinely suffered. A collective subject, considered invisible, dared to revolt. These migrants are an anomaly in the social, legal, and political senses. Their revolt is an example of rebellions who constitute a litmus test for the discourse of citizenship; it reveals itself as a form of political subjectivity and highlights the corporeality of the conflict. Understanding the revolt also troubles the boundary between body discourses and traditional political theory. In this paper, I analyse the revolt through categories of contemporary political theory such as the ‘bare life’ of Giorgio Agamben, and the ‘disagreement’ of Jacques Rancière. I show how these categories only partially help to interpret the phenomenon of this uprising. However, the Spinozist concept of indignatio is a more useful intellectual tool to interpret and understand the phenomenon of the revolt of Rosarno.     

Decentralization and access to social services in Colombia

Decentralization is meant to improve access to public services, but relatively few studies examine this question empirically. We explore the effects of decentralization on access to health and education in Colombia using an original database covering over 95 % of Colombian municipalities. We show that decentralization improved enrollment rates in public schools and access of the poor to public health services. In both sectors, improving access was driven by the financial contributions of local governments. Small increases in own-shares of spending led to surprisingly large increases in the access of the poor in both sectors. Our theoretical model implies that where local information dominates productive efficiency, elected local governments will provide services better tailored to local needs. Decentralizing such services should increase their use by the public. Together, theory and empirics imply that decentralization made the Colombian state more accountable. It provided local officials with the information and incentives they need to allocate resources in a manner responsive to voters’ needs and improve the impact of public expenditures.     

Decentralization as a constraint to Leviathan: a panel cointegration analysis

This paper extends the empirical literature about the effects of fiscal decentralization on the growth of government along three dimensions. It distinguishes between the effects of the level of decentralization from the way local governments finance their expenditures (common pool versus own resources); it uses a panel cointegration approach to separate the long run effects of decentralization from the short run dynamics; and it extends and revises the datasets generally used in these empirical analyses. The results show that the amount of revenue raised by sub-national governments leads to a long-term fall in the size of government but grants have the opposite effect. In addition, a greater decentralization of expenditure leads to greater overall spending. When the short-term is considered these influences work slowly, as the speed of adjustment towards the desired government size is relatively sluggish. In addition, in the short run, there is also a clear effect from the role of local revenue raising powers that stimulates the growth of government. These results appear robust to changes in the composition of the variables, countries and periods included the sample.     

Swiss worlds of welfare

Are there different worlds of welfare in Swiss cantons, analogous to different national welfare state regimes? Are the welfare regimes made up of functionally related sub-regimes in the field of employment, education, taxation and social security, as argued in recent analyses of ‘varieties of capitalism’? And can the variations between such cantonal welfare regimes be explained by the same politico-institutional variables that account for the development of national welfare states? These are the guiding questions of this article. We find strong empirical evidence for large inter-cantonal variation in welfare state policies. The sub-regimes are not functionally connected, however. Their variation is related to different sets of variables, indicating a weak functional link between them. Developments and causal structures are specific to the various subregimes. In addition, it is socio-economic and not politicoinstitutional variables that have had the strongest imprint on the overall structure of cantonal welfare regimes.     

Entrepreneurial performance of principal investigators and country culture: relations and influences

The paper focuses on the role of a country’s culture in influencing the entrepreneurial attitudes of Principal Investigators, in shaping their ability to combine knowledge theory and business practice, in determining their capacity to strengthen the cooperation between the two domains of research and business, and in supporting research spin-off creation in entrepreneurial universities. To make Principal Investigators’ orientation match Entrepreneurial Universities’ goals of the marketing of innovation and entrepreneurship is not an easy task. A research-oriented approach, rather than an explorative entrepreneurial orientation, is still predominant in Principal Investigators. Among the factors influencing the strategic orientation towards entrepreneurship of Principal Investigators, the paper argues that the country’s culture could be key. Evaluating the influence of the entrepreneurial culture on a Principal Investigator’s activity is critical in predicting his performance and comparing it with that of Principal Investigators in other countries.     

The Making and Unmaking of Feminicidio/Femicidio Laws in Mexico and Nicaragua

This article examines the contested process of law‐making related to the killing of women which resulted in the criminalization of feminicide (feminicidio) and femicide (femicidio) in Mexico and Nicaragua, two countries in which feminists engaged in legal activism to increase state accountability for gendered violence. Through comparative analysis, we demonstrate the importance of (1) the interaction between shifting local political conditions and supranational opportunities and (2) the position of feminist actors vis‐à‐vis the state and its gender regime in shaping regional variation in the making of laws concerning gendered violence. In Mexico, the criminalization of feminicidio resulted from a successful naming and shaming campaign by local feminist actors linked to litigation in various supranational arenas, and the intervention of feminist federal legislators. In Nicaragua, the codification of femicidio resulted from the state's selective responsiveness to feminist demands in a moment of narrow political opportunity within an otherwise highly consolidated regime. We also examine the unmaking of these laws through their perversion in practice (Mexico) and their intentional undermining (Nicaragua) at the hands of the state. Our analysis demonstrates how states' decisions to enact legislation against gendered violence does not occur solely because they are invested in international legitimacy, but also in response to states' shifting acceptance of the legitimacy of supranational authority itself.     

Political competition and economic performance: evidence from the Italian regions

We verify the predictions of the theoretical literature on the relationship between political competition and economic performance, holding that, when the predominance of an ideological dimension creates a political rent, the party exploiting it selects lower quality politicians whose policy choices worsen economic performance. We examine the sample of 15 Italian Regions from 1980 to 2002 that exploits the institutional reforms of 1995 as an exogenous shock to pre-existing rents. We find evidence that higher political competition improves economic performance, through the choice of more efficiency-oriented policies.     

Towards agonistic peacebuilding? Exploring the antagonism–agonism nexus in the Middle East Peace process

Many contemporary conflicts are framed as antagonistic and difficult to resolve because of their zero-sum framing among the disputants. This article addresses the antagonism–agonism nexus and the political and contested nature of building peace. It has a three-fold aim: (1) to critically assess the interplay between constructive and destructive dynamics; (2) to analyse the circumstances under which conflict may move from antagonism to agonism; and (3) to advance the novel notion of agonistic peacebuilding. The Middle East Peace process is used as a critical case of intractable conflict to elucidate the enabling and restraining conditions for agonistic peacebuilding.