Populists,Producers and the Politics of Rentiership

Populism studies finds itself in a crisis of originality. While some scholars have signalled over-usage, others have argued that by contextualising populism, we are able to specify our own ‘populist moment’ and remedy the term’s slipperiness. This article opts for the latter tactic through a comparison of two aspects of contemporary populism with late nineteenth century precedents. In the late nineteenth century, the American People’s Party pioneered a mode of mass politics anchored in agrarian and industrial labour which launched the term ‘populism’ in Western discourse. Contemporary populists show rhetorical and political overlap with this template, but also come up against two new constraints: (1) a stagnant capitalism increasingly centred on ‘rentiership’; and (2) a disorganised civil society. These factors render today’s populism resistant to analogy but also conceptually more specific, sharpening the contours of our populist moment.     

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Uncovering land tenure insecurities: tips for tenure responsive land-use planning in Ethiopia

Land-use planning, although a mechanism for development, can also generate insecurity during its implementation. This article argues that tenure security and land-use planning should not be implemented in isolation from each other. It posits that land-use planning – rather than restricting the security of people's tenure – has the potential to serve as a means of securing tenure. The article explores tenure (in)security elements in land-use planning as a crucial challenge in the urban town of Gelan Sidama Awash, Ethiopia. Using data collected through stakeholders’ interviews, it uncovers their tenure security challenges, and outlines a set of measures for enhancing tenure security through land-use planning.     

Playing the regional card: why and how authoritarian gravity centres exploit regional organisations

The evidence of regional authoritarian clustering across different world regions goes together with the finding that after the end of the bipolar world regional patterns of interaction became more important. Especially in the 2000s a process of revitalisation of regional organisations and even the creation of new regional organisations took place. Interestingly, these newly founded organisations consist predominantly of authoritarian regimes. Due to the emergence and resilience of authoritarianism in the world, the question arises: To what extent do regional organisations (ROs) play a role in this phenomenon? We argue that authoritarian protagonists which we call authoritarian gravity centres (AGCs) constitute a force of attraction for countries in geopolitical proximity – and use ROs as a transmission belt and a learning room for disseminating autocratic elements. In a cross-regional comparison, based on extensive field work, we provide empirical analysis on two AGCs (Saudi Arabia and Venezuela) within their respective ROs Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) and tackle the questions of why and how autocracies decide to move forward multilaterally within the RO.     

Elektorale Responsivität als Kriterium zur Beurteilung des deutschen Bundestagswahlrechts

We argue that plurality systems strengthen the accountability of governments towards the electorate while proportional systems lead to a broad representation of voter interests in parliament and coalition governments. We demonstrate these effects in an analysis of all German federal elections from 1949 to 2017 using first-tier votes and directly elected deputies as reflecting the plurality segment and second-tier votes and the seat shares of parties as reflecting the proportional representation segment. We show that the percentages of directly elected deputies react more to differences in perceived party competences (party valences) than the percentages of all party deputies. Electoral system reforms should take into account the effects of both parts of the German electoral system.     

Gender and Vernaculars in Digital Humanities and World Literature

Abstract

This article discusses the large-scale and world-encompassing aspirations of digital humanities and world literature and their methodological accordance with the analysis of literature in smaller languages and of texts understood in social, transnational, and gendered contexts. Are Digital Humanities and World Literature establishing themselves as fields utilizing analytical tools that are at odds with the aims and perspectives of feminist literary history and reception history as a part of literary history? We argue that gender research and theory is insufficiently developed in both computational literary history and World Literature. An unproblematic understanding of translations, canonization, English as a global language, and the use of large-scale computational methods and formalized interpretive models is in many cases not beneficial for the understanding of texts by women writers or from feminist perspectives. Drawing on feminist criticism of computational methods and arguments for specialized rather than generalized knowledge about literary history, we propose that digitization in some form, be it a bibliographical database or digitization of a corpus of texts, may be thought of as part of the research process in projects oriented towards gender and cultural exchange.     

Consolidating ZIP Codes for Small Area Fair Market Rents: A Method for Implementing the New Rule

Fair Market Rents (FMRs), calculated for an entire metropolitan region, are used to establish payment standards for the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. In response to recent criticism that FMRs do not represent rent disparity and restrict households from moving to high-opportunity areas, a new rule introducing Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) has been issued. SAFMRs are based on ZIP codes to reflect local market rents and increase the number of payment standards used to administer the HCV program. The purpose of this research is to determine whether the number of payment standards can be reduced by consolidating ZIP codes, while adhering to the primary objectives of the SAFMR rule. The ZIP code grouping process conducted offers one method for reducing the number of payment standards needed to implement the new rule; however, the rent analysis reveals the over- and underestimation of SAFMRs for some ZIP codes.     

Making sense of multilevel governance and governance coordination in Brazil: The case of the Bolsa Verde Programme

Brazil is an example of a challenging governance context par excellence: continental size, multi-levelled governance structures and diverse administrative cultures meet with ambitious, large-scale policy needs and objectives. The multilevel governance approach is applied here to analyse implementation and governance coordination of the Bolsa Verde Programme (BVP). Through a close reading of the narratives told by three programme officials – and zooming in on jointly exercised governance functions known from the metagovernance approach – we analysed how BVP’s programmatic governance coordination was made sense of. The analysis showed that our interviewees were well aware of the shortcomings of the governance coordination in BVP, understood as rather hierarchical, centrally driven and often tackling challenges of vertical multi-actor coordination in a reactive ad-hoc manner. However, since the implementers have been able to creatively and skilfully solve governance coordination challenges, possibilities for developing more systematic and inclusive (meta)governance approaches seem feasible.     

The right to vote and nomadic voter enrolment

What model of voter enrolment is appropriate for states with nomadic minority populations? The present paper examines this question with reference to an equality-based, moral right to vote and considers four models that track some of the different institutional strategies that have been developed by states with transient populations. The paper shows that the right to vote is compatible neither with a model that makes permanent residence in a constituency an absolute condition for voter enrolment and so excludes nomads from the electoral process, nor with a model that enables nomadic voter enrolment but restricts the number of nomads that can enrol in a single constituency. But the right is, subject to certain caveats, consistent with a model that enables nomads to enrol in a constituency of their choice and, as well, with a model that enables nomads to enrol and vote in a distinct, non-territorial constituency.