A critique of bourgeois theories of economic development

Festival expenditures amount to over 15 per cent of a household's annual expenditures in rural India. Yet they have never been studied by economists. This article uses both qualitative and quantitative data from a case study of three South Indian villages to show that festivals are important public goods in the village, but neither a pure entertainment motive nor an altruistic desire to contribute to a public event seems to explain their size. Households which spend money on festivals, everything else held equal, are able, however, to generate tangible rewards - lower prices on food, higher social status and more invitations to meals from other families. This indicates that active participation in festivals generates private economic and social returns which help resolve a potential free-rider problem. The evidence is consistent with the notion that festivals serve as mechanisms by which communities build social networks.     

大力提升我国主流政治文化网上引导力

主流政治文化是社会主义先进文化的重要组成部分,也是主流意识形态在政治领域的集中体现,对整合社会思潮,巩固党的执政地位,维护社会和谐稳定等都发挥着巨大作用。近年来互联网在我国迅速发展,极大改变了传统媒体建构的主流政治文化传播理念、传播环境、传播机制,使我国主流政治文化传播面临全新的挑战,亟需新的思路和举措来提升网上引导能力。     

Distributed Generation of Electricity: The Role of Academic Research and Advice in California’s “Clean DG” Policy Network

Deregulation and the combined threats of energy crises and global warming concern nations around the world, yet these issues continue to be addressed more directly by domestic regulatory systems than by international institutions. The present analyses of the integration of distributed sources of power generation (DG) into California’s electric utility system suggests that domestic environmental dilemmas with international repercussions provide an obvious entrée for global environmental policy specialists into the practice of environmental policy-making and law. Here I review current scholarship on policy networks that illuminates the contributions that technical and policy experts can make to such networks surrounding environmental issues. I then introduce the key members of California’s “clean DG” policy network that emphasizes the role of academic experts in this influential political system, and discuss how my own research has impacted the development of the state’s DG policy. I conclude that scholars are well positioned to observe and engage domestic and international environmental policy networks, and thereby also to influence environmental politics and law.     

Transnational Competence in an Emergent Epoch

The article elaborates a framework for understanding the relevance of transnational competence to the dynamics that mark the transformations of our time. Nongovernmental stakeholders interacting through dense civil-society networks that permeate domestic-foreign frontiers bear increasing responsibility for the course of events. Based on linked interests, interorganizational knowledge generation and aggregation, partnerships, and interpersonal/intercultural interactions, they are deeply involved in addressing the many challenges posed by an ever more interdependent world. Transnational competence lubricates transterritorial networks and projects. Here, the authors extend earlier work that posited a worldwide skill revolution both by developing explicit dimensions of transnational competence and by introducing a behavioral component. The new framework provides analytical groundwork for explaining why some people, groups, and networks are more effective than others in forging meaningful transnational solidarities, negotiating and benefiting from the intensifying experience of globalization, and waging successful transnational campaigns. The article also probes how the spread of transnational competence is being facilitated by global migration and transmigration trends. The final section explores the governance implications of expanding transnational competency for the emergent epoch.     

Blurring the line between licit and illicit: transnational corruption networks in Central Asia and beyond

The anti-corruption norm in both scholarship and the policy world has too narrowly focused on the domestic and institutional context of bribe-taking and public corruption. Instead, we argue that corruption in the contemporary global economy requires a multiple set of connected transactions, processes, and relationships that take place within informal transnational networks that blur the line between illegal and legal activities. These networks include multinational companies, elites in host countries, offshore financial vehicles and conduits, middlemen and brokers, and destination financial institutions. We examine how these actors operate in Central Asia, a region that is widely identified as corrupt, yet is rarely understood as embedded in the types of global processes, offshore connections and transnational links specified in our analysis. Examples of offshore centers in tax planning from Central Asia, and partial results from a field experiment based on impersonating high corruption risks from four Central Asian states, provide evidence for how the various actors in transnational financial networks structure their dealings. We then present two brief illustrative cases of how these transnational networks have operated in energy explorations services in Kazakhstan and telecommunications contracts in Uzbekistan. Our findings have theoretical, practical, and normative implications for scholars and practitioners of Central Asian international political economy and other ‘high risk' regions.     

Measuring the Ambivalence of Religion: Introducing the Religion and Conflict in Developing Countries (RCDC) Dataset

Despite ample anecdotal evidence, previous research on violent conflict has found little evidence that religion is an important factor in organized violence. Quantitative work in this area has been largely confined to the interreligious character of conflict and measures of religious diversity, and has strongly neglected the peace aspect of religion. The Religion and Conflict in Developing Countries (RCDC) dataset helps to fill this gap with innovative and fine-grained data for 130 developing countries between 1990 and 2010. RCDC includes four types of religious violence (assaults on religious targets, attacks by religious actors, clashes between religious communities, and clashes with the state). In addition, RCDC contains data on interreligious networks and peace initiatives. This article demonstrates the usefulness of RCDC by applying our data to a preliminary analysis. The results indicate that interreligious networks are a reaction to identity overlaps and previous interreligious conflict.     

Conceptualizing and theorizing EU regulatory networks

European regulatory networks (ERNs) play a central role in the formulation, deliberation, and implementation of EU policies and have, thus, become objects of investigation in a fast‐growing scholarly literature. We identify two shortcomings – one conceptual, one theoretical – in the literature on ERNs: First, we argue that the principal–agent approach, which is conventionally used to conceptualize ERNs, overlooks and even misrepresents central features of ERNs. By introducing and applying the “orchestration” framework to ERNs we demonstrate that it better captures the specific characteristics of ERNs. Secondly, explanations for the choice and design of ERNs have treated functional and power‐based accounts as mutually exclusive. We argue instead that explanatory leverage can be gained by combining these two accounts by specifying their respective domains of application. While functional accounts enable us to illuminate why and under what circumstances ERNs are created in the first place (rather than EU agencies or delegation to the Commission), political accounts help us to shed light on variation in the design of ERNs (i.e. why actors opt for rather close or loose network structures). We illustrate the explanatory value‐added of such an approach through two brief case studies on EU telecommunications and competition policies.     

Timing as a source of regulatory influence: A technical elite network analysis of global finance

Rules governing the international financial system are the subject of some of the most intense distributional battles waged in any area of global governance. Who wins and who loses such battles – and why? I develop a novel analytical framework – technical elite network (TEN) theory – which explains the widely varying levels of influence that stakeholders enjoy over global financial standards. TEN theory draws attention to how issue‐specific characteristics of international finance – in particular, its highly technical and complex nature – shape the distributional consequences of global regulatory processes. It posits that such characteristics influence distributional outcomes by (i) affecting who claims first‐mover position and, thus, sets the agenda in global financial rulemaking, and (ii) ensuring that proposals made by first movers are increasingly difficult to alter at later stages of rulemaking. I provide empirical evidence for the theory by examining two regulatory regimes that are central to the efficiency and stability of the global financial system: the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Accounting Standards Board.     

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.