Negotiating democracy with authoritarian regimes. EU democracy promotion in North Africa

ABSTRACT

In order to better understand the dynamics of international cooperation on democracy promotion with authoritarian regimes, this article looks into the processes and results of negotiations on democracy (promotion) between the European Union (EU) and two of its North African neighbours (Morocco, Tunisia) in the decade leading up to the Arab uprisings. Asking if, how, and to what effect the EU and its Mediterranean partners have negotiated issues related to democracy promotion, it analyses official documents issued on the occasion of their respective association council meetings in 2000-2010. It shows that partners have indeed addressed these issues since the early 2000s, however, without engaging in substantive exchanges. Most of the time, conflicts have been neither directly addressed nor resolved. Where there are traces of actual negotiations leading to an agreement, these are clearly based on a logic of bargaining rather than arguing. These findings challenge the picture of harmony and cooperation between the EU and Morocco. Furthermore, they point to the low quality of these exchanges which reinforces the dilemma of international democracy promotion in cooperation with authoritarian regimes.     

Opening Pandora’s Box: How Does Defendant Race Influence Plea Bargaining?

Minority overrepresentation in the criminal justice system has long been an important topic of research and policy debate. In New York City, recent changes in the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the controversy around police stop-and-frisk practices have placed an even greater emphasis on the need for studying the possible impact of defendants’ race and ethnicity on criminal justice outcomes. Relatively little contemporary research, though, examines plea-bargaining outcomes. Using unique data on misdemeanor marijuana cases, this study examines the impact of defendants’ race on prosecutors’ decisions to make (a) plea offers for a lesser charge and (b) sentence offers for non-custodial punishments. Preliminary findings indicated that black defendants were less likely to receive reduced charge offers, and both black and Latino defendants were more likely to receive custodial sentence offers. However, these disparities were largely explained by legal factors, evidence, arrest circumstances, and court actor characteristics, though black defendants were still more likely to receive custodial sentence offers after including these controls. No differences were found between white and Asian defendants. Implications for research and prosecutorial practices are discussed.     

The Complexity of Social Outcomes from Cooperative,Competitive, and Individualistic Reward Systems

Previous research on cooperative and competitive reward systems has investigated the relation between extreme cooperative and competitive conditions, along with an intermediate noninterdependent neutral condition, to numerous outcome variables. This study added two additional conditions to these three usual conditions, between the neutral midpoint and the cooperative or competitive extremes, to see if these intermediate conditions might be distinctive in the outcomes they produced. The study used 240 participants, divided into groups of three that played a board game under these five different reward conditions. Participants' attitudes toward self, others, and task were then assessed and analyzed along with objective measures of performance, measures of self-esteem, state and trait anxiety, and results coded from an autobiographical report in game-defined roles. Results indicated that the intermediate cooperative condition was distinctively different from the extreme cooperative condition in predicted ways, and that the intermediate competitive condition was distinctively different from the extreme competitive condition, but in unpredicted ways. The research also demonstrated that an individualistic condition, which had previously been thought to produce neither a cooperative nor competitive social orientation, in fact produced both, raising questions as to whether reward interdependence, as researchers have defined it, is really the cause of cooperation and competition.     

Labor–Management Relations: Understanding and Practicing Effective Negotiations

Periodic collective bargaining between employers and unions, combined with contract administration and workplace dispute resolution, has provided many core insights for the broad field of negotiations. Over the past twenty-five years, this arena has advanced knowledge regarding the interdependence of integrative and distributive bargaining, the concurrent shaping of attitudes, the management of internal relations (within a party), and the roles of elected and appointed agents. Public sector negotiations have provided new insights into the dynamics of multilateral bargaining as well as a broad array of mediation and arbitration models. While the number of labor agreements negotiated each year has declined over the past half century, at least 23,000 private sector agreements are still executed each year and fundamental changes in industrial relations systems make continued attention to labor–management negotiations of increasing importance. In particular, this arena now features highly structured approaches applying interest-based bargaining principles and presents profound challenges as power relations shift in multiple ways.     

辩诉交易的博弈分析--以囚徒困境为例

辩诉交易制度以抗辩式审判方式、法官居中裁判为制度基础,辩诉交易是控诉方与辩护方出于理性作出的行为,通过博弈论对辩诉交易进行分析,可以更好的理解辩诉交易在审理取证困难的疑难案件时,虽然不理想但却十分必要,是退而求其次的在公正与效率间寻求博弈均衡,是提高诉讼效益之必要方式.     

解析工资集体协商中的三个难题

工资集体协商工作要想开展得富有成效,仅有法律支持还不够,尚须努力破解三大实际难题:一是"不敢谈"的问题;二是寻求协商共同点难的问题;三是协商争议解决难的问题。这些难题,需要相关部门与相关同志在实践中都来作积极的破解性探索。     

Buying treaties with cigarettes: Internal side‐payments in two level games

Two‐level games models predict that domestic division within a state can alter the extent to which that state is able to reach agreements with other states, and also alter the content of any agreement that is reached. I extend the model by introducing internal side‐payments composed of unrelated domestic issues. Domestic opposition to an international agreement will inhibit cooperation most when the executive and median legislators are in relative agreement about other salient domestic political issues. Domestic opposition to an international agreement will inhibit cooperation least when the executive and median legislators are in relative disagreement about other salient domestic political issues. U.S. ratifications of the NAFTA and the Chemical Weapons Convention illustrate that not all types of domestic division inhibit international cooperation—some can facilitate it     

The changing political economy of Taiwan‐Southeast Asia relations

This paper examines the possibility that the United States could ‘capture’ the Asia‐Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and use it to impose America's economic agenda on the region. It discusses Washington's ability to shape the choices of APEC's East Asian members at APEC negotiations to reflect US interests through employing its military, economic, cultural, and ideological resources as instruments of leverage and influence. While interdependence constrains Washington's use of military and/or economic leverage to influence the choices of APEC's East Asian members, the complex bargaining and consensual decision‐making features of APEC further prevent Washington from imposing its agenda on APEC. On the other hand, Washington's capture of APEC could be facilitated if East Asian policy‐making elites were socialized through the APEC process to accept American norms. This would tend to lead to preference convergence since the values of both the US and East Asia would coincide. The analysis suggests, however, that American norms are unlikely to prevail within APEC in the near to medium term primarily because APEC's East Asian members consider East Asian norms to be superior. American culture and especially ideology are not sufficiently attractive to East Asian elites and are thus unable to be used as instruments of influence. For these reasons, the paper concludes that the United States will find it difficult to impose its economic agenda on the region through APEC.     

Discourses on Poverty: emerging perspectives on a caring economy

In The Real Wealth of Nations, Eisler proposes a holistic view of the economy, which would include the caring sectors—the household, unpaid community work and the environment—as an alternative to market-oriented economic models that have proven ineffective in dealing with the problems facing our local and global communities. Her inclusion of language change as part of a strategy for economic transformation implicitly recognises the socially constitutive function of discourse, a notion put forth by critical linguists. Based on these economic and linguistic perspectives, this article reports on a study that examined the social knowledge about poverty constructed through selected discourses to determine whether they communicate a narrow or holistic view of the economy. It proposes that economic planning for poverty reduction build upon the process of language change towards a caring economy as revealed by the study.