State intervention and neoliberalism in the globalizing world economy: lessons from Singapore's regionalization programme

The recent 1997-98 Asian economic crisis has thrown Asia's divergent pathways to development into serious question. Protagonists of neoliberalism argue that their agenda is now becoming a global orthodoxy when several ailing Asian economies have accepted IMF packages which come with neoliberal economic programmes. Drawing on lessons from Singapore's regionalization programme, this article contends that it is far too early to conclude that Asian developmental states are giving up their governance of domestic economies. Instead, there is evidence that these Asian developmental states are re-regulating their domestic economies to ride out of the economic crisis. The article first starts with the debate between neoliberalism and state developmentalism in our understanding of global political economy. It then examines the political economy of Singapore's regionalization programme through which Singapore-based transnational corporations are strongly encouraged by the state to regionalize their operations, followed by a critical discussion of the impact of the recent Asian economic crisis on the re-regulation of the regionalization programme by the state in Singapore. Some lessons for Asian emerging economies are suggested in the concluding section.     

China in East Asia: The process and implications of regionalization

This paper assesses the impact of foreign direct investment on China's integration into the East Asian regional economy. The phenomenal growth of investment since 1992 has both benefited from, and also fuelled, the growth of local autonomy in post‐Mao China. The central state's ability to control the process of integration has subsequently been significantly undermined as the relationship between the local and the international becomes ever more important. While the tendency to emphasize low cost production advantages has attracted considerable inward investment in some areas, impressive short‐term growth rates may hide less beneficial long‐term consequences for China's position within East Asia, and for the trajectory of China's development in general.     

Performance voting and knowledge of cabinet composition

Nearly every empirical study of outcome oriented retrospective voting assumes, though almost always implicitly, that a) every voter knows the composition of the incumbent government, or b) that voters who may not know who is in government do not cast retrospective votes. In this short essay we provide evidence that these assumptions are quite unlikely to hold and discuss how not taking this possibility into account has influenced our understanding of the retrospective voting mechanism and the conditioning effect of political sophistication on the economic vote. In so doing, we advocate for the inclusion of questions regarding cabinet composition in electoral surveys.     

Patrimonial voting: Refining the measures

Several studies have shown the importance of patrimony on voting for the right in French, British, and American national elections. However, these studies have only taken into account the diversity of patrimony and not their value. We propose to fill this gap in the literature with the “Mode de vie des Français” dataset that contains information on the savings and patrimony of French voters and was collected before the May 2007 presidential election. The results show that including measures that take into account the value of survey respondents' patrimony does not change the conclusions of previous studies that have demonstrated the existence of a strong relationship between holding a risky patrimony and support for the right.     

Hard choices in hard times: Valence voting in Germany (2009)

Recent studies of voting behavior in Anglo-American elections have demonstrated the clear superiority of the valence model over its rivals for explaining how people cast their ballots. In this paper we test the portability of the valence model in a particularly challenging setting the 2009 German Parliamentary elections. Although there are reasons to think that a spatial model might outperform the valence model, we find that the valence model outperforms it with results similar to previous findings in other political settings.     

Clarity of responsibility and economic evaluations

Convincing scholarly evidence shows the economy directs the mass public's support for parties and leaders. But the extent of economic voting depends on a country's “clarity of responsibility.” According to several scholars, political clarity is important because it determines whether people link national economic performance to the parties in government. This study explores a potential second role, which involves how clarity moderates the strength of partisan-motivated reasoning. Clarity of responsibility makes the economy more or less central to party politics. It could therefore moderate people's motivation to rationalize economic facts in a biased direction. Using cross-national survey data, this study tests this possibility by examining economic disagreement between people who support a party in government and those who support the opposition. Results from a Bayesian multilevel regression show that partisan disagreement varies systematically with clarity of responsibility. This finding raises new questions about cross-national differences in economic voting.     

Barriers to long-run growth in Russia

Russia's economic adjustment to the fall of communism has been notoriously troubled. The output recovery since 1998 is widely judged to be fragile. What is less often noted is that Russia is far from unique in its 'transition' troubles. In this paper the main hypotheses put forward to account for Russia's transition difficulties are reviewed in the context of economic change in all ex-communist countries. Accounts relying on (unexplained) mistakes in economic policy are inadequate. Two accounts may be sustainable in the light of evidence from other ex-communist countries: one based on inherited economic structure and one based on cultural factors. The latter hypothesis is shown to be susceptible to testing.     

Globalization and the Korean electronics industry

Abstract

Northeast Asia is notable for the relative absence of regional institutions. The Six Party Talks could constitute an embryonic starting point for the development of such institutions. The path toward greater institutionalization is likely to begin in a modest fashion. Functional working groups on topics such as the environment, maritime transport, technical barriers to trade, road and rail links, and energy could provide the locus for integrating North Korea into the broader regional and global economies. Foreign ministries will inevitably take the lead in developing the Northeast Asia Peace and Security Mechanism (NEAPSM), but meaningful economic achievements will require the involvement of other ministries. North Korea has proved problematic in this regard thus far. Moreover, given the importance of private-sector involvement in achieving sustainable economic development in North Korea, modalities will have to be developed to integrate private-sector actors when possible. The governments of the region, and particularly China and South Korea, may continue support on a bilateral basis as a hedge against North Korea's collapse or as inducements in the context of the nuclear talks. But the development of more permanent multilateral structures is unlikely until the nuclear issue is resolved.     

Does Membership in Civil Society Organizations Foster Social Integration? The Case of Danish Voluntary Sport Organizations

ABSTRACT

Voluntary organizations are generally perceived as important arenas in which social integration can be fostered. There is, however, no consensus on the meaning of such integration, and the empirical evidence for the claim is lacking. This article studies social integration within voluntary sport organizations, which make up a significant element of civil society in most Western societies. The article provides a theoretical framework well suited for the study of social integration, which differentiates members according to their levels of social interaction and emotional bonding across four community types: Strong, pragmatic, mediated, and weak. When applying this framework to the case of Danish sport organizations, the distribution of members among the four community types indicates that, although sport organizations are important arenas for the development of social integration, there is also a large minority of members who do not experience social integration. This article shows that both individual characteristics linked to members and organizational characteristics linked to sport organizations exert significant influence on the level and nature of social integration. Jointly, the results demonstrate that there are grounds to reassess the general conception that sport organizations are important arenas in which social integration can be fostered.