The Death of the Author through False Translation in Mario Bellatin's Orientalised Japan

This article argues that Mario Bellatin's exploration of the potential relationship between writing, translation and physical deformity leads, perhaps unconsciously, to the continuation of exoticising stereotypes about ‘Oriental’ cultures. In El jardín de la señora Murakami, Shiki Nagaoka: una nariz de ficción, and Biografía ilustrada de Mishima, Bellatin resorts to Japanese characters to distance himself from his own writings, as if it were the culture that is the most alien to his own. His lucubrations about reading and writing are sometimes accompanied of exocitising and orientalist overtones, which he mocks at times.     

Coordination between electoral arenas in multilevel countries

This article shows the existence of a coordination dilemma in multilevel countries that hold elections for different parliaments, at different territorial levels and with different electoral rules. With evidence from Spain, the analysis identifies interaction or contamination effects between national and subnational electoral arenas that generate, just as in most mixed-member electoral systems, a centrifugal force that increases the number of electoral parties in national elections. The incentives that solve this coordination dilemma faced by small regional or local parties are theoretically discussed and empirically tested.     

Economic crises and the nationalisation of politics

The literature on party system nationalisation has yet to provide a better understanding of the impact of short‐term factors upon the nationalisation of politics. This article helps to fill this literature gap by analysing the effect of economic conditions on party system nationalisation. The argument is that economic crises will decrease levels of nationalisation by amplifying territorial variation in preferences for redistribution, limiting political parties’ capacity to coordinate divergent interests across districts and triggering the emergence of new political forces. Data on 47 countries for the 1960–2011 period confirm this hypothesis and show that lower economic growth during the years prior to the election is associated with a decrease in levels of party system nationalisation in the next election. The result is robust to variation in the specification of the econometric model and to the use of different measures of nationalisation. Results also show that federal institutions increase the impact of economic conditions on the nationalisation of politics, whereas any moderating effect of electoral system proportionality on the economy is not found.