Suchergebnisse

The political science literature often points to populism as the cause of democratic backsliding. The literature purports that populism undermines democracy's liberal component, meaning the horizontal checks and balances on executive power by legislatures and courts and the vertical checks and balances by civil society, such as a free press and social movements. Populists promote political polarization to build sustainable ruling coalitions during and between elections that legitimize and support the illiberal policies above. However, this debate often ignores the economic tools that populists in power possess, such as capturing direct and indirect international rents to finance clientelist mechanisms to co-opt political support. This paper contributes to the rich literature on how economic rent conditions the negative relationship between populism and liberalism by disaggregating the moderating effects of direct and indirect international rents through panel regression models in 18 Latin American countries from 1991 to 2019. I find that direct international rents, such as natural resource rents, moderated a deepening in processes of democratic backsliding. Contrastingly, indirect international rents, such as remittances, moderately mitigated democratic backsliding.

This article presents an example of how globalization and digitization force states to rely on international organization. Examining tax policy with respect to cryptocurrency—an innovative, global technology—the implication is that a state levying taxes on cryptocurrency must turn to international monitoring and enforcement regimes to support effective taxation. Based on Margaret Levi's theory of predatory rule, I submit a theory of "co-predation" to explain international cooperation with respect to taxation of novel, cross-border technologies such as cryptocurrency. The Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI), an anti-tax evasion framework promulgated by the OECD, serves as an example of international cooperation. A comparison of cryptocurrency taxation in Russia and Belarus finds that, where effective tax policy is at stake, states are enjoined to commit to international cooperation through AEOI. The article concludes by considering implications for legitimacy, quasi-voluntary compliance, and strategic tax policy.

The article examines the European Community's role in three international negotiating processes aiming at improved free trade: the Uruguay Round of the GATT negotiations, the negotiations with EFTA and the EC's negotiations on association agreements with three Central European states. The liberal-institutionalist perspective on international cooperation is contrasted with the realist perspective, and in accordance with the realist expectations it is concluded that relative gains have played a decisive role in outcomes. However, the distribution of gains within the participating states has been of greater importance than the distribution between states, thus indicating the significance of domestic determinants for international cooperation.

Since the 1990s, many international institutions have gotten involved in the "fight against cor- ruption" and sought to harmonise national legislations. While a number of international con- ventions against corruption have been adopted they rely on governments' political will to com- ply, especially in the Global North. In the absence of coercive power, international institutions have used knowledge production and the rhetoric of evidence-based policy-making to influence domestic policy-making. This paper is interested in international institutions' use of knowledge and evidence to set the anti-corruption agenda. It questions and deconstruct what they present as evidence, showing that the meaning of the term has evolved overtime. Based on document analysis and interviews with international civil servants and NGO employees, this paper firstly comes back on the value attributed to knowledge in this policy field. It then presents what in- ternational institutions meant by evidence since the emergence of the anti-corruption agenda in the 1990s. Lastly, it critically discusses the use of knowledge and evidence, the function it plays and its effects on anti-corruption policy-making.