Electoral politics in Taiwan has undergone drastic changes in the past few years. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), established in 1986, has proven to be a viable political force, challenging the long-ruling Kuomintang (KMT). The article examines the interaction between policy formation and electoral competition in the Republic of China on Taiwan. (DÜI-Sen)
THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES THE SCHOLARLY CONTRIBUTION MADE BY FRANK CASTLES AND ROBERT D. MCKINLAY IN "DOES POLITICS MATTER? AN ANALYSIS OF THE PUBLIC WELFARE COMMITMENT IN ADVANCED DEMOCRATIC STATES," PUBLISHED IN 1979. IN THEIR ESSAY, CASTLES AND MCKINLAY TOOK ISSUE WITH THE PREVAILING WISDOM THAT ECONOMICS PLAYED A MORE IMPORTANT ROLE THAN POLITICAL FACTORS IN INFLUENCING POLICY OUTPUTS. THEY TESTED A NUMBER OF MODELS WITH BOTH ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL VARIABLES. THEY FOUND THAT, ALTHOUGH ECONOMIC FACTORS HAD SOME INFLUENCE, THE EVIDENCE RAN COUNTER TO THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM AND INDICATED THE GREATER SALIENCE OF POLITICAL FACTORS AS DETERMINANTS OF PUBLIC WELFARE OUTPUTS.
This book is a political tour de force that addresses the key contemporary question of what happens to politics in the postmodern condition. Politics in postmodernity is carefully contextualized by relating its specific sphere - the polity - to those of the economic, social, technological and cultural. The authors confront globalization and the notion of postmodernity as disorganized capitalism. They analyze the role of the mass media, the changing ways in which politics is used, the role of the state and the progressive potential of politics in postmodern times. Closing with a postscript on the future of the discipline of political science, this book offers a profound yet highly accessible account of how politics is undergoing a shift from the modern to the postmodern.
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Racism reflects how we think and act as much as what. It manifests in terms of biology, geography, and culture but reflects an episteme that normalises Self and Other into a bordered binary. Here, a trialectical epistemology can help. It dissolves racialised realities by showing how opposites exist in each other, thereby constituting a three-ness – e.g. self-in-other and other-in-self – that links Self and Other despite mutual antagonisms. From such trialectics, epistemic compassion can arise. It enables learning from the Other through what Buddhists call 'interbeing' or the recognition that 'you are in me, and I in you'. Reciprocity thus becomes key. The Self cannot violate the Other without also violating itself; likewise, loving the Other effectively loves the Self. Flat, monochromatic binaries like 'black' versus 'white' cannot continue and colour revivifies world politics, both literally and figuratively. I apply trialectics to the 'border problem' between India and China as an analogy.
The DIIS Working Paper 'From the geography of politics to the politics of geography' is the English version of the preface for the Brazilian edition of A return of geopolitics in Europe?. The book originally published with Cambridge University Press was translated by Bárbara Motta and published at the University Press of the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Editora Unesp) in São Paulo. The preface introduces the critical thesis of the political effect that the return of geopolitical thought had in Europe in the 1990s, well before 9/11. The rise of geopolitical thought can be linked to the disorientation, the foreign policy identity crises in many European countries when the end of the Cold War took away the stable coordinates of the post-1945 European security order. Its rise has, however, two pernicious consequences. First, it reverses Clausewitz by making politics the prolongation of war by other means. In other words, it militarises politics, as Aron had already criticised during the Cold War. Second, it essentialises physical and human geography, which justifies the homogenising of identities. The book does not claim that this European experience is universal, but invites scholars in Brazil to contrast it with the specificities of their political discourse and practice, the different nature of foreign policy identity crises and processes of militarisation in Latin America.
Catastrophic events like the bombing of Hiroshima, Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, and drone strikes periodically achieve renewed political significance as subsequent developments summon them back to public awareness. But why and how do different conceptions of time inform and challenge these key events and the narratives they create? In this book, Michael J. Shapiro provides an approach to politics and time that unsettles official collective histories by introducing analyses of lived experience articulated in cinematic, televisual, musical, and literary genres. His investigation is framed by questions of our responsibility to acknowledge those victims of violence and catastrophe who have failed to rise above the threshold of public recognition. Ultimately, by focusing on time as an active force shaping our conception of political life, we can deepen our understanding of complex political dynamics and improve the theories and methods we rely on to interpret them. This bold and original book will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, cultural studies and cinema studies looking for a new perspective on the temporal aspects of political life. Michael Shapirois Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i. His 2014 Polity book 'War Crimes, Atrocity and Justice' was awarded the 2015 Easton Prize for political theory by the American Political Science Association.
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The overall aim of this thesis is to better understand how politics and preferences influence policy outcomes. The thesis consists of two papers that examine two different policy outcomes in Swedish municipalities. Paper I analyzes the effect of income and education on the environmental policy performance of Swedish local governments. In estimating the effects of income and education we will also examine how they interact with political participation. To examine this I use panel data based on an environmental ranking of Swedish municipalities made every year between 1993 and 2001. The empirical results show that there is a positive relationship between income and the environmental policy performance. This relationship is however captured by controlling for the education level, which has a positive relationship with the environmental policy performance. Controlling for municipal fixed effects and relevant control variables does not change this result. Furthermore we find that political participation has significant interaction effects with both income and education. Paper II develops a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate the causal effect of political party power on the placement of refugee immigrants in Swedish municipalities. That Swedish municipalities have a proportional election system puts forward specific challenges for using a RD design, which this paper will provide solutions to. The identification strategy is based on the idea that a specific party getting one more seat or not in the municipal council can be considered as good as random if the party is close to a seat change. Even though this paper only looks at Swedish data the method could be applied to other countries with proportional election systems. The results of the paper show that the political party power has a large effect on the placement of refugee immigrants in Swedish municipalities.
Attempts to demonstrate that differentiation, disaggregation and interdependence are of equivalent importance to parliamentary sovereignty, cabinet government and prime ministerial power for the analysis of British government in general and territorial politics in particular. Concludes that postwar trends cannot be seen as the erosion of 'local autonomy' but are better described as the growth of interdependence between levels of government; the proliferation of ambiguous and confused relationships; and thus the coexistence of fragmentation in the centre with the centralisation of each policy network. (Abstract amended)
