Suchergebnisse

Do the economic development choices made by political elites impact political participation? Shepsle and North argue that to facilitate development political leaders must formalize those institutions protecting property and contract rights. The relationship between "institutional formality" and economic diversification has been empirically substantiated by Wood and Snider, who also find that political outcomes (growth in government size, transitions toward democracy) are sensitive to structural changes. Specifically, does the structural shift toward market driven development mitigate violent political participation? Does civil war or political terrorism give way to more peaceful politics as economies liberalize? Using data for eleven Latin American countries and OLS, the results are auspicious. They show that, consistent with Snider and Wood, when elites choose to institutionally protect property and contract rights and follow a market driven model, they dampen violent political participation and encourage peaceful political participation.

It has for years been accepted that as Latin American countries urbanize and industrialize, the proportion of people employed in tertiary ("services") categories relative to those in secondary (manufacturing, construction) increases more swiftly than in the nineteenth-century industrial countries. This is usually taken to mean that urbanization here "outruns" industrialization, that people are released from precarious rural occupations faster than stable secondary-sector jobs are created for them. The situation is aggravated by the introduction of advanced technology that allows high worker-output ratios and by the lack of possibilities for migration abroad such as relieved Europe of 55 million "excess" persons in the period 1750-1939. Table 5 shows that although the per cent of Latin Americans working in factories more than doubled in the period 1925-60, thus increasing much more sharply than the per cent of city dwellers, the total share employed in manufacturing barely increased at all—and in fact shaded off in the 1950s—because of a relative drop in artisans.

Historically, societies have been predominately patriarchal; the Americas are no exception. Patriarchy and male-dominated societies are still a presence in the world in general, but my focus is on Latin America, a region where sexism and misogyny continue to have a great impact on the overarching culture. My presentation will draw on articles that range from Feminist Review to St. Thomas Law Review to the Journal of International Women's Studies and such works as Phillip Swanson's Companion to Latin American Studies and Raphael Lopez-Corvo's Woman within: A Psychoanalytic Essay on Femininity. These works, coupled with a literary analysis of the poem "Kinsey Report" by Rosario Castelanos, and an analysis of the two films, Central do Brasil (Central Station) and The Official Story, as shown in my Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality Class last semester, are going to support the theory that 'gender' and therefore 'gender roles' are socially constructed. I argue that gender definitions of women are based on how women complement men. Women, then, are by definition secondary and hence inferior. If gender is a social construct and society propagates said constructs, then anything that defies or challenges the status quo is dangerous on social, political, economic, and cultural levels. These kinds of assumptions about how women are second-class citizens must be analyzed and deconstructed to help eliminate sexism, discrimination, intolerance, and violence. It is my hope, that my presentation will make a small yet important contribution to gender equality.

Political science has not come to terms with the idea of electoral mandates. The discipline's view is a hodgepodge of competing claims. In this article we review the empirical issues about mandates asking whether or not mandates occur and with what effect. We observe evidence of mandates as social constructions, as dialogues in the Washington community and in the press which serves it.We find that these dialogues accurately reflect election results – consensus emerges from actual sweeping election victories and not from mere strategic attempts to claim policy mandates. We find that Congress is highly responsive to the consensus interpretation. It engages in bursts of unusual policy activity which run for some months and then cease. And we find that these have a substantial policy legacy, that the changes that occur in these bursts produce some of the most important movements in American public policy.

This comprehensive book describes and analyzes the substance and politics of public budgeting at the national, state, and local levels of government. In doing so, it takes a comparative approach, illustrating the distinctiveness of budgeting at each level, as well as highlighting the features common to all three. A unifying focus is the extent to which budgetary decision makers use the budget as a central vehicle to advance their policy preferences. This fully updated sixth edition provides an extensive and thorough analysis of the causes of the Great Recession, its economic consequences, and the policy responses which pushed the boundaries of conventional monetary and fiscal policy. Also new to this edition is a chapter on the intergovernmental dimensions of public budgeting, along with boxed features highlighting hands-on vignettes of contemporary practical challenges facing budget makers at the different levels of government.--

The introductory survey is the single most important course we offer in Latin American history. What we attempt to achieve, how we go about it, and the interest we generate among our students will determine our success or failure in opening to them what Lewis Hanke rightly calls "a significant segment of world history." Course organization is an intensely personal matter, yet formal and informal discussions at recent conferences have convinced me that an airing of some thoughts on the matter is needed.A declaration of faith is necessary before proceeding. I do not agree with those who would abolish the introductory survey and substitute a "problems" course or an assortment of country histories. A problems course tends to distort the richness and diversity of the area's historical growth unless the student has some foundations such as those provided by an introductory survey. I do not dismiss a problems course for undergraduates.

José Carlos Mariátegui's "heroic creation" of Indo-American socialism had both political and epistemic dimensions and involved a rethinking of the revolutionary subject—the proletariat—in Latin America. This proletariat was, from Mariátegui's perspective, an articulated subject centered on the indigenous. Consideration of Mariátegui's work from a perspective that subverts the view of the historical/structural heterogeneity of Latin America and seeks a bridge among the region's revolutionary currents in popular praxis may contribute to deepening the study of its potential for enriching the political and epistemological alternatives to the neoliberal project. La "creación heroica" del socialismo indoamericano de José Carlos Mariátegui tuvo dimensiones tanto políticas como epistémicas e implicó un replanteamiento del sujeto revolucionario—el proletariado—en América Latina. Este proletariado era, desde la perspectiva de Mariátegui, un sujeto articulado centrado en lo indígena. La consideración de la obra de Mariátegui desde una perspectiva que subvierta la visión de la heterogeneidad histórico-estructural de América Latina y busque un puente entre las corrientes revolucionarias de la región en la praxis popular puede contribuir a profundizar el estudio de su potencial de enriquecer las alternativas políticas y epistemológicas al proyecto neoliberal.