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AbstractAlthough canonical models of clientelism argue that brokers use dense social networks to monitor and enforce vote buying, recent evidence suggests that brokers can instead target intrinsically reciprocal voters and reduce the need for active monitoring and enforcement. Combining a trove of survey data on brokers and voters in the Philippines with an experiment‐based measure of reciprocity, and relying on local naming conventions to build social networks, we demonstrate that brokers employ both strategies conditional on the underlying social network structure. We show that brokers are chosen for their central position in networks and are knowledgeable about voters, including their reciprocity levels. We then show that, where village social networks are dense, brokers prefer to target voters who have many ties in the network because their votes are easiest to monitor. Where networks are sparse, brokers target intrinsically reciprocal voters whose behavior they need not monitor.

In this paper I critically discuss the pros and cons of working with research brokers from a political science perspective. I do this by sharing my experiences of collaborating with two types of local "fixers" – cultural and communal brokers. I argue that even if similar approaches risk introducing a number of broker-induced biases, countermeasures can be taken to mitigate their effect: e.g. continuous triangulation, interviewing "sleepers" and asking in-depth questions to exclude interviewees who misrepresent themselves. However, researchers must be aware that working with multiple brokers can also generate methodological and ethical challenges that need to be taken into consideration.

AbstractIn exploring the leadership practices of chief executives of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), this article finds that IGO leaders recognize themselves as agents and as brokers. This article produces findings from a multiple‐case study of the executive leadership of NATO from 1995 to 1999 and of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy from 1999 to 2009. The relationship between member states and the IGO leader can be conceived as a principal–agent relationship where the agent plays a central role in framing a common vision and strategies, facilitating member states' involvement in the strategizing process, and mobilizing external and internal support. I depart from a restrictive principal–agent conceptualization of the relationship because I do not envision it as conflictive, but rather as collaborative.

Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations—and thus electoral information about broker performance—in Mexican electoral precincts, we find that greater monitoring capacity increases turnout and votes for the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the effect of monitoring capacity on PRI votes varies nonlinearly with the distance of voters to the polling station: it first increases because rural voters—facing larger costs of voting—generally favor the PRI, before declining as the cost of incentivizing brokers increases. This nonlinearity is not present for the PAN, who stand to gain less from mobilizing rural voters.

Bringing together ethnographic approaches to childhood, linguistic anthropology, and relational–feminist perspectives on care, this review focuses on the role of children as interactional brokers of care, a role that has been underappreciated. Building from the premise that, through language, children perform a fundamental form of other-oriented care—that of mediating another person's ability to express themselves—this review explores the material, political, moral, and affective dimensions of children's interactional care work. Attention to the interactional–relational aspects of children's caregiving shows the extent to which children are involved in facilitating the circulation of care and enabling community care networks, and it opens up new possibilities for how we conceptualize care: It illuminates the processes through which care practices are organized, negotiated, and enacted at the intersection of the local and the global; it reveals care as a reciprocal, distributed interactional achievement; and it helps us transcend dichotomies that have characterized scholarly thinking about care.

"The book investigates how the United Nations, governments and aid agencies mobilise and instrumentalise migration policies and programmes through a discourse of safe migration. Since the early 2000s, numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), UN agencies and governments have warmed to the concept of safe migration, often within a context of anti-trafficking interventions. Yet, both the policy-enthusiasm for safety, as well as how safe migration comes into being through policies and programs remain unexplored. Based on six years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mekong region, this is the first book that traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate towards the concept, as well as how safe migration policies and programmes unfold through aid agencies and government bodies. The book argues that safe migration is best understood as brokered safety. Although safe migration policy interventions attempt to formalize pre-emptive and protective measures to enhance labour migrants' well-being, the book shows through vivid ethnographic details how formal migration assistance in itself depends on - and produces – informal, mediated practices.
The book offers unprecedented insights into what safe migration policies look like in practice. It is an innovate contribution to contemporary theorizing of contemporary forms of migration governance and will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and human geographers working within the fields of Migration studies, Development Studies as well as Southeast Asian and Global Studies. "

Neutral and alliance-free states continue to exist. Even though neutrality has lost its realistic survival function, it continues to serve as provider of national identity for neutral states. This identity is rooted in neutrality's idealistic function, according to which neutral states used to engage for humanitarian issues and the reduction of violence in international relations. The argument developed suggests an extension of this traditional role concept of neutral states: they should engage as promoters of ideas in international peacebuilding which are contested because they are perceived as a threat to national sovereignty, such as the responsibility to protect (R2P). While neutrality's realistic functions make neutral states credible advocates of sovereignty and autonomy, its idealistic functions provide them with a track record in positive reforms in international relations. Acting as norm entrepreneurs, neutral states could reduce the contradiction between 'prevention' and 'intervention'. Therefore, the key argument of this article focuses on the basis of neutrality's conceptual roots, the conditions for success of political ideas and examples from recent peacebuilding practice.