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Political regimes are stable most years, but sometimes they jump. The stable years are periods of political status-quo equilibrium. To break a status quo requires a triggering event. The paper is an attempt to identify and classify what close observers at the time thought were the triggering events in a sample of 262 larger regime changes between 1960 and 2015 in 170 countries. The sample consists of all changes in the Polity index with a numerical rating above 3 (i.e. of 4 or more). The source for the triggering events is country-relevant articles in The Economist. Triggering events are classified in a (2 x 2) table with four cells: (DP) domestic political, (DE) domestic economic, (XP) external political, and (XE) external economic, which remains empty. By far the most common is (DP), but the domestic political events prove to be very different. Thus, most jumps are exogenous in the perspective of development.

This dissertation consists of three chapters, each representing a self-contained research paper in health economics. The first chapter formalizes a model which generalizes several political models of collective action and regime change. It considers the impact that an extremist party can have on the choices made by the population in choosing whether or not to take part in a revolt. This third party is usually a personal interest group that benefits from a revolution, or in some cases benefits from the current regime in power, and thus will try to persuade the general population into pursuing an action that is in the extremist's best interest. The paper presents several applications of the model with political and economic roots. These models add insight to revolutions in the present day as well as throughout history, particularly those aided by outside benefactors.(JEL codes: D5,D72,D91) In the second chapter, I study the effect that NCLB had on teacher turnover and compare it to the impact from state accountability systems that existed prior to the passage of NCLB. I find that, while state accountability systems have no significant effect on teacher turnover, teachers are 5 percentage points more likely to remain in the field following NCLB. The driving force behind this result is the year that a teacher earned his or her bachelor's degree. Receiving a bachelor's degree after 2002 makes an individual 27 percentage points more likely to stay in the field after NCLB was passed. I believe there is a self-selection process to explain this result, as after NCLB became law only those individuals who felt comfortable teaching under an accountability system earned their education degree and became a teacher. I find further evidence of this result by considering where the teachers earned their degrees. The state where a teacher earned their degree does not have a large effect on the likelihood of continuing to teach, regardless of whether or not that state had some kind of prior accountability system. This suggests that ...

Can monetary policy control inflation when both monetary and fiscal policies change over time? When monetary policy is active, a long-run fiscal principle entails flexibility in fiscal policy that preserves determinacy even when deviating from passive fiscal, substantially for brief periods or timidly for prolonged periods. To guarantee a unique equilibrium, monetary and fiscal policies must coordinate not only within but also across regimes, and not simply on being active or passive, but also on their extent. The amplitude of deviations from the active monetary/passive fiscal benchmark determines whether a regime is Ricardian: timid deviations do not imply wealth effects.

This article presents a case of political participation through radio broadcasting during World War II. Focusing on how the Portuguese listeners interacted with the transborder broadcasts from the BBC, it demonstrates how politically engaged citizens struggled to use a foreign station to disseminate their views on the country's po- litical situation. Grounded on Pateman's (1970) and Carpentier's (2011) definitions of different levels of participation, it demonstrates that listeners were not given the ability to achieve full or maximal participation due to limitations imposed by organizational and political structures. Departing from this case, the article also reflects on how audi- ences interact with "traditional media", questioning the widespread idea of radio listen- ers as passive agents and suggesting that an understanding of the political and social contexts in which media participation takes place is essential to ascertain the levels of empowerment given to the audiences. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Will autocracies dependent on the export of oil become democratic? To some, the answer seems evident. "The trend is clear," President Bush said in March 2005. "In the Middle East and throughout the world, freedom is on the march." Unfortunately, at least in the near term, the opposite is true. Not only is the worldwide spread of democracy stagnating in general, but a number of countries that had once demonstrated some progress are seriously backsliding. By my calculations, about a third of these backsliders are oil-exporters, perhaps most notably Russia. And not a single oil-exporter currently classified by Freedom House as "not free" or "partly free" shows signs of changing its status to democracy. This does not mean that oil-exporting countries cannot become democratic (witness, for example, Norway or Trinidad-Tobago), but it does indicate that oil dependence may pose special problems for democratization.

Between 2000 and 2005, Russia-allied governments in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and (not discussed in this paper) Kyrgyzstan were overthrown through bloodless upheavals. Though Western media generally portrayed these coups as spontaneous, indigenous and popular ('people power') uprisings, the 'color revolutions' were in fact outcomes of extensive planning and energy ─ much of which originated in the West. The United States, in particular, and its allies brought to bear upon post-communist states an impressive assortment of advisory pressures and financing mechanisms, as well as campaign technologies and techniques, in the service of 'democracy assistance'. Their arsenals included exit and opinion polling, focus groups for 'revolutionary messaging', and methods and training in 'strategic nonviolent conflict'. Among the key foreign agents involved in the process of creating 'transitional democracies', as discussed in this study, are the United States Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and its funded institutes, George Soros's Open Society Institute, Freedom House, and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. These developments are conceived as aspects of the larger neoliberal program of opening the Eastern European region for commercial, strategic military, cultural, and political domination by the G-7 countries. Four types of foreign assistance studied are: (1) political; (2) financial; (3) technical training; and (4) marketing (propaganda).

Barely a year after Zimbabwe's long serving President Robert Mugabe was ousted through a military coup which replaced him with his erstwhile trusted ally and vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, the army shot six civilians caught up in the crossfire of protestors alleging ZANU PF electoral theft of the 2018 July 30 polls. Although the military has always been in the background of Zimbabwe's politics in general and the ruling ZANU PF affairs in particular, the shooting of protestors incident which occurred on the 1st of August 2018 left the world shell-shocked on the prospects of any peaceful change of government or even transfer of power, confirming to all and sundry that Mugabe could have exited the political stage, but the system he presided over for 37 years is still intact, if not even more perfected in the aftermath. This has since rekindled debates on the feasibility of regime change in Zimbabwe and in that context the validity and essence of having an election in the first place if any outcome unfavourable to ZANU PF and its candidate is likely to witness the unleashing of armed soldiers and the subsequent killing of citizens in the process. With the security sector involved in politics in contrast to the old adage that politics lead the gun, it thus comes as a paradox that for the umpteenth time, regime change in Zimbabwe shall remain an elusive dream.

This article applies Walby's systemic theory of gender regime to Spain's decentralized state, to capture changes in the gender regime. Locating the "hegemon" at different levels of government for each domain (economy, polity, violence, and civil society) and considering interactions between governmental levels provided a clear understanding of changes in the gender regime. The relationship between governmental level acting as hegemon in specific domains and variations in political majorities across governmental levels explained changes toward a neoliberal– conservative type in the economy domain. Shifts toward a neoliberal gender regime in violence and polity, and toward a conservative type in civil society, were contested. ; Research for this article has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Research through the UNIGUAL Project (Ref: Fem2017-86004-R) ; SI

Abstract This paper argues the case for viewing a country's transition regime as a totality in which different career steps and routes assign significance and value to one another. Following the destruction of major sections of Britain's transition regime in the 1970s and 1980s, the paper explains how the regime has subsequently been reconstructed following the 1988 Education Reform Act, replacing the vocational education and training schemes of the 1980s with government-supported apprenticeships, almost uninterrupted employment growth since 1992, and the financialization of the corporate economy alongside uncapped expansion of higher education. England's current transition regime keeps rates of youth unemployment and NEET below the European Union averages and delivers the fastest transitions in Europe. However, the reconstructed regime also locks-in features that may well become long-term problems, namely an expensive higher education system which leaves graduates with debts that many do not expect to repay in full, and substantial low wage, low skill, low productivity sectors in the economy and workforce.

When we talk about human rights in Iran, the first thing that comes to mind is the torture of political prisoners. Amir Fakhravar is one of the eye witnesses to torture in the Islamic Republic prisons. He spent over five years of my life in prison, under torture, and over 15 years in the corridors of the Revolutionary courts.

Poland is currently facing a political regime change that erodes the country's democratic structures and undermines its judicial system. Resembling the Polish dissident movements that accompanied the transition from a socialist-led to a democratic state in the late 1980s, protest movements are recently emerging that aim to counter the illiberal tendencies of Poland's contemporary government. Civil society groups seem to accompany different types of regime change, either supporting the establishment of a democracy or fighting its disruption, making them a valuable indicator for the direction of political change. This chapter examines the relation between public protest and regime change based on a comparative case study of Poland. The findings indicate that the form of public protest gives insight into the type of political agitation. Civil society guiding a regime transition towards democracy acts from outside a country's political structures and targets the inside. A regime change that distances a country from a democratic set-up is marked by public protests that operate from within the state's structures, using the persistent democratic framework. Comparing the post-communist and today's stage of political upheaval in Poland thus reveals general patterns on the interaction between the public and the political sphere during a regime transformation process.

This study uses the natural experiment of German reunification and a difference-in-differences approach to test whether the political and economic transition in East Germany in 1990 affected intergenerational occupational and educational mobility. Applying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), I show that German reunification did neither strongly affect occupational nor educational mobility. These findings are robust to operationalizing social origin in various ways. Admittedly, reunification may have had small effects on occupational and educational mobility that cannot be uncovered with data currently available. However, my findings rule out that there were large effects of German reunification on intergenerational mobility. These findings are at odds with theories that argue that institutions strongly affect intergenerational mobility.

The developments in Kyrgyzstan differ markedly from the regime changes in Georgia and Ukraine. Yet the overthrow of Askar Akayev's regime again raises the question of how 'contagious' changes of government are in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The forms of political power that have become established in this region range from 'managed democracies' to authoritarian presidential regimes and neo-totalitarian systems. Sovereignty is centered largely in the person of the president, not in the will of the electorate. Since rigged elections were the catalyst for peaceful regime change in Georgia and Ukraine, speculation about the likely next candidate for a 'democratic coup' shifted to countries where elections were scheduled and there existed at least the rudiments of a civil society and a politically interested public. The message went out from Tbilisi and Kiev that electoral fraud was a risky business for the powers-that-be in any system that was at least partly pluralistic. President Akayev's reaction to this message, long before the recent parliamentary elections in his country, showed that he was most unsettled. (SWP-Comments / SWP)

Defence date: 11 June 1999 ; Examining board: Prof. Thomas Risse (European University Institute - supervisor); Prof. Philippe C. Schmitter (European University Institute); Prof. Volker Rittberger (Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen); Dr. Stefan Mair (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Ebenhausen) ; First made available online 12 September 2017 ; The subject of the study is regime change understood as the modification of broadly defined political institutions and practices governing domestic politics. Democratization is a possible outcome of such a process if the modification of political institutions and practices reflects convergence with a particular set of liberal ideas and norms. During the last 25 years the interest of political scientists in such processes has steadily grown. Democratization spread from Southern Europe in the 1970s to Latin America in the 1980s and finally reached Eastern Europe and the other continents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. More recently, some have diagnosed an 'ebbing' of the wave. While the empirical record of the 'third wave' is mixed, its profound effects on the way the academic community studies democratization are undeniable. The new cases o f democratization led during the 1980s to a paradigm shift away from structuralist explanations towards more contingency-driven and agency-based approaches. Challenges to the modernization school or cultural explanations of democratic change highlighted cases of regime change under structurally unfavorable conditions and called for greater attention towards the role of political actors, institutions, and contingencies.

DergiPark: 339975 ; klujfeas ; Vladimir Gel'man, who is a professor of political science at the European University at St. Petersburg and Finland Distinguished Professor at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki, is the author and editor of more than twenty books in Russian and English. Gel'man is notably productive about two and a half decade of Russian politics since the fall of the Soviet Union. He pulls the attention of the readers to the authoritarian politics in Russia in his recent book. With a wide perspective that includes Post-Soviet countries, he focuses on the factors impeding democratization in Russia. As usual characteristic of Gel'man's work, this study includes a detailed knowledge of Russian political actors and institutions. The structure of the book provides an easy-reading framework to readers. First two chapters on the regime change in Russia and the reasons of failure in democratization present necessary theoretical knowledge within a chronological perspective of Russian politics. Following chapters continue analyzing Russia's last two and a half decades without leaving the chronologic order. Thus, Gel'man's book emerges as one of the best studies that shed light on Russia's domestic politics and the logic of authoritarian rule since 1990.