Suchergebnisse

Home-country institutions are increasingly engaged in reaching out to their emigrants to further their domestic agendas. Using a most-different systems design, I compare two cases in which emigrant outreach is dominated by the state (Philippines and Mexico) and two cases in which it is dominated by parties (Lebanon and the Dominican Republic). My main argument is that each type of outreach results in a different trade-off between electoral mobilization and partisan autonomy. State-led outreach encourages emigrants to transcend partisan divisions but does not mobilize overseas voters. By contrast, party-led outreach generates higher electoral turnout while reproducing and reinforcing sectarian and/or clientelist patterns of interest representation. I conclude with the implications for whether emigrants are likely to play a democratizing role in fragile democracies with serious deficits in participation, representation, and accountability.

Sanford Schram's The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy (Oxford University Press, 2015) is an ambitious effort to link together three important political realities of our time: the rise of new forms of neoliberal governance, the associated rise of new forms of social and economic insecurity, and the recent development of organized forms of political resistance symbolized by the figure of "Occupy." The argument is relevant to all subfields of political science. And so we have invited a range of experts across the discipline to comment on the book and on the broader question the book poses: Are we confronting a new form of capitalism that engenders new forms of politics, and if so, what does this mean for political science?

AbstractAs part of an emerging research agenda on the political impact of remittances in high-migration countries, this article explores the conditions under which organized migrants are likely to engage in transnational public-private partnerships with their home governments through a comparison of Mexico and El Salvador. Both countries have well-organized migrants who have cofinanced community projects back home. But this collaboration has been more sustained, multifaceted, and negotiated in Mexico than in El Salvador. These outcomes are linked to four factors: the density and type of migrant organizations, the territorial distribution of state authority and resources, the extent and nature of diaspora outreach, and legacies of state-society relations. The article discusses how this framework might be applied to other high-migration countries and whether there is room for agency in creating more favorable conditions for migrant-state collaboration.

Market reform has dealt a serious blow to traditional alliances between governing parties and labor unions. This article examines the fate of these alliances by applying a revised version of Albert Hirschman's schema of exit, voice, and loyalty to party-union relations in Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela. After refining the concept of loyalty, the author argues that it is embedded in the principles and norms on which these alliances are based. Market reform places party-affiliated labor leaders in a "loyalty dilemma" in which they have no choice but to behave disloyally toward one set of claimants. Their propensity to respond with either voice or exit depends on their vulnerability to reprisals for disloyal behavior and the party's capacity to retain their loyalty even in the face of sacrifices imposed on workers and unions. Both variables are linked to the authority structures in which labor and party leaders find themselves. In the short to medium run the alliances most likely to survive are those in which labor leaders have significant autonomy from their bases and/or in which the party is able and willing to challenge its own executive. In the long run, however, even these alliances may be vulnerable to collapse because of popular frustrations with the inadequacy of interest representation and the multiple pressures on political organizations to adapt to a more fluid and uncertain environment.