Suchergebnisse

There's no question that Americans are bitterly divided by politics. But in Partisans and Partners, Josh Pacewicz finds that our traditional understanding of red/blue, right/left, urban/rural division is too simplistic. Wheels-down in Iowa--that most important of primary states--Pacewicz looks to two cities, one traditionally Democratic, the other traditionally Republican, and finds that younger voters are rejecting older-timers' strict political affiliations. A paradox is emerging--as the dividing lines between America's political parties have sharpened, Americans are at the same time growing distrustful of traditional party politics in favor of becoming apolitical or embracing outside-the-beltway candidates. Pacewicz sees this change coming not from politicians and voters, but from the fundamental reorganization of the community institutions in which political parties have traditionally been rooted. Weaving together major themes in American political history--including globalization, the decline of organized labor, loss of locally owned industries, uneven economic development, and the emergence of grassroots populist movements--Partisans and Partners is a timely and comprehensive analysis of American politics as it happens on the ground.

Students of contemporary statecraft have long argued that welfare states shape societies. Social programs do not merely provide benefits to individuals. They reinforce or undermine social hierarchies and shape citizens' views about natural bases of political solidarity (Esping-Anderson 1990). In southern Europe, for instance, corporatist welfare regimes tied social protections to the male breadwinner and other traditional social institutions, while means-tested programs in Anglo-Saxon nations reinforce the social stigma of direct public benefits.

American policymakers delegate the administration of many welfare programs to states, where officials implement them in increasingly diverse ways. Welfare state scholarship has little to say about this subnational policy divergence, and it portrays the complexity of delegated governance as a barrier to nonelite legislative influence. Drawing on an ethnographic study of one state's Medicaid program, this article shows that delegated governance offers ample opportunity for nonelite influence and policy divergence, but through regulatory governance rather than legislative advocacy. Medicaid is opaque to politicians, whose inability to monitor program details creates conditions of bureaucratic autonomy and even activism: health-care agency personnel sequence regulatory tweaks to protect and expand entitlements. But budget cuts, outsourcing, and fraught provider relations also deprive bureaucrats of street-level know-how, and bureaucrats depend on beneficiaries' advocates who selectively illuminate a path to reform. A full rendering of subnational divergence in American federalism requires attention to underexamined factors such as bureaucratic activism, agency advocacy, and regulatory governance.

Contemporary urban leaders use exotic fiscal and financial schemes to fund development, which scholars theorize as tools for creating public goods or critically as growth entrepreneurs' speculative self–enrichment schemes. Neither approach accounts for financing schemes' reactivity, or their tendency to shape development patterns. This paper facilitates analysis of the latter by developing a new theory of growth coalitions: the politics of earmarking perspective. Urban leaders are akin to local state builders whose superordinate concern is establishing priority over revenues earmarked for noncity functions, a goal they pursue by pairing financing schemes with developments that maximize discretionary revenue under unique geographic, fiscal, and regulatory constraints. I illustrate this perspective's utility by comparing scholarship on California's municipal fiscal crises with an ethnography of development in two Iowa cities. Although reliant on the same financing mechanism—tax increment financing—California's municipal leaders pursued discretionary revenue by incentivizing extravagant commercial developments, whereas Iowa's directed industries to outlying business parks.

Résumé Pronostiquée par les sondages, l'élection de Barack Obama apparaît rétrospectivement comme une victoire annoncée et acquise facilement. L'idée d'un raz-de-marée est reprise par les médias, comme si les États-Unis se réveillaient subitement démocrates pour tourner la page de l'ère Bush. Josh Pacewicz et Etienne Ollion reviennent sur les conditions du succès en montrant qu'il a été obtenu grâce à des méthodes de campagne innovantes qui feront date. Plus qu'un changement profond de comportements dans le corps électoral, la victoire de 2008 est le fruit d'une organisation efficace d'un réseau de bénévoles sans équivalent du côté des Républicains.

AbstractThis article investigates a trend in the Chicago region that defies conventional accounts of municipal politics and revenue-motivated policing: since the Great Recession, higher-income black suburbs have sharply increased collection of legal fines and fees. To explain this, we draw on a study of municipal officials to develop a racialization of municipal opportunity perspective, which highlights how racial segregation in the suburbs intersects with policies that encourage competition over tax revenue to produce fiscal inequalities that fall along racial lines. Officials across the region shared views about 'good' revenues like sales taxes paid mostly by nonresidents, but those in black suburbs were unable to access them and instead turned to 'bad' revenues like legal fines to manage fiscal crises—even where residents were fairly affluent and despite the absence of discriminatory intent at the local level. These findings invite inquiry into the racially uneven consequences of seemingly colorblind municipal fiscal practices in the USA and the distributional consequences of municipal governance in other national contexts.

Who governs in the international organizations (IOs) that promulgate global norms on trade and commercial law? Using a new analytic approach, this paper focuses on previously invisible attributes of a global legislature - the state and non-state delegatio

Who governs in the international organizations (IOs) that promulgate global norms on trade and commercial law? Using a new analytic approach, this paper focuses on previously invisible attributes of a global legislature - the state and non-state delegatio

AbstractWho governs in the international organizations (IOs) that promulgate global norms on trade and commercial law? Using a new analytic approach, this paper focuses on previously invisible attributes of a global legislature – the state and non‐state delegations and delegates that create universal norms for international trade and commercial law through the most prominent trade law legislature, the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). Based on ten years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and unique data on delegation and delegate attendance and participation in UNCITRAL's Working Group on Insolvency, we find that the inner core of global trade lawmakers at UNCITRAL represent a tiny and unrepresentative subset of state and non‐state actors. This disjunction between UNCITRAL's public face, which accords with a global norm of democratic governance, and its private face, where dominant states and private interests prevail, raises fundamental questions about legitimacy and efficacy of representation in global lawmaking.