This paper examines the clientelistic equilibrium that remains prevalent in much of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during the post-independence period, undermining service delivery and creating inequality in access. Political institutions and social practices that shape incentives for policymakers, service providers, and citizens create what can be called a potentially tenuous, "clientelistic equilibrium." Service delivery is influenced by political institutions that allow for the capture of public jobs and service networks, and by social institutions that call upon individuals to respond more readily to members of their social networks than to others. The result is poor quality service delivery (e.g., absenteeism, insufficient effort), difficulties in access (e.g., need for bribes, connections), and inequalities in the provision of services.
One of the main consequences of the legal rules that govern electoral systems is that they establish the conditions for the conversion of votes into seats. Based on various public sources of information, this essay constructs indicators on the effects of the rules adopted in the electoral systems of Latin America in the period 1990-2019 in terms of the fragmentation of votes and seats. The evidence analyzed shows that there is no defined and constant pattern that reflects that the adoption of a proportional representation system results in a different fragmentation than that which occurs when a mixed system is available. The lower fragmentation of the vote than of seats does not turn out to be a product of the presence of partisan alliances. The fragmentation of voting in mixed systems has increased systematically, a situation that does not occur in the case of proportional systems.
It is fashionable to affirm that populism is advancing in the world. Examples of governments assuming positions that can be qualified in this way are abundant. But it seems pertinent to really dimension the existence and magnitude of this phenomenon and not only attend to a casuistic vision, largely focused on the Western world. That is why this paper will seek to measure the growth during the 21st century in terms of votes and seats in the lower national assemblies and the participation in the governments of the world of parties, differentiated according to their populist orientation. Today there are reliable sources of information to do this type of exercise. In particular, we will use the data compiled by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project to compare the electoral presence and success and the ability to lead or be part of the government coalitions of the parties according to their adherence to populist logics. To do this, after an introduction related to the same concept of populism, the source of information to be used in this text and the indices that will be used for analysis will be characterized. Subsequently, the results of the measurement of the behavior of these indices in the world in the period 2000-2019 and their relationship with the achievements of the parties in terms of votes, seats and participation in government coalitions will be presented in a synthetic way. Finally, the meaning of the data compiled, displayed and analyzed will be discussed. The analyzed data allow us to advance in the finding of a relationship between populist discourse and the adoption of a position contrary to elitism and that the position to the right in the political-ideological spectrum tends to make an organization less likely to adopt a populist rhetoric. However, there would be a long way to go to achieve a full explanation of the phenomenon of populism in this century and it is not insignificant progress in achieving electoral support and integration into governments that has been detected during the last decade. This forces us to think of new paths and alternative sources for understanding the phenomenon that occupies the center of attention in this essay.
In this essay, data are recovered that account for the impact of the pandemic on the conditions of democracy in the world. The source of information is the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which for this year incorporates, in addition to its monitoring of the situation of democracy in more than two hundred countries, a compilation of state responses to the pandemic and its impact on the validity of democratic standards. In this regard, it is observed that throughout the last decade there has been a decline in democracy, and although the effects of the pandemic are still limited, it is to be feared that in the long term its consequences will be worse than those perceived today. And given that there is an evident relationship between the autocratic character of the regimes and the propensity to violate democratic standards with exaggerated or non-consensual measures to combat the pandemic, is expected a deepening of the distance between countries where democracy prevails and those in which are autocratic forms of exercise of power.
Much has been said about the impact of the Great Recession (2008-2009) on the conditions and foundations of democracy, especially in the Western world. But has it really been like this? Today we have various options to approach the comparative study of the state of democracy in the world through wide-ranging cross-sectional and longitudinal sections. Perhaps one of the most successful is that of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), whose approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy is to provide a data set that attempts to reflect the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of government that includes, but it goes beyond the simple presence of elections. For this reason, the V-Dem project collects data to measure different principles of democracy, one of which is the electoral one. In principle, the main finding of this documentary effort leads its authors to affirm that "autocratization", a word with which they call the decrease in democratic features, has accelerated in the world, particularly when the existing state at the time of The Great Recession will occur with the present situation in 2019. This has to be reflected in the state of the principles in the electoral question. Detailing the scope and characteristics of this loss of democratic features in general and its manifestation in the electoral sphere throughout this century and between two ten-year cuts (2000-2009 and 2010-2019) is the task that we propose to carry out in this paper. This, knowing that 2020 will represent a new watershed in the conditions for the development of democracy and elections in the world, given the experience of the Great Confinement, with a practice and hopefully temporary suspension of electoral exercises in the world and a return uncertain at the polls in which the repercussions of this event will gradually be seen in the spirit of the electoral bodies of the world.
Democratic systems have regular elections, which supposes the existence of one or more organisms in each nation in charge of organizing the elections. Electoral governance is supposed to have an impact on the quality of the processes and democracy itself. Formally, the integration and composition of the electoral bodies generate differences due to the number of management bodies, the duration of their mandates, the way in which their members are selected, their level of professionalization and links with parties and the government, their condition of autonomy and financial sufficiency, their capacity for legislative initiative and the level of involvement of the political parties in their decisions for the organization of the elections. In practice, it is essential to review and verify the effective existence, meaning and magnitude of the impact of electoral bodies and their autonomy regarding issues related to the quality of processes and democracy in Latin American nations. For this, it is necessary to resort to one of the most complete sources of information to conceptualize and measure democracy in the countries of the world through the compilation of a multidimensional and disaggregated set of data that aims to reflect the complexity of the phenomenon: the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which provides indices on democracy and electoral cleanliness and indicators on the autonomy and sufficiency of electoral bodies by country and year, which can be crossed with indicators for each election on electoral participation, vote buying and other irregularities, government intimidation and other forms of violence, as well as acceptance of defeat, in addition to an estimator of cleanliness and perceived freedom in each process. The exploitation of these data and the analysis of the relationship between the indicators by election and the annual estimators for the region will be the task that we will address in this paper.
Around the world, it is increasingly being recognized that for sustainability goals to be reached, efforts need to go beyond complying with standards and mitigating adverse impacts, to identifying environmental sustainability as an objective of the development process. This approach requires the integration of environmental, sustainability, and climate change considerations into policy and sector reform. Because sector reform brings about significant policy change involving adjustments in laws, policies, regulations, and institutions, it is a sensitive political process often driven by strong economic interests. Policy makers are subject to a number of political pressures that originate in vested interests. The recommendations of environmental assessment are often of little relevance unless there are constituencies that support them and have sufficient political power to make their voices heard in the policy process. While strong constituencies are important during the design of sector reform, they are even more important during implementation. It follows that effective environmental assessment in policy and sector reform requires strong constituencies backing up recommendations, a system to hold policy makers accountable for their decisions, and institutions that can balance competing and, sometimes, conflicting interests.
Two experiments with undergraduates as subjects were carried out with the aim of replicating and extending previous results showing that the implication of the behavioral life-cycle hypothesis (H. M. Shefrin & R. H. Thaler, 1988) that people classify assets in different mental accounts (current income, current assets, and future income) may explain how consumption choices are influenced by temporary income changes. In both experiments subjects made fictitious choices between paying for a good in cash or according to a more expensive installment plan after they had received an income which was either less, the same, or larger than usual. In Experiment 1 subjects were supposed to have savings so that the total assets were equal, whereas in Experiment 2 the total assets varied. The results of both experiments supported the role of mental accounts in demonstrating that subjects were unwilling to pay in cash after an income decrease even though they had access to saved money. Thus, in effect they chose to pay more for the good than they had to. Indicating a need for further refinement of the concept of mental account, choices to pay in cash after an income decrease tended to be more frequent when the consumption and savings motives were compatible than when they were incompatible. Furthermore, increasing the total assets made subjects more willing to pay in cash after an income decrease.
The UniSAFE survey collected data on experiences of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, among students and employees in 46 higher education institutions and research institutions in 15 countries in the period 17.01.-01.05.2022 (n= 42,186). Factors of influence and effects of gender-based violence are part of the survey. The prevalence data refers to six forms of violence, based on the four forms of gender-based violence described in the Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention: physical violence, psychological violence, economic violence and sexual violence. In addition, the survey includes two other forms of violence: sexual harassment and digital violence. The results of the UniSAFE survey add to the current knowledge base on the occurrence of gender-based violence by individuals (micro-level) in the context of science and research. The UniSAFE survey is part of an EU-funded study (grant number 101006261) with several qualitative and quantitative data collections.
