Suchergebnisse

Mankind is sectional in outlook, carving the world into little compartments with mile upon mile of boundary lines. Technology, on the other hand, is inherently universal in outlook; nature's laws operate as infallibly in Spain as in China, in Russia as in Australia. The substances which it uses are scattered widely over the earth without respect for human conventions. In the collection of raw products and the transportation of finished goods, its purposes are economic, not political. The engineer, then, in applying his rational skill to the world's haphazard system of political areas must necessarily cut across artificial regions with a variety of works. The railway needs no introduction as a map-slashing agency. It has pierced the Alps, connecting Switzerland and Italy by way of the famous Simplon tunnel; it has crossed the towering Andes, linking Argentina with Chile; it has stretched out through Siberia, tying China and the Pacific with the countries of western Europe; and it speeds the traveller through a veritable maze of Balkan nations. Electrical designers, creating superpower nets of transmission lines, run wires with utter abandon across national and local frontiers, joining Switzerland and France over the Alps in one net, and North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee in another. The production manager, turning out automobiles, airplanes, watches, and a flood of other commodities, seeks to distribute his products in every clime and under every flag. The engineer, in short, is a universalist, however intense his patriotism, and cannot function efficiently without traversing human boundary lines.

Treballs Finals del Màster d'Economia, Facultat d'Economia i Empresa, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2020-2021, Tutor: Andreu Arenas ; In this study we analyze whether party bans ignite ideological polarization by exacerbating pre-existing differences. We use the 2003 ban on Batasuna, a leftist Basque political platform, as case study. In the 2005 Basque regional elections EHAK-PCTV contested in its name, which enabled the outlawed party to avoid the ban. We aim to analyze these effects in the short-term, one election period later. Using a continuous treatment in a Difference-in-Difference strategy, we are able to show that municipalities react differently given their differences in baseline support to Batasuna (measured by pre-ban vote shares in regional elections), rather than by differences in the loss of institutional representation (proxied by the pre-ban share of Batasuna councilors). The latter case holds in extreme circumstances, those in which the city mayor was from Batasuna, as the material loss of the ban is more salient. We find that the banned party increased its vote share in those places where its baseline support was higher. Moreover, the nationalist bloc increased its size while the federal bloc lost support, redefining group boundaries. We argue that the ban reinforced the ethnic identity political cleavage accentuating the inter-group political conflict.