Suchergebnisse

Why do some citizens remove the same politicians that they elected from office? This article examines the use of recall referenda, an increasingly prevalent process in which citizens organize a vote to remove politicians from office before they complete their terms. Although celebrated as a tool to improve electoral accountability, we argue that recall referenda are organized to pursue political vendettas. We test this claim using an original data set on the different stages leading to subnational recalls in Peru. Recalls are initiated more often when politicians lose by narrow vote margins and when women hold office. Once put to a vote, citizens do use office performance to decide whether to retain their politicians. Losing politicians organized fewer recall referenda following an institutional reform that allowed politicians to name their successors. The implication is that recall referenda create weak incentives to improve office performance, but careful institutional design can improve their functioning.

AbstractHow do migrants decide when to leave? Conventional wisdom is that violence and economic deprivation force migrants to leave their homes. However, long-standing problems of violence and poverty often cannot explain sudden spikes in migration. We study the timing of migration decisions in the critical case of Syrian and Iraqi migration to Europe using an original survey and embedded experiment, as well as interviews, focus groups, and Internet search data. We find that violence and poverty lead individuals to invest in learning about the migration environment. Political shifts in receiving countries then can unleash migratory flows. The findings underscore the need for further research on what migrants know about law and politics, when policy changes create and end migrant waves, and whether politicians anticipate migratory responses when crafting policy.

Comparative research on Latin American welfare states recently has focused on the extension of non-contributory benefits to those outside the formal labor market. This extension of benefits constitutes a major break from past exclusionary welfare regimes. Yet there also are substantial areas of continuity, especially in the contributory social-insurance system that absorbs most of welfare budgets. We develop here a framework for studying changes in Latin American welfare states that reconciles these trends. We argue that Latin American governments enjoyed an "easy" stage of welfare expansions in the 2000s, characterized by distinct political coalitions. Bottom-targeted benefits could be layered on top of existing programs and provided to wide segments of the population. But many Latin American governments are nearing the exhaustion of this social-policy model. We explore policy and coalitional challenges that hinder moves to "hard" redistribution with case studies of unemployment insurance in Chile and housing in Colombia.

Organizational membership is one of the strongest, yet overlooked, predictors of vote buying across Latin America. We argue that this relationship is driven by the fact that politicians outsource some of their vote-buying efforts to interest associations. In contrast to the existing literature that focuses on party brokers, who are loyal to a single political machine, we introduce the concepts of organizational brokers, who represent interest associations and renegotiate ties to political parties between election cycles, and hybrid brokers, who split their loyalties between an interest association and a single political party. We illustrate the operation of these alternative broker types through case studies of street-vending organizations in an uninstitutionalized party system, Colombia, and peasant organizations in an institutionalized party system, Mexico. Attention to the role of brokers and the organizations that they represent has implications for political accountability, collective action, and the persistence of clientelism.

1 Introduction; Defining and Measuring Party-Building; Explaining Successful Party-Building: A Conflict-Centered Approach; The Centrality of Conflict; Organizational Inheritance; New Debates and Issues for Research; Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Party-Building; Party-Building and the State: A Double-Edged Sword?; The Role of Party Leaders; The Paradox of Populism; Structure of the Volume Part I Party-Voter Linkages and Challenges of Brand-Building2 Historical Timing, Political Cleavages, and Party-Building in Latin America; Linkages, Cleavages, and Party System Alignments; Critical Junctures and Party System Alignment; Programmatic (De)alignment and Party System Institutionalization in Comparative Perspective; Programmatic Alignments and Party System Stability; Conclusion; 3 Building Party Brands in Argentina and Brazil; Party Brands and Mass Partisanship; Building and Diluting the FREPASO Brand in Argentina; Building the PT Brand in Brazil Party Perceptions and Partisanship: Testing Individual-Level ExpectationsParty Brands, Timing, and the Success of New Parties; 4 Segmented Party-Voter Linkages; Sequencing Explanations of Party Origins and Consolidation; Linkage Segmentation and Harmonization: A Framework; Segmented Appeals in Unequal, Fragmented Societies; The Challenge of Harmonization; The Argument at Work: The Cases of Chile and Uruguay; The Case of the UDI; The Case of the FA; Comparing the Cases; Conclusion; Part II Challenges of Organization-.Building; 5 The Paradox of Adversity; The Argument: The Paradox of Adversity State, Media, and Incentives for Organization-BuildingMobilizing Structures and the Means for Organization-Building; Adversity and Activist Commitment; The Role of Authoritarianism; The Argument at Work: New Left Party Survival and Collapse in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina; The PT in Brazil; PT Organization-Building: State, Media, and Mobilizing Structures; Selection Effects and Activist Commitment; Surviving Crisis in 1982; The Institutio