Search results for "Politics"
showing 10 items of 2266 documents
Poverty, taxation and governance
2006
In a simple model based on political support approach, we show that poor and less egalitarian societies may impose a lower tax rate contrary to the prediction of the median voter approach. This is consistent with the available empirical findings. In the framework developed in this paper, the government can strategically design a weak governance system to promote informal activities for the poor. This constitutes an alternative redistributive strategy other than the standard tax-transfer policy. The government chooses the tax rate and the degree of governance simultaneously to maximize the average income of the poor in the informal sector of the economy, i.e. those who constitute the majorit…
Public Employees as Politicians: Evidence from Close Elections
2017
We analyze the effect of municipal employees’ political representation in municipal councils on local public spending. We use within-party, as-good-as-random variation in close elections in the Finnish open-list proportional election system to quantify the effect. One more councilor employed by the public sector increases spending by about 1%. The effect comes largely through the largest party and is specific to the employment sector of the municipal employee. The results are consistent with public employees having an information advantage over other politicians, and thus, being able to influence policy.
Posted Migration and Segregation in the European Construction Sector
2015
Worker ‘posting’ or temporary migration of manual workers sent by their employers to work on projects abroad has become increasingly prominent in the European construction industry. It is now normal to find groups of workers from all around Europe on construction sites, living in nearby temporary accommodations, moving on to other projects or back home when the project is complete. This article highlights the interaction between the social and spatial segregation and transnational mobility of these workers in the European Union construction labour market. We argue that the work-focused and employer-dominated nature of the posted workers' social world abroad contributes to their segregation …
Path dependency and landscape biographies in Latgale, Latvia: a comparative analysis
2010
This paper focuses on the path dependency of landscapes in Latgale, Latvia from the present perspective at the regional and local scale. During the last centuries Latvia's landscapes have passed through radical changes, which were driven by political events. Each new political era discarded the ideas of the previous era and subsequently reorganized the land(scape) according to the new views. At the regional level the role of history is significant in analyzing landscapes while at the local level the main force is people, often themselves not knowing the history of the place but putting the existing path dependency into practise or disregarding it. The biographies of two former villages are …
”Aika on kaikkein haurain pinta”
2016
“Time Is the Flimsiest Surface.” Affective Distance and the Weight of History in Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude
 This article examines the linkages between personal and political history and their relationship to the experience of time and a ective distance in Yiyun Li’s (b. 1972) novel Kinder an Solitude (2014). The method of analysis is a combination of close reading with a specific focus on affective distance, and a historically contextualizing approach. In this article, the notion of affective distance refers to an individual level psychic and emotional experience of estrangement, loneliness, and temporal and spatial discontinuity. The manifestation of a ective distance in Li’s no…
The Impact of Fiscal Consolidation on Human Development
2017
We find that fiscal austerity is associated with a reduction of human development standards, with the negative effect being particularly severe in the case of spending-driven consolidation episodes. Fiscal adjustments are especially damaging for human development in developing countries (namely, African and Latin American countries). Additionally, the empirical evidence shows that (i) government stability is a crucial institutional determinant of human development, and (ii) while investment in physical capital can boost human development, government consumption and inflation are detrimental to it. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Political Economy of the World Bank. The Early Years
2009
This book covers the early years of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), commonly known as the World Bank when it first confronted the issue of development as a fundamental part of its mission. The book is mainly concerned with how the Bank interpreted its mission and, more specifically, how its mission was born: what events shaped it, what cultural and ideological background influenced it and what was the historical context in which it arose. So this book is a contribution to the study of the prehistory of development, understood in its social and economic context. In this respect, the study of the early years of the World Bank offers excellent context for obser…
Quantitative analysis of the plurality in news programs of Nou at the last stage
2016
Durante los cerca de siete meses en los que Rosa Vidal y su nuevo equipo dirigieron RTVV, se produjo un cambio de tendencia en los informativos. Unos espacios de programación —vitales para una televisión pública— que habían perdido totalmente el prestigio y la audiencia después de 24 años de historia, la mayor parte de ellos bajo el poder político del Partido Popular. Esa última época convulsa coincidió en el tiempo con la aplicación de un expediente de regulación de empleo que el Tribunal Superior de Justicia de la Comunitat Valenciana anularía, provocando la decisión de acabar con las emisiones de la televisión autonómica. También por entonces se puso en marcha el Mandato-marco y el Contr…
Beyond ‘Left’ and ‘Right’? The Role of Culture and Context in Young People’s Understanding of Ideology
2017
In this chapter, new comparative data from the MYPLACE survey is drawn on to explore how different ideological attitudes are linked to self-placement on the conventional 0–10 left–right political scale and, thus, shed light on what the concept of ‘left’ and ‘right’ means to young people today. It is found that the ideological beliefs most salient for young people when they place themselves on the left–right scale vary depending on the historical, political and cultural context. Although the majority are able to describe themselves in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’, the meaning they attach to these notions differs from country to country. Accordingly, any cross-national analysis of ‘left’ and ‘…
Start Spreading the News: A Comparative Experiment on the Effects of Populist Communication on Political Engagement in Sixteen European Countries
2018
Although populist communication has become pervasive throughout Europe, many important questions on its political consequences remain unanswered. First, previous research has neglected the differential effects of populist communication on the Left and Right. Second, internationally comparative studies are missing. Finally, previous research mostly studied attitudinal outcomes, neglecting behavioral effects. To address these key issues, this paper draws on a unique, extensive, and comparative experiment in sixteen European countries (N = 15,412) to test the effects of populist communication on political engagement. The findings show that anti-elitist populism has the strongest mobilizing eff…