Search results for "democracy"
showing 10 items of 657 documents
Rapid Reform and Unfinished Business: the development of education in independent Latvia 1991-2007
2008
Education in Latvia has changed a great deal in the last 15 years. The development of an independent and democratic state system has creatively combined elements of foreign experience and influence with the enrichment and further development of features of the earlier Latvian system. This article outlines the main steps in this process of change and then goes on to argue that there is still much to be done: firstly, to consolidate and secure the developments to date, and secondly, to enable a successful functioning within the EU in a rapidly changing wider context.
Ethiopia and international aid: development between high modernism and exceptional measures
2016
The chapter explores the relationship between aid, foreign investments and the failure of democratization in Ethiopia across historical periods.
Grassroots Social Innovation for Human Development: An Analysis of Alternative Food Networks in the City of Valencia (Spain)
2017
This paper explores the contribution the capability approach (CA) and grassroots innovation (GI) literature makes to a better understanding of the complexity, richness and specificity of bottom-up processes of social innovation (SI), and their specific contribution to social transformation. Using a purely qualitative methodology, the paper addresses a case study—organic food buying groups in the city of Valencia—and examines them through the lenses of SI, GI and CA. By taking four concurrent dimensions of the SI literature (agents, purposes, drivers and processes) and cross-fertilising them with the bottom-up, people-driven character of GI, and the concepts of agency, capabilities, delibera…
Cambios políticos y Psicología en la Argentina
2006
This paper has the purpose of characterizing the narrations in the design of Psychology considering his theoretical and academicals debates; his applied institutions, the indications of systematic professional formation and the periodical publcations. Such narrations will be analized according to the political and economic changes that took place in Argentine, since 1900 to 1957, when the formation in psychology gets his universitary inscription in Buenos Aires University. The peculiar instability of the political, social and economic situation imposes constant reorientations to the different propositions connected to the political, social and economic behavior of the actor-subject. This co…
1936. Frustrated Hopes: The Great Depression, the Second Republic and the Civil War
2020
The Great Depression was accompanied by the collapse of the monarchical regime and the establishment of a modern democracy with the Second Republic in April 1931. The new regime had to balance the importance of gaining domestic and international respectability (using orthodox fiscal and monetary policy) with efforts to shift towards a moderate protectionist policy, and enact land, labour and educational reforms. There were fierce confrontations from 1934 on, eventually culminating in a civil war in 1936. The consequences included a long-lasting impact on economic growth; autarky and interventionist policies; a huge loss of human capital; poverty and rising inequality; and a 40-year-long dic…
The Credit Cooperative System in Spain
2016
Like other European countries, Spain has a long tradition of cooperative banks. Although some credit unions existed previously, essentially they date from the early twentieth century, originating as institutions founded by medium and small-sized farmers to improve their access to banking services. However, they occupied a marginal position in the financial system until the legislative reforms of the 1970s. During the two last decades of the twentieth century, Spanish cooperative banks suffered a deep crisis, two changes in their organizational model and the shock of transformation and innovation in the financial system. Currently, the sector is made up of 65 small institutions with a relati…
The democratization process: An empirical appraisal of the role of political protest
2020
Abstract This paper analyses the role of peaceful and violent protest in the democratization process. We interpret the democratization process as a sequence of phases so as to allow citizens' and elites' preferences for democracy to vary according to the particular phase that a country is experiencing. By doing so we jointly model the probability of protest and of moving through different phases of democracy taking into account time-constant and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. In particular, we develop a multivariate finite mixture model that introduces a latent variable to capture unobservable factors. On a sample of 171 countries from 1971 to 2010, we provide evidence that protest …
Institutions and Rural Stagnation in Eastern Indonesia
2018
This article addresses why agricultural productivity is still very low in peripheral parts of eastern Indonesia. The paper identifies rules and norms underpinning traditionalism. It further addresses how increased land-use efficiency can be supported while maintaining communal land ownership. Information collected from in-depth interviews was analysed based on new institutional economics (NIE) theory. I argue that the government, adat leaders, the Catholic Church, leading businesses, and internationally funded NGOs are organisations contributing to the status quo. Policy recommendations include awareness among international donors of what NGOs really do. Civil society organisations could co…