This article offers an overview of levels of party membership in European democracies at the end of the first decade of the twenty‐first century and looks also at changes in these levels over time, ...comparing party membership today with figures from both 1980 and the late 1990s. While relying primarily on the direct and individual membership figures as reported by the parties themselves, the fit of the data with survey data is explored and it is concluded that the two perform well in terms of convergent validity. The differences between large and small democracies are examined, as well as old and new democracies, and it is found that levels of party membership are related to both the size and age of the democratic polity in question. Finally, the implications of the patterns observed in the membership data are discussed, and it is suggested that membership has now reached such a low ebb that it may no longer constitute a relevant indicator of party organisational capacity.
The objective of this contribution is to account for the different political reform trajectories resulting from two of the most recent governance challenges faced by the European Union (EU), the ...so-called euro and refugee crises. While the euro crisis triggered various EU-level reforms, the refugee crisis has produced calls for policy and institutional reforms, most of which have - to date - not been adopted or implemented. We employ a liberal intergovernmentalist framework and show that differences in member states' preferences in the two crises ensue from different exposures to negative externalities. Moreover, we attribute differences in EU member states' willingness to engage in political reforms to variation in preference constellations among member states, producing different situation structures and bargaining dynamics. While the EU's response to the euro crisis reflects a situation structure, which highlights both redistributive conflict and a demand for joint action, the response to the refugee crisis resembles a 'Rambo' game situation: the states least affected by migratory pressure were satisfied with the institutional status quo, and were thus able to leave the more affected states aggrieved.
L’Université des Arts de l’Équateur est un projet éducatif créé en 2013 dans le cadre d’une réforme du système d’enseignement supérieur, qui s’inscrivait elle-même dans une politique gouvernementale ...visant à transformer les structures de développement du pays. Cet article passe en revue le processus de gestation de cette institution éducative publique et analyse son impact à travers différentes dimensions : i) la relation de l’université avec le territoire qu’elle habite, ii) son modèle éducatif original dans le domaine des arts et sa signification dans le système d’enseignement supérieur équatorien, iii) le dialogue entre les productions créatives de l’université et le champ artistique local. À partir d’une approche multidisciplinaire et de références théoriques critiques hétérodoxes, cet article mobilise des connaissances produites pour établir un compte rendu de l’histoire courte mais significative de ce projet universitaire innovant.
Abstract
Deciphering the non-trivial interactions and mechanisms driving the evolution of time-varying complex networks (TVCNs) plays a crucial role in designing optimal control strategies for such ...networks or enhancing their causal predictive capabilities. In this paper, we advance the science of TVCNs by providing a mathematical framework through which we can gauge how local changes within a complex weighted network affect its global properties. More precisely, we focus on unraveling unknown geometric properties of a network and determine its implications on detecting phase transitions within the dynamics of a TVCN. In this vein, we aim at elaborating a novel and unified approach that can be used to depict the relationship between local interactions in a complex network and its global kinetics. We propose a geometric-inspired framework to characterize the network’s state and detect a phase transition between different states, to infer the TVCN’s dynamics. A phase of a TVCN is determined by its Forman–Ricci curvature property. Numerical experiments show the usefulness of the proposed curvature formalism to detect the transition between phases within artificially generated networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in identifying the phase transition phenomena governing the training and learning processes of artificial neural networks. Moreover, we exploit this approach to investigate the phase transition phenomena in cellular re-programming by interpreting the dynamics of Hi-C matrices as TVCNs and observing singularity trends in the curvature network entropy. Finally, we demonstrate that this curvature formalism can detect a political change. Specifically, our framework can be applied to the US Senate data to detect a political change in the United States of America after the 1994 election, as discussed by political scientists.
In this article, we examine the programmatic reactions to the rise of populist parties. It has been argued that populism is not necessarily the prerogative of populist parties; it has been adopted by ...mainstream parties as well. The article investigates whether populism is contagious. On the basis of the results of a content analysis of election manifestos of parties in five Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom), we conclude that the programmes of mainstream parties have not become more populist in recent years. We find no evidence that mainstream parties change their programmes when confronted with electoral losses or successful populist challengers. Yet, we do find that populist parties change their own programmes when they have been successful: Their initial success makes them tone down their populism.
Este artículo examina la encrucijada actual del mercosur y las con-secuencias que en ésta tuvieron los cambios políticos de los últimos años en Brasil, por lo que toca a un cambio de paradigma ...integracionista mediante la adopción de perfiles de corte más "liberal-comercialista". Las preguntas de investigación que se plantean en el artículo son dos. ¿Hasta qué punto y en qué sentido los derroteros más recientes del bloque mercosur implican un cambio sustantivo de su "modelo" integracionista? ¿Cuánto ha afectado en esa deriva del bloque regional el cambio político efectivizado a partir de 2016 en Brasil? Para tales efectos, se sigue en el artículo la siguiente ruta de análisis: 1)una inscripción del texto propuesto en las discusiones académicas más recien-tes sobre ambos temas; 2) un examen necesariamente sumario y provisorio acerca del giro producido en la política exterior de Brasil en los últimos años; 3) una evaluación sobre las consecuencias de esos cambios en Brasil respecto a la evolución del proceso mercosur en el corto y mediano plazos.
Rafael Rojas, Velia Cecilia Bobes y Armando Chaguaceda, coords. El cambio constitucional en Cuba. Actores, Instituciones y Leyes de un proceso político. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ...2017. 256 pp.
We examine the average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. For each country affected by a large disaster, we ...compute the counterfactual by constructing synthetic controls. We find that only extremely large disasters have a negative effect on output in both the short and the long runs. However, we also show that this results from two events where radical political revolutions followed the disasters. Once we control for these political changes, even extremely large disasters do not display any significant effect on economic growth.
Just like its recent predecessors, blockchain - also known as the distributed ledger technology - is considered to have the potential to cause major economic, political and social transformations in ...the Global South. The visible effects of this technology are already being noted there. We present early evidence linking the use of blockchain in overcoming some economic, social and political challenges facing the Global South. The article highlights the key applications and uses of blockchain in developing countries. It demonstrates how blockchain can help promote transparency, build trust and reputation, and enhance efficiency in transactions. The article looks at opportunities and key triggers for blockchain diffusion in these countries. It also delves into challenges and obstacles that developing economies are likely to encounter in the use of blockchain.
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