Pax Syriana El-Husseini, Rola; Crocker, Ryan
12/2012
eBook
Pax Syriana provides readers with a broad picture of what has changed, and what has failed to change, in the Lebanese political system after the end of the civil war.
In Europe within Reach Gerrit Verhoeven traces some sweeping evolutions in the early modern travel behaviour of Dutch and Flemish elites (1585-1750), as the classical Grand Tour to Italy was slowly ...but surely overshadowed by other modes of travelling.
The literature frequently recommends purposive sampling of elites based on the assumptions that random sampling negatively affects the response rate and that it induces bias. I test these assumptions ...drawing on metadata from 282 samples of political, economic, and social elites, and on microdata from 2,658 elites. First I use permutations to calculate confidence intervals for the expected response rate following each sampling method. Second, I estimate the effect of random sampling on the final response rate using a range of regression models. Finally, I compare the distributions of the estimators for the average age, the share of male elites, and elites’ ideology by simulating repeated random and purposive samples. Results indicate that both random and purposive sampling of elites generate sufficiently large samples, as well as consistent and unbiased estimators of population parameters. Contradicting methodological guidelines in the field, the conclusion is that random sampling of elites is efficient.
How social and political power was wielded in order to build Moundville This work is a state-of-the-art, data-rich study of excavations undertaken at the Moundville site in west central Alabama, one ...of the largest and most complex of the mound sites of pre-contact North America. Despite the site's importance and sustained attention by researchers, until now it has lacked a comprehensive analysis of its modern excavations. Richly documented by maps, artifact photo-graphs, profiles of strata, and inventories of materials found, the present work explores one expression of social complexity; the significance of Moundville’s monumental architecture, including its earthen mounds; the pole-frame architecture that once occupied the summits of these mounds; and the associated middens that reveal the culture of Moundville’s elites.   This book supplies a survey of important materials recovered in more than a decade of recent excavations of seven mounds and related areas under the author’s direction, as part of a long-term archaeological project consisting of new field work at the Mississippian political and ceremonial center of Moundville.   Visitors to Moundville are immediately impressed with its monumentality. The expansiveness and grandness of that landscape are, of course, deliberate features that have a story to tell and this archaeological project reveals Moundville’s monumentality and its significance to the people whose capital town it was.   Exactly how the social and political power symbolized by mound building was distributed is a question central to this work. It seems critical to ask to what extent this monumental landscape was the product of a chief’s ability to recruit and direct the labor of large groups of political subordinates, most of whom were presumably non-kin. At the onset of the present project, speculations regarding the paired orders of mounds and the timing of the formal structuring of space at Moundville were already suggested but were in need of further testing, confirmation, and refinement. The work reported in this volume is largely devoted to filling in such evidence and refining those initial insights. An excellent chapter by H. Edwin Jackson and Susan L. Scott, "Zooarchaeology of Mounds Q, G, E, F, and R," compliments this research.   A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Bringing rare interviews and meticulous research to the cloaked world of Mexican politics in the mid-twentieth century, Palace Politics provides a captivating look at the authoritarian Mexican ...state—one of the longest-lived regimes of its kind in recent history—as well as the origins of political instability itself, with revelations that can be applied to a variety of contemporary political situations around the globe. Culling a trove of remarkable firsthand accounts from former Mexican presidents, finance ministers, interior ministers, and other high officials from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jonathan Schlefer describes a world in which elite politics planted the seeds of a mammoth socioeconomic crisis. Palace Politics outlines the process by which political infighting among small rival factions of high officials drove Mexico to precarious situations at all levels of government. Schlefer also demonstrates how, earlier on, elite cooperation among these factions had helped sustain one of the most stable growth economies in Latin America, until all-or-nothing struggles began to tear the Mexican ruling party apart in the 1970s. A vivid, seamlessly narrated history, Palace Politics is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand not only the nation next door but also the workings of elite politics in general.
Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book ...advances a novel answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the ...blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies. With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.
The presidency of Donald Trump – often framed as a result of a populist revolt against the elites of Washington and Wall Street – and his apparent break with the postwar liberal internationalist ...foreign‐policy elite consensus, has raised fundamental questions about the future of elite power in the USA and the implications for its global role. As established by previous research, America's foreign‐policy elite has in the past decades been closely connected to transnationally oriented corporate elite networks, the theme of this special issue. In this article, we address to what extent the Trump presidency represents a real rupture with these extant power structures in the American political system and its foreign‐policy establishment. We present the first systematic mapping and social network analysis of Trump, his cabinet and his White House advisers, which, based on a novel biographical data set, compares earlier findings on the elite networks of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. While finding some strong continuities, the Trumpian foreign‐policy elite is shown to display some very distinctive characteristics, particularly with respect to a lack of previous political affiliations, ties with a different kind of corporate elite, and a disconnect with the policy‐planning networks that have been so central to the previous administrations.
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