Activist State Research Articles

Regulatory offsetting in advanced democracies

AbstractThe growth of rules in modern democracies burdens citizens, businesses, and administrative bodies. To address this, many governments have implemented so‐called “regulatory offsetting schemes,” requiring the removal of existing rules and regulations for each new one introduced. However, systematic knowledge on which countries have adopted these schemes and their specific designs remains lacking. Our study maps regulatory offsetting initiatives across OECD states and offers a first theoretical framework for understanding government adoption. While political and ideational factors influence the adoption of offsetting schemes, they do not explain their specific design. Offsetting schemes thus reflect the political tensions between advocates for an activist state and supporters of a more restrained government, with design being of secondary importance. These findings enhance our understanding of how governments and public administrations manage rule growth.

Firm-Centered Approaches to Overcoming Semi-Peripheral Constraints

AbstractScholars of economic development in the Global South and of industrial policy in the Global North are increasingly advocating top-down policies by a strong, activist state to promote growth and innovation. Instead, we argue there is much to learn from firm-centered approaches about how the main economic decision-makers, namely, firms, engage with the constraints and opportunities that they face. This is particularly important in the semi-periphery, where public authorities do not always have the capacity, resources, and political support required to play the activist developmental role suggested in the literature. This introduction to the special issue develops the concept of the semi-periphery, showing that it can foster knowledge exchange across the North–South divide and promote innovation in analyses of the dynamics of economic development. It also presents the multilevel perspective through which the special issue accounts for cases where firms were able to overcome semi-peripheral constraints. We argue that carving out economic opportunities in the semi-periphery often requires the activation of the initiative of local firms, which form alliances with other actors from the private, public, and non-profit sectors. Rather than producing economic innovation directly, macro-institutions facilitate those efforts by providing a governance architecture that makes it easier for firms to form alliances and innovate.

Return of activist state in a former transition star: the curious case of Hungary

ABSTRACT European governments have become more active in economic affairs since the great financial crisis of 2008; the Covid-19 epidemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine have triggered a variety of government interventions. What is less obvious is the increased non-customary state activism in the form of ‘patriotic economic policy’ in EU periphery, particularly in Hungary, in and out of crisis times. The successive Hungarian governments under PMV. Orbán have systematically eroded checks and balances in order to enlarge their room of manoeuvre while practicing a self-styled illiberal, pro-sovereignty policy. The paper revisits the earlier development phases of the Hungarian transformation, trying to identify antecedents to the later Hungarian backsliding in market competition and liberal democratic order. Aspects of state capacity, size and composition of the state sector, and key policy directions are investigated in order to make sense of the differing transformation paths in Europe’s eastern periphery with a focus on Hungary, a onetime space setter in the transition process. Populism seems to be a misnomer for Orbanism which might be better understood as “cronyism with a cause”: government budgetary measures are self-serving but they also attempt at rebuilding the state. The paper concludes with an overview of possibly outcomes.

Reinventing the African State: Issues and Challenges for Building a Developmental State

contentious issue of the state–market interactions in Africa’s development agenda and processes, particularly since the 1960s independence era. At the heart of this debate has been the contestation over the agency for development. The global wave of democratisation that swept through most parts of the developing world in the late 1980s and early 1990s revived this debate on the linkage between democracy, sustainable development, and state capacity in Africa (Leftwich 1996). The twenty-first century is witnessing a resurgence of confidence in a new type of activist state: democratic and developmental in character and content. The fundamental concern of this study is whether the exigencies of globalisation can be reconciled with democratisation andsustainable development. This provokes further questions such as: how can fragile democratic regimes improve their prospects for consolidation at a moment when the distributive impact of concurrent programmes of economic liberalisation and adjustment are highly contestable? Are the economic reforms prescribed by Bretton Woods Institutions (BWI) and bilateral donors compatible with democratisation and developmental processes? How can the state’s systematic loss of capacity to manage the economy be reconciled with demands for a more democratic polity? Finally, this paper examines the strategies forbuilding the capacity of the African state as agent of development and partnership in the democratisation process.

The Brazilian Revolution of 1930: The Legacy of Getúlio Vargas Revisited

The Brazilian Revolution of 1930: The Legacy of Getúlio Vargas Revisited

The Faces of Securities Regulation and State Authority: A Comparison Between the United States and China

This article examines how the organizational structures and purposes of securities regulators affect securities law and its enforcement. Securities regulators in different jurisdictions can have either hierarchical or horizontal organizational structures, and their mission can be either policy‐implementing or dispute‐resolving. The securities regulators in China and the United States are two typical examples. The two countries can be roughly categorized as activist and reactive states, respectively. This article shows that the organizations of regulators and the disposition of governments affect the ends of securities regulation and provides some evidence that they also affect the means, which would explain the express differences in securities enforcement as well as those applied in practice. While a reactive state mainly seeks to protect investors and facilitate capital formation, an activist state tends to consider other state goals, including industrial policies and redistribution of wealth. Additionally, hierarchically organized securities regulators tend to focus more on technical rules and routines, whereas horizontally organized regulators employ more flexible standards and are better equipped to deliver substantive justice. This article contributes to the literature of law and finance and cautions against the “capital‐market‐centrist” view.

The Great Revenue Divergence

AbstractThis article describes and explains a previously overlooked empirical pattern in state revenue collection. As late as 1913, central governments in the West collected similar levels of per capita revenue as the rest of the world, despite ruling richer societies and experiencing a long history of fiscal innovation. Western revenue levels permanently diverged only in the following half-century. We identify the twentieth-century great revenue divergence by constructing a new panel data set of central government revenue with broad spatial and temporal coverage. To explain the pattern, we argue that sustainably high levels of revenue extraction require societal demand for an activist state, and a supply of effective bureaucratic institutions. Neither factor in isolation is sufficient. We formalize this insight in a game-theoretic model. The government can choose among low-effort, legibility-intensive, and crony-favoring strategies for raising revenues. Empirically, our theory accounts for low revenue intake in periods of low demand (the nineteenth-century West) or low bureaucratic capacity (twentieth-century former colonies), and for eventual revenue spikes in the West.

Making Medical Subjects: Regeneration, Experimentation, and Women in the Guatemalan Spring

AbstractIn the 1940s, US and Guatemalan doctors working with the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB) intentionally exposed at least 1,308 Guatemalan sex workers, prisoners, hospital patients, and soldiers to three sexually transmitted infections (STIs)—syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. The doctors aimed to study the transmission of disease and the effects of penicillin and other chemical solutions in preventing the spread of STIs. This article examines how US and Guatemalan doctors weaponized a bureaucratic registration system to study STIs at what they deemed their main vector—sex workers. The experiments served the purposes of the Guatemalan Revolution (1944–54), a democratizing moment when doctors and political leaders aimed to spur national regeneration. This essay argues that Guatemala's activist state was a critical enabling factor granting US researchers access to Guatemalans' genitals and blood for experimentation.

Multifaceted Islam: Malaysia

This paper analyzes the Islam’s impact on the Malaysian politics. Islam as an instrument of Malaysia’s foreign policy has been used by the political elite of the state for decades. Observers note the Islamization of the country’s foreign policy, especially during the premiership of Najib Razak (2008– 2018). However, the trend towards Islamization can be traced back to the moment Malaysia gained independence from Great Britain in 1957 and especially during the premiership of Mahathir Mohamad (1981–2003). The formation of such a foreign policy of Malaysia took place against the background of the Islamization of the political and social environment within the country, which, in turn, was the result of an internal political struggle. Thus, the projection of Malaysia’s identity into the outside world and the foreign policy corresponding to this identity was often motivated by the need to retain or attract the support of the malay-muslim majority in the domestic political arena. Since many of the issues raised in the article relate to identity both at the national and global level, a constructivist paradigm is used to conceptualize Malaysia’s foreign policy with a special emphasis on the identity of states. Particularly important in this process is the formation of domestic and foreign policy discourse. Malaysia’s Islamic identity is viewed externally in three dimensions: the Sunni state, the activist state in the Islamic world and the standard of moderate Islam. Consideration of these dimensions reveals quite obvious contradictions between them, as well as between rhetoric and real politics.

An Economic History of Regional Industrialization edited by Bas van Leeuwen, Robin C. M. Philips, and Erik Buyer

<i>An Economic History of Regional Industrialization</i> edited by Bas van Leeuwen, Robin C. M. Philips, and Erik Buyer

The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell

Reviewed by: The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell Charles J. Holden The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism. By Gregg Cantrell. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 555. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-300-10097-6.) Gregg Cantrell’s sweeping account makes a strong case for the Texas Populist Party having played a critical role in the foundation of modern American liberalism. Responding to the juggernaut of industrialization, Texas Populists were among the first to recognize the painful truth that modern capitalism had “rendered the classical liberal model obsolete” (p. 13). These “new forms of concentrated power” by the late 1800s posed a grave threat to individual liberty (p. 13). Whereas organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the Farmers’ Alliance had formed to counter the reactionary forces of industrial capitalism, it was the genius of the Populists to carry the challenge into the political system. By doing so, they brought political and economic democracy together as part of the same fight. The turn to politics was both principled and pragmatic: Populists called for an activist government as the “only institution that the ‘people’ could control” and as the remaining “countervailing power” that could defend citizens’ liberties against unchecked corporate greed (pp. 147, 15). Cantrell’s impressive research enables him to capture important distinctions among Texas Populist leaders as well as regional differences within the state. The chapters also detail the rough-and-tumble of Texas politics, culminating in the election of 1896, when a combination of fraud, voter intimidation, and fusion managed to blunt Populist momentum. It is hard to imagine another book offering the kind of on-the-ground look at this important political party that Cantrell does. The short lifespan of the Populist Party, Cantrell argues, has left its ideological legacy underappreciated in the scholarship on modern American liberalism. To cite just one critical example, Cantrell contends it was the Populists who “normalized anti-laissez-faire and made it a legitimate position for debate” in American politics (p. 410). The Texas Populists, astute “policy wonks” that they were, pointed to successful government agencies such as the Post Office Department that served citizens’ interests efficiently and fairly while remaining beyond the invisible hand of laissez-faire capitalism (p. 124). [End Page 735] The normalization of anti-laissez-faire politics and the call for an activist state in the name of democracy bore fruit nationally in the Progressive era and were given principles among many in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust. While careful not to draw a simple line between the Populist Party and the New Deal, Cantrell notes the personal connections from Texas. A young Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, was a passionate New Dealer, while his grandfather, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., was an early member of the Populist Party. In addition, while the reforming drive of the Texas Populists fell short when it came to racial and gender equity, here, too, their legacy survived, Cantrell suggests, since at its core the party “call[ed] into question the very foundations of the social and political order” (p. 259). Women and African American men were active within the party in the 1890s, and the Populists’ central principle of using the government as a “countervailing power” against oppression was at the heart of modern American liberalism through the 1900s (p. 15). Contemporary politics compels Cantrell to delineate his subjects from current discussions of “small-p populism” as a political style (p. 19). The ideological legacy of the Texas Populists is clearly visible in New Deal achievements such as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Social Security Act of 1935. That these laws countered “the captains of big business who could run roughshod over workers and consumers and [who] through their own power [could] corruptly manipulate the government to their own benefit” helps Cantrell draw a clear distinction between the party of the 1890s and the cynical populism of Donald J. Trump and his revanchist base (p. 13). Charles J. Holden St. Mary’s College of Maryland Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

<i>Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism</i>. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

Post–World War II Tejano Farm Labor: A Remembrance

Post–World War II Tejano Farm Labor:A Remembrance Arnoldo De León (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution A map of South Texas showing notable locations for this article. [End Page 136] Recent historical monographs about post–World War II South Texas posit that due to Cold War-era modernization and industrialization, large and mechanized corporate entities able to buy the needed farm machinery and devices, pay irrigation costs, and invest in insect eradication products displaced small independent farmers who could not afford the investments required for healthy profits.1 Newer research detects in this era the rise of a powerful and politically influential conglomerate of agribusiness companies with a free hand to exploit a mass of transient Mexican farm workers.2 The corporate farming system that took root in the trans-Nueces River area, some of these latest tomes find, was as brutal in its oppression as other systems adopted by capitalist powers in the exploitation of their territorial dependents. Indeed, historian Tim Bowman likens South Texas [End Page 137] corporate bosses to European oppressors who established colonial societies in underdeveloped countries. He argues that this colonialism, first implanted in the Lower Rio Grande Valley by Anglo growers in the early twentieth century, remains in a modified form. Texas Mexicans faced a cold-hearted, merciless, and detached syndicate of growers in the 1950s and after who manipulated the sizable pool of braceros and mojados (the former legal workers from Mexico temporarily in the United States under contract and the latter in the country illegally, derisively called "wetbacks") to depress farm wages. John Weber, another scholar of Mexican American labor, writes that "South Texas growers devised a thoroughly modern set of practices that relied on forced mobility, enforced immobility, and an activist state not present in earlier times."3 Corporate farming, the literature indicates, consisted of a structured world undergirded by an army of mobile families. Migrant farm workers after World War II suffered grim poverty and grappled with precarious road travel. They agonized first over what means of transportation (many relied on troqueros, or truckers) would carry them through the harvest season. Then they faced uncertainties about work availability at the next destination. Distress beset male heads of families who concerned themselves with properly provisioning their wives and children and obtaining safe shelter for them; some of the labor camps along the migrant route offered barely livable conditions. There appeared no refuge for migrants upon returning to their home region. Most came back to struggle through the winter in substandard quarters until the seasonal cycle resumed. Children enrolled at run down and unkempt "Mexican schools" until the spring.4 Weber writes: The condition of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in South Texas changed little from the beginning of the farm boom in the 1910s until the post-Bracero era. From the beginning of large-scale migration from Mexico during the Revolution, Mexican and Mexican Americans were viewed by potential employers as a never-ending supply of labor power, more beasts of burden than citizens. This system was merely amplified over the next several decades, even as massive economic and political changes occurred in both nations.5 My remembrances of growing up on small farms in South Texas run counter to the conventional characterization given of labor structures in the history books. Certainly, corporate farming gained power and influence over labor in Texas after World War II, but to not to the extent of [End Page 138] being the sole system of agricultural order in the state. I contend as much based on memories of my youth in Nueces County,6 first at the Chap-man Ranch (1945–56) and then at the Jesse T. Parr farm in Robstown (1956–63), where an alternate labor structure prevailed. The Parr farm in particular stands out as a salient exception to what the scholarship says about the world of organized cropping after World War II, and so I draw attention to it as a viable agricultural model that persisted concomitantly with and complementary to commercial farming in that era. Small farming operations, commonly found in Nueces County and neighboring counties, consisted of a white property owner...

Cashing in on the sky: financialization and urban air rights in the Taipei Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on urban air rights, property rights for the ownership, development and trading of the airspace above land parcels. A three-fold contribution is made to the study of urban financialization. First, urban air rights are explicated as a new empirical terrain for research into urban financialization. Second, air rights are conceptualized as ‘market devices’ that enable market-making processes and are deployed by an activist state to facilitate regulatory and socio-technical conditions for urban financialization. Third, case studies of urban Taipei show air rights take subtly different forms across financialized processes of infrastructure provision and urban renewal.

Scriptural Impressionism: The Use of the Bible in Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology, volume 1

This paper focuses on urban air rights, property rights for the ownership, development and trading of the airspace above land parcels. A three-fold contribution is made to the study of urban financialization. First, urban air rights are explicated as a new empirical terrain for research into urban financialization. Second, air rights are conceptualized as ‘market devices’ that enable market-making processes and are deployed by an activist state to facilitate regulatory and socio-technical conditions for urban financialization. Third, case studies of urban Taipei show air rights take subtly different forms across financialized processes of infrastructure provision and urban renewal.

Governance capacity, state policy and the rise of the Chongqing notebook computer cluster

ABSTRACTThe ability of a local development-oriented state to make their localities nodes in global production networks (GPNs) depends on the policy instruments available to it and the capacity of various actors to exploit this policy envelope fully and effectively. The post-2008 relocation and expansion in Chongqing of a coastal Chinese notebook computer manufacturing cluster is a compelling example of an activist state relocating and expanding parts of a GPN, and exporting globally from an inland location. Functional roles and governance capacity are examined through a study of the ways in which the Chongqing Municipal Government drew on government–industry relations, economic infrastructure, and social overhead capital provision, labour market organization and preferential policies, including measures to support chain logistics in and after industrial transfer, to couple its ambitions of lead companies, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and local enterprises with its own strategic goals.

Fueling the boom or smothering it? Examining oil and gas policy differences across the states

Public concern about the health and environmental risks from oil and gas operations has grown in recent years. However, scholarly attention is just beginning to unpack the differences in how states are regulating oil and gas development. For some states, a laissez faire approach is preferable because of the substantial economic benefits that accompany natural resource development. Others prefer a more activist state government that is more willing to use its oversight and regulatory powers to balance environmental protection with oil and gas development. Using data drawn from a variety of political, economic, regulatory, and energy sources, we find that litigation, state level liberalism, and the number of wells are most helpful in accounting for why some states have stricter regulatory standards as compared to others.

“The Necessary Result of Piety”: Slavery and Religious Establishments in South Carolina Presbyterianism, 1800–1840

Historians have argued that disestablishment liberated American religion and allowed for the proliferation of religious practice and religious freedom, especially individualistic Evangelicalism in the South. This proposition reduced nearly all of southern Protestantism to Revivalist Evangelicalism, and failed to account for the powerful presence of coercive Protestant religiosity in older southern states such as South Carolina. While they shared certain Evangelical particulars with frontier populations, Protestants in South Carolina, especially Presbyterians, rejected individualized religion in favor of religiosity that favored and nurtured activist state protection of both antidemocratic political norms and chattel slavery. This essay argues that ostensibly disestablished Presbyterianism in South Carolina helped intellectually erect and socially perpetuate coercive religious and state power.

Michaił Speranskij i jego rzekome „zesłanie” na Syberię w latach 1818–1821

Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky (1772–1839) was a prominent Russian activist state. In March 1812, he fell from favor with the Emperor Alexander I. He was expelled from St. Petersburg and ordered to reside first in Nizhny Novgorod, and then in Perm (the estate of her daughter, Wielikopole), in the province of Novgorod (the European part of the Russian Empire). In 1816, Alexander I appointed him the governor of Penza, and in 1819, governor-general of Siberia. He ordered him to review the three-province: Tobolski, Tomsk and Irkutsk. M. Speransky made a successful fight against corruption. He started the development of these provinces. In 1821, he was appointed by Alexander I a member of the Council of State, and in 1839, he received the title of count from Nicholas I.

The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century by Brian Balogh

Reviewed by: The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century by Brian Balogh Bell Julian Clement THE ASSOCIATIONAL STATE: American Governance in the Twentieth Century. By Brian Balogh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2015. This volume assembles half a dozen essays published over the past generation by historian Brian Balogh limning the evolution of the field of American Political Development. Political historians have, in Balogh's nomenclature, moved away from an older "Progressive synthesis," which cast American politics as a function of "activist government" versus "limited government" antagonisms, toward a new "associational" synthesis, in which scholarly attention focuses on exploration of the state itself as a potent and interested actor in policy matters. Attempts to understand the development of the American state, asserts Balogh, must reckon with the fact that American abhorrence of powerful central government is matched by American demand for energetic public policymaking. The key task confronting students, thus, is to explore the partnerships—among the federal government, market actors, organized interest groups, and the professions—that make possible a response to this apparently self-contradictory desire for activist, inconspicuous, governance. Balogh argues that the associational state pattern, far from being new, is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. The American state consistently has expanded through "a series of compromises brokered between central authority and local administration . . . a host of private and voluntary partners that blur the line between public and private spheres." (40) Twentieth-century associational state development was simply a continuation, one that "accelerated a long-standing American tradition forged over the course of the nineteenth century." (32) Associational state patterns are not only venerable; they are persistent. Balogh challenges the notion that the associational state met its demise with the Supreme Court's 1935 rejection of the National Recovery Administration. Despite that failure, "the New Deal state dramatically expanded its reach into the political economy . . . through a mechanism that blended state, local, and private associations." (155) Similarly, Balogh disputes the view that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society destroyed pluralism, the central mechanism of the associational state, by drowning the concept of shared national interest in seas of individual rights. Although the Great Society did indeed "democratize" politics, "new entrants into the policy sweepstakes" nevertheless "had to play by pluralist rules." (198) Several of these essays explore particular processes of associational state expansion. One avenue of growth has been provided by state actors' partnerships with market forces, as Balogh shows with his reinterpretation of Gifford Pinchot's turn-of-the-century successes at the U.S. Forest Service. In place of the standard telling, that Pinchot "sought to interpose administrative discretion in place of the market" (65) Balogh argues that Pinchot succeeded because he was able to merge state goals and market means, "framing his programs in the rhetoric of the market." (65) Growth of the central state has proceeded through elaboration of the relationship between the state and organized interest groups. As illustrated by Herbert Hoover's 1928 presidential campaign's special reliance on women's organizations, state actors' partnerships [End Page 226] with interest groups "laid the groundwork for crafting public policies that expanded the scope of government to serve select (and powerful) constituencies while avoiding the always dangerous charge in America of contributing to the growth of big government." (68) The American central state also expanded via "the coevolution of federal institutions and the experts who eventually staffed them." (91) World war and Cold War "expanded administrative capacity and pushed professionals into these new positions on a national scale." (123) The federal government which emerged "not only responded to well-organized interest groups, it now had the capacity to create them . . . and to define the research agendas of a host of professional disciplines." (91) Balogh writes with an agenda. He would like to see scholarship's associational state framework displace the stale "activist state versus limited government" paradigm that still structures American public discourse and, in his view, is responsible for much of our present policy paralysis. The attention of citizens should be as focused, as is that of scholars, on "how groups organize, how they gain access to the resources necessary to organize." (138) "The battle over how these intermediary institutions...