De Facto Power Research Articles

Recent Trends in Conrad Studies

Recent Trends in Conrad Studies Alexia Hannis (bio) Katherine Isobel Baxter and Richard J. Hand, eds. Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 165 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6490-1 Michael John DiSanto. Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. 253 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7735-3510-7 Katherine Isobel Baxter. Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 163 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7456-6902-9 It would seem that over the past two decades or so the call for new approaches to English literature has become increasingly pronounced, with the emergence in 1995 of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (as an alternative to the mla), and works such as After Theory by Terry Eagleton (2003) and Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (2005). In this context, when it comes to Conrad studies we are left with questions about what lies beyond, [End Page 189] say, the well-traversed terrain of dialogism, the specialized language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, or the now-familiar tensions between critiques of and complicity with imperialism in Conrad’s fiction. Three recent contributions to Conrad studies explicitly aim to open new lines of thought for Conrad readers, with mixed results. Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts, edited by two recently established academics, brings together work by well-known and emergent Conradians. As its title suggests, the volume is preoccupied with examining the relatively unexplored realm of performance in Conrad’s writings. Only in the last decade has a pronounced interest in this area emerged, signaled in particular by Richard Hand’s important book, The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions (Palgrave, 2005). The current collection —because it is so wide-ranging, drawing from elements of performance from the theatre and theatricality to cinematography—is particularly valuable as it provides some groundwork for scholars who are interested in pursuing what the editors describe in their introduction as “one of the most interesting and nascent areas of Conrad studies” (10). The volume opens with Linda Dryden’s “Performing Malaya,” an essay that explores anew the theme of imperialism in Conrad’s Malay fiction, by reframing the discussion with Clifford Geertz and James Clifford’s notions of culture and identity as performance. Drawing from A Personal Record, where Conrad uses theatrical imagery while reminiscing about his creative process in writing Almayer’s Folly and revisiting Conrad’s emphasis on fiction as a “visual performance” in the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ Dryden argues that Conrad’s concept “art as performance” is inseparable from the ethico-political underpinnings of his literary project. That is, if “the theatrical experience” allows for “all the cast [to be] equally present before us” (14), Conrad’s theatrical imagination is consistent with his aim “to challenge the romance and adventure genre and its simplistic, reductive assumption about Eastern peoples” (12). Impressively wide-ranging, the essay offers readings of Almayer’s Folly, “Karain,” Lord Jim, and The Rescue, following a trajectory in Conrad’s oeuvre as he explored enactments of “cultural programming” at the start of his career which developed into an exploration of the arrogance and catastrophic results of European self-fashioning on the imperialist stage. We encounter in Dryden’s essay the somewhat worn-out claims about the “multivocality” of Conrad’s fiction, and her reading of Lord Jim is not, at base, particularly new. That said, the conceptual framework Dryden brings to Conrad’s Malay fiction enables readers to consider anew Conrad’s attempt to negotiate between cultural difference and “common human experiences and passions” (27). [End Page 190] Dryden’s essay is followed by Susan Barras’s “‘Sly Civility?’: Mrs Almayer’s and Mrs Willems’s Performances of Colonial Resistance in Outcast of the Islands and Almayer’s Folly,” an essay that employs theoretical work by Erving Goffman and James C. Scott to shed light on how Mrs Almayer, Joanna Willems, and Aissa manage with varying degrees of success to exercise de facto power through performance. The backstage/front stage metaphor from Goffman’s theory and Scott’s application of this notion...

(Re)assessing Parliamentary Policy Impact: The Case of the Australian Senate

A recent article in this Journal suggested that assumptions about the legislative influence of the Australian Senate may overstate its de facto power. Stanley Bach indicated that compromise with the Senate was relatively rare, and pointed out that most successful Senate amendments were government amendments. This paper provides an alternative view. We suggest that legislative influence is more subtle than Bach acknowledged, and that it is necessary to dig deeper in the data to fully understand the Senate's role. We therefore supplement his analysis in two ways: (1) through tracking the ultimate outcome of government defeats in the Senate; and (2) through analysis of two case study bills. We find that in confrontations with government the Senate ‘wins’ the great majority of the time. This shapes government behaviour in the chamber, such that many government amendments actually respond to non-government concerns. The most important element of Senate influence is therefore ‘soft power’– exercised through negotiation – backed up only in extremis by the ‘hard power’ of government defeat. This holds important lessons for the study of legislative influence more broadly, as well as demonstrating the true power of the Australian Senate.

The arbitrariness of supermajority rules

There may be good general grounds for the adoption of supermajoritarian thresholds, but no such general arguments can justify the selection of a specific threshold. Although the benefits of supermajority rules, especially in the context of constitutional-amendment procedures, may outweigh the costs of their ex ante indeterminacy, the technically unjustifiable nature of specific thresholds means that those who are disadvantaged under such rules can be given no rational or reasonable explanation for their defeat other than the de facto power of coordination on a threshold. Political theory has a potential remedy in cases in which good reasons are not available, and in which bad reasons (such as the desire to ensure a veto for a powerful minority) might be brought to bear: randomization. If the benefits of supermajority rules are worth the costs of arbitrariness, we may wish to randomize the choice of threshold, though the move to do so may have its own negative consequences.

Military coups and the consequences of durable de facto power: the case of Pakistan

We analyze the role of the military as an independent interest group within the State, based on the two-player theoretical framework of Acemoglu and Robinson (Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006); we innovate by introducing the military as a third player, a specialist in violence. In particular, we study the conditions under which a democratic regime can prevent a transition to an authoritarian regime via a military coup, when a coup requires the support of both the military and the elite sections of the civilian population. We carry out an historical case study of Pakistan to motivate and illustrate our argument, and show that Pakistan’s three coups since independence are associated with parameter shifts in our model.

Elites, Education and Reforms

We analyze the interplay of political elites’ de facto power, democracy and education based on a theoretical framework inspired by the model in Acemoglu and Robinson (2006). We identify conditions under which the elite may overcompensate the loss of de jure power (as a result of political reform) by investing too much in de facto power so that the probability to have de facto power is higher under democracy than under non-democracy. The analysis also shows that depending on whether the income effect of education is strong or weak and whether citizens’ education has increasing or decreasing returns, the elite may or may not support education subsidy under democracy. We show that under certain assumptions the political elites may treat democracy and spending on citizens’ education as substitutes. We comment on the implications of the results for understanding why countries that started from comparable initial conditions may follow divergent development paths.

Exit and Power in General Equilibrium

We integrate individual power in groups into general equilibrium models. The relationship between group formation, resource allocation, and the power of specific individuals or particular sociological groups is investigated. We introduce, via an illustrative example, three appealing concepts of power and show that there is no monotonic relationship between these concepts. Then we examine existence of competitive equilibria with free exit and study whether maximal individual power is consistent with Pareto efficiency. As applications, we discuss when power spillovers occur and we identify human relation paradoxes: positive externalities increase, but none of the household members gains in equilibrium. We further identify implicit, determinate and de facto power.

Democratization and the US-South Korean Alliance

This article explains why, in the wake of South Korea's democratization, the US-Republic of Korea alliance has suffered a steady decline while avoiding an abrupt collapse. The author argues that democratization weakened this asymmetric alliance by increasing the political influence of nationalism in South Korea. New South Korean democratic elites, subscribing to nationalist ideals, demanded an autonomous, equal relationship with the United States regardless of the de facto power disparity between the two countries. These elites also deemphasized the security threat from North Korea—with which they perceived a shared national identity—and adopted an unconditional engagement policy with that nation. The United States, in turn, resented the apparently unrealistic policies of these elites and showed a decreased interest in the alliance. Democratization, however, did not cause an abrupt end to the alliance, for two reasons. First, North Korea's military strength preserved a significant strategic need in South Korea for allied support. Second, as the result of a measured transition process, old pro-alliance elites in South Korea retained enough political clout to proscribe a radical shift in foreign policy away from the alliance with the United States, while new elites had opportunities to reconcile their nationalist ideals with strategic realities.

De facto Veto? The Parliamentary Liberal Democrats

The parliamentary party of the Liberal Democrats is a symbol of the third party's growth in recent years. As a result of successful election targeting and an improvement in electoral reach, the party has seen its number of MPs at Westminster more than triple since 1992. It has been claimed that the increase in size of the parliamentary party has been accompanied by an increase in its power, so that the parliamentarians now have a de facto power of veto over policy despite the official policy‐making structures as laid out in the Liberal Democrat constitution. This article investigates the make‐up of the parliamentary Liberal Democrats and their contemporary influence over policy formation, and the parliamentary party's relationship with the conference and the party leader—and especially the events leading to the change of Liberal Democrat leader in 2006—to establish the veracity of this claim.

Persistence of Power, Elites, and Institutions

We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercise of de jure and de facto political power. A change in political institutions, for example a move from nondemocracy to democracy, alters the distribution of de jure political power, but the elite can intensify their investments in de facto political power, such as lobbying or the use of paramilitary forces, to partially or fully offset their loss of de jure power. In the baseline model, equilibrium changes in political institutions have no effect on the (stochastic) equilibrium distribution of economic institutions, leading to a particular form of persistence in equilibrium institutions, which we refer to as invariance. When the model is enriched to allow for limits on the exercise of de facto power by the elite in democracy or for costs of changing economic institutions, the equilibrium takes the form of a Markov regime-switching process with state dependence. Finally, when we allow for the possibility that changing political institutions is more difficult than altering economic institutions, the model leads to a pattern of captured democracy, whereby a democratic regime may survive, but choose economic institutions favoring the elite. The main ideas featuring in the model are illustrated using historical examples from the U.S. South, Latin America and Liberia.

Paradoxes of Power: The "Mamluks" and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804-1903

Paradoxes of Power: The Mamluks and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804-1903. By Sean Stilwell. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004. Pp. x, 281. $79.95. Sean Stilwell's Paradoxes of Power highlights an important facet of slavery that has long been ignored in the discourse. This book seeks to spark the debate on male royal slavery, the same way the works of Paul Lovejoy, Fred Cooper, Jean Boyd, and Beverly Mack have done for the study of women slaves used as concubines. This commentary will contribute greatly to the field, particularly because male royal slaves were as much an integral part of slavery as women slaves were. Apart from its oral sources, in interviews conducted by Stilwell and other scholars years ago, this discussion cites primary materials and secondary texts written by scholars in the field. Stilwell aims at clarifying two central points about royal slavery in Kano. First, he seeks to resolve the tensions between local and universal definitions of slavery. He argues that understanding the lives of royal slaves in Kano can add to our understanding of slavery in general but when contextualized, it best explains how it functioned within this particular socioeconomic and political environment. He submits that slavery, in the universal sense of the word, is a kinless institution that denies the enslaved access to free society, but once these universal concepts are contextualized, he shows how royal slaves in Kano worked within such confines to change the institution and thus gain power and kinship ties that at times included individuals as vital as the emir. Thus he argues that slavery, while having some universally predictable outward characteristics (capture, kinlessness, natal alienation, and outsider status) depends largely on time and place. In the case of the Kano royal slaves, Stilwell argues that patron-client relationships, patrimonial ideology, and the actions of the royal slaves themselves helped shape and change the institution of slavery and improved their access to a more privileged lifestyle. Second, Stilwell argues that while royal slaves were units of labor they still developed knowledge, tools, and trust that allowed them to move closest to those with political and economic power, like the emir and other royals. However, although they developed a system of knowledge that allowed them access to royals, it also alienated them from free society. Thus, while the knowledge helped to gain them access to the emir and a de facto power over other slaves, it also fundamentally defined them as slaves. Thus royal slaves were indeed slaves and they had unique opportunities opened to them; royal slavery was a continuation of other forms of slavery and should be seen as part of the institution. …

“To Lose One’s Soul”: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669

“To Lose One’s Soul”: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669

The Vitality of Local Political Institutions in the Middle Atlas, Morocco

In the Middle Atlas, Morocco, growing government bureaucracy has not undermined the informal village council and the legitimacy of local functionaries such as shaykh or muqaddam. Although official or elected bodies may formally have de facto power, in practice the village council still controls access to local resources. Instead of being manipulated by the regional government bureaucracy, the village council continues to represent the common people. However, newcomers and educated folk hold different attitudes toward local institutions and functionaries which weaken them, giving government officials opportunity to intervene. (Village council, district council, regional government, herders, farmers, Middle Atlas, Morocco) ********** This article discusses the changes that have taken place in the local political institutions of the Ait Abdi Berbers of the Middle Atlas as a result of encroaching government bureaucracy. It addresses the Ait Abdi of the rural district (commune rurale) Oued Ifrane, which has a population of 14,500. The population's main source of livelihood is sheep farming. Formerly, sheep farmers practiced transhumance between summer and winter pastures, but now they are generally settled in the winter pastures: mountain valleys with a climate permitting the development of agriculture and arboriculture. This sedentarization has resulted in the growth of rural centers in the Middle Atlas, among them Souk el Had, the main center of Oued Ifrane, with about 4,350 inhabitants. Several researchers have argued that growing government bureaucracy and extension of the powers of government courts in Morocco have undermined local political institutions in administration and in settling disputes (Geertz, Geertz, and Rosen 1979:53-57; Chiapuris 1980:232-36). With reference to the Central Atlas, Ilahiane (1999:41) concludes that the government now has a presence in every domain, curtailing the influence of local and collective institutions, and constituting an extension of government bureaucracy. Hammoudi (1997) agrees that contemporary elective institutions have increased the power of the state in the rural areas of Morocco, and claims that the central government collaborated with the rural notables, the sons of those who, as caid (district officer; pl. cuwwad) or shaykh (subdistrict officer; pl. shuyukh) during the era of the French Protectorate, acquired large parcels of land and became local strongmen. These notables now participate in the patronage network of the monarchy and state. They came to be cuwwad or shuyukh or members of the district council in return for collaborating with state authorities. This point of view does insufficient justice to the value attached to autonomy by the Berber population, however. In the Middle Atlas, the sultan and his army hardly ever succeeded in levying tribute on the trading routes between Fez, Meknes, and Tafilalt, which was considered the prerogative of the Berber leaders themselves. Only by sending troops did the sultan obtain a share of the tribute, and then often for only a limited period and only if the Berber leaders were allowed to continue their practices (Venema 1993:165). In 1912, Sultan Moulay Hafid signed a treaty with the French authorities under which Morocco became a French protectorate. In an attempt to nullify the treaty, the Berbers of the Middle Atlas, among other tribes, besieged Fez. The liberation of Fez by the French army marked the start of the military campaign in Morocco under the leadership of Marshal Lyautey, which continued until 1934 (Julien 1978:88, 89). Following independence, the Berbers continued their search for autonomy. In the Middle Atlas and several other regions there was an uprising against the provincial governors and judges appointed by the new government. Generally from an urban and Arabic background, these officials largely ignored the problems of the rural population, their customary law, and the ambitions of their leaders (Gellner 1981:194-206; Coram 1973:271). …

Justice and Lecturer Professionalism

Lecturers have significant de facto power and responsibility as arbiters of student justice. However, while the literature on ethics in higher education principally focuses on a self-regarding agenda connected with research codes and power relationships between academics, the more practical concerns of pedagogy tend to be overlooked. Moreover, while many new lecturer programmes stress competence in teaching techniques they tend to give restricted attention to many of the ethical dilemmas which confront university teachers in their daily lives. This paper addresses this imbalance by presenting a conceptual framework for debating the ethics of pedagogy based on four forms of justice. The concepts of procedural, retributive, remedial, and distributive justice are presented as a means of incorporating many of the key ethical challenges that confront lecturers new to higher education. The justice framework is also recommended as a means of encouraging practitioners to identify their own key ethical principles.

Fuero nobiliaire et droit de justice.

Noble fuero and the right to dispense justice. The 18th century « lords and masters » of Zacatecas (Mexico) - Quite real captains of industry before their time, the big landowners who dominated the mining region ofZacatecas, Mexico, reproduced a system of highly traditional values. This Hispanic heritage was based on a set of privileges that granted them absolute power far beyond their estates. This de facto power was shaped by these aristocrats' clans and patronage system. It was both the symbolic and real expression of a special right recognized by the Crown of Spain itself.

“Reasonable Cost” Reimbursement for Inpatient Hospital Services Under Medicare and Medicaid: The Emergence of Public Control

AbstractIn 1965 Congress, through amendments to the Social Security Act, established the Medicare and Medicaid programs and mandated that hospitals participating in those programs be reimbursed for the “reasonable cost” of providing inpatient services to Medicare and Medicaid patients. In this Article, the Chairman of the Massachusetts Rate Setting Commission contends that HEW—which, like Congress, was anxious to stimulate the voluntary participation of hospitals in the Medicare and Medicaid programs—interpreted “reasonable cost” with excessive liberality toward participating hospitals and created a fiscally burdensome and inflationary reimbursement system lacking principles of efficiency and planning. The author then describes a series of attempts—varying in scope and success—to reformulate “reasonable cost,” as applied to Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, in a manner more consistent with the author's concept of sound public policy. The culmination of these attempts to date, he states, was Public Law 92-603 (Social Security Amendments of 1972), which introduced to the reimbursement system the concepts of (1) tough evaluation of the reasonableness of hospital costs, with emphasis on efficiency, utilization, and planning; (2) shifting de facto power over reimbursement rates away from the hospitals and into the hands of the agencies that purchase their services; and (3) increased public scrutiny of hospital operations. The author contends that this law, and the philosophy which underlies it, represents a healthy balancing of the needs of hospitals and the needs of the public; that the trend toward cost control and public control which the law embodies has been substantially furthered in those states which have statutorily established hospital budget or charge review programs; and that such trend will continue and profoundly affect any national health insurance plan enacted in the future.

Impressions of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform

On 24 June 1969 the military government of Peru, exercising its de facto power to issue legislation by decree, promulgated a law of agrarian reform. In Latin America legal norms—even radical ones—are not necessarily to be feared. Many countries have agrarian reform laws and in most of these agrarian structures have not been changing rapidly. Indeed, the previous administration in Peru had passed a mild law in 1964, but the hacienda structure of the Peruvian Andes remained virtually intact. Few feared that the new code enacted by the military would present a strong challenge to tradition.Forty-eight hours after its promulgation opinions began to change. The government announced that interventors were being sent to eight of the largest sugar estates on the northern coast. Intervention is the first step toward expropriation. The sugar estates lie at the heart of the Peruvian oligarchy: they were exempt from the 1964 legislation.