Political Entrepreneurs Research Articles

Government Policies, New Voter Coalitions, and the Emergence of Ethnic Dimension in Party Systems

AbstractConventional theories of ethnic politics argue that political entrepreneurs form ethnic parties where there is ethnic diversity. Yet empirical research finds that diversity is a weak predictor for the success of ethnic parties. When does ethnicity become a major element of party competition? Scholars have explained the emergence of an ethnic dimension in party systems as the result of institutions, mass organizations, and elite initiatives. But these factors can evolve in response to an emerging ethnic coalition of voters. The author advances a new theory: ethnic cleavages emerge when voters seek to form a parliamentary opposition to government policies that create grievances along ethnic identities. The theory is tested on rare cases of government policies in Prussia between 1848 and 1874 that aggrieved Catholics but were not based on existing policies or initiated by entrepreneurs to encourage ethnic competition. Using process tracing, case comparisons, and statistical analysis of electoral returns, the author shows that Catholics voted together when aggrieved by policies, regardless of the actions of political entrepreneurs. In contrast, when policies were neutral to Catholics, the Catholic party dissolved.

Das europapolitische Erbe Angela Merkels: Krisen, Führung, Vorbild

In view of numerous contributions, and especially on the occasion of Angela Merkel’s last participation in a meeting of the European Council in October 2021, this contribution analyzes the work and effects of the former Chancellor on European politics. We shed light on the major political challenges and changes of the Merkel era (2005-2021) and critically explain Germany’s role in the numerous crises in the European Union. With a view to Merkel’s actions, we put the forms, possibilities, and limits of German leadership in Europe up for discussion. Doing so, we see Merkel both as a political entrepreneur and as driven by functional constraints and logics. In this respect, Merkel stands in the tradition of Jean Monnet, who viewed European integration as a crisis-driven process of limited but powerful and effective steps towards “more” Europe.

Research on the improvement of teachers’ “SiChuang” education and teaching ability in higher vocational colleges under the new engineering background

The cultivation of talents in the new engineering era has put forward new requirements for higher vocational education. The improvement of teaching ability of teachers in Higher Vocational Colleges plays an important role in the process of talent training. Teacher is the direct participants of teaching, and should coordinate with the orientation of cultivating new engineering talents. Teachers of traditional curriculum teaching content and teaching methods can’t meet the demand of the new talents cultivation, It is urgent to integrate ideological and political elements, innovation and entrepreneurship education elements into the curriculum. This poses a challenge to teachers’ ability of “SiChuang”. This paper mainly expounds the research on the improvement of teachers’ “SiChuang” education and teaching ability in Higher Vocational Colleges from the research background, research content and research significance. In the process of learning professional knowledge, students can subtly shape their correct core values, innovation and entrepreneurship consciousness, thinking and ability. Realize the goal of “Three-wide Education”and cultivating people with virtue.

“Swallowing the Red Pill”: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Political Imaginary of Stigmatized Knowledge in the Discourse of the Far-Right

Pandemic disease is not merely a biological reality but also a cognitive and socially constructed phenomenon which intensely mobilizes a multiplicity of political frames. Far-right political entrepreneurs are, despite their remoteness from actual decision-making processes, active stakeholders in the current crisis. Existential threats to societies breed a sense of urgency and heightened cultural warfare that is a hotbed for extremism. Our study seeks to map, compare and contrast the symbolic responses to the Coronavirus crisis articulated by various far-right actors in two established democracies in the transatlantic area: the United States and France. We aim to shed light on how entrenched far-right mythologies and tropes—which appear increasingly transatlantic—are channeled into a new synthesis as part of an “alternative” political epistemology. Infused with the mythos of resistance and insurgency, resolutely anti-systemic, this alternative epistemology can better be described, following Michael Barkun, as a form of “stigmatized knowledge”. Our study will employ a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to bring into focus the ideological semiotics of the current “infodemic” in the Euro-American far-right’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. To some extent, all groups and actors under study exhibited a conspiracist framework. We contend that conspiracist counter-epistemologies are an integral — and increasingly important — part of the semiotics of the new culture wars which have engulfed the COVID-19 response.

Dynamics of Political Entrepreneurship among the Elites in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe

The political arena is now abounding with people who either live ‘off’ or ‘for’ politics. The ferocious competition for people’s votes is akin to economic competition and as this study submits, the politicians are just like business people. Both productive and predatory profit opportunities have pervaded the Zimbabwean political arena where politics is a type of business. Political positions have afforded some people access to economic resources, making politics the quickest way to untold and unending riches. As a result, the political landscape has invited abuse of power thereby decimating not the physical being but the entire moral fibre of the nation. This study shows how Zimbabwean political leaders have turned out to be the primary controllers and distributors of power and resources with the capacity to penetrate society politically and secure their hegemony. Reference is made to politicians belonging to the ruling party Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), where politicians from either party have exhibited, though not uniformly, patterns of misconduct characteristic of political entrepreneurship. This paper applies the theory of the entrepreneur to political behaviour for the purpose of identifying political entrepreneurs and analytically distinguishing them from other government agents.

Movin’ on up? A survey experiment on mobility enhancing policies

We use a nationwide survey experiment in the United States to measure whether information on intergenerational economic mobility or policy-specific arguments influence support for six pro-mobility policies advocated by political entrepreneurs. We find the information treatments do not affect support, but the argument treatments significantly increase support for three of the policies. We also include a behavioral measure by allowing respondents the opportunity to write their U.S. Senators. We find argument treatments significantly increase the likelihood that letters address economic mobility and significantly promote advocacy for that policy in the letter, but no increase in advocacy from the information treatments. Our results persist after controlling for a variety of robustness measures.

Decentralised Governance in Kenya: Implications on Citizen Participation in Local Governance.

This study sought to examine the extent to which decentralisation efforts have affected citizen participation in local governance in Kenya. A survey research design that integrated a mixed-method approach was employed to collect data. The study used Krejcie and Morgan's table to select a sample size of 371 respondents from four counties for the questionnaire instrument. The purposive sampling technique was used to select 16 interview respondents, including critical institutions and organisations in the field. The findings revealed that decentralisation influences citizen participation in local governance. 77.3% of the respondents agreed that decentralisation had promoted political entrepreneurship, while 75% contended that decentralisation had influenced citizen participation in developing policies and legislation. Moreover, 57.2% of the respondents felt that citizen participation in decentralised policy-making was high, while 69% were satisfied that decentralisation had made it possible for citizens to participate in county budgeting. However, only 49% approved the effectiveness of decentralisation in promoting citizen participation in promoting participatory budgeting and planning process. Therefore, the study recommends that the national and county governments put in place measures to safeguard the independence of the counties in realising the objective of citizen participation in local governance.

Limits of Law in the Multilevel System: Explaining the European Commission's Toleration of Noncompliance Concerning Pharmaceutical Parallel Trade*

AbstractThis article aims to explain the under‐researched phenomenon of why the European Commission (the Commission), as ‘guardian of the Treaties’, tolerates member states’ noncompliance with the EU law. While major accounts of selective enforcement depict the Commission as a self‐serving political entrepreneur, this paper assumes that it is a trustee guardian of EU treaties that aims to safeguard the stability and integrity of the EU legal order. For this purpose, the Commission is theorized to strategically utilize toleration of noncompliance to evade jurisdiction overlap and norm collision. Relying on the detailed tracing of the Commission's enforcement leniency towards Slovakia regarding pharmaceutical parallel trade, this illustrative case study indicates that toleration of noncompliance is a necessary evil for the Commission and other stakeholders to navigate through a legal and political impasse. And it simultaneously preserves the delicate integrity of the existing legal order of EU free movement law.

Political Entrepreneurship di Madura (Studi tentang Kuasa Aktor dalam Demokratisasi Lokal)

This article focuses on efforts to find political entrepreneurship for poli-tical actors in Alang-alang Village and the prospects for democracy that are occurring. Based on the research conducted, there are several inte-resting things, including: First, the political entrepreneurship of Alang-alang village Klebun can be seen in the political strategy applied to manage the surrounding actors. Every relationship built by a Klebun to the actors around them is realized as part of the production of power and at the same time maintaining it. Second, in the context of demo-cratization at the local level, political actors in Alang-alang village are trying to get out of the previous centralism of power. The tagline "People's soldier" made by the Alang-alang village government places the community as a king who must be served. However, the ability of Klebun to manage village politics must also be anticipated so that a new king does not emerge at the village level.

Economic Cultures and Debates on Taxation in Italy after World War II: 1943–1948

Abstract This contribution analyses the change in the conception of taxation which occurred in Italy during the aftermath of World War II. From being a neutral mechanism to collect state revenue, in this period taxation became seen as a powerful political tool to redistribute income and wealth. The article primarily relies on material collected by the Economic Commission of the Ministry for the Constituent Assembly set up in 1945, a unique source which offers a comprehensive overview of the different conceptions of taxation at the time. Drawing upon their different economic and political ideologies, liberal economists and entrepreneurs, Christian Democrats, and Communists formulated alternative tax programmes. While liberal economists and entrepreneurs advocated the maintenance of the existing tax system on technical grounds, the Christian Democrats imposed a new conception of taxation as a means for income redistribution. Progressive and redistributive taxation was also present in the Communist programme, but their ambiguous tax views suffered from the lack of administrative and economic experience which liberal and Catholic economists had instead gathered before and partially even during the Fascist regime. The debate ended abruptly in 1947 with the exclusion of the left from government and the success of liberal conceptions. Nonetheless, during the 1960s, the Catholic emphasis on progressive and redistributive taxation incorporated the new Keynesian ideas on public finance and achieved a hegemonic position in the public debate, thus overcoming the traditional liberal view.

Jane Addams, Coherence in Uncertain Times: a Political Entrepreneurship in Social Work

Since its inception, social work has promoted the defense of human rights and social justice. Doing so has also implied having an influence in the political arena. Although, in some contexts, participation in the political arena of social workers is limited. Based on an analysis of the figure of Jane Addams, using a bibliographic analysis, this study shows the role that social work can play in changing policies and the importance of being coherent with personal values, as well as engaging in equal dialogue using human rights and social justice as a starting point. Jane Addams became a political entrepreneur in fields such as the struggle for women's rights, the rights of immigrants, the fight against child labor exploitation and the quest for peace. This positioning had negative repercussions on her public image, although she was finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Franchising and country development: evidence from 49 countries

PurposeAlthough previous research has examined the role of franchising for the economic development of countries, no empirical study to date has investigated the importance of franchising for social, infrastructural, and institutional development. The authors address this research gap by applying research results from the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and highlight that franchising has a positive impact on economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a fixed-effects model on a panel dataset for 2006–2015 from 49 countries to test the hypothesis that franchising positively influences various dimensions of country development such as economic social institutional and infrastructural development.FindingsThe findings highlight that franchising has a positive impact on the economic, social, infrastructural, and institutional development of a country. Specifically, the results show that the earlier and the more franchising systems enter a country, the stronger the positive impact of franchising on the country's economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development.Research limitations/implicationsThis study has several limitations that provide directions for further research. First, the empirical investigation is limited by the characteristics of the data, which are composed of information from 49 countries (covering a period of 10 years). Because franchising is not recognized as a form of entrepreneurial governance in many emerging and developing countries, the available information is mainly provided by the franchise associations in the various countries. Hence, there is a need to collect additional data in each country and to include additional countries. Second, although the authors included developed and developing countries in the analysis, the authors could not differentiate between developed and developing countries when testing the hypotheses, because the database was not sufficiently complete. Third, future studies should analyze the causality issue between franchising and development more closely. The role of franchising in development may be changing depending on different unobserved country factors, economic sector characteristics, or development stages.Practical implicationsWhat are the practical implications of this study for the role of franchising in the development of emerging and developing economies? Because public policy in emerging and developing countries suffers from a lack of financial resources to improve the social, infrastructural and institutional environment, entrepreneurs, such as franchisors who expand into these countries, play an important role for these countries' development. In addition to their entrepreneurial role of exploring and exploiting profit opportunities, they are social, institutional, and political entrepreneurs who may positively influence country development (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Shepard and Patzelt, 2011). Specifically, the findings highlight that countries with an older franchise sector (more years of franchise experience) may realize first-mover advantages and hence larger positive spillover effects on their economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development than countries with a younger franchise sector. Hence, governments of emerging and developing countries have the opportunity and responsibility to reduce potential market entry barriers and provide additional incentives for franchise systems in order to trigger these positive spillover effects. The authors expect that the spillover effects from the franchise sector on the economic, institutional, social and infrastructural development of a country are stronger in emerging and developing countries than in developed countries.Originality/valuePrevious research has focused on the impact of franchising on the economic development of a country, such as its growth of gross domestic product (GDP), employment, business skills, innovation and technology transfer. This study extends the existing literature by going beyond the impact of franchising on economic development: the results show that franchising as an entrepreneurial activity offers opportunities for economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development, all of which are particularly important for emerging and developing economies. The findings of this study contribute to the international franchise and development economics literature by offering a better understanding of the impact of franchising on country development.

The Marketing System of Exchange Between Regulatory and Political Entrepreneurs Engaging in Arbitrage

After receiving cease and desist letters in 2018, Bird strategically developed hospitable relationships with politicians that allowed the scooter-sharing firm to continue operating. Bird acts as a regulatory entrepreneur in seeking unfair legal treatment and the politicians brokering the legal deal as political entrepreneurs. The business models for unfairly changing or applying law represents entrepreneurial arbitrage. A mixed methods approach examines the structure of relationships between regulatory and political entrepreneurs through the Bootleggers and Baptists conceptual lens. Like Bird solving traffic and pollution problems for city leaders, Baptists served as a moral cover for illegal liquor vendors. Guided by a general systems theory, it is found that the micro-level, relational exchanges both assign value to as well as uses intellectual commodities to establish expectations guiding ongoing exchanges. Therefore, a marketing system is uncovered. This research also finds relationships structured by favors in sharp contrast to political markets governed by threats.

Making sense of health corruption in times of COVID-19

This paper provides readers with an analytical framework to better understand the rationality of corruption and its perpetuation in the health sector during the coronavirus pandemics. To pursue the foregoing task, it embarks on integrating insights from New Institutional Economics, Public Choice Theory, and the Austrian School of Economics to come up with an explanation of corrupt deals that uncover their causally relevant mechanisms. Its goal is to shed light on corruption risks that emerge from changes in legislation that weakened public procurement rules and therefore turned the Brazilian health system more vulnerable to corrupt acts. The article conjectures that increased uncertainty, asymmetric information, and decreased transparency channels have played major roles in triggering corrupt practices, such as bribery, kickback, embezzlement, influence peddling, and cronyism. More precisely, it argues that rent-seeking and predatory political entrepreneurship are two driving forces behind Brazilian corrupt exchanges and their risks in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers some evidence that corruption scandals in Rio de Janeiro state make a very good case for showing the explanatory value of the proposed theoretical approach. It closes by wrapping up the overall argument, presenting some policy implications and questions for further research.

Free municipality experiments should (also) be understood using an innovation doctrine

There is a long-standing Danish and Scandinavian tradition for free municipality experiments where municipalities are granted exemptions from legislation so that they can experiment with new welfare solutions. Despite a strong societal focus on the phenomenon, there is a need to qualify the governance doctrines decision makers can use to develop and evaluate free municipality experiments. Through an analysis of the idea behind free municipalities and the development and content of the Danish free municipality experiments, strengths and weakness are identified in the most relevant governance doctrines historically – bureaucracy, New Public Management and New Public Governance. However, this does not provide a full understanding of the innovative logic of the programs and the associated opportunities for governance. The article introduces an innovation doctrine as an additional management doctrine that can address the innovative logic and experimental behavior of political entrepreneurs at the local level and support policies and programs provided by the state.

The 1982 Voting Rights Act Extension as a “Critical Juncture”: Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and Republican Party-Building

AbstractRepublican support for the 1982 Voting Rights Act (VRA) extension is a puzzle for scholars of racial policy coalitions. The extension contained provisions that were manifestly antithetical to core principles of the “color-blind” policy alliance said to dominate the GOP. Recent scholarship has explained this puzzling decision by arguing that conservatives were confident that the VRA's most objectionable provisions could be undone by the federal bureaucracy and judiciary, while absolving Republicans of the blame of being against voting rights. This article suggests that the picture is more complicated. Applying the concept of “critical junctures” to the 1982 VRA extension, the article highlights the importance of actors’ contingent decisions and reveals a wider range of choices available to political entrepreneurs than has been conventionally understood. Highlighting differing views within the Reagan administration, this article also identifies a wider range of reasons why Republicans supported the act's extension, including career ambition, party-building, policy agenda advancement, and genuine commitment, rather than simply a defensive stance as implied by recent histories.

Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe

Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe

“Swallowing the red pill”: the coronavirus pandemic and the political imaginary of stigmatized knowledge in the discourse of the far-right

Pandemic disease is not merely a biological reality but also a cognitive and socially constructed phenomenon which intensely mobilizes a multiplicity of political frames. Far-right political entrepreneurs are, despite their remoteness from actual decision-making processes, active stakeholders in the current crisis. Existential threats to societies breed a sense of urgency and heightened cultural warfare that is a hotbed for extremism. Our study seeks to map, compare and contrast the symbolic responses to the Coronavirus crisis articulated by various far-right actors in two established democracies in the transatlantic area: The United States and France. We aim to shed light on how entrenched far-right mythologies and tropes—which appear increasingly transatlantic—are channeled into a new synthesis as part of an “alternative” political epistemology. Infused with the mythos of resistance and insurgency, resolutely anti-systemic, this alternative epistemology can better be described, following Michael Barkun, as a form of “stigmatized knowledge”. Our study will employ a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to bring into focus, in the response of the Euro-American far-right to the COVID-19 crisis, the ideological semiotics of the current “infodemic”.

Non-Modernization: Power-Culture Trajectories and the Dynamics of Political Institutions

Modernization theory is a cornerstone of much of political science, despite the mounting evidence against its predictions. In this paper, we argue that the theory's failings are rooted in predictions that are not conditioned on history and cultural configurations. We outline a theory in which the interplay of the distribution of political power and cultural configurations lead to three distinct self-reinforcing paths of political development, with very different state-society relations, institutions, and economic structures. These are paths to Despotic, Absent and Shackled leviathans. The role of cultural configurations, made up of attributes in a society's culture set, is critical in legitimizing the social arrangements in each path. For example, a Despotic Leviathan, as in China, cannot be understood without appreciating how Confucian culture has been used to bolster a worldview in which rulers are supposed to be virtuous and regular people are discouraged from political participation. We argued that this interpretation is not inherent to Confucian thought, but has to be understood as an endogenous outcome along the trajectory to the Despotic Leviathan. None of the three different paths we highlight support modernization theory. Under the Absent Leviathan, there is no economic modernization. Under the Despotic Leviathan, economic growth bolsters the existing regime and its supporting cultural configuration, with no tendency towards democracy or associate political changes. Under the Shackled Leviathan, there are dynamics leading to economic growth and political changes with greater bottom-up participation. Nevertheless, the causation does not go from the former to the latter, and these changes are critically dependent on cultural and political entrepreneurship in order to formulate and popularize new cultural configurations and institutionalize political changes. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Diasporic Foreign Policy Interest Groups in the United States: Democracy, Conflict, and Political Entrepreneurship

Why do some immigrant diasporas in the United States (U.S.) establish foreign policy interest groups while others do not? While scholars have demonstrated that diasporic interest groups often successfully influence U.S. foreign policy, we take a step back to ask why only certain diasporas attempt to do so in the first place. We argue that two factors increase the likelihood of diaspora mobilization: a community’s experience with democratic governance and conflict in its country of origin. We posit that these conditions make it more likely that political entrepreneurs emerge to serve as catalysts for top-down mobilization. To test our hypotheses, we collect and analyze novel data on diasporic interest groups as well as the characteristics of their respective countries of origin. In turn, we conduct the first in-depth case studies of the historical and contemporary Indian-American lobbies, using original archival and interview evidence.