Political Entrepreneurs Research Articles

The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century by Brendan McNulty and Tim McNulty

Reviewed by: The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century by Brendan McNulty and Tim McNulty Craig Goodman The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century. By Brendan McNulty and Tim McNulty. (Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books, 2019. Pp. xviii, 556. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-58838-321-1.) Using the personal archives of Representative Jack Brooks, Democrat of Texas, Brandon McNulty and Tim McNulty have written an interesting and important biography of an influential yet little-known member of Congress. Brooks was first elected to Congress in 1952 and represented southeastern Texas [End Page 538] until his defeat in 1994. Brooks’s career epitomized what Kenneth A. Shepsle describes as the “Textbook Congress,” where committees and their chairs were powerful actors but congressional leaders exercised less direct control over the House of Representatives (“The Changing Textbook Congress,” in John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson, eds., Can the Government Govern? [Washington, D.C., 1989], pp. 238–66). Brooks’s career unfolded against broader changes occurring in party politics that culminated in the realignment of white conservatives in the South that eventually cost Brooks his seat in Congress and that continues to affect American politics today. The career of Jack Brooks vividly illustrates the central role of the legislative branch in the American system of separated institutions sharing powers. Members of Congress are both representatives and lawmakers. Brooks embraced both roles during his long congressional career as he directed benefits to his congressional district while playing a critical role shaping public policies and challenging presidents of both parties. Like Lyndon B. Johnson, Brooks quickly figured out how to build relationships by figuring out what other members needed, and he learned the critical art of bargaining and compromise essential in a collective body. Political entrepreneurship is vital, as members decide how to allocate their resources and build relationships allowing them to exercise influence over public policies, and Brooks excelled at this part of the legislative game. Especially between 1973 and 1994, Brooks was one of the most effective members of the House of Representatives, often outperforming his expected legislative effectiveness and routinely ranking among the most effective Democrats. He aggressively championed consumer rights and often challenged corporations to change their policies; he was a pivotal figure in high-profile investigations such as Watergate and Iran-Contra, but Brooks was also the driving force promoting the adoption of computers in Congress so that the legislative branch could perform its work more efficiently. Using NOMINATE data, we can see that Brooks routinely remained more liberal than two-thirds of the Democratic caucus throughout his career, even as the political environment was beginning to change around him. Brooks was a liberal Democrat, and a loyal Democrat, who often supported his party 90 percent of the time. Brooks worked with the party leadership, especially Sam Rayburn, when it would be beneficial, but he was not afraid to buck party leaders when it was in the best interests of his district. Today a centralized and powerful leadership directs much of the activity in the House of Representatives. Ultimately, the changing political environment of Texas caught up with Brooks, as he lost his 1994 reelection campaign. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, white southerners began leaving the Democratic Party, and the 1970s was marked by high levels of split-ticket voting. As voters aligned their ideological and partisan preferences, the Republican Party replaced the Democratic Party as the dominant political party in the South, which contributed to increasing political polarization in the United States. Brooks remained a staunch liberal, but like other white Democrats representing rural areas of the South, his kind would become extinct. [End Page 539] Change is constant in American politics, and the biography of Representative Jack Brooks illustrates important changes in our nation. Brooks’s career spanned a period that may prove to have been an anomaly rather than the norm in American political history, characterized by substantive lawmaking instead of message politics (see Frances E. Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign [Chicago, 2016]). For people concerned about the separation of powers, the story of Jack...

Direct democracy and the rise of political entrepreneurs

The last decade saw a rise in the use of direct democracy in Croatia. The proliferation of citizens' initiatives and referendums was meant to activate politically passive citizens and to strengthen their role as controllers of the executive. Our research, based on the qualitative analysis of the legal framework on citizens' initiatives and referendums in Croatia, as well as post-2010 initiatives, showed that this was not the case. Instead, political and social entrepreneurs, both long established, like trade unions, and newly formed, like conservative civil society organizations, used the tools of direct democracy to promote their particular anti-minority, anti-government or anti-establishment agendas. They succeeded in both constraining the power of the elite through the process of getting to the referendum and wresting control over the agenda-setting process post hoc. The added value of this paper lies in showing that citizens' initiatives can succeed in getting their demands met even when they are not successful in organizing referendums, which is due to weaknesses in the legal framework surrounding referendums and initiatives.

Social Origin Is No Destiny: Background, Institutionalization, and Electoral Performance of New Political Parties in Slovakia

The existing research suggests that socially rooted new political parties are more likely to be reelected to parliaments than parties emerging without links to preexisting social groups. It is argued that the two groups face different prospects of institutionalization: Rooted parties are more viable because their links to preexisting societal groups contribute to a higher sustainability of their electoral support and stronger institutionalization. We assess the link between the origin of parties, their level of institutionalization, and their electoral performance in the context of Slovakia, a new Eastern European democracy. We add to the existing state of knowledge in three ways. First, we empirically assess the link between the social origin of parties and their level of institutionalization. We also provide rich empirical material on the intraparty processes resulting in various levels of institutionalization. Subsequently, we assess whether rooted parties record better electoral performance than political entrepreneur parties. Second, we provide some illustration of the fact that agential factors, especially the decisions and activities related to leadership contestation, directly impact both party institutionalization and electoral performance. Third, we show that developing the links to a sociostructurally well-defined electorate may be a viable strategy to secure a parliamentary relevance for a prolonged period of time for some political entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest that parties with different levels of institutionalization are able to secure reelection, and that their electoral performance is not directly linked to their social origins.

A U.S. Tripartite Experiment in the Kennedy Administration

Seeing the United States as a model for laissez-faire economies discourages research on the distinctive features of the U.S. political economy. The conventional view is that the U.S. economy suffers from chronic coordination problems, in which market actors engage in arm’s-length transactional relationships. This article challenges such generalization by delving into an unexplored tripartite experiment conducted by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s through the President’s Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy (LMAC). The experiment was a product of policy entrepreneurs’ attempts to tackle the decline of U.S. manufacturers’ market competitiveness and worsening labor-management relations, rather than being merely a negligible outlier of mainstream American liberalism. Given the absence of peak business and labor associations, these entrepreneurs designed the LMAC in a way that made it different from its European counterparts. Drawing from the literature on political entrepreneurship and creative syncretism in American political development, I describe where the tripartite experiment failed and how it paved the way toward industrial pluralism in a legal sense, and toward growth liberalism or reactionary Keynesianism in an economic sense. The article contributes to the burgeoning literature concerning various U.S. policy experiments to address problems in market coordination.

An Economic Recipe for Backlash

A populist backlash has seized a number of Western democracies. Two broad sets of explanations have emerged to address the sources of this backlash, with credible empirical evidence for each. The first focuses on economic drivers, and specifically on global economic integration, and exposure to trade competition. The second turns instead to cultural explanations, arguing that the shifting political winds are due to strictly nonmaterial considerations, like status threat and racial beliefs. How might we reconcile two apparently conflicting conclusions in the scholarly work examining this backlash? The question comes down to the particular interplay of these factors. I argue that the most promising approach may lie in tweaking our ideas about the relevant group that individuals use to make assessments about general welfare and the role of political entrepreneurs in manipulating these relevant groups. This, in turn, might explain why right-wing political parties appear to consistently gain from the ongoing backlash. I end with a consideration of the policy means that governments have to curb the political effects of economic grievances, and what explains the success or failure of such efforts. An economic recipe for backlash suggests the existence of an antidote.

‘Elections will not change anything. But they can change my life’. Manipulation of the electoral process and self-making of small politicians in Andhra Pradesh

ABSTRACTBased on an ethnographic case study of the 2014 electoral process in a small town of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, this article explores the tensions between the self-making of political entrepreneurs, the loyalties to political leaders and the everyday making of electoral manipulation. By looking at the Dalit henchmen of bosses-political candidates, it argues that electoral democracy is considered by henchmen as an issue of life and death: by performing electoral manipulation, they have the opportunity to appear as men of resources, capable of extraordinary actions, and to transform their precarious social and political positions.

Performance-Based Financing (PBF) in Mali: is it legitimate to speak of the emergence of a public health policy?

Performance-based financing (PBF) is just one of a number of recent experiments implemented in Mali to improve maternal and child health indicators. This article presents a qualitative study based on Kingdon’s (1984) multiple streams theory and an approach inspired by development anthropology. The aim was to describe the forms of national ownership of PBF and to determine whether it is possible to speak of the emergence of a PBF public policy in Mali at this stage. The contribution of this study is both theoretical (understanding the emergence of a policy) and empirical (roles of local and international actors). The data came from 33 qualitative interviews conducted with individuals representing various institutions, notably the Ministère de la Santé. The results suggest there has been no emergence of a PBF public policy in Mali due to a myriad of constraints, including an insufficient number of political entrepreneurs, windows of opportunity and funding partners as well as the short duration of the pilot projects.

The Politics of Manufactured Crisis

It is a widely used assumption in the literature on political decision-making that leaders ‘choose their battles’ according to their interests. This strategic approach often results in seemingly ‘fake crises’; crises which are – as opposed to natural disasters – not exogenous in nature. These crises are exceptional in that they are avoidable and are the product of political entrepreneurs following deliberate agendas. In this paper, the logic of crisis manufacturing is illustrated by a case study of the ‘fiscal wars’ of 2011–2013. The case study shows how, given the right institutional environment, political entrepreneurs, even those outside the political mainstream, can use crisis manufacturing to their advantage. In order to exploit the institutional veto points related to fiscal policy in the U.S. constitutional system, various actors associated with the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement used a networked, coalition-based approach to reach these goals. Although their quest to instill a regime of fiscal conservatism was eventually unsuccessful, they did manage to raise their national profile and set the policy agenda for an extended period.

Markets for rules: the promise and peril of blockchain distributed governance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the possible contributions of blockchain technology to creating new governance structures that facilitate social cooperation.Design/methodology/approachConceptual analysis with key ideas in new institutional economics and political theory is used in this paper.FindingsBlockchain technology provides a new tool through which political entrepreneurs can credibly alienate some of their power within a system of rules that they have established.Originality/valueThis paper links discussion of blockchain entrepreneurship in commercial markets to research into private governance.

Divided We Stand

Germany continues to face an inter-regional political divide between the East and the West three decades after unification. Most strikingly, this divide is expressed in different party systems. The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany and the left-wing populist Left Party are considerably more successful in the eastern regions, while German centrist parties perform worse (and shrink faster at the ballot-box) than in the West. The article discusses empirical evidence of this resilient yet puzzling political divide and explores three main clusters of explanatory factors: The after-effects of the German Democratic Republic’s authoritarian past and its politico-cultural legacies, translating into distinct value cleavage configurations alongside significantly weaker institutional trust and more wide-spread skepticism towards democracy in the East; continuous, even if partly reduced inter-regional socioeconomic divisions and varying economic, social and political opportunities; and populist parties and movements acting as political entrepreneurs who construct and politically reinforce the East-West divide. It is argued that only the combination of these factors helps understand the depth and origins of the lasting divide.

Regional diversity in experiences of cohesion policy: The cases of Emilia‐Romagna and Calabria

AbstractThis paper aims to provide new evidence on the role played by the local contexts in the implementation of Cohesion Policy, by means of a comparative analysis of the experiences of the Italian regions of Emilia‐Romagna and Calabria. Through a deep examination of the 2007–2013 programming period, focus groups with the Cohesion Policy practitioners complemented with document analysis, this work shows how political (in)stability, political entrepreneurship and administrative (in)capacity shaped the patterns of Cohesion Policy implementation in the two regions, thus supporting the idea that institutional arrangements of Cohesion Policy should better account for the diversity of local contexts.

The Practice of Political Entrepreneurship in a Rural Javanese Village

This qualitative case study aims to explore the practice of political entrepreneurship in a rural Javanese village. Political entrepreneurship is dictated by the special interest of political entrepreneurs, incentives gained from the political system, and awareness about targeting the change of political institution, an explanation theorized by McCaffrey and Salerno (2011). Unlike the theory, this study assesses the importance of cultural explanation of political entrepreneurship which provides room in an academic discussion. The study reveals the role of Javanese (and Islam) values in encouraging the political entrepreneurship of a village head. Philosophical values of Javanese leadership promoting an exemplary leader (ing ngarso sung tulodo) and leadership behavior that is andap asor (humble) have favored public acceptance of the practice of political entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the doctrine (akhlak) and practices of Islamic rituals by the village head explain the direction of political entrepreneurship. This study discovers also the concept of ‘sungkan’ demonstrated in respect for the performance of the village head. Moreover, the ability to provide solutions to villagers’ problems practiced through suwuk and petungan add gratitude for the village head. Leadership behavior adhering to these cultural and religious values directly or indirectly induced a ‘sungkan’ effect in a reelection bid (the 2013 Village Election). ‘Sungkan’, which is equal to electoral accountability, explicates the outcome of political entrepreneurship for the electoral process in the village that were relatively clean from vote-buying. Lastly, the casework expands political entrepreneurship theory, indeed, cultural and religious values can also drive the practice of political entrepreneurship.

Governance and the political entrepreneur

Governance and the political entrepreneur

Understanding Political Entrepreneurship in Local Government Administration – a Contextual Framework

It has been argued that political entrepreneurship is playing an increased role for public organizations and play a vital role in local government organizations. Political entrepreneurship has previously been studied from the motivations and actions of the individual entrepreneur. We argue that in order to understand why political entrepreneurship occurs in local public administration, these aspects are not enough. Instead, we need to consider entrepreneurship as situated, and analyse contextual conditions which form institutional demands for political entrepreneurship. A tentative framework is presented, which distinguish conditions coming from reformed organizational setting and conditions coming from new policy challenges. Finally, we conclude that the character of the conditions and thus the institutional demands directs political entrepreneurship towards either value-generative or collaborative entrepreneurship.

Muslims, Catholics, and the Secular State

Any attempt to explore the relationship between representations of Muslims and public advocacy in modern Western societies must at some point situate both processes in relation to the broader crises of liberal citizenship currently afflicting Western democracies. Calls heard in the 1990s for multicultural citizenship and pluralist “recognition” have long since given way to demands for the exclusion of new immigrants and the coercive assimilation of those – especially Muslims -- long since arrived. This essay examines French Catholic and Muslim perspectives on secularism and citizenship in contemporary France. It highlights disagreements among progressive secularists as well as mainline Catholics and Muslims over how to engage the secular state as well as one’s fellow citizens. It explores the ways in which Catholic advocacy for and with Muslim citizens has been challenged by conservative trends in French Catholicism, as well as the perceived rise of Salafism and, most important, growing support for far-right and Islamophobic movements. The example shows that real-and-existing public spheres look less like the genteelly deliberative public spaces Jurgen Habermas described a generation ago. They are landscapes reshaped by movements, social media, and political entrepreneurs making use of reductionist arguments and media caricature (“fake news”) as much as or even more than deliberative reasoning. These realities present serious challenges to those who hope to use education and dialogue in public advocacy with and for Muslim citizens.

Muslims, Catholics, and the Secular State

Any attempt to explore the relationship between representations of Muslims and public advocacy in modern Western societies must at some point situate both processes in relation to the broader crises of liberal citizenship currently afflicting Western democracies. Calls heard in the 1990s for multicultural citizenship and pluralist “recognition” have long since given way to demands for the exclusion of new immigrants and the coercive assimilation of those – especially Muslims -- long since arrived. This essay examines French Catholic and Muslim perspectives on secularism and citizenship in contemporary France. It highlights disagreements among progressive secularists as well as mainline Catholics and Muslims over how to engage the secular state as well as one’s fellow citizens. It explores the ways in which Catholic advocacy for and with Muslim citizens has been challenged by conservative trends in French Catholicism, as well as the perceived rise of Salafism and, most important, growing support for far-right and Islamophobic movements. The example shows that real-and-existing public spheres look less like the genteelly deliberative public spaces Jurgen Habermas described a generation ago. They are landscapes reshaped by movements, social media, and political entrepreneurs making use of reductionist arguments and media caricature (“fake news”) as much as or even more than deliberative reasoning. These realities present serious challenges to those who hope to use education and dialogue in public advocacy with and for Muslim citizens.

Economic development and complexity: the role of recombinant capital

AbstractThe neoclassical aggregate production-function concept of capital is unsuitable for the study of economic development. We provide a more realistic account of capital formation in which development is understood as a disruptive, disequilibrium process of creating (not merely allocating or accumulating) capital and in which capital is conceived as a ‘recombinant’ process. We draw upon the seminal ideas of Schumpeter, Lachmann and Hirschman to formulate the notion of recombinant capital. Capital is a complex, emergent constellation of resource connections rather than a neoclassical ‘stock’. We conceptualise recombinant capital formation as a process of transforming connections in production structures. Capital structures are the unintended outcome of polycentric interactions among private entrepreneurs and government actors (managers of state-owned enterprises and political entrepreneurs). Recombinant capital formation and capital structures emerge endogenously from the creation and destruction of complex connections. The standard distinction between ‘market failure’ and ‘government failure’ is critically deficient in analysing the structural economic dynamics engendered by recombinant capital. The fertility of our conceptual framework is illustrated by a study of major structural change in a small open economy. This structural change arose from the interpolation of a new, large-scale manufacturing industry in a capital structure previously dominated by primary industries.

Who coupled which stream(s)? Policy entrepreneurship and innovation in the energy–water nexus in Gujarat, India

SummaryAlthough policy entrepreneurship is essential for fostering policy innovations to achieve sustainable development, the literature has conflated different types of entrepreneurship and disaggregated it using inconsistent terminology. We conceptualize entrepreneurship using a six‐stream variant of the multiple streams framework (MSF)—which addresses key limitations of the original MSF—to examine entrepreneurial activities in the case of theJyotigram Yojana, a widely recognized policy innovation for managing the energy–water nexus in Gujarat, India. We find that whereas policy and political entrepreneurship no doubt played a significant role in coupling the streams and fostering this policy innovation, the process broker, program champion, and technology innovator were also important in policy formulation, implementation, and “success.” We conclude that the six‐stream variant of MSF is useful for identifying and distinguishing various types of entrepreneurship involved in policy innovation for sustainability.

Populism and the Politics of Resentment

This article argues that understanding the dangers and risks of authoritarian populism in consolidated constitutional democracies requires analysis of the forms of pluralism and status anxieties that emerge in civil society, in a context of profound political, socio-economic and cultural change. This paper has two basic theses. The first is that when civil societies become deeply divided, and segmental pluralism maps onto party political polarization, generalized social solidarity is imperiled, as is commitment to democratic norms, social justice and liberal constitutionalism. The second, is that populist political entrepreneurs excel in fomenting social antagonisms by framing shifts in the forms of social pluralism in ways that foster deep political polarization, generalized distrust and a politics of resentment against ‘elites’, ‘the establishment’ and ‘outsiders’. Why populist offers resonate requires a social theoretical analysis of status/solidarity issues and a direct response to them. I navigate between two inadequate approaches: that of the Hofstadter consensus school which construes status concerns and populism as retrograde, anti-modern, paranoid and meriting no direct response; and that of the neo-Marxist tradition that acknowledges the mobilizing power of ‘cultural factors’ and status anxieties but deems them to be epiphenomena of the deeper story of economic distributive injustice. Both approaches focus on the ‘rational” dimension of material interest and see status anxieties as inevitably bound up with reactionary politics of resentment. I reject this assessment and seek to take up the status/solidarity issues in ways that take them seriously, challenge populist framing and provide alternative direct responses to them.

Constitutionalism, Liberalism, and Political Entrepreneurship

I criticize contractarian approaches to political economy that assume the insularity of constitutions from ordinary political exchange. Using tools from market process economics, I outline a theory of the political-entrepreneurial process as applied to constitutions. This theory can help us understand many aspects of real-world constitutional politics, such as the frequent divergence of de facto constitutions from their de jure specification. I also discuss how my proposed framework can help advance classically liberal political economy, with special reference to the conditions that allow societies to develop and retain liberal constitutions.