Populist Pressures Research Articles

“Build a wall”. “Tax a shed”. “Fix a debt limit”. The constructive and destructive potential of populist anti-statism and “naïve” statism

ABSTRACTPopulist surges, movements and parties often centre around radically simplifying policy proposals, sometimes anti-statist in intent (e.g. fix a limit to state borrowing in cash terms), and at other times pushing naïve statist solutions (e.g. build a giant wall to keep out migrants; or tax companies' activities in a given shed, not their profits). Most liberal political science condemns the crudity and often unrestrained vigour of populist “solutions”. But on occasion, they can have value in counteracting the increasing complexities that elites often build into public policies. Two case studies show populist pressure for simplification working effectively in one instance – the “tax shaming” campaign against multinationals avoiding corporation taxes; and engendering only disorder in another instance – the effort to enforce national debt limits in nominal terms in the USA.

Changing archaeology's ‘brand’ would be helpful

González-Ruibal et al. raise challenging issues that seem frightening in their implications. In both their specificity and their wider theoretical contexts, I had previously given these issues little thought, and some I had not even recognised. I share fully the authors’ concern that archaeologists must seek ways to engage people influenced by ‘reactionary populism’, people who “are diverse, fragmented and complex”, and who may be “greedy, patriarchal, xenophobic or uninterested in the past” (González-Ruibal et al. above). The authors find fault with the multi-vocal, multi-cultural approaches of epistemic populist archaeologies that tend to exclude most of those who fit this description. I could object to some of the details of the authors’ critiques of epistemic populism and heritage studies, but their core arguments are mostly correct and powerful. At the same time, at least within a North American context, I think that archaeologists have generally reacted to the various populist pressures of the past century and that we have already started to do what the authors suggest.

Escaping Populism – Safeguarding Minority Rights: Non‐majoritarian Dynamics in European Policy‐making

AbstractContrary to earlier predictions, communitarization in the area of asylum policies has not led to an erosion of refugee rights. Instead, there is growing evidence that EU asylum harmonization has safeguarded existing standards and even enhanced the rights of asylum‐seekers and refugees in Europe. We seek to explain this by building on the insights of principal‐agent theory. We argue that delegation to supranational institutions can strengthen non‐majoritarian policy dynamics and shield EU policy‐makers from populist pressures for further immigration restrictions that national governments are often confronted with. We support this argument empirically through a systematic longitudinal analysis of the evolution of EU asylum policies. In particular, we seek to assess the motivation for and impact of greater delegation to EU institutions on rights developments for asylum‐seekers and refugees. We also explain to what extent EU policy‐making has changed with the EU's response to the ‘Syrian refugee crisis’.

Managing judges mathematically: an empirical study of the medical malpractice litigations in Shanghai

The post-Mao China has been increasingly managed mathematically, not the least in its judicial system. In this paper, I looked into some of the mathematical indicators used to judge the performance of judges in this nation, and ascertained their effects on the judicial decisions on medical malpractices in Shanghai. The findings of this paper support the previous study that qualitatively identified the judicial responses to such a quantified evaluation system. Underlying the effect of performance indicators is the Chinese judiciary’s bending toward populist pressure. Essentially, therefore, this paper serves to place in perspective the judicial populism well documented in the latest literature on Chinese judiciary. At the same time, however, my study also endorses the theory on courts’ reluctance to exercise discretion in a hierarchical judicial system. Thus, as hinted by the data, the actual behaviors of Chinese judges might be complex under a combination of institutional constraints embodying policy preferences of political leaders as well as structural characteristics of the judiciary.

Managing Judges Mathematically: An Empirical Study of the Medical Malpractice Litigations in Shanghai

The post-Mao China has been increasingly managed mathematically, not the least in its judicial system. In this paper, I looked into some of the mathematical indicators used to judge the performance of the judges in this nation, and ascertained their effects on the judicial decisions on medical malpractices in Shanghai. The findings of this paper support the previous study that qualitatively identified the judicial responses to such a quantified evaluation system. Underlying the effect of the performance indicators is the Chinese judiciary’s bending toward populist pressure. Essentially, therefore, this paper serves to place in perspective the judicial populism well documented in the latest literature on Chinese judiciary. At the same time, however, my study also endorses the theory on courts’ reluctance to exercise discretion in a hierarchical judicial system. Thus, as hinted by the data, the actual behaviors of Chinese judges might be complex under a combination of institutional constraints embodying policy preferences of the political leaders as well as the structural characteristics of the judiciary.

Understanding the Law of Torts in China: A Political Economy Perspective

In this paper, I tried to connect the text of the Chinese tort law with the institutional context of lawmaking in China from a political economy perspective. Two determinants, political influence and populist pressure, were identified for the tort law legislation in China, and a simple spatial model was presented to demonstrate the mechanism through which these determinants might have affected the text of the law. In particular, my research suggested that, when injurers’ political influence kept constant, the populist pressure on the injurer group tended to push the tort law rules toward the pro-victim end. On the contrary, with the similar populist pressure, the politically influential injurers could induce legal rules to their advantage. Even within a particular type of torts, the subgroup of injurers who were better organized to exert political influence would be rewarded with more favorable rules on torts than their fellow injurers, especially where populist pressure was moderate. Hopefully, this research will inspire more efforts among students of Chinese law to explore the operation of law at the microscopic level against the macroscopic institutional backdrops of this country.

Regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in urban China

AbstractIn China, urban middle class mobilization against potential pollution risk has become increasingly common. This article examines this phenomenon through a detailed case study of a 2009 anti‐waste incinerator campaign in the Panyu District of Guangzhou, which culminated in a sizeable public protest and government U‐turn. This episode revealed tension between the narrow, state‐centered regulatory model fixated on end‐of‐pipe pollution control, and a much broader decentered approach advocated – and practiced – by project opponents, which incorporated public consultation and much greater emphasis on upstream waste reduction and sorting. In the process, the Panyu campaign progressed beyond a case of “regulation by escalation,” whereby beneficial regulations are belatedly enforced following populist pressure. Instead, it transformed into an open dialogue between a plurality of actors, including citizens, journalists, experts, and officials, about what regulation should constitute and who should determine acceptable levels of risk. By focusing on the processes through which regulatory issues emerged and changed during the Panyu campaign, this article highlights the regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in a context of regulatory uncertainty, and campaigns against “locally unwanted land uses” more broadly.

Conceptions of Corruption, Its Causes, and Its Cure

Corruption was an obsession of eighteenth-century political theorists, and the target of radicals of all stripes at the end of the century. The obverse of the coin was a perhaps too uncritical worship of the stern republicans of ancient Rome and Sparta - the latter being notoriously open to bribes, and as greedy as the next man when not at home under the watchful eyes of their fellows. I begin with Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees emphasized the good effects of our less admirable desires, and the bad effects to be expected of any return to ancient austerity - a proto-Keynesian argument; I then explore Hume's defence of the balance achieved in British constitutional arrangements by essentially corrupt methods which enabled the monarchy to counterbalance the populist pressures of parliament by offering sinecures and near-sinecures - 'jobbery,' to put it briefly. Then I turn to the counterargument, essentially to Bentham's arguments for an inqusitorial political system in which every government officer would be exposed to scrutiny; here the notion of transparency begins to do some work, because Bentham's claim that any committee that was not an inquisition would be a screen rests on the thought that making government visible is the essential step to making it both cheap and honest.

Education, Jobs, and Equity in the Middle East and North Africa

In this paper, I describe the employment problems of Middle Eastern youth in terms of a credentialist equilibrium, in which investments in education have mainly served to secure desired public sector jobs. These problems are low productivity of education, high youth unemployment, and long waiting times between graduation and a first job as youth queue for public sector jobs. The outcomes can be directly linked to past (successful) efforts of nationalist governments that promoted modernization and social and economic mobility by linking government jobs to formal schooling. This strategy has been failing in recent decades because of the shrinking ability of the public sector to hire graduates and the rapidly rising population of youth. An important reason for the longevity of the policies that have created these adverse outcomes, and of the authoritarian bargain that has characterized Middle Eastern societies, is that their implementation was relatively meritocratic and free of the type of corruption that pervaded other government operations. In the early stages, access to schools and government jobs were based on performance in school rather than social class. However, evidence shows that even this aspect of the authoritarian bargain has eroded in recent years. Success in schools has increasingly come to depend on parental background and place of birth, thus undermining the legitimacy of the state-led education and employment strategy. I argue that reform of the exiting systems, in particular replacing the role of the public sector as the principal employer of educated youth with the private sector, is fraught with difficulties because populist pressures call for more, not less, state interventions and redistribution.

Public Provision for Urban Water: Getting Prices and Governance Right

Public sector monopolies are often associated with inefficiencies and inability to meet rising demand. Scholars attribute this to fundamental problems associated with public provision: (1) a tradition of below‐cost pricing due to populist pressures, (2) owner–regulator conflicts of interest, and (3) perverse organizational incentives arising from non‐credible threat of bankruptcy, weak competition, rigidities, and agency and performance measurement problems. Many governments worldwide have shifted to private provision, but recent experience in urban water utilities in developing countries has shown their limitations because of weak regulatory regimes compounded by inherent problems of information, incentives, and commitment. This article examines the paradoxical case of the Phnom Penh Water Supply in Cambodia to illustrate how public provision of urban water can be substantially improved by getting prices and governance right. Findings have implications for the search for solutions to provide one billion people worldwide with better access to potable water.

The Exclusion–Inclusion Spectrum in State and Community Response to Sex Offenders in Anglo-American and European Jurisdictions

Continental European and Anglo-American jurisdictions differ with regard to criminal justice and community responses to sex offenders on an exclusion-inclusion spectrum ranging from community protection measures on one end to therapeutic programs in the middle and restorative justice measures on the other end. In the United States, populist pressure has resulted in a community protection approach exemplified by sex offender registration, community notification, and civil commitment of violent sexual predators. Although the United Kingdom and Canada have followed, albeit more cautiously, the American trend to adopt exclusionist community protection measures, these countries have significant community-based restorative justice initiatives, such as Circles of Support and Accountability. Although sex offender crises have recently occurred in continental Europe, a long-standing tradition of the medicalization of deviance, along with the existence of social structural buffers against the influence of victim-driven populist penal movements, has thus far limited the spread of formal community protection responses.

China's Courts: Restricted Reform

AbstractChina's courts have in recent years engaged in significant reforms designed to raise the quality of their work. Yet such top-down reforms have been largely technical and are not designed to alter courts' power. Courts have also encountered new challenges, including rising populist pressures, which may undermine their authority. The most important changes in China's courts have come from the ground up: local courts have engaged in significant innovation, and horizontal interaction among judges is facilitating the development of professional identity. Recent developments have largely avoided two central questions facing China's courts: why have courts been permitted to develop even limited new roles, and what additional roles, if any, may they play within the Chinese political system?

European Union Policy on Asylum and Immigration. Addressing the Root Causes of Forced Migration: A Justice and Home Affairs Policy of Freedom, Security and Justice?

Abstract This paper contributes to the debate on the development of the future common European Union Policy on Asylum and Immigration. It seeks to explain the rationale behind the evolution of the Union's policy outlook on asylum and immigration. It then analyses the most recent Union‐wide policy tools available to address asylum and migration issues, arguing that common European asylum policies thus far have focused on containment of migration flows seen as a threat to the European internal security regime and in response to perceived populist pressures. The return and readmission clauses now being implemented, in agreements with countries outside of the Union, serve to illustrate this point, as does the political willingness to extra‐territorialize asylum processing. However, the focus on eliminating the root causes of migration flows is a relatively new paradigm, developed since the 1999 Tampere European Council. Although off to a slow start, the European Union Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument may become an institutional outlet to create a more normative framework for asylum and migration. The success of such a framework is contingent upon breaking with earlier conceptualizations of “asylum” as a security threat. Implicit in such a framework is the need to retain a clear distinction between asylum‐ and labour‐related migration. Partnerships must also be granted a budget sufficient for their establishment in real terms with countries of origin and transit. Lastly, there must be changes in modes of governance, as well as institutional reform, if efforts to elaborate a strategy on asylum and migration are to be executed successfully. Curiously, while the proposed Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe sought to abolish the pillar structure put in place by the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, it would have retained the institutional inhibitions imposed by long‐existing tensions between national and community administrations and the “inter‐pillar” battles between the foreign policy, humanitarian and development dimensions of the EU apparatus. The current political debate about moving Europe “closer to its people”, following the rejection of the proposed Constitution at national referenda in France and the Netherlands, appears unlikely to solve any of these tensions.

Trends and regional differences in testosterone prescribing in Australia, 1991-2001.

To analyse temporal trends and geographical variations in testosterone prescribing in Australia. An analysis of testosterone prescribing over the past 11 years according to products and region, determined by Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) expenditure in Australian states and territories. Patterns of monthly PBS expenditure on injectable, oral and implantable testosterone products from 1 January 1991 to 30 December 2001, classified by state or territory. There were two periods (1993-1994 and 1998-1999) of striking upsurge followed by declines in national total prescribing of testosterone. These changes were more prominent for oral than injectable testosterone products, and patterns were similar in all regions, apart from a disproportionately higher peak in Western Australia in 1998. On a per-capita basis, Western Australia showed a dramatic increase in prescribing of oral and implantable, but not injectable, testosterone coinciding with the opening of a franchised men's sexual health clinic in Perth. The two striking upsurges in testosterone prescribing despite no convincing new evidence to justify them appear to reflect promotional activity to prescribe testosterone for older men, rather than overcoming the underdiagnosis of androgen deficiency related to pituitary or testicular disease in younger men. The curtailments after the introduced restrictions to PBS prescribing for older men without overt androgen deficiency were partial and temporary, suggesting that such regulatory barriers are only partly successful in counteracting the commercial and populist pressure driving excessive testosterone prescribing. Professional and community education is needed for appropriate diagnosis of genuine androgen deficiency in younger men, while discouraging unproven testosterone treatment for ageing men.

Our Corporate Federalism and the Shape of Corporate Law

In the public debate sparked by the corporate scandals of the last years, Delaware has been strikingly absent. In contrast to the high profile activity of Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock exchanges, federal prosecutors, and even state law enforcement officials, Delaware has been largely mute: no legislation; no rule-making; no criminal investigations; few headlines. In this Article, we use Delaware's relative passivity during this latest episode of corporate law-making as a starting point in the analysis of the shape of American corporate federalism and Delaware's place within it.We argue that Delaware long ago opted for what we will call a or 19th-century common law model of corporate law-making. In Delaware, corporate law is largely judge-made; judicial opinions are filled with quasi-deterministic reasoning; statutory law is comparatively narrow and rarely subject of partisan disputes; the judiciary as well is relatively non-partisan and has claim to technical expertise; and the law is enforced through litigation brought by private parties. We view these traits through the lens of the institutional and political landscape in which Delaware must operate. This landscape is characterized by a federalist system in which Delaware's regulatory powers co-exist with, and can be constrained by, the powers of the federal government. In this system, Delaware is faced with the threat that populist pressures will lead to a federal preemption of Delaware corporate law and thus eradicate the huge profits Delaware derives from being the domicile of choice for public-traded U.S. corporations. By creating and enhancing an apolitical gloss over Delaware's corporate law, the various traits we identify help shield Delaware against this threat. At the same time, the scope of Delaware's corporate law is designed to minimize conflicts by assuring that Delaware has the requisite personal jurisdiction over defendants to enforce its law effectively and that the prevailing conflict rules point to substantive Delaware law as applicable to a corporate law dispute. But this classical model of law making carries with it intrinsic limitations. Specifically, legal change is slow, standard-based and incremental. Faced with the recent corporate scandals, calls for action, and Sturm und Drang, Delaware reacted accordingly: Basically, it does nothing until cases are brought. Any more pro-active response by Delaware actors would have threatened to undermine the political legitimacy achieved by Delaware's commitment to the classical common law model. But because the classical common law style, together with jurisdictional and conflict rules, constrain Delaware, federal law is needed to complement Delaware's. In that respect, the relation between federal law and Delaware law is symbiotic, rather than antagonistic: Delaware is happy to have federal law pick up the slack and thereby reduce the likelihood that ineffective regulation produces a populist backlash.

The Cry for Land: Agrarian Reform, Gender and Land Rights in Uzbekistan

Agrarian reform in Uzbekistan has been informed by contradictory objectives and priorities. Legislation has oscillated between measures to increase private access to land, in line with populist pressures and the structural reform agenda of international agencies, and counter–measures to tighten and restrict such access in response to the Government imperative of retaining control over the production and export earnings of cotton. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the provinces of Andijan and Khorezm in 2000–1, this article analyses the role of gendered divisions of labour in the maintenance of a commercial cotton sector alongside a smallholder economy that has become the mainstay of rural livelihoods since the post–Soviet collapse of public sector employment and wages. It also discusses the outcomes of different types of farm restructuring and highlights the gender differentiated outcomes of a reform process that forces a growing number of women out of the recorded labour force into casual, unremunerated and informal work.

South Africa 1999: The ANC and Democratic Consolidation

Two days before South Africa’s national election on June 2, 1999, Business Day—the country’s “quality” national daily newspaper—pronounced that “on balance” its vote was going to the African National Congress (ANC) for the job it had done since 1994. The government’s performance could have been better, it opined, but it could also have been a lot worse:The ruling party deserves credit for the relative social stability SA has enjoyed since 1994. Its macroeconomic management, while not flawless, has been impressive. It has resisted taking the populist route. That it has been able and willing to do so is thanks, in part, to the strong 62% majority it won at the last election. ANC leaders might have felt less able to resist populist pressures had the majority been narrower.After an uncertain start, the ANC has begun to deliver the improvements to the quality of life of its primary constituency, the black majority. Maintaining fiscal discipline while delivering on at least some election promises in the midst of an emerging markets crisis has been a remarkable balancing act.Nevertheless, we cannot overlook some severe flaws and failures. The school system is a mess. Crime could have been more effectively dealt with. The performance of many ANC-run provincial governments has been abysmal. Notwithstanding its anti-corruption talk, it has displayed a reluctance to act firmly against culprits seen as party loyalists. All of which emphasizes the need for an effective opposition—if one can be found.

South Africa 1999: The ANC and Democratic Consolidation

Two days before South Africa’s national election on June 2, 1999, Business Day —the country’s “quality” national daily newspaper—pronounced that “on balance” its vote was going to the African National Congress (ANC) for the job it had done since 1994. The government’s performance could have been better, it opined, but it could also have been a lot worse: The ruling party deserves credit for the relative social stability SA has enjoyed since 1994. Its macroeconomic management, while not flawless, has been impressive. It has resisted taking the populist route. That it has been able and willing to do so is thanks, in part, to the strong 62% majority it won at the last election. ANC leaders might have felt less able to resist populist pressures had the majority been narrower. After an uncertain start, the ANC has begun to deliver the improvements to the quality of life of its primary constituency, the black majority. Maintaining fiscal discipline while delivering on at least some election promises in the midst of an emerging markets crisis has been a remarkable balancing act. Nevertheless, we cannot overlook some severe flaws and failures. The school system is a mess. Crime could have been more effectively dealt with. The performance of many ANC-run provincial governments has been abysmal. Notwithstanding its anti-corruption talk, it has displayed a reluctance to act firmly against culprits seen as party loyalists. All of which emphasizes the need for an effective opposition—if one can be found.

Clientélismes et mafia

Namer, Gerard, Client Systems and Mafias ; The Italian example suggests that there is presently a convergence of economic and political client systems which has facilitated the success of the mafia. Such a situation may be emerging in France because of the weakness of democracy, the presence of existing client systems, capitalist deregulation and populist pressures.

Housing Finance Agency Allocations

At the height of the recession in the early 1980s, a multitude of state and locally sponsored housing finance agency programs were legislatively introduced in response to populist pressure. Many of these controversial programs utilized lower cost municipal bonds to subsidize private sector housing programs and had remarkable diversity in their stated objectives. This study focuses on one of these programs, the Ohio Housing Finance Program, which purported to address the needs of mainly first‐time home buyers. Housing program evaluations,while rarely done, are very important where publicborrowing is used to support them. Using county‐level demographic data for 1983, the empirical results suggest that the Ohio program’s target clientele, first time homebuyers, were the major beneficiaries of the program.