Right-wing Government Research Articles

Who pays for crime? Criminal violence, right-wing incumbents, and electoral accountability in Latin America

Are right-wing incumbents punished for failures in public security? Partisan accountability models predict greater sanctions for politicians who fail to deliver on issues they “own.” According to this logic, right-wing incumbents should suffer more from crime spikes. Contrary to this expectation, we show that right-wing governments are not always punished for sudden increases in crime just before an election. We take advantage of rich local crime data in Chile and Mexico to identify places that experienced a crime shock, and use a difference-in-differences design to illustrate the heterogeneous electoral effects of public security failures. We also provide survey evidence from 18 Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the main findings. We hold that right-wing incumbents’ greater electoral resilience to crime spikes could be explained by voters attributing security failures to exogenous factors or by voters still perceiving left-wing and centrist challengers as less competent at addressing crime.

Bolsonaro's Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Environmental Policies in Brazil

Bolsonaro's Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Environmental Policies in Brazil Luciene Cristina Risso and Clerisnaldo Rodrigues de Carvalho Translated by Liz Mason-Deese In the thirty years following the enactment of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, Indigenous and environmental rights advanced through policies and actions that led to important results, as shown by the decrease in annual deforestation rates. It is worth pointing out that providing socio-environmental protections and development has always been an arduous and, at times, paradoxical task for the Brazilian state, as there are copious economic interests fighting against and overriding the rights in question. However, previous governments never gave up and were successfully able to reduce deforestation and comply with international treaties and programs, in which Brazil played a prominent role. Since 2019, when Bolsonaro's government—characterized by a reactionary posi tion in relation to those issues, including a pronouncement against environmental conservation and the demarcation of Indigenous lands and in favor of economic sectors interested in exploring the Amazon—came to power, problems related to these matters have intensified. To achieve its objectives, the government elaborated a series of anti-policies connected by omissions, negligence, and the dismantling of environmental and Indigenous institutions. That scenario of devastation favored groups and individuals that felt they had the right to invade Indigenous lands and deforest the Amazon rainforest. Government actions converged to make those protected lands available for land grabs, agribusiness, and mining, similar to what happened during the period of military rule (1964-1985). Bolsonaro was trained by the [End Page 183] Brazilian army, has publicly expressed nostalgia for the dictatorship era, and has never hidden the fact that he considers the regime's torturers and other human rights' abusers to be heroes. The government's support base includes a large wing of the armed forces. It could be considered an extreme right-wing government, with indicators of authoritarian behavior such as rejecting the Constitution, promoting anti-democratic acts, restricting environmental and Indigenous rights, denying political opponents' legitimacy, promoting violence (including praising dictatorial governments and favoring arming the population), and the propensity to restrict opponents' civil liberties, especially those of the media (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 33-34). Its political economic management continues to be based on the primary sector, the export of natural resources to the global market, which redirects the political economy in general toward a process of re-primarization and deindustrialization. Within the framework of the international division of labor, it is nothing more than a neocolonization of the world in which, in exchange terms, nation-states appear as commodity producers. This approach is not exclusive to the Bolsonaro government, but the intensification of this process in an extended state demonstrates the fact of a new political and economic framework of the capitalist periphery, orchestrated by capitalist accumulation schemes in the global hierarchy. The weakening of the nation state, privatization, and financialization are this framework's conduits of leverage on a vector scale, given the capitalist crisis and the new ordering of the global economic power hierarchy. The result and effect of this is that Brazil has become a zone of primary neocolonization of its economy, following the more general interests of the dominant Brazilian classes subordinated to global capitalism. It is well-known that the State under capitalism is a central element of capitalist accumulation and, in order for it to survive, it requires the existence or the creation of a new space for accumulation because "the internal contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographic landscapes. That is the tune to which the historical geography of capitalism must dance without cease" (Harvey, 2001, p. 333). That is the meaning of accumulation in Brazil today, with the support of the Brazilian nation state tied to orbits of capital reproduction. In this sense, with the support of the international extreme right, neoliberal finance, and economic agents that destroy the environment, which are symbiotically associated with internal/external cleavages, the Brazilian state infringes upon the constitutional rights of the environment and Indigenous peoples, especially in the Amazonian region, as well as forests (the loci and natural habitats of those peoples and other communities). It does so...

Incumbent-Aligned Terrorism and Voting Behavior: Evidence from Argentina’s 1973 Elections

What is the relationship between domestic terrorism and voting behavior? Past research notes the prevalence of domestic terrorist attacks in democratic regimes, but focuses primarily on such violence as a “weapon of the weak.” We extend this literature by focusing on terrorism by incumbent-aligned armed groups and argue these actors use selective violence against political elites to delegitimize the political opposition and provide credible signals of the instability and unrest that is likely to accompany a transfer of power. Using data from two Argentine presidential elections in 1973, we evaluate the relationship between incidents of violence and changes in two measures of voting behavior—vote share and turnout. Consistent with expectations, left-wing political violence between elections reduced right-wing vote share but did not reduce turnout. Additional tests support the mechanism that violence increased voters’ doubts about a potential right-wing government’s ability to govern, and show violence is correlated with future repression.

“Selective Friendship at the Fund”: United States Allies, Labor Conditions, and the International Monetary Fund’s Legitimacy

This article discusses the International Monetary Fund’s recent effort to garner legitimacy by incorporating the reduction of economic inequality in its lending programs. It argues that the impact of the US as a major shareholder on conditionality and geopolitical considerations beyond objective and measurable economic necessities detract from these efforts to expand legitimacy. Using a panel data analysis of International Monetary Fund programs between 1980 and 2013, the article shows that US-allied left-wing governments receive a larger number of labor conditions in their programs compared to non-allied and right-wing governments. The article argues that this is part of left-wing governments’ strategy of maintaining their alliance with the US and demonstrating ideological proximity. In exchange, the US uses its influence to secure fewer conditions in total for its allied governments. This not only shifts the burden of adjustment on labor groups but also harms the Fund’s procedural legitimacy, as conditions are not objectively determined. It also has adverse implications for outcome legitimacy by distorting economic policies and outcomes and increasing income inequality.

The politics of public health investments

Public health investments help to prevent mortality and reduce health care costs. Yet very few studies have examined the determinants of preventive care investments across countries and over time. We develop a theory of health spending priorities contrasting preventive and curative care. Preventive care is particularly unlikely to be prioritized by governments since it is a public good that requires the allocation of scarce resources in the present to generate diffuse benefits that unfold only in the long-term. As such, public health is a “quiet” policy that is not supported by interest groups or public opinion. These characteristics have two implications: like other long-term investments, public health programs are particularly vulnerable to fiscal austerity, and prevention expenditures are not influenced by government partisanship since parties cannot attract votes with such low visibility, long term investments. We use a dataset covering 25 OECD countries from 1970 to 2018 to demonstrate that fiscal consolidations are negatively associated with the absolute level of preventive care and with its proportion relative to curative care. We also confirm that left-wing governments are not more likely to invest in public health than right-wing governments. Finally, contributing to the literature on comparative health care systems, we show that National Health Services systems maintain higher preventive care investments than Social Health Insurance systems.

Israel’s new government and the implications for Israeli foreign policy

As a result of legislative elections held in November 2022, Israel is forming what will be its most right-wing government in history and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will return to power for a third time. The government will include ministers deferential to the wishes of Israel’s growing Haredi (strict Jewish Orthodox) community, which will inflame domestic tensions about the group’s influence on public policy. The government’s decisions will have significant effects on Palestinian issues, Israel’s approach to Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear programme and its relationships with the United States and with other countries in the Middle East.

On the Character and Causes of Inequality in Latin America

On the Character and Causes of Inequality in Latin America

Reaching out to the unbanked: The role of political ideology in financial inclusion

This paper studies the effect of political ideology on household financial inclusion. Financial inclusion is the access to formal financial services and provides an entry key for people to participate in the economy. Using granular data of 65 countries, we find that financial inclusion is higher under right-wing regimes than under left-wing governments. We use regression discontinuity design and propensity-score matching to address endogeneity issues. We investigate multiple channels for the effect and conclude that right-wing market-oriented policies are more successful in enhancing financial inclusion than left-wing societal policies.

Shifting Boundaries of ‘Perceived’ Legitimacy

Our article focuses on the farmers’ protests, one of the longest sets of protests in independent India (September 2020 - December 2021). Indian farmers carried out an arduous protest movement on the borders of the nation’s capital, New Delhi, against the three farm laws passed by the Parliament under the ruling right-wing government of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP). These laws, which claimed to liberalize India’s agricultural markets and encourage contract farming, were perceived by farmers and farmer organizations as an attempt to corporatize Indian agriculture, threatening the farmers’ livelihoods and autonomy. We examine three animative scenarios staged as part of their demands to repeal the farm laws- first, farmers’ demonstrating in bitter cold - living in temporary tenements, sharing food and stories; second, the violent clashes that unfolded on January 26, 2021 eroding support for the movement; and finally, farm leader Tikait’s emotional breakdown on national television, which infused fresh calls for solidarity and strength into the movement. We cite these events to draw attention to the embedded structures of inequality that pervade contemporary protests, rehearsing historical communitarian and democratic ethics in the present moment. We see these scenarios as offering an expansive vocabulary of dissent that must be accounted for in any contextual analysis of contemporary protests. We engage with questions of ‘perceived’ legitimacy to ask if there is an acceptable way of protesting. What motivates people to extend their support and solidarity? What determines the grounds of a movement’s legitimacy: claims made, or the manner in which they are performed or perceived? We argue that legitimacy is not determined or shaped in or for perpetuity; it is constantly shifting, and its coordinates need analytical attentiveness and reinterpretation.

Including the "Nation's Enemies": The Long Politics of Recognition and Restitution during the Third Greek Republic (1974–2006)

In 1974, democracy was restored in Greece and the state had to shift the boundaries of social and political exclusion. Nevertheless, the first right-wing governments did not accept the Left's symbolic legitimacy and integration into the nation. They refused to recognize the left-wing Resistance, while the Left opposition tried to establish the National Resistance as a central landmark in national history. PASOK's rise to power in 1981 altered the state's policy on the past. They incorporated EAM's legacy into national history, creating a new foundational myth with new silences and new voices. ND began to adopt a more inclusive stance, but when they came to power in 1990 they overhauled the process that had recognized the left-wing Resistance. PASOK's return to power in 1993 did not manage to resolve the many pending issues. Coming to terms with the Greek past was not a straightforward, linear process but rather a long, tangled, and arduous one, the end of which is not yet clear.

The strengths and limits of neoliberal populism: the statism and mass organisation of contemporary rightwing regimes

ABSTRACT ‘Neoliberal populism’, as both concept and mode of government, has peculiar capacities and strengths. But the concept should not be overstretched, and the strength of pure neoliberal populism should not be overestimated. The most resilient of the regimes that have been labelled ‘neoliberal populist’ (Erdoğan’s Turkey and Orbán’s Hungary) could not go beyond ten years without mobilising statist tools much more heavily than others. In comparison to them, earlier Latin American, Eastern European, and Southeast Asian neoliberal populist governments have had relatively short tenures. Moreover, our theoretical approach to populism needs to be thoroughly revised to make analytical sense of the mass organisational bases of some rightwing regimes. The strongest of today’s rightwing populist regimes are differentiated from earlier and contemporary neoliberal populist cases by their statist policy tools and mass organisational underpinnings.

The influence of political ideology on greenhouse gas emissions

This research tests the casual link from political ideology to national greenhouse gas emissions by utilizing multinational panel data covering 98 countries during the period 1990–2016. Overall, the baseline results and robustness tests show a political divide on national greenhouse gas emissions, whereby compared to right-wing governments, left-wing governments are more likely to exhibit less carbon dioxide emissions. We further explore this topic from the perspectives of energy efficiency and education. Three-stage OLS regressions suggest that leftist parties increase energy efficiency and spend more on secondary education, which lead to less greenhouse gas emissions. We also introduce the interaction between political ideology and economic performance as well as globalization to test the moderating effects of economic performance and globalization. The study further looks into the interaction effects of political ideology and democracies on greenhouse gas emissions by dividing the whole sample into two sub-samples. The results indicate that the ideology effect on greenhouse gas emissions varies among countries with different economic performances or different degrees of political globalization, as well as between democracies and non-democracies.

How partisan politics influence government policies in response to ageing populations

Since old-age programmes mitigate life-course risks that are relevant to individuals across socio-economic groups in ageing societies, all parties have a political incentive to support these initiatives. Nevertheless, pre-existing partisan commitments bind the policy instruments that parties use. Cabinet-level analyses of OECD economies demonstrate that left incumbency relies more on public expenditure than right-wing governments. What is more important is that, in the context of large elderly populations, pension coverage is greater under right-leaning governments, while pension replacement rates are higher in left-leaning governments. This shows that party behaviour related to life course-related policies cannot be explained by the conventional pro-expansion versus the pro-retrenchment partisan politics. Rather, a focus on partisan variation in the use of policy instruments is required.1

Land occupation as a form of peasant struggle in Turkey, 1965–1980

AbstractThis article contributes to the literature on rural politics in Turkey by investigating peasants’ land occupations between 1965 and 1980. We show that agricultural modernization after 1945 created the structural conditions for land conflicts by enabling the reaching of the frontier of cultivable land and facilitating landlords’ displacement of tenants. The 1961 Constitution’s promise of land reform and the rise of the center-left and socialist politics helped peasants press for land reform by combining direct action and legalistic discourse. Moreover, the vastness of state-owned land and the incompleteness of cadastral records allowed peasants to challenge landlords’ ownership claims. During land occupations, villagers often claimed that contested areas were public property illegally encroached upon by landlords, and that the state was constitutionally obliged to distribute it to peasants. Although successive right-wing governments decreed these actions to be intolerable violations of property rights, their practical approach was more flexible and conciliatory. Although nationwide land reform was never realized, land occupations extracted considerable concessions via the distribution of public land and inexpensive land sold by landlords.

Epistemes of human rights in Kashmir: Paradoxes of universality and particularity

Human rights violations through militarized control have been the cornerstone of Indian statecraft in Indian-administered Kashmir. This article offers a close reading of the April 2017 episode of using a civilian Kashmiri Muslim man as a human shield by the Indian Army in Indian-administered Kashmir. Whereas the existing scholarship on the relationship between militarization, human rights violations, and Hindutva politics have employed political or feminist analytical frameworks, this article focuses on rereading the episode of human shield usage to analyze how “universality” of human rights in India is being redefined. It reflects on how the ruling right-wing government in India appropriates the language of violations and afflictions to embolden its strategies to alter the grammar of human rights in India. Drawing on a discourse analysis of the human shield event, the article deliberates on how anthropology of Hindutva and right-wing extremism research could pay greater attention to the conversation between Hindutva theology of rights and neoliberal ethics when approaching questions of recurrent human rights violations in Kashmir.

Transformation of Civil Society in Poland under the United Right Government

Recent scholarship points to a growing political prominence of various non-liberal civil society organizations in many countries around the world. In Poland, this phenomenon is simultaneous with the emergence of political division in civil society driven by the policies of the United Right government. I argue that a wider historical perspective emphasizing reciprocal connections between civil society organizations and political parties helps to understand this recent surge. In Poland, the growing division in civil society builds upon the relationship between right-wing political parties and civil society organizations bound together since the beginning of the 1990s by the common vision of social memory. After taking power in 2015, the right-wing coalition in Poland centralized the supervision over the distribution of funds to civil society, providing financial support to organizations closer to its conservative agenda. At the same time, organizations that have been in frequent conflict with the right-wing government due to their main area of focus (human rights, anti-discrimination, women’s rights, environmental protection, and immigration) had limited access to government funding and were presented in a negative light by the government as well as its allied organizations and the state-controlled media. The argument in this article is based on secondary data about the organizational sphere of civil society and a case study of a set of right-wing civil society organizations, Gazeta Polska clubs.

Right-Wing Populism and the European Parliament’s Agonistic Politics

Abstract How is it that the European Parliament (EP), the only directly elected institution of the European Union (EU), has both empowered right-wing populist politicians in the UK and France, and helped challenge the right-wing populist governments of Hungary and Poland? Part of the response lies in institutional rules shaping the EP’s elections and its authority, which this article discusses critically. The paradoxical impact of the EP on European right-wing populism leads to another question: Should the EP privilege the rights of right-wing populist and anti-system actors; or, to the contrary, should it “protect democracy against democracy”? This article draws from political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic politics to assess comparatively the measures the EP majority has taken to limit the influence of right-wing populists within the chamber and beyond in EU member states. It critiques the exclusionary cordon sanitaire within, and conditionality and the “judicialization of conflicts” without, which the EP discusses passionately also.

Disentangling the Vernacular in Bolivia and Decolonising the Law

Abstract This piece critically engages with the spaces of encounter between indigenous peoples and the (Bolivian) State by exploring indigenous subordination and inequalities in a socio-legal sense. It explores ‘epistemological oppression’ and ‘epistemological hesitance’ as it arises and is being responded to in i) the vernacular, in empirical realities, ii) in constitutional law and its principles, iii) and in international legal orders including indigenous peoples’ rights regimes. In a first step, indigenous knowledge is conceptualised and contextualised, understanding said encounters in the light of Bolivian constitutionalism and recent regressive indigenous politics under the intermittent right-wing government. Empirical, grassroots perspectives provide further insights into power dynamics and internalised asymmetries which become relevant to understand the knowledge-law nexus. In turn, we disentangle the constitutive elements of neo-colonial subordination, drawing on concepts of sovereignty, self-determination, citizenship and collective rights, and political recognition. Finally, hope is placed in the decolonising function of the law, international law in particular in the way it may reposition indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the State. A dedicated focus is placed on indigenous knowledge and its consideration in current jurisprudential developments. Constitutional law – Andean developments in particular – too is taken as a legal starting point for contextualising indigenous-State encounters, seen with decolonising lenses. In that sense, contemporary State architectures serve as unavoidable spaces of articulation that may reinforce neo-colonial tendencies through classical Western constitutionalism or create ambitious venues for indigenous rights to be recognised in a plural legal landscape.

Policy Legacies, Sociopolitical Coalitions, and the Limits of the Right Turn in Latin America: The Argentine Case in Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACTAfter more than a decade of leftist governments in Latin America, the left turn began to reverse course, giving way to the rise of rightist political forces. Even moderate right-wing governments undertook reforms to reduce public spending. This agenda, however, encountered important obstacles. Focusing on the 2017 Argentine pension reform and based on extensive qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with key players, the findings here uphold previous work on the strength of policy legacies in opposition to promarket reforms. This study contributes to the existing theory by showing that protests against retrenchment favor the formation of opposition coalitions only in places where left-leaning governments had established inroads with organized popular sectors, maintaining relationships of coordination and collaboration. In these cases, the cost of specific reforms can jeopardize the broader project of retrenchment.

Policy drift in ideologically heterogeneous governments: tax policy in Latin America

Abstract The relation between taxation and partisanship is a widely studied topic in Political Science. However, previous works have provided conflicting findings without clarifying which parties are most prone to progressive taxation. These studies also did not consider one distinctive feature of Latin American politics: coalition governments. Using the level of direct tax collection as a proxy for progressive taxation and panel data of Latin American countries since 1990, we investigate how progressive taxes vary across a scale of ideology observed in the executive branch along with the ideological heterogeneity of its coalition. The results show that ideologically heterogeneous governments present a policy drift, as the policies being enacted depart from parties’ original preferences. Homogeneous left-wing governments collect more direct taxes than ideologically heterogeneous coalitions led by governments with the same ideology. The same dynamic is observed with homogeneous right-wing governments, which collect more indirect taxes in ideologically homogeneous coalitions. These results create new paths of research highlighting the need to include the government’s composition in the analysis to understand policy design and the need to unravel the mechanism through which policy drift occurs in ideologically heterogeneous governments.