Salient Political Issue Research Articles

Satellites and commissars: strategy and conflict in the politics of Soviet-Bloc trade

Why did the Soviet Union squander the political leverage afforded by its trade subsidy to Eastern Europe? Why did Soviet officials fail to bargain with resolve, to link subsidies to salient political issues, to make credible commitments and to monitor the satellites' policies? Using formerly secret documents housed in archives in Moscow, Warsaw and Prague, as well as interviews with former Communist officials across Eastern Europe, this book attempts to answer these and other questions. The book argues that trade politics revolved around the incentives created by distorted prices on the Western market and those in the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Union made numerous attempts to reduce its implicit trade subsidy and increase the efficiency of the bloc, but the satellites managed consistently to outmanoeuvre Soviet negotiators. Drawing upon recent developments in bargaining and principal-agent theory, the book argues that the incentives created by domestic institutions weakened Soviet bargaining strategies. In effect, it suggests, perverse incentive structures in the Soviet economy were exported into Soviet foreign policy. Futhermore, the book argues, incentives to smother information were so deeply entrenched that they frustrated numerous attempts to reform Soviet institutions.

Gender Struggles in the British Labour Party from 1979 to 1995

This report examines the internal struggles that have taken place in the British Labour Party since 1979 to make gender a salient political issue and to increase the representation of women. I argue that the culture and organization of the Labour Party in 1979 provided an inhospitable terrain for women to organize around gender issues, but that since that time women have been able to use the spaces created by other agendas for party adaptation and change, particularly demands for party democratization and party modernization, to develop a gender-party dynamic which has allowed women to press their claims more effectively, but only in ways that are congruent with the leadership's modernization strategy.

Opinion Structure of Party Activists: The Reform Party of Canada

AbstractThis article provides a systematic examination of the social bases and ideological and policy orientations of the Reform party of Canada through a study of the attitudes of delegates attending its 1992 national assembly. We identify the core political attitudes of Reform activists, and examine whether their positions on policy matters are distinctive and whether they are characterized by internal cohesion or division. We then examine the party's mobilization strategy to determine the extent to which this strategy produces systematic cleavages among party activists. Our analysis reveals that Reform promotes a distinctive position on a number of salient political issues. However, we also challenge the view that Reform activists are united by a unidimensional right-wing ideology. We conclude by discussing the impact of party mobilization on future divisions within the party.

The Problem(s) of (Anishinaabe) History in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich: Voices and Contexts

The publication ofLove Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich are mi terventions in the writing f tribal histories. Disrupting he boundaries between history and fiction, her novels reflect variety of literary c nve tions, i scribing revisionist histories of the ultural borderlands ea the geographical center of North America. Her fictionalized reservation community and town lie athwart the bound ries of the woodlands and the plains. Its pop lation of India s, whites, and mixed-bloods i ermingle in efiance of standard social science cat gories. The s ries, taken as a whole, reflects historic changes th ough most of the twentieth century in su h instituions as tribal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he locally o ned butcher shop, the Catholic Church (and its schools), and the family. These institutional h stories are fr med within the personal narratives of Erd c 's fictio al c aracters. Most reviewers have commented on Erdrich's use of multiple n rrat rs, whose stories overlap, contradict, and comment on one another. For some, her shifting arrative point of view is the major flaw in her writing.' The bulk of her critics, on the other and, p a se Erdrich's narrative form. Russ ll B ks, for example, situates the orchestration of several points of view by Erdrich and others in terms of an effor t rediscover a narr tive form equal to a social and political vision radically di ferent fro the one we inherited from the mo ernists.2 Still others beli ve, as Jack Cady puts it, that [t]oo many demands are m de on the first-person short-story form, although Erdric b ings it mo t of the wa home.3 Both her avant-garde narrative structure and her use of one community over a series of novels raise questions regarding her interventions in history. To what extent does the multiplicity of voices in her novels challenge the conventions of objective history in their montage of partial truths and prejudicial interpretations? Do her works stimulate research on the part of scholars in literature who teach her works into the problems of Indian and tribal histories? How effective in raising pertinent issues is her fictional catastrophe in Tracks, with its resemblance to the historic White Earth timber scandal? What interpretive significance should be accorded novelistic histories when the author (and her husband-collaborater, Michael Dorris) insist that their work is only incidentally political? In the opening chapter of We Talk; You Listen (1970), Vmine Deloria, Jr. develops some questions regarding the content of the form in a society oriented increasingly toward instantaneous communication. Repeatedly asserting that the medium became the message, he observes that the children of the Depression generation learned the media of federal solutions for local problems. Both the demise of Kozka's butcher shop from Tracks through The Beet Queen and the double-edged entanglements of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Tracks and Love Medicine are salient political issues, extending beyond the Depression era in both directions. How do content and form intertwine with local, national, tribal, and universal concerns in Erdrich's historical fictions? Historical dialogues regarding assimilation are refigured in the contrast of the parallel spiritual autobiographies of Pauline, Sister Leopolda and her daughter Marie Lazarre (Kashpaw) and with the stories of cultural survival of Nanapush and Eli. Almost immediately, once she begins to speak about

Identification, Agreement and Government Performance: The Relative Impact on Voting*

Debating explanations of electoral behavior, American scholars have focused on three main theories: The identification model relying on underlying loyalty of voters towards specific parties; the political agreement or proximity model assuming a rational calculation of parties' ideological positions or stand on salient political issues as the yardstick for choice of party; and the investment model relying on voters' ability to calculate which government alternative will bring most utility for the individual voter. Examining these theories with the use of Norwegian data from the elections of 1965, 1969 and 1977, we find that the identification model is far the most powerful in predicting individual voting behavior. This model also has an edge in explaining support for the individual parties and the total distribution of voters. However, at the major postwar government election in 1965, the investment model certainly is of importance, and at the election in 1977 the significance of the proximity model has increased.

Origins of the Politics of Inflation in Chile, 1888-1918

oF THE LATIN AMERICAN REPUBLICS which have undergone severe inflation since the Great Depression, Chile alone has managed to maintain stable, constitutional government. Chile's uniqueness in this respect owes much to the tradition of political stability which distinguished that country in the nineteenth century; but it also reflects the success of the Chilean approach to controlling the conflict generated by inflation. As early as the 1930s Chile established the embryo of today's complex system of price controls and annual adjustments of wages and salaries to the cost of living. This policy has neither completely neutralized the effect of inflation on income distribution, nor prevented periodic attempts to curb inflation by sacrificing real wages, and therefore has not succeeded in eliminating inflation as a salient political issue. Nonetheless, judicious use of the price and wage machinery has attenuated the impact of inflation on the nonagricultural marginal, working, and middle classes, and thus has kept group conflict, which normally intensifies in an inflationary economy, within bounds. By adjusting income to prices, the Chilean system undeniably fosters the continuation of inflation; but in reducing the level of the accompanying conflict, it has served to insulate political institutions against a major threat to their stability. The efficacy of the Chilean solution is demonstrated by comparison with Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and the Uruguay, which since the 1930S