Durable Constitutional Rules and Rent Seeking

Many constitutional political economists argue that the length of time constitutions remain in effect distinguishes constitutional politics from legislative politics. The author explores the role of constitutional durability in a repeated rent-seeking game. A general interest (e.g., consumers) in the game can lobby for a constitutional prohibition that prevents the rent-seeking contest from occurring. A durable constitution can reduce expected rent-seeking expenditures if constitutional politics occurs less frequently than legislative politics, stable rights to receive rents do not exist, and the general interest has a longer time horizon than rent seekers. Under these conditions, general interest lobbying for a constitutional prohibition denies transfers to future rent seekers unable to participate in politics today.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Fiscal discipline and exchange rates : does politics matter?

We look at the effect of exchange rate regimes on fiscal discipline, taking into account the effect of underlying political conditions. We present a model where strong politics (defined as policymakers facing longer political horizon and higher cohesion) are associated with better fiscal performance, but fixed exchange rates may revert this result and lead to less fiscal discipline. We confirm these hypotheses through regression analysis performed on a panel sample covering 79 countries from 1975 to 2012. Our empirical results also show that the positive effect of strong politics on fiscal discipline is not enough to counter the negative impact of being at/moving to fixed exchange rates. Our results are robust to a number of important sensitivity checks, including different estimators, alternative proxies for fiscal discipline, and sub-sample analysis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Practicing concrete universality : psychoanalysis as a political method : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Lacanian psychoanalysis, embodied in contemporary thought by Slavoj Žižek's dialectical materialist rehabilitation of universality, enables a form of political analysis based on the possibility of structural change. Many political theorists argue that because psychoanalysis stresses the negative ontological base of the social (the Real) it is fundamentally conservative and nihilistic. Conversely, the very political value of psychoanalysis lies in its accent on the Real. However, there are two separate psychoanalytic perspectives on the Real. The idealist approach, which contends that every social construction is essentially conditional, is politically and theoretically limited. In contrast, Žižek's materialist perspective emphasises the fundamental fixity which lies in the necessary exclusion from a universal horizon. Thus, the main political insight of Lacanian psychoanalysis is not to reveal the contingency of the social, but rather the disavowed foundation on which these constructions are based; the concrete universal. This thesis argues for a Žižek-inspired psychoanalytic approach to the political which 'practices concrete universality'. Conversely, while Žižek himself considers his own theoretical endeavours as an application of this task, his work can appear to be at times abstract and obscure, such that the reader is not sure exactly what it is that Žižek is arguing. As such, this thesis seeks to develop a methodological position that practices concrete universality, taking on the fundamental insights of Žižek's position whilst grounding them in a methodology which can be applied for political intervention. The methodology analyses both the manner in which universal imaginaries domesticate the effect of the symptom (that which represents the concrete universal) and the possibilities for practicing concrete universality and in doing so evoking radical structural change. These possibilities are considered against global capital, which Žižek describes as a modality of the Real. Capital has produced a paradoxical and pressing condition in humanity is living both well beyond and beneath its material needs and the finite capacity of the planet to provide for those needs. Rather than seeking an impossible utopian revolution (the removal of all lack), by evoking the concrete universal it is hoped that humanity can rid itself of that lack which is historical contingent; global capital

Du Bois's Horizon: Documenting Movements of the Color Line

This article examines W. E. B. Du Bois' work with The Horizon, an early African American Magazine

Rewriting Modernity

This article rereads Paul Virilio, drawing on the distinctionbetween topography and topology to argue a case for Virilio as a rewriter of modernity. Invoking Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of rewriting modernity as an unbroken process of accumulation founded on affective life in “Re-writing Modernity” and “Argumentation and Presentation: The Foundation Crisis,” it enlists topology as a horizontal spatial structure that enables us to rethink space, time,and modernity outside the limits of the “squared horizon,” where the“squared horizon” is viewed as a spatial and textual metaphor for framing perspectives on the past, present, and future. The analysis deconstructs the topography of the “squared horizon” as a relationality in an unfolding continuum, where spaces exist ontologically and where the immaterial forces of the dromospheric and the atmospheric generate a relational and historical connectedness

Not Making A Virtue Of A Necessity: Nancy Fraser On 'PostSocialist' Politics

A new politics is growing in influence and power across the industrialised world. Active but decentred, rebellious but non-programmatic, influential but not state-centred, this new politics is redefining radicalism. Raising issues around sexuality, gender, drugs, transport, the environment, ethnicity, computers and communication, democracy, music and the future of socialism, the new politics ventures into areas the timid political establishment does its best to avoid. Activists are beginning to reflect on their struggles, as journalists and intellectuals are recognising the importance of new politics. Storming the Millennium is the first book to bring a range of activists and intellectuals together in one volume. It provides first histories of new movements that are at the core of new politics and grapples with the important political and theoretical issues raised by new politics through interviews and analyses. Bringing together new and established writers, it discusses crime and justice, disabilities, bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender politics, race issues in 1990s Britain, activism on the Internet, gender politics and the relationship between new politics, the New Left and socialism. Nancy Fraser, one of the most influential voices of contemporary Anglo-American feminist theory, has worked in the encounters between socialism and postmodernism and between feminism and postmodernism. Her work has been key in the development of feminist theoretical perspectives that are not immobilized by critiques of 'big sister' feminism or 'big brother' socialism. Rather, she has articulated a feminist position that remains productive for political critique, retains some kind of feminist or critical project and finds a way beyond the impasse. Here she is interviewed about her critique of old-style socialist politics for their lack of feminist and ecological analyses, and on her views of new forms of activism

Tocqueville, Pascal, and the Transcendent Horizon

Most students of Tocqueville know of his remark, “There are three men with whom I live a little every day; they are Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.” In this paper I trace out the contours of Pascal’s influence upon Tocqueville’s understanding of the human condition and our appropriate response to it. Similar temperaments lead both Tocqueville and Pascal to emphasize human limitations and contingency, as Peter Lawler rightly emphasizes. Tocqueville and Pascal both emphasize mortality, ignorance of the most important subjects, the effects of historical contingency on what we take to be human nature, and both represent the complex internal dynamic of human nature in terms of the interplay of “angel” and “brute.” The most important difference between them concerns their relative estimates of human power and the significance of human action. Whereas the motif of human weakness is fundamental for Pascal, Tocqueville repeatedly affirms that, under the right conditions, human beings are “powerful and free.” Beginning from Pascalian premises, and endeavoring to be more faithful to some of those premises than Pascal himself was, Tocqueville aims to illuminate the possibility of an amelioration of the human condition through a “new political science” that redeems the political realm without divinizing it

Tocqueville, Pascal, and the Transcendent Horizon

Most students of Tocqueville know of his remark, “There are three men with whom I live a little every day; they are Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.” In this paper I trace out the contours of Pascal’s influence upon Tocqueville’s understanding of the human condition and our appropriate response to it. Similar temperaments lead both Tocqueville and Pascal to emphasize human limitations and contingency, as Peter Lawler rightly emphasizes. Tocqueville and Pascal both emphasize mortality, ignorance of the most important subjects, the effects of historical contingency on what we take to be human nature, and both represent the complex internal dynamic of human nature in terms of the interplay of “angel” and “brute.” The most important difference between them concerns their relative estimates of human power and the significance of human action. Whereas the motif of human weakness is fundamental for Pascal, Tocqueville repeatedly affirms that, under the right conditions, human beings are “powerful and free.” Beginning from Pascalian premises, and endeavoring to be more faithful to some of those premises than Pascal himself was, Tocqueville aims to illuminate the possibility of an amelioration of the human condition through a “new political science” that redeems the political realm without divinizing it