Worker remittances and the global preconditions of ‘smart development’

With the growing environmental crisis affecting our globe, ideas to weigh economic or social progress by the ‘energy input’ necessary to achieve it are increasingly gaining acceptance. This question is intriguing and is being dealt with by a growing number of studies, focusing on the environmental price of human progress. Even more intriguing, however, is the question of which factors of social organization contribute to a responsible use of the resources of our planet to achieve a given social result (‘smart development’). In this essay, we present the first systematic study on how migration – or rather, more concretely, received worker remittances per GDP – helps the nations of our globe to enjoy social and economic progress at a relatively small environmental price. We look at the effects of migration on the balance sheets of societal accounting, based on the ‘ecological price’ of the combined performance of democracy, economic growth, gender equality, human development, research and development, and social cohesion. Feminism in power, economic freedom, population density, the UNDP education index as well as the receipt of worker remittances all significantly contribute towards a ‘smart overall development’, while high military expenditures and a high world economic openness are a bottleneck for ‘smart overall development’

Political Party Mortality in Established Party Systems:A Hierarchical Competing Risks Approach

Existing scholarship offers few answers to fundamental questions about the mortality of political parties in established party systems. Linking party research to the organization literature, we conceptualize two types of party death, dissolution and merger, reflecting distinct theoretical rationales. They underpin a new framework on party organizational mortality theorizing three sets of factors: those shaping mortality generally and those shaping dissolution or merger death exclusively. We test this framework on a new data set covering the complete life cycles of 184 parties that entered 21 consolidated party systems over the last five decades, resorting to multilevel competing risks models to estimate the impact of party and country characteristics on the hazards of both types of death. Our findings not only show that dissolution and merger death are driven by distinct factors, but also that they represent separate logics not intrinsically related at either the party or systemic level

Football’s emerging market trade network: ego network approach to world systems theory

The football transfer market is a billion-pound industry, traditionally dominated by the European market. This has been challenged by the rise of relatively new markets emerging from China, Brazil, Turkey and Russia. Important countries within the market, they also challenge the traditional status order. While classical international trade theorists suggest that capital or resource advantage predicts trade, economic sociologists argue that a world-systems perspective economic relationships are a core component. Therefore, we analyse the football trade network of these emerging markets to understand the structure, specifically in relation to the world-systems perspective. Using social network analysis, we identify the network is structured analogously to a world-systems perspective with a core of European countries, a semi-periphery of developing countries and a periphery containing countries where football is less developed. Furthermore, Turkey and Brazil occupy structural holes acting as brokers between the core, semi-periphery and periphery positions which can be advantageous

Zum Zusammenhang von Geschlechterungleichheiten in Bildung, Beruf und Karriere : ein Ausblick

Ziel der folgenden Ausführungen im abschliessenden Teil dieses Sammelbands zur Entwicklung und Genese von geschlechtsspezifischen Bildungsungleichheiten ist es, den Blick zu öffnen in Richtung Berufsleben. Wie sind die verbesserten Bildungsmöglichkeiten von Frauen zu interpretieren? Ist es in den letzten Jahrzehnten gelungen, eines der grundlegendsten gesellschaftlichen Ungleichheitsverhältnisse zu beseitigen? Oder beginnt sich dieses sogar zu verkehren in eine gesellschaftliche Benachteiligung der Männer? Wir gehen bei unseren Überlegungen von der These aus, dass ein Abbau von Benachteiligungen der Frauen im Bildungssystem für sich genommen noch wenig aussagekräftig ist, wenn wir uns mit der klassischen soziologischen Frage der Persistenz bzw. des Wandels von gesellschaftlichen Ungleichheiten befassen wollen. Erst wenn die ganze Verknüpfung von Bildung und gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheit in den Blick genommen wird und sich dabei zeigt, dass Frauen ihre Bildungsgewinne auch in entsprechende Chancen im Beschäftigungssystem umsetzen können, sind ihre verbesserten Bildungschancen ein Gewinn für die Individuen und ein Fortschritt für die Gesellschaft – und erst dann könnten mögliche Bildungsvorteile von Frauen, wie sie in den vorliegenden Aufsätzen z.T. diagnostiziert werden, gar als neue gesellschaftliche Benachteiligungen von Männern skandalisiert werden

Signalling Demand for Foreign Investment: Postsocialist Countries in the Global Bilateral Investment Treaties Network

A unique dataset on bilateral investment treaties provides a novel source of evidence on the link between neoliberal globalisation and market transition. We argue that postsocialist countries of Europe and Eurasia, more than other developing regions in the world, signed such treaties to signal demand for foreign investment in the spirit of neoliberalism. We calculated the density of the whole BIT network since its inception in 1959 to 2009, and density and centrality of different regional blocks within it, and found strong support for our argument. Yet, even if bilateral investment treaties are designed to promote foreign direct investment, dynamic panel regression models show that signing them does not automatically translate into foreign direct investment inflows for postsocialist European and Eurasian countries in the 1990–2010 period

Combining deductive and inductive elements to measure party system responsiveness in challenging contexts: an approach with evidence from Latin America

Contexts outside the advanced developed democracies present a challenge to assessing how well party systems reflect voter preferences across over-arching policy dimensions because not all electorates readily interpret political conflict in dimensional terms. In this contribution, I advocate an approach suited for such contexts that combines deductive and inductive elements: It starts out with what observers consider the most important dividing lines in a party system, and then goes on to operationalize these dimensions in an inductive fashion by drawing on all theoretically relevant items that are available in mass and elite surveys. I devise a relative-fit measure of responsiveness that can be compared across space and time, even if positions at the elite and mass levels are measured on different scales. To illustrate the usefulness of the strategy, I show how it leads to novel contrasts in terms of programmatic responsiveness among four Latin American countries, namely, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia

Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage

<p>This article argues that the perforation of national states by immigration, integration and trade may signify a critical juncture in the political development of Europe no less consequential for political parties and party systems than the previous junctures that Lipset and Rokkan detect in their classic article. We present evidence suggesting that (1) party systems are determined in episodic breaks from the past; (2) political parties are programmatically inflexible; and, (3) as a consequence, party system change comes in the form of rising parties.</p