The Presidency and the Executive Branch in Latin America: What We Know and What We Need to Know

The presidential politics literature depicts presidents either as all- powerful actors or figureheads and seeks to explain outcomes accordingly. Th e president and the executive branch are nonetheless usually treated as black boxes, particularly i n developing countries, even though the presidency has evolved into an extremely complex branch of government. While these developments have been studied in the U nited States, far less i s known in other countries, particularly in Latin America, where presi dential systems have been considered the source of all goods and evils. To help close the knowledge gap and explore differences in policymaking characteristics not only between Latin America and the US but also across Latin American countries, this paper s ummarizes the vast literature on the organization and resources of the Executive Branch in the Americas and sets a research agenda for the study of Latin American presidencies.Fil: Bonvecchi, Alejandro. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Departamento de Ciencia Política y Estudios Internacionales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Scartascini, Juan Carlos. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo; Estados Unido

The medical text: between biomedicine and hegemony

The unequal distribution of power in contemporary society is reflected and reproduced in medical ideology. The present article analyses some articles from Israeli medical journals in order to show the ways in which biomedicine--the dominant medical ideology--is reinforced through hegemonic discourse. The central ways by which this is achieved are medicalization--which includes the desocialization of disease and the explanation of social phenomena in medical terms--and the affirmation by the Israeli medical literature of national, ethnic, class and gender relationships of domination. Analysis of the Israeli example provides useful insights about biomedicine's desocializing role, as the disregard for the social dimension of disease is particularly telling in a society characterized by several cleavages which determine a clearly unequal distribution of power and resources.Hegemony Biomedicine Medical ideology Israel Palestinians The occupied territories

How Populist are the People? Measuring Populist Attitudes in Voters

Contains fulltext : 120643.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)The sudden and perhaps unexpected appearance of populist parties in the 1990s shows no sign of immediately vanishing. The lion’s share of the research on populism has focused on defining populism, on the causes for its rise and continued success, and more recently on its influence on government and on public policy. Less research has, however, been conducted on measuring populist attitudes among voters. In this article, we seek to fill this gap by measuring populist attitudes and to investigate whether these attitudes can be linked with party preferences. We distinguish three political attitudes: (1) populist attitudes, (2) pluralist attitudes, and (3) elitist attitudes. We devise a measurement of these attitudes and explore their validity by way of using a principal component analysis on a representative Dutch data set (N = 600). We indeed find three statistically separate scales of political attitudes. We further validated the scales by testing whether they are linked to party preferences and find that voters who score high on the populist scale have a significantly higher preference for the Dutch populist parties, the Party for Freedom, and the Socialist Party.17 maart 201430 p