Search Results

Deals with three main topics: the nature and origins of social trust and its importance in society; trends in social trust in Western societies (with some comparisons with less developed societies); and the relations between social and political trust, and their implications for theories of politics and society. In terms of the main concepts and measures of the book, and as outlined in the introductory chapter, social trust is a feature of the most basic level of community, while political trust refers primarily to attitudes about political institutions and leaders. The general assumption seems to be that social and political trust are closely linked, perhaps different sides of the same coin—social trust is regarded as a strong determinant of, or influence upon, political support of various kinds, including support for the political community, confidence in institutions, and trust in political leaders. As a result it is believed that the accumulation of social capital, in the form of social trust, will also result in the accumulation of political capital. Presents theory and evidence questioning these assumptions; it includes evidence comparing social trust in communal and modern societies, and of political trust in early modern and contemporary democracies.

This chapter continues the emphasis on cross-regional comparison, addressing the role of both transnational and national actors by focusing on World Bank-funded rural development projects. The question is to what degree the World Bank's ostensibly new-style projects actually contributed to the ‘enabling environment’ that allow poor people to consolidate representative organizations. The term ‘enabling environments’ refers to the institutional context that either facilitates or blocks the collective action that is critical to providing leverage and voice to under-represented people. The study documents whether or not enabling environments were in fact created by assessing the degree to which the projects complied with the World Bank's own policy reforms involving public information disclosure and informed participation by indigenous peoples. The study documents outcomes, both across projects and across regions within projects. With few exceptions, the projects did not significantly improve the enabling policy environment for the organizations of the rural poor.

Most well-trained economists would agree that the standard policy reforms included in the ‘Washington Consensus’ have the potential to be growth-promoting. What the experience of the last fifteen years has shown, however, is that the impact of these reforms is heavily dependent on circumstances. This chapter argues that this calls for an approach to reform that is much more contingent on the economic environment. It is possible to develop a unified framework for analyzing and formulating ‘growth strategies’ which is both operational and based on solid economic reasoning. The key step is to develop a better understanding of how the nature of the binding constraints on economic activity differs from setting to setting. This understanding can then be used to derive policy priorities accordingly, in a way that would use the scarce political capital of reformers efficiently. The methodology that it proposed here can be conceptualized as a decision tree. The first questions concern what keeps the level of domestic investment and entrepreneurship low. At each node of the decision tree, the kind of evidence that would help answer the question one way or another is discussed. The chapter draws on the experience of three specific countries: El Salvador, Brazil, and Dominican Republic. Aside from providing a useful manual for policy makers, this approach has the advantage that it is broad enough to embed all existing development strategies as special cases. It can therefore unify the literature and help settle prevailing controversies.

This chapter outlines how the Vietnamese state has structured a challenging investment environment for private firms with its control of land ownership, land use planning, and investment approval. Therefore, the cooperation of state bodies is instrumental for firms wishing to capture potential profits through land development projects. However, it is also argued that entry into the market was relatively open in Ho Chi Minh City and firms could develop the political connections and social networks necessary to realize projects. The possession of initial endowment of political capital does not adequately explain who became entrepreneurs nor who succeeded in the new market.

This introductory chapter examines an Arizona immigration bill ordering immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times, and requiring police to question any detainees that they believed might be in the United States illegally. Many politicians support the bill in spite of the fact that the majority of voters (45 percent versus 40 percent) believe that it would lead to discrimination against Hispanics. In relation to this case, the book investigates the convergence of legal and political excess with ethno-racial privilege. It also theorizes that citizenship is inherently a process of uneven political capital accumulation, which follows ethno-racial lines.

The Leadership Capital Index utilizes the conceptual terminology of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. This chapter presents the groundwork for the LCI as it clarifies Bourdieu’s key concepts and traces the evolution from political capital to leadership capital. With an overview of Bourdieu’s three core concepts of economic, cultural, and social capital, plus the more elusive symbolic capital, the chapter assists with an appreciation of the analytical potential of the concept of political capital. The notion of leadership capital integrates many (but not all) aspects of Bourdieu’s field-specific notion of political capital and the LCI succeeds in translating his complex conceptualization into a manageable set of ten indicators. The chapter explains how together Bourdieu’s political sociology and the approach suggested through the LCI create numerous synergies and are promising and useful endeavors in the analysis of political leadership.

This chapter predicts that capital punishment in the United States will be abolished by 2050. While support for the death penalty will not wane in the face of financial cost-benefit analysis or the cultural authority of scientific evidence, the chapter expects abolition to become a reality because of the strength of moral opposition to the death penalty. It also cites quantitative studies that use cross-national models to systematically assess the determinants of the abolition of the death penalty, along with domestic political and social correlates of abolition. Finally, it explains how political capital and ordinary acts of resistance—or bottom-up political opposition—will provide the momentum for swing states to embrace abolition, resulting in a change of the political climate and a shift in public opinion and ultimately, in a federal constitutional ban on capital punishment by 2050.

This chapter reviews literature bearing on the question of who participates in deliberative civic engagement initiatives. Research to date suggests that although significant variation exists among different kinds of civic and political engagement, an underlying logic shapes all forms of public participation: participation goes up when, from the perspective of the individual, its material and symbolic costs are lowered, and/or its benefits are increased. Moreover, a vast amount of research shows that the costs and benefits of participation are generally skewed in favor of those with higher socio-economic status (SES) and education levels. While other factors, such as membership in civic and political organizations and various social networks, can mitigate the impacts of SES and education, it is clear that unless practitioners take corrective measures, participation of all varieties will be skewed. To assist practitioners in such efforts, the chapter reviews several recruitment strategies that may enable the assembly of a broad and diverse group of participants in deliberative civic engagement events.

This chapter critiques the popular television dramedy Ugly Betty to explore how political capital accumulation is manifested under the guise of media corporate ethics and liberal politics of accommodation. Ugly Betty demonstrates the convention of having the discourse of citizenship produced and disseminated from the subject/legal position of the citizen; in doing so, it helps to reproduce notions of labor equity that are ultimately harmful to Latinas/os. In relation to this example, the chapter argues that the use of citizenship in media studies often disregards “the legal production of citizenship”: how law effectively generates the category of the citizen and its companion, the “illegal” noncitizen.

This chapter examines the role that resources and experiences acquired in the former GDR played as conditions for success and failure in the new labor market, describing several aspects. One is the issue of whether differences in skills remained important after the transition or whether the arbitrariness of structural location in regions, firms, or sectors outweighed individual characteristics. The second issue is whether educational and occupational achievements or acquired political capital helped more for maintaining or improving one's job situation, and the third is whether specific biographical experiences such as prior occupational mobility proved to be assets under the new circumstances. The discussion also notes the relative fortunes of women in comparison to men and unravels how various labor-market processes varied in intensity across the stages of the transition.

This chapter examines class structure and class mobility in East Germany before and after 1989, paying special attention to the changing role of political capital. It follows two analytical perspectives: social mobility as a process of transformation of the class structure; and the life course as a process of continuity or discontinuity in class membership. The GDR started with some opening of the class structure and ended with a quite closed mobility regime. The gap between the top and the bottom increased over the generations as the social structure became politically entrenched. Access to the upper service class was increasingly restricted to university graduates, and educational opportunities in general were differentially distributed according to social origin and political loyalty.

The chapter provides the analytical framework for this cross-national comparison. Applying a neo-institutional lens, the Institutional Capacity Building Framework is presented to analyse and compare the transformation and institutionalisation of social, political and intellectual capital during the implementation of both Area-based Initiatives.

This chapter focuses on the T. Don Hutto Detention Center—an agency that detains undocumented immigrant families, including children and toddlers–to study the problem of equating citizens with political agents. Framing the agency as part of the post-9/11 state of exception that saw the creation of legal tools such as “enemy combatant” as well as “extraordinary rendition,” the detention practice can be considered an example of political capital accumulation, which assumes that all politics are the purview of the nation. It also demonstrates that political capital accumulation—when taken to the extreme—becomes a tyrannic and nefarious manifestation of citizenship excess.

This chapter discusses the greater concern Moscow felt at the beginning of the war, as compared to that felt in Berlin or Rome. Moscow had a good deal of political capital invested in Spain, not merely in the PCE but as one of the two bastions of the Popular Front. Additionally, a much more radicalized situation offered the USSR a greater long-term opportunity in Spain than in France. The USSR was the only power that had been intervening systematically in Spanish affairs before the beginning of the Civil War, operating its own political party within the country and at long last achieving some success. By comparison, Nazi Germany limited itself to small-scale propaganda funding, and Fascist Italy, while engaging in more extensive cultural and propaganda activity, otherwise did no more than pay a small subsidy to the Falangist party.

Chapter 1 introduces the subject of the book. It reviews literature on social control theory, candidate selection, and political capital resources to argue that presidents prefer to appoint qualified ministers. These literatures lead to the expectations that (1) women appointed to cabinets will be well qualified and that (2) women with the expected credentials will be successful. It presents a typology of how credentials and treatment intersect to determine whether cabinets are gendered institutions. The authors explain why inclusion of women in presidential cabinets is important for women and for the quality of democracy and how presidential cabinets are an important and yet understudied venue where the representation of women occurs. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book.

Chapter 5 explores political experience and connections. It assesses whether women and men are equally likely to bring the political capital resource of political skills to the administration. In most cases, men and women seem equally likely to have (or to lack) political background traits. However, in the overall data set and among initial ministers women are less likely to be political insiders (have political skills). But, in many partitions of the dataset women are more likely to have political connections, although a majority of men and women do not have connections so this is not a requirement. This chapter also investigates whether ministers who have political connections also have policy expertise related to the purview of their portfolio. Statistically equivalent percentages of men and women with political connections have experience related to their post suggesting connections are not a wholesale substitute for qualifications.

Chapter 6 examines the group links of ministers. It assesses whether women and men are equally likely to bring the political capital resource of support resources to the administration. In most cases, women are as likely as men to have links to clients of their ministry and in Central category posts and the United States they are more likely. Overall and in most partitions of the data set, women are, however, notably less likely than men to have links to business. Additionally, very few women appointed to these presidential cabinets have links to women’s organizations. Finally, our summary analysis shows that it is rare for ministers—men or women—to have all three political capital resources (policy expertise, political skills, and support resources), but men and women are equally likely to bring multiple political capital resources to the administration. However, women are more likely than men to have none of the PCRs we measured.

This chapter analyzes the nature of the relationship that evolved between Western archaeologists and the local Chinese officials with whom they interacted during the course of their expeditions in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia. It finds that Qing and Republican officials placed a higher value on various forms of intangible social and political capital made available to them by the Western archaeologist than they did on the art and antiquities he removed from their jurisdictions. Political capital, which evolved out of a shared conservative imperialist ethos referred to as trans-imperial bonding, was expressed through the discourses of development and modernization. By contrast, social capital was derived from an admiration of the scholarly celebrity that accrued to the Western archaeologist as a result of his archaeological labors.