scholarly journals Poor people’s beliefs and the dynamics of clientelism

2021 ◽  
pp. 095162982110036
Author(s):  
Miquel Pellicer ◽  
Eva Wegner ◽  
Lindsay J. Benstead ◽  
Ellen Lust

Why do some poor people engage in clientelism whereas others do not? Why does clientelism sometimes take traditional forms and sometimes more instrumental forms? We propose a formal model of clientelism that addresses these questions focusing primarily on the citizen’s perspective. Citizens choose between supporting broad-based redistribution or engaging in clientelism. Introducing insights from social psychology, we study the interactions between citizen beliefs and values, and their political choices. Clientelism, political inefficacy, and inequality legitimation beliefs reinforce each other leading to multiple equilibria. One of these resembles traditional clientelism, with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to another equilibrium where clientelism takes a modern, instrumental, form. The model delivers insights on the role of citizen beliefs for their bargaining power as well as for the persistence and transformation of clientelism. We illustrate the key mechanisms with ethnographic literature on the topic.

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Maarten Keune

In the context of rising inequality between capital and labour and among wage-earners in Europe, this state-of-the-art article reviews the literature concerning the relationship between collective bargaining and inequality. It focuses on two main questions: (i) what is the relationship between collective bargaining, union bargaining power and inequality between capital and labour? and (ii) what is the relationship between collective bargaining, union bargaining power and wage inequality among wage-earners? Both questions are discussed in general terms and for single- and multi-employer bargaining systems. It is argued that collective bargaining coverage and union density are negatively related to both types of inequality. These relationships are however qualified by four additional factors: who unions represent, the weight of union objectives other than wages, the statutory minimum wage, and extensions of collective agreements by governments.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (53) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Fabio Perocco

Abstract During the last two decades of rising anti-migrant racism in Europe, Islamophobia has proven to be the highest, most acute, and widely spread form of racism. The article shows how anti-migrant Islamophobia is a structural phenomenon in European societies and how its internal structure has specific social roots and mechanisms of functioning. Such an articulate and interdependent set of key themes, policies, practices, discourses, and social actors it is intended to inferiorise and marginalise Muslim immigrants while legitimising and reproducing social inequalities affecting the majority of them. The article examines the social origins of anti-migrant Islamophobia and the modes and mechanisms through which it naturalises inequalities; it focuses on the main social actors involved in its production, specifically on the role of some collective subjects as anti-Muslim organizations and movements, far-right parties, best-selling authors, and the mass-media.


1979 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 458-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Lever

There is some controversy concerning the role of ethnicity in South African electoral behaviour. Since the society is segmented on ethnic lines it is to be expected that ethnicity would play a crucial role in affecting political choices. Some writers have gone so far as to suggest that ethnicity is the only significant factor affecting voting preferences. The controversy arose at a time when Goodman's method of log-linear analysis for hierarchical models had not yet been developed. This method provides the most powerful tool available for the multivariate analysis of categorical data. A re-analysis of previously published research using Goodman's method shows that ethnicity is not the only significant factor having a bearing on voting preferences. The first four-way table of voting preferences in South Africa is presented. The order of importance of the variables affecting party choice is: (1) ethnicity (2) socio-economic status (3) age of the voter. The recursive model suggested by the analysis explains approximately 98 per cent of the data.


2021 ◽  
pp. 186810342110278
Author(s):  
Inaya Rakhmani ◽  
Muninggar Sri Saraswati

All around the globe, populism has become increasingly prominent in democratic societies in the developed and developing world. Scholars have attributed this rise at a response to the systematic reproduction of social inequalities entwined with processes of neoliberal globalisation, within which all countries are inextricably and dynamically linked. However, to theorise populism properly, we must look at its manifestations in countries other than the West. By taking the case of Indonesia, the third largest democracy and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, this article critically analyses the role of the political campaign industry in mobilising narratives in electoral discourses. We use the Gramscian notion of consent and coercion, in which the shaping of populist narratives relies on mechanisms of persuasion using mass and social media. Such mechanisms allow the transformation of political discourses in conjunction with oligarchic power struggle. Within this struggle, political campaigners narrate the persona of political elites, while cyber armies divide and polarise, to manufacture allegiance and agitation among the majority of young voters as part of a shifting social base. As such, we argue that, together, the narratives – through engineering consent and coercion – construct authoritarian populism that pits two crowds of “the people” against each other, while aligning them with different sections of the “elite.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Anna

Taking the murder of Greek HIV+ and queer activist Zak Kostopoulos as its starting point – an exercise of necropolitical power in broad daylight – this article explores the work of drag queens in Greece and their aesthetic/political choices. It interprets their performances as tactics of survival and resistance and as creative responses to queer trauma. The role of queerfeminist spaces, cultural events and collectives also is examined as a response to the increasing right-wing turn in the country’s political scene – itself the result of the financial crisis of 2008. It imports José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentifications and counterpublics, Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics into the Greek/Balkan context and analyses the particular configurations and intersections of sexualities, genders, statehood, race, class and religion in Greece. It then examines disidentifications and counterpublics as empowering practices of community forming, offering glimpses of a queer Balkan counterpublics and the tools employed towards its making (humour, parody, reclaiming, disidentification, mourning and embodied pleasures).


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-131
Author(s):  
Md Mahfuzar Rahman ◽  
AK Mahbubul Hoque

Transformative learning is a process of learning that individuals to changes their critically assumptions and beliefs and consciously making and implementing plans that bring about new ways. It is a fundamentally rational and analytical process. It is also a process of getting beyond gaining factual knowledge alone to instead become learns in some meaningful way. It involves questioning assumptions, beliefs and values, and considering multiple points of view, while always seeking to verify reasoning. This learning is to make interpretations from the person's own beliefs, judgments and feelings and consciously define the meaning of the experience1 or a process of learning that creates a substantial change in the habits, ideas and/or outlook of an individual. This article highlights concept and theories that deals with the paradigm shift of changes needed among adult learners, role of educators and learners towards development of individual and social lives in addition to existing perspective (traditional) of teaching & learning practice. Practices of transformative learning vision and process in adult education have the scope to bring improved critical thinking and a way of changing life style.Anwer Khan Modern Medical College Journal Vol. 8, No. 2: Jul 2017, P 128-131


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