Forecasting Stability or Retreat in Emerging Democratic Regimes

Drawing on the literatures on elite transitions, factionalism and the new institutionalism, this paper hypothesizes that the stability of partially democratic and emerging democratic regimes is dependent on the willingness of elites to make credible commitments to cooperate and comply with democratic rules. That willingness (or lack thereof) can be signaled by the presence of cooperative or conflict-precipitating events and actions in the periods around elections. We identify and analyze a variety of intra-elite interactions and demonstrate that conflict-precipitating events significantly increase the odds of a democratic retreat in the months before or just after an election, while cooperative events can balance them and prevent retreat. Using event data collected from 40 low- and middle-income countries for two-year periods around national elections between 1991 and 2007 we show that the imbalance of conflict-precipitating over cooperative events is far greater in cases of retreat from democracy. Furthermore, international intervention and pressure had a negative relationship with democratic stability. A logistic regression model accurately identified democratic retreat in 79 percent of the cases examined. Factor analysis revealed several common patterns of intra-elite conflict that can lead to democratic retreat, or conversely, patterns of cooperative events that bolster democratic consolidation. Finally, the data strongly argues for a model of democratic development that depends on open-ended elite maneuvering and the emergence of elite agreements, rather than a model where strong prior institutional constraints determine elite actions.

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Universal healthcare in our lifetime? All teach, all learn

Human: Solving the global workforce crisis in healthcare ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198836520.003.0018 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 144-152

Author(s):

Mark Britnell

Keyword(s):

Health Coverage ◽

National Elections ◽

Middle Income ◽

Universal Healthcare ◽

Middle Income Countries ◽

The World ◽

Global Movement ◽

Development Goals ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Universal Health

The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals of achieving universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030 have energized many governments to devise bold strategies and make big investments in their health systems. The global movement around UHC has gathered momentum at blistering speed. Within a few years it has transformed the focus of healthcare in low- and middle-income countries from a few diseases to a comprehensive vision of affordable, accessible, and acceptable care for all. In this chapter, Mark Britnell looks at how Philippines, Vietnam, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Columbia, Costa Rica, Panama, Nigeria, South Africa, Cyprus, islands across the Caribbean, and many others have announced significant UHC reforms since the development goals were passed in 2014, and UHC has been a headline issue in a number of national elections. He analyses UHC across the world, and looks to at the future of healthcare globally.

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Middle-Income Groups in Kenya. Conflicting Realities Between Upward Mobility and Uncertainty

sozialpolitik ch ◽

10.18753/2297-8224-132 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Dieter Neubert

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Social Security ◽

Science Studies ◽

Upward Mobility ◽

Middle Income ◽

Democratic Development ◽

The People ◽

Empirical Social Science ◽

The Stability ◽

The One

For more than a decade scholars mostly from economy and development studies have described the rise of a newly emerging ‘middle class’ in the Global South including Africa. This has led to a ‘middle class narrative’ with the ‘middle class’ as the backbone of economic and democratic development. Especially with regard to the stability of the position of the people in the ‘middle’, empirical social science studies challenge the ‘middle class narrative’ and at their uncertainty and insecurity. This tension between upward mobility at the one hand uncertainty and instability at the other hand (the vulnerability-security nexus) and the options to cope with this challenge under the condition of limited provision of formal social security is the focus of this case study on Kenya. Instead of an analysis of inequality based on income, it is more helpful to start from the welfare mix and the role of social networks as main elements of provision of social security. Against this background, we identify different strategies of coping that go together with different sets of values and lifestyles, conceptualised as milieus, that are not determined by the socio-economic situation.

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Spanking and Young Childrens Socioemotional Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

10.31219/osf.io/tceas ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Garrett Todd Pace ◽

Shawna Lee ◽

Andrew Grogan-Kaylor

Keyword(s):

Multilevel Models ◽

Child Outcomes ◽

Negative Relationship ◽

Well Being ◽

Global Scale ◽

Socioemotional Development ◽

Cross Sectional ◽

Middle Income ◽

Middle Income Countries ◽

Low And Middle Income

Spanking is one of the most common forms of child discipline used by parents around the world. Research on children in high-income countries has shown that parental spanking is associated with adverse child outcomes, yet less is known about how spanking is related to child well-being in low- and middle-income countries. This study uses data from 215,885 children in 62 countries from the fourth and fifth rounds of UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) to examine the relationship between spanking and child well-being. In this large international sample which includes data from nearly one-third of the world’s countries, 43% of children were spanked, or resided in a household where another child was spanked, in the past month. Results from multilevel models show that reports of spanking of children in the household were associated with lower scores on a 3-item socioemotional development index among 3- and 4-year-old children. Country-level results from the multilevel model showed 59 countries (95%) had a negative relationship between spanking and socioemotional development and 3 countries (5%) had a null relationship. Spanking was not associated with higher socioemotional development for children in any country. While the cross-sectional association between spanking and socioemotional development is small, findings suggest that spanking may be harmful for children on a more global scale than was previously known.

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