scholarly journals Working for the Machine: Patronage Jobs and Political Services in Argentina

Author(s):  
Virginia Oliveros

Conventional wisdom posits that patronage jobs are distributed to supporters in exchange for political services. But why would public employees comply with the agreement and provide political services after receiving the job? Departing from existing explanations, I argue that patronage employees engage in political activities because their jobs are tied to their patrons’ political survival. Supporters’ jobs will be maintained by the incumbent, but not by the opposition. Supporters, then, have incentives to help the incumbent, which makes their original commitment to provide political services a credible one. Using survey experiments embedded in a survey of 1,200 Argentine public employees, I show that patronage employees are involved in political activities and that they believe their jobs are tied to the political success of the incumbent.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Oliveros

In countries around the world, politicians distribute patronage jobs to supporters in exchange for a wide range of political services – such as helping with campaigns and electoral mobilization. Patronage employees (clients) engage in these political activities that support politicians (patrons) because their fates are tied to the political fate of their patrons. Although conventional wisdom holds that control of patronage significantly increases an incumbent's chance of staying in power, we actually know very little about how patronage works. Drawing on in-depth interviews, survey data, and survey experiments in Argentina, Virginia Oliveros details the specific mechanisms that explain the effect of patronage on political competition. This fascinating study is the first to provide a systematic analysis of the political activities of mid and low-level public employees in Latin America. It provides a novel explanation of the enforcement of patronage contracts that has wider implications for understanding the functioning of clientelist exchanges.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 659-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabina Haveric ◽  
Stefano Ronchi ◽  
Laura Cabeza

Research on the link between turnout and corruption has produced inconclusive evidence: while some studies find corruption to be positively related to turnout, others report a negative relationship. This article argues that the relevant question is not whether corruption has a positive or negative effect on turnout, but for whom. We hypothesize that the effect of corruption on the likelihood to vote depends on individuals’ employment sector. Public employees have different incentives to vote in corrupt settings since their jobs often depend on the political success of the government of the day. Hence, while corruption dampens turnout among ordinary citizens, public employees are more likely to vote in highly corrupt countries. Analysis of World Values Survey data from 44 countries, shows that the differential in voting propensity between public employees and other citizens gets larger as corruption increases, partially confirming our expectations.


ICL Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret O’Brien

Abstract The political rights of public employees vary greatly in scope and depth across democratic societies. While some countries balance the need for a neutral government with the rights of its employees, others fail to provide meaningful avenues for expression of political activities. As the civil service has grown and become more vocal, the government’s desire for an impartial government has grown with it. Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, three Westminster-style governments who evolved from a once singular legal system, have adopted laws and regulations to address their employees’ political activities with varying effectiveness and form. This Article will analyze each country’s legal framework for these restrictions, within their larger free speech regime. In particular, this Article will use candidacy and social media activity as a lens to examine these restrictions and provide examples for how these restrictions most commonly effect civil servants’ political activities. Although each regime has successes and failures at balancing the government’s need for impartiality with the civil service’s rights to expression, Canada has most successfully established a balance between the government’s interests in neutrality with their employee’s rights to political expression.


1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-257
Author(s):  
Mark Franko

This article examines the political and artistic activities of dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar at the Paris Opéra during and immediately after the occupation of Paris. Although Lifar was cleared of charges of collaborationism with the German authorities after the war, the question of collaborationism has arisen again in light of the rehabilitation of his aesthetic by the Paris Opéra and other dance companies. Using archival materials usually ignored by dance scholars, this article examines Lifar's political activities, his political convictions, and his political ambitions. His theory of ballet as set forth in La Danse: les grands courants de la danse académique (1938) and two of his successful ballets of this period – Joan de Zarissa (1942) and Suite en blanc (1943) – are discussed in light of his politics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019/2 ◽  
pp. 5-39
Author(s):  
Darius Baronas

ANNOTATION. This article is the first attempt of the biographic research of Grand Duchess Uliana Algirdienė of Lithuania (d. 17/03/1392), based on the critical analysis of primary sources. It is also aimed at pointing out the reflection of the role of women in the pagan Lithuanian society. The research was carried out by means of the analytical and comparative method of historical source analysis with a view to separate as distinctly as possible the information derived from contemporary sources from the images imposed by later historiographic tradition. The article questions the stereotypes related to Uliana’s great political power in Lithuania’s political life that are well-established in modern historiography and present-day cultural memory. With this an attempt is made to draw attention to the problematic nature of information derived from historical sources as well as to more distinctly define the frames imposed by the political culture of pagan Lithuania which clearly marked the boundaries for the political activities of women representing the ruling dynasty. This article for the most part dwells on the issues related to the coverage of Algirdas and Uliana’s marriage and the period of their married life up to Algirdas’ death in 1377. KEYWORDS: Uliana, Algirdas, Simeon, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Moscow, Tver, Rus’, women


Author(s):  
A. FREDDIE

The article examines the place and role of democracy and human rights in South Africas foreign policy. The author analyzes the process of South Africas foreign policy change after the fall of the apartheid regime and transition to democracy. He gives characteristics of the foreign policy under different presidents of South Africa from 1994 to 2018 and analyzes the political activities of South Africa in the area of peacekeeping and human rights on the African continent.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110242
Author(s):  
Terrell Carver

The bicentenary of Engels’s birth in 1820 is an occasion for assessing his works as received by geographers. This Afterword to the special issue draws on Terrell Carver’s recent researches into Engels’s political activities and associations, beginning with his schooldays in Wuppertal, focusing on his Anglo-German journalism, continuing through his political partnership with Marx, and extending after the latter’s death into later life in London. The article demonstrates the value of close contextual attention to the precise character of the political regimes which Engels struggled to change. This approach also reveals the Marx-centric terms through which Engels has been understood, thus undervaluing many of his achievements. Concluding speculatively, it is possible to glimpse in Engels’s thought a geography of space-time, where capitalism is an Einsteinian warp.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Christina Griessler

AbstractFor the countries of the Western Balkans, the path to membership in the European Union (EU) has been particularly tortuous. Its slow progress has created frustration among applicant countries. In 2014 Germany, stepping into the political void that had formed, inaugurated what has come to be known as the Berlin Process, an initiative aimed at injecting new energy into the dormant EU enlargement process. The author examines the political activities initiated between 2014 and 2019, analysing the official documentation of the Berlin Process along with publications such as policy papers and media commentaries. She concludes that although meaningful and proactive measures have been taken, such efforts have not been successful in persuading or enabling the Western Balkan states to implement the political and economic reforms required for EU accession.


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