Nations of bankers and Brexiteers? Nationalism and hidden money

This article examines the relationship between nationalistic mobilisations, hidden funds and undisclosed campaign contributions, commonly known as dark money. Contextualising Brexit alongside the Icelandic economic crash of 2008 shows how nationalist mobilisation and racism can secure economic and political interests for a small minority and thus create space for what Zygmunt Bauman has called ‘evasion’ or ‘slippage’ as a primary technique of power in the present. Both the build-up to Brexit and the Icelandic economic crash were characterised by a strong national-centred rhetoric of ‘us-the-nation’ versus ‘others’ that diverted attention from massive minority interests, which had access to hidden funds. The Panama Papers showed that many of the same people celebrated in Iceland as the embodied representation of the country were simultaneously moving money into tax havens. Exposés have also revealed the way that dark money secretly funded campaigns using anti-migrant racism to facilitate the Brexiteers’ longer-term interests.

The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Bureaucracy

In the postwar era, Japan benefited from an unusually competent, public-minded, and powerful central bureaucracy that contributed to rapid economic growth, high education and health standards, domestic stability, and peaceful international relations. The regime combined democratic politics with strong administrative capacity and partial insulation from interest group pressures. Central ministry officials developed a compromise between autonomy and inclusion whereby they played a distinctively political role of arranging bargains among key interest groups. Yet the bureaucracy’s power and insulation also restricted the participation of civic groups and minority interests in the policy process, limited accountability to the broader public, and fostered collusive partnerships with politicians and favored interest groups. Bureaucratic dominance began to wane in the 1970s as politicians pushed beyond Ministry of Finance budget limits to expand the welfare state and boost public works spending for their constituents. Bureaucrats confronted even greater challenges in the 1990s, including a devastating financial crisis that abruptly ended the high-growth period, an electoral system reform that transformed political dynamics, and a gradual erosion of prestige. Meanwhile, political leaders enacted administrative reforms to strengthen their control over the bureaucracy and to centralize power in the Prime Minister’s Office and the cabinet. Nevertheless, Japan’s elite civil servants have preserved some core powers, including control over substantial elements of the policy process, the capacity to forge political bargains, and a knack for manipulating politicians to pursue their own policy preferences.

The Sociopolitical Context of Abortion Bill Authorship in Texas

This study examines abortion bills proposed in the Texas legislature between 1993 and 2015 to explore how legislators respond to the power resources of minorities versus the (supposed) threat that they pose and how these responses vary across partisan lines to hamper or further pro-life interests. To test competing hypotheses about the influences of women’s socioeconomic and political resources, and the representation of poor, Black, and Hispanic constituents, multilevel models analyze a key behavior that strategically demonstrates issue-positions, that is, authorship of abortion bills. The findings largely support power resources accounts but also detect minority threat processes, and they reveal that beyond mean differences in support for restrictions on legal abortions, Democrats and Republicans respond distinctly to their constituent contexts. This detailed look at an early stage of the legislative process in a major battleground state highlights the multifaceted nature of abortion politics and the importance of considering both partisan and minority interests, especially in the face of sociodemographic shifts within the state and beyond.

Ownership-motivated income shifting: evidence from European Multinational Groups

PurposeAlthough tax-motivated income shifting has been widely explored, no studies have as yet analyzed the association between ownership structure and management decisions about income shifting. The ownership structure of multinational groups is characterized by different levels of minority interests, and our aim is to establish whether income shifting is explained by the aim of expropriation of minorities, as well as taxation avoidance.Design/methodology/approachWe collect data on a sample of European parent companies located in five countries and their foreign subsidiaries, and run a multivariate regression based on the Huizinga and Laeven (2008) model.FindingsOur results support the idea of minority expropriation, finding evidence of ownership-motivated income shifting. We also find that the level of minority protection affects ownership-motivated income shifting, and that, when both are present, expropriation is statistically significant.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the study looks at a wide range of subsidiaries, a limitation may be that it examines only firms having parent companies in five European countries. Further research would overcome this limitation and extend the literature and take into account other income-shifting contextual variables. Our results may lead regulators to pay more attention to the protection of minority interests.Practical implicationsThis research offers insights to companies and investors, and should help them to make better-informed decisions and evaluate the best contexts for investments.Originality/valueThis study enriches the literature on income shifting by revealing that it can be caused by factors other than the desire to avoid taxation. It suggests that ownership structure is crucial.

Solidarity Across Cultures: Working Together For Democracy

At the heart of the matter in diversity, the balancing of minority interests with the majority requires ingenuous commitment from both sides as represented by their respective community leaders. Religious strife of whatever denomination or faith would seriously undermine the very foundation of constitutional democracy. There is therefore much sense in the saying that the empowerment of one cultural group at the expense of another in any society would only lead to a clash of interests. This clash if left unchecked would threaten the essential overlapping consensus, recogni- zed as a central feature of the kind of democracy that we are talking about.

Muftī Courts, Minority Protection and the European Court of Human Rights

Being one of the leading cases in 2019, as described by the President of the European Court of Human Rights, this article analyzes the Molla Sali case in the merits as well as the just satisfaction stages. It argues that the Grand Chamber’s decision did not open the door for an expansive application of Islamic religious law (Sharī ̔a) in Europe; that the ECtHR did not impose a flat ban on religious adjudication; and that the ramifications of the decision may influence different religious minorities in general with a particularly alienating impact on Muslim Europeans. The case brought the minority protection regime that had been established in Western Thrace in the aftermath of the First World War under the ECtHR’s scrutiny as to its compatibility with the principles of equality and the rule of law as set forth in the ECHR. Although the Hellenic Republic was held in violation of the ECHR, its newly introduced law amending the functioning of the Muftī courts sought to balance minority interests with the mandates of the ECHR. While the just satisfaction decision was perceived as a Pyrrhic victory, it remains to be seen whether the ongoing proceedings before Turkish courts will be politicized.

The effects of ownership structure, sub-optimal cash holdings and investment inefficiency on dividend policy: evidence from Indonesia

We investigate how a firm’s decision to hold excessive cash or to overinvest could influence its dividend payout policy in Indonesia. Additionally, we examine the association between corporate ownership structure and cash dividends. Using a data set of Indonesian listed firms for the period from 1995 to 2014, we find that excessive cash holding (overinvestment) positively (negatively) affects a firm’s likelihood of paying dividends. Also, we find that family, foreign, state and institutional ownership have significantly negative links with dividends, which suggests the signals of expropriation of firms’ wealth by major shareholders. These findings strongly support the expropriation hypothesis that commonly applies to firms with higher level of concentration or to firms in a weak legal environment by which the rights of minority interests are put at risk by large shareholders.