Abstracts (Pdf)

2004 ABSTRACTS / RÉSUMÉS 2004 Abedi, Amir and Schneider - Adapt, or Die! Organizational Change in Office-Seeking Anti-Political Establishment Parties There is relatively little work dealing with anti-political establishment (APE) parties in the extensive party organization literature. Organizational change within that party type remains an under-researched area even as a number of APE parties has joined governments in several West European countries. Government participation should put stress on APE parties because they differ from mainstream parties both in terms of policy profiles and of their organizational make-up. Being in government should foster more moderate policy positions and organizational structures more closely resembling those of mainstream parties. APE parties that fail to adapt may be less successful in their attempts to establish themselves permanently as (potentially) governing parties. We examine these issues by focusing on Germany, which not only provides examples of APE parties that have become serious contenders for government participation but also formations that have succeeded in gaining access to government but not in establishing themselves long-term. Despite growing political cynicism, APE parties have faced considerable hurdles in Germany. Organizationally challenges often proved at least as important - and in many cases, fatal - as the hurdles built into the electoral system. These challenges stemmed from conflicts between the very rationale of being anti-establishment on the one hand and the objective of government participation on the other. Using the most similar cases design, our paper compares the experiences of successful and unsuccessful cases of organizational change. This should help us in answering the larger theoretical question of whether APE parties can transform themselves into establishment parties, and if so, which factors are most important in predicting the likelihood of successful organizational adaptation. Abizadeh, Arash - Words versus the Public Thing: Verbal Threats to the Rousseauist Republic If republican legitimacy, for Rousseau, derives from the physical presence of the assembled people, then the political role of language, which operates via representation like the theatre, is immediately suspect. First, representation introduces a gap between appearance and reality, making arbitrariness, falsehood, and deception possible; second, the proliferation of linguistic signs threatens to efface the presence of the very objects that they are supposed to represent. Thus republican freedom hinges on the possibility of a form of language that overcomes these problems even while it facilitates the harmonious unity of a people and the transparent expression of its general will. By examining the sources and philosophical context of Rousseau’s linguistic theory (especially Plato, Plutarch, Descartes, Hobbes, Arnaud & Nicole, Lamy, Condillac), I show how the early modern preoccupation with the thing-idea-word relation shapes Rousseau’s political theory. In particular, the possibility of freedom becomes dependent, for Rousseau, on a form of language that maintains the ontological priority of the thing to the idea to the word, a priority threatened by the “corruption” that Rousseau claims has affected modern languages, and to which his musical theory is ostensibly supposed to provide a “solution.” Akintola, Bukola - THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN GRASSROOT EMPOWERMENT IN NIGERIA Civil society in Nigeria is made up of a wide array and a rich variety of voluntary associations, charity organisations, professional associations, trade unions, hometown associations, co-operative societies, ethnic associations, academic associations and alumni, age grades, youth associations and clubs, religious associations, the press as well as non- governmental organisations (NGOs). Members of the society formed many of these associations, primarily, to serve and protect the interests and values of their members, and to address many developmental needs that may not be met by the state. Secondarily, they promote political awareness and educate their members on their rights and responsibilities as citizens of the country. In other words, the organisations of civil society generate the power to undertake their missions through bringing together members for concerted action, through persuading people of the importance of their efforts, and through combining resources and seeking funds through contributions, grants, and contracts. In brief, civil society organisations generate the power to act through co-ordinating the efforts of many and substantial resources from various sources. Yet, despite the visibility of civil society organisation in Nigeria, many Nigerians are wallowing in abject poverty. Many of these organisations are able to attract funding from international NGOs and donors, but are not doing enough in making the people to be self-reliant, and not to continue to rely and wait for the state to provide them with infrastructure, and other basic facilities. The paper examines what civil society organisations have done, and what they still need to do to empower people in Nigeria, most especially in the rural areas. It argues that civil society organisations need to put in an extra effort in empowering the people of the grassroots who feel detached from the state to make their lives a little easier. Albo, Greg - Varieties of Capitalism or Varieties of Imperialism? The internationalization of capital has raised the stakes in the theorization of the divergences and convergenes of contemporary capitalism. Neoliberals have argued that globalization constitutes homogenous world market, only differentiated by the relative cost conditions for competitiveness. Weberians have responded by stressing the uniqueness of markets and of the conditions for the creation of competitiveness, that is, by the varieties of capitalism. Neither of these positions adequately incorporate the more general and abstract characteristics of capitalism that produces both processes of equalisation and differentiation: the uneven development that makes empirical postulates of convergence or divergence besides the point. The contemporary internationalisation of capital raises questions about the varieties of imperialism that have been the concrete form of international competition. Ammirante, Julian - PROFESSIONAL SPORT AND SPECTACLE IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Public money has been crucial in the past twenty-five years in bringing major league sport franchises to cities. Though private investors have paid exorbitant franchise fees, most expansion teams since the late 1960s have performed in publicly financed facilities, socializing one of the owners’ major costs, more recent cases of public subsidization will be understood against the background of greater capital mobility in an area of new information technologies, free trade, and more flexible industrial work processes. Changes in the interrelated spatial and temporal modalities of capitalism that distinguished the post-Fordist phase of ‘flexible accumulation’ from the Fordist era of mass production, have changed to such a degree that the world has increasingly become a single field within which capital flows are more sensitive to the relative advantages of spatial locations. Growing and declining cities and regions now compete more self-consciously for every kind of investment. They have long done so for manufacturing, but with manufacturing jobs declining, civic leaders now campaign for information-processing and telecommunications functions, for shopping complexes, entertainment venues, and other consumption and tourism-related investment. This situation underlines the growing role of leisure and entertainment in the western world’s urban political economy and the perceived importance of investment in civic image. In this paper, I will assess and compare state policy with respect to t! he conflict between the regulation requirements of major league spectator sport as a public, professional and market-based activity in both Europe and North America. Anderson, Cameron - Economic Voting and Multi-level Governance The literature on economic voting has moved well beyond the initial formulations of a simple reward and punishment calculus. One of the most important developments concerns the clarity of attributions of responsibility in different political contexts. The clarity of responsibility argument contends that economic perceptions will play a greater role in determining support for the government where responsibility is more clearly attributable to the government (e.g. under a single party government) than under conditions where responsibility is less clear (e.g. coalition government). While the clarity of responsibility literature is extensive, a surprising omission has been the comparative consideration of economic voting in the context of federal or multi-level institutions of government. The proposed paper tests the proposition that the presence of multi-level and/or federal institutions of government will decrease the effects of economic evaluations on voting for the incumbent government in elections to the national parliament or congress. The logic underlying this proposition is that the existence of more than one level of government makes it harder for voters to attribute credit and blame for economic conditions. There are two reasons for this. First, the actions of other levels of government also have an effect on economic conditions, and second, incentives are created

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