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This paper provides an introduction to and some initial analyses of responses to questions about government spending in the CSES 4 module. Thus far, we have data for just 11 countries - the possibilities where analysis is concerned are rather limited. Even so, we aim here to describe the initial justification for the questions, and then to review the data gathered thus far. Our analyses will then focus on (a) basic country-level descriptives, (b) evidence of (cross-sectional) thermostatic responsiveness to government spending, and (c) differences in spending preferences across income cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores state stability using various governance and development indicators. We find it is associated with state capacity measured by revenue raised by taxation and by social spending; good governance; development and income; integration with the world economy; and democracy and human rights. In particular, we show the importance of legitimacy, rule of law, judicial independence and secularity. Environmental degradation and debt dependency undermine stability. Government capacity, legitimacy and good governance can be important even in the face of incomplete democracy and lower GDP per capita. Legal-rationality, good governance and democracy are relatively more important in low income states. We present results from cross-national and pooled time-series analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the assumption that parties and candidates with access to material benefits will distribute goods to low-income voters in exchange for electoral support. I claim that a candidate's capacity to turn to clientelistic strategies of mobilization is a necessary, but insufficient condition to explain his or her decision to use clientelism. Besides having access to material resources and a network of party activist to distribute goods to potential voters, candidates have to prefer to use clientelism to mobilize voters. In studying candidates' capacities and preferences to use clientelism, this paper provides an account of the microfoundations of political clientelism in Argentina. By combining quantitative and qualitative data at the municipal level, I find that an almost equal number of pragmatist candidates, who are capable of using clientelism prefer to turn to these strategies, and idealist candidates who, although capable, prefer not to use clientelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the one hand the Conservative-Liberal coalition looks tough on addressing the budget deficit through a radical programme of expenditure cuts. On the other hand, the discourse surrounding cuts is very often pitched in terms of 'progressivism' - that those with higher incomes should shoulder a bigger share of the cuts (for example, child benefit cuts for those with higher incomes) and a bigger responsibility for paying for their success (for example, larger tuition fees for university and steeper paybacks for those on larger incomes). Adopting a case study approach, I examine discourse from three parliamentary debates (1998, 2004 and 2010) on higher education reform juxtaposed alongside manifesto pledges and policy outcomes to explore the extent to which the parties differ in their defence of the rights of the poor over time. Results suggest that all main three parties express concerns about those from poorer backgrounds and that the breadth and depth of concerns are greatest when a party is in opposition. When in power, parties appear largely reactive to events yet still find ways to make and defend policy as being in the interests of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the impact of climate change on poorer communities and indigenous populations who are already suffering due to globalization and the modern industrialized world's attack on natural resources, and on the indigenous cultures. It focuses on a capabilities approach to environmental justice by analyzing the capabilities of communities, affected by climate change.

In theory, democratic political systems are created to insure equality amongst their citizenry through universal suffrage. In reality, there is very little equality between those who vote and those who do not. From the study of mass behavior, we know that the affluent and educated vote. From the literature, we also know that campaigns intentionally mobilize these particular voters because they vote. Poor and uneducated voters are disregarded by campaigns and for this reason they do not participate. In this paper I ask, will low socioeconomic status voters participate, if they are mobilized? I explore the effects of a non-partisan "Get-Out-the- Vote" personal canvassing campaign on individual, poor and uneducated, low propensity voters. Using a randomized field experiment, I find that individual, low propensity and low socioeconomic status voters who are personally contacted and encouraged to vote participate at significantly higher rates than those who are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent empirical studies based on data from developed Western democracies concluded that income inequality depresses political engagement and voting participation among the poor. This paper tests whether the conclusions of these studies extend to a new set of cases namely post-Communist Eastern Europe. Using pooled cross-sectional data covering the period 1990-2007, the paper employs multilevel modeling with cross-level interactions. This paper finds that while overall income inequality is correlated with lower political engagement and political engagement is stratified by income, income inequality does not appear to depress political engagement among the poor in post-Communist Eastern Europe. These findings question the general applicability of the theories relating to income inequality and political engagement developed in the US/Western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On most accounts of practical reason, an agent who is informed and rational will do what he or she has most reason to do. When this is not the case, we can infer that the person in question is either misinformed or rationally deficient in some regard. Identifying an impediment of either kind is central to an explanation of their conduct. Reasons to assist people living in extreme poverty are both weighty and pressing. Yet many affluent people fail to act in a way that is commensurate to this fact. In light of this, it seems likely that false belief or rational error help to account for inaction. This paper explains their omission by looking at the beliefs that they entertain about the state of the world, at their beliefs about value, at the way in which they deliberate about world poverty and at the question of motivation. To this end, it draws upon survey data, experimental psychology and theoretical reflection to argue that a convincing explanation of this phenomenon is compound in form. False belief and cognitive bias combine in a number of ways to diminish the good of assistance, and to inflate the cost associated with this course of action, in the eyes of many affluent people. Following on from this, these people often conclude that they have sufficient personal or prudential reason to act in other ways when this is not the case. While many people display moral weakness in this area, the paper holds that they are not akratic or weak willed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School vouchers are one of the most contested issues in educational policy. Yet, various survey data often yield different results on support for vouchers (Moe 2001). Voucher opinions are better understood by looking at American people into several demographical and geographical segments. However, by doing this, we encounter a data problem because we do not have enough sample sizes in each segments. To address this issue, we propose the use of a model based simulation method - multilevel regression and poststratification - to estimate the voucher opinions. We find that vouchers aremost popular among high-income white Catholics and Evangelicals that in general, among whites, the higher the income, the more popular vouchers are. But the pattern goes the other way among nonwhites. Among them, Vouchers are less popular among mid-income class but are more welcome in lower income groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research analyzes how legal institutions deal with the politics of economic hard times from the perspective of indigents who are constitutionally entitled to legal representation but constrained to pay the cost of appointed counsel. Legal cost recovery systems, also called recoupment or contribution, allow governments to recover public defender expenses in providing legal aid to indigents. U.S. Supreme Court precedent and federal/state practice generally reaffirm their constitutionality under the Sixth Amendment and enjoy widespread application; but prior research infers they incur a variety of financial, ethical, and human "costs" that span public administration, lawyer ethics, and comparative law. After outlining the different types of cost recovery systems and their constitutionality in the United States, the paper analyzes whether cost recovery systems incur detrimental costs and diminish access to justice, as suggested by prior studies, by examining case studies of their application in regards to the politics of state budgeting and the ambivalent demands of attorney ethics. The conclusion briefly examines whether right to counsel and its costs, as incurred in the U.S. context, are comparable to the demands placed on indigents pressing for the judicial enforcement of their social rights in criminal and/or civil adjudications in foreign jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study that examines the application of policy-centered theory to the policies and programs of urban government. It suggests that many low income and minority members of the Seattle community would likely have received a different and less empowering message from the community policing program. It reveals constraints on implementation of a full-blown community policing program that will limit the empowerment impacts of community policing in Seattle.

This paper compares the patterns of income transfers within village communities in the north and south of Vietnam by analyzing household survey and experimental data. The results of household data analysis show private transfers flow from high-income households to low-income households in the south where social safety net is limited. In contrast, private transfers do not correlate with pre-transfer income in the north where public transfers are more widespread. In addition, public transfers crowd out private transfers in the north. We conducted a trust game in both regions and found consistent results. People in the south are more altruistic toward the poor: they send more to the poor without expecting higher repayment. This pattern is consistent with the idea that private norms of redistribution from rich to poor are active in the south, but are crowded out in the north, possibly by communist public institutions, although we observe higher levels of trust and reciprocity in the north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses spatial inequalities in Brazil and policies for equality in the country. It states that infrastructure and social services policies may increase spatial inequality by limiting such services to poor. It discusses national policies related to equality and how they affect revenue of local governments. It explores the relationship between intergovernmental relations, state-building and inequality.

The article presents a research paper which analyzes the factors affecting lower-income individuals' vote choice and their preference for Democratic presidential candidates in two elections in the U.S. It focuses on how discussing politics and involvement in organizations like labor unions, affect the voters' vote selection.

Research examining the consequences of voter turnout has been mixed. While research at the local and state levels has found that greater turnout among disadvantaged groups leads to greater representation of their policy interests in government, studies examining turnout at the national level have generally failed to identify important implications of group disparities in turnout. This research examines the political implications of turnout among African Americans and improves on this literature in several important ways. First, we provide an assessment of the influence of district-level black turnout on substantive representation in the House of Representatives. Second, we introduce a new measure of substantive representation of blacks' interests by comparing congressional voting with black public opinion, rather than assuming blacks' preferences are simply liberal or represented by interest groups that are active in Congress on a limited number of votes. The findings provide greater insight into the quality of representation of African Americans, as well as providing insight into the mechanisms of linkage between the mass public and political elites in general.Our paper examines the relative influence of Black turnout and Black constituency size (conceptualized in several ways) on substantive representation in Congress. The findings provide insight into the mechanisms of linkage between the mass public and political elites in general. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research by McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal (2006) appears to contradict earlier positions in political science (Key 1949) concerning the consequences of party polarization on the policy benefits that accrue to the poor. In this paper we examine party polarization and state party ideology to assess the relationship between state economic context, party polarization and overall system ideology. We develop a new measure of state party ideologies based on data from over 16,000 state legislative candidate responses to Project Vote Smart's issue surveys. The impact of polarization on the representation of the poor in state party programs is highly conditional with polarization associated with less favorable party stances in wealthier states but more favorable positioning in poorer states. These results are explained by the differential responsive of Democratic and Republic elites to their constituencies and how state economic conditions influence the ideological preferences of their party supporters and beneficiaries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I develop simple game-theoretic model of political clientelism in Mexico. The model, which is based on the payoff structures of the clientelist party, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), and the poor in Mexico, yield two predictions: (1) the poor is more likely to keep being the clients of the PRI when the granted resource surpasses the potential lost, and (2) in a game where remittances play a role, the PRI is more likely to give the patronage to the poor even when the poor opts out of the clientlist network. The main argument is that the neo-liberal reform has weakened the PRI's ability to distribute resources. Remittances filled in the need of the poor and enabled the poor to signal for better governance from the PRI. The PRI thus strategically distributed resources to the remittance-fed poor, hoping to stop losing the support. I test these predictions on a large transfer program for rural peasants (procampo ) in different states in Mexico and find them consistent to the expectations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comparative study of Fujimori of Peru and Chandrababu Naidu of India, and their redistributive programs. The paper traces similarities between the two leaders policy strategies, and narrates the experience of the implementation of their respective development programs - FONCODES and Velugu. The paper argues that 'neo populists' like Fujimori and Chandrababu Naidu are capable of reaching the poor, but run the risk of making the poor worse off. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the transition Taiwan to democracy is presented. It examines the role of the middle class in the country's democratic transition. It discusses the significance of factors including class-related grievances, demands and identities to many urban social movements based in poor neighborhoods.

The article aims to shed light on U.S. President George W. Bush's exercise of legal authority and use of the executive branch to support faith-based organizations. The intellectual seeds of Bush's compassionate conservatism stem in large part from author Myron Magnet and professor Marvin Olasky. His views of U.S. welfare policy and culture were solidified by Magnet's critique of the 160's counterculture and its impact on the U.S. poor. Also, his relation with Olasky impacted his thinking on the role of the government in relation to the poor.

Many scholars claim that democracy tends to improve the material well-being of the poor. I argue that previous tests of this claim were flawed, particularly by sample bias. Once these flaws are addressed, there is no evidence that poor people have benefitted from living under democratic governments. This disturbing result suggests that democracies have not functioned well for their poorest citizens. I speculate about the reasons for this finding, and suggest avenues for further research. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does democracy help the poor and disadvantaged? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This paper reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve the welfare of the poor, and tests the hypothesis that democracy improves human development. Using infant mortality rates as a measure of human development, it conducts a series of time-series cross-national statistical tests of the relationship between democracy and infant mortality. It finds a strong relationship for both contemporary levels of democracy and a historical stock measure of democracy with infant mortality, though the results for the stock measure are more temporally robust and theoretically plausible. We find strong evidence of an empirical association between democratic stock and human development, and good reason to believe that this relationship is a causal one. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the impact of voter turnout among different groups of people on state public policy in the U.S. This study re-examines a 1995 study by Hill, Leighley, and Hinton-Andersson. It found that there is less evidence that voter turnout among the poor results to more generous funding for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). It also found that there is less evidence that voter turnout results to generosity to low-income non-poor individuals on Unemployment Insurance (UI).

The article examines the impact of battleground designation by presidential campaign strategists in the U.S. on the political activation and involvement of resource poor and peripheral voters, including those in lower income brackets, weak partisans, and African Americans. It is suggested that low income voters are much more likely to develop an interest in the campaign when they reside in states that both parties have targeted as battlegrounds compared to states that both parties have designated as safe.

The privatization of natural monopolies in post-communist states has been extremely slow and difficult. There are multiple, interrelated problems across different sectors blocking full price liberalization and greater privatization. After discussing the progress of utility reforms within the energy sector in five post-communist states, this paper identifies problems of reform in transitional economies, especially problems of affordability. The main purpose of this paper is to assess different policies associated with energy affordability for poor households that are consistent with sector restructuring. The paper then explores two methodologies for evaluating programs to assist poor households with increasing energy costs and concludes with recommendations for new strategies for energy reform in transitioning states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers evidence that the information age may have transformed disparities in poor communities into new barriers to technological access and skill. Paradox of race and digital disparities; Skills needed to use computers; Racial and ethnic attitudes toward technology.

Among the world’s wealthiest democracies, the price of a standard basket of goods is higher in countries that employ proportional electoral rules than in those countries with single-member electoral districts. We demonstrate that this relationship between electoral institutions and prices also holds in a diverse sample of all democracies worldwide, from 1972 to 2000. Among all democracies, the long-run price level in SMD systems is lower by nearly 12%. Expanding the sample beyond the OECD reveals a large price gap between rich and poor democracies, but the effect of electoral institutions on real prices is not modified by a democracy?s level of wealth. Finally, we demonstrate that over the past thirty years, at the same time that global real prices with respect to the United States have been falling steadily, the disparity between baseline real prices in SMD and PR countries has twice closed and re-opened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the theory chapter for a book exploring when the poor count in Latin American politics. The book looks at when formal and informal institutions (e.g., electoral rules, party nomination procedures, clientelism, powers of the executive and legislature) give members of the legislature an incentive to represent poor people. Given that poor people constitute a majority, or near majority, of the population in many Latin American democracies, their support would seem to be essential for winning elections. However, lack of attention from government is a common complaint of Latin America’s poor. This book explores representation of the poor from the perspective of whether elected officials have an incentive to represent poor people. This paper builds on principal-agent models of democratic accountability developed to study the relationship between elected officials and voters in industrialized, advanced democracies. It explores how the existence of competing principals, one poor and one rich, affects the agent’s strategy for pursuing a political career. It presents a theoretical assessment of when institutions can create incentives for members of the legislature to represent poor people. Successive chapters explore these predictions in the case of Honduras and with comparative data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates whether or not negative attitudes towards single mothers contribute to relatively low levels of support for welfare spending in the U.S. Attitude of politicians and the media toward the sexual behavior of single mothers; Reasons for the overwhelming support of the U.S. people for government spending to help poor people and their lesser support to government spending on welfare; Public opinion about welfare recipients.

Examines the impact of economic sanctions on domestic politics and acts of political violence within the target state. Logic of economic sanctions; Explanations for the occurrence of political violence; Impact of sanctions on the poor and the middle class.

The paper examines the "moral economy" of electoral clientelism - the exchange of votes for goods - on the basis of qualitative interviews conducted in late 2000 in rural Mexico. Contrary to common assumptions about physical needs forcing the "poor and powerless" to trade their political rights for material favors, it finds that respondents reject clientelist practices, defend their individual autonomy, and demand universalistic policies. In democratic Mexico, the paper concludes tentatively, attempted vote trading may be a widespread practice; yet an illegitimate one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both global economic inequality and poverty are growing problems, despite decades of development efforts directed at less developed countries. The paper looks at some of the most basic assumptions of the prevailing (neoclassical) development economics of the period, asking whether some of the failure can be attributed to misconceptions at that level, as they translate into practice in policies of IFIs such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Engaging recent works by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and Brooke Ackerly, which look at development as the increase of human well-being--including freedom and functioning--and take seriously the perspectives of the world’s economically least well-off, particularly poor women, the paper also turns to more direct evidence of how those living in severe poverty see their situation and articulate their needs. Such evidence, collected during both preparations for the Fourth World Women’s Conference, 1995, and in the World Bank’s recent study, Voices of the Poor, suggests the need to re-evaluate the ways in which the problem of world poverty has been approached, such that both gender and the voices of the poor themselves are kept in the forefront of discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thousands of people, throughout the world, are so medically needy that they must get an organ, some tissue or blood in order to lead minimally decent lives or even to survive; the majority of them will not get a transplant, and some of them will die as a result. This paper argues that, if one thinks that the needy have a right to the material resources they need to lead minimally decent lives, one must be committed, in some cases, to conferring on the sick a right that the healthy give them some of the body parts they need to lead such a life. My argument proceeds in two steps: first, I show that body parts are the kind of resources of which it makes sense to say that one can have a right to it; second, I show that the very considerations that dictate conferring welfare rights on the poor dictate conferring on the sick rights to some of the body parts of the healthy. I then assess two objections against that view, to wit: to confer on the sick a right to the live body parts of the healthy (a) violates the bodily integrity of the latter; and (b) constitutes too much of an interference in their life. The first one relies on a misinterpretation of the Kantian requirement that people be treated as ends; the second one relies too heavily on the principles of acts and omissions and double-effect. However, although those objections are not as strong as their proponents aver, they lead me to qualify my proposal in some respects. I conclude that although the sick sometimes have a right to some of the body parts of the healthy, the latter still retain a considerable degree of autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses the relationship between the duty of poor relief and the moral impetus engendered by sympathy, as reflected in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I argue that Smith’s overriding concern is that individuals will express an excess of sympathy for those is distress rather than too little. This view places Smith in sharp contrast to other Scottish moralists, such as Francis Hutcheson, James Thomson, Henry Home, and Hugh Blair, whom he silently parodies as "whining and melancholy moralist". I argue that the best explanation for Smith’s attempt to restrict sympathy for the poor does not lie in his subsequent analysis of the market, as is often suggested. An explanation more in keeping with the themes of sympathy and self-command, running throughout TMS, may be identified by recalling that Smith’s theory of intersubjective sympathy lacks the firmer grounding of self-identity that is found in the theologically oriented moralists. In a theory lacking such concepts as "moral sense", "heart" or "conscience", Smith describes the individual developing self-awareness completely through the complex processes of sympathy. As a result, Smith’s concern is that individuals who are swept up in the sorrow of others risk loosing a sense of self-command, rendering them incapable of helping themselves or others, not unlike the condition parodied in Henry MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling. Smith’s restrictions on the traditional moral and legal duties to recognize and aid the visible sufferings of the poor should be taken into account before positing a theory of sympathy as the grounds for a more intersubjective, and less legalistic, theory of distributive justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many ways to be Poor is to be powerless in society. Not only does poverty affect one's ability to be autonomous but also it affects one's ability to engage in politics. In this paper I argue that Rousseau and Smith, who may appear at first glance, to be an odd couple to label as defenders of the Poor, do in fact have much in common in their treatment of the Poor and poverty. Both hold that the advent of private property created inequality; they also think that owning private property is one of the most important individual rights. Two other crucial points of agreement are their calls for progressive taxation and their beliefs that poverty is a relative concept. The latter is one of the moral justifications that Smith uses to reconcile the inevitable inequalities that arise in market economies. Their beliefs about the Poor are provocative because they both write about poverty and its effects on individuals with greater sensitivity and understanding than most Western political theorists. I argue that one can only understand their treatment of the Poor by connecting it to their beliefs about human nature. Both Rousseau and Smith are optimistic about the goodness and sincerity of human beings, and this shapes their beliefs about the Poor. The tone of their treatments of poverty stands in sharp contrast to other liberal theorists such as John Locke since neither Rousseau nor Smith believe that the poor are lazy nor are they always to blame for their poverty. Moreover, their work indicates a sense of compassion and understanding that exposes the existential state of powerlessness share by the Poor. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]