Search

"The Crooked Course of Charles Crowe: A Reconstruction Narrative" is an article that explores the life of Charles C. Crowe, a white southern Republican during the Reconstruction era. The article discusses Crowe's personal journey, including his political advocacy, marriage, and military service, as well as the challenges he faced as a white Republican in the South during this period. It also examines the political landscape in Alabama during Reconstruction and the role of Crowe, a former Confederate captain who became a prominent Republican. The text sheds light on the efforts of southern Republicans to find opportunities in the western territories and contributes to our understanding of Reconstruction and the experiences of scalawags. [Extracted from the article]

A politicization of diplomacy weakens the professionalism of the foreign service and arguably endangers the external relations of states. Yet, this phenomenon has largely escaped scholarly scrutiny. Public administration research on politicization usually overlooks the foreign service, whereas diplomacy scholars have focused almost exclusively on the United States. Our exploratory study of ambassador appointments compares the levels and modes of politicization (through politically connected professionals, or political appointees) of 669 ambassadors in 2019, across seven countries and three administrative traditions. The analysis is guided by three expectations: 1) countries that are more politicized overall appoint more non-career ambassadors; 2) patronage recruitment of political appointees focuses on low-hardship postings; and 3) politically connected professionals are used to control politically important foreign missions. We find that states politicize their foreign services to a varied degree and in different ways. Appointing politically connected professionals instead of political appointees is the most common way of politicization among our cases. In this regard, the US is an outlier, which also points to the need of studying politicization of diplomacy comparatively. This article thus makes an important contribution by setting the agenda for future research on this hitherto underexplored topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid Lebanon's multifaceted economic crisis, this paper explores the intricate dynamics between political patronage networks and financial stability. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Project Management (PM), the study delves into how entrenched political elites and patronage networks have shaped Lebanon's financial system, exacerbating vulnerabilities and perpetuating the ongoing crisis. Utilizing qualitative methods including in-depth interviews, document analysis, and case studies, the research illuminates the pivotal role of political actors and their vested interests in economic policies and financial institutions. The findings reveal systemic governance failures, crony capitalism, and institutional decay as underlying causes of Lebanon's economic stress. In response, the paper proposes a comprehensive framework for governance reform that integrates insights from NIE and PM, emphasizing structured planning, accountability mechanisms, and institutional strengthening. The purpose of this study is not only to contribute to a nuanced understanding of Lebanon's challenges but also to offer actionable insights for policymakers, academics, and stakeholders to address the root causes of the crisis and pave the way for sustainable economic recovery and revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-engaged scholarship has largely neglected the potential of sports to construct progressive forms of community and mobilize disparate interests. In this article, we critically reflect on how sports were used for placemaking purposes in the Friendship and Hope Campaign, an annual event that is driven by residents of Thembelihle, a low-income community in South Africa. The Campaign is a participatory and community-based intervention that seeks to strengthen community relations and mobilize resources to build peaceful, nonracial, and nonsexist communities. Although the Campaign hosted several sports tournaments and cultural events, its attempt to strengthen community cohesion for the purposes of making democratically-led change renders it a political approach to placemaking. Yet, as with all community-engaged work, this was far from a simplistic process. The Campaign's deployment of sports as a placemaking practice was complicated by a multitude of political interests that oftentimes contradicted the community-oriented values and aims of the Campaign. We reflect on how patronage politics can assist us in understanding such internal contestations and conflicting interests, and how community campaigns can work to move through and hold complexity in a democratic fashion, rather than attempt to settle such complexity altogether [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In divided-executive patronal systems, legislatures have been sites of resistance to the centralization of power in a single patronal pyramid. Kyrgyzstan is an anomaly among divided-executive patronal systems when between 2010 to 2020, the Kyrgyz parliament was neither a site of opposition nor did it demonstrate legislative agency vis-à-vis the executive. Instead, following another uprising in 2020, a unified single patronal pyramid was re-established. Adopting an approach rooted in the semiotics of meaning making and drawing on a dataset of interviews with parliamentary deputies and a range of documentary sources, this article complements existing institutional approaches to explaining weak legislative agency by revealing a series of dialogical relationships between deputy meaning making and broader institutional and cultural constraints which shaped the Kyrgyz's parliament's overall quality and strength. These relationships pertain to legislative initiative, the protection of private interests and representation, with the interplay between the ascribed meaning and its constitution within broader institutional and cultural context contributing to the diminishment of legislative agency vis-à-vis the presidency. Kyrgyzstan illustrates the value of meaning making as an approach to understanding legislative-executive relations in non-democratic contexts, and its impact in conjunction with cultural and institutional constraints in shaping legislative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding clientelist practices is one of the core issues to unravel to ensure the proper functioning of electoral institutions. This article focuses on the decision of patrons/brokers on who to target, introducing a new norm into the picture – authoritarianism. Building on the theories of norm-based compliance, I argued that authoritarian individuals should be more frequently targeted, as they should be more likely to comply with brokers demands without external monitoring. I posit that this is true because authoritarian individuals should be more willing to submit to the will and demands of authorities (brokers), and because they are likely to evaluate clientelism as morally acceptable and a legitimate electoral strategy. Furthermore, the rate of authoritarian targeting should be higher in institutional settings that limit the overall reach of clientelism. Utilizing Afrobarometer (2011-2013) data for 34 countries, through multilevel regression modelling I show that authoritarian individuals do have a higher chance of being targeted with the strength of this association increasing as the district magnitude rises. This article opens a new avenue of research that introduces individual level authoritarianism into the literature on clientelist targeting and complements the norm-based compliance approach with a focus on a new and potentially influential norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how negative oil shocks affect military expenditures and the quality of democracy in the oil rentier states of the greater Middle East using annual data from 1990 to 2018, inclusive. The theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in oil revenues decreases the government spending on patronages and public goods and may challenge the political power of the incumbent leader. The results of the impulse response functions based on the estimated panel vector autoregressive models indicate that the responses of the military burden and non-military expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) to negative oil shocks become negative and statistically significant after three to four years. Reductions in the financial capability of a rentier government and spending on patronages improve the political environment and quality of democracy. However, this political improvement takes some time to develop as the government may resist the reduction in its expenditures during the initial phase of oil shocks. The policy implication of these results is informative for organizations and policymakers interested in the security and political impact of oil sanctions. Restrictions on oil exports decrease the military spending of the oil rentier states and improve their democracy indices in the long run, although the short-run impacts can be negative. These results are not sensitive to different proxies for oil abundance, alternative data on military expenditures, different indicators of democracy, and different groups of oil-dependent countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political interference has been one of the leading factors in inhibiting state-owned entities reach their mandates. Through political patronage, political elites are the gateway to the SOE's thus impacting the efficacy of most state-owned entities. In this regard, South African Airways (SAA) is also one of the entities in the grip of corruption due to political patronage. Therefore, this political patronage has been the difference between the efficacy of SAA in executing its mandate. SAA has been taking center stage due to corruption, maladministration, and failure to execute its mandate as a result of political interference as well as patronage. This paper reviews existing literature on the effect of political patronage on the efficacy of SAA in executing its mandate. In doing so, the paper employed qualitative techniques. Document analysis was utilized to understand the effect of political patronage on SAA's ability to execute its mandate. Eventually, the paper discovered that political patronage affects the ability of SAA to execute its mandate. The paper then closes by making recommending mechanisms for inhibiting political interference in SOE most specifically SAA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local brokers are essential in the implementation of clientelist politics, but their efforts on parties' behalf are not fully observable. A growing literature studies how parties address this agency problem, highlighting two distinct reward schemes: allocating promotions or prizes based on observed vote shares or doing so based on inferred effort allocations. This article develops a formal model to examine the conditions under which one or the other of these reward schemes is optimal for minimizing brokers' rent seeking. Intuitively, the effort-based reward mechanism is optimal when broker effort is inferred with relative precision. Less intuitively, the vote-based mechanism will tend to be optimal when a party's supporters are evenly distributed across regions and when the prize β adopts intermediate values, which together lead to high levels of interbroker competition. When brokers must compete with one another over valued prizes, parties can often minimize rent seeking without directly monitoring broker effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]