En este libro Arturo Santa Cruz desarrolla una concepcion del poder como relacion social y la aplica consistentemente al ambito economico de las relaciones de Estados Unidos con otros paises del hemisferio occidental. Siguiendo el debate academico y popular acerca de los altibajos de la hegemonia estadounidense, este trabajo centra su analisis en un caso critico para el ejercicio del poder estadounidense a traves de su diplomacia economica (o economic statecraft): el continente americano, su zona de influencia historica. La racionalidad del enfoque regional es metodologico: si se puede demostrar que la influencia de Washington ha disminuido en el area desde inicios de la decada de los anos 70 del siglo pasado (cuando la discusion sobre la materia inicio) puede asumirse que lo mismo ha ocurrido en otras latitudes. El analisis se concentra en tres regiones: Norteamerica, Centroamerica y Sudamerica. Puesto que cada region contiene estados que en ocasiones han mantenido muy diferentes relaciones con Estados Unidos, los hallazgos contribuyen a un major entendimiento de la practica del poder en la subregion en cuestion, anadiendo variabilidad a los resultados generales. La hegemonia estadounidense y el continente americano: Poder y diplomacia economica en las relaciones internacionales es una fuente invaluable para estudiantes y academicos interesados en la politica y la historia de America Latina, en la integracion regional en America del Norte, en la teoria de Relaciones Internacionales, en la Diplomacia Economica, en Economia Politica, y en Politica Comparada.

Der Tagungsband zu Ehren von Prof. Dr. Gunther Kuhne enthalt Beitrage zum Energieregulierungs- und Wirtschaftsrecht. Die Beitrage untersuchen aktuelle Rechtsentwicklungen, die von wesentlicher Bedeutung fur das deutsche und europaische Energie- und Wirtschaftsrecht sind. Sie gehen der Frage nach, wie der Wechsel der Stromerzeugung von Kernenergie und Kohle hin zu erneuerbaren Energien rechtssicher gestaltet werden kann und in welchem Umfang Mitgliedstaaten die Energieregulierung normativ ausgestalten koennen, ohne die unionsrechtlichen Vorgaben zu verletzen. Die Beitrage analysieren zudem, welche Spielraume fur umlagefinanzierte Foerdersysteme die neue Rechtsprechung des EuGH zum EEG 2012 eroeffnet und inwieweit die jungsten Entscheidungen des EuGH noch Raum fur eine Investitionsschutz-Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit lassen, z.B. im Rahmen des Energiecharta-Vertrags.

Examining the startling revival of the Scottish Conservative Party under Ruth Davidson's leadership Key features First book to examine the recent revival of the Scottish Conservative Party Analyses the Scottish Conservative Party and Ruth Davidson's leadership in ground-breaking ways, for example in the context of gender and LGBT politics; its relationships with the SNP, Northern Ireland, the Scottish media and the UK Tory Party; its use of Scottish national identity in promoting itself electorally Complements and updates David Torrance's 2012 edited volume for Edinburgh University Press on the decline of the party, Whatever Happened to Tory Scotland? Helps inform Scottish political and academic discourse ahead of the 2021 Holyrood elections When Ruth Davidson was elected leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party in 2011, it was considered something of a joke: in electoral decline for decades, politically irrelevant and apparently beyond the point of no return. But by 2017, 'Ruth Davidson's Conservatives' had become Scotland's second party at Holyrood and Westminster, and its leader spoken of as a future leader of the UK Conservative Party, if not the next Scottish First Minister. This book, which brings together leading academics and analysts, examines the extraordinary revival of the Scottish Conservative Party between 2011 and Ruth Davidson's shock resignation in 2019. Contributors look at the importance of gender and sexuality, the 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish media and the UK Conservative Party's 'territorial code' to the changing fortunes of the party and its leader, asking if it can be sustained amid the turbulence of two ongoing constitutional debates.

What explains contemporary variations in African legislative institutions - including their strengths and weaknesses? Compared with the more powerful executive branches, legislatures throughout the continent have historically been classified as weak and largely inconsequential to policy-making processes. But, as Ken Ochieng' Opalo suggests here, African legislatures actually serve important roles, and under certain conditions, powerful and independent democratic legislatures can emerge from their autocratic foundations. In this book, Opalo examines the colonial origins of African legislatures, as well as how postcolonial intra-elite politics structured the processes of adapting inherited colonial legislatures to local political contexts and therefore continued legislative development. Through case studies of Kenya and Zambia, Opalo offers a comparative longitudinal study of the evolution of legislative strength and institutionalization as well as a regional survey of legislative development under colonial rule, postcolonial autocratic single-party rule, and multiparty politics throughout Africa.

Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia's modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, this Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the past half century. Drawing on primary fieldwork undertaken in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and secondary studies from across the region, Rigg shows how the experience of Southeast Asia offers a counterpoint and a challenge to standard, historicist understandings of agrarian change and, more broadly, development. Taking a rural view allows an alternative lens for theorising and judging Southeast Asia's modernisation experience and narrative. The Element argues that if we are to capture the nature - and not just the direction and amount - of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, then we need to view the countryside as more than rural and greater than farming.

In Stand on Guard, Stephanie Carvin sets out to explain the range of activities considered national security threats by Canadian security services today. As new forms of terrorism and extremism appear, especially online, we need a responsibly widened view of such threats and how they manifest in the contemporary world. Canadians should not be more fearful, Carvin explains, but a more sophisticated understanding among security services personnel and the general public is needed if we are to anticipate and ameliorate threats to national security. As a former security analyst tasked with providing threat assessments to high levels of government, Carvin writes with both authority and urgency. Her book presents an insider's look at the issues facing the Canadian security and intelligence community. Timely and accessible, Stand on Guard will be required reading for scholars, practitioners, and any Canadian concerned about national security in the twenty-first century.

This book analyses the crucial role that guns play in the dynamics of extreme violence engulfing Latin America and the policies that are being implemented to confront it. Gun control is surprisingly not a prominent issue in most countries of the region, but this situation is rapidly changing as proliferation and violence dramatically increase. The book adopts an extended version of John Kingdon's influential Multiple Streams Framework to explore how gun control enters political agendas and why some countries act to end gun violence and others do not. In this effort, the Brazilian Disarmament Statute and the Uruguayan Responsible Firearm Ownership Law serve as in-depth case studies that exhibit the region's heterogeneity and put Kingdon's policy theory to the test. Gun Control Policies in Latin America is an essential reading for anyone interested in Latin American security and public policies.

Cloud-Dienste gewinnen mit dem stetigen Wandel der Technik immer groessere praktische Bedeutung. Fehlten bislang ausdruckliche Regelungen zu Cloud-Computing-Vertragen im deutschen Recht, konkretisiert nunmehr die Digitale-Inhalte-Richtlinie spezifische Rechte und Pflichten der Vertragsparteien eines Cloud-Computing-Vertrags. Die Autorin befasst sich vor diesem Hintergrund mit der Frage, inwieweit sich die Rechte und Pflichten der Vertragsparteien bei Mangelhaftigkeit der Cloud-Dienste mit der Verabschiedung der Digitale-Inhalte-Richtlinie verandern. Ein besonderes Augenmerk legt die Autorin hierbei auf die Mangelrechte des Nutzers, die Beweislast fur das Bestehen eines Mangels sowie auf die Moeglichkeit des Anbieters, seine Haftung zu begrenzen.

Around the same time that Richard J. Daley governed Chicago, greasing the wheels of his notorious political machine during a tenure that lasted from 1955 to his death in 1976, Anthony "Dutch" Hamann's "reform" government centralized authority to similar effect in San Jose. In light of their equally exclusive governing arrangements--a similarity that seems to defy their reputations--Jessica Trounstine asks whether so-called bosses and reformers are more alike than we might have realized.
Situating her in-depth studies of Chicago and San Jose in the broad context of data drawn from more than 240 cities over the course of a century, she finds that the answer--a resounding yes--illuminates the nature of political power. Both political machines and reform governments, she reveals, bias the system in favor of incumbents, effectively establishing monopolies that free governing coalitions from dependence on the support of their broader communities. Ironically, Trounstine goes on to show, the resulting loss of democratic responsiveness eventually mobilizes residents to vote monopolistic regimes out of office. Envisioning an alternative future for American cities, Trounstine concludes by suggesting solutions designed to free urban politics from this damaging cycle.

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As more Africans get online, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly hailed for their transformative potential. Yet, the fascination for the possibilities of promoting more inclusive forms of development in the information age have obfuscated the reality of the complex negotiations among political and economic actors who are seeking to use technology in their competition for power. Building on over ten years of research in Ethiopia, Iginio Gagliardone investigates the relationship between politics, development, and technological adoption in Africa's second most populous country and its largest recipient of development aid. The emphasis the book places on the 'technopolitics' of ICTs, and on their ability to embody and enact political goals, offers a strong and empirically grounded counter-argument to prevalent approaches to the study of technology and development that can be applied to other cases in Africa and beyond.

This book studies political leadership at the local level, based on data from a survey of the mayors of cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants in 29 European countries carried out between 2014 and 2016. The book compares these results with those of a similar survey conducted ten years ago. From this comparative perspective, the book examines how to become a mayor in Europe today, the attitudes of these politicians towards administrative and territorial reforms, their notions of democracy, their political priorities, whether or not party politicization plays a role at the municipal level, and how mayors interact with other actors in the local political arena. This study addresses students, academics and practitioners concerned at different levels with the functioning and reforms of the municipal level of local government.

In imperial China, workers drawn from the local populace performed many of the basic functions of local administration. Standing between the rulers and the ruled, these men mediated in both directions. McKnight's study concentrates on the nature of this village-level subbureaucratic activity in the Sung period; it sheds new light on the emergence of early Chinese society while providing a background against which to assess social changes during later dynasties.

Winner: 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award

This is a book about forces challenging the continued integrity of Canada, one of the world's oldest and most admired democracies. It focuses on six critical events, beginning with the 1988 federal election and the fierce debate over the risks of free trade with the United States for Canada's economy and cherished social programs. It ends with the 1998 re-election of the Parti Qu?b?cois and the possibility of a third sovereignty referendum. Collectively, these events have pushed Canada to the edge of disintegration. The book's analyses and interpretations of these events are based on a unique collection of survey data gathered over the past two decades. Conversations with thousands of Canadians map the dynamics of public beliefs, attitudes and behavior in an era of economic dislocation and political crisis. Struggling to adapt its political institutions and processes to regional and ethno-linguistic cleavages invigorated by forces of economic restructuring and globalization, Canada exemplifies many of the "forces from above and below" that have beset democracies, new and old alike, in recent years. By explaining how these forces have brought a "charter member" of that very special political club to the brink of fragmentation, this book will be of interest to all those concerned with the future of democracy in polycommunal societies.

Examines the complex ecology of quasi-public and privatized institutions that mobilize and administer many of the political, administrative, and fiscal resources of today's metropolitan regions In recent decades metropolitan regions in the United States have witnessed the rise of multitudes of "shadow governments" that often supersede or replace functions traditionally associated with municipalities and other local governments inherited from the urban past. Shadow governments take many forms, ranging from billion-dollar special authorities that span entire urban regions, to public-private partnerships and special districts created to accomplish particular tasks, to privatized gated communities, to neighborhood organizations empowered to receive private and public funds. They finance and administer public services ranging from the prosaic (garbage collection and water utilities) to the transformative (economic development and infrastructure). Private Metropolis demonstrates that this complex ecosystem of local governance has compromised and even eclipsed democratic processes by moving important policy decisions out of public sight. The quasi-public institutions of urban governance generally escape the budgetary and statutory restraints imposed on traditional local governments and protect policy decisions from the limitations and vagaries of electoral politics. Moving major policy decisions into a privatized and corporatized realm facilitates efficiency and speed, but at the cost of democratic oversight. Increasingly, the urban electorate is left debating symbolic issues only tangentially connected to the actual distribution of the resources that affect people's lives. The essays in Private Metropolis grapple with the difficult and timely questions that arise from this new ecology of governance: What are the consequences of the proliferation of special authorities, privatized governments, and public-private arrangements? Is the trade-off between democratic accountability and efficiency worth it? Has the public sector, with its messiness and inefficiencies-but also its checks and balances-ceded too much power to these new institutions? By examining such questions, this book provokes a long-overdue debate about the future of urban governance. Contributors: Douglas Cantor, California State U, Long Beach; Ellen Dannin, Pennsylvania State U; Jameson W. Doig, Princeton U; Mary Donoghue; Peter Eisinger, New School; Steven P. Erie, U of California, San Diego; Rebecca Hendrick, U of Illinois at Chicago; Sara Hinkley, U of California, Berkeley; Amanda Kass, U of Illinois at Chicago; Scott A. MacKenzie, U of California, Davis; David C. Perry, U of Illinois at Chicago; James M. Smith, U of Indiana South Bend; Shu Wang, Michigan State U; Rachel Weber, U of Illinois at Chicago.

Marco Just Quiles offers new perspectives on how domestic and external factors interact to shape variations in local state capacity. Using Bolivia as a case, he applies quantitative and qualitative methods to decode the nexus between global interdependencies, subnational bargaining processes, and diverging configurations of public service provision at the local level. Relying in part on newly compiled indicators, the author presents the ways in which shifting distributional coalitions between regional elites, central governments and their connections with international markets in different periods of the last century have produced the contemporary fragmentation of stateness in Bolivia.

This volume examines how urban stakeholders in China - particularly city governments and social actors - tackle China's urban environmental crisis. The volume's case studies speak to important interdisciplinary themes such as new tools and instruments of urban green governance, climate change and urban carbon consumption, green justice, digital governance, public participation, social media, social movements, and popular protest. It lays out a unique theoretical framework for examining and discussing urban green governance. The case studies are based on extensive fieldwork that examines governance failures, challenges, and innovations from across China, including the largest cities. They show that numerous policies, experiments, and reforms have been put in place in China - mostly on a pragmatic basis, but also as a result of both strategic policy design, civil participation, and protest. The book highlights how China's urban governments bring together diverse programmatic building blocks and instruments, from China and elsewhere. Written by experts and researchers from different disciplines at leading universities in China and the Nordic countries in Europe, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students who are interested in Chinese politics, especially urban politics, governance issues, and social movements. Both students and teachers will find the theoretical perspectives and case studies useful in their coursework.The unique green governance perspective makes this a work that is empirically and theoretically interesting for those working with urban political and environmental studies and urbanization worldwide.

This book presents narratives of the social use of space in the divided city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Through the narratives of movement in the city, the work demonstrates how residents engage informally with conflict transformation through new movement and use of spaces. This book will appeal across the social sciences, and in particular to students, academics, and researchers in the fields of peace and conflict studies, political sociology, and human geography.

The book examines the pattern of non-farm development at the national level and identifies the correlates and determinants of occupational diversification for the major states. It is one of the few studies that unravels the dynamic processes associated with growth and development at the sub-national level; wherein it elucidates changes in rural employment pattern and its implications for urban growth. The book fills a crucial gap in current research, notably, an understanding of conditions that enable large villages to assume an urban character. By providing micro-level study of census towns to capture the nuances of the dynamic situation in the countryside, the book would offer useful insights and provide reference material on the social and economic impacts of urban growth, thereby satisfying the needs of students, researchers and practitioners of regional economics, rural development, and sustainable urbanization. The book is the outcome of financial support received under the Research Programme Scheme of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, India.

Mit Verabschiedung der Verbraucherkreditrichtlinie 2008/48/EG hat der europaische Gesetzgeber nunmehr auch im Verbraucherkreditrecht ein europaweites Widerrufsrecht eingefuhrt. Die Autorin beleuchtet die Ausgestaltung dieses Widerrufsrechts und vergleicht sie mit den Widerrufsvorschriften der Fernabsatzrichtlinie fur Finanzdienstleitungen, der Verbraucherrechterichtlinie, der Timesharing-Richtlinie und dem Entwurf eines Gemeinsamen Referenzrahmens. Dabei untersucht sie die Frage, ob das Widerrufsrecht der Verbraucherkreditrichtlinie der Verbraucherschutzkonzeption der ubrigen europaischen Widerrufsrechte folgt und unterbreitet Vorschlage fur eine weitere Rechtsangleichung des Widerrufsrechts unter Einbeziehung des Verbraucherkreditrechts.

Die Grundsteuer ist Gegenstand langjahriger Reformdiskussionen. Ob sie sich daruber hinaus auch in den Immobilienpreisen kapitalisiert, wurde bislang nur unzureichend fur den deutschen Immobilienmarkt untersucht, wohingegen fur den US-amerikanischen Immobilienmarkt die Kapitalisierungsforschung weit aufgestellt ist. Fur die Immobilienmarkte Bremen und Niedersachsen wird jeweils eine Regressionsanalyse durchgefuhrt, um zu uberprufen, ob sich oeffentliche Leistungen und Grundsteuerbelastung in den Immobilienwerten kapitalisieren. Weiterhin dienen das Governance-Konzept und die Neue Institutionenoekonomik als erweiterte Analyseinstrumente des Kapitalisierungsprozesses im Hinblick auf Dynamiken von Akteuren und Institutionen sowie auf Reformauswirkungen.

Are politics local? Why? Where? When? How do we measure local versus national politics? And what are the effects? This book provides answers to these questions, within an explicitly comparative framework, including both advanced and developing democracies. It does so by using a statistically-based and graphical account of party nationalization, providing methodology and data for legislative elections covering scores of parties across dozens of countries. The book divides party nationalization into two dimensions - static and dynamic - to capture different aspects of localism, both with important implications for representation. Static nationalization measures the consistency in a party's support across the country and thus shows whether parties are able to encompass local concerns into their platforms. Dynamic nationalization, in turn, measures the consistency among the districts in over-time change in electoral results, under the presumption that where districts differ in their electoral responses, local factors must drive politics. Each of the two dimensions, in sum, considers representation from the perspective of the mix of national versus local politics.

This accessible text summarizes and explains the structure of British local government, focusing on key changes introduced during the Thatcher/Major years and initiatives implemented by the current Labour administration. While offering a detailed discussion of these policies, the book examines how local government has sought to respond in a proactive way to a range of important social, political and economic changes.

Readers are introduced to local government as a lively and complex site of political engagement. British local government is set in a wider political, social and theoretical context. Throughout, the authors argue that the attempt by the Thatcher and Major administrations of 1979-97 to push local government into the role of merely administrating centrally defined policies was largely short-circuited. While outlining and explaining these changes and their effects, the authors argue that far from being defenceless victims of central government, local authorities devised numerous strategies to protect their independent policy-making role. The authors go on to examine the proposals for change introduced by the Labour government and assess their implications for local government in the twenty-first century.

This book will be essential reading for lecturers and students of local government, politics, public policy and urban policy, as well as practitioners.

This volume sheds light on the development of squatting practices and movements in nine European cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Rotterdam and Brighton) by examining the numbers, variations and significant contexts in their life course. It reveals how and why squatting practices have shifted and to what extent they engender urban movements. The book measures the volume and changes in squatting over various decades, mostly by focusing on Squatted Social Centres but also including squatted housing. In addition, it systematically compares the cycles, socio-spatial structures and the political implications of squatting in selected cities. This collection highlights how squatters' movements have persisted over more than four decades through different trajectories and circumstances, especially in relation to broader protest cycles and reveals how political opportunities and constraints influence the conflicts around the legalisation of squats. p>