The Political Economy of Inappropriate Technology: Industrialization in Sub-Saharan Africa

The failure of public sector investment projects in Sub-Saharan Africa can often be described in large measure as a technological one, where technology is defined not just in the narrow sense of alternative factor proportions, but in the wider terms of scale and import intensity as well. In confining itself mainly to the economic dimensions of the problem, the existing literature fails to consider the reasons for the extraordinarily rapid and widespread expansion of the public sector in Sub-Saharan Africa and it hence ignores the possibility that this expansion might itself be related to the observed patterns of technological behaviour in the sector. Such a possibility, I suggest, resides in the political and institutional compulsions that drive industrial firms in the public sector to increase the size of their operations.     

纵贯历史：辛亥前后的铁路国有

1911年,由铁路国有引发的保路运动,正是辛亥革命爆发的导火线,辛亥革命则导致了清朝的灭亡。不过,铁路国有的政策却并未成为清帝国倒台的殉葬品。民国建立以后,铁路国有化的整体趋势却是不可逆转的。铁路国有在清朝和民国的不同命运,揭示了辛亥前后政治格局的变动。     

工业化以前英国乡村教育初探

本考察了工业化启动前英国农民——包括普通农夫、雇工和富裕农民阶层“约曼”的教育状况。章认为,工业化启动前,英国乡村教育已经取得了较为显的发展,农民的识字率及乡村整体化水平均有相当程度的提高。英国农民逐渐摆脱了愚昧和迷信,显示出新的精神风貌和品质,这为工业化的启动提供了精神上和智力上的保证。具有一定化水准的英国农民成为工业化的积极推动力量。     

论辛亥革命前批判理性的成长

从现代化的角度来看,洋务派、改良派和革命派对近代中国人的现代化的探索经历了这样的历程：洋务派以实业救国的认真努力翻开了近代中国批判理性成长的第一页;改良派在总结洋务派失败的基础上,在变革政体的过程中,发现了民族自身强大的药方,即改造民族精神,造就新一代新国民;而革命派则以强烈的勇气冲击着一切阻碍革命前进的国民劣根性,它与改良派相互辉映,把辛亥革命前中国先进人批判理性的恩潮推向一个高蝰．     

Political Science in Mexico: Cold War and Post-Cold War Context

Abstract

Through a critical consideration of recent proposals urging the use of “citizen forums” or “mini-publics” on issues involving science, this article reflects on the challenge posed to democracy and democratic decision making by the intellectual authority of modern science. Though the danger of a descent into technocracy is real and pressing, arguably the most serious challenge to democracy today, these novel “deliberative democratic” institutions are unpromising as a corrective beyond the local level, and may actually exacerbate the problem. The article concludes with a consideration of alternatives.     

International Regimes and Democratic Governance: Political Equality and Influence in Global Institutions

Proponents of cosmopolitan democracy rely primarily on institutional design to make their case for the feasibility of democratic governance at this level. Another strategy seems more plausible: proposing a 'non-ideal' theory in Rawls's sense that examines the social forces and conditions currently promoting democracy at the international level. The strongest forces operating now are various transnational associations that help to produce and monitor regime formation and compliance. Such a highly decentralized form of governance suggests that democratization is thereby promoted by a dense network of associations in international civil society, a global public sphere, and responsive political organizations. However much these forces disperse power through the normative principle of equal access to political influence, they could also fall well short of realizing desirable ideals such as free and open deliberation. In order not to devolve into an interest group pluralism, the decentralized strategy requires that a richer democracy be realized through the legal institutionalization of free and equal access to the global public sphere.     

The Conditioning Effects of Policy Salience and Complexity on American Political Institutions

Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience- complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley's salience-complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley's contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy's salience.     

Regulating Investment Abroad: The Political Economy of the Regionalization of Singaporean Firms

This paper attempts to understand the regionalization of national firms from Singapore within the methodological construct of the regulationist perspective. It aims to demonstrate the usefulness of some concepts in the regulationist perspective for explaining restructuring processes in developing countries, and to evaluate critically the role of some of these concepts—such as regimes of accumulation and modes of social regulation—in illuminating the internationalization of capital through transnational corporations and their associated foreign direct investment. In particular, the paper argues that Singapore's export-led regime of accumulation manifests inherent contradictions in its dependence on foreign capital, the domination of the domestic economy by state-owned enterprises, and the relative underdevelopment of indigenous entrepreneurship. While this accumulation process was embedded in an earlier set of social and institutional mechanisms, its contradictions and tensions were not appropriately regulated and contained. When Singapore experienced two major external economic crises in the mid-1970s and 1985, these shocks and their internal tensions triggered a continuous process of economic restructuring regulated by a distinct combination of social and institutional mechanisms, or "fixes." One such institutional fix in recent years has been the promotion of the regionalization of Singaporean firms through the social regulation of local labor markets and the state-led establishment of institutions to facilitate the regionalization drive.     

The Political Economy of Industrialization: A Comparison of Latin American and East Asian Newly Industrializing Countries

ABSTRACT The paper analyses the industrial performance of two East Asian (South Korea and Taiwan) and three Latin American (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico) newly industrializing countries. It argues that the better performance in East Asia is not due simply to differences in trade orientation or the degree of state intervention, but rather to the effectiveness of intervention. This is explained in terms of the relative autonomy of the state and the structuring of the state apparatus in the two regions. The historically determined class structure and the international context led to much greater state autonomy in East Asia than in Latin America. The last part of the paper shows a number of ways in which this greater relative autonomy has contributed to rapid industrial growth in East Asia in comparison with Latin America.     

第二次郑州会议前后的政治沟通探析

第二次郑州会议前后,为做好人民公社体制的调整工作,在与中央领导层达成共识的基础上,毛泽东对地方领导人进行了耐心细致地说服工作,同时要求将第二次郑州会议的精神一竿子捅到底。在中央与地方的信息传递与交流过程中,不仅在一定程度上发扬了民主,而且地方还对人民公社体制的弊端提出了若干建设性意见。在这次政治沟通中,虽然没有道出农民包产到户的心声,但它对于统一全党思想、整顿人民公社初期的混乱局面起到了积极作用。