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The UK housing emergency: personal reflections
No full textIt is widely believed that Britain is grappling with a housing emergency. This may be the culmination of policies and practices deeply rooted in the past, but its extent and accelerating impact on the lives of families and, especially, children, make headlines every day. No wonder scholars and activists, like the public at large, take it so personally. This article, prefaced by a short introduction, comprises two reflections from a discussion in the British Academy’s popular Summer Showcase series, which also benefitted from a lively presentation by Kieren Yates around her book All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In (2023, Simon and Shuster). One author tackles the injustices of a ‘blame game’ around limited housing supply, the other offers a moving testimony to the carelessness built into housing environments by the long running under-provision of accessible homes. This article accompanies another in this issue, ‘Six provocations on the origins and impacts of the UK housing emergency’, by Ben Ansell, Martin Daunton, Emily Grundy, John Muellbauer, Michael Murphy, Avner Offer, and Susan J. Smith
Max Adler’s neo-Kantian reinvention of Marx’s notion of history
No full textAt the turn of the twentieth century, few philosophical ideas in Marx’s work gained as much attention as his account of history. Orthodox Marxists made it their programme to closely follow Marx’s development thesis, which posits that the productive forces determine the course of history. The Austromarxist Max Adler (1873–1937), influenced by neo-Kantianism, took more liberties in interpreting – or, perhaps more accurately, ‘reinventing’ – the law of history in practical terms. This article reconstructs Adler’s neo-Kantian ‘reinvention’ of Marx’s account of history. According to Adler, the notion of ‘necessity’ that underpins critical judgements is not grounded in the regularity of history but rather in the moral judgements we make about how history should develop. More specifically, I defend two claims. First, by interpreting human progress as a possibility that presents itself as a necessity from the standpoint of practical rationality, I show that Adler laid the foundation for a critique of the Marxist development thesis that only later gained traction. Second, while Marxists may fear that Kantian formalism cannot address misguided ideological beliefs, I argue that Adler’s neo-Kantian formalism is robustly anti-ideological, emphasising the ideology-emancipating transformation we undergo when we recognise exploitative structures
Encomienda, the colonial state, and long-run development in Colombia
No full textThe Spanish encomienda, a colonial forced-labour institution that lasted three centuries, killed many indigenous people and caused others to flee into nomadism. What were its long-term effects? We digitize a great deal of historical data from the mid-1500s onwards, impute prehispanic populations at municipal level, and reconstruct the Spanish conquerors’ route through Colombia using detailed topographical features to calculate their least-cost path. We show that Colombian municipalities with encomiendas in 1560 enjoy better outcomes today across multiple dimensions of development than those without: higher municipal GDP per capita, tax receipts, and educational attainment; lower infant mortality, poverty, and unsatisfied basic needs; larger populations; and superior fiscal performance and bureaucratic efficiency, but also higher inequality. Why? Mediation analysis using data on local institutions, populations and racial composition in 1794 shows that encomiendas affected development primarily by helping build the local state. Deep historical evidence fleshes out how encomenderos founded local institutions early on in the places they settled. Places lacking encomiendas also lacked local states, often for centuries. Local institutions mobilized public investment in ways that doubtless suited encomenderos, but, over time, spurred greater economic and human development
Managing exchange risk foreign monies and private trade finance in pre-modern long-distance trade (or why did bills of exchange not circulate beyond Europe?)
No full textBy specifying the specie on which returns were to be repaid respondentia was a ubiquitous financial instrument to carry international trade in which silver was “essential” for its continuation. Where multiple currencies existed and silver was the preferred money, imported silver species performed as foreign currency. Thus, the import of foreign coins created issues for prices, profits and exchange rates. Eighteenth century Europeans alternatively used respondentia or bills depending on the monetary context, casting a shade of doubt on the inherent efficiency of a cashless means of payment. Until the 1820s, private bills of exchange did not circulate where cash had a premium. Europeans developed means to regulate the price of foreign coins and exchange rates. Elsewhere respondentia allowed to hedge against exchange risk and propitiated arbitrage profits, giving an advantage over bills. The article documents the global scope of the instrument; it explains the exchange nature of the contract and explores the issues that respondentia came to solve. It highlights the role of monies of account Europeans used in pricing foreign currencies in international trade
Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code, 2020 and interstate women migrants: a gender integrative evaluation
No full textThe original forty-four central labour laws in India have been merged into four labour codes: the Code on Wages, 2019 (CoW); the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 (IRC); the Code on Social Security, 2020 (CSS); and the Occupational Safety, Health & Working Conditions Code, 2020 (OSH Code). In this discussion, I highlight the general concerns and specific limitations of these new labour codes, particularly the OSH Code, by examining its applicability to the most vulnerable section of migrants: the interstate seasonal migrant women belonging to marginalised communities. This review aims to highlight the lacunae in the new labour codes, in terms of perspective and enaction, for potential policy modifications
Green party entry and conservative backlash: evidence from Germany
No full textHow do voters react to new political actors? Recent research suggests that radical right party success can provoke electoral backlash. We argue that such backlash is not exclusive to the radical right but can emerge whenever new political actors disrupt the status quo. With very distinct policy positions and behaviour, Green parties were early disruptors of post-war party systems in Europe. Using first-difference and difference-in-differences designs with voting records from Germany, we show that Green party success provoked a conservative backlash. After the Greens entered state parliaments, the Christian Democrats gained support. Using additional evidence from election surveys, we find that Green party success reinforces feelings of animosity among conservatives, mainly driven by disapproval of the Greens’ behaviour. These results highlight a broader pattern of backlash against new disruptive political actors. Our findings are especially relevant as polarization and party system fragmentation intensify across many established democracies
EU money and mayors: does Cohesion Policy affect local electoral outcomes?
No full textThe EU Cohesion Policy, with its capacity to shape the socio-economic development of European regions and cities, also holds the potential to influence the political preferences of citizens. While existing research has explored the effects of EU funding on national electoral outcomes, its impact on local elections remains underexamined, overlooking the inherently territorial nature of Cohesion Policy and the crucial role local policy-makers play in its activation and implementation. This study leverages detailed administrative data on European development projects to examine how EU funds affect political support for incumbent local politicians in Italy. It analyses the relationship between the inflow of European funds and the electoral support for Italian mayors, considering different project types that reflect the mayors’ ability to attract European funds. The findings demonstrate that Cohesion Policy significantly shapes local voting behaviour. Larger, more visible projects significantly increase the likelihood of mayoral re-election. Moreover, municipalities experiencing faster economic growth, where EU projects contribute to public service improvements, witness the strongest electoral gains for incumbents. These results highlight the critical importance of project design, visibility, and effectiveness in determining the political consequences of EU redistributive policies
When can we trust regression discontinuity design estimates from close elections? Evidence from experimental benchmarks
No full textRegression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Following recent methodological advances, scholars can choose from various RDD estimators for point estimation and inference. This decision is mainly guided by theoretical results on optimality and Monte Carlo simulations because of a paucity of research on the performance of the different estimators in recovering real-world experimental benchmarks. Leveraging exact ties in personal votes in local elections in Colombia and Finland, which are resolved by a random lottery, we assess the performance of various estimators featuring different polynomial degrees, bias-correction methods, optimal bandwidths, and approaches to statistical inference. Using re-running and re-election as outcomes, we document only minor differences in the performance of the various implementation approaches when the conditional expectation function (CEF) of the outcomes in the vicinity of the discontinuity is close to linear. When approximating the curvature of the CEF is more challenging, bias-corrected and robust inference with coverage-error-rate-optimal bandwidths comes closer to the experimental benchmark than more widely used alternative implementations
Phase transitions in debt recycling
No full textDebt recycling is an aggressive equity extraction strategy that potentially permits faster repayment of a mortgage. While equity progressively builds up as the mortgage is repaid monthly, mortgage holders may obtain another loan they could use to invest on a risky asset. The wealth produced by a successful investment is then used to repay the mortgage faster. The strategy is riskier than a standard mortgage-repayment plan since fluctuations in the house market and investment's volatility may also lead to a fast default, as both the mortgage and the liquidity loan are secured against the same good. The general conditions of the mortgage holder and the outside market under which debt recycling may be recommended or discouraged have not been fully investigated. In this paper, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of traditional monthly mortgage repayment versus debt recycling strategies, we build a dynamical model of debt recycling and study the time evolution of equity and mortgage balance as a function of loan-to-value ratio, house market performance, and return of the risky investment. We find that the model has a rich behavior as a function of its main parameters, showing strongly and weakly successful phases – where the mortgage is eventually repaid faster and slower than the standard monthly repayment strategy, respectively – a default phase where the equity locked in the house vanishes before the mortgage is repaid, signaling a failure of the debt recycling strategy, and a permanent re-mortgaging phase – where further investment funds from the lender are continuously secured, but the mortgage is never fully repaid. The strategy's effectiveness is found to be highly sensitive to the initial mortgage-to-equity ratio, the monthly amount of scheduled repayments, and the economic parameters at the outset. The analytical results are corroborated with numerical simulations with excellent agreement
Crafting “attractive” histories: (visual) narrative contestation along the Silk Road
No full textSince its inception, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has become a focus of scholarly research, highlighting the implications of China’s global reach onto international relations. Within this research agenda, the appropriation of Silk Road histories is an evident practice of China’s diplomacy. This chapter thus aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary subfield that includes International Relations (IR), Memory, and Heritage Studies, providing insights into the use of Silk Road narratives and their role in shaping China’s diplomacy