1,682 research outputs found
Cuba’s slow motion glasnost: more focused on boostingforeign investment than domestic reforms
Full text linkAs diplomatic relations between Havana and Washington thaw, pressure for reform within Cuba is mounting. While there have been immediate economic benefits for Cuba, Bert Hoffmann looks at the limits on just how far political change in the country will go and how this might affect US-Cuban relations
Emerging Middle Powers’ Soft Balancing Strategy: State and Perspectives of the IBSA Dialogue Forum
Full text linkHow can weaker states influence stronger ones? This article offers a case study of one recent exercise in coalition building among Southern middle powers, the ‘India, Brazil, South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum’. The analysis outlines five major points: first, it argues that the three emerging players can be defined as middle powers in order to frame their foreign policy behavior and options at the global level. Second, soft balancing is a suitable concept to explain IBSA’s strategy in global institutions. Third, institutional foreign policy instruments are of pivotal significance in IBSA’s soft balancing strategy. Fourth, the potential gains of IBSA’s sector cooperation, particularly in trade, are limited due to a lack of complementarity of the three economies. And fifth, IBSA’s perspectives and impact on the international system will depend on four variables: IBSA’s ability to focus on distinct areas of cooperation, the consolidation of its common strategy of soft balancing, the institutionalization of IBSA, and its enlargement in order to obtain more weight in global bargains.India, Brazil, South Africa, IBSA Dialogue Forum, middle power, foreign policy, international relations, South-South relations
Why Reform Fails: The ‘Politics of Policies’ in Costa Rican Telecommunications Liberalization
Full text linkAs the 'Washington Consensus' reforms are losing momentum in Latin America, the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB) is calling for shifting the focus from the content of policy choices to the political process of their implementation. As this paper studies the paradigmatic case of telecommunications reform in Costa Rica it underscores the importance of these 'politics of policies'. The analysis finds, however, that the failure of repeated liberalization initiatives was not only due to policy-makers' errors in steering the project through 'the messy world of politics' (IDB); instead, as liberalization remained unpopular, policy content indeed mattered, and only the interaction of both explains the outcome. Particular attention is drawn to the political feed-back effects, as the failed reform, precisely because it had been backed by bi-partisan support, became a catalyst for the disintegration of the country's long-standing two-party system.Liberalization, privatization, telecommunications, public enterprises, Costa Rica, development model, Inter-American Development Bank
Bert Hoffmann, The Cuban Transformation as a Conflict Issue in the Americas. The Challenges for Brazil's Foreign Policy
No full textVayssière Pierre. Bert Hoffmann, The Cuban Transformation as a Conflict Issue in the Americas. The Challenges for Brazil's Foreign Policy. In: Caravelle, n°74, 2000. pp. 304-306
It’s Not Only Rents: Explaining the Persistence and Change of Neopatrimonialism in Indonesia
Full text linkIndonesia has long been associated with neopatrimonialism, corruption, collusion, and nepotism as the main modi operandi of politics, economics and public administration. Despite various measures and initiatives to fight these practises, little evidence for a significant decline can be found over the years. Rather, longitudinal analysis points to changes in the character of neopatrimonialism. Based on more than 60 in-depth interviews, focus-group discussions, and the analysis of both primary and secondary data, the aim of this article is, first, to describe the changes that have taken place, and, second, to investigate what accounts for these changes. Political economy concepts posit the amount and development of economic rents as the explanatory factor for the persistence and change of neopatrimonialism. This study’s findings, however, indicate that rents alone cannot explain what has taken place in Indonesia. Democratisation and decentralisation exert a stronger impact.Economic Rents, Neopatrimonialism, Democratisation, Decentralisation, Indonesia
Transnational migration and political articulation. Making new sense of "Exit and Voice"
Full text linkHoffmann B. Transnational migration and political articulation. Making new sense of "Exit and Voice". COMCAD Arbeitspapiere - working papers, 47. Bielefeld: COMCAD - Center on Migration, Citizenship and Development; 2008.Albert O. Hirschman’s scheme of "exit and voice", long a classic in the study of migration and its political implications, was conceived within the framework of "methodological nationalism". However, the rise of migrant transnationalism is eroding the distinction between domestic and foreign actors on which the postulate was based, that exit meant renouncing on voice. Combining theoretical considerations with empirical insights from Latin American migration, this paper calls for a critical reappraisal of Hirschman’s scheme. In times of transnational migration, exit, voice, and loyalty are no longer exclusive categories; instead, transnational migration can be conceived of precisely a as a new and non-exclusive configuration of exit, voice, and loyalty, and the modalities of this reconfiguration become key to understanding the political implications of migration. With such a revised understanding, the Hirschmanian metaphor can indeed be a helpful heuristic tool for studies of current migration phenomena
Transitions from Charismatic Rule: Theories of Leadership Change and Cuba’s Post-Fidel Succession
Full text linkFor theories of political succession and charismatic authority, the almost half-century long rule of Fidel Castro presents an extraordinary test case since Fidel in July 2006 handed over power ‘temporarily’ to his deputy and brother Raúl. On the background of Max We-ber’s work on charismatic rule, the paper analyzes the way in which the Cuban leadership has responded to the succession question and identifies four aspects in which it differs from the succession problems typically attributed to charismatic rule: Cuba’s longstanding exceptionalism regarding the ‘second man’ behind the leader; the succession during the life-time of the leader with a sui generis modus of ‘cohabitation’ between the outgoing and the incoming leader; the routinization of charisma which domestically allows a bureau-cratic succession model with the Communist Party, rather than any individual, being pos-tulated as Fidel Castro‘s heir; and as a correlate to the latter, the ritual transmission of Fidel’s charisma to a heir beyond the nation-state, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, as the new charismatic leader to continue Fidel Castro’s universal revolutionary mission.political succession, leadership change, charismatic authority, Max Weber, Cuba
Probing BERT for Ranking Abilities
No full textContextual models like BERT are highly effective in numerous text-ranking tasks. However, it is still unclear as to whether contextual models understand well-established notions of relevance that are central to IR. In this paper, we use probing, a recent approach used to analyze language models, to investigate the ranking abilities of BERT-based rankers. Most of the probing literature has focussed on linguistic and knowledge-aware capabilities of models or axiomatic analysis of ranking models. In this paper, we fill an important gap in the information retrieval literature by conducting a layer-wise probing analysis using four probes based on lexical matching, semantic similarity as well as linguistic properties like coreference resolution and named entity recognition. Our experiments show an interesting trend that BERT-rankers better encode ranking abilities at intermediate layers. Based on our observations, we train a ranking model by augmenting the ranking data with the probe data to show initial yet consistent performance improvements (The code is available at https://github.com/yolomeus/probing-search/ ).Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Web Information System
Emigration and Regime Stability: Explaining the Persistence of Cuban Socialism
Full text linkThe ‘Cuban safety-valve theory’ explains sustained survival of Cuban socialism in part through the high levels of emigration, following Hirschman’s model of ‘exit’ undermining ‘voice’. The article argues that this remains insufficient in two important ways. Taking a closer look at the crisis years since 1989, at least as important as the opening of exit options was the Cuban state’s capacity to rein in uncontrolled emigration and to reassure its ‘gatekeeper role’. In addition, the transnationalization of voice and exit must be taken into account as a crucial factor, as much in feeding the regime’s anti-imperialist discourse as, paradoxically, by generating sustained economic support from the emigrants.Emigration, Regime Stability, Transnational Networks, Cuba, USA
Emigration and Regime Stability: Explaining the Persistence of Cuban Socialism
Full text linkThe ‘Cuban safety-valve theory’ explains sustained survival of Cuban socialism in part through the high levels of emigration, following Hirschman’s model of ‘exit’ undermining ‘voice’. The article argues that this remains insufficient in two important ways. Taking a closer look at the crisis years since 1989, at least as important as the opening of exit options was the Cuban state’s capacity to rein in uncontrolled emigration and to reassure its ‘gatekeeper role’. In addition, the transnationalization of voice and exit must be taken into account as a crucial factor, as much in feeding the regime’s anti-imperialist discourse as, paradoxically, by generating sustained economic support from the emigrants.Emigration, Regime Stability, Transnational Networks, Cuba, USA
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