The purpose of this article is to analyze the constitutional situation that developed in Venezuela between December 2012 and April 2013, resulting from the deterioration of the health and the death of President Hugo Chávez, and that is linked to the following events. First, on December 10, 2012 he left the country to be treated in La Habana Cuba, since then he was not seen in public anymore; second, he did not show up at his Inauguration and Oath Ceremony on January 10, 2013, to begin his new presidential term 2013-2019 for which he was elected in October 2012. Third, the Constitutional Jurisdiction ordered, without any logic, that the absent President nonetheless continued to be «in full charge of his office» along with his Ministers, imposing a non-elected official to be the Executive Vice-president and to exercise the Executive Power. Fourth, the same Constitutional Jurisdiction imposed, when the Vice-president announced the death of Chávez on March 5th, 2013, the same non elected Vice-president to be President in charge, without any democratic legitimacy, which gave him the opportunity to participate in the April 2013 presidential elections without having to leave the office. / El presente estudio analiza la situación constitucional que se produjo en Venezuela entre diciembre de 2012 y abril de 2013, con motivo del agravamiento de la salud y el fallecimiento del presidente Hugo Chávez, y que se vincula con los siguientes acontecimientos. Primero, se ausentó de Venezuela el 10 de diciembre de 2012 para operarse en La Habana, Cuba no volviéndoselo a ver más en público; segundo, no compareció el 10 de enero de 2013 ante la Asamblea nacional a tomar posesión del cargo de presidente (2013-2019) para el cual había sido reelecto en octubre de 2012. Tercero, el juez constitucional decretó, sin lógica alguna, que el presidente ausente, sin embargo, continuaba «en ejercicio pleno de su cargo», junto con sus ministros, imponiendo a un funcionario no electo como el vicepresidente ejecutivo para ejercer el Poder Ejecutivo. Cuarto, el mismo juez constitucional impuso al mismo vicepresidente Ejecutivo, sin legitimidad democrática, cuando él mismo anunció la muerte de Chávez el 5 de marzo de 2013, para que asumiera como presidente encargado y, sin separarse de su cargo, pudiera participar en las elecciones presidenciales de abril de 2013.

Submitted by Maria Dulce (mdulce@ndc.uff.br) on 2014-01-10T19:23:02Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Castro, Clarissa-Dissert-2013.pdf: 6407586 bytes, checksum: 0674ef34ca0ad59944120dae26506c75 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-01-10T19:23:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Castro, Clarissa-Dissert-2013.pdf: 6407586 bytes, checksum: 0674ef34ca0ad59944120dae26506c75 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Universidade Federal Fluminense. Programa de Pós-Graduação em História / Analisar os Cinejornais do Governo Democrático de Vargas como produções construtoras de uma memória e imagem do período pela ótica do Estado. A relação entre Vargas e os meios de comunicação e a utilização destes canais como veiculadores de propagandas políticas, permite o estudo da exibição de um poder que, não mais pela força, mas pelo esforço de convencimento e persuasão, através da produção midiática, busca sua legitimação perante o público receptor. Identificar nestes Cinejornais tanto o tipo de conteúdo por eles veiculado quanto elementos da linguagem cinematográfica presentes em suas construções, permite-nos analisar o discurso que permeia tais produções e as enxergar como escolhas feitas a partir de intenções e interesses que, em contato com o público receptor, podem ou não atingir seus objetivos. Parte de uma Cultura Política criada em torno da figura de Vargas, os Cinejornais desse período são uma das expressões do diálogo entre o Poder e seus interlocutores. / Analyze the newsreels of the Vargas Democratic government productions buiders of memory and an image of the period through the eyes of the state. The relationship between Vargas and the media channels and use these as vehicles for political propaganda, it allows the study of a display of power, not by force but by the effort of convincing and persuasion through media production, seek its legitimacy receiver to the public. Identifying these newsreels both the type of content conveyed by them as elements of film language present in their buildings, allows us to analyze the discourse that permeate such products and see how choices made from the intentions and interests which, in contact with the public receiver may or may not achieve their goals. Part of a culture built around the figure of Vargas, the newsreels of the period are an expression of dialogue between the Power and its partners.

The thesis aims to address criticisms of cosmopolitanism that characterise it as an elite discourse, by exploring the role that it might play in Third World resistance movements. In doing so, it complicates the landscape of international normative theory, which has traditionally been mapped as a debate between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Part I of the thesis argues that cosmopolitanism and communitarianism can function as languages in which First and Third World states respectively justify exercises of power that impede the self-determination of Third World societies. These discourses of power frame the condition of postcoloniality, which might be understood – borrowing the terminology of International Society theorists – as an entrapment of Third World societies between 'coercive solidarism' and 'authoritarian pluralism'. A normative worldview committed to enhancing the scope for self-determination of such societies must be critical of the production of both external and internal environments that are hostile to the enjoyment of self-determination by Third World peoples. Part II of the thesis explores the political challenges of sustaining such a critique by studying four theorists of resistance who perceive themselves as manoeuvring between hostile external and internal environments. It analyses the political thought of Rabindranath Tagore and Edward Said, who were both leading figures of anti-colonial nationalist movements but also fierce critics of nationalism. It also studies the activism of two leaders in the field of 'anti-globalisation' protest – Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas in Mexico and Professor Nanjundaswamy of the Karnataka State Farmers' Association in India – who struggle against both national elites and global capital. Part II concludes that if resistance in the condition of postcoloniality must grapple simultaneously with both a hostile 'outside' and 'inside', it must speak in mixed registers of universalism and particularity. Cumulatively, the thesis demonstrates that the language of common humanity operates in ways that are both oppressive and emancipatory, just as the language of community is a source of both repression and refuge. Normative theory that does not seek to hold both in tension fails the needs of our non-ideal world.

This dissertation deals with court-executive relations in post-authoritarian Argentina (1983-2006). Specifically, I analyse Supreme Court behaviour in highly sensitive cases to determine whether the tribunal has cooperated with or obstructed the government’s policy preferences in three key policy areas: human rights, economic emergency and pensions. This innovative type of approach – i.e., focusing on a small number of highly sensitive decisions – allows me to concentrate on cases that are genuinely important for the government or, more precisely, for the country’s political administration. There are cases that are significant for the State apparatus but irrelevant for the president (thinking of politicians as self-interested actors). My research uses a rational choice approach to courts, underscoring the strategic nature of judicial behaviour. This vision of judges provides a more accurate account of judicial-executive relations by bringing politics into the study of courts. By focusing exclusively on attitudes and apolitical jurisprudence, other visions take for granted the institutional context. Political stability, for example, cannot be assumed in many developing democracies. My findings indicate that the Argentine Supreme Court has consistently avoided obstructing the president’s policy preferences. Such behaviour is motivated by strategic considerations: judges are risk-averse actors that avoid clashing with the executive. For most of the time, the Supreme Court has operated under unified government, which increases the chances of being punished for anti-government decisions. Two other factors also account for the court’s risk-averse behaviour. First, procedural rules grant the Supreme Court wide discretion over its docket. The tribunal has used such discretion to strategically select the timing of its decisions. Second, recurrent democratic breakdowns have repeatedly led to attacks against the court, such as impeachment, irregular dismissals, and/or enlargements. Third, politicians exert broad control of judicial promotions, allowing them to block the careers of independent, courageous judges that act as a check on political power.

This thesis answers the question how and why do individuals specialise in different types of political participation? By examining the degree to which individuals concentrate their political activities within one type of political participation, or spread them out across many. This thesis complements previous research on rates of political participation; and adapts and extends existing theories of political participation to explain differences in the degree of specialisation between different groups in society and between countries. Using data from the European Social Survey, covering as many as 21 European countries, and applying a range of different statistical methods, I distinguish four types of political participation: voting, conventional and unconventional political participation and consumer politics. I show that in countries with higher levels of socio-economic development, more democratic experience, and an increased presence of mobilising agents, the degree to which individuals concentrate their political activities within one type of political participation is higher, regardless of the accessibility and responsiveness of their political institutions. This is partly due to the fact that these countries have a higher educated population and that higher educated individuals specialise more. Specialisation also varies along the lines of other socio-demographic divisions, such as those based on gender. Moreover, I show that in contexts in which political issues are salient, such as during an election year, individuals are more likely to engage in non-electoral types of political participation if they also vote. This implies that specialisation is reduced during times of country-wide political mobilisation. The final finding of my thesis is that non-Western immigrants tend to concentrate their political activities less within one type of political participation than the majority population in Western Europe. Western immigrants specialise quite differently, suggesting differences in the way in which they are mobilised. As well as providing an important contribution to the study of political participation, these findings are relevant to discussions regarding citizen engagement and representation.

This thesis examines the conditions under which democratically elected policymakers are more likely to provide policies that compensate individuals that lose from international trade. It develops and empirically tests a theoretical framework of compensation in open economies that accounts for differences in the degree to which governments benefit losers from trade. It first develops a theory of preference formation based on economic geography, and then argues that electoral and legislative institutions jointly condition the supply of compensation. The theoretical analysis provides three sets of observable implications evaluated using micro- and macro-level data in Europe and Latin America. First, exposure to international competition increases demand for policy that compensates for the costs of trade, but this effect is more pronounced among those individuals in economically specialised and uncompetitive contexts where reemployment in the event of a shock is difficult. Second, policymakers in proportional electoral systems face weak incentives to target trade losers in geographically concentrated and uncompetitive regions. In contrast, majoritarian institutions generate incentives to increase compensation when trade losers are geographically concentrated. Another implication is that under some conditions, the presence of a strong upper house that represents regional interests dampens the provision of compensation, and the relative effect of electoral rules. The empirical implications of the argument are tested using a multi-method research strategy that combines cross-national and case study analyses and draws on quantitative and qualitative techniques. Chapter 3 tests the micro-level implications of the model using survey data for European regions over 2002-2006. The findings indicate that regional economic specialization and regional competitiveness jointly condition the impact of trade on preferences for compensation. Chapter 4 systematically tests the extent to which the geographical concentration of trade losers conditions the effect of electoral institutions on levels of compensation. It uses panel data from 14 European countries from 1980 to 2010. The findings indicate that where trade losers are concentrated, lower district magnitude leads to more compensation. Chapters 5 and 6 conduct case studies of compensation in Spain and Argentina, both countries that underwent deep liberalisation and offer significant variation at the regional and institutional level. Chapter 5 explores preferences over compensation in selected regions in Spain and Argentina, and shows that regional specialisation and competitiveness were important in shaping levels of support for compensation. Chapter 6 examines the role of electoral institutions and legislative veto bargaining in shaping the politics of compensation in Spain and Argentina.

While not uncontested, the finding that liberal democracies rarely, if ever, fight wars against each other represents one of the seminal discoveries of international relations (IR) scholarship. Nevertheless, 'democratic peace theory' (DPT) – the body of scholarship that seeks to explain the democratic peace finding – still lacks a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon. In this thesis, I argue that a primary source of this failure has been DPT's failure to recognize the importance of collective identification and trust for the eventuation of the 'liberal peace'. Building on existing DPT scholarship, most of it Realist or Rationalist in its inspiration, but also employing insights from Constructivist and Cognitivist scholarship, I develop a new model of how specific forms of collective identification can produce specific forms of trust. On this basis, I elaborate a new explanation of the liberal peace which sees it as arising out of a network of trusting liberal security communities. I then elaborate a new research design that enables a more rigorous and replicable empirical investigation of these ideas through the analysis of three historical cases studies, namely the Canada-USA, India-Pakistan, and France-Germany relationships. The results of this analysis support the plausibility of my theoretical framework, and also illuminate four additional findings. Specifically, I find that (1) IR scholarship needs a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between agents and structures; (2) 'institutionalized collaboration' is especially important for promoting collective identification; (3) DPT scholarship needs to focus more attention on the content of the narratives around which collective identification takes place; and (4) dramatic events play an important role in collective identification by triggering what I term catharses and epiphanies. I close the thesis by reviewing the implications of my findings for IR and for policymakers and by suggesting some areas worthy of additional research.

This paper provides a theoretical rationale for the simultaneous use of repression and democratic institutions by a non-democratic government, as is often observed in reality. We find that economic development has different impacts on the levels of repression and democracy, depending on whether it appears in the form of rises in income or in education: A higher income level reduces democracy, whereas more education leads to both more democracy and more repression. These theoretical implications are corroborated by dynamic panel data regressions.

This dissertation fundamentally explores the nature of change, and the development interventions that aim to bring this change into a particular society. What emerges is the notion of a ‘spiral’: imagining the dynamic relationship between paradigms and discourses, the institutions and programmes operating in a place, and the way individual identities are constructed in intricate and contradictory ways. Within this spiral, discourse has power – ‘words matter’ – but equally significant is how these words interact dialogically with concrete social structures and institutions – ‘it takes more than changing words to change the world’. Furthermore, these changes are reacted to, and expressed in, the physical, sexed body. In essence, change is ideational, institutional, and embodied. To investigate the politics of change, this dissertation analyses the spiral relationships between gender discourses, institutions, and identities in contemporary Indonesia, focusing on their transmission across Java. It does so by exploring the Indonesian state’s gender policies in the context of globalisation, democratisation, and decentralisation. In this way, the lens of gender allows us to analyse the dynamic interactions between state and society, between ideas and institutions, which impact on everything from cultural structures to physical bodies. Research focuses on the gender policies of the Indonesian Ministry of Women’s Empowerment, substantiated with case study material from United Nations Population Fund reproductive health programmes in West Java. Employing a multi-level, multi-vocal theoretical framework, the thesis analyses gender discourses and relational structures (how discourses circulate to construct the Indonesian woman), gender institutions and social structures (how discourses are translated into programmes), and gender identities and embodied structures (how discourses enter the home and the body). Critically, studying gender requires analysing the human body as the site of both structural and symbolic power. This dissertation thus argues for renewed emphasis on a ‘politics of the body’, recognising that bodies are the material foundations from which gender discourses derive their naturalising power and hence ability to structure social relations. The danger of forgetting this politics of the body is that it allows for slippage between ‘gender’ and ‘women’; policy objectives cannot be disentangled from the reality of physical bodies and their social construction. This thesis therefore argues that there are distinct and even inverse impacts of gender policies in Indonesia. As the ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’ assumptions of gender equality are overlaid onto the patriarchal culture of a society undergoing transformation, women’s bodies and women’s sexuality are always and ever the focus of the social gaze. The gender policies and interventions affecting change on discursive and institutional levels may thus provoke reaction at the level of individual identities that are contrary to explicit intentions. In effect, projects that purport to work on ‘gender’ are often so deeply rooted in underlying gender normativity that their net effect is to reinscribe these gender hierarchies. By exposing the contradictions in these underlying paradigms we gain insight into the politics of a transforming society. Furthermore, engaging with the politics of the body allows us to analyse the spiral processes between discourse and practice, the question of power, and the way men and women embody social structures and experience social transformation.