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Élites Empresariales. Análisis desde el Sector Automotriz en Colombia entre 1985-2018
Abstract
Este capítulo hace un recorrido sobre las carreras políticas de los Ministros de Hacienda en Colombia desde los años 1985 a 2019. Esto como una forma de analizar su incidencia en las reformas arancelarias enfocadas en el sector automotriz. A partir de los postulados de Tsebelis, se establecen cambios relevantes sobre grupos de actores económicos con poder de veto sobre la toma de decisiones. En un primer momento, se identifican actores que priorizaron principalmente la importación y el libre comercio y en un segundo periodo la protección a la industria nacional.
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El artículo analiza al Partido Comunista Colombiano (PCC) en su organización y dinámicas internas durante el periodo 1974-1986. A partir del estudio de sus documentos internos, de las declaraciones oficiales, de fuentes hemerográficas y testimoniales, se reconstruye la dinámica interna de esta organización que se mantuvo en el escenario político desde 1930 demostrando capacidad de reproducción y canalizando un sector significativo de la oposición política. Incluye cinco dimensiones: sus orígenes, la estructura organizativa, la dirigencia nacional, las formas de solucionar sus conflictos internos y las orientaciones ideológicas y disciplina interna. Las conclusiones a que se llegan son que el PCC constituyó durante este periodo una organización con alto grado de institucionalización, con una dirigencia estable y poco renovada, que presentó tendencias centrífugas en la resolución de tensiones y conflictos y tuvo una concepción ideológica muy ortodoxa basada en el marxismo-leninismo.
Resumen En este artículo se expone una parte de las conclusiones obtenidas en la investigación sobre la gestualidad de los ojos en los textos latinos, investigación que se ha llevado a cabo en el marco de un estudio más amplio sobre la gestualidad en la Antigüedad romana. A partir del modo de realización del gesto, hemos establecido una clasificación de los gestos realizados con los ojos que comprende dos grandes apartados: los gestos que consisten en un movimiento del iris y aquellos que implican un movimiento de los párpados. Centrándonos en el segundo de estos apartados, analizamos aquí cuatro gestos realizados con los párpados: parpadear, guiñar un ojo, cerrar los ojos y entrecerrarlos.
Abstract. Eye Gaze Communication in Ancient Rome: Eyelids Movement This article presents part of the conclusions drawn from our research on eye gestures in Latin texts, which has been conducted within the framework of a broader study on gestures in Ancient Rome. We have established a classification of eye gestures that comprises two major sections based on the nature of the gestures: gestures that consisted in iris movements and those that involved eyelid movements. Focussing on the second of these sections, this paper analyses four gestures involving eyelids: blinking, winking one eye, closing the eyes and squinting.
Social media open the chance to observe communication behavior of direct candidates in North Rhine-Westphalia during the German federal elections 2017. The right-wing populistic party AfD is new to the party system in Germany. Anti-elite attitude is part of populist campaigns. By observing the following behavior on Twitter we detect the distinction between right-wing populists and other parties within the German party system. The theoretical background is set with modern and classical elitism theories, deriving the necessary condition for our model. The model itself distinguishes between standard and anti-elite behavior during the campaign. With the help of the method of Social Network Analysis (SNA) we test our hypothesis and explore our data.
Several recent studies have examined how professional journalists use social media at work. However, we know little about the differences between younger and older journal-ists' use of social media for newsgathering. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews comparing eight young journalists (median age = 24) with eight older journalists (median age = 50) in Norway. The younger journalists reported using multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, to collect politically significant information, news observations, sources and comments. By comparison, the older journalists reported relying heavily on elite sources on Twitter. This reluctance to use a variety of social media platforms may limit older journalists' exposure to a variety of news sources. As a result, younger journalists seem to follow a more multi-perspectival approach to social media and may be more innovative in their newsgathering. Hence, younger journalists may be exposed to more diverse types of news sources than older journalists. Together, the findings indicate a generational gap in 'networked publics' concerning how younger and older journalists approach newsgathering in social media.
El presente informe entrega un primer panorama empírico sobre el fenómeno de la circulación público-privada en Chile, demostrando la existencia del fenómeno y esbozando un primer análisis de sus determinantes. Tomando un universo de 386 personas, que ejercieron los cargos de ministro, subsecretario y superintendente durante los gobiernos de Ricardo Lagos, Michelle Bachelet y Sebastián Piñera, se analiza sus trayectorias político-profesionales, con especial énfasis en el paso entre el sector privado y público. Interesan dos tipos de trayectorias, por un lado del sector privado hacia lo público en general, que corresponde a la circulación público-privada, y por el otro dentro de un mismo sector, que se define como la puerta giratoria. A nivel general, para explicar la circulación público-privada son variables significativas y con coeficientes positivos, es decir, aumentan las probabilidades de ocurrencia de la variable dependiente, el sexo, ser economista o abogado, y, especialmente, provenir del sector privado. Por otra parte, es significativo, pero disminuye las probabilidades de circulación, ser militante de un partido político. Este efecto es distinto según el gobierno y el tipo de cargo. Para los casos de puerta giratoria, es decir cuando la salida del cargo público se hace hacia un cargo privado en el mismo sector donde se desempeñado en el gobierno, solo dos variables son significativas: el nivel educacional y haber ocupado antes del cargo en el gobierno un cargo privado en la misma industria. Vistos desde las teorías del “soborno retardado” (Schneider, 1993, 2001) y del “principal en la sombra” (Adolph, 2013), estos resultados son particularmente preocupantes por las consecuencias que podría tener el fenómeno sobre el diseño y la implementación de políticas públicas.
In May 2013 and March 2015, actress Angelina Jolie wrote in the New York Times about her choice to undergo preventive surgery. In her two op-eds she explained that - as a carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation - preventive surgery was the best way to lower her heightened risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. By applying a digital methods approach to BRCA-related tweets from 2013 and 2015, before, during and after the exposure of Jolie’s story, this study maps and interprets Twitter discursive dynamics at two time points of the BRCA Twitter stream. Findings show an evolution in curation and framing dynamics occurring between 2013 and 2015, with individual patient advocates replacing advocacy organisations as top curators of BRCA content and coming to prominence as providers of specialist illness narratives. These results suggest that between 2013 and 2015, Twitter went from functioning primarily as an organisation-centred news reporting mechanism, to working as a crowdsourced specialist awareness system. This paper advances a twofold contribution. First, it points at Twitter’s fluid functionality for an issue public and suggests that by looking at the life story – rather than at a single time point – of an issue-based Twitter stream we can track the evolution of power roles underlying discursive practices and better interpret the emergence of non-elite actors in the public arena. Second, the study provides evidence of the rise of activist cultures that rely on fluid, non-elite, collective and individual social media engagement.
There is an ongoing academic debate whether social media empowers activists and advocacy groups in relation to established political actors and media gatekeepers. This article investigates these premises by analysing the influence of various actors in two policy debates on Twitter, environmental policy (climate change) and Internet governance (net neutrality). We extract tweets on both topics and code the respective 500 most central accounts according to a categorisation of relevant political actor groups. Applying methods from social network analysis, we reveal temporally fluctuating actor constellations and network structures which converge to elite actors during high attention periods. Furthermore, a comparative keyword analysis shows that non-governmental organisations and citizen media emphasise personalised connective action frames, whereas political actors and traditional media tend to refer to the political decision-making process and its institutions. Both findings are in line with cyclical conceptions of policy processes.
p>El presente artículo estudia el Partido Comunista Colombiano entre los años 1939 y 1949, en especial a partir de las ideas postuladas por el secretario de la época: Augusto Durán Ospino. Con el análisis de los seis primeros Congresos, realizados entre 1941 y 1949, así como de la prensa del Partido (Ahora, Diario Popular, Unión Popular, Vanguardia del Pueblo y Guía del Socialista) se pretende explicar la
línea política enarbolada por Durán.</p
Hundreds of papers have been published using Twitter data, but few previous papers report the digital divide among Twitter users. British Twitter users are younger, wealthier, and better educated than other Internet users, who in turn are younger, wealthier, and better educated than the off-line British population. American Twitter users are also younger and wealthier than the rest of the population, but they are not better educated. Twitter users are disproportionately members of elites in both countries. Twitter users also differ from other groups in their online activities and their attitudes. These biases and differences have important implications for research based on Twitter data. The unrepresentative characteristics of Twitter users suggest that Twitter data are not suitable for research where representativeness is important, such as forecasting elections or gaining insight into attitudes, sentiments, or activities of large populations. In general, Twitter data seem to be more suitable for corporate use than for social science research.
Since the ruling of the European Court of Justice, the right to be forgotten has provided more informational self-determination to users, whilst raising new questions around Google’s role as arbiter of online content and the power to rewrite history. We investigated the debate that unfolded on Twitter around the #righttobeforgotten through social network analysis. The results revealed that latent topics, namely Google’s role as authority, alternated in popularity with rising and fading flare topics. The public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit, that we observed resembles the traditional one, with elite players such as news portals, experts and corporations participating, but it also differs significantly in terms of the underlying mechanisms and means of information diffusion. Experts are critical to comment, relay and make sense of information. We discuss the implications for theories of the public sphere and examine why social media do not serve as a democratising tool for ordinary citizens.
El diccionario biografico mas completo de la las personas involucradas en las actividades de la Comintern en America Latina en 1919-1943.
Centenares de libros y miles de artículos han sido escritos sobre la historia de la III Internacional; no obstante en ella existen lagunas y varios enigmas. Una de las causas primordiales de este hecho es la confrontación ideológica acerca sobre la actividad del "partido comunista mundial". Porque mientras los adversarios del movimiento comunista intentaban comprobar que la actividad de las secciones nacionales de la Comintern fue dirigida siempre desde Moscú y que los partidos comunistas nunca fueron organismos independientes, los comunistas por su parte insistían en la originalidad de sus partidos y buscaban la manera de ocultar un tema muy importante, es decir, el carácter de las relaciones entre sus partidos y el Estado Mayor de la Comintern en Moscú. Ambas corrientes adversarias, al mismo tiempo basaban sus postulados sobre "las conjeturas y suposiciones" sin tener la posibilidad de comprobar sus teorías con documentos, como lo ha escrito francamente el historiador R. Alexander en su obra fundamental "Comunismo en Latinoamérica".
En las últimas décadas, las manifestaciones globales del racismo han estado sujetas atransformaciones significativas. Las luchas anticoloniales, el movimiento de los derechosciviles y la ofensiva anti-apartheid han retado los regímenes raciales establecidos. No obstante,la consolidación del capitalismo global ha creado nuevas formas de racialización.Una variedad de estrategias e intervenciones antirracistas han surgido para confrontarestos nuevos racismos. Los análisis sobre el racismo han buscado interrogar su historia ysus manifestaciones contemporáneas, cómo se ha mantenido, cómo se ha reproducido, altiempo que han intentado predecir su futuro. En este contexto, el reto para antropólogosy otros científicos sociales yace en avanzar nuestra comprensión de las nuevas manifestacionesde la raza y el racismo.
This article evaluates the potential that Twitter affords politicians to communicate to citizens directly, through messages that they broadcast to users who follow them, and indirectly, to the extent that their followers autonomously re-circulate politicians’ messages to their own contacts. Analysis of more than 2 million accounts of followers of 10 national party leaders during the Italian 2013 general election campaign shows that most users are rather inactive and have very small followings. Moreover, the most followed politicians have on average the least active and followed users, and vice versa. Users’ activity and followings are also unevenly distributed, with very tiny minorities accounting for the vast majority of tweets and followers. The most followed followers of politicians are celebrities in realms other than politics, or people who are already highly visible in the politics-media ecosystem. Our findings suggest that most of the potential for indirect communication may lie in the “vital middle” of the Twitter population who are more active than average, but are not part of the restricted elite of high-impact outliers.
This article provides both an historical basis as well as a theoretical-methodological proposal with which to analyze processes of racialization before the modern period. To do so, the proposal is framed within the debate about the possible racial-ized character of the purity of blood laws, taking into account the power of discourse and everyday practices. After an historical overview both in Spain and in the New Kingdom of Granada (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), the article argues that, starting from a racial antisemitism in the Iberian peninsula, the purity of blood became, in Hispanic America, a strategy of colonial racialization because it codified social relations hierarchially through corporeal and cultural symbols.
The advent of social media has spurred democratic optimism and been seen as something that help political public relations establish and maintain good relationships with key publics. Still, research has shown how, for instance, political candidates in the US by large did not respond to messages on their Facebook walls. Another popular social media platform, Twitter, has often been deemed as an elite medium, thus reducing its democratic potential. The findings in this study show a different picture. Most of the politicians in the sample do use Twitter and its @reply functionality. Furthermore, the extent to which they communicate with ordinary citizens is larger than expected. Still, it is a clear tendency that the exchanges are found in user clusters with little overlap between them. The researched party leaders mostly approach other Twitter users in unique clusters. Thus, Twitter probably functions to maintain good relationships with, literarily, followers. As Norwegian party leaders use the @reply functionality more frequently than before – especially to engage in communication with citizens – maybe we are seeing a shift in how political actors engage in online interactivity.
Resumen En este artículo se estudia la lucha de los sectores populares. Es un acercamiento preliminar a la insurgencia social que se presentó en el Valle del Cauca durante las primeras cinco décadas del período republicano, cuando los campesinos de la zona, se opusieron a las políticas estatales y fueron calificados y perseguidos como "bandidos". Se busca mostrar que los campesinos y habitantes pobres de pueblos y ciudades habían asumido una actitud política frente, por una parte, a los intentos reformadores republicanos y, por otra, a la oposición que a ellos hacían los sectores más tradicionales de la sociedad, en particular los esclavistas. Desde luego se trata de una lucha política y social que se remonta al período colonial y a los orígenes mismos de la sociedad vallecaucana. Abstract In this article the fight of the popular sectors is studied. It is a preliminary approach to the social "insurgencia" that was presented in the Valley of the Cauca during the first five decades of the republican period, when the peasants of the area, were opposed the state politicians and they were qualified and pursued as "bandits." It is looked for to show that the peasants and poor inhabitants of towns and cities had assumed an attitude political front, on one part, to the intents republican reformers and, for other, to the opposition that made the most traditional sectors in the society to them, in particular the pro-slavery ones. Certainly it is a political and social fight that goes back to the colonial period and the same origins of the society vallecaucana.
Social media are often discussed in terms of online novelties. However, especially within the broader field of political communication, the uses of such services, as Twitter, at the hands of political actors such as politicians and the parties to which they belong, have become something of a fixture of research in recent years. Although the study of political Twitter use has provided a series of insightful case studies, often focused on one single election or country, this article presents a comparative study looking at Twitter use at the hands of political actors during two Norwegian elections, 2011 and 2013. We are interested in what overarching tendencies can be discerned from these uses—specifically, if differing usages can be found between the two elections, suggesting developments pertaining to the normalization and equalization hypotheses respectively. This is examined by focusing on two main analytical areas: The level and type of activity undertaken by those up for election, and the repercussions that this activity appears to have in terms of popularity on the studied platform. In short, the results suggest that although Twitter largely remains an “elite” medium in the Norwegian context, smaller political and other actors are making use of the platform at hand to higher degrees than their more well-known peers. Tendencies of both hypotheses are traced in the data, and although the findings could signal an opening for “outsiders” in this regard, the sheer amount of traffic driving the tweets sent by high-end politicians suggest otherwise.
Women occupy a small minority of elite positions in contemporary society. In addition, the minority of women who gain access to influential elite positions are often assumed to have their actual influence circumscribed by mechanisms of marginalization. However, systematic evidence to support the latter view is relatively scarce. We apply social network analysis to study sex differences in local elite networks in Sweden, and show empirically that, despite the fact that women are the minority group across all elite dimensions, female elites uphold the same ‘structural status’ as male elites.
In the political environment of contemporary Russia, government-controlled media dominate the discourse. However, the Internet still provides a platform for - and visibility to - alternative voices and ideas. Parody microblogging is a popular recent phenomenon of Russian-language social media. Users with satire accounts utilize the names of power holders, publish links to the news, and provide opinion and contextualization, as well as offering satirical commentary on corruption, the management of the country and media propaganda. This article studies the function of parody framing in critical microblogging in the Russian-language Twitter. It discusses accounts spoofing the elites as tactical media that disrupt the hegemonic discourse and interpret political reality for the Russian digital audience.
En este artículo intentaré mostrar que la organización social de Cartagena se basa en la jerarquía racial y en la omnipresencia de los prejuicios raciales, y comprender porqué el racismo no ha sido pensado y no aparece en la agenda política y científica de la ciudad.
Frankenberg explores the unique intersection of race and sex as she examines the way that white women relate to racism. She writes from the assumption that whiteness is socially constructed rather than naturally pre-existing. She theorizes "from experience" to offer a unique perspective that retains the strength of a theoretical foundation as well as the relatability of personal narratives. She interviews thirty white women to get their perspectives on various racial topics and gain a critical standpoint for thinking about individual and social forces that construct and maintain whiteness in contemporary society. She begins with the question, "What is white women's relationship to racism?" The women discuss various aspects of interracial courtship, the role of power in acknowledging racial differences, and the function of language in facing and overcoming the negative effects of this difference.
This paper examines information networks on social media to draw conclusions about influence relationships among members of the mass media. The project considers social networks and information patterns using Twitter data, first at the newspaper level and second at the journalist level. Using a computational approach, we look for evidence of elite-directed information flows, as well as exploring whether we find evidence of an increase in the democratization of newsmaking. This study finds that elite voices continue to dominate information networks in the digital age; however, it also finds evidence that information can move expeditiously from journalists in local and regional outlets to elite ones, and vice versa. We move further to explore the content of tweets among the journalist network, finding that there are substantial, direct interactions among elite and regional and local journalists. Our results taken together uncover new network patterns and provide a novel insight on the role of information technologies in newsmaking in the digital age.
In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communication, especially during elections. This study positions Twitter volume as an outcome of other electoral antecedents and then assesses its relevance in election campaigns. Using a data set of more than 3 million tweets about 2014 U.S. Senate candidates from three distinct groups—news media, political actors, and the public—we find that competitiveness and money spent in the race were the main predictors of volume of Twitter discourse, and the impact of competitiveness of the race was stronger for tweets coming from the media when compared to the other groups. Twitter volume did not predict vote share for any of the 35 races studied. Our findings suggest that Twitter is better understood as a tool for political communication, and its usage may be predicted by money spent and race characteristics. As an object, Twitter use has limited power to predict electoral outcomes.
Past research using self-report questionnaires administered to ordinary citizens demonstrates that value priorities differ as a function of one's political ideology, but it is unclear whether this conclusion applies to political elites, who are presumably seeking to appeal to very broad constituencies. We used quantitative methods of textual analysis to investigate value-laden language in a collection of 577,555 messages sent from the public Twitter accounts of over 400 members of the U.S. Congress between 2012 and 2014. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we observed that Republican and conservative legislators stressed values of tradition, conformity, and national security (as well as self-direction), whereas Democratic and liberal legislators stressed values of benevolence, universalism, hedonism, and social/economic security (as well as achievement). Implications for the large-scale observational study of political psychology are explored.
This article puts forward a theory of the role of digital media in social change. It begins by criticizing three theories that currently dominate our understanding of digital media and of media generally: network theory, mediatization theory and actor-network theory. It also identifies a gap in current communication theory, namely, that digital media mostly do not fit the divide into mass and interpersonal communication. A further problem is that insufficient attention is given to the difference between political communication and popular culture or everyday life. The article develops an alternative, focusing on four countries that provide a range of relationships between media and society; the U.S., Sweden, India and China. In all four countries, despite their differences, digital media, in contrast to traditional broadcast and interpersonal media, have led to a more differentiated media landscape. Greater complexity in political communication nevertheless runs up against the continuing dominance of elite agenda-setting. In terms of popular culture, all four countries have experienced a proliferation of media offerings and greater tetheredness between people. Hence, new divides are emerging between more active and variegated as against more passive and restricted media uses. The article concludes with implications of digital media for understanding media generally: with new digital media, there is now a need to rethink media theory in terms of fundamental debates about how media transform or preserve the social order.
While a good deal of research has examined the uses of Twitter in journalism, comparably few research projects employ comparative research designs in order to provide new insights. The present study details Twitter use by public service broadcasters (PSBs) during recent national elections in Norway and Sweden. Utilizing quantitative analysis of social media content in tandem with qualitative interviews with key PSB journalists, the main results indicate that while the PSB organizations—the Norwegian NRK and the Swedish SVT—are both frequently contacted by “regular” citizens on Twitter, they seem to prefer to retweet and interact with journalists, politicians or other “elite” users. Compared with the interviews performed, the study uncovers an interesting tension as journalists often talk about the need to engage with “regular” users—a practice that is arguably in line with PSB regulations, but that is seldom adhered to in the contexts studied here.
This article analyzes political communication by partisan elites on Twitter. Based on framing theory, it investigates whether tweets on U.S. political debates by Democratic and Republican party actors diverge with regard to their semantics. Applying computational text analysis to the most discussed political topics in 2015, the paper identifies topically varying degrees of partisan framing.
While social media like Twitter and Facebook carry with them potential for the practice of journalism, novelties like these are also associated with adaptation difficulties – perhaps especially when it comes to the interactive capabilities that services like these afford. This study employs a multi-method approach to study the different uses of Twitter and Facebook by one media company – the Swedish public service broadcaster SVT – during the 2014 election year. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data, we find that Twitter was used more extensively and in a comparably more interactive fashion than Facebook. Hence we suggest Twitter, used more for interaction, functions as a 'chat room'; while Facebook, used more for broadcasting messages, can be viewed as functioning like a 'show room'. As Twitter is often associated with societal elites in the Swedish context, it raises a question about the suitability for a public service broadcaster to engage to such a degree on this particular platform.
In 2014 Malawi experienced its first-ever tripartite elections involving presidential, parliamentary and local government contests. The role of the media was monitored in a major operation covering radio, television, newspapers, news websites and social media. The results revealed that, with the exception of state-controlled media, news outlets played a broadly positive role, providing fair coverage for the four leading candidates and reporting on a broad range of topics. Social media provided a lively platform for the views and opinions of mainly partisan participants (presumably mostly from the urban elite). On the negative side, coverage of the presidential and to a lesser extent the parliamentary contests dominated, so that the amount of news about local government issues was minimal. The most important negative aspect of the campaign was the one-sided coverage provided by the two state radio channels, the state television station and its online news service.
This article analyses a Twitter network of 150 Dutch journalists and politicians in 2010 and shows that Twitter networks have an underlying structure that is more detailed than one would expect from a simple list of followers and following. In-Degree (followers) measures a users' popularity as a news source and Out-Degree (following) measures openness and newsgathering by users and give insights into the structure of this underlying network. Also, the bridging function—being a hub or link—in this network can be clearly identified, and shows how important a person is as a networker. Ego Network analysis may specify these positions and reveal how a single user has links and bridges to central network positions. From the network connections on Twitter between politicians and journalists it cannot be concluded that there is a closed elite like a fully connected group of users controlling information. Journalists and politicians are mutually dependent on each other and how this dependency is constructed is shown by various network centrality measures, specifying their role (source versus news gatherer) and position in the network (being a networker or not). Consociationalism used to be one of the main characteristics of the Dutch political and media structures. Twitter network analysis on a sub-group level shows that contacts on Twitter between reporters and politicians are no longer influenced by religious or ideological identity of parties and media. Finding news and spreading news is the driving force in the Twitter network between politicians and journalists.
This essay analyzes the social and economic forces behind the push for online education (especially in public universities), the discourses that support it, and the sometimes surprising discursive alliances that form among critics of the university. It also considers the opportunities as well as the risks of digital humanities and calls for increasing digital literacy on the part of humanists.
This article outlines three theoretical arguments—socialization, status discontent, and elite cues—that generate competing predictions about the way context shapes gender attitudes. Using hierarchical analysis, we assess the power of these arguments in Latin America, a region that manifests considerable variation on our central explanatory variables and thus offers important theoretical leverage. We find men's gender attitudes to be highly contingent on elite cues and susceptible to backlash effects in response to women's economic advancement. Also, where women lack national representation, distrust of government promotes support for female leadership as an alternative to the discredited (male) establishment. The analysis supports existing individual-level explanations of gender attitudes and demonstrates a connection between diffuse democratic values and gender egalitarianism. The findings suggest that recent advances for female politicians in Latin America may be susceptible to reversal, and they illuminate strategies for strengthening women's equality in the region.
How can policymakers circumvent obstacles to taxing economic elites? This question is critical for developing countries, especially in Latin America where strengthening tax capacity depends significantly on tapping under-taxed, highly-concentrated income and profits. Drawing on diverse literatures and extensive fieldwork, the paper identifies six strategies that facilitate enactment of modest tax increases by mobilizing popular support and/or tempering elite antagonism. Case studies from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia illustrate the effect of these strategies on the fate of tax reform initiatives. The analysis builds theory on tax politics and yields implications for research on reform coalitions and gradual institutional change.
One of the hallmarks of the Arab Spring uprisings has been the role of social media in articulating demands of the popular protesters and broadcasting dramatic events as they unfolded, but it is less clear whether social media acted as a catalyst for many of the movements in the region. Using evidence from the popular protests in Tunisia between December 2010 and January 2011, this paper argues that social media acted as an important resource for popular mobilization against the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Drawing on the insights from ‘resource mobilization theory’ (RMT), we show that social media (1) allowed a ‘digital elite’ to break the national media blackout through brokering information for mainstream media; (2) provided the basis for intergroup collaboration that facilitated a large ‘cycle of protest’ to develop; (3) overcame the collective action problem through reporting event magnitudes that raised the perception of success for potential free riders, and (4) led to an additional element of ‘emotional mobilization’ through depicting the worst atrocities associated with the regime’s response to the protests. These findings are based on expert interviews with Tunisian bloggers and digital activists conducted in October 2011 and a revealed preference survey conducted among a sample of Tunisian internet users between February and May 2012.
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http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/jJRh6cu53P5rZR2779hJ/full