Research Library

Multiculturalism and diversity have raised a number of challenges for liberal democracy, not least the stigmatization of people in response to these developments. In this book, leading experts from a range of disciplines look at the responses to stigmatization from the perspectives of ordinary people. They use a range of case studies drawn from the US, Brazil, Canada, France, Israel, South Africa, and Sweden: the first systematic qualitative and cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in the course of their everyday lives.

The chapters in this book tackle a range of theoretical questions about stigmatization, including how they make sense of their experiences, how they shape subsequent behaviour, and how they negotiate and transform social and symbolic boundaries within a range of social and institutional contexts.

Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective provides new data and analysis of how stigmatization affects a range of societies, and its original research and analysis will be important reading for those studying Ethnicity, as well as Sociologists, Political Scientists, and Anthropologists. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

International Relations scholars have long debated whether the American public is allergic to realism, which raises the question of how they would “contract” it in the first place. We argue that realism isn’t just an IR paradigm, but a belief system, whose relationship with other ideological systems in public opinion has rarely been fully examined. Operationalizing this disposition in ordinary citizens as “folk realism,” we investigate its relationship with a variety of personality traits, foreign policy orientations, and political knowledge. We then present the results of a laboratory experiment probing psychological microfoundations for realist theory, manipulating the amount of information subjects have about a foreign policy conflict to determine whether uncertainty leads individuals to adopt more realist views, and whether realists and idealists respond to uncertainty and fear differently. We find that many of realism’s causal mechanisms are conditional on whether subjects already hold realist views, and suggest that emotions like fear may play a larger role in realist theory than many realists have assumed.

In recent years, the number of field experiments using public officials as subjects has increased. Some of these experiments are relatively cheap and easy to replicate, and yet, the ethical guidelines for dealing with this particular class of subjects are in some ways both nascent and underdeveloped. If this line of research is to continue in a responsible manner, it is worth considering whether there are particular ethical questions raised by using elite, public servants as subjects and if so, how we might deal with those ethical questions. I am not a moral philosopher, and I do not have hard and fast answers to the issues I raise below. I am sympathetic to these types of experiments, having conducted one myself, but I am also sensitive to issues raised by their critics. I hope the following will encourage further debate.

There are at least two reasons public officials differ from citizens as experimental subjects. First, when we use public officials as subjects, the behavior we are trying to observe and affect is usually part of their routine, public duties. This may mean that the societal benefits of the knowledge gleaned from these experiments are particularly great. But it also introduces questions about whose resources are being used while subjects take time to participate, as well as questions about debriefing and appropriate compensation. Second, public officials are a limited pool, and they often control public purse strings, including funding for universities and research. This difference introduces questions about researchers’ ethical responsibilities to other researchers when conducting experiments with public officials. Let me consider each of these differences in turn.

We build on the emerging literature of influence-based models to study how multinational firms can navigate host governments. Our ‘core-periphery’ framework posits that the actions that an MNC takes with actors in what we call the ‘periphery’—comprised of state, quasi-state, and civil society actors—can lead to positive or negative influence with interconnected state actors in a ‘core.’ There are two mechanisms by which this can happen: engaging the periphery may either change the information set of the core or help align incentives of multiple core actors. Engaging the periphery might be particularly relevant in settings where the institutional framework is still emerging. We build a case study of a multinational firm in the biotechnology sector to illustrate how the core-periphery framework works in multiple emerging markets across institutional differences. The analysis is based on 32 interviews conducted with the CEO and other executives of Genzyme at the corporate headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in subsidiaries in Brazil, China, Costa Rica, France, India, and the United States.

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas—affect women’s representation in developing nations. We find that democratization’s effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women’s representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women’s representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife—but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of post- communist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women’s representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy—as measured by a nation’s level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time—but rather the democratization process that matters for women’s legislative representation.

NYU Law's symposium "From Rights to Reality: Mobilizing for Human Rights and Its Intersection with International Law" has been a valuable opportunity to reflect on the role that international law has played in the furtherance of human rights around the world over the past six decades. It has also been a stimulating forum to assess the state of our knowledge, experience, and research relating to the development of human rights law and its application in various settings around the world. The scholars and practitioners participating in this symposium have each made remarkable contributions to the development, interpretation, and application of human rights law internationally, and I am very grateful that they have taken the time to engage the arguments and evidence in Mobilizing for Human Rights. The editors of the Journal of International Law and Politics are to be congratulated on a stimulating symposium and a valuable volume.

In this concluding article, I will describe what Mobilizing for Human Rights set out to do, what I think it did well, and what it did not, in the end, accomplish. There is much to mention on both scores. While the book was one of the first comprehensive efforts to theorize and test empirically the effects of international legal agreements on a broad range of rights indicators, the research necessarily fails to speak to some issues, raises additional questions, and opens up new avenues for empirical research. I will also engage the observations of my colleagues in the symposium, whose supportive as well as skeptical views I very much appreciate. I hope to make clearer how the research potentially connects with strategies for rights improvements. I conclude on a very humble note: the experience represented by the symposium participants far outstrips the scholarly findings of the book, but I am hopeful that discussion of the kind we have had leads both to better scholarship and broadly informed practice.

This book project introduces a theory of planetary urbanization via a critique of dominant ideologies of the contemporary ‘urban age’ and associated discourses on global urbanism.  We argue for a new epistemology of urban studies based on the distinction between concentrated and extended urbanization, which is applied to periodize the capitalist mode of territorialization and to illuminate early twenty-first century sociospatial landscapes.

The single most important aspect of an exchange rate regime is the degree of flexibility. The matter is of course more complicated than a simple choice between fixed exchange rate and floating. One can array exchange rate regimes along a continuum, from most flexible to least, and grouped in three major categories:

1. Floating corner
   1. Free float
   2. Managed float
2. Intermediate regimes
   1. Target zone or band
   2. Basket peg
   3. Crawling peg
   4. Adjustable peg
3. Institutionally fixed corner
   1. Currency board
   2. Dollarization
   3. Monetary Union

   This chapter reviews the state of research concerning how a country should choose where to locate along this continuum of exchange rate regimes.

   The ‘‘corners hypothesis’’ - that countries are, or should be, moving away from the intermediate regimes, in favor of either the hard peg corner or the floating corner - was proposed by Eichengreen (1994) and rapidly became the new conventional wisdom with the emerging market crises of the late 1990s. But it never had a good theoretical foundation. The feeling that an intermediate degree of exchange rate flexibility is inconsistent with perfect capital mobility is a misinterpretation of the principle of the impossible trinity. To take a clear example, Krugman (1991) shows theoretically that a target zone is entirely compatible with uncovered interest parity. The corners hypothesis began to lose popularity after the failure of Argentina’s quasi currency board in 2001. Many countries continue to follow intermediate regimes and do not seem any the worse for it.

   Attempts to address the optimal degree of exchange rate flexibility within a single theoretical model are seldom very convincing. Too many factors are involved. Better instead to enumerate the arguments for and against exchange rate flexibility and then attempt to weigh them up. This chapter considers five advantages of fixed exchange rates, followed by five advantages for exchange rate flexibility. We then turn to analysis of how to weigh the pros and cons to choose a regime. The answer depends on characteristics of the individual country in question.