La subpoliarquía colombiana. Deficiencias estatales, democracia deficitaria

El artículo analiza la democracia colombiana en la década 2002-2011. El argumento central es que Colombia representa un caso de una democracia con déficits, que no alcanza a cubrir las condiciones mínimas de las democracias políticas y se constituye en una subpoliarquía. En esta condición incide de forma  directa las deficiencias estatales, en sus dimensiones de coacción y cohesión social. Los déficits democráticos se presentan en las condiciones básicas de la competencia  política, con elecciones periódicas, pero no libres ni competitivas ni limpias; en la presencia continuada de fraude y manipulación de los resultados electorales y en la  ausencia de garantías para las libertades civiles y políticas. Estas características justifican los diversos adjetivos aplicados a la democracia colombiana, siempre  en clave negativa.

Summit of the Americas 1994-2009: selected indicators

Includes bibliography

15M. La expresión del conflicto en las canciones protestas

El objetivo de esta comunicación es analizar de manera exploratoria en qué forma las letras de las canciones protesta, escritas en el entorno de las movilizaciones del 15M, contienen una visión del mundo social, económico y político. Las canciones protesta se caracterizan por la denuncia social de situaciones de explotación, discriminación o esclavitud. El rasgo común a todas ellas es la existencia de un conflicto, al que responden tomando posición por una de las partes o apelando a la paz y al consenso. En ocasiones ofrecen soluciones a dichos conflictos, si bien no es la situación más extendida. En relación a las canciones del 15M, emplearemos como referencia las disponibles en la página de la Fundación Robo. En dicha página se alojan canciones cuyo nexo de unión es la protesta por la situación que vive la sociedad española. Tomando las canciones como datos de análisis, se estudiarán los estilos más empleados para protestar, el empleo del “bricoleur” (Levi-Strauss) de músicas y letras para recomponer un nuevo mensaje y finalmente se considerará la presencia de dualizaciones como las de “nosotros” y “ellos”. Se exploran las razones que se exponen en las letras para llegar al conflicto actual y las soluciones que se proponen. Tras definir qué actores y colectivos definen cada uno de los grupos, se consideran las relaciones que se proponen entre ellos. Destacan los planteamientos que presentan la relación como de lucha o conflicto, mientras que la oferta de relaciones constructivas, ya sea de diálogo, consenso o negociación, es prácticamente inexistente. Raramente ofrecen una solución pacífica a los conflictos.

2007-2008 Juvenile Court Services School Liaison Program Data, July 2008

Data are provided to CJJP through statistical summary forms completed by the JCSLs. Because forms are completed only when meaningful contact between a student and a liaison takes place, only a portion of the total population served is reported. Meaningful contact is defined as having at least five contacts within a 60-day period (at any point during the academic year) regarding at least one of the referral reasons supplied on the form. Data are entered into a web-based application by the liaisons and retrieved electronically by CJJP via the internet. Service information is submitted and uploaded only at the end of the academic year.

2010-2011 Juvenile Court Services School Liaison Program Data, July 2011

Data are provided to CJJP through statistical summary forms completed by the JCSLs. Because forms are completed only when meaningful contact between a student and a liaison takes place, only a portion of the total population served is reported. Meaningful contact is defined as having at least five contacts within a 60-day period (at any point during the academic year) regarding at least one of the referral reasons supplied on the form. Data are entered into a web-based application by the liaisons and retrieved electronically by CJJP via the internet. Service information is submitted and uploaded only at the end of the academic year.

2012-2013 Juvenile Court Services School Liaison Program Data, July 2013

Data are provided to CJJP through statistical summary forms completed by the JCSLs. Because forms are completed only when meaningful contact between a student and a liaison takes place, only a portion of the total population served is reported. Meaningful contact is defined as having at least five contacts within a 60-day period (at any point during the academic year) regarding at least one of the referral reasons supplied on the form. Data are entered into a web-based application by the liaisons and retrieved electronically by CJJP via the internet. Service information is submitted and uploaded only at the end of the academic year.

The Sex Offender Research Council’s Annual Report: An Analysis of the Sex Offender Special Sentence in Iowa, November 2014

To study the effects of the special sentence, two groups of sex offenders were analyzed: those serving a special sentence and a pre-special sentence cohort of offenders. Recidivism rates were compared between the two groups over a three-year period. For the special sentence group, the recidivism tracking period began at the beginning of an offender’s special sentence supervision start date. For the comparison group, the recidivism tracking period was observed following an offender’s sentence expiration, meaning that they were not under any type of correctional supervision when examined.

Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990

This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.

An Ardent Flame: Witness to Distant Suffering, Human Rights and Unworthy Victims in the Coverage by The New York Times and Two Journals of the Religious Left of the 1980s Civil Wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua

Scholars have investigated witness to distant suffering (WTDS) almost entirely in visual media. This study examines it in print. This form of reporting will be examined in two publications of the religious left as contrasted with the New York Times. The thesis is that, more than any technology, WTDS consists of the journalist’s moral commitment and narrative skills and the audience’s analytical resources and trust. In the religious journals, liberation theology provides the moral commitment, the writers and editors the narrative skills and trust and the special vision of the newly empowered poor the analytical foundation. In bearing witness to those who have suffered state or guerilla terrorism in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 1980s, we will investigate a distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy victims.” This last issue has a special ethical and political significance. Media witnessing to the suffering of strangers can help them become known, and so “worthy.” It can help them, and their plight and cause, become better recognized. This is the power of the media.

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights : A comparative analysis of the conceptual relationship between democracy and rights in contemporary political theories

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights is a research in normative political theory, based on comparative analysis of contemporary democratic theories, classified roughly as conventional liberal, deliberative democratic and radical democratic. Its focus is on the conceptual relationship between alternative sources of democratic legitimacy: democratic inclusion and liberal rights. The relationship between rights and democracy is studied through the following questions: are rights to be seen as external constraints to democracy or as objects of democratic decision making processes? Are individual rights threatened by public participation in politics; do constitutionally protected rights limit the inclusiveness of democratic processes? Are liberal values such as individuality, autonomy and liberty; and democratic values such as equality, inclusion and popular sovereignty mutually conflictual or supportive? Analyzing feminist critique of liberal discourse, the dissertation also raises the question about Enlightenment ideals in current political debates: are the universal norms of liberal democracy inherently dependent on the rationalist grand narratives of modernity and incompatible with the ideal of diversity? Part I of the thesis introduces the sources of democratic legitimacy as presented in the alternative democratic models. Part II analyses how the relationship between rights and democracy is theorized in them. Part III contains arguments by feminists and radical democrats against the tenets of universalist liberal democratic models and responds to that critique by partly endorsing, partly rejecting it. The central argument promoted in the thesis is that while the deconstruction of modern rationalism indicates that rights are political constructions as opposed to externally given moral constraints to politics, this insight does not delegitimize the politics of universal rights as an inherent part of democratic institutions. The research indicates that democracy and universal individual rights are mutually interdependent rather than oppositional; and that democracy is more dependent on an unconditional protection of universal individual rights when it is conceived as inclusive, participatory and plural; as opposed to robust majoritarian rule. The central concepts are: liberalism, democracy, legitimacy, deliberation, inclusion, equality, diversity, conflict, public sphere, rights, individualism, universalism and contextuality. The authors discussed are e.g. John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Young, Chantal Mouffe and Stephen Holmes. The research focuses on contemporary political theory, but the more classical work of John S. Mill, Benjamin Constant, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt is also included.

Political Institutions, Technology and Growth: a dynamic panel approach

This paper investigates whether the effect of political institutions on sectoral economic performance is determined by the level of technological development of industries. Building on previous studies on the linkages among political institutions, technology and economic growth, we employ the dynamic panel Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator for a sample of 4,134 country-industries from 61 industries and 89 countries over the 1990-2010 period. Our main findings suggest that changes of political institutions towards higher levels of democracy, political rights and civil liberties enhance economic growth in technologically developed industries. On the contrary, the same institutional changes might retard economic growth of those industries that are below a technological development threshold. Overall, these results give evidence of a technologically conditioned nature of political institutions to be growth-promoting.

Realising political equality: the European Court of Human Rights and positive obligations in a democracy'

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) speaks of the importance of an “effective political democracy” in its Preamble, though it is only in Article 3 of Protocol 1 (P1-3) that we find a right to free elections. This paper discusses the role of “positive obligations” under P1-3. This paper outlines the positive obligations in P1-3 focusing on obligations where the state is required to do more than just change the law. This may mean providing resources or facilities, adopting regulatory frameworks or creating new institutions. The paper highlights specific positive obligations that need to be further developed in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Sometimes these can be developed by analogy with positive obligations recognised in other areas of ECtHR jurisprudence. However, beyond these cases, states should ensure that members of vulnerable and disadvantaged minorities are able to participate in the electoral process and should ensure that dominant political groups cannot abuse their political power to exclude other parties unfairly. This is necessary to realise equal political rights. The second section of this paper sketches some preliminary points about the Strasbourg institutions’ approach to P1-3. After that, the third section identifies circumstances where the ECtHR should apply a more intense scrutiny in P1-3 cases. The fourth, fifth and sixth sections look at positive obligations relating to the right to vote, the right to run for election and the regulation of political parties.

The Fundamental Rights Agency and Civil Society: Reminding the Gardeners of their Plants' Roots. EDAP 02/2012, 2012

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the EU body responsible for advising EU institutions on fundamental rights, is equipped with a Fundamental Rights Platform (FRP) to ensure an on-going and structured exchange of information and feedback between the FRA and Civil Society. When the FRA was founded in 2007, there was little pre-existing knowledge on how to design such a Platform; hence, the development of the relationship between the FRA and Civil Society over the first five years proved an interesting experiment. Although the Platform was never intended as a mechanism of democratic co-decision making, it is far more than a loose marketplace where Civil Society actors across the spectrum of fundamental rights themes gather. The Platform offers channels of consultation and exchange not only among the participants but also with the FRA. It allows for cross-pollination, ensuring informed grassroots input into FRA work and FRA expertise flow to Civil Society actors. This synergetic relationship builds upon both the self-organising forces of Civil Society and the terms of references of the FRP as defined by the FRA. The Platform allows to find a certain unity in the remarkable diversity of fundamental rights voices. To what degree, however, the Platform’s dynamics allow the transformation of sometimes ‘compartmentalised’ single human rights discussions into wider trans-sectoral and transnational debates within the Human Rights Community depends on the motivation and the interest(s) of the different Civil Society players.

Health care rights and NHS rationing: turning theory into practice

How should we understand the nature of patients’ right in public health care systems? Are health care rights different to rights under a private contract for car insurance? This article distinguishes between public and private rights and the relevance of community interests and notions of social solidarity. It discusses the distinction between political and civil rights, and social and economic rights and the inherently political and redistributive nature of the latter. Nevertheless, social and economic rights certainly give rise to “rights” enforceable by the courts. In the UK (as in many other jurisdictions), the courts have favoured a “procedural” approach to the question, in which the courts closely scrutinise decisions and demand high standards of rationality from decision-makers. However, although this is the general rule, the article also discusses a number of exceptional cases where “substantive” remedies are available which guarantee patients access to the care they need.