Does political proximity to the U.S. cause terror?

We analyze the impact of political proximity to the United States on the occurrence and severity of terror. Employing panel data for 116 countries over the period 1975–2001 we find that countries voting in line with the U.S. are victims of more and deadlier attacks.

Eurooppalainen näkökulma suomalaiseen kulttuurijohtamiseen ja suomalaiseen yhteiskuntaan sopeutuminen

Tässä tutkielmassa korostuu Euroopan sisäinen kulttuurillinen erilaisuus ja sen vaatimukset Suomessa toimiville monikansallisille organisaatioille. Eurooppalaista johtamista on tutkittu jo vuosikymmenten ajan, mutta erityisesti suomalaisesta, Suomessa työskentelevien eurooppalaisten näkökulmasta ei vastaavaa tutkimusta tiettävästi ole aiemmin tehty. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää suomalaisen kulttuurin ja johtajuuden arvoeroja muiden Euroopan Unionin maiden kansalaisten näkökulmasta. Pohjois-Euroopan maista tutkimuksessa on mukana edustajia Ruotsista, Tanskasta ja Hollannista. Keski-Euroopan maista edustusta löytyy Saksasta ja Itävallasta, kun Etelä-Eurooppaa edustavat ranskalaiset ja italialaiset henkilöt. Itäisestä Euroopasta mukana on latvialaisia henkilöitä ja anglo-Euroopasta britannialaisia. Tutkimus kartoittaa tutkimukseen mukaan otettujen maiden yhteisö- ja johtamiskulttuurillisia törmäyskohtia suomalaisen kulttuurin kanssa, jotta Suomessa toimivat monikansalliset työyhteisöt löytäisivät yhä parempia strategioita eurooppalaisen ihmispääoman, eurooppalaisten työntekijöiden ja näiden osaamisen, johtamiseksi ja monikansallisen yhteisön toimivuuden ymmärtämiseksi ja parantamiseksi. Näitä törmäyskohtia tarkastellaan empiirisesti Hofsteden (1984) kulttuuridimensioiden, Housen ym. (1999) GLOBE-tutkimuksen ja Koopmanin ym. (1999) johtajuusulottuvuuksien avulla. Tutkimusaineisto koostuu Internet-pohjaisesta kyselystä, joka suoritettiin keväällä 2010. Siihen osallistui 75 Suomessa työskentelevää Euroopan Unionin kansalaista. Analysointimenetelmänä tutkimuksessa käytetään klusterointia, keskiarvoistuksia, Kruskall Wallisin testiä ja sisällönanalyysiä tukemaan määrällisen analyysin tuloksia ja tuomaan esiin siitä poikkeavia havaintoja. Tutkimuksen ytimessä on johtamiskulttuurilliset erot, joista tehdään laajempaa analyysiä edellä mainituin keinoin. Yhteisökulttuurillisia eroja havainnoidaan tutkimuskyselyyn perustuvien väittämien perusteella tehtyjen histogrammien avulla. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että maantieteellinen, uskonnollinen tai poliittinen läheisyys eivät määritä kulttuurillista läheisyyttä tai johda kulttuurilliseen sopeutumiseen. Poliittinen raja kahden naapurin välillä saattaa johtaa saman asian kokemiseen kahdella täysin eri tavalla. Lisäksi tuloksista käy ilmi, että yhteisökulttuurilliset ja johtamiskulttuurilliset arvot eivät välttämättä kulje käsikkäin Suomessa työskentelevien eurooppalaisten näkökulmasta. Yleisinä kulttuurillisina kipukohtina tutkimuksessa nousee esiin suomalaisen kulttuurin sosiaalisuuden ja kommunikaation puutteellisuus, toisaalta suomalaiseen kulttuuriin sopeutumista helpottaa suomalainen rehellisyys ja suoruus. Johtamiskulttuurillisina haasteina eurooppalaiset kokevat suomalaisen tyyppijohtajan kyvyttömyyden riskien ottamiseen ja kannustusmenetelmien puutteet. Tämän lisäksi tutkimuksessa tulee ilmi useita tiettyihin kansallisuuksiin liittyviä törmäyskohtia. Tutkimus on nähtävä tämän hetken kuvauksena. Kulttuuritutkimus sisältää monia tekijöitä, jotka ovat jatkuvassa muutoksessa ja lisäksi hyvin subjektiivisia. Kulttuurijohtajuus merkitsee kuitenkin nyt ja tulevaisuudessa kykyä olla innovatiivinen, joustava ja herkkä sosiaalisille merkityksille.

Fiscal adjustment, conditionality and politics in IMF programs

A common feature in programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the use of conditionalities, macroeconomic and structural measures that a requesting country should adopt to obtain an assistance package. The objective of this work is to conduct an empirical analysis of the economic and political determinants of such conditionalities. In particular, our main contribution consists in the development of a new measure of conditionality, fiscal adjustment, and its comparison with the most used in the literature, the number of conditions. We choose fiscal adjustment because it is an adequate proxy for program austerity, since its implementation carries economic and political costs. In the empirical exercise, we use data from 184 programs in the period of 1999 and 2012, and estimate how our two measures of conditionalities respond to the economic and political factors. Our results suggest that they are quite different. The main determinant of the number of conditions is the political proximity of the borrowing country to the Fund’s major shareholders, the members of G5. On the other hand, the main determinant of fiscal adjustment is the size of the government fiscal deficit. Finally, we did not find correlation between the size of fiscal adjustment and the number of conditions. These results suggest that the analysis of the content of IMF programs should take into account the different measures of agreed conditionality.

The determinants of IMF fiscal conditionalities: economics or politics?

Conditionalites, measures that a borrowing country should adopt to obtain loans from the IMF, are pervasive in IMF programs. This paper estimates the effects of political and economic factors on the number of conditionalities and on the fiscal adjustment requested by the IMF. As found in the literature, political proximity of the borrowing country to the Fund’s major shareholders has an important effect on the number of conditions in an agreement. However, the fiscal adjusment requested by the IMF is strongly affected by the size of a country’s fiscal deficit but not by political proximity. We also find a very small correlation between the number of conditions and the fiscal adjustment requested by the IMF

Letters that construct limits: intellectual and political projects in the letters of Capistrano de Abreu to Barao do Rio Branco (1886-1903)

The intention of this paper is to analyze the letters from Capistrano de Abreu to Barao do Rio Branco in the years between 1886 and 1903. The focus will be given to the divergences around the notion of territorial formation, a basic concept for these authors who were thinking about the construction of a historical narrative at the end of the 19(th) and beginning of the 20(th) century. Later, the question is the construction of the craft of the historian in the letters of Capistrano de Abreu and his distinction and proximity to the ideas of the Barao do Rio Branco.

Is there space for senior civil servants hybrid management models across political- administrative systems?

Comunicação apresentada na 17.ª conferência anual da NISPACee, realizada de 14 a 16 de Maio de 2009.

Understanding Political Knowledge and Its Influence on Voting Preferences in the 2007 Federal Election

In this article we propose a model to explain how voters' perceptions of their ideological proximity to a party affect their propensity to vote for that party. We argue that political knowledge plays a crucial moderating role in the relationship between party proximity and voting propensity. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between institutional knowledge (information about the political system) and party knowledge (information about the parties' left-right positions). An analysis of survey data from the 2007 Swiss federal elections supports our main hypothesis that party knowledge enhances the link between party proximity and voting propensity. Institutional knowledge may have additional influence, but clear evidence for this effect was obtained only for propensities to vote for the Swiss People's Party (SVP). Overall, the impact of political knowledge was found to be substantial, even after controlling for the outstanding influence of party identification and other predictors of voting propensities

Negotiating proximity:expert testimony and collective memory in the trials of environmental activists in France and the United Kingdom

This article analyzes the role of expert witness testimony in the trials of social movement actors, discussing the trial of the "Kingsnorth Six" in Britain and the trials of activists currently mobilising against airport construction at Notre Dame des Landes in western France. Though the study of expert testimony has so far overwhelmingly concentrated on fact-finding and admissibility, the cases here reveal the importance of expert testimony not simply in terms of legal argument, but in "moral" or political terms, as it reflects and constitutes movement cognitive praxis. In the so-called climate change defence presented by the Kingsnorth Six, I argue that expert testimony attained a "negotiation of proximity," connecting different types of contributory expertise to link the scales and registers of climate science with those of everyday understanding and meaning. Expert testimony in the trials of activists in France, however, whilst ostensibly able to develop similar bridging narratives, has instead been used to construct resistance to the airport siting as already proximate, material, and embedded. To explain this, I argue that attention to the symbolic, as well as instrumental, functions of expert testimony reveals the crucial role that collective memory plays in the construction of both knowledge and grievance in these cases. Collective memory is both a constraint on and catalyst for mobilisation, defining the boundaries of the sayable. Testimony in trials both reflects and reproduces these elements and is a vital explanatory tool for understanding the narrativisation and communication of movement identities and objectives. © 2013 The Author. Law & Policy © 2013 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary.

Information or context : what accounts for positional proximity between the European Commission and lobbyists?

Peer reviewed

Information or context : what accounts for positional proximity between the European Commission and lobbyists?

Peer reviewed

Transformative Political Spaces? Asambleas Populares, Identity, Alliances and Belonging in Buenos Aires

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Cidadania e educação física : matrizes históricas e políticas, contradições e perspectivas = Citizenship and physical education : historical and political matrices, perspectives and contradictions

Universidade Estadual de Campinas . Faculdade de Educação Física

A trajetoria da educação fisica nas primeiras series do ensino fundamental na rede publica do Estado de São Paulo : entre o proposto e o alcançado

Universidade Estadual de Campinas . Faculdade de Educação Física

Diffractive phase-shift lithography photomask operating in proximity printing mode

A phase shift proximity printing lithographic mask is designed, manufactured and tested. Its design is based on a Fresnel computer-generated hologram, employing the scalar diffraction theory. The obtained amplitude and phase distributions were mapped into discrete levels. In addition, a coding scheme using sub-cells structure was employed in order to increase the number of discrete levels, thus increasing the degree of freedom in the resulting mask. The mask is fabricated on a fused silica substrate and an amorphous hydrogenated carbon (a:C-H) thin film which act as amplitude modulation agent. The lithographic image is projected onto a resist coated silicon wafer, placed at a distance of 50 mu m behind the mask. The results show a improvement of the achieved resolution - linewidth as good as 1.5 mu m - what is impossible to obtain with traditional binary masks in proximity printing mode. Such achieved dimensions can be used in the fabrication of MEMS and MOEMS devices. These results are obtained with a UV laser but also with a small arc lamp light source exploring the partial coherence of this source. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America

Density-functional description of superconducting and magnetic proximity effects across a tunneling barrier

A density-functional formalism for superconductivity and magnetism is presented. The resulting relations unify previously derived Kohn-Sham equations for superconductors and for noncollinear magnetism. The formalism, which discriminates Cooper-pair singlets from triplets, is applied to two quantum liquids coupled by tunneling through a barrier. An exact expression is derived, relating the eigenstates and eigenvalues of the Kohn-Sham equations, unperturbed by tunneling, on one side of the barrier to the proximity-induced ordering potential on the other.