The study and analysis of the perceptions of local elite’s representatives aims to give a valuable contribution to the process and work of policy-making institutions. In addition, this study will serve to help establishing a thorough process and benchmarks that would lead to improved processes of drafting, reviewing, implementation and monitoring of the national security policy framework, in line with Albania’s obligation as NATO member country and contemporary standards of the North-Atlantic Alliance.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, NATO, National Security, Regional Cooperation, Alliance, and Elites
City Political Economy Research Centre (CITYPERC), University of London
Abstract:
Present social movements, as “Occupy Wall Street” or the Spanish “Indignados”, claim
that politicians work for an economic elite, the 1%, that drives the world economic policies.
In this paper we show through econometric analysis that these movements are accurate:
politicians in OECD countries maximize the happiness of the economic elite. In 2009
center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and
center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the
seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter.
Topic:
Economics, Political Economy, Politics, Democracy, Representation, Elites, and Occupy Wall Street
Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University (ISID)
Abstract:
The investigation in education and its role in social stratification has been the focus of
attention in the sociology literature for a number of decades now. However, very little is known
as to what takes place in Latin America. The supposed point of departure to study education and
its role in social stratification is that education should act to break the inertias between origins
and destinies. This article has asked the question whether education is a factor that contributes
to break the cycle of persistent inequality in Mexico, and also if this is a form to evaluate the
achievements of the social contract that came out of the Mexican Revolution, which this year,
2010, celebrates its century of existence. This is so because one of the main objectives of the
revolution was to cut down the privileges of the dominant class, and along with it, the intergenerational transmission of wealth that perpetuates inequality. Two models of structural
equations were compared to evaluate the relationship between wealth in the home of origin, the
schooling of the parents, childhood academic achievement, the final schooling of the ego, and its
economic wellbeing. The results show that there are statistical differences between the cases of
Mexico and Chile in terms of the process of stratification. In Mexico, the wealth of the home of
origin and the childhood academic achievement are the variables that best explain both the final
level of schooling as well as the socioeconomic wellbeing of ego. In Chile, education functions
as a variable that interrupts the weight of the inter-generational legacy. It is discussed then that
the State in Mexico has failed in providing an educational system that can break the inertia of the
association between origins and destinies, and the implications of the importance of childhood
academic achievement, which calls upon keeping children in their classrooms, at least for the
time period that the law mandates.