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Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

This paper develops a new theory arguing that party change results from ruptures in political parties’ ties to civil society organizations. I demonstrate the utility of this approach by using it to explain why the Rhode Island Democratic Party (RIDP) changed from a hierarchical machine to a porous political field occupied by multiple interlegislator cliques and brokered by extra-party political organizations and professionals. While others attribute party change to bureaucratization, electoral demand, or system-level changes, I analyze historical, observational, and interview data to find that a severance in the RIDP’s relationship with organized labor prompted party change by causing power to diffuse outward as leadership lost control over nominations and the careers of elected office holders. In the spaces that remained, interest groups and political professionals came to occupy central positions within the party field, serving as brokers of the information and relationships necessary to coordinate legislative activity. This analysis refines existing theories of party change and provides a historically-grounded explanation for the institutionalization of interest groups and political professionals in American party politics.

The purpose of this study tests whether political instability influence financial decision-making behavior of Tunisian-listed firms, in particular dividend payout policy.

This paper uses dividend payout decisions announced over the period 2008–2015 by nonfinancial firms listed on the Tunisian Stock Exchange. A logistic regression is applied to analyze the relationship between political instability and dividend payout decision “changes. These latter are: past non-payers” dividend initiation, past payers' dividend termination, dividend payout “increasing and dividend payout” decreasing. Political instability variables used are as follows: number of changes in government head and dummy variables indicating the changes of ruling party and election year.

This study shows that government head changes are positively related to dividend initiation decisions while changes in ruling party are negatively related to termination dividend decisions except for family controlled ones. These firms are more likely to stop dividend on period of ruling party changes. Moreover, firms become unwilling to increase dividend payment on the period of political instability (changes in ruling party and government head and elections) and become willing to decrease dividend payment only when the government head changes.

The empirical findings contribute to the current debate on the signaling power of dividend policy in emerging market where raising equity capital is difficult and controlling shareholders prefer reinvest benefit to pay dividends. In addition, this study has important implications for regulators and governments struggling to design policies to improve investors' confidence and boost market activity. Indeed, investors may use corporate payout as a signal for better governance.

To the author' best knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate and to compare the effect of three political instability sources; government head changes, changes in ruling party and elections, on dividend payout decision changes. This paper provides evidence that firms facing political unstable environment seek to achieve two goals when they make dividend policy: reducing financial distress probability and attracting minority owners.

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.

Data on economic variables are drawn from the International Financial Statistics (IFS) Yearbook (Edward, 2008; Carson, 2000, 2002, 2004; McLenaghan, 1992, 1995) published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Statistics Department (1964, 1973, 1981, 1983). The economic variables that I obtained from the IFS are GDP, gross domestic investment, and government expenditures. The IMF values for the variables are in current prices. The current values are non-comparable across countries due to the different amounts of inflation across nations over time. I converted all data to constant values with the year 1985 as a base year using the GDP deflator provided by the IFS. For countries that do not have GDP deflators for the period (1960–2002), I used the consumer price index (CPI)² provided by the same source. In addition, the values for the variables are converted from their respective national currencies to U.S. dollars. Some countries in Latin America posed problems when I conducted the conversion process because they arbitrarily changed their national currencies several times from 1960 to 2002. These currency changes made it very difficult in the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico to draw reliable conclusions from the empirical analysis. Several countries – Chile, Indonesia, Liberia, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Sudan, Tanzania, Zaire, and Zambia – have numerous missing values that made their time series fall below the required span for appropriate time series analysis. These nine countries were dropped from the NLS analysis, which reduced the number of countries involved in the NLS analysis to sixty countries. However, these nine countries were included in the CNTS analysis.

The purpose of this study is to examine the changing political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community towards Islamic political parties in general elections; to analyze the factors that influenced the political orientation of Air Tiris community in general elections; and to realize the political rights of the society including Air Tiris community.

The subject in this study is the political orientation of the Air Tiris community in the 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014 general elections with a period of research from 2009 to 2016. This qualitative research method consists of sources, data collection, informants, data collection techniques, data analysis and processing and writing systematics.

The results of the research indicate that there are three dominant factors affecting the change in the political orientation of the Air Tiris community towards Islamic political parties characterized by the deterioration of vote acquisition for Islamic political parties in Air Tiris village in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014 general elections. The weakening of the link between religious identity and voting behaviour, as well as the weakening of political movement. The identification or loyalty of the santri community towards Islamic parties has faded.

The originality of this research lies in the analysis of the political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community, in general, elections towards Islamic political parties. Traditionally, this community has more political orientation on religious/Islamic political parties but such orientation experiences developments and changes that lead to non-Islamic parties. This research contains new information about the analysis of the political orientation of Air Tiris, Kampar, Riau community in the general election of Islamic political parties.

The emergence of climate science denialism in the United States provides a challenge to STS theories of the relationship between scientific expertise and public policy because a situation of epistemic rift occurs: the capacity of scientific consensus to establish the grounds of political debate is broken, and the standard circulation of expertise from the scientists and funding from the state is interrupted. Three mechanisms for the containment of scientific expertise are studied: direct intellectual suppression of climate scientists, industry support of contrarian scientists and policymakers, and cutbacks on government research programs that support climate change. This situation politicizes climate scientists, who are drawn into the public sphere as a counterpublic to the effort to contain the circulation of their knowledge in the political field. Although the strategy of contained expertise has been effective in blocking climate legislation at the federal government level in the United States, it may be losing effectiveness, and an emergent alternative strategy based on adaptation may be coming to replace it. Factors that affect the reduction in the capacity to contain the circulation of scientific expertise are also analyzed.

This paper seeks to investigate to what extent (and why) CSR reporting in developing countries reflect instrumental and/or “political CSR” motivations and the types of organisational legitimacy sought in these circumstances.

We adopt a theoretical framework based on neo-institutional theory, “political CSR” framework and types of organisational legitimacy. This interpretive research is set in the Egyptian context post-2011 revolution. We first carry out a content analysis of web disclosures for 40 banks in 2013 and 2016 to ascertain the nature of CSR activities and any changes over time. Second, we draw on 21 interviews to tease out the implications of the change in societal expectations due to the revolution and to deepen our understanding of the organisational motivations underlying CSR reporting.

Following the 2011 revolution, the banks’ CSR reporting practices have gradually shifted from a largely instrumental “business-case” perspective towards a more substantive recognition of a wider set of societal challenges consistent with a political CSR perspective. Overall, the maintaining/gaining of legitimacy is gradually bound to the communication of accounts about the multi-faceted socially valued consequences or structures performed by banks. Our interview data shows that participants reflected on the legitimation challenges brought by the revolution and the limits of transactional strategies involving traditional constituents, with a preference for pursuing consequential and structural forms of moral legitimacy.

This study demonstrates a constructive shift by businesses towards engaging with the new social rules in response to sociopolitical changes and the need to achieve moral legitimacy. Hence, policymakers and stakeholders could consider engaging with different economic sectors to foster more transparent, accountable, and impactful CSR practices.

We highlight the implications of Scherer and Palazzo’s political CSR approach for accountability and CSR reporting. CSR reporting in some developing countries has typically been seen as peripheral or a symbolic exercise primarily concerned with placating stakeholders and/or promoting shareholders’ interests. We suggest that researchers need to be instead attuned to the possibility of a blend of instrumental and normative motivations.