IC3JM - Estudios = Working Papers

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  • Publication
    Increasing inequalities: Recent School Failure Trends in Spain
    (Instituto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM), 2014-02-20) Fernández Mellizo-Soto, María; Martínez-García, José Saturnino
    School failure is substantive in Spain. The percentage of students that do not achieve the compulsory education diploma is around 20%. Students who “fail” cannot continue to post-compulsory education and, sooner or later, have to leave formal education. School failure is usually higher for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This article explores the evolution of Inequality of Educational Opportunities (IEO) in compulsory education from the seventies in Spain. Using logit models of estimation to control for socio-demographic factors that may interfere with IEO dynamic, it shows that IEO at this level of education ran parallel with school failure: specifically, it decreased until the late nineties and increased afterwards. In order to explain this (unexpected) increase, we have tested the impact of a Law, known as LOGSE, which was implemented in Spain at the end of the nineties. We provide evidence that this Law, although egalitarian in spirit, in practice could have worked against students from lower socio-economic backgrounds continuing in education; thereby increasing IEO at this transition point.
  • Publication
    Should I stay or should I go? Losers’ fate and the role of Spanish political parties in candidate renomination for regional executive office
    (Instituto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM), 2014-02-20) Astudillo, Javier
    Under what conditions do oppositional politicians in Western parliamentarian democracies repeat as candidates after losing their first election? Political leaders need to attain the highest executive offices to lead. But in most democracies this means that parties must previously select them as their candidates for those offices. Parties' intervention in candidate selection is thus a vital part of the game. However, this is still an understudied topic in Western parliamentarian politics. A few studies have analyzed losers’ fate, but they have exclusively focused on the US case where party machines have played for long a lesser role in leadership recruitment. This paper seeks therefore to make a contribution to the literature about the current role of party organizations for political leadership survival in party-centered parliamentarian countries by studying the specific case of candidates for the presidency of the Spanish Comunidades Autonómas.
  • Publication
    Labor Force Participation among Immigrants in 10 Western European Countries: Generation, Gender and Ethnicity
    (Instituto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM), 2014-02-20) Gorodzeisky, Anastasia; Semyonov, Moshe
    Using data from five European Social Surveys the study focuses on labor force incorporation of sub-groups of immigrants in 10 West-European countries. Whereas the analysis reveals that rate of labor force activity among first-generation immigrants is lower than that of comparable native-born populations regardless of ethnicity or gender, meaningful differences across sub-groups of second-generation immigrants are observed. Second-generation male and female immigrants of European origin achieve parity with native-born Europeans in rate of participation; by contrast, second-generation immigrant men and women of non-European origin and of the Muslim faith are less likely to become economically active than comparable Europeans.
  • Publication
    Preferences for Regional Redistribution in Multi-Tiered Politics: The Role of Information and Survey Evidence
    (Instituto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM), 2014-02-20) Balcells, Laia; Fernández-Albertos, José; Kuo, Alexander
    What explains individual support for redistribution among regions within a country? Building on extant models, we hypothesize that such preferences are affected by regional income, conditioned by individual income and political ideology. We test hypotheses with an experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey in Spain, where we randomly inform some citizens of the true relative income of their region. The effect of this information is therefore akin to changes in relative regional income. We find that citizens' learning about a region's relative position affects preferences for redistribution; specifically, low-income respondents in relatively well-off regions become particularly against inter-regional redistribution. The effects of regional income are moderated by political ideology and priming of "out group" regions. The findings have implications for debates about the applicability of economic models to explaining support for regional arrangements, and about the role of second-dimensional "identity" politics.
  • Publication
    ‘You can vote but you cannot choose’: Democracy and the Sovereign Debt Crisis in the Eurozone
    (Instituto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM), 2014-02-20) Alonso, Sonia
    The objective of this paper is to analyze the alleged unfolding of ‘democracy without choices’ in Europe and its consequences for the quality of national democracies, particularly those of the Eurozone periphery (GIIPS – Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain). The argument is, in a nutshell, that the lack of responsiveness of GIIPS national Governments to their respective national constituencies is the reverse of the medal of an excess of responsiveness in core Euro countries, particularly Germany. Governments are trapped between the pressure to be responsive at home and the need to be responsible to their European partners and the European project. If the trade-off of all democratic politics is between responsiveness and responsibility, Euro core countries have clearly opted for responsiveness (to domestic constituencies) and Eurozone peripheral countries have been forced to be responsible (towards their EU partners and the EU as a whole). As a result, the 2008 financial crisis has led to a three-fold breach inside the EU between core and periphery concerning the pace of economic recovery, the degrees of governmental autonomy and, most important of all, democratic legitimacy. Eurozone peripheral countries are at the losing side of this three-fold breach.