INCOME INEQUALITY AND POLITICAL POLARIZATION AND FRACTURALIZATION:AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF SOME EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

This paper investigates the relationship between economic inequality and the distribution of votes among political parties, namely political polarization and fracturalization. Economic inequality is captured by the Gini index, whereas new measures of political polarization and fracturalization are offered. This is the first paper to calculate political polarization and fracturalization indices by a methodology previously used for ethnic, religious and linguistic polarization and fracturalization. Empirical analysis uses data for 17 European countries and for three decades, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. It is shown that increased income inequality increases political party polarization and reduces fracturalization and that political party polarization decreases with increased GDP per capita.     

Building,Marketing and Living in an Islamic Gated Community: Novel Configurations of Class and Religion in Istanbul

This article analyses the development and marketing of Islamic gated communities in Basaksehir, Istanbul. It demonstrates how a blueprint of public–private urban development was appropriated by middle‐class Islamists. The gated communities in Basaksehir—which, at the outset, were not explicitly religious—gradually became attractive to religious actors searching for enclosed urban enclaves where Islamic communities would be protected against perceived moral‐urban threats. While urban‐religious enclaves appear to bear similarities to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the rise of contemporary Islamic gated communities should be understood in light of the recent coming to power of the Islamist Turkish government. In cooperation with this government, housing development agencies approached Islamic investors to find capital for their public–private housing projects. One of the results of this form of urban development is that, contrary to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the Islamic gated communities are homogenous in terms of economic class, catering specifically to the Islamic middle classes. Moreover, people who invest in Basaksehir desire an urban‐religious lifestyle that differs from the ‘traditional' religious lifestyle experienced in ‘traditional' Islamic neighbourhoods. The specific urban‐religious configuration generates a new type of Islam that better fits middle‐class values and a middle‐class lifestyle.     

Speculative attacks and currency crises: The Mexican experience

By using data from the Mexican economy, this paper estimates a speculative attack model of currency crises in order to identify the role of macroeconomic fundamentals and early warning signals of a potential currency crisis. A deterioration in fundamentals appears to generate high one-step-ahead probabilities for the observed regime changes during the sample period 1982–1994. Particularly, foreign reserve losses, expansionary output, monetary and fiscal policies, an increase in inflation differentials and the share of short-term foreign currency-indexed debt, and an appreciation of the real exchange rate appear to have contributed to the speculative pressures and the associated regime changes.     

Locating leisure as the route to well-being: challenges of researching women’s leisure in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the relation of leisure to subjective well-being by focusing on the language-based challenges during empirical research, which deeply impact upon both the substance of the data collected and its interpretation, thereby the knowledge that is produced on leisure. Drawing upon the empirical data collected via qualitative methods, the article seizes on the relationship between women’s free-time, labour, leisure and subjective well-being. The findings of the research suggest that the translation of leisure as ‘free time activities’ in Turkish creates serious challenges in researching women’s leisure. Women in this research understand leisure in multiple ways, such as an escape from boredom, a sphere of recuperation, pleasure and self-fulfilment which altogether represent their understanding of leisure as a route to their subjective well-being. Building on these findings, the article aims to highlight the importance of ethnographically guided qualitative research in uncovering both the meanings of and the interdependence between leisure and subjective well-being in both Turkey, the focus of the study, and other comparable societies around the world.     

Team Climate,Team Cognition,Team Intuition,and Software Quality: The Moderating Role of Project Complexity

Teams represent a prevailing approach to getting work done in today’s hypercompetitive business environment. Although there is a widely held assumption that team-related capabilities determine the success of new product development projects, empirical research on team capabilities is scant. Based on the resource-based view of the firm, organizational learning theory, and situated learning theory, this study investigates the interrelationships among team climate, two information-processing capabilities (i.e., team cognition and team intuition), and software quality. As well, this study explores the moderating effect of project complexity between the information-processing capabilities and the quality of the software. In studying the data from 139 software development projects using the partial least squares structural equation modeling methods, we found that team climate has a direct influence on team cognition. Moreover, the findings showed that team cognition was positively related to the quality of the software product in general; in particular, this relationship was found to be far more significant when project complexity was used as a moderator. This finding indicates that the software development team’s ability to process information logically in order to interpret situations effectively allows the team to launch superior software products when unexpected and undesirable events make a project complicated and challenging to perform. In particular, managers should encourage teams to benefit from new ideas and make collective efforts for reaching goals. Managers should also enable teams to specialize in their tasks and improve their collective information-processing capabilities.     

Research on the Credit Cycle and Business Cycle with a Focus on Ten States from Central,Eastern, and Southeastern Europe

By performing an econometric analysis of the credit cycle and business cycle from an individual as well as a comparative perspective, with a focus on ten relevant economies from the areas of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, this research offers a fresh view regarding the importance of banks in promoting long-term economic growth through their lending capacity. The purpose is to better understand the behavior (the short- and medium-term dynamics) of the credit cycle and business cycle and the effects of the interactions between them. The results of this study offer valuable insights for both academics and policymakers and provide a warning to regulators not to overregulate or put too much pressure on banking activity.     

Inflation targeting in an import dependent indebted economy

This paper develops a one-sector Kaleckian model of an import dependent indebted small open economy; where the mark-up rate is sensitive to both changes in the interest rate and the exchange rate and foreigners provide part of the long-term finance. The short-run consequences of an inflation targeting policy in the form of high interest rates and strong domestic currency are explored. Among the possible short-run scenarios, the one most relevant for developing countries involves a decline in the profit rate, the capacity utilization rate and the rate of accumulation as well as the employment rate and the real wage. Leverage ratio of the firms and the extent of external indebtedness play an important role in bringing about this result. Long-run analysis reveals that this scenario is associated with instability in the long run and that, also in the long run, the extent of foreign indebtedness and the responsiveness of capital inflows to the return on existing portfolios are important in determining the direction of the effects of inflation targeting on the equilibrium debt–capital ratio.