How to bring managerial independence and public accountability into a working accord, so that neither efficiency nor necessary controls will be neglected, is the fundamental problem arising out of the operation of government corporations. Having dealt with managerial independence in the first instalment of this article, we now are faced with the problem of explaining how such independence can be reconciled with the controls necessary to assure public accountability. Experience everywhere has shown that governments can carry on a business enterprise efficiently only, when it possesses sufficient autonomy and flexibility to call forth managerial skills that are self-reliant and inventive as well as prudent. It has been argued that the corporate device, when faithfully followed, is superior to departmentalism in at least three major respects: it is potentially less subject to injurious political considerations; it is more autonomous in organization and capable of a greater degree of unity in its management, both of which are essential to efficient operation; and it has more flexibility with regard to its financial operations and is designed to stand on its own financial feet, as a business-operated enterprise should. The competent manager of a government corporation must be free within his own sphere, but he must also be externally accountable in important respects as regards both policy and administration, and to both Congress and the President. To effect such an equilibrium is difficult, at best, but it is particularly difficult and uncertain when the political climate is hostile toward the social purposes for which government corporations are created.

The divergent results of two roughly simultaneous negotiations about international regimes for TV broadcasting and remote sensing from satellites reveal that governments do not form preferences by referring only to the interests emphasized in rational choice accounts or to the identities emphasized in sociological institutionalist ones. Tracing the course of the negotiations reveals that governments' perceptions of the interests and identities at stake, and their formulation of their preferences are shaped by their understanding of the contours of the problem or issue at hand. These understandings, or situation definitions, structure political interactions by indicating the causal and moral beliefs relevant to the question at hand, the range of efficacious and acceptable policy means available for addressing it, and the sorts of authority, expertise, skills, and other resources that give particular actors strong claims to inclusion in the process of deciding how to address it.

In this article, I show that in contexts where the state fails to deliver order and security, criminal organizations can paradoxically facilitate economic development. I consider the case of the Primeiro Comando da Capital [“First Capital Command”] (PCC)—a Brazilian prison gang that has achieved hegemony over the criminal market of a large region and become the de facto regulator of violence and organized crime in São Paulo. Employing a robust difference-in-differences approach on granular administrative employment data, firm creation registries, and satellite-based nighttime luminosity (as a proxy for informal economic activity), I provide causal evidence that the PCC’s stable, rule-based criminal governance significantly increased local economic opportunities. My findings challenge conventional wisdom on the negative economic externalities of crime, demonstrating that hegemonic, institutionalized, and non-extractive criminal governance can generate positive economic externalities by reducing violence and uncertainty.

This article explicates and critiques an understanding of markets that is dominant in much contemporary political theory. Drawing on the insights of new materialist economic sociology, it argues that the divide between “the political” and “the market” that grounds many recent analyses cannot ultimately be sustained. Conceptualizing markets not as abstract, impersonal mechanisms but as polyvalent assemblages, the paper develops a view of markets as material devices subject to a wide variety of political inflections and deployments. This understanding is then used to clarify some of the disputes between market-friendly neo-republican theorists and their critics. The article argues that markets are best conceptualized as political institutions (rather than as alternatives to politics). It commends an approach to political theorizing that moves beyond “pro-” and “antimarket” positions, focusing instead on the material details of market configurations and their consequences for agency and social power.

A decisive voter’s exact ideological preferences can be hard to predict, even for seasoned candidates. We develop a novel theory of electoral competition where candidates are evaluated on ideological and nonideological dimensions. The key feature of our theory is that an electorate’s partisan leaning serves as a signal of the median voter’s ideological position where extreme leanings are more informative about voters than centrist leanings. We show that this leads to an endogenous sorting of districts between “extreme” and “centrist” and that an increase in the importance of candidate competence for voters increases polarization—but only in extreme districts. We evaluate our theory using data from mayoral elections in Brazil’s 95 largest municipalities and exploit COVID-19 as a shock to the salience of candidate competence. We show that COVID-19 increases the salience of competence in these elections, leading to increased political polarization, which is concentrated in cities with extreme partisan leanings.