Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

[Impuestos sin contribuyentes: la invisibilidad de los impuestos en Chile]AbstractThis study documents the existing gap between tax structure and tax visibility using evidence from a nationally representative survey in Chile around the time of a contentious tax reform bill. Debates over taxation often assume that taxpayers know the scale and reach of their tax obligations and the benefits associated to paying taxes, which are crucial to the success of taxation as a tool for development. We tested the assumption of a well-informed taxpayer and find generalised opacity along with the stratification of both income and value-added taxes visibility. We end by discussing how tax visibility relates to taxpayers’ expectations of tax morality and redistribution.[We thank the Instituto de Políticas Públicas of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in particular to Ignacio Irarrázaval and Francisca Alessandri, for access to the data set and comments during the seminar “Encuesta Bicentenario: Una radiografía al alma de Chile,” in January 2015. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales for their helpful comments, and Germán Vera Concha and Jorge Atria for the lengthy discussions on these issues. The usual disclaimer applies.]ResumenEste estudio documenta la brecha existente entre la estructura impositiva y la visibilidad fiscal, utilizando evidencia de una encuesta nacionalmente representativa aplicada en Chile cuando se discutíauna ley de reforma tributaria contenciosa. Los debates sobre impuestos comúnmente asumen que los contribuyentes son conscientes de la escala y alcance de sus obligaciones tributarias y de los beneficios asociados con el pago de impuestos, cuestión fundamental para el éxito de los impuestos como herramienta para el desarrollo. Al poner a prueba el supuesto de un contribuyente bien informado, encontramos una opacidad generalizada y estratificación de la visibilidad del impuesto sobre la renta y del impuesto al valor agregado. Concluimos con un examen de cómo la visibilidad fiscal se relaciona con las expectativas de los contribuyentes sobre moralidad fiscal y redistribución.

Since its inception, International Relations (IR) as a discipline has posited the orthodox aim of building its own scientific method, comparable to that of the exact sciences. However, this claim is considered as one of the likely approaches to the study of social behavior at the international level and, therefore, is part of the epistemological debate that has a renewed interest for the IR and the philosophy of science in the 21st century. In this context, hermeneutics offers clues for a scientific approach of the social, that guide the thinking of International Relations into an interpretative slant. As a contribution to this exegesis, this article raises the value of hermeneutics, based on the postulates of Nietzsche and Vattimo, as a method for interpreting international reality.

Establishing a mechanism of observation of the prison environment is crucial to know what life is like inside, and also to promote processes of social reintegration. This study used a version adapted to Chile from the Measuring Quality of Prison Life [mqpl] questionnaire (Liebling, 2004), surveying 1 448 inmates in five Chilean prisons. The results of our study suggest that i) the Chilean version of the mqpl would be sensitive to the Chilean prison realities ii) the prisons studied would vary in their moral performance, both globally and in specific indicators, providing preliminary empirical evidence of what life is like in each prison and where the main problems would be in each of them.

This paper contributes to the debate on the Althusserian concept of void, as presented in The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter. Based on both the textual criticism of Althusser’s later writings and the specialized literature, we resume Hegel’s proposal regarding the dialectics of the beginning, where philosophies dealing with the pure void as the condition for movement –and, thus, transformation– are criticized. In this sense, we conclude that Althusser’s objections to the Hegelian dialectic are already answered in Hegel’s philosophy, thus restoring its fertility to regard the transformation of social structures as the result of their internal contradictions.

This paper presents a reflection about the study of everyday life throughout Lluís Duch’s work, with a focus on his main theoretical categories such as: contingency domination praxis, structure, history, and ambiguity. It also analyzes Duch’s reception structures, namely, family, city, religion, and comediation. The author describes the theoretical tradition in which his ideas are inscribed, underlying those proposals that he considers as Duch’s main inputs for a social, political and historical analysis of everyday life in contemporary societies. Various problems and questions resulting from Duch’s work are put forward, highlighting the relevance and validity of some of his contributions.

This article exposes the results of a descriptive investigation whose objective was to determine the current situation of the production and diffusion of academic contents in, by and for the line practice by the academic staff of the unam. This is the first work that specifically addresses the incorporation of converging technologies for the development of a digital university academic culture. A survey was applied to a representative sample of faculty members. The results suggest that academics use the network only to consult and download documents, but not to process data or to disclose the results of their research. It is concluded that greater efforts are needed to achieve an authentic transformation of the academic digital culture.

This paper presents a review of concepts from the hermeneutic, pragmatic, and discourse analysis traditions, aiming to show that their approaches can be seen as complementary, even though these areas are often presented as not clearly differentiable, and even as unconnected or incompatible. It is shown that, although they come from different trends of thought, hermeneutics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, they actually share the object of study, purpose and starting point which is why, not surprisingly, they share conceptual matrices, regardless of their obvious differences in scope, precision and applicability.

My aim is to show why the philosophy of the social sciences (PSS) is important for social science research. Firstly, I will identify the two obstacles that challenge the relevance of pss in social science. On the one hand, I will take the case of social science in Mexico and point out a pitfall present there around their understanding of the central claim of the philosophy of science; then I will try to offer a solution to this misunderstanding. I discuss how philosophical claims better sum up the conditions to support epistemological assumptions in social science research. On the other hand, I will suggest that a second obstacleto recognizing the relevance of pss is the self-sufficiency stance of social science concerning its epistemological assumptions. Finally, Iwill show three examples of pss contributions to crucial debates in contemporary social science, namely, social causality, the role of interpretation, and scientific objectivity.

Christopher H. Achen y Larry M. Bartels (2017) Democracy for realists. Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Much of the literature on Presidentialism focuses on the argument that bipartisan presidential systems are better able to avoid an intense Executive-Legislative relation by facilitating the formation of coalitions in Congress and the partisan ideological identification. From a comparative perspective, this study aims to identify and discuss the powers of the presidents of the United States and Brazil in promoting their actions as producers of public policy and checking the degree of conflict in the production of such policies by checking legislative vetoes. In addition, we analyze the success rate of draft laws of welfare policies voted in the lower house of the two countries and supported by their respective presidents. Our time frame covers a period of 16 years in each country (from 1995 to 2010 in Brazil and in the United States from 1993 to 2008), with eight years of more liberal administrations and eight years of more conservative governments in each country. The hypothesis is that there is no significant difference regarding the conflict and production of public policies in two-party or multi-party systems and that success rates are similar. The data were analyzed using multivariate regressions and will undergo a qualitative treatment for a deeper understanding.