Search results

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the area specialty of Soviet Politics has been transformed. Research on six themes is reviewed: state and revolution, democratization, federalism, economic growth, international relations, and institutional legacies reflecting the communist past. The review finds that post-Soviet research speaks directly to current trends in political science, and the findings of this research should impel generalists to re-specify their theories. A recommendation is offered that the study of post-Soviet politics should push political science away from a notion of institutionalization and in the direction of identifying institutional equilibria.

The major changes in the Belgian political agenda for 1993 are reviewed. The state constitutional reforms embodied in the Saint-Michael Agreement directed the nation toward a new federalism, distancing itself from the linguistic-based separatism of the past. The unexpected death of the country's monarch, King Baldwin, after forty-two years on the throne, & his succession by Albert II as the sixth King of the Belgians, are discussed. Problems with social welfare provisions, continued high unemployment, & decreasing competitiveness of the Belgian economy on the global market prompted a new crisis plan to restructure public spending, which was challenged by trade unions. Issues in Belgium's international relations & defense policy are also considered. J. Sadler

In the the spring 2018 issue of Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Martin Gainsborough's "Malesky vs. Fforde" offers to adjudicate a supposed dispute between two highly cited scholars of modern Vietnamese politics. Purportedly drawing on the philosophical traditions of ontology and epistemology, Gainsborough claims that we can gain traction as a field by looking closely into the preexisting belief systems that scholars bring to their research questions. Along the way, Gainsborough questions the plausibility of my own work and claims that I smuggle "liberal" values into my writing on Vietnam. In this response, I discuss five dimensions in which Gainsborough and I disagree and why they matter for studying Vietnamese politics. I do so by contrasting my choices with Gainsborough's scholarship (both in "Malesky vs. Fforde" and other work), illustrating how Gainsborough's research decisions lead him to faulty and damaging conclusions about my work.

This special issue overcomes the still existing reservations to analyze children's perspectives on politics and society. Dealing with different topics, research questions, and new data, the articles provide new insights and open the discussion for questions of children's involvement in civil society. The findings of these articles should be relevant for all researchers of childhood sociology, for civic educationalists and students of political learning and behavior. Questions investigated are, among others, how do children think about politics, democracy, and society? How do they express their political attitudes? What do children's political orientations and behavior look like? How politically knowledgeable are they and what are the reasons for between-group differences? What are important democratic learning contexts and factors that shape these orientations? And, last but not least, what methods can we use to analyze children's political involvement in an adequate manner?

The controversy over mixing religion and politics has not kept religion apart from government. Religious groups participate in a wide variety of political activities. But religious groups in the United States are not organized as political parties or political machines. There is a relation between religious affiliation and party affiliation. The correlation, however, does not usually indicate a "religious" vote. In part, the relation reflects socio-economic status. For Catholics and Jews it is very much a result of awareness of minority status. As minority awareness declines, trends in voting change. There is no pattern of voting for or against candidates because of their religion. The importance of religion in a presidential election cannot be assessed on the basis of other elections. The election of a Catholic president would not change the nature of our government, but it would have an effect on American politics.

The problem of women's access and participation in politics is extremely important today and has received considerable attention worldwide. Gender equality in politics is a fundamental indicator of a modern democratic society. According to international standards, both men and women should have equal rights and opportunities to fully participate in all aspects of the political process. In practice, it is difficult for women to gain access to the politics, and this is a violation of human rights. According to statistical data, states where number of women in political positions is equivalent to the number of men demonstrate stronger economy and successful development, as well as in domestic and foreign policy.

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in women's presence in local politics. According to the newly published United Nations (UN) Women in Local Government data set, women constitute 36% of local deliberative bodies worldwide compared to merely 25% in national parliaments.1 Much of this increase is the result of gender quotas: the Gender Quotas Database (International IDEA 2022) shows that as of 2021, 75 countries had some form of gender quota on the local level, 24 of which were authoritarian regimes. Yet, extant work on gender politics in authoritarian regimes tends to focus on the national level, given the highly centralized decision-making processes in such contexts. We contend that the study of women's engagement and representation in local politics can help scholars better understand not only gender and politics, but also authoritarian politics more generally.

During the past 20 years, the politics of the Chinese in Malaya has been a subject of international interest.The Malayan Communist Party has been predominantly Chinese; it was Chinese politics in Singapore (briefly part of Malaysia) which produced the phenomenon of Lee Kuan Yew; and the Kuala Lumpur riots of May 1969 are widely thought to have been efforts to stem a Chinese challenge to Malay supremacy. The Chinese in West Malaysia, especially when taken together with those in Singapore, have earned the attention of governments, journalists and scholars alike. They form the largest concentration of Chinese outside of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong; their economic life is among the most sophisticated in Asia; their social and cultural life probably the most complex that Chinese anywhere have ever known; and, above all, their political life has been more open and exposed than that of any other kind of Chinese. This last, their political life, has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons. The main reason is that two contradictory views about them have long prevailed: that the Chinese are non-political and that the Chinese are political in a secretive and inscrutable way. These views are based on a concept of politics in the democratic tradition and are either anachronistic or misleading. Chinese, Malay and colonial political systems have been, in varying degrees, authoritarian, and Chinese political life must be seen in that context except in the period 1957–69.

"Violence, Politics, and Gender" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Constitutions in Latin American Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.