Suchergebnisse

What defines the Cypriot communist party, AKEL, as an exceptional case in Western Europe is the existing trend of its recent electoral fortune. While it is the oldest Cypriot party, with wide appeal to the Cypriot electorate in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, its more recent history defies the trends of West European communism. Since the boiling point of 1989, not only has it not suffered serious electoral decline but it is the only communist party to dominate the left in a Western European society, and its performance in municipal, presidential and, most of all, legislative elections has come to bear a pattern of continuous success. This electoral success can be accounted for by a combination of internal and external factors. Internal factors include ideological renewal, the party's response to European integration, the specific Cypriot issue of inter-communal rapprochement, and organizational issues. External factors concern the domestic political arena in which AKEL competes with other actors, and the Cypriot class structure from which AKEL draws its support. The ideological, programmatic and organizational renewal of the party and the strategy of relying less on theory and more on activism are the main elements that allowed AKEL to remain an important part of Cypriot politics. Adapted from the source document.

Extending cue theory and arguments about heuristics, in this article we argue that in the European Union (EU) member states, trust in the EU acts as a proxy for trust in the United Nations. While existing studies have shown that citizens take cues from national political institutions in order to form an opinion about institutions at the transnational and international level, this study illuminates why and shows how the same is done from the EU to the international level. It further shows that the less politically aware citizens are, the more likely they are to use the EU as a proxy for assessing institutional structures at the international level. The findings suggest that the sociological legitimacy of international organizations should be assessed in a more nuanced manner that takes into consideration regional institutions. This is a methodologically instructive paper, drawing on several waves of the European Social Survey and additionally employing an elaborate replication design, confirming our main findings using empirical data from four international studies, with alternative question wordings, different question order, and different response formats.

Southern European countries are currently experiencing a dramatic economic slump and fully fledged austerity measures. Accordingly, the standard of living of the majority of southern European populaces has fallen significantly. Nevertheless, the dynamics of social contention in the form of strikes and demonstrations that accompany these experiences remain understudied. Why, in certain southern European countries, has collective upset arising from economic deprivation translated into frequent and large-scale contentious acts, while in others it has not? Drawing on the case of Cyprus from a comparative, southern European perspective, we seek to explain how relations within the party system, as well as between parties and civil society, can create the conditions that obstruct open social conflict. The intensity and nature of party-society linkages with causal roots in a country's history can be a sufficient condition for the relative absence of protest.

The study of parties that label themselves as Marxist-Leninist has, for the most part been subsumed in the exploration of the broader radical (or, far) left tradition in the post-1989 period. In an attempt to bridge this gap in the recent literature on radical left parties, this article attempts to uncover the (non) distinctiveness of Marxism-Leninism by studying empirically two European parties that are self-labelled as Marxist-Leninist — the Greek (KKE) and Portuguese (PCP) Communist parties. The central question we explore is whether there are significant similarities between these parties, so as to allow us to speak of Marxism-Leninism's distinctiveness today. Overall, the two parties studied here have enough in common to testify to Marxism-Leninism's ongoing distinctiveness with several qualifications, especially concerning ideology.

So far little has been done to explore similarities and differences between radical left parties and other traditionally perceived party families of the left at the societal level. A noticeable gap thus remains in the study of the European radical left: whether and in what ways social divides form the basis of radical left party support. Using data from the fourth round of the European Social Survey (2008), for five West European countries, we investigate radical left party supporters' socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics, juxtaposing them with those of social democratic party supporters and green party supporters. Our approach departs from related studies by distinguishing three cognitional operations within the economic left-right axis, that are based on the distinction between ideals and their effects on reality; and by testing for intra-left divides revolving around trust. Based on insights from cleavage research, we devise a number of hypotheses, most of which test positively. Our findings suggest left party families across Western Europe do reflect certain lines of division in society, albeit with qualifications. While structural divides are not found to be significant, there appears to be correspondence between political and attitudinal divides on a three-dimensional space. These concern the cognitive divisions within the economic left-right axis, issues of political trust, and attitudes towards the environment. Our findings have conceptual and empirical implications both for the left and for investigations into cleavage politics.

In 2008, leftists across Europe hailed the election of communist leader Dimitris Christofias to executive office in the Republic of Cyprus as a breakthrough, with grand prospects for progressive, leftward change. The Cypriot left in the form of AKEL seemed to be the exception in the neoliberal European political universe, offering a new hope and the potential for an alternative political course. AKEL's rise to executive power was seen as evidence that the left could head the government in a European state, and as an example for other left parties. Five years on, during a period in which Cyprus has signed a bailout agreement with the Troika comparable to those of Greece, the right has triumphantly returned to office, some of the harshest austerity measures have been imposed by EU elites and passed by parliament, and with public opinion on the left government's record unprecedentedly negative, the issue of communist participation in the executive is once again, rightfully back on the agenda.