Suchergebnisse

This article describes and explains patterns of electoral governance in Africa's emerging democracies through a systematic examination of election management bodies (embs), the formal units principally responsible for the organization and conduct of elections. The effectiveness of embs as institutional linchpins of electoral governance depends largely, but not exclusively, on their autonomy from the government. The article measures the degree of autonomy of embs as an indicator of the varying patterns of electoral governance in Africa's emerging democracies and employs an ordered probit model to account for them. The model confirms the expected combined effects of the institutional legacies of colonial governance and postcolonial neopatrimonial regimes, ethnopolitical fragmentation and political negotiations over new democratic institutions on the relative autonomy of embs. Predicted probabilities calculated from the probit coefficients accurately predict the separate impact of each independent variable on the likelihood of African countries choosing non-autonomous, semi-autonomous or autonomous embs.

AbstractThis article investigates whether different political institutions such as executives, legislatures, parties, party systems, judiciaries, decentralization, constitutionalism, and referendums across 24 Western democracies are venues for debate across five individual morality policies. Using data since 1945, the article compares three theories of morality policy—(1) Policy Type leading to different institutional venues; (2) Two Worlds of religious/secular party systems; and (3) U.S./European exceptionalism. In order, the most frequently debated issues are abortion, same sex marriage, euthanasia, stem cells/assisted reproductive technology (ART), and capital punishment. There is considerable variation in the institutions and country groups that debate them although fewer differences in the Two Worlds model. Abortion, euthanasia, and same sex marriage are the most convergent issues across institutions, party systems, and country groupings while capital punishment and stem cells/ART show the most diverse patterns of deliberation. The general Policy Type model of morality policy is upheld, but varies institutionally by specific issues. The Two Worlds model is of some importance, but only on three issues. There also are regional differences between the United States, Europe, and non‐European democracies.

__Abstract__ This article explores the introduction of performance measurement tools in new democracies by presenting a qualitative study based on Estonian governmental documents and performance audits. A set of specific factors help to explain difficulties in introducing performance measurement tools in immature policy environments: instability, poor strategic planning and policy analysis, an implementation gap and uncritical, uninformed transfer of Western performance management initiatives. Although the authors recognize the limits of generalizations based on the Estonian example, the presence of such 'transitional' factors is likely to make the development of performance measurement in new democracies even more complicated than in the West.

Recent sedition cases registered in India show that the law in its wide and diverse deployment was used against agitators in a community-based pro-reservation movement, a group of university students for their alleged 'anti-national' statements, and also against the anti-liquor activists and anti-nuclear movements, to name a few. Examining the relationship between sedition and liberal democracies, particularly in India, this book looks at the biography of sedition laws, its contradictory position against free speech and democratic ethics.

Recent sedition cases registered in India show that the law in its wide and diverse deployment was used against agitators in a community-based pro-reservation movement, a group of university students for their alleged 'anti-national' statements, and also against the anti-liquor activists and anti-nuclear movements, to name a few. Examining the relationship between sedition and liberal democracies, particularly in India, this book looks at the biography of sedition laws, its contradictory position against free speech and democratic ethics.

Everywhere you look, incarceration seems to be doing harm. Research has implicated incarceration not only in worse outcomes for individuals, their families, and their communities but also in growing inequality. Yet incarceration may not always harm society—even if it does harm those who experience it. To consider this possibility, I build an argument demonstrating how the macro‐level consequences of incarceration may be distinctively harmful in the United States, focusing on the incarceration–health relationship as one indicator of a broader phenomenon. I then test my hypothesis by using an unbalanced panel data set including 21 developed democracies (N = 414) and a series of ordinary least‐squares models predicting three measures of population health as a function of incarceration. Models including only a main effect of incarceration demonstrate an inverse association between changes in incarceration and changes in population health. Models including an incarceration by U.S. interaction, however, indicate that the population health consequences of changes in incarceration are far worse in the United States than elsewhere. Taken together, the results indicate that the United States is exceptional for both its rate of incarceration and its effects of incarceration, although it is unclear what drives this exceptionalism in effects.

First published in 1988, Parties and Party Systems in Liberal Democracies considers the extent and ways in which Western European and North American parties and party systems changed in the 1970s and 1980s after decades of relative stability. It examines changes in the nature and organisation of parties and relates this to changes in electoral behaviour and to wider social and economic change. It concentrates on political parties as actors and the ways in which they maintain themselves and respond to the moves and gambits of both established and newer parties and to the increasingly numerous and vociferous single interest pressure groups. One important argument put forward is that many social and economic changes have had a minimal impact because established parties have been able to adapt by redefining issues in their favour and have also been able to rely on residual support and access to patronage. This engaging volume will have strong appeal for courses in political science, government, political behaviour and history.

The influence of ideology & political institutions upon the voting behavior of a given democracy's electorate is studied. Reviews of several sociological, psychological, & economic approaches to understanding voting behavior are offered. It is hypothesized that the arrangement of political institutions within a certain nation functions to limit the voting public's electoral choice. A cross-national analysis of electoral choice in various European democracies (N = 13) is performed to determine the extent to which ideology & institutions affect voting choice. Two central findings are shared: (1) ideology strongly influences voters' selection of political parties & (2) political institutions can both assist voters in achieving significant political change or severely restrict the electorate's voting choice. In addition, it is noted that volatility in electoral behavior generally has little effect upon political institutions. It is concluded that both political institutions & parties possess considerable influence upon voters' capacity to choose. 4 Tables, 4 Charts. J. W. Parker

The objective of this article is to explain populist attitudes that are prevailing in a number of European democracies. Populist attitudes usually lead to social protests and populist votes. We capture the populist wave by relying on values that are traditionally viewed as populist—such as distrust of institutions and neighbors, rejection of migrations, and strong preferences for law and order—rather than on voting behavior. Our study covers the period 2004–2018 and 25 European countries for which we match aggregated indicators of populist values and social polarization based on ESS and SILC survey micro-data. We show that social polarization varies dramatically across European regions, but at the same time, some convergence is observed. Our estimations confirm, in most cases, a positive and statistically significant relation between social polarization and populist attitudes. (JEL codes: D63 and I30)

The proposition that democracies rarely fight one another has been well-substantiated by empirical research. A prominent explanation for this finding is that shared norms fostered by a democratic political culture promote peaceful conflict resolution. Joint democratic dyads allegedly have a greater propensity than other types of dyads to entrust third parties with judicial competence to settle their disputes. The results from a study of 206 dyadic disputes involving third-party intermediaries support this claim. The presence of joint democracy in dangerous, war-prone dyads has a strong positive effect on the probability of referring interstate disputes to binding third-party settlement, even when controlling for alliance bonds and geographic proximity. In addition, the more a joint democratic dyad is marked by coherent regimes or a rough parity in the distribution of military capabilities, the greater the propensity to refer disputes to binding third-party settlement.

Abstract. In addressing issues of party development in contemporary democracies, many of the recent discussions confuse notions of party formation with those of party adaptation. The contention of this article is that the conceptual confusion of these two distinct processes undermines our understanding of party development, which is of particular importance in the context of the more recently established democracies. Moreover, in order to contribute to theory building on political parties more generally, it is necessary to differentiate between the two. This article offers some theoretical contours for the study of party formation and development, and empirically evaluates the patterns of organizational development in some of the newer democracies in Southern and East‐Central Europe. The analysis shows that the external context of party formation has encouraged these parties to adopt an organizational style largely resembling their contemporary counterparts in the older democracies. However, despite the resemblance between party organizations in the older liberal democracies and the newly established ones, the paths of party development are best understood as processessui generis. The historical uniqueness of parties emerging as strong movements of society, as opposed to agents of the state, is a path that is unlikely to be repeated in contemporary polities which democratize in a different institutional context.

Abstract The conventional wisdom concerning the choice between majoritarian electoral systems and proportional representation (PR) ‐ and, more broadly, between majoritarian and consensus forms of democracy ‐ is that there is a trade‐off: PR and consensus democracy provide more accurate representation and better minority representation, but majoritarianism provides more effective government. A comparative analysis of 18 older and well‐established democracies, most of which are European democracies, shows that PR and consensus democracy indeed give superior political representation, but that majoritarian systems do not perform better in maintaining public order and managing the economy, and hence that the over‐all performance of consensus democracy is superior. This conclusion should also be tested among the growing number of slightly newer non‐European democracies, which are already old enough to have proved their viability and can be studied over an extended period of time. If its validity is confirmed ‐ and the evidence so far is very promising ‐it can have great practical significance for the future of democracy in the world.

Lijphart, Arend: Democracies: forms, performance, and constitutional engineering, in: European journal of political research (Dordrecht), 25 (January 1994) 1, S. 1-17