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Oppositional pre-electoral coalition formation has, in a number of recent studies, been proven to have an important effect on the prospects for liberalizing electoral outcomes in authoritarian elections. Despite this recent recognition of oppositional coalitions as a trigger for democratization, almost nothing is known about when these coalitions are formed. An important explanation for the lack of cross-national large-N studies on this issue is the lack of sufficient data on party policy positions, among parties operating within these authoritarian systems. Policy differences between oppositional parties have been hypothesized to have a negative effect on the prospects for coalitions in the more studied Western democratic systems. In order to perform an exhaustive investigation of the prospects for oppositional coalitions in authoritarian elections, sufficient data on party policy differences would therefore be necessary. In this paper different strategies for party policy mapping is presented and assessed as methods for approximating policy distance between parties in authoritarian regimes. It is argued that a voter-based policy mapping (VPM) approach is the best strategy for this task, when considering both feasibility and validity aspects. In the later part of this paper an empirical comparison is performes between approximations made by VPM and the widely used Manifesto Research Group (MRG), using data for parties that contested post-communist authoritarian elections in the period 1990-2004. The comparison shows a significant correlation between the data produced with these two different strategies. Moreover, more qualitative comparisons of widely divergent cases in the VPM and MRG data, and a comparison with expert-survey data suggest that the VPM data is at least as reliable as the MRG data, in this particular context.

A number of countries have emerged as stable (though minimalist) democracies despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighbouring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. The study of these deviant democracies is a promising new research field but it is afflicted by a notable problem, viz. the lack of a consensus as to which countries are actually instances of deviant democracy. The present article attempts to solve this problem by carrying out a comprehensive mapping of deviant democracies. First, I review the existing literature to provide an overview of the cases most often identified as deviant democracies. Second, I use a large-N analysis to systematically map deviant democracies. The analysis includes 159 countries covering the time period 1993–2008. The analysis points to 12 cases that merits further attention, viz., the Central African Republic, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mongolia, Niger, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.

10 páginas y 6 figuras ; The first soil maps representing Spain date from the beginning of the century: the Universal Soil Map of Glinka and that prepared by Sibirtzev and Ramman (Mudarra 1989). The first research work carried out on Spanish soil however must be attributed to E. Huguet del Villar, who was already pioneering soil surveys of the Iberian Peninsula in 1927 on the occasion of the first Intemational Soil Science Congress held in Washington (Huguet del Villar 1927). At that time, he collaborated on the world map drawn up by Stremme. Huguet del Villar's work in Spain, curtailed by the Spanish Civil War, culminated with th e publication of a two-language book (Spanish-English) Soils of the Lusitano-Iberian Peninsula in 1937, which included a l:l,500,000 scale soil map. In 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, with Huguet del Villar absent because of his political convictions, a second stage of Spanish soil mapping commenced. ; Peer reviewed

Drawing on several critical cartographers' approach to counter-mapping as method and on Boaventura de Sousa Santos' "sociology of absences," I discuss their combination - counter-mapping as a method for the sociology of absences - as a means of enhancing sociological reflexivity through a transdisciplinary lens. Such a lens reveals the very constitution of those academic disciplines that deal with the social world as shaped by the colonial and imperial context of their emergence. I argue that counter-mapping can serve as a decolonial strategy to the essentialization of nation-states and world regions in social scientific and political discourse and propose a relational perspective capable of revealing the constitutive entanglements through which a global capitalism grounded in colonial expansion interlinked all areas of the world. The focus lies on the entanglements that counter-mapping as a method uncovers between semiperipheries such as Eastern Europe and Latin America, constructed as fixed and unrelated locations on imperial maps.