Suchergebnisse

The quest by Nigeria to make appreciable progress in her democratic journey has been a herculean task. This is due the antidemocratic actions of the political class This article aims at identifying how actions of the political class act as a backward clog to democratic growth in the country. Crucial among the causative factors is the fact that its political class decelerate the country's democracy by their abysmal display of undemocratic tendencies. They perpetrate these through a several ways which include: godfatherism, succession crises and abuse of incumbency, electoral malpractices, electoral violence, political alienation, travesty of justice, recourse to primordial cleavages, corruption and inconsistent policy inconsistency, human rights abuse, to mention but some. This article is qualitative. It argues that there is need to make reform in the Electoral Act and strengthen the anti-corruption crusade in order to check the excesses of the political class and record fundamental gains in Nigeria's democratic experience.

It is hard to remain positive at a time when our discipline is experiencing a considerable reduction in new jobs, when far too many of our young doctors are struggling to get by on temporary and futureless contracts, the physical conditions within many of our organizations are deteriorating due to budgetary cuts and the differences in resources between them are increasing (Déloye & Mayer, 2018). Nevertheless, despite all these serious issues and the pressing need to address them with policy and political changes, it is important to recall and underline some of the key qualities of contemporary political science in France, and indeed the strengthening it has undergone over the last three decades. This exercise is valuable not only to remind ourselves, and others wishing to understand and susceptible to supporting us, just how far we have come over the past 50 years. It is crucial if we, as a discipline, are to continue to believe in what we do and how it contributes to the production and dissemination of knowledge within the social sciences, but also considerably beyond it.For these reasons, this paper successively presents three sets of data and analysis which are all harnessed to argue that today's political science in France has considerable strength, i.e. a solid base from which it is more than conceivable that its scientific and societal impacts can further increase in the future. In this country, the discipline's first strength is its institutionalization as a profession, a phenomenon which goes hand in hand with a capacity to generate robust, and most often collective, research projects, data and results. Secondly, the data I mobilize shows that although the internationalization of French political science does not necessarily take the shape of publishing in English and, in any case remains uneven, it has nevertheless significantly increased over the last two decades. Thirdly and finally, unlike some other national equivalents, this professionalization and internationalization has not been paralleled ...

This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists' normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter's normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today's West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers' objectives.

The Transition Process in Hungary Produced Well-established parties and a developed party system. Parties came into existence along political and ideological lines. Parties had an organization, party programme, membership and party discipline similar to those of political parties in the Western European countries. The organization and structure of these parties resembled those of middle-class parties more than socialist or communis/fascist parties. Hungarian parties also had 'direct structure' with individual membership. All of them were closer to mass parties than to cadre parties, i.e. their primary aim was electoral success. But none of them became a mass party in terms of membership figures, which were rather low (the total membership of the six parliamentary parties was below 200,000 in 1990, so it was about 2.5 – 3 per cent of the electorate. There were 'catch-all' parties (HDF, AFD), parties with specific interest representation (SHP) and parties organized along some ideological principle (CDPP).

Eminent political theorist John Dunn argues that democracy is not synonymous with good government in this work. The author explores the labyrinthine reality behind the basic concept of democracy, demonstrating how the political system that people in the West generally view as straightforward and obvious is, in fact, deeply unclear and, in many cases, dysfunctional

On July 5, 2015, Greek voters were asked to vote on whether the country should accept the terms of austerity offered by the European Union for bailout from the country's financial crisis. With a turnout rate of 62.5% overall, 61.3% of Greeks voted "no." While a majority of voters in every district opposed the bailout's terms, the margin against the proposed austerity measures ranged from 51.2% in Lakonias to 73.8% in Chanion. This paper explores whether political parties influenced Greek voters' decisions to accept or reject the EU's budgetary reforms. We first review the literature relevant to that question, focusing on whether party platforms are merely "cheap talk" or instead are salient in determining electoral outcomes. We then test our hypotheses empirically at the voting district level. In this model, our key independent variable is party influence, which is measured by party vote shares in the nationwide election held in January of 2015. The dependent variable is the percentage that voted "no" to austerity in July 2015 in each of Greece's 56 electoral districts. We also control for average age and the unemployment rate across regions, as well as the fraction of first-time voters in each electoral district. After conducting simple regression analysis, we report evidence that a pro-austerity party (New Democracy) was a significant factor impacting the results of the referendum. This research finding bolsters the claim that parties can shape electoral outcomes on questions decided by an institution of direct democracy.

ABSTRACTThis article develops a number of measures of the research productivity of political science departments using data collected from Google Scholar. Departments are ranked in terms of citations to articles published by faculty, citations to articles recently published by faculty, impact factors of journals in which faculty published, and number of top publications in which faculty published. Results are presented in aggregate terms and on a per-faculty basis.