Suchergebnisse

Scholars of foreign policy-making have concentrated on how the most powerful domestic actors influence foreign policy and have largely ignored the influence of less powerful, minority actors. This article argues that bureaucratic minorities — subordinates and less powerful departments — can and do influence foreign policy. Despite the extensive scholarship on bureaucratic politics and the central importance of `power' in the theory, we know little about the nature and effects of asymmetrical power relations. Drawing from various research, this article proposes that bureaucratic minorities can adopt strategies based on rewards and costs, manipulation of decision procedures, and information to bypass or exploit their status to influence policy. The choice and effectiveness of these strategies may depend on whether or not the actor is a vertical minority (a subordinate influencing a superior) or a horizontal minority (a representative from a less powerful department influencing other departments). Further investigations of the conditions under which minority players have influence can be part of a much needed revival of the bureaucratic politics perspective on foreign policy-making.

In the post-communist period, the driving forces behind minority rights protection have been international—the incentives surrounding membership in the European Union and relations with Hungary—and domestic—the minority's capacity to gain representation, and therefore leverage, in the political system. In this analysis of the current state of minority affairs, we focus largely on the domestic context—the politics of Hungarian minority representation in Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia—and the ramifications of relations with Hungary. In this overview, we will contextualize the key strategic situation in all three cases: the demographic challenge of inexorably declining minority populations. Given the size of their electorates, neither the half-million Slovak Hungarians nor the 1.2 million Romanian Hungarians can afford the kind of partisan split that could push all minority parties below the five percent electoral threshold. In Serbia, the Hungarian minority of around a quarter million benefits from the waiving of the electoral threshold. Nonetheless, they are a distinct minority even in Vojvodina, the region of their greatest concentration. We will also review ongoing controversies that have surrounded minority issues since the collapse of communism: language, education, and the issue of territorial and cultural autonomy.

In this thirty-second annual volume in the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy's NOMOS series, entitled Majorities and Minorities, thirteen distinguished contributors consider a diverse selection of topics. Included are essays on legitimacy of the majority, the utilitarian view of majoritarianism, majorities and elections, pluralism and equality, democratic theory, and American democracy and majority rules. Of Interest to political scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars, this collection brings together a variety of viewpoints. Each author is a leading voice within his or.