Suchergebnisse

AbstractA leader's wife can be a key player in consolidating his authoritarianism through her public diplomacy activities. Taking the example of Egypt's former First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak (1981–2011), this article demonstrates how her role in public diplomacy framed her as a "modern" woman with a mission of "modernizing" women or the country's whole population. The modernization model adopted in these frames presumes the need for agents to transform "traditional" societies into "modern" societies and the need for agents to build more networks of collaboration with the "West." The second section of the article focuses on political instrumentality, showing how former President Hosni Mubarak attempted to look good, to look democratic, and to look useful to his allies. This process was partly organized by Mrs. Mubarak herself, who used her public diplomacy roles as opportunities and resources to build a personality cult drawn on glorifying herself and aggrandizing her activities.

AbstractTraditional analyses of political liberalization in China focus on elections or other facets of democratization. But they cannot account for the fact that although China remains authoritarian, it is nevertheless responsive to the increasingly diverse demands of Chinese society. I argue that the rules of the policy-making process are still captured by the fragmented authoritarianism framework, but that the process has become increasingly pluralized: barriers to entry have been lowered, at least for certain actors (hitherto peripheral officials, non-governmental organizations and the media) identified here as "policy entrepreneurs." With policy change as the variable of interest, I compare three cases of hydropower policy outcomes. I argue that policy entrepreneurs' ability to frame the issue effectively explains variation in hydropower policy outcomes. I then extend these findings to an unlikely policy area, international trade, specifically, the 2001–06 Sino-EU trade talks over child-resistant lighter safety regulations.

"What drove the horizontal spread of authoritarianism and corporatism between Europe and Latin America in the twentieth century? What processes of transnational diffusion were in motion and from where to where? In what type of 'critical junctures' were they adopted and why did corporatism largely transcend the cultural background of its origins? What was the role of Intellectual-politicians in the process? This book will tackle these issues by adopting a transnational and comparative research design encompassing a wide range of countries"--

One of the important effects of digital transformation is the expansion of digi­tal authoritarianism, which causes a noticeable transformation at all levels (global, national, local) in different socio-political systems. The article defines the concept, philosophical foundations, and model of legitimation of digital and network authoritarianism. The author substantiates the thesis that intel­ligent technical systems in autocracies support, first of all, the inviolability of the regime on the basis of control over big data, exploitation of sado­masochistic tendencies in society, propaganda through new media and social networks, mechanisms of instrumental and pragmatic consent. Together, these tools create a specific interface of the digital world the emblems of which are passivity and fear, and the installation is a blind belief that what is happening is the norm. It is suggested that as a result of the expansion of authoritarianism in cyberspace, many citizens are forced to independently protect themselves and their property by digital means such as VPN technologies and "onion rout­ing" or using a Hidden Network (Darknet). The digital confrontation between ordinary users and the ruling class (for example, in the form of street protests organized through social networks and messengers) intensifies at the intersec­tion of virtual and material realities. Reflection on these phenomena allows us to give well-founded answers to the questions about the nature and direction of digital transformation in the sphere of state and law, to make reasonable forecasts, to help the public understand the grounds and methods of controlling influence by which the government is held, which programs the consciousness and behavior of citizens.

This volume provides a novel explanation of rising Euroscepticism and right-wing populism in Western Europe. The changing political and cultural environment of recent decades is generating an ongoing realignment of voters structured by authoritarianism, which is a psychological disposition towards the maintenance of social cohesion and order at the expense of individual autonomy and diversity. High authoritarians find the values and demographic changes of the past several decades a threat to social cohesion, which has created an opportunity for PRR parties to gain their support by campaigning against these perceived threats to national community posed by immigration, values change, and European integration. The result is a worldview evolution in which party conflict is shaped by the rival preferences of high and low authoritarians.

This article argues for a radical recasting of the European Union democratic deficit debate. Critics have long argued that the EU suffers from a democratic deficit and that growing EU power undermines national democracy. But recent backsliding on democracy and the rule of law in Hungary and Poland reminds us that grave democratic deficits can also exist at the national level in member states and that the EU may have a role in addressing them. This article will place the EU's struggles with democratic deficits in its member states in comparative perspective, drawing on the experience of other democracies that have struggled with pockets of subnational authoritarianism. Comparative analysis suggests that considerations driven by partisan politics may allow local pockets of autocracy to persist within otherwise democratic political unions.

In the past few decades, the change in China's welfare system has been characterised by a balanced distribution of benefits across social sectors and the institutionalization of welfare redistribution. This process has occurred without significant political change that would empower politically disadvantaged groups such as the urban and rural poor. This book questions what has motivated the regime to redistribute welfare benefits through an institutionalized manner whilst its political structure remains largely unchanged. By situating China within the broader context of East Asia and against the backdrop of globalization since the 1980s, this book examines the institutional origin and development of China's new welfare system. Through doing this, it provides an understanding of the nature of the Chinese state in dealing with its economy and society in a context of global economic integration. A global-local dynamics framework highlights the importance of the interactive relationship between China's integration into the world economy and its unique geopolitical constraints, which together induce the regime to listen to its subjects and follow a "move to the middle" in welfare restructuring. Offering a novel explanation of the welfare-globalization relations in a non-democratic setting, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Social Policy, International Political Economy and Chinese Politics

The author presents an account of early twenty-first century Egyptian politics, with a particular focus on the years 2002-2007. The text contains a theoretical dimension that considers the role political opposition and the core working mechanisms of state-society relations under authoritarian rule.

Past research shows that authoritarian individuals hold strong opinions about a variety of political and social issues, such as race relations and military conflict. What has not been established, though, is the amount of general political knowledge that authoritarians possess. In this study, three groups of college students were administered Altemeyer's Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale; most of them also received items assessing general political knowledge and specific knowledge about the 2000 presidential election, as well as items assessing interest in politics. Relative to students with low RWA scores, those with high scores possessed less political knowledge; moreover, they expressed less interest in learning about politics. In general, authoritarianism was unrelated to how individuals got their political information or how credible they found their sources. The implication that authoritarians hold strong attitudinal beliefs with weak political knowledge is discussed.

This study argues that the understanding of politics that prevails in contemporary Turkey resonates with Ernesto Laclau's perspective on Turkish politics of the 1930s. Adapting Laclau's antagonistic politics to the analysis of contemporary Turkey produces a critical counter-narrative that reveals in effect a continuation of an authoritarian tradition, between the socio-political discourses of the 1930s CHP and the present AKP. Accordingly, discourses of both political movements are fundamentally inspired by the same logic of difference, one that reduces the role of the construction of equivalential chains among different pre-existing political demands to a pragmatist game of hegemony. Their authoritarianisms, however, differ from one another in terms of the symbolic frameworks within which each respective regime is sustained. Whereas the early CHP represented French-inspired, Jacobin-like, nationalist approach to democracy, the AKP has established US-paralleling, neoliberal and neo-conservative governmentality, which was made public in the party's New Turkey Manifesto in 2014.

How do subnational authoritarian enclaves emerge (or survive) in a democratic transition at the federal level? How can they endure large-scale social protests, like the one that shook Oaxaca in 2006? While federal tolerance for subnational authoritarian practices is a necessary condition, it is insufficient in itself to explain why subnational political systems sustain and eventually reproduce authoritarian practices in the first place. In this article, therefore, I focus on the internal dimension of subnational authoritarianism. I argue that, because of its reliance on two distinct sources of legitimacy, Oaxaca's neo-patrimonial domination system was able to respond to the formal democratizing pressures emanating from the federal transition without losing its authoritarian nature. This process of hybridization transformed Oaxacan institutions, but left social structures and the political dynamics that emerge from them - the sources of subnational authoritarianism - almost intact By exploring the evolution of neo-patrimonialism and hybridization in Oaxaca from a theoretical perspective, I address the issues of change and continuity in the emergence of subnational authoritarian enclaves, in Mexico and elsewhere. Adapted from the source document.

Vietnam is simultaneously an aspiring environmental state and an authoritarian one. As such, it has clearly articulated policies for biodiversity protection, including measures to secure the livelihoods of communities adjacent to national parks. However, the realities on the ground often confound state environmental discourse. The national parks in the highlands were created through new forms of territorial domination after the war, while continued in-migration and development have made these parks contested spaces that are fraught with pervasive inequities and unsettled ethnic relations. Among the consequences of this weak legitimacy are illegal logging and poaching; indecisive management and protection; and rapidly declining biodiversity, with severe impacts on local livelihoods. Based on a study of two parks in southern Vietnam, this article explores the real-life complexities of national park development under authoritarianism, including the persistent gap between state environmental rhetoric and locally negotiated illegalities. It finds that the key characteristics of authoritarian environmentalism drive a bifurcation of environmental management regimes: a formal, top-down domain of policy- and law-making, serving multiple purposes of legitimation, and a contingent domain of provincial development priorities and locally negotiated use rights. Despite the apparent disorder, both are equally significant to the party-state's resilience.

The Covid-19 pandemic provides unprecedented situations and challenges for the world on multiple levels. The structures and functioning of various institutions in society are questioned as the world looks to them for assistance and support. Governments under such situations are given new and increased powers to efficiently combat the myriad of problems faced by them. The problem, however, lies in the fact that large amounts of power, uncertain situations and unrest among the world population in the past have given way to autocratic leaders manipulating and consolidating their powers. The establishment of various autocratic states is owed to situations of widespread social and political unrest. In the modern world, under the situations of the pandemic, various states are showing similar authoritarian traits. Powers secured under the pandemic are being misused by leaders and governments to establish conditions favourable to them, often damaging the institution of democracy in their nation. Hungary appears to be one such nation where the government has taken a large number of decisions in the pandemic, in an arguably non-democratic manner. This paper aims to analyse the rise of authoritarianism in the world today and the role played by the pandemic in the same.

A sharp rise in the use of digital media in Southeast Asia in recent years has raised questions about the impact of these digitally networked technologies on the prospect for democratization in a region known for its authoritarian resilience. In the absence of a regional uprising as witnessed in the Middle East through the Arab Spring, Southeast Asian authoritarian states have maintained their durability despite a massive surge in online political activities and in some cases, digitally mediated large-scale mobilization of opposition groups. What explains authoritarian resilience in Southeast Asia in the face of rising opportunities for online political opposition? This article argues that while digital media has emerged as an important repertoire of activism, particularly for political opposition groups, a deft combination of political authoritarianism and increasing Internet controls have stunted democratic pressure in society and hampered future prospect for democratization. It also offers a comparative analysis of how the Internet more generally and digital media in particular has affected state-society relations in Southeast Asia in recent years. In order for digitally mediated political opposition to meaningfully challenge the existing authoritarian incumbents, sufficient opening in the political system is needed. This means, authoritarian states with competitive, routinized elections which have recently experienced large-scale or sustained mobilization by opposition groups are most likely to be susceptible to breakdown than closed regimes.