Suchergebnisse

This article evaluates the trends of democratization over the last 10 years, focusing on the new transitions to democracy taking place in Central-Eastern Europe & sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions where this political process has lately been more pervasive. The basic question addressed is whether the conditions that favored the democratic wave originating in Portugal in the mid-1970s are still able to explain the political transformations that followed the breakdown of the Berlin Wall. For many, the implosion of communism makes any such comparisons impossible. After summarizing some crucial variables suggested by the literature to explain democratic transitions & consolidation, the author tests this hypothesis in both Central-Eastern Europe & sub-Saharan Africa. Initial findings show that, in many cases, the variables that favored democratic transitions before 1989 continued to operate in similar ways thereafter. A few differences aside, in the most recent cases, a number of basic economic, institutional, & cultural conditions continue, as they did earlier, to favor or frustrate democratization. 8 Tables, 42 References. Adapted from the source document.

The democratic reforms introduced in many sub-Saharan African countries during the 1990s involved the restoration of multipartism. The re-emergence of party politics spurred a number of analyses of the continent's new parties & party systems, largely based on theories & concepts derived from the study of advanced democracies. The article reviews & critically examines recent works on Africa's parties & party systems by presenting the dominant themes & issues & by investigating the utility of Western-derived models for the analysis of new multiparty regimes. In spite of a quantitative increase & a qualitative improvement in the study of Africa's parties & party systems, the latter still suffers a scarcity of empirical & theoretical investigations. At the same time, the use of political science tools for the study of party politics south of the Sahara is part of a broader positive trend towards a better integration of the analysis of African politics with that of politics in other world areas. Tables, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

On November 2004 the fifth day of the conference "The Politician" was held at the Political Science University of Pavia. The conference continued to develop the themes covered during the one held in 2003, with more emphasis on the current state & future of Europe after the signing of the European Constitutional Treaty in Rome on October 29, 2004. The doubt that all the twenty-five countries would actually ratify the Constitution gave the conference a peculiar feeling of uncertainty. This article is the synthesis of Gian Paolo Calchi Novati's speech, which focused on International European Policy with respect to peripheral areas such as the Balkans, the Middle-East & Sub-Saharan Africa. Maria Williamson

The analysis is focused on the results arising from the use of nationality as connecting factor in questions of applicable law to personal relations between spouses who are citizens of States having a non-unified legal system, characterized by the coexistence of different sub-systems of personal law referred to members belonging to diverse religious and ethnic communities, as several States in Africa and Asia regions. The issue will become more and more relevant in a close future before the Italian courts, giving the increasing migrations and the consequently growing number of marriages and divorces to which such composite systems of law should be applied. The Italian and foreign case-law show that the religious and customary laws are often based on principles that may infringe the very concept of international public order. Nevertheless, there are circumstances where the sole diversity of values and cultures should not constitute per se an obstacle for the application of foreign laws in Italy. This result could be aimed by applying a flexible judicial approach on a case by case analysis, maybe giving a special relevance to other connecting factors, instead of citizenship, already used in EU law and in international multilateral treaties in matrimonial matters (such as the closest connection and habitual residence). Adapted from the source document.