Suchergebnisse

The most important achievements in early post-Soviet Russia were the creation of a federal system & the establishment of scheduled elections. However, federalism in Russia substitutes rhetoric for reality with regard to many substantive elements of Western federalism. It is more a decorative ritual than a democratic function. This chapter examines the roots of Russian federalism, as far back as the 11th century, & its development in the post-Soviet era. It is concluded that Vladimir Putin does not want a system of political pluralism or development of grassroots parties. His vision for Russia is one of a vertical, not horizontal, chain of command, with a strong national police presence in control at the regional level. Figures. J. Stanton

AbstractHow do members of Congress anticipate and prepare for redistricting? I present data from the 1992 redistricting cycle that indicate that one reason why we rarely see changes in representation after redistricting is that incumbents change both their legislative activities and their campaigning prior to the first post-redistricting election. To examine incumbents' behavioral anticipation of redistricting in more detail, I also present a case study of incumbents' activities prior to the 1998 court-ordered congressional redistricting in North Carolina. I find that these incumbents participated actively in the redistricting process and made behavioral adjustments before they began to represent their new districts officially. These types of adjustments were often subtle, including changes in casework, local projects, and the allocation of staff and campaign resources.

AbstractThis article discusses the relationship between certain institutional regulations of voting rights and elections, different levels of electoral participation, and the degree of political instability in several Latin American political experiences. A formal model specifies the hypotheses that sudden enlargements of the electorate may provoke high levels of political instability, especially under plurality and other restrictive electoral rules, while gradual enlargements of the electorate may prevent much electoral and political innovation and help stability. Empirical data illustrate these hypotheses. A historical survey identifies different patterns of political instability and stability in different countries and periods, which can be compared with the adoption of different voting rights regulations and electoral rules either encouraging or depressing turnout.

This article argues that a key step in King's iterative approach toR×Cecological inference problems—the aggregation of groups into broad conglomerate categories—can introduce problems of aggregation bias and multimodality into data, inducing model violations. As a result, iterative EI estimates can be considerably biased, even when the original data conform to the assumptions of the model. I demonstrate this problem intuitively and through simulations, show the conditions under which it is likely to arise, and illustrate it with the example of Coloured voting during the 1994 elections in South Africa. I then propose an easy fix to the problem, demonstrating the usefulness of the fix both through simulations and in the specific South African context.

This analysis of election campaigning in South Africa demonstrates that those parties that invoke an exclusive "us and them" message fare better than those that attempt an inclusive "catch-all" strategy. This conclusion has important implications for the debate over the best electoral system for a divided society. It is suggested here that list proportional representation encourages the growth of a centrifugal party system where the most successful parties are those that "outbid" their competitors for the votes of the groups they principally represent. It is quite possible that, over time, South African political parties will "learn" that the most successful means of mobilizing voters is to play on the fears and aspirations associated with their race, thus exacerbating racial tensions.

March 20, 2000, constituted a milestone in
Taiwan's modern political history. That day its
electorate chose as president Chen Shui-bian, the
candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP) who had been defamed as an antistate rebel
only a decade before. The election also marked the
end of the forty-year-plus hegemony of the
Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalists). That the DPP
ascended to the island's supreme political office
in spite of its rival's powerful organizational
and economic arsenal suggested that the rules of
the democratic electoral game finally took root in
society, respected by all major political players
to produce a peaceful and orderly regime change.
Taiwan joined the club of consolidated
democracies, so declared many observers.

Although Korea has made significant strides to strengthen its democratic system since the successful transition in the late 1980s as part of the "third wave" of global democratization, a look into the process of making budgetary policy in the National Assembly would suggest that Korean democracy is far from consolidation. Korean politics has shed itself for the most part of its authoritarian past, when the military was the main conduit of action and oppression. The principle of free, regular, and fair competition has taken root as the procedural norm in both national and local elections. Korean citizens enjoy civil liberties to a degree unprecedented in the authoritarian era, and civil society transformed into an increasingly open, transparent, and pluralistic field of political action.

Over a decade has passed since the heady days of 1989 and 1990 when communist governments fell one after the other and almost all political parties taking part in elections shared the same goals: Democracy, the Market, and Back to Europe. In December 2002, the efforts of the new leaders of these countries to 'return to Europe' bore fruit in an event that many had in 1989 regarded as too farfetched to imagine, the invitation of most of the countries in the region to join the EU in 2004 or 2007. The culmination of a decade-long process of harmonization and negotiation, this invitation symbolized the success of these countries in instituting political democracies and market economies. But how complete is this process, particularly in the political realm?

Hopeful of bringing citizens closer to government decision‐making Gary Humphries recently presented the Community Referendum Bill 2002 to the ACT Legislative Assembly.The Citizen Initiated Referendum has many staunch advocates however this paper considers whether CIR is an appropriate solution to perceived democratic deficits in the ACT or anywhere else in Australia. The paper canvasses a number of pitfalls of CIR. These include: their potential to aggravate rather than ameliorate the democratic deficit; the problems associated with under‐deliberation; and potentially detrimental consequences for existing electoral arrangements. Specifically, CIR could engender voter fatigue, reduce the salience of elections and exacerbate levels of ungovernability and accountability, all of which are known to turn people off politics and voting.

This article analyzes the relationship between each of three conceptions of American identity—liberalism, civic republicanism, and ethnoculturalism—and support for declaring English the official language and printing election ballots only in English. Focus group discussions showed that these conceptions provide a common means of discourse for talking about language conflicts and ethnic change, and that the civic republican conception of American identity is a particularly important factor in the opinion formation process. Although all three conceptions help people to decide whether they think English should be the official language, they are not consistently associated with support for or opposition to restrictive language policies. How individuals interpret these images of national identity also shapes the direction of their preferences.

Psychological research has found that being asked to predict one's future actions can bring about subsequent behavior consistent with the prediction but different from what would have occurred had no prediction been made. In a 1987 study, Greenwald, Carnot, Beach, and Young induced an increase in voting behavior by means of such a "self‐prophecy" effect: Undergraduates who were asked to predict whether they would vote in an upcoming election were substantially more likely to go to the polls than those who had not been asked for a prediction. This paper reports on a replication of the Greenwald study conducted among a larger group of respondents more representative of the American electorate. No evidence was found that self‐prophecy effects increase voter turnout.

During the 2000 national election season, there was unprecedented attention paid by the media, and by presidential campaigns, to the political content of late night comedy shows such as the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Late Show with David Letterman. Focusing on the more than thirteen thousand jokes about U.S. political figures from 1996 to 2000 on late night comedy talk shows, this study explores the choice of targets and subjects of political humor. The authors find that late night humor is heavily centered on the president and top presidential contenders, that the various late night shows tend to exhibit the same patterns in their choice of targets, and that the humor is generally devoid of issue content.

English
Although convincingly discredited academically, a crude 'business school' globalisation thesis of a single world market, with its attendant political 'logic of no alternative', continues to dominate the discourse of globalisation adopted by the British Labour Party. Here, we identify three separate, albeit reinforcing, articulations of the policy 'necessities' associated with global economic change. Labour's leaders are shown to have utilised a flexible synthesis of potentially contradictory ideas in constructing their chosen discourse of globalisation to guide the conduct of British economic policy following the Party's election victory in 1997. We conclude that Labour appealed to the image of globalisation as a non-negotiable external economic constraint in order to render contingent policy choices 'necessary' in the interests of electoral rejuvenation.

AbstractThis paper examines three common political expressions and ideas from a marketing perspective. First, the origins of the 'selling candidates like soap' expression are traced and it is argued that, rather than being 'sold' like a product, candidates are instead 'marketed' like a service provider such as a real estate agent. Traditional campaign rituals have a legitimate marketing function if electors, and not just political actors, are meaningfully incorporated and military analogies in elections have increasing relevance given the classic military strategy used by commercial marketers. Together, these examples suggest that the application of marketing to politics may require the rethinking of ingrained electoral jargon and concepts. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications