Suchergebnisse

One of the preoccupations of students of Soviet and communist politics in the past decade or so has been the problem of system change. There can be no doubt that in a number of fundamental respects the Soviet Union today bears little resemblance to the totalitarian model bequeathed by Stalin. In particular, despite the well publicized attempts to stifle vocal opposition, the abandonment of the capricious and widespread use of terror has brought about a radical modification in the life of the mass of the population and party membership. Equally significant has been the rise in living standards, over the past decade especially. Perhaps also of relevance to the average citizen, envious of and apprehensive towards foreigners – particularly Chinese and Germans – is the Soviet leadership's tangible success in reaching some form of accommodation with the country's main ideological adversaries, and the rise in prestige stemming from the USSR's achievements in space and in the international sports arena. Hence, for probably the majority of Soviet citizens, taking a broad view, Harold Macmillan's British election slogan of 1959 would be quite apposite: they have never had it so good.

This article focuses on the challenges to the authority of Vietnam's one-party state that emerged in 2009 and state responses. Three separate challenges are discussed: opposition to bauxite mining in the Central Highlands; mass protests by the Catholic Church over land ownership issues; and revived political dissent by pro-democracy activists and bloggers. The Vietnam Communist Party bases its claims to political legitimacy on multiple sources. The bauxite mining controversy challenged the state's claim to political legitimacy on the basis of performance. The Catholic land dispute challenged the state's claim to legitimacy on rational-legal grounds. Revived political dissent, including the linkage of demands for democracy with concerns over environmental issues and relations with China, challenged the state's claim to legitimacy based on nationalism. Vietnam responded in a "soft authoritarian" manner. Future challenges and state responses will be debated as Vietnam moves to convene its eleventh national party congress in 2010. (JCSA/GIGA)

Das Verhältnis der regional und ethnisch orientierten Parteien war gekennzeichnet durch Haß und Feindschaft, wobei vor allem die politische Hegemonie des Nordens für Zündstoff sorgte. Der Militärputsch des Jahres 1983 zeigte, wie wenig das den USA entlehnte Verfassungsmodell in der politischen Kultur Nigerias (vor allem der Vielvölkercharakter) verankert war. (DÜI-Spe)

This article examines one widespread but widely overlooked informal party practice to access state resources indirectly: the 'taxing' of MP salaries, which obliges candidates who win elected office on a party ticket to regularly donate a fixed share of their private income to party coffers. Linking Duverger's classical approach on party organization that stresses the importance of party–society relations with the more recent, highly influential cartel party theory that argues that parties are shaped by their relationship with the state, we specify factors that shape the acceptability of this informal practice and thus parties' capacity to extract rent from their MPs. The analysis of an original dataset covering parties across a wide range of advanced democracies reveals that demanding salary transfers from national MPs to their parties are not only more common in leftist parties as argued by Duverger but also in systems in which the penetration of the state apparatus by political parties is intense as argued by the cartel party approach. Linking the two perspectives further reveals that ideological differences between parties shape their relative capacity to collect higher payments from MPs in systems where parties and the state are less intertwined.

Vietnam's political development has entered an extraordinary, if indeterminate, phase. Politics in Vietnam, long a predictable and dour affair, are today characterized by a sense of uncertainty and possibility that has no precedent in the country's post-war history. Comprising contributions from leading Vietnam scholars, this volume comprehensively explores the core aspects of Vietnam's politics, providing fresh perspectives on one of East Asia's least understood countries. The collection focuses on a variety of themes including the development and decay of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the evolution of relations between central and local authorities in the context of economic globalization, the functions of representative institutions, the activities of political dissidents, the growth of incipient forms of secondary association and civil society, and state repression. Unlike much of the scholarship on Vietnam, the contributions in this volume consider Vietnam in light of broader debates concerning politics in Asia

A political party is defined in terms of coalition building: collective effort directed toward capturing public office and governing once that office is attained. Party organization thus defined includes factional organization as well as the administrative apparatus. This definition assumes a linkage between the electoral party and the party inside the government.

Taking the contemporary debate about the status of political sociology as a starting point, the article presents some of the alternative views, and discusses the relationships between sociology and political science. It claims that, despite persistent controversies, looking into the research tradition of political sociology is a useful resource to grasp the identity of the sub-discipline. Accordingly, the author takes the relationship between state and society as the central issue that everywhere cuts across theoretical and methodological diversity. Finally, the text takes the nation-state as the most typical configuration of the relationship between state and society in modern history, and one that remains so in the present, despite the many historical and analytical challenges we observe today.