Suchergebnisse

AbstractThirty‐five Muslim‐majority and 18 Muslim‐minority countries formally integrate Muslim Family Laws (MFLs) into their legal systems and enforce them through state courts. Both Muslim‐majority and Muslim‐minority governments have undertaken legislative reforms to alleviate the effects of religious laws on fundamental human rights, increase accountability and accessibility, and strengthen the rule of law within their MFL systems. Extant literature is silent on whether MFLs are more reformed or more human rights and the rule of law compliant in Muslim‐majority or Muslim‐minority countries. Utilizing a novel methodological tool, the MFL Index, this exploratory article surveys cross‐national and historical trends in MFL reform (1946–2016). It shows that Muslim‐majority and ‐minority governments have opted for different forms of legislative reform. Muslim‐majority countries favored substantive reform, while Muslim‐minority states prioritized exit reforms. The type and extent of reform were strongly associated with colonial heritage, secularism, women's activism, ethnoreligious diversity, and prevailing multicultural arrangements. These findings have implications for studying multicultural theory, human/women's rights, and democratization in the Muslim world and beyond.

Explores impact of the split-ticket voting system for prime minister and Knesset that was utilized in the 1996 and 1999 elections; argues that split-ticket voting fragmented the party system, strengthened small, ethno-sectarian and single-issue parties at the major parties' expense, and that it revealed a lack of adequate checks and balances. The Knesset voted in Mar. 2001 to repeal split-ticket voting and restore the former one-ballot voting system that had been in effect before 1996.

The article analyzes the evolution of state law pluralism in the field of personal status law in India and Indonesia in the postcolonial era. Having inherited pluri-legal personal law systems from their colonial patrons, postindependence leaders in both countries vowed to eliminate and replace pluri-legal arrangements by uniform civil law systems that would not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, custom, or religion. Despite their attempts at legal unification from the 1940s to 1960s, however, both nations today exhibit high degrees of state law pluralism in personal law. We show that plans for legal unification were abandoned in both countries in the 1970s, and that the turn away from legal unification was mostly driven by concerns of political stability and electoral politics, not, as is often argued in the literature, due to state incapacity or ideological reorientations on part of the ruling elite.

AbstractThis article compares the strategies through which Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Indonesia have regulated religion and addressed questions of what constitutes "the religious" in the post-independence period. We show that the dominant approach pursued by the Indian state has been one of judicialization—the delegation of religious questions to the high courts—while in Indonesia it has predominantly been one of bureaucratization—the regulation of religious issues by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Contrary to the expectation that judicialization devitalizes normative conflicts while bureaucratization, more frequently associated with authoritarian politics, "locks" these conflicts "in," we show that these expectations have not materialized, and at times, the effects have been reverse. Engaging the literatures on judicialization and on bureaucratization, we argue that what determines the consequences of the policy toward religion is less the choice of the implementing institution (i.e., the judiciary or bureaucracy) than the mode of delegation (vertical versus horizontal) which shapes the relationship between the policy-maker and the institution implementing it. Bureaucrats, judges, and elected politicians in multicultural societies around the world encounter questions of religious nature very similar to those that authorities in India and Indonesia have faced. How they address the challenge of religious heterogeneity has a profound impact on prospects of nation-building and democratization. It is therefore imperative that the consequences of the policy toward religion, and even more so the consequences of political delegation, be studied more systematically.

Introduction : forms of pluralism and democratic constitutionalism / Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen -- Federation, confederation, territorial state : debating a post-imperial future in French West Africa, 1945-1960 / Fred Cooper -- Decolonization and postnational democracy / Gary Wilder -- From the American system to Anglo-Saxon union : scientific racism and supra-nationalism in nineteenth-century North America / Joshua Simon -- Constitutions and forms of pluralism in the time of conquest : the French debates over the colonization of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s / Emmanuelle Saada -- The constitutional identity of indigenous peoples in Canada : status groups or federal actors? / Patrick Macklem -- Federacy and the Kurds : might this new political form help mitigate Hobbesian conflicts in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria? / Alfred Stepan and Jeff Miley -- Europe-what's left : towards a progressive pluralist program for EU reform / Robert Howse -- Subsidiarity and the challenge to the sovereign state / Nadia Urbinati -- Indian secularism and its challenges / Christophe Jaffrelot -- Tainted liberalism : Israel's millets / Michael Karayanni -- Jurisdictional competition and internal reform in Muslim family law in Israel and Greece / Yuksel Sezgin -- Corporate legal particularism / Katharina Pistor -- Tax competition and the unbundling of sovereignty / Tsilly Dagan -- The politics of horizontal inequality : indigenous opposition to wind energy development in Mexico / Courtney Jung -- Conclusion : territorial pluralism and language communities / Astrid von Busekist