Suchergebnisse

The politics of African democracies is marked by a curious disjuncture: in spite of severe social diversity and proportional electoral arrangements, dominant parties abound. This peculiarity frustrates the design of constitutional experts, who expect proportional electoral arrangements to translate social cleavages into discrete political parties. In such cases, it follows that the dominant political party – rather than parliament – becomes the primary site of accommodation between competing social formations. Little, however, is known of how groups vie for power within Africa's dominant political parties; electoral law is largely silent on the subject of intraparty democracy. Under what conditions do dominant parties – understood as coalitions of social formations – remain cohesive? We address this question by looking at the process of candidate selection, often considered 'one of the best points at which to observe the distribution of power within the party' (Schattschneider, 1970 [1942]: 64). We conduct a comparative case study of two dominant parties in South Africa and Namibia, using evidence drawn from primary party documentation and interviews with party leaders, officials, candidates and members. We find that inclusive candidate selection mechanisms can stabilize factional competition, while exclusive mechanisms, conversely, can presage elite rupture within the dominant party.

It has long been claimed that the police are the most visible symbol of the criminal justice system (Bittner, 1974). There is, however, a significant strand of policing – covert investigation that relies routinely on methods of deception – that resists public revelation (Ross, 2008). The growing importance of covert police investigation has profound implications for the relationship between citizen and the state in a democratic society, but it is relatively unexplored by police researchers. In this article, we describe the methodology of the first ethnographic study of how the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) – a piece of 'enabling' legislation that regulates the conditions under which law enforcement agencies can intervene in the privacy of individuals – has effected the conduct of covert police investigation in the United Kingdom. We describe our ethnographic experience in the 'secret world' of covert policing, which is familiar in many respects to ethnographers of uniformed officers, but which also differed significantly. We contend that the organizing principle of surveillance – the imperative to maintain the secrecy of an operation – had a marked impact on our ethnographic experience, which eroded significantly our status as non-participant observers and altered out reflexive experience by activating the 'usefulness' of our gender.