Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe European Union has sought to democratise its post-communist neighbours for the past three decades, starting with Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. Since the end of the wars in Former Yugoslavia in 2000, the EU first pursued closer integration with the Western Balkans followed by the goal of enlargement. However, despite intensive EU involvement, the fight against corruption has stagnated or deteriorated in post-communist Europe, particularly in Former Yugoslavia. The central question in the article is whether indirect EU influence has led municipal officials—who are at the front line of vital distributive decision-making for citizens at the local level—to imitate (or emulate) attitudes related to corruption and to informality in line with EU norms. The article focuses on the case of Serbia, where anti-corruption progress has been particularly slow. Using a survey of Serbian municipal officials, the article examines whether indirect EU influence via involvement in policy implementation affected attitudes towards informal payments, and through a vignette-based survey experiment, whether those involved in EU-compliant policy implementation are less accepting of local political elite corruption.

Religious division formed the basis for the subcontinent's partition and has continued to be a major social cleavage in local relations. Yet remarkably religious parties have rarely been successful in India. This may be changing with an ascendant Bharatiya Janata Party mobilizing the Hindu vote. Accordingly, this article seeks to explicate the conditions under which successful religious parties may emerge. In order to do so, I conceive of electoral mobilization on religion as a form of ethnic mobilization, what I refer to as religion-as-ethnicity voting. I argue that religion-as-ethnicity voting emerges when the religious group meets certain spatial demographic criteria (density and pivotality) and when a governing party representing these interests can use state power to reify boundaries between religious groups. I use this framework to explain the emergence of the Hindu vote in the Indian state of Assam.

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the associated Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have had far-reaching health, economic, social and political impacts. The latter is the focus of this research note, which proposes using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates. The approach is illustrated using data from the 2020 Croatian parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are the vote shares for the dominant Croatian Democratic Union party, as well as the turnout. The analysis concludes that there is no evidence that reported county-level infection rates affected Croatian Democratic Union support or turnout. However, results using this approach may be affected by the statistical power of the analysis, issues related to causal identification and reliability of infection rate measures. Nonetheless, the difference-in-differences approach can potentially be applied in contexts around the world to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the associated Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have had far-reaching health, economic, social and political impacts. The latter is the focus of this research note, which proposes using a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates. The approach is illustrated using data from the 2020 Croatian parliamentary election. The outcomes of interest are the vote shares for the dominant Croatian Democratic Union party, as well as the turnout. The analysis concludes that there is no evidence that reported county-level infection rates affected Croatian Democratic Union support or turnout. However, results using this approach may be affected by the statistical power of the analysis, issues related to causal identification and reliability of infection rate measures. Nonetheless, the difference-in-differences approach can potentially be applied in contexts around the world to estimate the electoral impact of reported SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.

Rammohun Roy was the first Indian to use the English language to communicate his views on religious, social, and political issues. He also was possibly the first to make Bengali prose his vehicle to communicate his message. The essential message he wished to convey was that of rationalism and of an anxiety to convey Western advances in knowledge, especially science, to his fellow countrymen. He thus preferred English to Sanskrit education. His fight against sati was based not only on a call for humanity but also on a reform of traditional Hinduism and improvement of the position of women. His knowledge of Arabic and Persian made him appreciate the monotheistic message of Islam, which he also saw in ancient Hinduism, notably the Upanishads. Despite his own position as a large landholder, he wished to protect peasants from oppression and argued that rents payable by peasants should also be fixed at a low figure, just as the tax imposed on the landlord had been fixed under the Permanent Settlement.