Suchergebnisse

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) has moved decisively to the right since its astounding electoral victory in 1970. Although its official slogan is "Islam is our religion; socialism is our economy; democracy is our pol," & despite its claims to "serve the people" in the "Chinese way," the PPP has consistently pursued counter-revolutionary policies wrapped in populist rehetoric. The party is rapidly losing the support of the Pakistani masses who rallied to it after the confusion & demoralization that accompanied the military defeat of West Pakistan by India over Bengladesh, & after broad enthusiasm of the masses about a pol'ly victorious party that would deliver them from their age-old exploitation & oppression. The gov's policy toward labor & the Left of co-optation, containment & destruction has won them the support of the Pakistani bourgeoisie & rightist elements that were formerly opponents. The land reform measures, that set the peasant tenant against the smaller-owner & therby undermine unity among the poor tillers, have attracted the feudal remnants to the PPP. As the PPP transforms itself into a traditional bourgeois-feudal party, it loses its leftist middle echelon leadership & cadre & its ability to mobilize grass-roots support. As the Pakistani economy increasingly attaches itself to internat'l imperialism, & as Pakistani policies more clearly show it is becoming a part of US Mediterranean & Gulf strategy, the state controlled media continues to promote the myth of non-aligned independence. The formerly leftist Nat'l Awami Party (NAP) is also shifting to the right, although in the past it advocated non-alignment, secularism, rights of the nat'lities, land reforms, & civil liberties. The lesson drawn from Pakistan is that bourgeois-led multi-class parties & parliamentary pol fail as a means of soc change in a neo-colonial context. A. Karmen.

We propose a simple game-theory model of single-member plurality electoral systems, two parties with unequal resources being the players. Strategies consist of allocations of resources among the n contests, and a party's payoff is the number of contests to which it has assigned more resources than the other party. Mixed strategies exist which are asymptotically optimal as n increases. Identifying a party's proportion of total resources with its total vote proportion, we predict that the swing ratio, or marginal seat proportion per vote proportion, is 2. This compares to empirical findings which range between 2 and 4, and to the hitherto unexplained cube law, which predicts 3. We suggest that the strategic problem modeled by this game accounts for the major part of the swing ratio effect. Factors which vary from system to system, such as proportion of hard-core support attached to parties, may amplify this effect.