Judicial Reform as Insurance Policy: Mexico in the 1990s

After seven decades of Mexican judicial subordination, President Ernesto Zedillo in 1994 introduced judicial reforms that increased the independence and judicial review powers of the judicial branch. The willful creation of a judiciary capable of checking the power of the president and the ruling PRI appears to counter political logic; but it makes sense as a political "insurance policy" to protect the ruling party from its rivals. PRI politicians, newly unable to control political outcomes at state and local levels and unsure if they would continue to dominate the national government in the future, opted to empower the Mexican Supreme Court as a hedge against the loss of office. This article argues that the likelihood of the reforms' producing an empowered judiciary increases as the ruling party's probability of reelection declines.     

Fragmentation of Power and the Emergence of an Effective Judiciary in Mexico, 1994–2002

Legal reforms that make judges independent from political pressures and empower them with judicial review do not make an effective judiciary. Something has to fill the gap between institutional design and effectiveness. When the executive and legislative powers react to an objectionable judicial decision, the judiciary may be weak and deferential; but coordination difficulties between the elected branches can loosen the constraints on courts. This article argues that the fragmentation of political power can enable a judiciary to rule against power holders' interests without being systematically challenged or ignored. This argument is tested with an analysis of the Mexican Supreme Court decisions against the PRI on constitutional cases from 1994 to 2002. The probability of the court's voting against the PRI increased as the PRI lost the majority in the Chamber of Deputies in 1997 and the presidency in 2000.     

Ordinary Singapore: The Decline of Singapore Exceptionalism

For decades Singapore’s ruling elite has sought to legitimate its rule by claiming to be a talented and competent elite that has made Singapore an exception among its neighbours – an exemplar of success and progress in a sea of mediocrity. In this article it is contended that this basis of legitimation has been irreversibly damaged. In essence, it is suggested that the governing People’s Action Party has lost control of the national narrative, and its achievements are increasingly regarded as being “ordinary” by the electorate. The mystique of exceptionalism, which was the basis on which the government was widely presumed to be above the need for close scrutiny and accountability, has collapsed. This collapse has substantially levelled the political playing field, at least in terms of expectations and assumptions. The government can and probably will continue to win elections and rule through its control of the instruments of institutional power, but the genie of scepticism and accountability has been released from its bottle, and it is hard to see how it can be put back in. This fundamentally changes the condition of Singapore politics: the narrative of exceptionalism is dead and the Singapore elite finds itself struggling to cope in a new and critical political environment.     

A Tale of Three Cities: Electoral Accountability in Indonesian Local Politics

In Indonesia, local government is endowed with important policy prerogatives and local politics is key to advance social welfare. The literature on Indonesian local politics has convincingly exposed serious limitations in local democratic practices, and it has questioned the ability of local democracy to promote genuine political change. This work, however, predominantly focuses on elite politics and specific forms of accountability based on patronage and clientelism. In this paper, we study democratic accountability in Indonesia from a different perspective. Drawing from the comparative literature on voting behavior, we hypothesize that Indonesian voters evaluate local politicians for their performance, and that they vote to reward or punish them for what they do in office. The analysis of three original surveys conducted in the cities of Medan, Samarinda and Surabaya offers partial support for this argument. While there is a positive relationship between evaluations of local government performance and support for incumbents, the strength of this link varies substantially across individuals and cities. The results shed new light on voter-politician linkages in Indonesia, suggesting that forms of accountability different from clientelism may emerge in this large and diverse country.     

Seychelles: Democratising in the shadows of the past

This article is an assessment of the country's governance and the likelihood that the country can break free from the shadow of former President René and his one-party state. The paper examines eight key areas of democratic governance: the constitution and rule of law; the judiciary; the National Assembly; elections; civil society; the internal security forces; economic life; and the executive. Although it finds some changes for the better over the last few years, old habits remain of a politicised judiciary, a blurring of the boundaries between party and state, regime policing, partisan distribution of state benefits and a constrained National Assembly. It concludes with a discussion of the likely role of the former incumbent, given that he still retains the chair of the ruling party and shows little sign of allowing the new President to be his own man. The likelihood of further governance progress for Seychelles depends on the political courage of President Michel.     

The British Parliament and ministerial responsibility c. 1740–60*

This article deals with certain matters concerning the issue of the political accountability of ministers to parliament during the last twenty years of the reign of King George II. It emphasizes the fact that there was no constitutional convention during this period that would have allowed parliament or the House of Commons alone to force the dismissal or resignation of ministers (as the ultimate sanction of political accountability). At that time, the king was the real master of his ministers. On the other hand, and as a matter of fact, only those ministers who could best manage the king's business in parliament were kept in office by the king. These propositions are demonstrated by examining the practice of the various administrations between 1740–60. It was also especially important for the leading ministers, such as Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham, the Duke of Newcastle and William Pitt to secure both the favour of the king and the confidence of parliament to remain in office. The Pitt-Newcastle administration (from 1757) additionally confirmed the general principle in times of war that administrations can only have firm parliamentary majorities to hold onto power as long as they would lead a war successfully.     

俄罗斯中央与地方关系嬗变的宪法逻辑考察

俄罗斯中央与地方关系是保证国家稳定发展的重大问题。俄罗斯联邦宪法及具有宪法性法律文件是调整中央与地方关系的重要载体。从动力上,中央和地方对宪法的凝聚力是在强总统推动下逐渐实现的,总统—威权体制是中央与地方关系嬗变的动力;从趋势上看,中央与地方关系结构从分散联邦制走向了集中联邦制,职权从地方向中央聚集,并最终集中于总统;从控制上看,中央对地方官员的问责从横向政治问责转变为垂直行政问责,中央控制地方的重要手段是问责,对地方最高官员问责的提出与决定权集中于总统。实践证明,完全照搬西方的联邦制并没有带来国家的统一和安定,建立符合俄罗斯国情和现代化要求的联邦体制是中央与地方关系模式的基石,明确中央与地方权责的合理边界,是二者关系的核心;顺应民主法治化潮流,注重以法治方式构建长效稳定的关系格局,加大权力制约力度,这是维护良性关系的重要保障。     

The Gambian 2016 Presidential Election and its Aftermath

This article explores the Gambian presidential election of December 2016, which was very surprisingly won by the leader of an opposition coalition, Adama Barrow, and its extraordinary aftermath. Barrow defeated Yahya Jammeh, who had won the four previous presidential elections, thus ending Jammeh’s 20-year rule of The Gambia, which had been marred by human rights abuses. Jammeh at first accepted the result, but changed his mind a week later, thus triggering a major political crisis. Over the next month, he made various desperate attempts to cling to power, before finally leaving the country on 21 January 2017, when faced with the prospect of being removed by force. Barrow, who had earlier been inaugurated as president, finally returned to Banjul on 26 January to assume office. The article concludes by considering the possible key features of a Barrow presidency and assesses the challenges that he will face.     

The Authoritarian Executive? Horizontal and Vertical Accountability in Nicaragua

This article uses empirical evidence from Nicaragua to examine Guillermo O'Donnell's argument that new democracies often become undemocratic delegative democracies and that vertical accountability is not enough to stop such encroaching authoritarianism. While events in the last five years have focused attention on illegal executive behavior by former president Alemán, Nicaragua's democracy actually has experienced authoritarian presidencies under all the major parties. Elections and popular mobilization have strengthened the independence of the legislature, however. Mechanisms of vertical accountability thereby have proven more effective than expected in restraining executive authoritarianism and fostering institutions of horizontal accountability. The case of Nicaragua shows that citizens can use the power balance and separate institutional mandate of presidential democracy to limit authoritarianism.     

THE POWERS OF XI JINPING

Since becoming head of the Communist Party in China in late 2012, Xi Jinping has accrued an impressive raft of titles. He has been compared to the founder of the regime, Mao Zedong, and is seen by some as sitting at the centre of a network of different power sources. But is power as personalised as this model makes out in contemporary China, with all its complexity and diversity? And can one person really rule the continental sized country in this paternalistic way? This article argues that Xi's powers are intrinsically linked with the organisation that he leads and which his power is sourced in – the Party itself. Far from him being the emperor of modern China, it is the Communist Party which acts as the all-seeing, all-powerful ruler. In this model, Xi is its servant, not its master.     

The struggle for Korea's national rights

This article assesses the role played by Indonesian capitalists in the country's new democratic political system. It takes as its starting point the analysis presented by Richard Robison in his influential 1986 book, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital . Robison saw the authoritarian state as central to capitalist class formation, viewing it as midwife and protector of an emergent business class. Though democratisation was not his primary concern, this analysis made him pessimistic about the prospects of democratic change. Over the intervening years, Indonesia has not only undergone democratisation; its capitalist class has also changed significantly. The article notes elements of continuity in the nature of Indonesian capital (including the continuing weight of politically vulnerable ethnic Chinese business interests) as well as change (including the taking of political office by businesspeople and the strengthening of provincial business). Overall, there is now much greater independence of private capital vis-à-vis the state, even if business-state relations are still characterised by patterns that developed during authoritarian rule, including the clientelist and predatory behaviours that have been the subject of much analysis in post-Suharto Indonesia. A focus on the capitalist class and its enmeshment in state power, in the style pioneered by Robison, thus helps explain continuity between Indonesia's authoritarian past and its new democratic order, especially the continuing ubiquity of corruption and patronage. However, such a focus is less useful in accounting for political change, especially democratisation itself. To explain democratisation we need to broaden our class analytical optic to bring into focus the actions and interests of lower and middle class forces.     

The genesis of the ‘Exceptional’ Republic: the permanency of the political crisis and the constitution of legal emergency power in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Almost half of the political life has been experienced under the state of emergency and state of siege policies in the Turkish Republic. In spite of such a striking number and continuity in the deployment of legal emergency powers, there are just a few legal and political studies examining the reasons for such permanency in governing practices. To fill this gap, this paper aims to discuss one of the most important sources of the ‘permanent’ political crisis in the country: the historical evolution of legal emergency power. In order to highlight how these policies have intensified the highly fragile citizenship regime by weakening the separation of power, repressing the use of political rights and increasing the discretionary power of both the executive and judiciary authorities, the paper sheds light on the emergence and production of a specific form of legality based on the idea of emergency and the principle of executive prerogative. In that context, it aims to provide a genealogical explanation of the evolution of the exceptional form of the nation-state, which is based on the way political society, representation, and legitimacy have been instituted and accompanying failure of the ruling classes in building hegemony in the country.     

中国特色的开放之路——对外开放经验总结和新时代开放的战略思考

改革开放40多年来,我国坚持对外开放基本国策毫不动摇,坚持独立自主地扩大开放,坚持共产党人推动开放的担当和初心,坚持开放与改革的良性互动,坚持试点渐进的开放路径,坚持紧紧抓住经济全球化机遇,坚持与自身能力相匹配的国际参与,坚持辩证统一、中道和合的思想方法,成功走出了一条有中国特色的开放之路。新时代推动新一轮高水平对外开放征程中,我国应理性把握发展中国家的定位、市场经济的定位和中美关系的定位。未来30年,为建设民族复兴路上的开放强国,我们应重点推进经贸强国战略和跨国公司战略,深入把握聚焦中高端竞争的开放、创新力驱动的开放、比较优势升级的开放、汇聚全球人才的开放、中国带动世界的开放和经济人文互补共进的开放等六个全方位、高水平对外开放新特征。     

Accountability and Authoritarianism: Human Rights in Malaysia and Singapore

The concept of accountability enjoys wide and growing appeal, its advocates submitting both normative and functional arguments for institutions limiting discretionary powers of political and economic elites. This development is seen as facilitative of democratisation, especially in post-authoritarian societies. Yet it has gone almost unnoticed that not all authoritarian regimes have dismissed accountability reform and some are adopting reforms in its name. This article contrasts the patterns in Malaysia and Singapore on a specific accountability institution – human rights commissions – offering explanations for why the former has established one and the latter not. It is argued that intra-state conflicts associated with Malaysian capitalism have created pressures and opportunities for accountability reform not matched in Singapore where there is a more cohesive ruling elite. Moreover, the PAP's acute ideological emphasis on meritocracy concedes no space for horizontal political accountability.     

Surviving Financial Crises: The Chinese Overseas in Malaysia and Singapore

This article analyses key elements of the Thaksin government's public sector reform program since 2001 in the context both of a longer history of public sector reform in Thailand, and of Thaksin's style of political rule. Carefully chosen instruments of new public management reform such as budgeting for results and performance management have been accompanied by an agenda of wholesale restructuring of the bureaucracy. However, these instruments do not include many familiar items of the public management reform agenda. The reforms are best viewed as part of a politicisation strategy aimed at asserting political control at the centre. Managerial reforms are being deployed to reshape the bureaucracy into an instrument of the Thaksin government's political program. In the process, the traditional power of the bureaucracy is being challenged and undermined. The long-term impact of the bureaucratic modernisation program on administrative performance is less certain.     

Gender equality and the electoral system in the regional council of Sardinia

This article provides an account of the process followed by the legislative assembly of the autonomous region of Sardinia, the regional council, to change its electoral law. More specifically, this article will focus on equal access to the elective office at the regional council that the electoral law should have guaranteed. The introduction of measures of gender equality is part of the broader process of change in the electoral law of Sardinia. It is also part of the wider review process of Sardinian autonomy that finds its roots in the amendment of title V of the Italian Constitution of 2001. Following these reforms, constitutional law 3/2013 states that ‘In order to achieve the balance between men and women in representation’, the new electoral law should ‘promote a new equal opportunity in the access to the office of regional councillor’ (article 16). The introduction of double preference for male and female candidates would have guaranteed equality, instead of reserving a share of seats to the underrepresented sex. It would have involved a new approach to the problem of underrepresentation of women. At the 20 June 2013 meeting, however, double preference was rejected in a secret ballot. Yet only four years later, on 21 November 2017, the electoral law was changed to guarantee equal access for women.     

Undermining the Rule of Law: Democratization and the Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico

This article asks whether democratization, under certain historical conditions, may relate to the deteriorating rule of law. Focusing on Mexico City, where police corruption is significant, this study argues that the institutionalized legacies of police power inherited from Mexico's one-party system have severely constrained its newly democratic state's efforts to reform the police. Mexico's democratic transition has created an environment of partisan competition that, combined with decentralization of the state and fragmentation of its coercive and administrative apparatus, exacerbates intrastate and bureaucratic conflicts. These factors prevent the government from reforming the police sufficiently to guarantee public security and earn citizen trust, even as the same factors reduce capacity, legitimacy, and citizen confidence in both the police and the democratically elected state. This article suggests that when democracy serves to undermine rather than strengthen the rule of law, more democracy can actually diminish democracy and its quality.     

The Uneven Performance of Third Wave Democracies: Electoral Politics and the Imperfect Rule of Law in Latin America

This article investigates the performance of the new democracies of the third wave by developing a conceptual model of the core elements of liberal democratic government and by constructing a new Database of Liberal Democratic Performance. The performance is shown to be uneven in two main ways. First, the institutional attributes of democratic government advance while individual and minority rights languish. Second, particular institutional attributes coexist uncomfortably, as do particular rights. A comparison of Brazil, Colombia, and Guatemala complements the big picture drawn from the database and focuses on the specific contextual conditions that can create the general political contours of the wave. The uneven democratic performance of these cases is mainly explained by the combination of persistent oligarchic power and a largely unaccountable military. Yet uneven performance, and the imperfect rule of law in particular, does not necessarily prevent democratic survival.     

Controlling the unruly agents – linkages between accountability and corruption within the executive structures of Botswana

ABSTRACT

Representative democracy entails delegation of power to representatives and other actors within the political system. Oftentimes, the delegating party has little insight into the actions of the person(s) to whom power is delegated. Ensuring that the power-holder does not misuse his/her powers is, therefore, a challenge. This article analyses accountability mechanisms through which the delegating party can prevent and detect misuse of power in the form of corruption. The article argues that political institutions contribute towards such mechanisms being available/unavailable to the delegating party. The analysis focuses on the case of Botswana, where executive structures stipulate the accountability mechanisms available to principals. As shown by the analysis, principals have formal access to many such mechanisms. Oftentimes, however, these mechanisms are not applied. The analysis shows that accountability alone cannot explain levels of corruption within executive structures of Botswana but that informal rules also explain the presence/absence of corrupt practices.     

‘Belmopan. A New Capital for a New Nation’ State,Nation and Ethnicity at the Time of Independence

In Belize, a project for building a new capital emerged in the early 1960s, just after the ravages of Hurricane Hattie, which had destroyed much of the colonial capital, Belize City. According to the common narrative, Belmopan was the answer to a natural threat. But this article will show that it was also a political strategy, intended to give the country a new, modern face, the symbol of a young nation on the road to independence (1981). One of the issues of this post-colonial state is the definition of a national ‘us’ and the place of ethnic groups inherited from the British colonial administration's policy of ‘divide and rule’. The article shows that the politicisation of ethnicity entails neither its integration in the state nor its institutionalisation by the parties, but rather the emergence of ‘citizenship from below’.