New localism or fuzzy centralism: policymakers’ perceptions of public education and involvement in education

This research examines local authority involvement in education as a function of local policymakers’ perceptions of education as a public service – namely, whether public education is for the benefit of society as a whole, or for individual students and parents. Perceptions of education and involvement in education were assessed through 107 questionnaires returned by mayors and heads of local education departments in Israel. The results show that (1) local policymakers tend to perceive public education as a general public service, and (2) the relationship between this perception and involvement in education varies with the locality’s centre-periphery status. In peripheral localities, perceiving education as a general public service and an understanding of ‘society’ as the local community leads to greater involvement in education. In central localities, involvement rose with a more individualised perception. Implications of the findings are discussed in line with viewing education in the spirit of new localism.     

Pushed by national politics or pulled by localism? Voting for independent local parties in the Netherlands

This study examines why citizens in the Netherlands vote for independent local parties. These are parties that run in municipal council elections, but do not run in elections at higher levels. This article examines a number of expectations: namely that voters vote for these parties out dissatisfaction with established parties, that they do so because they have a 'localist' political orientation or that they do so because their own national party is not running in the municipal elections. More support is found for the idea that voters vote for local parties because they are pushed away by national parties (either because they do not participate in some municipalities or because voters distrust them) than for the idea that voters vote for local parties for positive reasons, such as a localist political orientation. This article examines two surveys concerning voting behaviour in the 2014 Dutch municipal elections.     

Popular Punitiveness? Punishment and Attitudes to Law in Post-Soviet Georgia

Georgia is the only country in the post-Soviet region where incarceration rates significantly grew in the 2000s. Then in 2013, the prison population was halved through a mass amnesty. Did this punitiveness and its sudden relaxation after 2012 impact attitudes to the law? We find that these attitudes remained negative regardless of levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, the outcomes of sentencing may be less important than procedures leading to sentencing. Procedural justice during both punitiveness and liberalisation was not assured. This may explain the persistence of negative attitudes to law. The Georgian case shows that politically-driven punitive turns or mass amnesties are unlikely to solve the problem of legal nihilism in the region.     

Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan as Post-Soviet Rentier States: Resource Incomes and Autocracy as a Double ‘Curse’in Post-Soviet Regimes

This article presents an analysis of two post-Soviet states, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, which can be identified as post-Soviet rentier states. Both countries are characterised economically by enormous national resources of gas and oil and low economic diversification as well as politically by strong autocratic presidentialism with neopatrimonial structures. These two factors, combined with further post-Soviet legacies such as a low level of political interest in the respective societies and a basically hierarchical orientation of the population, lead to a specific post-Soviet variety of rentierism. From a political science perspective, this article reveals the impact of resource policies on these comparably new political systems and concludes with a summary of core features of these post-Soviet rentier states.     

Ethnofederalism and ethnonationalism in the separatist politics of chechnya and tatarstan: sources or resources?

Common explanations of the recent war in Chechnya add up to an astonishingly overdetermined picture. The conflict between Russia's central government and its separatist ethnic autonomy was blamed on several grand factors: oil interests, resurgent Islam, imperial collapse, international terrorism, organized crime. Superficially, Chechnya shares most of these features with Tatarstan — another defiant republic of the Russian Federation which has oil, notorious gangsters, and a native population of Islamic heritage. A more detailed account shows, however, that the two state entities have little in common except the Soviet-made institutional framework. Tatarstan is a rare example of an ethnically non-Russian republic within the very urban industrial core of the former USSR, while Chechnya was patently peripheral. Differences in historical legacies and present-day social compositions conditioned very different outcomes of multifaceted political struggles that accompanied the demise of Soviet empire. In Tatarstan, local ethnically-colored nomenklatura exploited the chaotic transition to claim property rights over the local economy. The new rhetoric of national revival which the nationally-minded wing of Tatar intelligentsia advanced during Gorbachev's relaxation of censorship, was used by the Tatar nomenklatura to justify its struggle for economic property rights and exclusive political jurisdiction in its territory. By contrast, the Communist patronage network which ruled Chechnya until 1991 was too dependent on the central government for subsidies and coercive resources to follow the Tatarstan example. In the aftermath of August 1991 hardliner coup, when the Chechen apparatchiks misplaced their bets in Moscow's politics and momentarily lost support of the central government, they were swept away by the social movement of rural masses and urban marginal intellectuals. In its turn revolution, the only such outcome among the republics of the Russian Federation (but not the USSR), created an inherently unstable regime in Chechnya which could legitimate itself only with the idea of national independence and, once Moscow attempted to destabilize it, through the patriotic war.     

Can Islamists be secularized? Religion and politics in urban Bangladesh

As in many other Muslim majority states, the Islamist parties play a significant role in the body politic of Bangladesh. Because of their counter-hegemonic modus operandi, the question arises regarding the ability of the Islamists to cohabit democratically in a secular or a quasi-secular political system. The literature on secularization, secularism, and Islam relies on a grand narrative of the reasons to address the question and provides us with polarized answers regarding the Islamists’ ability to accommodate the principle of secularism. However, almost all of the works have been done on the abstract, theoretical level and do not address the interplay of social and political factors in Muslim societies. None of the research on Islamism in Bangladesh addresses Islamist parties’ ability or inability to participate in a quasi-secular, democratic system through acclimating to secularism in the rubric of their political ideology, Islamism. This study therefore examines the grassroots-level socio-political interplays of the Islamist activists with the non-Islamists and analyzes their willingness and ability to accommodate secularism in order to democratically participate in a quasi-secular political system.     

Military twists and turns in world politics: downsides or dividends for UN peace operations?

Russia’s challenge to the post-cold war order, and the rise of Islamic State have resulted in a call for increased military spending among NATO members. Despite the increased demand for UN peace operations, any expansion is unlikely to benefit the world organisation. Instead we see an increasing reliance upon regional organisations like the African Union, European Union and NATO, in particular, for robust peace operations. An analysis of Western states (France, Germany and the USA) suggests that future investments in weaponry, technology and staff will primarily benefit NATO and the EU, but not the United Nations.     

Flourishing retail in the post-soviet sphere? Potentials and constraints of small-scale retail activities in rural Kyrgyzstan

The demise of the USSR led to the collapse of its centrally organised retail system. With this collapse the supply of consumer goods dried up, especially in the remote parts of the former USSR. At the same time the advent of capitalism offered a new institutional framework for independent retail activities. In the Kyrgyz Republic, where the economic liberalisation followed strictly the Washington Consensus, a large number of small shops emerged in both urban and rural areas. This study analyses the reasons for this boom in retail start-ups as well as the constraints the mainly inexperienced merchants encounter. As will be shown, any success in retail activities depends greatly on the performance of other economic sectors. The main goal of starting a retail business is to minimize risks within the overall livelihood strategies of households in rural Kyrgyzstan.     

Aspects of local government and politics in china: 1955–58

This study, based on work in six villages, seeks insights into the likely effect of the introduction of prospective land‐, water‐, and crop‐management technologies, being researched at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi‐Arid Tropics, on the existing village labour‐use patterns in one major relevant region: peninsular India. Explicit attention is given to the similarities and differences between small and large farms and their relevance to the adoption of the prospective new technologies.

Regional variation in labour utilisation reveals a tremendous employment‐creating potential in the existing tank and well irrigation systems in the Alfisols of peninsular India. The prospective technologies should increase employment, compared with existing technologies, by at least 100 per cent in the Alfisols and by over 300per cent in the deep Vertisols— but with some increase in the seasonal variability of labour demand. Given the existing availability of labour, there will be, with the improved watershed technologies, major farm labour bottlenecks. These should eventually generate increased wage rates and employment potentials. However, even temporary adverse effects on the timelessness of operations could be critical to the success of a double‐cropping and/or intercropping technology aiming at greatly increased yields. This would create demands for selective mechanisation, for example, of threshing.     

“Success” in policy piloting: Process,programs, and politics

Research has demonstrated that pilots contain multiple shifting purposes, not all of which relate to simple policy testing or refinement. Judging the success of policy pilots is therefore complex, requiring more than a simple judgment against declared goals. Marsh and McConnell provide a framework against which policy success can be judged, distinguishing program success from process and political success. We adapt Boven's modification of this framework and apply it to policy pilots, arguing that pilot process, outcomes and longer-term effects can all be judged in both program and political terms. We test this new framework in a pilot program in the English National Health Service, the Vanguard program, showing how consideration of these different aspects of success sheds light on the program and its aftermath. We consider the implications of the framework for the comprehensive and multifaceted evaluation of policy pilots.     

How to study ideas in politics and ‘influence’: a typology

The influence that ideas have (or do not have) in political life is widely regarded as a problematic issue – across many fields of study. Reservations about the possibilities for assessing ideas' influence can be shown to differ, however, in quite revealing ways. Apprehension rests neither on a single, shared reservation, nor even on a core set of reservations. Moreover, many of the reservations lack cogency. A more useful way of addressing the ‘influence-problem’ is by employing a typology. This typology would seek to capture the full range of modes in which influence might be exercised. The article therefore proposes one, as a heuristic framework for investigation and analysis, with the intention that it might be applied to the study of ‘real-world’ cases.     

Exigency or expediency? Contextualising political Islam and the pas challenge in Malaysian politics

Few would disagree that Islam has become a major force in Malaysian politics. Be that as it may, scholarship on political Islam in Malaysia has mostly centred on detailing the umno–pas confrontation. While it is important to understand the depths of this phenomenon of politicised Islam, it is equally vital that attempts be made to relate it to broader socio-political tectonics in the complex Malaysian landscape in order to better appreciate the nature and trajectory of the politicisation of Islam in Malaysia. Focusing on pas as the institutional manifestation of politicised Islam in Malaysia, this paper advances two arguments. First, pas has been successful insofar as it has managed to relate Islam to the pressing issues of the day. Second, the best electoral performances turned in by pas have all coincided with problems with umno and the broader coalition. Islam then, appears to be less vital to the politics of pas than is widely perceived.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.     

Women in politics in the people's republic of china: Holding up half the sky?

In China, there has been a long tradition of oppression, with the burden falling particularly on rural women. Since 1949, Chinese leaders have supported women's emancipation as a natural consequence of Socialist economic development. Government actions to mitigate the problem of inequality have enhanced some achievements but are largely inadequate. This paper examines the issue of Chinese women in politics and concludes that negative influences of the past, misunderstanding of the connection between general and gender specific policies, and the absence of general commitment to the ideology of sex equality have been the obstacles to women's emancipation in China.