Pathways to Partisanship: Evidence from Russia

Newly competitive party systems provide an opportunity to observe individuals as they first acquire partisan orientations. The development of partisanship shortly after the advent of multiparty competition in Russia is investigated. Expectations from existing scholarship are grouped into potential "pathways" to partisanship: political motivation and ability, voting experience, exposure to politics, civic motivations, group pressures, and immersion in social networks. The contributions of these pathways to partisan stability, consistency, and self-identification are assessed. This study examines the origins of party identification in democracies and helps to clarify a discrepancy between theories of partisanship as a crutch for the unaware and evidence that partisans are more sophisticated than their fellow citizens.     

The Elephant, Umbrella, and Quarrelling Cocks: Disaggregating Partisanship in Ghana's Fourth Republic

Within the literature on Ghanaian partisanship, a healthy debatehas arisen between those viewing Ghana’s two dominantparties as cleaved along socioeconomic lines and those suggestingthat this cleavage runs along ethnic lines. Using election results,constituency maps, census data, and a survey of voters’‘cognitive shortcuts’, this article weighs in withthe debate. The findings suggest that ethnicity matters in Ghanaianelections far more than socioeconomic variables. The findingsdo not, however, lead easily towards the gloomy predictionsthat often accompany ethnic politics. The relationship betweenethnicity and partisanship in Ghana is far more complex. Datapresented here suggest that Asante and Ewe voters are likelyto vote for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National DemocraticCongress (NDC), respectively, regardless of the candidates theyselect. Voters of other ethnic backgrounds, who make up thevast majority of Ghanaian voters, view the dominant partiesas representative of Asante and Ewe interests but do not themselvesvote as a block and base their evaluations of the ‘Asante’and ‘Ewe’ parties ultimately on things other thanethnicity. It is this latter group of voters that makes Ghanaianelections unpredictable and discourages politicians from turningnational votes into a zero-sum ethnic censes.     

Sources

It is not often that one has the chance to acknowledge the variouspublic sources, nearly all written, which are drawn on for thequarterly notes, but the end of the Jubilee Year seems a suitableoccasion to print a list, which is at once a guide, an acknowledgementand a tribute to the agencies of self-consciousness in Africa.Those publications are starred which have been, at one timeor another, for our special purposes, of special use.     

The Politics of Police Violence in Democratic Brazil

More than a decade after Latin America's most recent turn to democracy, unchecked police violence and torture continue and in some cases have increased. This study examines police killings in 19 Brazilian states from 1994 to 2001 and finds that democracy has not substantially reduced these types of human rights violations, for two reasons. First, underlying social conflict has continued to exert a significant impact on the lethal use of force by police officers. Second, pro-order political coalitions, generally represented by right-wing politicians, have blocked effective measures to control police violence and have implemented public safety measures that stress the use of force. The analysis emphasizes the nonteleological nature of democratization processes and demonstrates the strength of political forces working to maintain "illiberal democracy."     

Mass Education in Udi Division

This paper, written at our request by the responsible DistrictOfficer, illustrates the vitally important long-term, personallink between Europe and Africa. Udi is a Division in the OnitshaProvince (South-Central Nigeria) and the people described inthis "extension of the Administration" are Ibo.     

Sources of Reform in Britain: A Review Article

Books reviewed in this article:
Anna Clark and Sarah Richardson, History of Suffrage
Gregory Claeys (Ed), The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850     

Money, Elections, and Democracy in Brazil

Brazis 1993 law requiring candidates to report their campaign contributions has generated a new source of data to explore the supposition that Brazilian elections are extraordinarily expensive. An examination of these data from Brazis 1994 and 1998 general elections reveals that most money for Brazilian electoral campaigns comes from business sources and that leftist candidates have extremely limited access to such financing. The effect on democracy is that Brazis largely unregulated campaign finance system tends to decrease the scope of interest representation.     

Domestic relations in Brazil: legacies and horizons

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.     

Unworthy of Grief: Enduring Urban Violence in Northeast Brazil

Pervasive urban violence has taken its toll on daily life in the northern part of Recife. Taking an ethnographic approach, and tracing recent developments of violent crime and homicide in Recife, this article explores the implications of the normalisation of violence. By thinking through how residents tried to protect themselves and endure the violence in practical and moral terms, the article seeks to elucidate why some members of the community – victims of violent crime and their mothers – were not deemed worthy of grief.     

The politics of indigenous land rights Brazil

Brazilian indigenous rights policy has been exclusionary. As a result indigenous people and their supporters have mobilised and politicised indigenous issues. Politicisation led to inclusion of indigenous rights in the 1988 Constitution. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that this process led to a retrenchment of interests opposed to indigenous rights. This analysis compares the asymmetric access to the policy‐formation process granted to political and economic interests and indigenous people. The argument is that democratisation has yet to open the policy‐making process to disenfranchised groups such as indigenous people. To illustrate the argument evidence of setbacks to indigenous land rights is examined.     

Federalism and Governability in Brazil: Oil Royalties in Dispute

This article discusses the relationship between governability and federalism in Brazil, analysing the dispute among Brazilian states for oil royalties. This conflict features an unusual pattern in federal legislative voting, leading to regional alignment, rather than the usual party political configuration. This study explains the phenomenon by showing how this organisation makes it possible to align the preferences of national party leaders, regional party leaders, parliamentarians, and each state's voters. The political influence of governors and mayors is also underlined, and the Union's role in the process is described in detail.     

Agribusiness,Legislative Elections and Party Fragmentation in Brazil

The article explores the impact of agribusiness on the politics of legislative elections in Brazil. The central argument is that social contexts dominated by agribusiness tend to amplify the number of right-wing micro-parties, due firstly to the economic interests prevalent in such regions and secondly given the ‘catch all’ nature of Brazil's traditional right and centre-right political parties. By showing how agribusiness favours the proliferation of small parties, we may also reveal one of the main reasons behind the ‘hyperfragmentation’ of Brazil's party system.     

Gender Wage Work and Development in North East Brazil

The last three decades have witnessed a major expansion of export agriculture in Latin America and the emergence of largely feminised labour forces. Research has illustrated how farms purposefully construct gendered divisions of labour and how women often experience worse pay and conditions than men. However, it is also important to consider how and why gender divisions of labour change. This article does so by examining export grape production in North East Brazil. It locates farms' practices of gendering work within a three-pronged context of rising buyer requirements, changes in labour supply and the influence of rural trade unions.     

泰国非暴力群众运动与政治转型

20世纪60年代以来,非暴力群众运动在泰国的政治转型中曾起到重要的作用.本文通过对典型案例的分析,从参与群体、形成原因、主导力量的角度,探讨了泰国非暴力群众运动的特点.同时指出,对于泰国非暴力群众运动而言,其形成并不必然代表普遍的民意,其进程并不必然遵从参与者的意志,其结果也并不必然符合民主的初衷.