The determinants of voluntary judicial resignation in Australia,Canada, and New Zealand

This article compares supreme and high court judicial turnover with respect to voluntary exits and retirements in three Westminster parliamentary democracies, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, for the period 1970–2012. The findings of an event history model indicate that judges who author large numbers of opinions in a given year are likely to stay longer, while those who dissent from their colleagues frequently are more likely to exit early. It was also found that judges are more likely to resign if the party that appointed them was expected to lose government.     

The Resurgence of the Niger Delta Militants and the Survival of the Nigerian State

The 2016 resumption of hostilities in the oil-rich Niger Delta region that is the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, in a dwindling international oil price, has become a subject of controversy. This analysis, which is based on empirical evidence from primary and secondary sources, shows a group of militants—the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), selective anti-corruption crusade, the clamp down on federal government structure in the Niger Delta, amnesty time limit to Niger Delta ex-militants, self–determination and the attempt to single out former President Goodluck Jonathan from Niger Delta, among other former presidents for prosecution, as the core drivers of insecurity in the oil-rich region. It is suggested that the Nigerian government should embrace the power of dialogue that has brought relative peace in the Niger Delta region from 2009 to 2015, as a veritable tool to stop the ongoing hostilities.     

Land tenure regimes and state structure in rural Africa: implications for forms of resistance to large-scale land acquisitions by outsiders

This paper argues for seeing African land tenure regimes as institutional configurations that have been defined and redefined as part of state-building projects. Land regimes have built state authority in the rural areas, fixed populations in rural territories, and organised rural society into political collectivities subject to central control. Land tenure regimes can be understood as varying across subnational jurisdictions (rather than as invariant across space) in ways that can be grasped in terms of a conceptual distinction between neo-customary and statist forms (rather than as infinitely diverse). Differences between the two have implications for the character of political authority in the rural areas, the nature of political identities and community structure, and the nature of property and land claims. These political effects are visible in differences in the forms of local protest and resistance to commercial land acquisitions in peri-urban Kumasi, Ghana, where a neo-customary land regime prevails, and the Kiru Valley of northern Tanzania, where land institutions are decidedly statist.     

The nature of political advising to prime ministers in Australia,Canada, New Zealand and the UK

Political advisors to heads of government occupy such a privileged sphere of influence that their role is a source of consternation among democratic idealists. Interviews with advisors to prime ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK inform a small body of comparative literature about political advising in the Commonwealth. The authors find that first ministers consider input from many advisors and therefore the counsel of any one advisor is of limited impact. Further research is needed to understand the extent to which these agents project the power of the executive office and make decisions on the principal's behalf.     

Authoritarian Co-optation in the Age of Globalisation: Evidence from Hong Kong

The existing literature on authoritarian survival, implicitly or explicitly, assumes that political challenges faced by authoritarian regimes are all domestic. I argue that globalisation exposes authoritarian regimes to new sources of threat. In particular, capital mobility forces authoritarian regimes to deal with not only those who dare to voice out dissatisfaction, but also those who exit. While repression may be the best strategy to silence the vocal, co-optation would be a more effective tool to retain the runaway. It is, however, often impossible to co-opt all the capital owners. As such, authoritarian regimes have to be selective when choosing co-optation targets. I argue that authoritarian regimes would co-opt renowned firms because these firms yield the greatest demonstration effect. Hong Kong provides an interesting case to illustrate my arguments. Beijing strategically co-opted the stakeholders of renowned firms in Hong Kong in order to solve the city's pervasive confidence crisis prior to 1997. I test my arguments with data on firms listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. I find that firms owned by well-known and prestigious elite families were more likely to build political connections with Beijing. To test the causal linkage more rigorously, I use both the genetic matching and instrumental variable approaches. The empirical results provide strong support to my arguments.     

The Effect of Ministerial Instability on Government's Mandate Fulfilment: Evidence from the Portuguese Case

Research on the fulfilment of electoral promises has been particularly fruitful over the past decades. Most of it focused on examining pledge fulfilment at the cabinet level, and little emphasis was placed on the reasons underlying the level of compliance. As a consequence, core factors in explaining pledge fulfilment have not yet been explored. One such factor might be instability in a government's internal functioning. We argue that ministerial instability is relevant for explaining a government's broken promises, and that its importance increases at the junior minister level and among the most salient ministries. Relying on data on the fulfilment of electoral promises and ministerial instability in Portugal between 1995 and 2019, backed by interviews with former ministers and junior ministers, we provide evidence that the fulfilment of electoral promises is significantly influenced by portfolio volatility, particularly at the junior ministerial level and in the most important ministries.     

The enactment of public participation in rulemaking: A comparative analysis

This study analyzes the enactment of public participation in rulemaking within the European Union and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries. It relies on an original dataset of administrative procedural acts and administrative laws concerning the making of delegated legislation. As 12 out of 39 countries enacted a procedure of notification, publication, and consultation between 1995 and 2015, the study focuses on courts while controlling for other domestic institutional determinants of legislative adoption and countries’ interdependence. The empirical findings show that countries with a highly independent judiciary system are less likely to enact a comprehensive provision for public participation in rulemaking. This finding highlights a paradox, namely that political systems are more likely to adopt rulemaking to enhance democratic legitimacy if they are characterized by a judicial system that does not actively pursue the legality of rulemaking.     

The Politics of Welfare State Reform

This article presents and discusses the state of the art in political science research on welfare state reform. While scholars first aimed at explaining the emergence and growth of the welfare state, national variation in its development, and crises of welfare state regimes, more recently the focus has shifted to the persistence and reform of the major welfare state institutions. Research in this direction has typically adopted an institutionalist perspective, stressing how institutional settings affect the feasibility and direction of reforms. These studies have shed light on important aspects of the question, in particular by demonstrating the role of path dependency and veto players in reform processes, but suffer from two main problems, namely the difficulty of defining the dependent variable in an appropriate way, and the neglect of the importance of power resources.     

唐朝与新罗往来研究二题——以西安周边所在的石刻碑志为中心

西安及其周边地区乃汉唐都城长安辖区所在,保存着大量的历史文化遗迹。由于唐朝与朝鲜半岛国家保持有十分紧密的来往关系,入唐新罗使者、僧人、商人、留学生等纷纷来到这里,成为唐朝与周边民族国家友好交往的典范。本稿对“万年宫碑阴题名”、“乾陵六十一蕃臣像”涉及的唐朝与新罗关系问题试作论述,认为万年宫碑阴题名中应该是“左领军将军臣金仁问”,而非此前一些论著所误释的薛仁贵或刘仁轨;乾陵六十一番臣像东南角的石像应为新罗人没错,但将其确定为具体的某人就有问题。     

The New Dynamic of Blockbuster Exhibitions: The Case of Brazilian Museums

Many European and North American museums have increasingly adapted to the new communication era. They have opened up a new cultural flux and attract millions of visitors each year. In Brazil, we have observed in recent years the acceptance of new temporary and international exhibits. What is the meaning of the new exhibiting strategies, since the most important and traditional national museums still face stagnation? Can they be considered as part of a process of democratisation and reflexivity or accused of capitulating to the consumer society? This article proposes to analyse the production, diffusion and reception of recent Brazilian exhibitions. This analysis will be carried out in relation to the hierarchy of norms, values and practices present in Brazilian society.     

Australian National Anthologies: A Study of Poems and Poets

This article analyses the contents of fifteen Australian “national” poetry anthologies published between 1946 and 2011. The study has three basic aims: to identify the most anthologised poems (as determined by the greatest number of inclusions in all anthologies), to identify poets with the most poems anthologised, and to identify the poets most consistently represented during this period. Based on quantitative data derived from each anthology’s table of contents, this article provides an empirical and analytical account of Australian national poetry anthologies over a six-decade period. The results reveal a core group of consistently anthologised poems and poets. While each anthology is different, there is a degree of consensus among national anthologists regarding the inclusion of “standard anthology pieces”. This article also considers the role of national anthologies in supporting a hierarchy of established literary reputations and perpetuating a poetic tradition in Australian literature.     

The Rise and Fall of the Australian Women's Bureau

Policy textbooks often overlook the importance of international borrowing in their accounts of the policy process. Analysis of feminist policy influence also tends to neglect the international dimension of the opportunity structure and the leverage provided by international agendas. In this article we tell the story of how the Women's Bureau, the first women's unit in Australian government, came into being in the 1960s. This story encompasses the overseas modelling of such bureaux and the promotion of such models through international women's organisations and their national affiliates. The international dimension has been inseparable from the development of women's policy machinery in Australian government; the current disengagement from international standard setting coincides with the dismantling of domestic machinery, including the Women's Bureau.     

The politics of culture and the space for Islam: Soviet and post-Soviet imaginaries in Uzbekistan

This article examines how possibilities for Muslim expression were and are shaped by the political imaginaries in Soviet-era and independent Uzbekistan. It develops the concept of social ‘imaginary’ in Charles Taylor's critique of Western secular modernity. Political imaginaries are the assumptions about the nature of being, the essential categories through which the world is understood and acted upon, that are produced within dominant state discourses and that shape the space for the political. The article compares the Soviet vision of socialist modernity and the logic of the current state ideology in independent Uzbekistan, and discusses how these have framed the possibilities for being Muslim. It argues that the category of culture is produced in distinct and contrasting ways in these imaginaries, and plays a central role in delineating the public space for Islam.     

探析当今美国传播与政治的关系

传媒与政治有密切的关系,传媒的巨大宣传功能为政府提供了影响和引导舆论的工具。美国向来标榜“新闻自由”,但却打着信息传播的幌子对他国进行价值观的渗透,本文从美国传媒对北约轰炸南联盟的报道中剖析美国传媒与政治的关系,指出美国传媒并非它所自我标榜的那么“独立”和“公正”     

"9·11事件"对东南亚伊斯兰文化圈的冲击

"9·11事件"对东南亚的最大影响之一,是使该地区政治与宗教的关系发生变化,两者之间的矛盾有可能上升为主要矛盾,影响该地区主要国家的社会政治稳定,进而危及该地区的和平与安全,还有可能改变地区政治格局.     

The Other Side of the Coin: Reading the Politics of the 2008 Financial Tsunami

In the spring of 2009, long months after the September 2008 financial tsunami had begun its destructive journey around the financial machineries of the global system, the governing party of the United Kingdom, one of two countries whose financial centres had precipitated all the trouble, is still in place, notwithstanding the almost audible sound of a population tapping its collective foot as it awaits an electoral opportunity to wreak a measure of revenge. But the electorate is condemned to wait upon the convenience of the government and administrative machineries that are responsible for the debacle. This seems unreasonable. One might ask how is this possible and what—speculatively—could happen to improve matters; that is, one can ask how the elite's insulating machineries might be reduced in order to bring them more routinely within the reach of the judgements of the electorate.     

Institutional and symbolic aspects of illiberal politics: the case of North Macedonia (2006–2017)

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the underlying characteristics of Macedonian illiberal politics during the 11-year rule of the centre-right party VMRO-DPMNE (2006–2017) focusing on two aspects: institutional and symbolic. We argue that the unfair political competition was enabled by the weakness of pre-existing institutions and the population’s clientelist preferences, which were systematically exploited and expanded by VMRO-DPMNE. We also argue that the multi-ethnic character of the country, the disputed Macedonian national identity and the lack of viable international prospects allowed VMRO-DPMNE to construct a strong nationalist narrative that appealed to voters and further isolated the opposition.     

In Search of Alternatives: The Making of Grassroots Politics and Power in Argentina

This article analyses ethnographically the reconfigurations of the state and relations of power through their dynamic interactions with subaltern alternatives that emerged in the 2001 uprising in Argentina. In this regard, it counters influential interpretations of these events articulated within John Holloway’s framework of ‘anti‐power’, which ignores the reconstruction of the state, and rank and file trade unionism. The article concludes that intensified class and political struggles in the region offer new spaces for contesting hegemonic reinventions of populism and ‘top‐down’ socialism in Latin America.     

The Political Constraints on Economic Policy in Post-1982 Mexico: The Case of Pemex

Abstract Fourteen years of market-oriented reform in Mexico have led to many economic changes. However during 1982–1994 there was relatively little change in the hydrocarbon sector. This article seeks to explain the slowness of reform essentially in political terms. While political constraints on reforming the hydrocarbons sector were genuine, it is also clear that the De la Madrid and Salinas governments chose to avoid controversial decisions in this sector as far as possible. Risk aversion seems, at least in this context, to have been a characteristic of Mexican authoritarianism during 1982–1994. Because of the inherent importance of the oil and gas sector to the Mexican economy, the slow growth of production since 1982 (largely resulting from extreme policy caution) provides a part of the explanation for the slow growth of the Mexican economy as a whole.