A comparative analysis of regionalism in the Global South: The security and defence dimension of Unasur and the African Union

The aim of this article is to compare Unasur and the African Union with regard to their institutional structure, agenda and performance. Although some scholars have made comparative assessments of regional institutions in the same region or comparisons between regional projects worldwide and the European Union, there are still few academic contributions which develop a cross-regional comparison among regional initiatives from different regions of the Global South. By assessing the cases of Unasur and the African Union, and particularly Unasur’s Defence Council and the AU’s Peace and Security Council, taking into account their institutional structure, performance and limitations, and the role of regional leaders and exogenous actors in both cases, we have elaborated an analytical framework aiming to identify and explain the similarities and differences between two regional institutions outside Europe. Based on the contributions of comparative regionalism and the evaluation of Unasur and the AU, we conduct a comparative analysis of both regional organisations, giving specific attention to their security and defence agendas, moving forward the empirical and analytical agenda of comparative regionalism.     

Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of ‘deliberative democracy’. This debate is fanned by the claims of ‘traditional leaders’ that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from people's daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over local-level resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Personal Politics and Being British: Political Rhetoric,Democracy and their Consequences in Colonial New South Wales

This paper argues that although our understanding of politics in colonial New South Wales in the period after 1856 has increased in recent times there is little appreciation of the political rhetoric employed to justify those politics. It contends that the key to understanding that rhetoric is an appreciation that politics was not understood in terms of institutional design but focused rather on the quality of political leaders. In particular, as exemplified by the case of Henry Parkes, it involved being British and being able to work British institutions. This emphasis on personal politics, rather than institutional matters such as the creation of checks and balances, helped to shape the nature of democratic institutions in Australia. In particular it encouraged a form of democracy that concentrated power. The refusal of members of the Legislative Council to oppose the Influx of Chinese Restriction Bill is an early indication of the consequences of that form of democracy.     

Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin

This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weakening of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts by Russian leaders to disengage society from the sphere of decision-making entail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership's best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation. Three case studies of the policy-making process are presented: the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.     

The coordination of policy priorities among regional institutions from the Baltic Sea to the Arctic: the institutions – coordination dilemma

We examine the coordination of policy priorities among the Arctic Council, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, the Council of Baltic Sea States, and the Nordic Council of Ministers. The member states of these groups established these institutions to coordinate their regional cooperation. However, the member states ended up having to coordinate the parallel work of these institutions. This coordination effort influenced their cooperation, creating an institutional coordination dilemma. We analyze how interests, leadership, and identity politics influence this dilemma and how negative, problem-solving, and positive forms of coordination can amend its effects regarding the temporal consistency of policy priorities and their sectoral overlap.     

A note on Palestine

Political dynasties seem to flourish in Asia, whatever the political system. But this is not a relapse into traditional rule. Political dynasties are modern hybrids in which elite political aims are linked to popular norms of charismatic legitimacy. They are found in non-democratic regimes, electoral democracies and democratic movements, providing key advantages in a context of weak institutions or institutional decay. The author's detailed analysis of the situation in countries as varied as North Korea and India, Singapore and Thailand, Japan and the Philippines, shows that the descendents of charismatic leaders play a major role in politics in Asia. For they are often the key to the survival of a regime, a party or a movement.     

Vietnam’s and China’s Diverging Industrial Relations Systems: Cases of Path Dependency

ABSTRACT

This article explains why Vietnam and China, one-party states that allow only one official trade union, are traversing different paths in their trade unions’ institutional structures, the state’s and trade union’s attitudes towards strikes, their willingness to allow independent trade unions and willingness to engage with the international labour union movement. These will be examined in terms of the path dependency of their recent histories, in which changes have been incremental on a path laid down by pre-existing entrenched institutions, until each national system no longer operated properly and new contingencies obliged the leadership to revamp the system. As a consequence of China’s and Vietnam’s divergent path dependencies, when external contingencies finally forced institutional change, countries have veered onto divergent trajectories – the Trans-Pacific Partnership energising Vietnam to debate the acceptance of autonomous trade unions, while Xi Jinping in China has intensified Party control over industrial relations.     

Reforming sacred institutions,part II: the Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church compared

The Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church are conceptualized as hierocratic institutions that faced analogous challenges of adaptation to a changing world from the 1950s onward. Building upon an earlier publication in Post-Soviet Affairs, this article identifies four strategies of “selective inclusion” chosen by these institutions as their leaders sought to reduce the pre-1950s levels of sectarianism: hierocratic reformism; hierocratic managerialism; messianic revivalism; and anti-hierocratic radicalism. Parallels in the adoption of these strategies, and common features of a legitimacy crisis they both came to face, reveal the causal strength of common features, while possible differences in their institutional durability suggest the likely causal impact of differences between them.     

能力分配、制度共容性和战略关注度:冷战后亚太多边经贸合作制度构建的成败分析

冷战结束后,亚太地区以经济合作制度为主的各类制度建设迅速发展,并嵌入到地区秩序中,这些制度的发展经历了不同的历程,产生了不同的结果。从制度变迁理论的视角来看,地区制度的发展历程可以分为制度需求、制度构建和制度的维持与深化三个阶段,不同因素在各阶段发挥的作用不同。具体而言,在亚太地区,能力分配、制度共容性和霸权国对地区的战略关注度这三个变量对于地区经贸合作制度构建的成败起到了决定性的影响。文章将后冷战时期的亚太制度变迁分为四个时期,通过考察各个时期内最具代表性的制度来检验上述理论假设。文章认为,当地区内大国力量对比悬殊时,只有同时具备较高的霸权国战略关注度和较强的制度共容性时,地区合作制度的构建才能成功;当地区内力量对比接近时,地区合作的路径会趋于多元化,具备较高的霸权国战略关注度或具有较高共容性的地区合作制度的构建都可以获得成功。因此对于中国而言,在霸权国对地区合作的战略关注度下降和大国力量对比接近时,要推动当前地区经济合作,需要保持战略定力,更多着眼于地区合作中的互利共赢。     

Does everyday corruption affect how Russians view their political leadership?

Do Russians’ personal experiences with corruption influence how they evaluate their political leaders and, if so, in what direction? In addressing this question, we focus specifically on small-scale corruption that arises when Russians encounter employees of service provision organizations. We analyze survey data gathered in the summer of 2015 from Russia to trace the links between personal corrupt behavior and political attitudes. We show that participation in everyday corruption lowers a person’s support for the political regime, both as a bivariate relationship and in a multivariate model with controls. Being involved in corrupt transactions reduces support for the regime through two indirect mechanisms: by making the political leadership’s performance seem worse and by heightening perceptions that corruption is widespread among the country’s leaders. We find no support for arguments in the literature that bribery and other forms of bureaucratic corruption help citizens pursue their needs in the face of inefficient state institutions and less developed economies. In Russia, those who frequently encounter corruption are less, not more, happy with the regime.     

The Participation Paradox of Indigenous Autonomy in Mexico

As indigenous movements around the world seek to strengthen their collective voice in their respective political systems, efforts continue to design political institutions that offer both sufficient local autonomy and incentives to participate in the broader political system. The state of Oaxaca, Mexico, offers a test case of one such effort at indigenous‐based institutional design. This article argues that such reforms often fail to confront the tension between local autonomy and citizen engagement in politics outside the borders of the community. Testing this theory through a comparative analysis of voter turnout rates in municipalities across the state of Oaxaca and the neighboring state of Guerrero, this study finds that the adoption of indigenous institutions at the local level is associated with significantly lower voter turnout rates for national elections.     

The paradox of natural resource abundance and widespread underdevelopment in Africa

A crisis in leadership, political instability and extreme state control of natural resources has marred Africa’s economic development over the years. these negative extremities paradoxically exist amidst a copious and generous endowment of abundant and diverse natural resources. State actors dominate the political scene, clamping down on any form of opposition to their hegemonic rules. they appear to seek to change leadership, often unconstitutionally, not for the wider benefit of the society, but to satisfy their selfish and narrow interests. The illegitimacy of the mode of change generates feelings of insecurity that compel such leaders to want to perpetuate themselves and their cronies in office. In order to finance their costly security requirements or manage the crisis they might have created, they fall back on state resources, exploiting them unsustainably to generate income and foreign exchange without channelling such earnings towards state development. this article reviews the development trajectory and challenges facing political transformations in post-independence Africa. Africa’s development stalemate is blamed on the tragedy of self-inflicted and constantly erupting political crises; failure to raise investment capital from abundant natural resources; and limited capacity of states to provide the necessary infrastructure for development. Continued reliance on development partners for development capital has not yielded desired results.     

Can a rentier state evolve to a production state? An ‘institutional upgrading’ approach

ABSTRACT

Can a rentier state evolve to a production state? This article attempts to answer this question by analysing how historically states evolved to production states and by comparing their experience with today’s Gulf states. Although the Gulf states show some productive traits today, their mode of production largely remains ‘production with rentier characteristics’, that is reliant on oil-driven advantages. Their further economic diversification requires improved governance capabilities that enable their government to enhance human capital. Production states around the world acquired such governance capabilities through ‘institutional upgrading’, a replacement of clientelistic institutions with meritocratic ones. While clientelistic institutions tend to persist, such institutions were significantly reduced in these states through the exit of vested-interest players from major fiscal and organizational spaces. The exit appears to occur when these vested-interest players accept pain-sharing to ensure their protection in the context of the revealed vulnerability of their patron regime and when alternative productive gains are offered to them in lieu of conventional distribution. Presently neither condition is in existence in the Gulf states, which continue to be characterized by their direct and extensive distributional regimes. Without a prospect for immediate governance improvement, a realistic reform possibility lies in agency under institutional constraints.     

The vicious circle of post-Soviet neopatrimonialism in Russia

Since the collapse of Communism, Russia and some other post-Soviet states have attempted to pursue socioeconomic reforms while relying upon the political institutions of neopatrimonialism. This politico-economic order was established to serve the interests of ruling groups and establish the major features of states, political regimes, and market economies. It provided numerous negative incentives for governing the economy and the state due to the unconstrained rent-seeking behavior of major actors. Policy reform programs revealed these institutions to be incompatible with the priorities of modernization, and efforts to resolve these contradictions through a number of partial and compromise solutions often worsened the situation vis-à-vis preservation of the status quo. The ruling groups lack incentives for institutional changes, which could undermine their political and economic dominance, and are caught in a vicious circle: reforms often result in minor returns or cause unintended and undesired consequences. What are the possible domestic and international incentives to reject the political institutions of neopatrimonialism in post-Soviet states and replace them with inclusive economic and political ones?     

The Structural Limits of Depoliticisation in Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

Sri Lanka’s institutional reform project has gathered momentum with the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment restored the Constitutional Council, which is mandated to recommend and approve appointments to key ‘independent’ institutions and offices. This article asks what it means to be meaningfully ‘depoliticised’, and explores the dynamics and parameters of the current institutional reform project in Sri Lanka. It argues that the entrenchment of Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism within Sri Lanka’s institutional structures has led to ‘institutional decay’. Given such decay, the article points to serious limitations in legalistic approaches that are preoccupied with improving appointment procedures. Since institutions in Sri Lanka are structurally incentivized to appease a majoritarian agenda, relying on legal-textual and institutional reform alone is inadequate. Institutional reform is ultimately constrained by the structural limits of Sri Lanka’s current constitutional framework. The article concludes that meaningful constitutional transformation requires a long-term project that aims to transform the majoritarian socio-political and cultural norms that underpin Sri Lanka’s constitutional order.     

Promoting empowerment? The World Bank's Village Investment Project in Kyrgyzstan

This article examines the extent to which the World Bank's community-driven Village Investment Project empowered people to influence the choice of local investments (micro-projects) and to exact accountability from their leaders. It is based on qualitative interviews and group discussions in 16 rural communities. The research demonstrates that the project provided an effective mechanism for responsive infrastructure delivery to address local priority needs. However, it did not improve accountability either within or outside the micro-project boundaries. The project's bottom-up development model was not by itself sufficient to enable people to exercise power over local government officials and informal leaders in the absence of effective horizontal accountability institutions within the state.     

The institutionalization of relative advantage: formal institutions,subconstitutional presidential powers,and the rise of authoritarian politics in Russia, 1994–2012

What role do formal institutions play in the consolidation of authoritarian regimes such as the Russian Federation? Oftentimes, it is assumed that autocrats, usually potent presidents, wield informal powers and control far-flung patron–client networks that undermine formal institutions and bolster their rule. After the institutional turn in authoritarianism studies, elections, parties, legislatures, or courts have taken center stage, yet presidencies and public law are still on the margins of this research paradigm. This paper proposes a method for measuring subconstitutional presidential power and its change by federal law, decrees, and Constitutional Court rulings as well as a theoretical framework for explaining when and under which conditions subconstitutional presidential power expands. It is argued that as a result of a gradual, small-scale, and slow-moving process of layering, presidential powers have been accumulated over time. This furthers the institutionalization of presidential advantage toward other federal and regional institutions, which in turn contributes to the consolidation of authoritarianism.     

Nagano Shigeo: Business Leadership in the Asia Pacific Region and the Formation of the Pacific Basin Economic Council

The Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) was established in 1968 through the initiatives taken by the Japanese and Australian business leaders. This article focuses on the ideas and activities of the Japanese and Australian business leaders in the establishment of PBEC, especially those of Nagano Shigeo and W.R.C. Anderson, both of whom devoted themselves to the establishment of PBEC, while cooperating with each other. The central questions posed are: how and why Nagano and Anderson came to consider it desirable to establish an economic institution in the Asia Pacific region in the mid-1960s; how and why those ideas were refined and transformed into the establishment of PBEC; what approaches business leaders in other countries took towards Pacific cooperation and how the Japanese and Australians adjusted different interests of people in other countries in organising PBEC. Finally, the article assesses the role played by PBEC in the development of economic cooperation in Asia and the Pacific and insists that it should help set up foundations for the subsequent organisations of regional economic institutions such as the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.     

How the Global Pandemic Intensifies Vulnerabilities for Colombia's Women Social Leaders

Women social leaders in Colombia say that the biggest danger posed by the global pandemic comes not from contracting the virus, but rather from non-state armed groups taking advantage of the quarantine to violently pursue social and territorial control. This article details three phenomena that highlight how existing vulnerabilities for women social leaders have been sharpened by the global pandemic: (a) women's community work increases while state and institutional support decrease; (b) armed groups' ability to target violence increases while women's ability to self-protect decreased; and (c) armed groups' ability to act with impunity is increasing as access to justice is limited.     

Politics and the Price of Rice in Thailand: Public Choice,Institutional Change and Rural Subsidies

Despite the Thai state’s long record of rice market interventions, historically politicians failed to leverage rice subsidies in their pursuit of political support, notwithstanding the large number of farmers in the country. Since Thaksin Shinawatra’s election in 2001, though, each government has subsidised rice producers, although at varying degrees. What explains this change? This article traces the four-decade history of rice price support programmes. It is proposed that these policies be interpreted through the dual lens of institutionalism and public choice theory, demonstrating how political institutions have shaped incentives for politicians to cater to different constituencies. During the pre-1980 period, under authoritarian regimes, Thai leaders applied rice price policies to benefit urban consumers and the government. From 1979 through 2000, following implementation of the block-vote system, rice interventions were used to appeal to voting intermediaries like rice millers, as bargaining chips among competing parties and as stopgap measures to diffuse farmer protests. Since 2001, responding to the electoral system created by the 1997 constitution, politicians have appealed directly to the voting public, seeking broad-based support via subsidies. The analysis highlights the impact that shifting institutional incentives have on politicians’ actions and thus the emergent policies.