俄军费猛增为哪般

2004年底,俄罗斯政府提出高达1870亿卢布(约合66亿美元)的2005年国防预算,较上年增加27.6%也是俄政府预算总额5320亿卢布(约合190亿美元)所占份额最大一部分,这个预算已经俄议会批准.对俄军方这无疑是一个令人振奋的的消息.此次俄大幅度提升军费是苏联解体后的俄罗斯最大规模增加国防开支的行动.     

Contesting Europe: Strategies and Legacies in Polish Political Competition

This essay explores positions on European integration in the campaigns of a number of mainstream Polish political parties in recent elections. It shows how contestations of the European Union have, to some extent, been driven by strategic considerations related to inter-party competition. In Poland's fluid party landscape, political actors have sometimes relied on Euroscepticism to create seemingly clear lines of division between themselves and their political competitors. Yet these Eurosceptic views interact with, and are therefore also constrained by, certain legacies: ideas on the relationship between Europe and Poland that are already part of the cultural context.     

Political Competition and Local Social Spending: Evidence from Brazil

Electoral theories of democracy imply electoral competition insures accountability. Using data on local elections, socioeconomic factors, and municipal budgets from more than 5,000 municipalities in Brazil for the years 1996, 2000, and 2004, we find that municipalities with more competitive elections allocate less to social spending compared to municipalities with little political competition. We argue that previous theory on political competition and public goods obscures the critical role that financial resources play in shaping the dynamics of social spending and political competition. Municipalities with small budgets lack the resources necessary to engineer convincing electoral victories. Where resources are negligible, voter turnout is low, and incumbents rarely win reelection. Incumbent parties in municipalities with large financial resources win big. Armed with adequate resources, incumbent parties mobilize voters and win by large margins. This new argument and evidence reconcile contradictory findings in the existing literature on competition and public goods.     

伊朗大选缘何引发政治危机

伊朗伊斯兰政权创立伊始,具有现代政治理念的三权分立的治理方式就被嫁接到法基赫主宰的伊斯兰政权体系上,选举制度被纳入伊朗的政治系统中,并为伊斯兰政权的合法性提供依据,由此而形成的“伊斯兰民主”,在中东地区可谓独树一帜。因此,选举乃是伊朗政治生活的重要内容。然而,作为选举,最为重要的是它的公正性和有效性,否则,选举结果就很难被选民所认可,甚至会引发激烈冲突。2009年6月举行的伊朗第十届总统大选,围绕着是否存在选举舞弊问题,最终爆发了大规模抗议性示威并演化为深刻的政治危机,不仅对伊朗政局造成了前所未有的冲击,而且对未来伊朗政治发展道路也将产生深远的影响。     

苏共垮台溯源

1991年,苏共这个有着93年历史的大党宣布解散,同时也结束了自己单独连续执政长达74年的历史。那么,苏共是怎样由一个与人民群众血肉相联、甘愿为人民的利益流血牺牲、为人民谋福利的党,演变成为一个脱离了群众、高高在上而为群众所抛弃的党呢?其实,这个问题自苏联解体、苏共解散以后,就一直为我国所关注。显然,世界上最大、历史最长的共产党的兴衰成败对我党的执政实践更具借鉴意义。     

墨西哥革命制度党失去政权的原因

对墨西哥来说,20世纪是革命制度党的世纪。在其领导下,墨西哥创造了“奇迹”,不仅政治稳定,而且经济迅速发展。但这个单独连续执政71年的大党却在2000年失去了执政地位。之所以如此,主要有以下几个原因:一是它放弃了党的指导思想和原则,削弱了党的社会基础;二是经济政策的失误,诱发了一系列经济社会危机,动摇了党的阶级基础;三是党的职团结构功能弱化,党内派别斗争激烈,严重破坏了党的团结统一;四是治党不严,为政不廉,层出不穷的腐败丑闻降低了党的影响力;五是连续实施的政治改革,大大加速了革命制度党的失败进程。     

Patronage,District Creation,and Reform in Uganda

The effects of economic and political reforms on patronage in Africa remains unclear. In particular, there is much disagreement about whether structural adjustment programs and democratization have helped to make patronage less pervasive in African politics. Here, I examine the case study of Uganda, which has received much praise for its large-scale economic and political reforms since the late 1980s. However, at the same time, Uganda has also experienced a near-explosion in the number of districts (the highest level of local government), going from 39 to 80 in less than a decade. I examine a variety of potential reasons why these districts might have been created and argue, through the use of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, that district creation has functioned as a source of patronage. Specifically, I show that President Museveni’s government has created new districts as a means to compensate for other patronage resources lost through reforms and that new districts have helped him to continue to win elections. This paper thus constitutes the first rigorous demonstration that the creation of new sub-national political units can constitute a form of patronage and suggests that similar processes may be currently taking place across Africa.     

Patronage,Service Delivery,and Social Justice in Indonesia

This article examines how patronage networks operate in subnational governments in Indonesia paying particular attention to how they have affected human resource management (HRM) practices in education and health services. Corrupt practices were found in varying degrees in all the provincial public services studied. They were associated with patronage systems and involved illegal payments for entrance exam results, recruitment and selection, placement, promotion, and transfer. These practices had an adverse effect on the quantity and quality of service delivery and represented a challenge to social justice.

This article is related to the special issue “Contemporary Challenges for Public Sector Human Resource Management” of the International Journal of Public Administration, Volume 35, Issue 8, 2012.     

Why do presidents fail? Political leadership and the Argentine crisis (1999–2001)

This article explores why Argentine president Fernando de la Rúa (1999–2001) failed to govern and the factors that prevented him from compelting his constitutional mandate. This study draw on current literature about leadership. We argue that President De la Rúa’s ineffective performance was characteristic of an inflexible tendency towards unilateralism, isolationism, and an inability to compromise and persuade. Moreover, we examine how de la Rúas performance, in the context of severe political and economic constraints, discouraged cooperative practices among political actors, led to decision-making paralysis, and ultimately to a crisis of governance This work seeks to make four contributions. First, it conceptualizes political leadership by providing an analytical framework that integrates individual action, institutional resources and constraints, and policy context, thus filling a gap in the literature. Second, it explains the importance of effective leadership in building up and maintaining multiparty coalitions in presidential systems. Third, it complements existing institutional approaches to improve our understanding of a new type of instability in Latin America: the failure of more than a dozen of presidents to complete their constitutional mandates. Fourth, it analyzes the way political and economic variables interact in times of crisis. Mariana Llanos is a researcher at the Institut für Iberoamerika-Kunde (IIK) in Hamburg, Germany, and teaches Latin American politics at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on Latin American political institutions particularly to the president-congress relations and the legislatures of the Southern Cone. She is the author ofPrivatization and Democracy in Argentina (Palgrave, 2002), co-author ofBicameralismo, Senados y senadores en el Cono Sur latinoamericano (ICPS, Barcelona, 2005, together with Francisco Sánchez and Detlef Nolte) and co-editor ofControle Parlamentar na Alemanha, na Argentina e no Brasil (KAS, Rio de Janeiro, 2005, with Ana María Mustapic), among other works. Ana Margheritis is assistant professor of international relations and Latin American politics at University of Florida. Her research interests are in international political economy, foreign policy, regional cooperation, and inter-American relations. She is the editor ofLatin American Democracies in the New Global Economy (2003); author ofAjuste y Reforma en Argentina, 1989–1995 (1999); and co-author ofHistoria de las relaciones exteriores de la República Argentina (with Carlos Escudé et al., 1998) andMalvinas: Los motivos económicos de un conflicto (with Laura Tedesco, 1991), as well as of several articles in academic journals and book chapters. The authors are grateful to Vicente Palermo and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Electoral Rules,Political Competition and Fiscal Expenditures: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Brazilian Municipalities

We exploit a discontinuity in the rules of Brazilian mayoral elections to investigate whether political competition has a causal impact on fiscal policy choices. In municipalities with fewer than 200,000 voters, mayors are elected under a plurality voting system. In all other municipalities, a runoff election takes place between the top two candidates if neither achieves the majority of votes. Our results suggest that political competition induces more investment and less current expenditures, particularly personnel expenditures. The impact is larger when incumbents can run for re-election, suggesting incentives matter insofar as incumbents can themselves remain in office.     

Party Politics,Political Competition and Coming to Terms with the Past in Post-Communist Hungary

This article considers processes involved in coming to terms with the past in the early years of post-communist Hungary. It addresses the impacts of ‘soft’ late socialism, ‘negotiated’ post-socialist transition, and the intense inter-party and intra-party competition in which Hungary’s first democratically elected government operated. It concludes that claims that Hungary failed to confront the past in the early 1990s miss the mark. The past was confronted openly and aggressively by political actors, but the public will, as reflected in parliamentary legislation, was in favour of measures that resonated with ‘soft’ late socialism and a smooth post-socialist transition rather than political retribution.