Food security as a political issue: the 2009 elections in Malawi

African electorates are expected to use non-evaluative rationales, like patronage and ethnicity, when casting their vote. In famine-struck countries like Malawi it is however worthwhile to investigate how a salient political issue like food security influences voters’ decisions. At the turn of the millennium Malawi went through a series of famines. In 2005 the government changed its famine prevention strategy and started to subsidise fertilisers. The fertiliser programme was a political success and is used to explain the outcome of the 2009 elections. Although this explanation seems plausible, such analyses should be grounded in thorough analyses of the origin and implementation of the food policy. Through archival studies and fieldwork, this study reveals the importance of the opposition in changing the food policy and the politics of the implementation process. Hence, even if food security increased ahead of the 2009 elections, the election cannot be interpreted as a ‘national referendum’ on the incumbent's fertiliser programme.     

Economic voting in South Korea: The 1988 assembly elections

The 1988 Assembly elections in South Korea provide an opportunity to explore whether voting based on short-term economic fluctuations was a feature of the elections. The research design regresses party votes from a large sample of the 224 electoral districts against several well-known determinants of Korean voting behavior (regionalism, urban-rural residence, and social class), as well as district unemployment rates and levels and changes in income. With traditional explanations of voting behavior held constant, income variables had no apparent influence on the vote. However, the coefficients for unemployment rates are large, statistically significant, and in a direction entirely consistent with the theory of rational economic voting. There are grounds for including short-term economic variables in future modeling of Korean electoral behavior.     

Two elections and a political regime in crisis: Turkish politics at the crossroads

Turkey had its fourth National Assembly elections on 7 June 2015 in the twenty-first century and this time they resulted in a hung parliament. The efforts at establishing a coalition government failed and the country moved to a snap, ‘repeat’ election on 1 November 2015. This paper focuses on how the voters registered their party preferences almost 5 months apart in the same legislative general elections and why. Using the same sample and interviewing those who lived at the same addresses as those in the ISSP Citizenship survey conducted February to April 2015 and again in October 2015, a panel data-set was constructed. A theoretical framework for voting behaviour that uses party identification, political ideology, ethnic, religious, social class identities and perceptions of the performance of the economy of the respondents to understand what factors help to influence the party preferences of the same respondents 5 months apart. A multivariate (binary logistic regression) analysis of the pre-June and October 2015 data sets revealed that economic voting had been the predominant factor in the June elections, but security concerns also interacted with popular economic evaluations in the November 2015 elections to reinstall the AKP to power.     

Parties and political change in South Asia

Over the past seven decades and more political parties have become an essential feature of the political landscape of the South Asian subcontinent, serving both as a conduit and product of the tumultuous change the region has experienced. Yet they have not been the focus of sustained scholarly attention. This collection focuses on different aspects of how major parties have been agents of – and subject to – change in three South Asian states (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), examining some of the apparent paradoxes of politics in the subcontinent. Recurring themes are the importance of charismatic leaders and their families (and the corresponding neglect of institutionalisation) and the lack of pluralism in intraparty affairs, factors that render parties and political systems vulnerable to degeneration.     

Social capital, social liabilities, and political capital: Social networks and informal manufacturing in Nigeria

This article addresses the question of why social networks havefailed to promote economic development in Africa when they havebeen associated with economic growth in other parts of the world.Detailed field research traces the role of social networks inthe economic organization of two dynamic informal enterpriseclusters in the town of Aba in south-eastern Nigeria, an arearenowned for the density of its popular economic networks andfor the rapid development of small-scale manufacturing underNigeria’s structural adjustment programme. Focusing onthe role of embedded social institutions and their restructuringamid the competitive pressures of rapid liberalization, I considerthe extent to which social networks in Aba constitute ‘socialcapital’ capable of promoting economic development inthe context of ongoing liberalization, ‘social liabilities’that undermine accumulation through a social logic of redistributionand parochialism, or ‘political capital’ throughwhich popular forces are incorporated into the ‘shadowstructures’ of predatory states. This article challengesthe essentialism of much of the contemporary literature on Africansocial networks, arguing for a sharper focus on the specificinstitutional capacities of indigenous economic institutions.It calls for greater attention to the role of rapid liberalizationand state neglect in explaining the developmental failures ofAfrican informal enterprise networks.     

Security implications of economic and political nationalism in the United States and South Korea

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent the position of any U.S. government agency.     

Human rights practices and the Indonesian middle class

Abstract

During the New Order we have often witnessed or read in the newspapers or at least heard from various circles about KOPKAMTIB actions such as banning or ordering coverage of a story in the mass media through only a telephone call; carrying out arrests, detention, and interrogation against citizens without regard to the proper procedures delineated in law; inhumane treatment during questioning; carrying out executions performed without regard to legal procedures, more commonly known as “mysterious shootings”; undertaking “political screening” of citizens to determine their loyalty to the government as in the case of prospective nominees in the General Elections; depriving citizens of their civil rights without trial, such as forbidding signatories to the Petition of 50 to leave the country and depriving them of the ability to earn a living by instructing all agencies and state banks not to honor their requests; the arrest and detention of religious teachers and so forth. All of this has been done with the excuse that the individuals involved are suspected of engaging in extremist or other subversive acts.     

Social injustice and economic dynamism in contemporary Korea

Abstract

This article examines the processes of labor market restructuring and welfare reform in South Korea since the 1997/98 crisis, arguing that the Korean state-capital complex has succeeded in effecting a substantial redistribution of income from labor to capital. This redistribution of income has played a critical role in enhancing Korea's international competitiveness and in facilitating a return to sustained growth. The principal mechanisms through which this redistribution has been achieved are the intensified exploitation of weaker sections of the proletariat and the reduction of the traditionally more protected organized sections of the workforce in major firms. At the same time, the state has strengthened welfare safety nets and sought to place concerns about structural competitiveness at the heart of the welfare regime through the promotion of vocational training. What has been most striking about the process of welfare reform, however, has been the capacity of the state to limit the growth of welfare expenditures/provision whilst simultaneously creating massive new labor market insecurities. As a result of the success of the Korean state in restructuring labor markets in order to effect a redistribution of income from weaker sections of the proletariat to capital and limiting the growth of social spending we have witnessed a marked increase in inequality since 1997. Korea's apparent success in transforming itself into a competitive, dynamic neoliberal economy must, therefore, be understood as being symbiotically linked to the intensification of inequality.     

Neo-liberalism in post-crisis South Korea: Social conditions and outcomes

South Korea's post-war development pattern has been considered to be a developmental state model, where the basic institutional framework was the “state-banks-chaebol nexus.” Since the financial crisis of 1997, however, the country has been swiftly transformed from the developmental state model and has acquired more neo-liberal characteristics. This has been made possible through intense reforms implemented by the post-crisis South Korean government under the IMF's guidance and encouraged by domestic political, ideational, and social conditions. Among those, significant conditions for this swift transformation include chaebols' legitimacy problems, neo-liberal consensus among the domestic elite, democracy hijacked by neo-liberalism, and the role of some NGOs. As social outcomes of the transformation, we find the enlarged presence of transnational capital, increased labour flexibility, inequality and poverty, and an increasing cultural gap in the country. Huge social costs of such neo-liberal transformation necessitate an alternative path of political economy.     

Social Movement Tradition and the Role of Civil Society in Japan and South Korea

In 1947, Japan became the first East Asian country to introduce democracy, and it was not until four decades later that South Korea completed the democratic transition. Today, surprisingly, South Korea stands out among the East Asian countries as the one that has the most vibrant and politically powerful civil society, whereas in Japan, the role of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector in political advocacy is greatly limited. Using historical institutionalism, this paper tries to explain why the NGOs in South Korea and Japan play vastly different roles in political advocacy. It concludes that the different social movement traditions have played important roles in the evolution of the civil societies in Japan and South Korea, and led to the different levels of institutionalization within the NGO sector.     

中、韩、日三国古代女性社会地位的表现及其异同

本文回顾了中、韩、日三国女性古代社会地位的发展和表现,并对其进行了对比,在此基础上分析了随着儒教的根基性影响及各国本土传统的结合,三国女性古代社会地位在整体相似的基础上出现了怎样的差异。