Nato Enlargement and the Spread of Democracy: Evidence and Expectations

The second enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since the end of the cold war fueled an ongoing debate over whether the alliance contributes to democratization in Europe. In the 1990s, critics warned that the 1999 NATO enlargement would cultivate a new cold war and prove irrelevant to democratic consolidation in central Europe. Events have not borne out these forecasts, however. In Poland, not only did NATO build a civilian consensus in favor of democratic control over the armed forces corresponding to NATO norms, but it also delegitimized Polish arguments for defense self-sufficiency that had derived their credibility from Poland's experience of military vulnerability and foreign domination. Such democratizing and denationalizing trends have contributed to stability in postcommunist Europe. An assessment of the seven states that joined in 2004 similarly reveals some scope for NATO's influence in all cases. The alliance's access to domestic reform processes, however, will be uneven across cases in ways largely consistent with the predictions of the theoretical framework in this article.

     

Digital India? an email experiment with Indian legislators

ABSTRACT

Of the many tasks elected representatives perform, constituency service is among the most difficult to observe and, therefore, to measure. However, a burgeoning literature uses digital tools such as email to experimentally evaluate the responsiveness of political elites to requests for constituency service. To date, this literature has overwhelmingly focused on the developed world. In this article, we describe the results of an email experiment in which we sent plausible, but fictitious constituency service requests to national legislators in India to evaluate their responsiveness, helpfulness, and possibly discriminatory behavior. While the overall response rate to our request is quite poor, those that do respond tend to offer “meaningful” responses. We find scant evidence of legislators discriminating on religious lines.     

Teaching restorative justice: developing a restorative andragogy for face-to-face,online and hybrid course modalities

Teaching restorative justice in an academic setting is different from teaching almost any other academic course. Courses taught in the context of academic criminal justice programs tend to reinforce the structural inequalities in society, replicated and reinforced by instructor driven classroom experiences. In contrast, effective teaching of restorative justice should emulate the values of principles of restorative justice in the organization and management of the course. Teachers of restorative justice must ‘walk the talk’ and apply restorative principles and values to the design and delivery of the course itself. A conceptual framework for ‘restorative andragogy’ is developed that blends principles and values of adult learning with those of restorative justice. Four principles of this approach are identified and applied across three instructional modalities – face-to-face, online only, and hybrid courses. This approach provides a theoretically grounded model for effective teaching of restorative justice courses.     

Safety in small numbers: Local strategies for survival and growth in Romania and the Kyrgyz Republic

Using a comparative study of farm households from poor rural communities in Kyrgyzstan and north-east Romania this paper explores the intricacies of a variety of forms of cooperation in agriculture. The findings highlight the safety net, labour specialisation, asset-pooling and service delivery functions of different groups that enable rural livelihoods to, at times, cope and at times improve in situations of imperfect information, sluggish labour and land markets, and constrained capital markets. The research presented here indicates that small to medium forms of cooperation provide the rural poor with predictable livelihood strategies under conditions of uncertainty. Specifically, cooperative action, in the form of groups, substitutes for imperfect markets. Despite the push for decollectivisation and privatisation across transition countries there remains a place for encouraging group initiatives, at least for the medium term, on the grounds of both poverty alleviation and agricultural growth.     

Shorter notices

Extension in Rural Communities. By A. H. Savile. Oxford University Press, 1965. Pp. 143. 21/‐.

The Financial Sector and Economic Development: The Mexican Case. By Robert L. Bennett. Oxford University Press, 1965. Pp. 244. 56/‐.

The Wretched of the Earth. By F. Fanon. MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1965. Pp. 255. 36/‐.

The Sierra Leone Diamonds By H. L. Van der Laan. Oxford University Press, London, 1965. Pp. 228. 25/‐.

Some Economic Aspects of Business Organisation. By James E. McNulty. University of Pennsylvania Press,Philadelphia. Pp. 122.40/‐.

Farming as a Business. By M. Upton and Q. B. O. Anthonio. Oxford Tropical Handbooks. Oxford University Press, 1965. Pp. 133. 21/‐.     

A Tangled Web: Complexity and Inequality in the English Local Government Finance Settlement

The £29 billion formula grant stands at the heart of the English local government finance system. This transfer of resource from central to local government has, since 2006–07, been distributed using the so-called ‘four block model’. This extraordinarily complex formula-based funding mechanism aims to ensure that all local authorities are able to provide individuals with a broadly comparable level of public service – offering greatest support to local authorities with high service needs and/or low capacity to raise revenue. This paper outlines the structure and workings of the four block model and, drawing attention to key methodological shortcomings, explains why the resulting distribution of the formula grant is both arbitrary and inequitable. In particular it argues that key model parameters – specifically the need and resource equalisation proportions – are set in order to fulfil a particular funding outcome. This flies in the face of the basic tenets of resource allocation methodology in that, being outcome-led, the approach is clearly neither need-based nor impartial. The paper argues that the four block model fails to meet its own goal of fiscal equalisation, is likely to lead to increasing service disparities, and must be replaced as a matter of urgency.     

The Russian Dance with Democracy

An American political scientist investigates whether, and how, the political and economic values of ordinary Russians have changed. The study is based on a three-wave panel survey of a representative national sample of Russians, conducted between 1996 and 2000. The article considers the degree to which democratic commitments have solidified over the last half of the decade. The article also tests the conventional wisdom that democratic values are dependent upon perceptions of a successful economy.     

The Road from Dayton to Brussels? The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Politics of War Crimes in Bosnia

Abstract

The tenth anniversary of the massacre of 7–8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995 set in stark relief the continuing salience of war crimes in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the country now firmly on a path ‘from Dayton to Brussels’, dealing with the war crimes legacy is critical to its future development. Cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is a non-negotiable condition for further progress toward membership of the European Union and NATO's Partnership for Peace, while in the long-term, dealing with the legacy of war crimes is crucial to establishing lasting peace in Bosnia and in the region. This article examines the potential contribution of the ICTY to the restoration of peace in Bosnia in the context of debates about the role of post-conflict justice in societies in transition from war to peace and in the context of the international community's use of the war crimes issues as a political bargaining tool. It will be argued that the two are inextricably linked as short-term pragmatic advantages brought by cooperation work in tandem with longer-term goals of peace and reconciliation.