Indonesia and the “conflictual consensus”: a discursive perspective on Indonesian democracy

In this essay we propose an alternative approach to assessing the state of democracy in Indonesia. We focus not on institutional indicators (as is usually the case) but on manifestations of political discourses in the public sphere. In applying post-Marxist political theory through the work of Slavoj ?i?ek and Chantal Mouffe, we argue that democracy’s main defining feature is that it allows antagonistic discourses about alternative policies to coexist, yet still manages to coalesce around a minimal consensus on how these discursive conflicts are to be dealt with in a fair way. Applying this approach to democracy analysis to Indonesia, we suggest that the major obstacles to democratic practice do not emerge from institutional problems, but from an overbearing political discourse that imposes broad consensus and harmony on most political issues. Political discourse in Indonesia is generally structured around “Islam” and “the people.” These themes provide a basis for a political consensus that conceals economic and social contradictions and reveals considerable depoliticization in Indonesian democratic practice.     

Social Movements within Organisations: Occupy Parties in Italy and Turkey

This paper analyses a little-studied phenomenon: movements within parties. While parties and movements are often assumed to be separate entities, the borders between the two have proved to be more fluent. Parties frequently play a pivotal role in movement politics, and movements influence parties through the dual militancy of many of their members. The article presents two cases of Occupy movements taking place within major left-of-centre parties – the Italian PD and the Turkish CHP – and analyses the causes of discontent within the party and the choice of activists to voice this discontent rather than exit the party. It is argued that, beyond country specificities, shared factors include the perceived betrayal of social-democratic values, a lack of internal democracy, and electoral defeats. In both cases, activists’ choice to refer to Occupy in their opposition inside the party can be explained by the normative resonance of anti-austerity protest claims and forms within the party, as well as the instrumental exploitation of mass media attention to Occupy as a logo.     

Cognitive dissonance and the effects of Voting Advice Applications on voting behaviour: evidence from the European Elections 2014

ABSTRACT

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) – also known as Voting Engagement Applications – are online tools which inform users about their proximity to party positions before elections by indicating which parties are closest to the policy preferences of the individual voters. Referring to the theory of cognitive dissonance, this article examines the impact of using a VAA on voting behaviour by looking at the effect mechanisms. For the empirical analyses, we draw on data of a two-wave panel study we conducted before the European Elections 2014, thereby focusing on the German VAA – the Wahl-O-Mat. The findings show that irritation emerges if the preferred party is not positioned at the top of the VAA result list. In turn, a strong irritation can lead to a change in vote choice.     

When and where do elections matter? A global test of the democratization by elections hypothesis, 1900–2010

Successive multiparty elections in sub-Saharan Africa are associated with incremental democratization. Yet tests in other regions are less than encouraging. Non-significant findings on Latin America and post-communist Eurasia, as well as conceptual criticism regarding the theory’s application in the contemporary Middle East, suggest that this may be a case of African exceptionalism. This article moves these debates forward by posing a comprehensive, global set of tests on the democratizing effect of elections. We seek to establish the scope conditions of the argument geographically, temporally, and substantively. Although we find a correlation between reiterated multiparty elections and improvements in the liberal-democratic components of electoral regimes globally since 1900, the relationship is only substantial in the period since the onset of the third wave of democracy. Experiences with iterated multiparty elections have substantive importance for democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, the post-communist region, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. For the Middle East and North Africa, the relationship is weaker and less robust. Finally, the results suggest that reiterated sequences of multiparty elections are associated with improvements to liberal and deliberative components of democracy more so than egalitarian components.     

Unravelling semi-presidentialism: democracy and government performance in four distinct regime types

Do semi-presidential regimes perform worse than other regime types? Semi-presidentialism has become a preferred choice among constitution makers worldwide. The semi-presidential category contains anything but a coherent set of regimes, however. We need to separate between its two subtypes, premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism. Following Linz’s argument that presidentialism and semi-presidentialism are less conducive to democracy than parliamentarism a number of studies have empirically analysed the functioning and performance of semi-presidentialism. However, these studies have investigated the performance of semi-presidential subtypes in isolation from other constitutional regimes. By using indicators on regime performance and democracy, the aim of this study is to examine the performance of premier-presidential and president-parliamentary regimes in relation to parliamentarism and presidentialism. Premier-presidential regimes show performance records on a par with parliamentarism and on some measures even better. President-parliamentary regimes, on the contrary, perform worse than all other regime types on most of our included measures. The results of this novel study provide a strong call to constitution makers to stay away from president-parliamentarism as well as against the idea of thinking about semi-presidentialism as a single and coherent type of regime.     

Negotiating interference: US democracy promotion,Bolivia and the tale of a failed agreement

Since 2009 the USA and the Bolivian government have been trying to fix their broken diplomatic relations. These negotiations culminated in 2011 in the signing of a bilateral agreement but, ultimately, failed to establish a basis for mutually acceptable development aid relations. This article analyses these negotiations and suggests a partial explanation that accounts for their dynamics and results. Specifically it shows how the negotiations have pitted Bolivian demands for state sovereignty and mutual respect, based on an egalitarian understanding of inter-state relations, against the US emphasis on common obligations and universal rights, informed by a non-egalitarian notion of liberal hegemony.     

How Election Polls Shape Voting Behaviour

This article investigates how election information such as opinion polls can influence voting intention. The bandwagon effect claims that voters ‘float along’: a party experiencing increased support receives more support, and vice versa. Through a large national survey experiment, evidence is found of a bandwagon effect among Danish voters. When voters are exposed to a news story describing either an upwards or downwards movement for either a small or large party, they tend to move their voting intentions in the according direction. The effect is strongest in the positive direction – that is, when a party experiences increased support, more follows. Consistent effects are found across two different parties for a diverse national sample in a political context very different from earlier research on the bandwagon effects. Considering previous research and the fact that evidence is not found that suggests that the effect of polls vary across sociodemographic groups, the results imply that bandwagon behaviour is based not on social or political contingencies, such as media or political institution, but on fundamentals of political cognition.     

The Puzzling Lack of a Social Dilemma

Among theories dealing with welfare state policy development, theories of social dilemmas and of key actor-group influence over government policy formation are increasingly holding sway. These theories emphasise that few would risk being unilateral contributors to the systems without any compensating elements. Thus, selective, means-testing systems or stingy universal systems in which some citizens 'contribute' while others 'receive' may risk being regarded as unfair in the eyes of the contributors in spite of the redistributive intentions. The degree of welfare state programme 'fairness' and reciprocity would, then, explain the degree of support for the welfare state. However, by using data from the United Kingdom and Sweden, this article will, first, claim that the social dilemma research turns a blind eye to the fact that public opinion in general as well as key groups appears to be able to yield its support even when welfare states contain distinctly selective elements and low-compensation universal programmes. Second, the article will elaborate on the confusion surrounding welfare state taxonomies as one plausible reason for why social dilemma theories may risk missing the target. Finally, the article will elaborate on the future of the welfare state as we know it. The main points are that given the fact that the welfare states in the two countries really already are conglomerates of different types of welfare programmes and, given a weak relationship between key groups and policy formation, the most likely future for the welfare state is that policies will continue to follow mixed paths.