Revisiting elites,transitions and founding elections: An unexpected caller from Indonesia

This article assesses the usefulness of the literature on democratic transitions for analysing recent regime change in Indonesia. A first stage in this literature emphasized the autonomy of elite relations (whether unified or disunified) and the roles adopted by elites (for example, soft‐liners, minimalists and swingmen). A second stage contextualized elite behaviours, addressing such variables as economic crisis and the intrinsic properties of different modes of transition. However, some limitations in this conceptualization are revealed by attempts to apply it in the Indonesian case. Specifically, elite relations are difficult to classify empirically and role choices remain highly ambiguous. Further, the notion that economic crisis compels elites to democratize, and second, the argument that transition by opposition‐led ‘replacement’ leads to far‐reaching changes and authoritarian backlash, are unsupported by Indonesian data. Two principal conclusions are reached: Indonesian democracy has good prospects for consolidating, and the literature on transitions has limited capacity to explain this benign outcome.     

Correctional officers and the use of force as an organizational behavior

During the past 30 years, bureaucratic managerialism has reshaped how prison staff maintain order. Policies and graduated disciplinary models have replaced coercive methods, reducing disciplinary use of force by prison staff against incarcerated people. Managerialism, however, disguises deep problems in the interpretation and enforcement of use-of-force policies. Drawing on 131 semistructured interviews with Canadian correctional officers (COs), I show how managers and prison staff interpret and negotiate policies to justify using force to maintain order. Although COs frame policies and management supervision as significant checks on their actions, they also suggest that inconsistencies in policy interpretation and implementation facilitate certain kinds of use-of-force decisions, which I define as “construction” and “outsourcing.” I conclude by discussing the broader organizational implications of these findings.     

Explaining Rivalry Escalation to War: Space, Position, and Contiguity in the Major Power Subsystem

Vasquez's (1996) rivalry escalation theory stressed territorial disputes as the principal focus for a two-path explanation of war. Neighbors fight over adjacent space and non-neighbors sometimes join ongoing wars between neighbors. But major powers are also much concerned with positional issues. Expanding the war motivation focus to encompass both spatial and positional issues facilitates the development of a new, more elaborate theory from which several new hypotheses can be derived, in addition to the older ones. Testing of the new theory can also proceed with rivalry data not based on dispute density measures, different types of contiguity can be assessed, and the presence of spatial-positional issues can be measured directly, as opposed to relying on a proximity proxy. The empirical outcome strongly supports the two-path, two-issue theory. In the major power subsystem, noncontiguous rivals outnumber contiguous rivals, dyadic wars are scarce, and war joining has been the norm. Spatial issues alone would have a hard time accounting for this pattern. Variable mixes of spatial and positional issues are able to account for it and a number of derived hypotheses reasonably well. This is not the last word on rivalry escalation to war but it appears to be an additional step in the right direction.