Mayahood Through Beauty: Indian Beauty Pageants in Guatemala

The election of a Ra'bin Ajaw constitutes the climax of the National Folklore Festival ( Festival Folklórico Nacional ), which since 1969 has taken place in Cobán during the last week of July. All participants are Maya Indians and must wear the traditional folk costume of their native township. The intention of this and other Indian pageants has been to preserve and reinvigorate traditional forms of cultural expression. Different from Ladina beauty queens, Indian queens are elected not so much on the basis of their looks as on their aptitude for representing cultural 'authenticity'. However, as the notion of the authentic relates to how cultural identities are constructed in the present, the beauty pageant has increasingly been troubled by a tension between a traditional folklorist type of orientation and a more recent and politicised Mayanist one. Indeed, the Indian pageants, originally formed within a folklorist paradigm, have become important arenas for the communication of Maya consciousness and identity.     

Attitudes and behaviour of party activists

Abstract. During the last four years a research project has studied the 'Middle-Level Elites' of sixty European political parties. Like most previous studies in this area the main objective of the project was strictly party activists' attitudes; no attention was paid to their actual behaviour in the party organisation. Other studies of recent date indicate however that party activists, despite their often more radical or extreme stands on many issues, often submit to the authority and dominance of the party leadership in the intraparty policy-making process. Thus, attitudinal data seem to tell us very little about the actual behaviour of the party activists. The article first presents the results of some recent studies on the attitudes of party activists. Secondly, these findings are related to studies on the actual behaviour of the activists. When synthesising these different types of observations, we can develop a typology of intraparty conflicts, as well as one of party activist behaviour. Together, these two typologies represent different models of intraorganisational behaviour. Finally, by using empirical illustrations drawn from recent studies on party activist attitudes or behaviour, some hypotheses deduced from the theories of May, Hirschman and Michels are introduced to suggest paths for future research and to point to some of the most salient problems in this area.     

Endogenous Parties in an Assembly

In this article, I show how members of an assembly form voting blocs strategically to coordinate their votes and affect the policy outcome chosen by the assembly. In a repeated voting game, permanent voting blocs form in equilibrium. These permanent voting blocs act as endogenous political parties that exercise party discipline. In a stylized assembly I prove that the equilibrium parties must be two small polarized voting blocs, one at each side of the ideological divide.