Akwasidae

This account of a famous Ashanti festival was written by anEwe scholar, who revisited his native country in 1949, after20 years in Europe. In this time he had a varied career, whichinvolved co-operation in anthropological work, the friendshipof certain well-known Swedish and German physicists, a certainpart in the social and intellectual life of Dublin, in whichhe joined from his Lomeshie Research Centre in Londonderry.He wrote a brief history of West African Art, and proposed inquiriesinto indigenous herbal remedies, and various endemic diseases.He has now returned to Kumasi, to set up a new Research Centre.     

Medicine in Africa as I have seen It

This address by Dr. Smith was given before a joint meeting ofthe Royal African Society and the Royal Empire Society withLt.-Col. Sir Stewart Symes in the chair. Dr. Smith is May Readerin Medicine at Oxford University and Physician-in-Charge ofthe tuberculous Meningitis Unit at the United Oxford Hospitals.She formerly worked with Sir Hugh Cairns at the Radcliffe Infirmary,and was associated with him in starting certain research projectsin Africa concerned with various aspects of tuberculosis.     

Blame shifting and blame obfuscation: The blame avoidance effects of delegation in the European Union

The delegation of governance tasks to third parties is generally assumed to help governments to avoid blame once policies become contested. International organizations, including the European Union (EU), are considered particularly opportune in this regard. The literature lacks assessments of the blame avoidance effects of delegation, let alone of the effects of different delegation designs. To address this gap in the literature, we study public blame attributions in the media coverage of two contested EU policies during the financial crisis and the migration crisis. We show that the blame avoidance effect of delegation depends on the delegation design: When agents are independent (dependent) of government control, we observe lower (higher) shares of public blame attributions targeting the government (blame shifting effect), and when agents are external (internal) to the government apparatus, overall public blame attributions for a contested policy will be less (more) frequent (blame obfuscation effect). Our findings yield important normative implications for how to maintain governments’ accountability once they have delegated governance tasks to third parties.     

Institutionalising electoral uncertainty and authoritarian regime survival

Authoritarian incumbents routinely use democratic emulation as a strategy to extend their tenure in power. Yet, there is also evidence that multiparty competition makes electoral authoritarianism more vulnerable to failure. Proceeding from the assumption that the outcomes of authoritarian electoral openings are inherently uncertain, it is argued in this article that the institutionalisation of elections determines whether electoral authoritarianism promotes stability or vulnerability. By ‘institutionalisation’, it is meant the ability of authoritarian regimes to reduce uncertainty over outcomes as they regularly hold multiparty elections. Using discrete-time event-history models for competing risks, the effects of sequences of multiparty elections on patterns of regime survival and failure in 262 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010 are assessed, conditioned on their degree of competitiveness. The findings suggest that the institutionalisation of electoral uncertainty enhances authoritarian regime survival. However, for competitive electoral authoritarian regimes this entails substantial risk. The first three elections substantially increase the probability of democratisation, with the danger subsequently diminishing. This suggests that convoking multiparty competition is a risky game with potentially high rewards for autocrats who manage to institutionalise elections. Yet, only a small number of authoritarian regimes survive as competitive beyond the first few elections, suggesting that truly competitive authoritarianism is hard to institutionalise. The study thus finds that the question of whether elections are dangerous or stabilising for authoritarianism is dependent on differences between the ability of competitive and hegemonic forms of electoral authoritarianism to reduce electoral uncertainty.