The right-wing populism of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (and why comparativists should care)

Despite the vast amount of comparative research on right-wing populist parties over the past decade, there has been little work on non-European parties (as opposed to leaders). In this article, we argue that the international literature on populist parties has largely overlooked a significant non-European case: India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP – Indian People’s Party). Following the ideational approach to understanding populism, we examine whether the three distinguishing features of right-wing populism – its conceptions of “the people”, “elites” and “others” – are reflected in the views from interviews we conducted with BJP officials and representatives. We find that they are and so then consider whether they have been manifest in actions and statements while in power or whether, as some scholars claim, governing parties like the BJP moderate their populism. We conclude that the BJP can be very fruitfully included in comparative research on right-wing populist parties and propose a series of concrete ways in which this could be pursued.     

Legacy of the past,promise of the future: Land reform,land grabbing,and land conversion in the Calabarzon

Abstract

Rather than viewing the recent violence in the Thai South largely as a product of long-standing historical and socioeconomic grievances, this article argues that the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has played a crucial role in provoking conflict in the region. Early in his premiership, Thaksin decided that the South was controlled by forces of “network monarchy” loyal to the palace and to former prime minister Prem Tinsulanond. Thaksin sought to reorganize political and security arrangements in the deep South in order to gain personal control of the area, but in the process he upset a carefully negotiated social contract that had ensured relative peace for two decades. As the violence increased, royal displeasure — articulated mainly by members of the Privy Council — forced Thaksin to make certain concessions, notably the creation of a National Reconciliation Commission to propose solutions for the growing crisis. Network monarchy had struck back, albeit from a position of weakness. This analysis seeks to demonstrate that the southern violence is actually inextricable from wider developments in Thailand's national politics.     

THE CHANGING POLITICS OF THAILAND'S BUDDHIST ORDER

Thailand's monastic politics are in turmoil. No longer can the sangha be written off as a political force and viewed simply as a fount of legitimacy for the nation and the monarchy. The role played by a few hundred pro-Thaksin “redshirt” monks in the March to May 2010 mass demonstrations testified to growing unease within the rank-and-file monkhood, which is drawn from the same regions and segments of society as the redshirt movement more generally. But beyond these overt displays of dissatisfaction, the sangha faces a range of serious challenges. While long-standing tensions between the rival Thammayut and Mahanikai orders have apparently declined, a dearth of moral and administrative leadership has paralyzed the Thai monkhood and rendered it seemingly incapable of reforming itself. Competing power groups linked to secular politics are vying for influence within the Supreme Sangha Council, while there is no widely supported successor ready to replace the current supreme patriarch, himself nearly a hundred years old. In many respects, the political paralysis of the monkhood mirrors the wider crisis confronting the body politic of the Thai nation itself.     

Up the slippery slope: Groupwork with sex offenders with a learning disability

Abstract

Techniques developed for work with sex offenders are not always applicable to or appropriate for sex offenders with a learning disability due to the cognitive and social difficulties which such individuals may have. This paper describes an attempt to adapt and combine a number of psychological and art therapy techniques in group work with sex offenders with a learning disability. The aim was to identify areas relevant in sexual offending behaviour and to adapt treatment approaches for the above client group.     

Network monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand

Abstract

This article argues that widely used ideas such as bureaucratic polity, constitutional monarchy, transitional democracy and political reform fail to characterize accurately the recent politics of Thailand. Instead, Thai politics are best understood in terms of political networks. The leading network of the period 1973–2001 was centred on the palace, and is here termed ‘network monarchy’. Network monarchy involved active interventions in the political process by the Thai King and his proxies, notably former prime minister Prem Tinsulanond. Network monarchy developed considerable influence, but never achieved the conditions for domination. Instead, the palace was obliged to work with and through other political institutions, primarily the elected parliament. Although essentially conservative, network monarchy also took on liberal forms during the 1990s. Thailand experienced three major legitimacy crises after 1992; in each case, Prem acted on behalf of the palace to restore political equilibrium. However, these interventions reflected the growing weakness of the monarchy, especially following the landslide election victories of prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001 and 2005. Thaksin sought to displace network monarchy with new networks of his own devising. This article suggests that conventional understandings of the power of the monarchy need to be rethought.     

Workers' compensation and the governance of pain

This article examines the medico-legal systems of workers' compensation. It is divided into three parts, the first taking an historical perspective to locate the first workers' compensation laws, the circumstances which led to their implementation, and their consequences in terms of the shift from individual fault to industrial risk. In the second part, the discursive practices of medico-legal knowledge-power typically found in workers' compensation systems are examined, especially the principles and clinical practices that are deployed to 'police' the boundaries of such schemes and to mitigate costs. Part three then summarizes the effect of neo-liberal governmentality and its underlying economic rationality as it attempts to regulate, by means of the artifice of liberty, the behaviours of firms and workers. Workers' compensation deserves analysis for the special technical and insurantial problems it entails, given its complex triangular insurance relation (involving the insurer, the firm, and the worker), its deployment of medical, economic and actuarial knowledges, and its production of special problems and uncertainties surrounding the governing of a class of persons incapacitated for productive work.     

Patterns of EU Energy Policy Outputs: Incrementalism or Punctuated Equilibrium?

Although macro-level analyses of EU policy outputs are common, few empirical studies have measured the long-run evolution of the Union’s energy policy sector. This article provides an overview of European energy legislation to show past sectoral developmental trends, current characteristics and potential future directions. During this period, EU energy policy has evolved sequentially to encompass multiple sectors, including coal, nuclear energy, oil and gas production, energy conservation, market harmonisation and climate change concerns. Moreover, by measuring the velocity of legislative output as an indicator of policy activity, the overall picture is one of gradual incremental growth centred broadly on several episodes of shallow, delayed action punctuated equilibrium that has resulted in an uneven mixture of national and supranational decision-making. Expansion is perhaps set to continue along a similar path as a common EU climate–energy policy emerges, although some constraints are evident.     

The role of mandates in third party intervention

Conclusion Mandate, as a noun, is the charge that authorizes and legitimizes an intervenor's actions. The intervenor may act at the bidding of the disputants or of third party stakeholders. Mandate provides a functional taxonomy of intervenors—from go-betweens to conciliators to mediators to arbitrators to dictators. Mandate affords a perspective for analyzing initiation, process, and evaluation of intervention. Useful heuristics have been proposed for categorizing the ways in which intervenors restricted to persuasion, such as mediators, can attempt to change beliefs. Future work might seek to determine conditions under which an intervenor's persuasive abilities may change beliefs about available alternatives, about the probability that the alternative will lead to certain outcomes, and about the value of the outcome. Sanda Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio 44115.George T. Duncan is Professor of Statistics at the School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Penn. 15213.The authors thank Mark Kamlet for many valuable discussions, Linda Argote for her thoughtful suggestions, and Christina Duncan for her criticial reading.     

Reviews

John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, xi + 360 pp., £24.95, $29.95.

W. Lutz, S. Scherbov & A. Volkov (eds), Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union Before 1991. London: Routledge, 1994, xl + 496 pp., £85.00.

Deborah Adelman, The ‘Children of Perestroika’ Come Of Age. Young People Of Moscow Talk About Life in the New Russia. Armonk, NY & London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994, xxii +193 pp.

Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, viii + 319 pp.