State-led violence in Ukraine’s 2004 elections and orange revolution

The Ukrainian opposition faced one of the greatest degrees of state-backed violence in the second wave of democratization of post-communist states with only Serbia experiencing similar cases of assassinations and repression of the youth Otpor NGO. In the 2004 Ukrainian elections the opposition maintained a strategy of non-violence over the longest protest period of 17 days but was prepared to use force if it had been attacked. The regime attempted to suppress the Orange Revolution using security forces. Covert and overt Russian external support was extensive and in the case of Ukraine and Georgia the European Union (EU) did not intervene with a membership offer that had the effect of emboldening the opposition in Central-Eastern Europe. This article surveys five state-backed violent strategies used in Ukraine’s 2004 elections: inciting regional and inter-ethnic conflict, assassinations, violence against the opposition, counter-revolution and use of the security forces. The article does not cover external Russian-backed violence in the 2004 elections unique to Ukraine that the author has covered elsewhere.     

人民政协的基本职能与加强和改进中国共产党的自身建设

人民政协的发展与中国共产党的建设不可分割地联系在一起。人民政协的政治协商,是提高党的执政能力的重要途径;人民政协的民主监督,是促进党的廉政建设的重要力量;人民政协的参政议政,是改进党的领导方式的重要条件。     

论中国化马克思主义经济学的建设性质

马克思主义经济学的科学性蕴涵在其内容的丰富性之中.马克思主义经济学有着多方面的理论观点,这些观点有着相对独立的价值.但这些观点并不仅仅是一棵棵孤立的"大树",而是由多种"树木"构成的"森林",其严密逻辑把这一个个观点缀连成不可分割的整体.正是在马克思主义经济学的基础上,中国化马克思主义经济学才除了革命性质以外,还具有了重要的建设性质,成为集革命与建设于一体的建设的经济学.指导中国改革开放的主流经济学,是主张发展社会主义的中国化马克思主义建设经济学,而不是主张葬送社会主义的西方非马克思主义激进经济学.     

民主的蝴蝶：一个权力分享的角度

权力是政治的最核心的本质要素,也构成民主理论研究的基本视角.从这一角度出发,民主政治最根本的诉求是对权力的分享.本文通过回顾民主理论的历史演进与嬗变,探讨了民主的原初定义、民主与共和的融合以及民主技术化的制度实现路径,提出以科学民主理论为指导,为中国本土化的民主政治发展注入新的活力.     

新闻报道与民主建设的关系思考

随着我国经济的高速发展,公众价值观念得到了很大的改变,而民主意识的崛起则是其重要的组成部分。以现实变动为己任的新闻传媒,理应坦然面对并积极报道。十七大提出的"健全民主制度、丰富民主形式,拓宽民主渠道",对建设社会主义民主政治具有重要的指导意义,新闻传播应努力为之宣传、呐喊,并为保障公众的知情权、拓展公众的民主理念、健全与完善社会政治生活而发挥重要的推进作用。     

Do Citizens Tolerate Antidemocratic Statements?

Antidemocratic statements by politicians have become part of politics in several backsliding democracies. Yet, we know little about how ordinary citizens think antidemocratic statements should be dealt with. We employ conjoint experiments fielded in the United States, Germany, and Hungary to investigate the extent to which citizens think undemocratic and other controversial statements should be restricted. Specifically, we randomly assign antidemocratic statements – threatening electoral integrity directly or indirectly – along with other controversial statements to hypothetical politicians running for elections. We show that citizens wish to ban antidemocratic statements relative to generic placebo statements. Moreover, this willingness corresponds to their willingness to ban other forms of controversial statements that either represent offenses to different identity markers or induce material risks. We also find that the willingness to ban antidemocratic statements is evident across the three countries and regardless of gender, education, age, and partisanship, with only modest differences in the results between countries and subgroups. Our findings thus indicate that citizens generally care about democracy, which is good news for democracy and electoral integrity, but also that they do not care more about democracy than other fundamental values related to material costs or identity markers.     

A scientific approach to measure public political participation in Pakistan

Public political participation is an exhaustive subject in the democratic system that is contributing as a tilled land since the birth of democracy. It has a wide range of frequency, but voting is one of the easiest among all forms of public participation. Despite the easiness of voting, Pakistan ranks 164th in terms of voter turnout among 169 countries of the world. The voter turnout of the second largest Muslim democracy and the fifth largest among all the democratic states was recorded as 45.3% in the 2013 general election, which was less than India’s (59.4%) and even Bangladesh’s (58.2%). More than half of the population in Pakistan does not think it is its duty to cast its vote. The present study is an effort to investigate public political participation through six independent variables: democratic political party, party mobilization, security, accessibility, leadership image and moderating factor citizen distrust, and a useful sample size of 1884 was collected across the country. SPSS version 24.0 was used to measure the data. The results show significant and positive relations among the dependent and independent variables, while citizen distrust negatively moderates the dependent and independent variables of the study.     

Project for a Kantian Europe

Immanuel Kant’s political treatise Perpetual Peace can be seen as a project for world peace with practical value. Applied to contemporary word politics, the United Nations is commonly seen to be the closest approximation of this project. This article argues that such a view is misguided and fails to perceive that the United Nations lacks crucial elements of a Kantian peace federation. Kant’s argumentation for perpetual peace rests on two pillars: peace through law and peace through institution. Both of these are necessary conditions that must be supplanted by an exclusive peace federation of republican states in order to make a sufficient guarantee for lasting peace. Viewed from this perspective, the European Union comes closest to a real-world Kantian peace federation, even though it remains a regional organization, and despite the current challenges it faces.     

Destabilizing Effects of Terrorism on Party System Stability

In democracies with stable party systems, voters can more easily trace policy decisions from parties and representatives within the government to specific policy outcomes. Consequently, party system stability (PSS) has been reportedly linked to a variety of factors including economic conditions, democratic performance, political institutions, and socioeconomic cleavages. While informative, these lessons offer precious little insight into other factors that can destabilize a party system. In this work, we surmise that terrorist attacks have important implications for two commonly used measures of PSS. The results of a pooled, cross-sectional time series analysis confirm our hypothesis: deadly attacks proximate to elections destabilize party systems, even when controlling for multiple standard controls. In addition, the level of democratic consolidation within states also influences the degree that fatal terrorist attacks affect party system stability. These findings are based on terrorism data collected from the Global Terrorism Database and from PSS data compiled by the authors.     

Explaining the European Parliament’s gains in the EU Constitution

The Constitutional Treaty, like each set of reforms since the Single European Act, would constitute another incremental increase in the European Parliament’s powers. But the Parliament did not get everything it wanted. What we do in this paper is investigate why the European Parliament tends to ‘win’ in some areas but not in others. We consider five possible explanations and test these theories by looking at the issues the Parliament promoted in the constitutional negotiations and the factors that determined whether the Parliament was successful or not in a particular area. We find that the Parliament gains power in areas where the governments delegate new powers to the EU and are uncertain about the consequences of this delegation. We also find that public support for the Parliament played a role in the extension of the Parliament’s powers in the Constitution.