This paper examines how the political opposition innovated strategies to overcome obstacles presented by Russia’s uneven electoral playing field. Using evidence from two municipal elections in Moscow, I argue that members of the opposition have coordinated around local contests in response to political opportunities created by the Kremlin, including the anti-electoral fraud protests of the winter of 2011–2012 and the resurrection of gubernatorial elections in 2012. Following these openings, grassroots electoral initiatives recruited and trained opposition-minded individuals, first focusing on established activists and then on politicized individuals, to run for municipal council seats. The campaigns provided training using ad hoc educational seminars and later developed electronic tools that lowered barriers to political participation. As a result of these campaigns, electoral competition has boomed at the local level in Moscow even as regional and national contests have become less competitive. The campaigns demonstrate the continued vulnerability of authoritarian regimes that rely on elections for political legitimacy. Furthermore, the development of highly portable online tools for campaigning has potentially long-term democratizing consequences. 相似文献
Competitive elections in authoritarian regimes are inherently ambiguous: do they extend regime persistence or, vice versa, operate as subversive events? This article tests Inglehart and Welzel's “emancipatory theory of democracy”, which has not been tested for competitive elections in autocracies: when emancipative values grow strong, autocratic power appears increasingly illegitimate in people's eyes, which motivates subversive mass actions against authoritarian rule. For electoral outcomes this suggestion implies, first, that authoritarian incumbents are more likely to suffer electoral defeat when emancipative values have become more widespread. Second, post-electoral protest against fraudulent elections is more likely when emancipative values have become more widespread. To test these hypotheses, we analyse 152 elections among 33 electoral authoritarian regimes over 21 years from 1990–2011. We find that emancipative values are indeed strongly conducive to incumbent defeat while their effect on post-electoral protest is conditional: it only occurs in elections won by the incumbent. These findings intertwine two separately developed literatures: one on authoritarian regime subversion and the other on emancipatory cultural change. 相似文献
An emerging literature in political economy focuses on democratic enclaves or pockets of quasi-democratic decision-making embedded in non-democracies. This article first explores the factors that may lead to the emergence of such institutional checks and balances in autocratic politics. I use the comparative analysis of courts in Morocco and Tunisia, and argue that interest group mobilization and the centrality of legalism in political development have been essential for the existence of “governance” enclaves. Second, I explore whether such checks effectively contain everyday rent-seeking, as well as the theoretical channels through which this may occur. Findings from firm-level surveys conducted in Morocco and Tunisia in 2013 indicate that higher general trust in courts, even in modest relative terms, rendered businesses significantly less vulnerable to tax corruption in Tunisia, in sharp contrast to the Moroccan case. 相似文献
In recent years, Western countries and NATO have repeatedly intervened in international conflicts using military means (e.g., Kosovo, Macedonia, and Afghanistan). The countries involved in these military operations have stated that these interventions did not serve strategic goals; instead, their prime purpose was to enforce human rights. Against this background the present paper aims to answer two main questions: First, how can attitudes toward such military interventions be measured? Second, how are these attitudes related to prosocial and antisocial personality dispositions? Two studies were conducted to address these questions. A first study with 275 university students from Germany enabled us to develop a short and reliable scale to measure attitudes toward the military enforcement of human right. A second study (N = 190) revealed that authoritarianism and the willingness to aggressively sanction the antisocial behavior of others were positively related to this attitude, while no significant relationship with prosocial dispositions emerged. Furthermore, it could be shown that a high concern for human rights only then was connected to a positive attitude toward their military enforcement if persons indicated to handle their daily conflicts in an aggressive manner.
There is a normative expectation that constitutionalism does not co-exist well with autocracy. How do constitutional courts then uphold their integrity under authoritarianism? In this paper, I answer this question by taking the case of the Russian Constitutional Court (RCC) and showing how court–government accommodation in the new post-third wave autocracies can be achieved by limiting the amount of information the court receives from its secretariat. It follows from a detailed analysis of case selection in the RCC that the secretariat can function as an “insulator,” protecting the Court from political and reputational risks. The two features that make this possible are its invisibility to the judges and the clerks’ specific professional culture. The research is informed by an extensive series of in-depth interviews in the RCC, and benefits from the relocation of the RCC to St. Petersburg in 2008. 相似文献
In December 2015, leaders from Central and South Asia took part in the ground-breaking ceremony for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline project. Sixteen months later, a confusing information flow continues to obfuscate external assessments of the project’s development: official rhetoric notwithstanding, there is no certainty on the details of project financing, while the pipeline route has yet to be determined. To illuminate this obscure implementation path, this article regards TAPI as a virtual pipeline, an infrastructure project that wields invaluable influence only when it is employed as a foreign policy tool or permeates domestic discourses of progress framed by the elites of the four consortium partners. The constituent elements of TAPI virtuality are discussed here through a dedicated focus on the process of energy policy-making of Turkmenistan – the sole supplier of gas for the pipeline project and the consortium’s key stakeholder. 相似文献
正"Developing countries need to take the primary responsibility for national development.At the same time,the international community should help developing countries to build capacity,put in place a fair,equitable,inclusive and well-organized international economic and i nancial order and enable developing countries to make full use of their resources endowment,take an active part in the global value chain and cultivate a competitive edge in the course of opening-up so that they will benei t from globalization." 相似文献