The Malay Community: Voting Trends and Issues

Abstract

This article attempts to analyse the reasons for the Malay community’s seeming support for the People’s Action Party (PAP) government in Singapore, in spite of online discontent that was expressed towards the party immediately prior to the elections. The article makes three main arguments: first, that the reasons explaining the community’s support for PAP are similar to other Singaporeans, such as the death of founding leader Lee Kuan Yew and the risk-averse nature of the electorate; second, that institutional impediments exist with regard to the community that heavily favour the government; and third, that the main opposition party, the Workers’ Party, has not been able to present itself as a viable alternative to PAP for the community in terms of either quality of candidates or ideas for governance.     

“Bad enough governance”: state capacity and quality of institutions in post-Soviet autocracies

This article contributes to current discussions on state capacity, quality of institutions, and political regimes. Our analysis demonstrates that the J-curve argument (“good institutions” in autocracies as compared to hybrid and transitional regimes) may not be generic and is not well supported by empirical evidence from the sample of post-Soviet countries. An explanatory model of the “King of the Mountain” is instead provided. Its focus is on the monopoly of political rent as a precondition for extraction of economic rent. It demonstrates an inverse correlation between the quality of institutions and the extraction of political and economic rent, and explains why an autocrat may not have an incentive to improve institutions that may make his/her monopoly vulnerable, and rather would prefer to preserve a low quality of institutions and “bad enough governance.” An analysis of a variety of external and domestic factors that may endanger this monopoly is provided. Finally, the autocrat's alternative strategic choices are analyzed. It is argued that better payoffs for the autocrat – paradoxically – may result from partial reforms and improvement of the quality of institutions. However, for various reasons, this is not occurring in post-Soviet autocracies.     

Protectionist Executives

The trade policy literature long presumed that legislatures favor relatively more protectionist policies than executives do, but more recent studies have found little evidence to support the idea. This article clarifies these mixed results with a simple formal model. It finds that legislative protectionism requires very specific circumstances involving the combination of universalistic legislative norms and a particular economic geography, with trade policy interests large relative to legislative districts but small compared to countries. Empirical evidence on this latter point suggests that the necessary spatial patterning is likely to have diminished in many countries since the 1930s, when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act focused attention on institutional differences. The assumption of legislative protectionism based on theories and measures of that era thus may not hold today, and widespread presumptions about institutional preferences may accordingly be uncomfortably fragile.     

What is democracy? A reconceptualization of the quality of democracy

Works on the quality of democracy propose standards for evaluating politics beyond those encompassed by a minimal definition of democracy. Yet, what is the quality of democracy? This article first reconstructs and assesses current conceptualizations of the quality of democracy. Thereafter, it reconceptualizes the quality of democracy by equating it with democracy pure and simple, positing that democracy is a synthesis of political freedom and political equality, and spelling out the implications of this substantive assumption. The proposal is to broaden the concept of democracy to address two additional spheres: government decision-making – political institutions are democratic inasmuch as a majority of citizens can change the status quo – and the social environment of politics – the social context cannot turn the principles of political freedom and equality into mere formalities. Alternative specifications of democratic standards are considered and reasons for discarding them are provided.     

The Global Climate Regime: Explaining Lagging Reform

There have been growing calls for reform of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). How have governments met the demand for action on climate change despite the lagging pace of UNFCCC reform? New qualitative data demonstrate that the institutional, sectoral, and technical characteristics of multilateral institutions have guided government choices in managing climate change issues. Institutional resources and sectoral participation in multilateral institutions have enabled governments to handle climate change issues outside the UNFCCC, reducing the need to invest in its reform as demand for action has grown. These specialized institutions are able to mitigate political disputes and facilitate greater efficacy in handling specific issues such as financing and emissions mitigation. They have mandates that overlap with the cross‐cutting nature of climate change, requiring no new mandates, which mitigates political disputes in managing specific climate issues.     

The Flypaper Effect: Do Political Institutions Affect Danish Local Governments’ Response to Intergovernmental Grants?

Abstract

Despite a large number of empirical studies on the flypaper effect, it remains disputed whether the effect exists and to what extent it is asymmetrical. The flypaper effect suggests that intergovernmental grants tend to result in higher increases in public expenditures than a similar increase in citizens’ private income would have led to. An asymmetrical effect exists when the fiscal response differs depending on whether grants are increased or decreased. By considering political institutions that moderate the effect of intergovernmental grants, this article offers a theoretical explanation that accounts for the mixed empirical evidence. The local response to intergovernmental grants is tested using a reform of the Danish intergovernmental grant scheme in 2007. In line with the expectation, the article finds a strong asymmetrical effect, but more surprisingly, this effect is found both when subnational budget institutions are centralised and when they are fragmented.     

Religious Intelligence

Sacred rituals and symbols can act as force multipliers that motivate and constrain the effectiveness of actors. Religious intelligence involves an assessment of how these rituals and symbols affect combat operations. The fourfold challenge faced by the religious intelligence analysts is to ascertain how prominent a role religion will play in a given conflict, what the relevant sacred phenomena are, how salient they are for the specific religious communities present, and how they will affect a given conflict. The case studies that form the core of this article highlight three issue areas open to religious intelligence collection and analysis, and exhibit variation in the ability of intelligence analysts to correctly assess those religious factors. Egyptian and Israeli decision making prior to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War illustrates how information about sacred time can influence war initiation. The diverging outcomes of two counterinsurgency operations at the same sacred site, “Operation Blue Star” (1984) and “Operation Black Thunder” (1988), demonstrate the utility of intelligence about the parameters of sacred space. A final case study explores the U.S. failure to grasp the importance of religious authority in the Iranian Revolution. I conclude by considering the actors best suited for gathering and processing religious intelligence. Religious intelligence requires interdisciplinary teams that combine expertise in religion, area studies, and military operations.     

Terrorist Assassination and Institutional Change in Repressive Regimes

ABSTRACT

Missing from the political violence literature is an in-depth and systematic examination of the effects of terrorist assassination on state political institutions in repressive regimes. By broadening the scope and depth of empirical research into terrorist assassinations, the potential exists to enhance our understanding of the outcomes of assassination by terrorist actors as well as our overall understanding of political violence in repressive regimes. Utilizing survival analysis and data from the Global Terrorism Database, the Polity IV Project, and the Political Terror Scale, this project focuses on the post-terrorist assassination institutional outcomes in repressive regimes. While the effects are long-term, the most repressive regimes are the most likely to experience political institutional shifts in the wake of terrorist assassinations. The direction of the institutional shifts is mixed, but results indicate that the level of state repression in existence prior to a terrorist assassination matters to post-terrorist assassination outcomes.     

Analysing the sexual abuse of children by workers in residential care homes: Characteristics,dynamics and contributory factors

Abstract

This article analyses why workcrkhild s m l abuse occurs in residential children's homes. The importance of previously documented features, such as inadequate complaints and whistle blowing procedures, and poor vetting, training and supervision of stafi arc acknowledged. This exposition, however, concentrates on the tactics abusers employ to groom, entrap and silence children, whilst simultaneously controlling and silencing non-abusive staff. The success of these tactics is then contatualised within notions ojwebcrian rational-legal bureaucratic and charismatic power. as well as the location ofsomeabusers within entrenched pedophilenetworks. Contributory jactors, such as the enclosed and institutionaliscd nature of many settings and the inadequate, gendcrcd and haophobic manner in which stafloften deal with both sexuality and sexual abuse issues are also m i n e d and analyscd, as arc children's own gendcred prc-conceptions. Important theoretical constructions utiliscd include Goffman's theory of 'total institutions', the social construction ofchildhood, includingchitdhoodasdity and the concept of'organisation sexuality'.     

Parliamentary Questioning in 17 European Parliaments: Some Steps towards Comparison

All democratic parliaments have some procedures to allow representatives to put questions to ministers. However, there are no two parliaments with exactly the same procedures. Cross-national comparisons are hindered by the lack of agreed-upon scientific criteria to group similar procedures, which are too often classified on the basis of their names rather than on their substantive characteristics. To overcome this problem, this article devises a typology of parliamentary questions based on relevant procedural features in 17 European countries. A ranking of parliaments according to the criteria of the effectiveness of procedures is developed and a discussion of the relationship of this ranking to the coalitional characteristics of the parliaments is provided. Finally, the article develops some tentative arguments to explain what influences the development of more or less effective questioning procedures, testing the hypothesis that countries dominated by coalition governments tend to have more effective procedures. In contrast with the authors' expectations, with regard to the countries included in the present analysis, the frequent presence of coalition government is associated with weaker procedures.