Nation,national remembrance,and education – Polish schools as factories of nationalism and prejudice

This article describes and attempts to explain the reasons for the conservative and nationalist character of Polish schools. The author uses data from surveys, analyzes political programs, postulates concerning education put forward by conservatives, and quotes poems emphasizing national identity from textbooks used at schools to teach reading skills. According to the author, it can be observed that nationalists build an atmosphere of aversion to immigrants, which affects racism in the school hallways. The article also presents the phenomenon of so-called school chambers of national remembrance, which are part of patriotic rituals practiced by Polish society. The author emphasizes that nationalism is the basis for changes in history programs of study, which are part of the educational reform implemented by the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwo?? – PiS) government. The cultural soft power, which is used to make reality more “national,” complements the administrative and political hard power of the PiS party – both tools are used to create an authoritarian-nationalist vision of social order.     

Assessment of country‐risk on the euromarkets

Recent years have seen several studies and proposals from national parliaments (NPs) to deepen their direct involvement in European decision-making, most notably by strengthening the early warning mechanism (EWM – also known as yellow card procedure). The EWM is a technical-legalistic procedure that is restricted to subsidiarity. This ‘straightjacket’ is too limited as a monitoring tool for European policies more broadly and can hardly be seen as a response to current democratic concerns. Framing the EWM as a democratic solution to empower NPs thus risks becoming one of Europe’s empty mantras.     

Measuring the quality of election administration

How do we distinguish between a ‘genuine’, ‘free and fair’, or ‘legitimate’ election and an election that is something less? In this article, we offer an answer to this vexing question: the Election Administration Systems Index (EASI). EASI is a practical, transparent, and sustainable tool for measuring the quality of elections in the developing world. The following pages describe the current limitations in measuring election quality, detail the EASI approach, and provide a comparative analysis of the results of its pilot implementation. EASI scores are drawn from a survey of experts on elections in the target country following a recent nationwide election. The analytical framework is comprised of three electoral dimensions: participation, competition, and integrity of the process. We also divide these dimensions temporally according to the electoral cycle: either pre-election, during the election, or post-election. The final product is a set of six primary scores displayed across dimension and time. By aggregating the survey data in this fashion, we provide for a nuanced assessment of an election by each dimension and across the cycle. As our pilot results demonstrate, EASI is a diagnostic tool for identifying electoral strengths and weaknesses and serves well for comparative assessments.     

Compulsory voting and ethnic diversity increase invalid voting while corruption does not: an analysis of 417 parliamentary elections in 73 countries

Invalid voting, meaning blank and spoiled ballots, is a regular phenomenon in democracies around the world. When its share is larger than the margin of victory or greater than the vote share of some of the large parties in the country, invalid voting becomes a problem for democratic legitimacy. This article investigates its determinants in 417 democratic parliamentary elections in 73 countries on five continents from 1970 to 2011. The analysis shows that enforced compulsory voting and ethnic fragmentation are strong predictors for invalid voting while corruption has less impact. Our findings suggest that the societal structure is crucial in understanding invalid voting as a problem for democratic legitimacy because greater social diversity seems to lead to either a greater rate of mistakes or lesser attachments of social groups to the democratic process. Thus, rising levels of invalid voting are not only concerning in themselves but also for the divisive factors driving them.     

The primacy of political security: contentious politics and insecurity in the Tunisian revolution

The removal of Ben Ali's regime in Tunisia signalled the start of the Arab Spring. The abrupt nature of the regime change raises questions about why it happened in the way it did. This article examines the contextual factors that precipitated the regime change through the lens of political security. The aim is to examine how political insecurity in society led to the emergence of opposition sufficiently organized to unseat Ben Ali. The paper develops a framework to consider how the loss of legitimacy by the regime opened the space for opposition. Attempts to restrict opposition failed to address underlying claims, leaving the way open for the opposition to unite following the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi.     

Claims to legitimacy count: Why sanctions fail to instigate democratisation in authoritarian regimes

International sanctions are one of the most commonly used tools to instigate democratisation in the post‐Cold War era. However, despite long‐term sanction pressure by the European Union, the United States and/or the United Nations, non‐democratic rule has proven to be extremely persistent. Which domestic and international factors account for the regimes' ability to resist external pressure? Based on a new global dataset on sanctions from 1990 to 2011, the results of a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) provide new insights for the research on sanctions and on authoritarian regimes. Most significantly, sanctions strengthen authoritarian rule if the regime manages to incorporate their existence into its legitimation strategy. Such an unintended ‘rally‐round‐the‐flag’ effect occurs where sanctions are imposed on regimes that possess strong claims to legitimacy and have only limited economic and societal linkages to the sender of sanctions.     

What comes first,democracy or human rights?

Minimalists about human rights hold that a state can have political legitimacy if it protects a basic list of rights and democratic rights do not have to be on that list. In this paper, I consider two arguments from Benhabib against the minimalist view. The first is that a political community cannot be said to have self-determination, which minimalists take to be the value at the heart of legitimacy, without democracy. The second is that even the human rights protections minimalists take to legitimize institutions cannot be had without democracy. These rights can only be adequately interpreted and specified for any social context if the interpretations and specifications result from democratic processes. Here, I bring out some important problems with these arguments and so conclude that they do not represent a robust case for rejecting minimalism.     

What price fairness when security is at stake? Police legitimacy in South Africa

The legitimacy of legal authorities – particularly the police – is central to the state's ability to function in a normatively justifiable and effective manner. Studies, mostly conducted in the US and UK, regularly find that procedural justice is the most important antecedent of police legitimacy, with judgments about other aspects of police behavior – notably, about effectiveness – appearing less relevant. But this idea has received only sporadic testing in less cohesive societies where social order is more tenuous, resources to sustain it scarcer, and the position of the police is less secure. This paper considers whether the link between process fairness and legitimacy holds in the challenging context of present day South Africa. In a high crime and socially divided society, do people still emphasize procedural fairness or are they more interested in instrumental effectiveness? How is the legitimacy of the police influenced by the wider problems faced by the South African state? We find procedural fairness judgments play a key role, but also that South Africans place greater emphasis on police effectiveness (and concerns about crime). Police legitimacy is, furthermore, associated with citizens' judgments about the wider success and trustworthiness of the state.     

PUBLIC COOPERATION WITH THE POLICE IN GHANA: DOES PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS MATTER?*

Recent criminological emphasis on the salience of normative concerns, such as procedural fairness and legitimacy, in understanding public law‐abiding behavior has been based on evidence from Anglo‐American studies. This article examines these issues in the African context based on general survey data from Accra, Ghana. The results show a lack of empirical validity, in the Ghanaian context, of the Sunshine–Tyler legitimacy scale. The results also show that public cooperation with the police in Ghana is shaped by utilitarian factors such as perceptions of current police effectiveness infighting crime. It is argued that the importance of perceived police effectiveness to public cooperation is a result of police legitimation deficits and the public's alienation from the Ghana police, which in turn are traced to the colonial history of the police and current poor police performance.     

Youth, Police Legitimacy and Informal Contact

This paper explores the under-researched topic of young people’s attitudes towards police in two studies using structural equation modelling. The first study examines the influence of police legitimacy on the willingness of young people to assist police. The second study examines the impact of informal contact with police during a community policing project on young people’s willingness to assist police. Findings show that young people who view police as legitimate are more willing to assist police. Participation in the community policing project had a significant and positive influence on young people’s willingness to assist police independent of young people’s attitudes about police legitimacy.