Violence against Women in Scandinavia: a Description and Evaluation of two new Laws Aiming to Protect Women

Violence against women by a present or former male partner has over the last decade been given a higher priority in the political discussion in all of the Scandinavian countries. Increasingly, violence in intimate relationships is viewed as a public rather than a private matter in these countries. With this change in attitudes and levels of political interest, higher expectations are placed on official authorities, including the criminal justice system, to deal actively with this social problem. In all of the Scandinavian countries it may, for example, be decided by a prosecutor that a woman should be protected from a man by issuing a restraining order. Moreover, a new offence called ‘gross violation of a woman's integrity’ was introduced into the Swedish penal code in 1998. With this offence, less serious but repeated violent acts committed by a man against a present or former female partner are to be judged as one serious offence. The stipulated sanction for this offence is imprisonment between 6 months and 6 years. The purpose of this article is to evaluate how the police, the prosecutors and the courts deal with this new offence. The article also present results from an evaluation of restraining orders in Sweden.     

Focus Group Follies?

Abstract

Media coverage of the contemporary British Labour party routinely suggests party leaders, notably Tony Blair, have been overly reliant on using focus group as a means of obtaining voter feedback. The paper explores this popular understanding by considering how and when qualitative forms of opinion research began to play a significant role in developing campaign strategy. Following their incorporation into party planning during the mid-1980s, focus groups provided an increasingly influential (and at the time more discreet) source of data and support for the leadership's Policy Review later that decade. Following the 1992 election defeat selective findings from the party's qualitative research programme became integral to the public relations' initiatives of Labour's self-styled “modernisers,” particularly in their largely successful attempt to delegitimise and then marginalise the role of the party's once formidable affiliated union supporters in internal affairs. Crucially this contributed to a climate that enabled the key moderniser Tony Blair to emerge and win the leadership.     

中国特色社会主义理论体系的特性分析

中国特色社会主义理论作为马克思主义中国化第二次飞跃所产生的一项重要理论成果,是指导我国社会主义现代化建设的行动指南。十一届三中全会到十八大的胜利召开,中国特色社会主义理论体系经历了一个不断发展和创新的过程。具有中国特色的社会主义理论体系本身的特性主要有:鲜明的阶级民族性、紧密的历史连续性、严密的结构整体性、鲜活的现实时代性和灵活的发展创新性。这个体系是坚持中国特色社会主义制度,走中国特色社会主义道路,最终实现中国特色社会主义的行动指南。     

Fixing failures of U.K. electoral management

Concerns about electoral malpractice have been raised in many democracies in recent years because of errors made in the administration of elections by local election officials (LEOs). This article argues that adopting appropriate policy instruments to manage LEOs is an under-explored method for improving election administration and reducing electoral malpractice. The article provides a case study of the use of performance benchmarking schemes in the UK 2008–2010. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 74 LEOs from 41 organisations subject to newly devised performance indicators. The research demonstrates that performance benchmarking can encourage learning amongst local electoral officials and strengthen central control over them.     

Electoral coordination in mixed‐member systems: Does the level of democratic experience matter?

A number of institutional and non‐institutional factors hamper electoral coordination and, hence, increase party system fragmentation in the nominal tier of mixed electoral systems. Contrary to expectations, the number of electoral parties is not lower in all old democracies. Nevertheless, the level of democratic experience modifies the effect of other variables like the type of mixed electoral system or the closeness of the races. Econometric tests evaluate this phenomenon in a diverse sample of 15 countries and a total of 57 elections with more than 10,000 observations at the district level.     

Reformas electorales y coherencia ideológica de los partidos políticos en Colombia, 1986-2013

This article sets out changes which the Colombian party system experienced throughout the last two decades. It focuses on the topics, ideology and party divisions present in a representative sample of the last four legislatures’ congress members. This study is based on factorial and discriminate analyses, making use of the Latin American Parliamentarian Elites database. This article holds that the 2003 political reform had a positive effect on Colombian parties’ and social movements’ ideological coherence within Congress. Electoral reforms are also discussed in the light of these findings.     

Electoral Violence in Africa Revisited

This article addresses the still unsettled question of the incidence of violent election periods in Africa. It uses two new datasets, which report episodes of social conflict in the region for 1990–2011, and elections worldwide from 1960 to 2010. When combined, these data suggest that onsets of electoral violence peak around major election days in Africa as a whole, but with wide national variability in the volume of new episodes. Depending on the time span and type of social conflict, from one-quarter to three-quarters of the elections for national leadership have been without incident. The article also investigates the timing of electoral violence and the extent to which there is an experience curve effect, whereby subsequent elections have fewer onsets of social conflict. The data indicate that two-thirds to three-quarters of elections are free of onsets of social conflict, but that the proportion does not change much with experience. Overall, there appear to be reasonable grounds for optimism about peaceful elections in many African countries.     

Media-usage patterns and political knowledge of NWU students: The 2009 election

Abstract

One of the central elements in a sustainable democracy is an informed and independent voters’ corps who is knowledgeable regarding democratic values and the policies of different parties, and who participates in democracy. The literature suggests that voters who are more heavy media users are also more politically knowledgeable. It follows that the media have an important informational role in a democracy. Against this background, the media usage patterns, media usage perceptions and political knowledge of the students of the North-West University on the Potchefstroom, Mafikeng and Vaal Triangle campuses were investigated during May 2009. This was done in the form of a quantitative survey that allowed students to report their real perceptions, experiences and knowledge levels. Questionnaires were administered in a self-administered style to avoid interviewer bias and to increase truthful self-reporting. Trained field workers used certain guidelines to ensure that the sample was representative of NWU students. The study found that students on all three campuses had poor levels of political knowledge. It was furthermore established that they were light users of media and did not often engage in political discussions with peers. On all three campuses, for political information television was the preferred medium, followed by radio. Although there were only weak correlations, it would seem that the students who were heavier users of media, were also more politically knowledgeable.     

Stuck in transition: electoral processes in Zambia 1991–2001

Zambia has held three multiparty elections since its restoration of democracy in 1991. This peaceful transition raised expectations of a smooth process towards democratic consolidation. But similar to experiences in other African countries and Eastern Europe, the Zambian democratic process has remained stuck in a ‘transitional zone’ between actual democracy and authoritarian systems. This article argues that Zambian elections fall short of the expectations of a democratic process due to the institutional uncertainty surrounding elections and the weakness of the Zambian Electoral Commission in particular. The continued uncertainty – of the rules and regulations guiding elections and electoral administration – has maintained the same party in power through three consecutive elections, despite an alarming economic record.     

The decline of citizen participation in electoral politics in post-authoritarian Chile

Turnout among registered voters remains high in post-authoritarian Chile, but valid votes as a percentage of the voting-age population have fallen significantly in the post-authoritarian period and blank/null voting, non-registration, and abstention are on the rise. Why? This article tests three rival explanations: (1) lack of political support; (2) depoliticization; and (3) a generational shift in political culture. These theories are not mutually exclusive, but rather explain distinct contours of this electoral phenomenon. Compared to valid voters, blank/null voters exhibit less support for the political system, are less politicized, and more likely to have reached legal voting age during the democratic transition. Although non-registrants also exhibit less political support and are more depoliticized than valid voters, their behaviour is largely explained by a new political culture that stresses individual as opposed to collective participation. In addition to shedding light on this Chilean puzzle, the findings enhance the debates over electoral participation, mandatory voting, and quality of democracy in Latin America and other nascent democracies.