A ‘pivot’ that never existed: America’s Asian strategy under Obama and Trump

This article argues that Donald Trump’s Asian strategy hardly marks a radical transformation from Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’. This is because the ‘pivot to Asia’ never really existed. Although Obama was successful in building legitimacy for the strategy through international norms, he failed to translate his lofty rhetoric into practice. Much of his original pivot components (building a constructive relationship with China, coordinating with Asian allies and multilateralism in the Association of South East Asian Nations and the Trans-Pacific Partnership) has either failed or did not live up to expectations. Donald Trump was adamant that the Asian pivot was a bad strategy and that he would not follow it. But although he completely discarded Obama’s legitimization of the rebalance (as Trump speaks pragmatically and does not care about international norms), in actuality he has followed many of Obama’s policies, and even improved on some of them. That being said, Trump’s ‘pivot actions’ appear to be erratic, pragmatic short-term actions rather than a meticulously planned long-term strategy similar to Obama’s rebalance (which did not materialize). Thus, while Obama failed to transform the pivot into an effective strategy, neither is Trump’s effectiveness backed by a coherent Asian strategy.     

Class rule as patronage: Kinship,local ruling cliques and the state in rural sardinia

It is argued here that much of the literature on patron‐client relations is unsatisfactory because it tends to conceptualise the ruling classes of underdeveloped areas as individualised power brokers or ‘strong men’. Instead, one must identify those specific means of production which mark the class position of patrons, and which ultimately, are the basis of their power. Clientelism therefore not only refers to the economic position of the patrons, but also to a specific form of political power which is defined by the patron's relationship to the state. The paper addresses these questions by analysing the local ruling cliques of several communities in Central Sardinia. The pre‐World War II cliques differ markedly from those after the war, but they all have in common that they monopolise, at the local level, access to the state apparatus, that they are its local representatives, and that they are organised, and organise other classes, on the basis of kinship.     

Ideological position,leaders' charisma,and voting preferences: Personal vs. partisan elections

The study compared the relationships between voting preferences and two predictors: voters' ideological position and the perceived charisma of political leaders, under two conditions: partisan elections and personal elections. It also examined whether these relationships are moderated by the ideological extremity of the parties standing for election and by voters' personal disposition to ascribe importance to leadership. The study was carried out a short time before the last general elections in Israel. Two comparable samples were used: one focused on relatively moderate parties and their leaders, and the other on more extreme parties and leaders. In both samples, voters' ideological position was strongly related to leaders' perceived charisma and to voting preferences, but leaders' perceived charisma added significantly to the prediction of voting preferences, especially under conditions of personal elections. In combination, voters' ideological position and leaders' charisma perceptions predicted voting preferences very accurately. These relationships were not affected by the two hypothesized moderators.The assistance of Amos Chividaly in data analysis is gratefully acknowledged.     

Mythologizing war: legacies of conflict in Croatian parliamentary debates

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes models based on latent semantic analysis and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Using a complex vector representation of war-related concepts, the paper specifically focuses on their framing in the context of right-wing authoritarianism. The results show a negative trend of pushing the most frequent war-related concepts to more extreme framing as a potential reflection of their political abuse and ongoing mythologization.     

Analysis of Factors of Overpricing in Public Procurement: A Study for Low-performing EU Countries

ABSTRACT

The paper deals with the issue of overpricing of public procurement in low-performing EU countries. It examines a uniquely large sample of public procurement in 11 Central and Eastern European countries. Hierarchical regression is used to analyze the factors that influence public contract. Our results indicate that institutional factors have a greater impact on overpricing than individual decisions by the contracting authority. Our analysis for low-performing EU countries provides interesting results and also draws attention to behavior that is not typical of the better established and more advanced EU countries. Our results are particularly important for public policy in each country, as they show the direction of regulatory action in the field of public procurement. The results introduce a debate on the appropriateness of “one size fits all” regulations within the EU.     

Diverging perceptions of the “Visegrad Four + ” format and the limits of the V4 + Japan cooperation

Asia Europe Journal - The Visegrad Group format — coordinated policy forum for Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary — has been dubbed as a significant policy tool that advocates the...     

Moistened hands do not necessarily allude to high quality fingerprints: the relationship between palmar moisture and fingerprint donorship

We explored the quality distribution of ninhydrin-developed prints on A4 bond paper in two groups of individuals, in Israel and in India. While the quality distributions of the developed marks in both countries had some dissimilarities, both groups showed the expected bell-shape distribution, with the majority of the donors belonging to the central zone, defined as "average" or "good." Attempt was made to correlate between a physiological feature, palmar moisture, and the fingerprint donorship. As a rule, high fingermark quality could be associated with sweating hands, but there were individuals with moist palms whose fingermarks had a low score and vice versa. This finding supports the logical but hitherto unproven assumption that besides the amount of palmar sweat, the other physiological factor governing the prints' quality is the total amount of substrate, amino acids in this case, in the latent deposits, which depends on the substrate concentration in the sweat.     

South Africa's Iran policy: ‘Poster child’ meets renegade

Compliance with universal norms is one of the most important aspects of the global order. Iran, through the conduct of its nuclear programme, is seen as a challenger of the global non-proliferation norms, which enjoy almost universal recognition. South Africa's policy on Iran has been extremely puzzling — a rising power in the international system, subscribing to a global norm of nuclear non-proliferation, but challenging the interpretation and application of that norm. This contribution asks why this is the case, and demonstrates that South Africa's policy towards the Iranian nuclear programme has been clearly marked by a strongly held belief regarding the value of negotiations, a distrust of the global North, and a preference for a wide multilateral approach in institutions.     

Horse‐race Journalism and pollsters' performance in Israel

Abstract

This paper examines the interaction between the horse‐race attitude of the press in covering election campaigns and pollsters’ performance in Israel. Attempting to provide highly processed and more exciting reports, the press encourages pollsters to switch from relatively conservative approaches to projecting election results, into more daring ones, prone to situational errors. Moreover, criticizing such errors when they occur, the press focuses mainly on those errors consistent with its horse‐race orientation. Professional and political implications of the press's orientation and pollsters’ performance are discussed.