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Communist Regime (communist + regime)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	55%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	33%

Selected Abstracts

Ironies in Human Rights Protection in the EU: Pre-Accession Conditionality and Post-Accession Conundrums

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 1 2009
Anneli Albi
In the wake of the extensive scrutiny of the human rights credentials of the new Member States under the EU pre-accession conditionality, which itself was riddled with paradoxes, this article considers a rather unexpected irony thrown up by the accession of these countries. It is that the post-communist constitutional courts, which have been applauded for vigorous protection of fundamental rights after the fall of the Communist regime that was marked by nihilism to rights, have come rather close to having to downgrade the protection standards after accession, due to the new constraints of supremacy of EC law. The article will consider the sugar market cases of the Hungarian and Czech Constitutional Courts and of the Estonian Supreme Court, which appear to add weight to the concerns that have been voiced in some older Member States about the fundamental rights protection in the EU. Indeed such concerns were recently also addressed in the concurring opinions to the Bosphorus judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. [source]

The Politics of Peace in the GDR: The Independent Peace Movement, the Church, and the Origins of the East German Opposition

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2001
Steven Pfaff
Comparative research offers some insights into the genesis of movements under highly repressive conditions in which dissident groups are systematically denied the organizational and political resources necessary to mount a sustained challenge to the state. During the 1970s and 1980s there were circles of dissidents in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany), but most grievances were not expressed in an organized form, and there were few opportunities to mobilize protest against the Communist regime. State repression and party control of society meant that opposition had to be organized within institutions that were shielded from state control. Religious subcultures offered a rival set of identities and values while generally accommodating the demands of the regime. Within the free social space offered by the church, a peace movement developed during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The effort to build an independent citizens' peace movement based in the church played an important role in linking together various groups committed to nonviolent protest, peace, ecology, and human rights into a coherent, if still organizationally weak, opposition during the East German revolution of 1989. [source]

The US 9/11 Commission on Border Control

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2004
Article first published online: 30 SEP 200
The collapse of Europe's Communist regimes and the breakup of the Soviet Union marked the end of the "short twentieth century" and appeared to have opened up an era of accelerating globalization,increasingly free movement of goods and capital and, if not yet free movement of persons, certainly travel less hindered by bureaucratic obstacles. The threat of international terrorism, however, places a major question mark on such expectations. The magnitude of this threat was shown by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on US targets in New York and Washington. The attacks have led to greatly increased security checks on international travel and, especially in the United States, to tightened visa regulations and border controls. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, created by the US Congress and the President in 2002, submitted its final report in July 2004. The analysis of the terrorist threat and the recommendations on how to counter it offered in this 567-page document suggest that restrictions on crossing US international borders are unlikely to be eased soon and may well be made stricter. The practical inconvenience of such measures, however, may be lessened by improvements in the technological means of identifying persons, such as through use of biological markers. Relevant passages of the 9/11 Commission Report, from Chapter 12, section 4, are reproduced below. Footnotes have been omitted. [source]

Cooption and Repression in the Soviet Union

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 1 2001
Dmitriy Gershenson
The Soviet ruling elite, the nomenklatura, used both cooption and political repression to encourage loyalty to the communist regime. Loyalty was critical both in defusing internal opposition to the rule of the nomenklatura and in either deterring or defeating foreign enemies of the Soviet Union. The cost of coopting people into the Communist Party was a decrease in the standard of living of members of the nomenklatura, whereas the cost of political repression was the danger that members of the nomenklatura would themselves be victimized. We assume that the nomenklatura determined the extent of cooption and the intensity of political repression by equating perceived marginal benefits and marginal costs. We use this assumption to construct an account of the historical evolution of policies of cooption and political repression in the Soviet Union. [source]

The Effect of Religiosity on Tax Fraud Acceptability: A Cross-National Analysis

JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 3 2006
STEVEN STACK
Religion provides an important basis for social integration and the prevention of deviant behavior, such as tax fraud, a crime that costs society billions of dollars in lost revenue. The literature on tax fraud and tax fraud acceptability (TFA) has neglected religiosity as a social bond that may deter this type of behavior. Furthermore, existing work is based on the United States; there are no systematic cross-national studies. In particular, there is no research exploring the "moral communities" hypothesis that religiosity's effect on deviance will vary according to the strength of national moral communities. The present study addresses these two gaps in the literature by analyzing data on 45,728 individuals in 36 nations from the World Values Surveys. We control for other predictors of TFA, including social bonds, economic strain, and demographic factors. The results determined that the higher the individual's level of religiosity, the lower the TFA. Results on the moral community's hypothesis were mixed. However, in a separate analysis of individual nations, the presence of a "moral community" (majority of the population identifies with a religious group) explained 39 percent of the variation in the presence or absence of the expected religiosity-TFA relationship. Furthermore, the presence of a communist regime in a nation, often known for the oppression of religious groups who then may view the regime as illegitimate, diminished the impact of religion on TFA. [source]

Science, Modernity, and the Making of China's One-Child Policy

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 2 2003
Susan Greenhalgh
China's one-child-per-couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one-child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world-in-crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core,that China faced a virtual "population crisis" and that the one-child policy was "the only solution" to it,as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge-making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself. [source]

The Operational Codes of Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung: The Last Cold Warriors?

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2005
Akan Malici
Although the end of the Cold War brought the transformation of the communist bloc, some states have resisted the ensuing wave of democratization. This study assumes that important mechanisms of continuity and change in communist states are situated in the belief systems of their leaders and that the years between 1985 and 1991 were a catalytic period. What did Fidel Castro of Cuba and Kim Il Sung of North Korea learn from the end of the Cold War? Their belief systems are examined prior to 1985 and after 1991, i.e., before and after the collapse of other communist regimes. If learning has occurred, it should be reflected in a comparison of their beliefs for these time periods. Our results from ANOVA analyses indicate that Fidel Castro engaged in some learning but Kim Il Sung did not. This finding is complemented by the results of a MANOVA analysis, which indicate that the end of the Cold War had only a modest impact on Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung, independent of their specific personalities. We conclude by drawing attention to the ensuing debate between structural- and agent-level theorizing and by giving some suggestions for future research. [source]

Wy are the transition paths in China and Eastern Europe different?

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 1 2003
A political economy perspective
Abstract The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework linking communist regime collapse and privatizing economic reforms. The framework permits us to explain why certain communist regimes lost their monopoly of political power while others have not. We show that the essential difference between those communist regimes which survived economic reform and those which did not, lies in the nature of the privatization reform introduced by the communist leadership. The privatization that we call ,Market-Leninist', was implemented in China and Vietnam while the second type of privatization, termed ,Embezzlement for a rainy day' was the type of privatization implemented in Eastern Europe. We show, in the context of a game between rulers and the population, that the size of the repressive apparatus is the key element determining the type of privatization chosen by the rulers. JEL classification: P2, P3. [source]