			Home About us Contact

Political Elites (political + elite)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	93%
2 Other Domains	7%

Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences

General & Introductory Political Science	43%
International Relations	12%
General & Introductory History	9%
8 Other Subdomains	36%

Selected Abstracts

Entering the Political Elite in Canada: The Case of Minority Women as Parliamentary Candidates and MPs,

CANADIAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY/REVUE CANADIENNE DE SOCIOLOGIE, Issue 2 2000
Jerome H. Black
Cette recherche analyse les femmes des minorités ethniques comme nouveau groupe social visant à accéder à l'élite politique. Elle est axée sur les conséquences liées à leur appartenance à une «double minorité». L'analyse examine deux modèles de cheminement de carrière qui offrent des caractérisations alternatives quant aux obstacles de recrutement auxquels se heurtent les nouveaux groupes sociaux et qui créent des attentes différentes quant aux ressources détenues par les femmes des minorités, comparativement à celles des groupes plus établis. Les résultats principaux, fondés sur un sondage canadien de 1993 sur les candidats parlementaires et completés par de l'information sur les députés, appuient davantage le modèle de «compensation» et, en général, semblent indiquer que l'inégalité continue de caractériser le processus d'accès à l'élite politique. This study examines minority women as a new social group seeking access to the political elite, emphasizing the consequences of their "double minority" status. The analysis considers two career path models that make alternative characterizations about the recruitment barriers faced by new social groups and that yield different expectations about the resources held by minority women compared with more established groups. The main results, based on a 1993 Canadian survey of parliamentary candidates, supplemented by information on MPs, indicate more support for the "compensation" model and, generally, suggest that inequity continues to characterize the process of political elite access. [source]

Value Words and Lizard Brains: Do Citizens Deliberate About Appeals to Their Core Values?

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2001
Paul R. Brewer
Political elites often present citizens with frames that define issues in terms of core values. This study tests two competing accounts of how citizens might process such frames. According to the "passive receiver" thesis, citizens process elite frames automatically, without engaging in critical thought. In contrast, the "thoughtful receiver" thesis holds that the impact of frames may depend on how favorably or unfavorably citizens respond to them. An experiment in value framing produced evidence more consistent with the thoughtful receiver thesis: The message that welfare reform is "tough love" influenced opinion only among those it did not anger, whereas the message that welfare reform is "cruel and inhumane" produced an effect only among those who judged it to be strong. More generally, these findings suggest that active processing of frames may limit the power of elite framing. [source]

Forging Collective Capacity for Urban Redevelopment: "Power To,""Power Over," or Both?

CITY & COMMUNITY, Issue 1 2006
Richard Gendron
This paper explores the dynamic of cooperation between economic and political elites in a public-private partnership that was created to guide the redevelopment of downtown Santa Cruz, California, following the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. While the public-private partnership was instrumental in the success of post-earthquake reconstruction of the central business district, the consensus and cooperation between progressive political leaders and local business elites in this "partnership" were often more apparent than real. This occurred not only because of the longstanding tensions between the local pro-growth coalition and progressive political leadership of the city but also because the public-private partnership became a mechanism for potential regime transformation. Thus, the "collective capacity" needed to proceed with post-earthquake redevelopment of the central business district was "forged" in two senses: It was created to effect necessary redevelopment, but it was also counterfeit. Political elites sought to limit both the scope and the duration of the partnership to check the increasing power of economic elites in the aftermath of the earthquake. Although regime theory acknowledges the relationship between "power over" and "power to," I argue that its emphasis on the latter overlooks critical sources of conflict in the creation and implementation of local urban development policy. Consequently, I further argue that an analysis of both conceptions of power is necessary to understand not only how local development policies are enacted but "who benefits" from them. [source]

Napoleon and the Universal Monarchy

HISTORY, Issue 319 2010
PHILIP DWYER
Although the idea of ,Universal Monarchy' has existed since the early middle ages, the term started to be used pejoratively from the sixteenth century onwards. This article looks at the manner in which contemporaries perceived Napoleon's actions on the international scene, and how they used the term in relation to his foreign policy. Most of Europe's political elite believed that Napoleon was bent on some sort of ,universal domination', and that it was not limited to Europe. That perception was a direct result of an aggressive, expansionist French foreign policy. Napoleon's intentions, on the other hand, are more ambiguous. While at times he adopted a rhetoric which informed contemporary fears, the practical limits to his foreign policy were such that ,Universal Monarchy' could never be anything more than an ephemeral dream. [source]

Persistence, Principle and Patriotism in the Making of the Union of 1707: The Revolution, Scottish Parliament and the squadrone volante

HISTORY, Issue 306 2007
DEREK J. PATRICK
Since the 1960s most historians of the Union of 1707 have considered it a less than glorious chapter in Scotland's history. Driven by ambition and greed, Scots politicians, covetous of English wealth and swayed by promises and bribes, bartered their nation's independence for personal gain. Those genuinely committed to political union were in a minority. The following article maintains that this interpretation is based on an essentially short-term approach to the subject. Concentrating on the worsening relations between Scotland and England in the years immediately preceding the Union gives a distorted impression of what was a more enduring concern. It suggests the Revolution of 1688,9 had a far greater impact on the politics of union than previously anticipated, with the religious and political freedoms it guaranteed shaping the beliefs of a large number of Scots MPs who sat in Parliament 1706,7, almost half of whom had been members of King William's Convention Parliament with a majority supporting union. Focusing on the squadrone volante, one of the two much-maligned Scots unionist parties , the article traces the ideological roots of its key members and illustrates the various factors that led them to endorse an incorporating union which offered security for presbyterianism and a solution to Scotland's economic underdevelopment. Not denying that management and ambition played a significant part in securing the Union, it highlights the fact that amongst the Scottish political elite there was also a degree of genuine commitment and principled support. [source]

Czech Social Reform after 1989: Concepts and Reality

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SECURITY REVIEW, Issue 2-3 2001
Martin Pot
The goal of this paper is twofold: to present a description of the most important institutional changes taking place in Czech social policy after 1989, and to offer the explanation of these changes in a broader cultural, economic and political framework. The significant economic, social and cultural conditions of the country, in which social policy operates, comprise the disposable economic resources, the concept and realization of economic reform including changes in ownership rights, the capacity of public administration, the way political democratization is designed and implemented, and political priorities and concepts of the political elite actually in power. Recent developments in the labour market and the new patterns of employment policy are discussed in more detail. After that, the incidence of poverty and the ongoing social and economic stratification are associated with the new approaches to the construction of a social security system which has been composed of three main tiers (or "pillars"): social insurance, state social support, and social assistance. As a conclusion, the sensitive points of the present state of Czech social policy, along with crucial decisions to be taken in the future, are identified. [source]

Politics of Exception and Unease: Immigration, Asylum and Terrorism in Parliamentary Debates in the UK

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2008
Jef Huysmans
This article analyses how the British political elite has securitised migration and asylum since 9/11 by looking at when and how parliamentary debates linked counter-terrorism to immigration and/or asylum. The findings suggest that there is considerable reluctance within the political elite to introduce or especially sustain the connection between migration and terrorism too intensely in public debate. The parliamentary debates also show that for understanding the securitising of migration and asylum one cannot focus exclusively on the main security framing that is found in counter-terrorism debates, which we name ,the politics of exception'. There is at least one other format, which we call ,the politics of unease', that is central to how the British political elite securitises migration and asylum, and contests it, in the public realm. [source]

Entering the Political Elite in Canada: The Case of Minority Women as Parliamentary Candidates and MPs,

DO GOVERNMENTS SUPPRESS GROWTH?

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 1 2007
AND INNOVATION BLOCKING IN A MODEL OF SCHUMPETERIAN GROWTH, INSTITUTIONS, RENT-SEEKING
This paper argues that some governments adopt growth-reducing policies due to the rational self-interest of the political elites. The model takes a rent-seeking government that can block innovation and incorporates it into a Schumpeterian growth model. The quality of a country's institutions is reflected in the cost of innovation blocking. An increase in the level of innovation-blocking activity will reduce the rate of innovation and therefore reduce growth. The government also faces the possibility of losing power whenever an innovation occurs. We examine the conditions under which a government will choose to block innovation and suppress growth. [source]

Brecht and Sinn und Form: The Creation of Cold War Legends

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2007
Stephen Parker
ABSTRACT Brecht and Peter Huchel's Sinn und Form are among the few examples of early GDR cultural life with a genuine capacity to accumulate cultural capital on the international stage. The analysis of Brecht's collaboration with Sinn und Form in the Deutsche Akademie der Künste offers a fresh perspective upon their attainment of a legendary pre-eminence in German cultural life during the Cold War. Brecht's espousal of Marxism-Leninism and of a relative artistic autonomy, informed by political constraints, ensured some common ground with the SED leadership. However, the Party's enforcement of a binary opposition between Socialist Realism and Formalism became a crucial field of conflict, spawning major illusions and antagonisms between the artistic and political elites. In key contributions to Sinn und Form, Brecht foregrounded aesthetic considerations and historical responsibility, yet the SED's nationalistic discourse colouring Socialist Realism was motivated by the geopolitical imperative of justifying the GDR's status among the people's democracies of the Eastern Bloc. This, in turn, justified the SED's subordination of cultural to political capital, dismissing the claims of elite culture in a series of staged events. The position of Brecht and his supporters was relentlessly eroded until, quite improbably, the crisis of 17 June 1953 allowed them to turn the tables. While popular opposition was suppressed, Brecht simultaneously re-affirmed his loyalty to the weakened SED leadership, whose revolutionary achievements he continued to praise, and re-asserted the relative autonomy of the elite Akademie and its journal. Brecht and Sinn und Form capitalised upon their enhanced reputations, securing the legendary status that later repression did nothing to diminish. [source]

Tutors and Pupils: International Organizations, Central European Elites, and Western Models

GOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2001
Wade Jacoby
In the past decade, political elites in Central and Eastern Europe have often sought to imitate Western organizational and institutional models, while organizations like the EU and NATO have often acted as "institutional tutors" in the region. Using evidence from Hungary and the Czech Republic, this paper demonstrates why imitating Western structures has been both administratively expedient and useful in building political coalitions. It also stresses that the short-term benefits of doing so are followed by longer-term costs. The paper answers four questions: How have certain models been held up to CEE elites? Why might some such models be targets for elites to imitate? How does such imitation occur? And what results from imitation? Contrary to expectations that institutional modeling would be merely technocratic and used only yearly in the transformation, the paper's threefold heuristic of templates, thresholds, and adjustments shows that the process is both politically contentious and sustained. [source]

Political-Elite Formation and Transition to Democracy in Pre-State Conditions: Comparing Israel and the Palestinian Authority

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 3 2009
Aviad Rubin
This article's main argument complements the literature on transitions to democracy by focusing on the long-term process of political- elite formation and its influence on the ability of political elites to lead a peaceful and stable transition to democracy. By comparing the case of Israel before independence and the case of Palestine before the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, this article suggests that gradual political-elite formation from within the domestic population is likely to achieve better democratic results than a political- elite formation in exile, without close ties to the domestic population, that is ,parachuted' on the population when the political entity is formed. [source]

The Russian Revolution: Broadening Understandings of 1917

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2008
Sarah Badcock
The rich historiography of the revolution has tended to focus around urban and political elites, labour history and events in Petrograd and to a lesser extent Moscow. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened previously inaccessible archives and shifted the ideological battlegrounds ranged over by scholars of the Russian revolution. New archivally based research is shifting its focus away from the capitals and political elites, and draws together social and political approaches to the revolution. By investigating revolutionary events outside the capitals, and lived experiences of revolution for Russia's ordinary people, most of whom were rural, not urban dwellers, current research draws a complex and multifaceted picture of revolutionary events. Explanations for the failure of democratic politics in Russia can now be found not only in the ineptitudes of Nicholas II, the failings of Kerensky, or the machinations of Lenin and his cohort. Instead, ordinary people, outside the capitals and in the countryside, defined and determined revolutionary events. [source]

The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
Loïc Wacquant
This article examines the workings and effects of the penalization of poverty in urban Brazil at century's turn to uncover the deep logic of punitive containment as state strategy for the management of dispossessed and dishonored populations in the polarizing city in the age of triumphant neoliberalism. It shows how ramifying criminal violence (fed by extreme inequality and mass poverty), class and color discrimination in judicial processing, unchecked police brutality, and the catastrophic condition and chaotic operation of the carceral system combine to make the aggressive deployment of the penal apparatus in Brazil a surefire recipe for further disorder and disrespect for the law at the bottom of the urban hierarchy and steers the country into an institutional impasse. The policy of punitive containment pursued by political elites as a complement to the deregulation of the economy in the 1990s leads from the penalization to the militarization of urban marginality, under which residents of the declining favelas are treated as virtual enemies of the nation, tenuous trust in public institutions is undermined, and the spiral of violence accelerated. Brazil thus serves as a historical revelator of the full consequences of the penal disposal of the human detritus of a society swamped by social and physical insecurity. Drawing parallels between penal activity in the Brazilian and the U.S. metropolis further reveals that the neighborhoods of urban relegation wherein the marginal and stigmatized fractions of the postindustrial working class concentrate are the prime targets and proving ground upon which the neoliberal penal state is concretely being assembled, tried, and tested. Their study is therefore of urgent interest to analysts of international politics and state power at the dawn of the twenty-first century. [source]

State Building and Transitional Politics in Iraq: The Perils of a Top-down Transition

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 3 2007
Katia Papagianni
This article examines Iraq's transitional politics from June 2003 to the Constitutional Referendum of October 2005. It argues that the top-down political transition led by the United States and a narrow group of Iraqi elites was inappropriate for the task of reforming the Iraqi state and building democratic institutions. The article argues that, in countries going through regime change while also radically reforming the state, inclusive transitional institutions and consultative processes contribute to agreements being reached about the future of the state. Such transitions allow actors to guarantee the continued participation of opponents in the political process and to gradually develop agreements on constitutional questions. This did not occur in Iraq. An inclusive political process and a national debate on the country's future did not occur. Rather, a narrow group of political elites led the transitional process in the absence of wide consultations. The article argues that the management of Iraq's transition had an independent impact on the outcome of the transition, namely the failure to reach agreement on the sharing of political and economic power within one state by October 2005. [source]

Samuel Huntington and the Geopolitics of American Identity: The Function of Foreign Policy in America's Domestic Clash of Civilizations

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 2 2003
Emad El-Din Aysha
Abstract The clash of civilizations thesis's true origins lie partly in problems Samuel Huntington sees brewing in his own country. His thesis is to a considerable extent an externalization of these troubles,,an attempt to solve them through international means, while serving U.S. national interests in tandem. As a scholar of American exceptionalism Huntington is,,explicitly and openly,,concerned about the political unity and cultural homogeneity of his country in the absence of the existential threat of world Communism. He sees "multiculturalism" and excessive immigration threatening America's dominant Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, English culture and its libertarian political values. Right-wing "anti-federalism" is threatening the authority and very existence of the federal government, while "commercialism," the elevation of commercial interests above all else among economic and political elites, intensifies the class conflict roots of much anti-federalism. The solution to these myriad problems is a foreign threat, whether real or perceived; hence, the clash of civilizations. [source]

International Prosecutions and Domestic Politics: The Use of Truth Commissions as Compromise Justice in Serbia and Croatia

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 4 2009
Brian Grodsky
Since the end of the Cold War, increased efforts at international criminal justice have begun to transform transitional justice for the worst cases of atrocities from a predominantly domestic affair to an international one. I examine side-effects of international pressure for criminal justice, arguing that political elites struggling to balance conflicting international and domestic demands may launch "compromise justice" policies designed to satisfy both, but which in effect weaken mechanisms that transitional justice scholars posit make postconflict reconciliation most likely. I apply this argument to the former Yugoslavia, examining Serbian and Croatian truth commissions as a form of "compromise justice." [source]

Thinking about the Recent Past and the Future of the EU,

JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2008
GEORGE TSEBELIS
After the referendums in France and the Netherlands, the European Union was in disarray. However, political elites in all countries were insisting in the adoption of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, which in turn was a slight modification of the text adopted in the European Convention. The solution was found in the IGC of Brussels in 2007, where the substance of the Treaty was adopted, and symbolic details (flag, anthem) were dropped out. The article explains the impact of the institutions adopted in the Convention, and argues that these institutions would help political decision-making in the EU. It then explains how such significant results became possible (because of the important role of the Presidium in terms of agenda-setting). Finally it argues that the text of the Constitution became a focal point for all negotiating governments. This is why elites came back to it despite the public disapproval of the referendums. [source]

The Creation and Empowerment of the European Parliament*

JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2003
Berthold Rittberger
Up until now we have lacked a systematic, theoretically guided explanation of why the European Union, as the only system of international governance, contains a powerful representative institution, the European Parliament, and why it has been successively empowered by national governments over the past half century. It is argued that national governments' decisions to transfer sovereignty to a new supranational level of governance triggers an imbalance between procedural and consequentialist legitimacy which political elites are fully aware of. To repair this imbalance, proposals to empower the European Parliament play a prominent though not exclusive role. Three landmark events are analysed to assess the plausibility of the advanced theory: the creation of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, the acquisition of budgetary powers (Treaty of Luxembourg, 1970) and of legislative powers through the Single European Act (1986). [source]

D(en)ying narratives: death, identity and the body politic

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2000
Patrick Hanafin
One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with particular symbolic capital and casts a traumatic shadow over discourses on death in Irish society. The nation is always already in the shadow of death, of the deathly apparition of the new nation, made hauntingly manifest in the photos of the dead body of the nationalist hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, as his corpse lay in state in 1920. This body being dead also signals the hope that, in the sacrifice of the individual for the national cause, liberation will one day come. This theme of the primacy of community over individual prefigured the manner in which in postcolonial Irish society the individual body of the citizen was relegated to a secondary position. The attempt to deny or repress death may be analogised with the similar attempt on the part of political elites to create a notion of political identity which is rigid and attempts to keep all those others associated with death and degeneration outside the body politic. [source]

The constitution and the politics of national identity in Spain

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 1 2010
ENRIC MARTÍNEZ-HERRERA
ABSTRACT. The 1978 Spanish Constitution enshrined the recognition of linguistic, cultural, and some degree of ,national' pluralism in the country and outlined procedural mechanisms for the creation of regional ,autonomies', which has given rise to a de facto asymmetrical federal state. This article begins by analyzing the compromise over issues of national identity embedded in the Constitution and the process by which this was forged. It highlights the articulation among political forces of contending conceptions of national identity and different projects for reorganising the territorial structure within and/or against the Spanish state. It also describes the social bases of support for the respective projects. Next, the article examines recent challenges to the parameters of the constitutional compromise. It shows that citizens' support for the basic parameters of the 1978 compromise remains high and has even become stronger. It emphasises that the preferences of the general public stand in sharp contrast with the preferences of influential sections of the Basque and Catalan regional political establishment, and it concludes that current challenges to the constitutional compromise are driven by political elites. [source]

The Limitations of Heuristics for Political Elites

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2009
Kristina C. Miler
Despite the extensive literature on citizens' use of cognitive heuristics in political settings, far less is known about how political elites use these shortcuts. Legislative elites benefit from the efficiency of the accessibility heuristic, but their judgments can also be flawed if accessible information is incomplete or unrepresentative. Using personal interviews and a quasi-experimental design, this paper examines the use of the accessibility heuristic by professional legislative staff when assessing the importance of natural resources issues to their constituents. Staff members recall only a small subset of the relevant constituents in the district, and this subset is biased in favor of active and resource-rich constituents over other, equally relevant constituents. This paper provides a new application of cognitive psychology to political elites and addresses important normative questions about the importance of information processing for political representation. By drawing on the psychology literature on heuristics, this paper identifies the cognitive mechanisms of congressional representation and provides new evidence of old biases. [source]

Neo-liberalism and the Decline of Democratic Governance in Australia: A Problem of Institutional Design?

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2005
Ian Marsh
This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate changing patterns of democratic governance, at least in Westminster-style parliamentary settings, and possibly more generally. It has two specific purposes: first, to propose a paradigm for evaluating the empirical evolution of democratic governance; and second, to illustrate the explanatory potential of this paradigm through a mini-case study of changing patterns of governance in one particular polity. The conceptual framework is drawn from March and Olsen's eponymous study (1995) from which polar (,thick' and ,thin') forms of democratic governance are derived. Four conjectures about its evolution are then explored. First, in its mass party phase, the pattern of democratic governance approximated the ,thick' pole. Second, the subsequent evolution of democratic politics has been in the direction of the ,thin' (minimalist or populist) pole. Third, the cause of this shift was a failure to adapt political institutions to changing citizen identities, which was masked by the ascendancy amongst political elites of the neo-liberal account of governance. Fourth, the paper considers the means by which democratic governance might be renewed. The approach is applied to explain changes in Australian politics over recent decades. [source]

Elites and the Diffusion of Foreign Models in Russia

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2004
Sharon Werning Rivera
Globalization has sparked renewed interest in the diffusion of ideas and norms across boundaries. Although much work has focused on diffusion at the macro-level and on the groups that transmit ideas, few researchers have studied the cognitive processes of political elites as they weigh the merits of various foreign-inspired models. Drawing on a series of original, in-depth interviews with Russian parliamentarians and high-ranking bureaucrats conducted in 1996, this paper makes two contributions to the study of individual-level borrowing in the Russian context. First, the openness of Russian elites to foreign borrowing is investigated; despite the public rhetoric about Russia's uniqueness, a substantial number of Russian elites are willing to borrow from foreign experience , particularly from models of European welfare capitalism. Second, three explanations of why policy-makers prefer to emulate some countries rather than others are tested , because they are similar to their own country either geographically, historically or culturally (comparability); because they have geostrategic prominence (prestige); or because they excel economically and/or politically (performance). Comparability and prestige are found to be of lesser importance than performance to Russian elites when considering the merits of various foreign models. Given that Russia closely approximates a most-likely case for validating explanations stressing comparability, this suggests that the array of foreign ideas that could become part and parcel of Russia's transition process is probably wider than is usually assumed. It also implies that, in general, the regional dimension of diffusion plays a smaller role than previously theorized. [source]

Why Are Fewer Women than Men Elected?

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2010
Gender, the Dynamics of Candidate Selection
Why are fewer women than men elected? Research suggests that this is the combined result of: (1) the supply of female aspirants, or the qualifications of women as a group to run for political office; and (2) the demand for female aspirants, or the preference of political elites for male over female candidates. The aim of this article is to reassess this explanation through the lens of recent case studies of female representation in four regions of the world: Africa, Latin America, North America and Western Europe. On their own, each contribution lends support to arguments about either supply or demand, leading their authors to offer distinct recommendations for change: an increase in the number of women who come forward, which is likely to be a slow and difficult process, or the adoption of gender quotas, which are quick but may produce mixed results. Yet juxtaposing these studies also exposes the limits of the traditional supply and demand model of candidate selection. On the one hand, the ,political market' does not operate efficiently towards an equilibrium solution of supply and demand. Rather, ideologies of gender introduce important distortions to the process: the fact that women are under-represented in all countries around the world suggests that both the supply of and demand for female candidates is artificially repressed, leading to low numbers of women in elective office. On the other hand, important variations exist in women's descriptive representation across countries and across political parties. These differences suggest that dynamics of supply and demand are shaped in crucial ways by features of the broader political context, which may include structural conditions but also the emergence of new and sometimes unanticipated opportunities. [source]

Studying the Polarized Presidency

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2002
Charles M. Cameron
For reasons that political scientists do not fully understand, American political elites are now more ideologically polarized than they have been since the end of World War I. This polarization,in combination with the rise of divided party government,has sweeping implications for the presidency. No aspect of executive-legislative relations is untouched. But also deeply affected are relations with the media, with thejudiciary, with the bureaucracy, and even the organization of the president's own staff. Presidential scholars are just beginning to grasp these changes. We face an enormous challenge but also a remarkable opportunity. The polarized presidency makes us confront a broader range of the institution's possibilities,and those of American democracy. [source]

Making Sense of Violence in the "Badlands" of Kenya

ANTHROPOLOGY & HUMANISM, Issue 1 2009
Bilinda Straight
SUMMARY In this article, I situate violent conflict affecting pastoralists in northern Kenya in the context of media representations of violent incidents and the relationship that many Kenyans perceive between such incidents and election politics. I argue that media representations are implicated in cycles of violent conflict through erasure and misrecognition. Most crucially, media representations tend to focus on cultural stereotypes that tacitly legitimate ongoing violence by explaining it away as timeless and cultural. These unidimensional representations can distract from the culpability of political elites and from the role of economic and political disenfranchisement in sustaining violence. They can also mask the ways in which some elites benefit from the propagation of cultural stereotypes even while deliberately engaging in manipulation of ethnic fault lines. Finally, I argue that these already ubiquitous representations hinging on cultural stereotypes contribute to a global politics of marginalization, within which so-called indigenous violence is simultaneously politically expedient, routine, and forgettable. [source]

Front and Back Covers, Volume 23, Number 1.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 1 2007
February 200
Front and back cover caption, volume 23 issue 1 Front cover A Dutch participant in the reality television series Groeten uit de rimboe, in which Dutch and Belgian families immerse themselves in the daily life of the world's ,most primitive tribes'. Some time afterwards, their hosts pay a return visit to experience life in Europe, screened on television in the sequel Groeten terug. The two series have been subject to heated debate in the Dutch media, having been both lauded as unpretentious entertainment and condemned as unethical ,popular anthropology'. The attention of Myrna Eindhoven, Laurens Bakker and Gerard Persoon was first drawn to the series when a family was sent to Mentawai, where all three have done fieldwork. While they themselves are critical of the unashamed focus on entertainment, they became intrigued by the reactions of other anthropologists to the series. Here they connect this case from the Netherlands to the ongoing debate on ,popular anthropology' in ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, triggered by the UK series Tribe. Dutch anthropologists have mostly dismissed the series as ,not anthropology', criticizing it as exploitative and as ethnocentric. But do anthropologists have the authority to define ,popular anthropology'? How do we come to terms with blatant commercialization of our fieldwork sites, and their conversion into exotic locations for popular entertainment? Back cover NATION-BUILDING IN EAST TIMOR East Timor celebrates its Independence Day on 20 May each year. The day forms the backdrop for the largest annual encounter between the political centre and the periphery. In this photo, an elder (katuas) member of Fretilin, the largest political party, blends traditional and modern at the Independence Day celebrations in the capital, Dili, in 2005. As an exemplar of the United Nations' capacity for ,nation-building', the Democratic Republic of Timor Leste (or ,East Timor' as it is more popularly known) developed into something of a ,poster boy' for the United Nations from the day it became a sovereign nation on 20 May 2002. But in April 2006, some months after the last remaining UN staff had left, violence in the streets of the capital began to undermine social and political stability, resulting in the overthrow of prime minister Mari Alkatiri. Under the more engaged leadership of his successor, José Ramos-Horta, the threat of unrest has abated to some extent. Nevertheless, the country faces an array of serious problems , political, social and economic. In his article in this issue, David Hicks draws on his anthropological fieldwork to highlight the widening gap between the ,centre' and the ,periphery'. Hicks argues that the former embodies the institutions and quasi-Western values professed by the national leaders in Dili, while the latter centres around the traditional, largely indigenous values of the country's local communities, who comprise the overwhelming majority of the population. Although already latent before the United Nations left, this widening divergence in values is eroding the political integrity of the first nation-state to become a member of the United Nations in the 21st century, and if it continues to grow, will call into question the ability of the United Nations to ,manufacture' nation-states. Anthropology has an important role to play in highlighting and analysing the implications of grassroots discrepancies between local populations and political elites. More than this, it has a role to play in confronting the international community with the ethical and other consequences of its increasingly regular interventions in third countries. [source]

State Socialism in Australian Political Thought: A Reconsideration

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 1 2006
Tod Moore
In understanding the origins of conventional tenets in political thought, we should attend to cross-spectrum analysis of usage. Taking state socialism as an instance, this paper argues that the practice of treating it historically either as an element within a radical tradition (by Labour historians) or as a discredited part of a socialist agenda (by liberals) ignores the ways in which it was it was deployed across the political spectrum. Outsiders (such as the Webbs and Métin) skewed the record, describing the pragmatic accommodations they saw as "socialism without doctrines", unconscious of the debates amongst Australian political elites. We need to explore anew where ideas came from, how they were taken up and adapted in the Australian context (by all sides) and the circumstances that determined their duration within everyday discourse. [source]

Belarus, Ukraine and Russia: East or West?

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2010
Stephen White
Belarus and Ukraine are ,lands in between', pulled by their language, religion and history towards the west but also towards the former Soviet republics in the east with which they were for so long associated. The evidence of national representative surveys between 2000 and 2010 suggests that feelings of ,Europeanness' have been declining, as is also the case in Russia; so has the wish to join the European Union (although it remains a popular option) or NATO. ,Soviet nostalgia' has been declining in parallel, more so in Belarus and Ukraine than in Russia; but there is a strong wish in all three countries to associate more closely within the Commonwealth of Independent States. Cross-tabulating, the evidence suggests that Ukraine is the most sharply polarised between these two foreign policy orientations, and the one in which popular attitudes are most likely to constrain the actions of its governing authorities; more generally, it suggests that a constructivist analysis is particularly appropriate in cases in which rival national security complexes are rooted in domestic cultural divisions and expressed through competing political elites. [source]