This article analyses Turkey's responses to the Arab uprisings in the context of its larger foreign policy transformation and regional aspirations. The AKP government seized the uprisings as an ...opportunity to increase its influence in the region by assigning itself a central role in the transition processes in various countries. In the process, however, Turkey faced a number of setbacks and reversals. Comparing the cases of Libya, Syria, and Egypt, the paper argues that Turkey's efforts to advance regime change in these sites were marked by inconsistency and incoherence. Furthermore, the paper argues that this trajectory of reactions can be explained only by taking both ideational and domestic factors into account. Despite the shortcomings of Turkey's actions, however, the article concludes that Turkey has consolidated itself as a regional actor, albeit a controversial one.
Regional powers are often conceived of as ‘regional leading powers’, states which adopt a cooperative and benevolent attitude in their international relations with their neighbours. The article ...argues that regional powers can follow a much wider range of foreign policy strategies in their region. Three ideal-typical regional strategies are identified: empire, hegemony, and leadership. The article is devoted to a theory-led distinction and clarification of these three terms, which are often used interchangeably in the field of International Relations. According to the goals pursued, to the means employed, and to other discriminating features such as the degree of legitimation and the type of self-representation by the dominant state, the article outlines the essential traits of imperial, hegemonic, and leading strategies and identifies sub-types for better classifying hegemony and leadership.
It is widely recognized that unified oppositions present a bigger threat to dictators than divided oppositions. In this paper, we use micro-level data on opposition protests in Putin-era Russia to ...examine the factors that facilitate co-operation among different opposition forces. In particular, we focus on what leads so-called systemic opposition parties - those who have been granted some institutional accommodation by the regime - to join forces with non-systemic opposition forces. We propose a novel permutation-based method for analyzing protest coordination using event count data and find that coordination is most likely on issues of fundamental importance to the systemic opposition's base supporters. We also find that state co-optation reduces the extent of coordination. These findings illustrate the politically precarious position of "loyal" oppositions under autocracy; they must simultaneously show fealty to the state and maintain some measure of credibility as an opposition party that cares about its supporters' demands.
Across South Asia and beyond, the politics of belonging continue to breed alarming volatility and violence. The embodied, affective dimensions of these politics remain an imminent concern. In this ...article, I question how anxiety informs these reckonings of who belongs and who does not. Capable of galvanizing bodies and the greater body politic, anxieties over national belonging remain a powerful, but less understood, political force. In Darjeeling, India, anxieties over belonging–what I term "anxious belongings"–have fueled a particularly mercurial subnationalist politics, involving recurrent agitations for a separate state of Gorkhaland. Situated amid these interplays of anxiety, politics, and belonging, I identify anxious belonging as a collectively embodied phenomenon–at once historical, social, and pregnant with political possibility. As I show, these anxieties are deeply rooted in body and time. Today, they remain as unsettling as they are formative of a people and their politics. Thinking anthropologically about the origins and sociopolitical life of anxiety in Darjeeling, with this article I signal new ways of understanding–and perhaps anticipating–the volatilities that attend the politics of belonging worldwide. Anxious belonging accordingly comes into view as a dimension of and potential for markedly agitated forms of life and politics. A través de Asia del Sur y mas allá, la política de pertenencia continúa generando, una inestabilidad y violencia alarmantes. Las dimensiones representadas, afectivas de estas políticas permanecen como una preocupación inminente. En este artículo cuestiono cómo la ansiedad influye en las consideraciones de quien pertenece y quien no. Capaz de incitar cuerpos y una entidad política más grande, las ansiedades sobre pertenencia nacional continúan siendo una poderosa fuerza política pero poco entendida. En Darjeeling, India, ansiedades sobre pertenencia–lo que llamo "pertenencias ansiosas"–han avivado una política sub-nacional particularmente volátil envolviendo recurrentes agitaciones por el estado separatista de Gorkhaland. Situada en el medio de estas interacciones de ansiedad, política y pertenencia, identifico pertenencia ansiosa como un fenómeno colectivamente corpóreo-a la vez histórico, social, y concebido con posibilidad política. Como demuestro, estas ansiedades están profundamente arraigadas en cuerpo y tiempo. Hoy ellas continúan siendo inestables en la medida en que influyen en la gente y su política. Pensando antropológicamente sobre los orígenes y la vida socio-política de la ansiedad en Darjeeling, con este artículo indico nuevas maneras de entender–y quizás anticipar–las inestabilidades que están presentes en la política de pertenencia a través del mundo. Pertenencia ansiosa, por consiguiente aparece como una dimensión de y potencial para formas de vida y política marcadamente agitadas.
The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of intermunicipal fiscal cooperation on municipal public spending, based on the French experience. A model of municipal spending choice is estimated ...using panel data and spatial econometrics for municipalities over the period 1994—2003. Two main results are provided. First, intermunicipal cooperation has no significant impact on the level of municipal public spending, which suggests that cooperation does not achieve its goal of reducing municipal spending by the sharing of local responsibilities. Second, there are no spending interactions between municipalities belonging to the same intermunicipal community. This is in line with the goal assigned to cooperation in terms of internalisation of spatial externalities. However, the results show that benefit spillovers remain highly significant outside intermunicipal communities.
It has been suggested that political distrust is associated with lower levels of voter turnout and increased votes for challenger or populist parties. We investigate the relationship between ...political (dis)trust and electoral behaviour using the 2009 Belgian Election Study. Belgium presents an interesting case because compulsory voting (with an accompanying turnout rate of 90.4 per cent) compels distrusting voters to participate in elections. Nevertheless, distrusting voters are significantly more inclined to cast a blank or invalid vote. Second, distrust is positively associated with a preference for extreme right (Vlaams Belang) and populist (Lijst Dedecker) parties. Third, in party systems where there is no supply of viable challengers (i.e. the French-speaking region of Belgium), the effect of political trust on party preference is limited. We conclude that electoral effects of political distrust are determined by the electoral and party system and the supply of electoral protest. Adapted from the source document.
Traditional explanations of the origins of regional parties as the products of regionally-based social cleavages cannot fully account for the variation in regional party strength both within and ...across countries. This unexplained variance can be explained, however, by looking at institutions, and in particular, political decentralization. This argument is tested with a statistical analysis of thirty-seven democracies around the world from 1945 to 2002. The analysis shows that political decentralization increases the strength of regional parties in national legislatures, independent of the strength of regional cleavages, as well as of various features of a country's political system, such as fiscal decentralization, presidentialism, electoral proportionality, cross-regional voting laws and the sequencing of executive and legislative elections.
RESUMO O texto traz os resultados de um estudo prosopográfico de 130 membros da alta administração pública e da elite política do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, atuantes durante a Primeira República, e ...estendendo-se do início do período, em 1889, até 1937, data que marca o fim do primeiro governo Vargas, com o golpe do Estado Novo e o fechamento do sistema político representativo no país. O estudo lançou luz sobre o perfil social e profissional de altos dirigentes políticos do Estado, então atuantes em nível regional ou nacional. Pela metodologia e critérios de análise utilizados, o trabalho busca também a realização de comparações com estudos anteriores sobre elites políticas de outros estados brasileiros, ampliando o conhecimento acerca da atuação dos grupos políticos regionais do Brasil da Primeira República às vésperas do Estado Novo. Ao fazê-lo, a pesquisa relativiza a perspectiva excepcionalista que dominou por muito tempo a historiografia política sobre o Rio Grande do Sul - notadamente a ideia de uma administração científica não-oligárquica fundada no Positivismo -, embora reafirme alguns aspectos historicamente associados ao republicanismo do Sul do país, como a baixa renovação de quadros políticos e, por conseguinte, a longevidade das carreiras públicas na alta administração pública.
Drawing from recent theories of economic accountability that stress the contextual nature of attributed responsibility, this paper explores how variation in regional authority influences the ...interplay between objective regional economic conditions and perceived regional economic performance. The study uses a virtually unexplored set of surveys about public opinion in European Union regions in a broad sample of politically decentralized European democracies. The results demonstrate that while higher levels of self-rule increase the weight citizens place on economic outcomes when building their regional evaluations, higher levels of shared rule reduce it.
The author contends that the Arab Spring has provided an opening for the Gulf Cooperation Council as a group and for Saudi Arabia as a long-time aspiring leader of the Arab world to try to expand ...their regional influence and global profile. An already weakened Arab state system, he argues, has been once again weakened by the sweeping wave of rebellion.
PDF
