The Kurds in Iraq have won the international community’s trust as they have been part of the solution to the issues facing the region. Dissatisfied with Baghdad and overconfident that the regional ...countries will not backlash due to the referendum, the KRG proceeded with the referendum for independence in the Kurdistan region including the disputed areas. The KRG decision-makers were vigilant enough to avoid playing the nationalist card and make the case exclusively as a domestic affair. Neither neighboring countries, in which many Kurds are residents, nor the international community supported the referendum. In this article, I would like to bring certain aspects of the Kurdistan Independence Referendum into a better light of appreciation. It will be argued that it is not about the process rather the structure of the international regime of recognition. The international community has opted for the already dysfunctional Iraq.
The blasphemy referendum 2018 H Moore, David
Irish political studies,
04/2019, Letnik:
34, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Although no-one had ever been convicted of blasphemy in modern Ireland, there had been semi-regular calls for the removal of the constitutional provision that stated blasphemy to be an offence, which ...would then make it possible for the relevant legislation to be repealed. In June 2018 the Government declared that a referendum was to take place to remove the word 'blasphemy' from the constitution. In September, it was announced that this would be held on the same day as the presidential election in the following month. The referendum was seen as uncontroversial, with all the major political parties in favour of the amendment. Further, most religious groups either supported the proposal or, at the very least, did not oppose it. In the build-up to polling day, opinion polls demonstrated strong support from the public for the amendment, and only one member of parliament opposed it. On 26 October 2018, the proposed amendment was approved by the people with a 65-35 majority.
This paper presents novel evidence on the pattern of voting in referenda and develops a spatial learning model that helps explain such behavior. In particular, we shed light on the determinants of ...voters' choices over nuclear power using data on two Italian referenda. Exploiting the panel structure of the data, we document that voting against nuclear power increases, whenever the distance from the closest nuclear plant decreases. However, we detect a different voting behavior between municipalities close to existing reactors and those close to proposed ones. A possible explanation is that many citizens hold more precise information on nuclear safety because they have experienced the presence of a reactor in their vicinity for many years. Therefore, we propose a model of voting with endogenous information acquisition interacting both proximity and learning effects, whose results are compatible with the empirical findings. Citizens receive public and private signals and revise their beliefs on the risk of living close to a plant. Such revision process is nested into a spatial voting model establishing conditions for a similar or different voting behavior of the electorate based on the proximity from the reactor.
Economics was front and centre during the run-up to the June 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union and economists were almost unanimous that leaving would make the UK ...economically worse off than otherwise. Still, in the 6 months since the referendum, there has been little discernible impact on macroeconomic variables beyond a fall in the value of the pound, and the economics profession has been criticized for being overly gloomy in its predictions. This article offers some immediate reflections on the state of the economy in the run-up to the vote, on the forecasts of economists during the campaign, and on the changes to policy since. The lack of an immediate recession has been taken as evidence that the economics was wrong, but it is not evidence that leaving the EU will be economically harmless. Despite fiscal and monetary loosening most forecasters still expect growth to be slower than otherwise over the medium term. The vote and debate around it does offer some challenges for economics and we conclude with five lessons for the profession.
The characteristics of the Yellow Vest movement in France and the government's response to its emergence are discussed. The movement's demand for the Citizens' Initiative Referendum is based on a ...twofold denial of political reality: the assumption that the national state still has power and that the constitution is an essential vector and a denial of the political character of the wage struggle.
The Nordic model has long been admired in Scotland, and has featured prominently in aspects of the Scottish independence referendum debate. This article explores the difficulties in instituting a ...similar system here, identifying two significant barriers: the institutional setting (the powers available to Scottish politicians) and the partisan nature of competition between the two parties that might be able to deliver upon such a commitment. It concludes that the prospects of moving towards a Nordic‐style social investment model are slight, given the political, institutional and attitudinal barriers in place.
The UK voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union in a referendum on 23 June 2016. This article examines why this was the result and brings out comparative implications. Building on ...previous findings that expectations about the impact of Brexit were central to voters’ decisions, we seek to improve understanding of how these expectations mattered. On average across a range of issues, our analysis suggests that Leave would have won if voters had expected things to stay much the same following Brexit. A big exception is immigration, for which “no change” is associated with Remain voting. But there was a clear expectation that immigration would fall after Brexit (as most voters wanted). That consideration strengthened the Leave vote, and did so sufficiently to overwhelm a more important but less widely and strongly held expectation that the economy would suffer. We also find that those who were uncertain about where Brexit might lead were more likely to back the status quo. This supports a posited tendency towards status quo bias in referendum voting, notwithstanding a widespread belief that this bias failed to materialize in the Brexit vote. Our methods and findings have valuable implications for comparative research.
Después del fracaso del golpe de estado, el diario español EL PAÍS moderó los contenidos de su información sobre Venezuela. Si bien se mantuvo crítico con Chávez, mantuvo una cierta distancia con ...respecto a la oposición. Continuó con la publicación de fragmentos de la prensa antichavista, pero expresó también sus desacuerdos en los editoriales sobre las estrategias seguidas para derrumbar al Gobierno de Chávez. After the failure of the coup d´etat, Spanish newspaper EL PAIS moderated its information contents on Venezuela. Despite being critical of Chávez, it kept a distance with regard to his opponents. It continued to publish excerpts of antichavist press, but also expressed its disagreement of the strategies employed to overthrow Chávez’s government in its editorials.
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