In contrast to more pessimistic studies, the authors find evidence that civic participation in one domain of public life can lead to more participation elsewhere, what they call spillover effects. The authors’ findings are based on a large survey—among the broadest in its class—of participants in community-managed schools throughout rural Honduras and Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. Despite various ob…
The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was established by the UN Security Council on 25 October 1999 to administer the territory of East Timor towards independence in the wake of its violent separation from Indonesia. UNTAET largely fulfilled the elements of the security and governance mandate conferred on it by the Security Council, but this was not sufficient to…
As China expands its foreign policy interests and strategic power further into the Pacific Ocean, a division is developing between Beijing’s policies in the western Pacific (around East and Southeast Asia), which have begun to assume a more assertive strategic role, and the South Pacific where China is instead seeking to engage in ‘soft balancing’ power behaviour towards American and by extensi…
To date, no research has attempted to evaluate human rights in the Pacific region in comparative perspective. Employing commonly used cross-national measures of basic human rights, the author examines how well regimes in the region respect political and civil rights as well as the right to physical integrity. The results reveal that, as regards political and civil rights, the region appears to …
New Zealand was a founding member of the League of Nations in 1919 but there was no enthusiasm for the new organisation in Wellington. The Massey government only saw unwelcome obligations resulting from its membership, and the League’s great quest for a comprehensive agreement on security and arbitration was regarded as a threat to the British Empire by its most loyal dominion. Obliged to send …
Previous studies on new political parties have assumed that they either represent new or ignored cleavages or issues, or emerge in order to cleanse an ideology deficiently represented by an existing party. Four highly successful parties analyzed in this article manifestly fail to comply with these assumptions. The article proposes a parsimonious two-dimensional typology of new parties refining …
This article is motivated by the growing need to integrate the current political science and marketing literature in order to provide a deeper understanding of the behaviour of political actors and their relationships with relevant stakeholder groups. In our article, we demonstrate how Ormrod’s conceptual model of political market orientation complements political science models of party organi…
How do electoral systems affect legislative organization? The change in electoral systems from Single Member District plurality (SMD) to Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) in New Zealand can illuminate how electoral incentives affect the distribution of cabinet positions. Because in SMD the outcome of individual local districts determines the number of seats a party wins collectively, New Zealand …
We offer a new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of political parties/party groupings that is intended to be complementary to the standard approach to counting the effective number of political parties – the Laakso–Taagepera index (1979). This approach allows the possibility of precise measurement of concepts such as polarized pluralism or fragmented bipolarism and is applicable to…
This article examines the impact of party system change in Germany on the role, status and power of the two catch-all parties (CDU/CSU and SPD) in the light of the 2009 federal election. It argues that party system change has had a paradoxical impact. On the one hand, the decline in the overall catch-all vote undermines the two parties’ integrative function. On the other, the presence of three …
This article presents an inquiry into the causes of party-switching under two different electoral regimes. It exploits a natural experiment in South Africa, where a large number of local legislatures are elected using the same mixed system, to examine how the party-switching behaviours of legislators elected under proportional representation (PR) rules may differ systematically from those of le…
Recent major surveys of the Scottish electorate and of Scottish National Party (SNP) members have revealed a distinct gender gap in support for the party. Men are markedly more likely than women to vote for the SNP and they comprise more than two-thirds of its membership. In this article, we use data from those surveys to test various possible explanations for the disproportionately male suppor…
Parties often have to campaign for two or more levels of office at the same time. However, declining levels of organization means that the demands of concurrent elections can potentially increase the demands on volunteer party organizations considerably. These demands are multiplied by the concurrent use of different electoral systems which provide party organizations with different incentives.…
Participatory forums, in which lay citizens or users of public services contribute to the governance of public services, have proliferated in recent years. In debates about the quality and influence of such processes, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of emotional as well as rational deliberation, and criticism of the way in which the structures imposed on such forums can …
Two of the most important social policy agendas of the Welsh state in the contemporary period are the attempt to revitalize the Welsh language – through the promotion of Welsh medium education, in particular – and the effort to eliminate regional inequality and poverty – most recently, through the government’s Communities First programme. This article recounts the history of a cool and sometime…
Drawing on data from a Scottish research study, this paper explores the relationship of professionals’ perceptions about specific perpetrators and victims to their constructions of ‘adult protection’ issues in practice. It finds that professionals’ perceptions of victim distress did not consistently coincide with the construction of adult protection issues, whilst the connection to any assessme…
The UK government’s White Paper on Education, The Importance of Teaching (2010), includes a proposal (Troops to Teachers) to encourage ex-service personnel to train as teachers: this paper presents a critical analysis of the discussions promoting the initiative. Firstly, it is argued that the initiative attempts a rapprochement between ‘reputation’ and ‘respectability’ (McDowell, 2003) by prese…
This paper explores personal assistance – a practice considered crucial for supporting the independence and social inclusion of disabled people. The starting point of the analysis is the presumption that the significance of personal assistance goes well beyond welfare, touching upon existential-ontological issues. In order to uncover these issues, a phenomenological approach is used. The aim is…
Classic work suggests that intergroup conflict increases intragroup cohesion and cooperation. But how do group members respond when their peers refuse to cooperate? Simmel ([1908] 1955) argued that groups in conflict quell dissent by sanctioning group members and supporting centralized leadership systems. This claim has important implications, but little direct support. This research investigat…
Against the background of contrasting religious versus secular norms in immigrant communities and in Dutch society, this study examines how religious identity expression is related to the social integration of Dutch Muslims within (a) Turkish or Moroccan minority groups and (b) Dutch majority groups. Using nationally representative survey data (N = 2,027), we distinguish religious identificatio…