The Choice for Proportional Representation: Electoral System Design in Peace Agreements

After a civil war, there is a keen interest in ‘getting the institutions right’. This article summarizes our knowledge of one particular institution, the electoral system, through a review of the literature on power sharing and electoral systems in post-conflict societies. Surprisingly, there is little statistical support for the conviction that proportional representation (PR) contributes to inclusive political institutions and thereby to peace and democracy. More positively, a closer look at electoral system design as integral part of peace agreements reveals that PR is the standard choice, that it works as intended, and has a good record in securing peace, though less so of democracy. Future research should look at electoral system design as part of the peace process to explain these findings and draw lessons.     

MOZAMBIQUE

Mozambique is widely regarded as a success story. The parliamentary and presidential lections in 1994 marked the peak of the peace process in Mozambique. Despite minor irregularities, the elections were declared free and fair by international observers. Mozambique has succeeded where other countries such as Angola has failed—a stable peace process, multiparty elections and the transformation of the armed opposition into a civil political party. Its transition to liberalism and capitalism brought macro-economic growth rates that are probably envied by many countries in the region. This article argues, however, that Mozambique provides an example of a third wave democracy where the transition from in electoral democracy to a consolidated democracy has not yet been completed, with little progress towards democratic maturity. In particular, the repercussions of the elections in 1999, Mozambique's ‘black’ November in 2000 and the process of recent consultation between the and Frelimo leadership in order to resolve the paralysed state of Mozambican politics underline a tendency towards a permanent entrenchment of democratic minimalism.     

Economic Development and Military Effectiveness

Abstract

What makes some states more militarily powerful than others? A growing body of research suggests that certain ‘non-material’ factors significantly affect a country's ability to translate resources into fighting power. In particular, recent studies claim that democracy, Western culture, high levels of human capital, and amicable civil-military relations enhance military effectiveness. If these studies are correct, then military power is not solely or even primarily determined by material resources, and a large chunk of international relations scholarship has been based on a flawed metric. The major finding of this article, however, suggests that this is not the case. In hundreds of battles between 1898 and 1987, the more economically developed side consistently outfought the poorer side on a soldier-for-soldier basis. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that many of the non-material factors posited to affect military capability seem to be irrelevant: when economic development is taken into account, culture and human capital become insignificant and democracy actually seems to degrade warfighting capability. In short, the conventional military dominance of Western democracies stems from superior economic development, not societal pathologies or political institutions. Therefore, a conception of military power that takes into account both the quantity of a state's resources and its level of economic development provides a sound basis for defense planning and international relations scholarship.     

Defense Burden and the Effect of Democracy: Evidence from a Spatial Panel Analysis

ABSTRACT

Do democracies spend less on national defense? This paper provides new evidence of the effect of democracy on defense burden based on a Spatial Durbin Model with panel data for 98 countries for the years 1992–2008. While democracy measured by means of an index variable covering the entire range from perfect democracy to perfect autocracy turns out to be insignificant, dummy variables indicating transition to higher levels of democracy reveal a statistically highly significant negative effect of democracy on a country’s defense burden. Allowing for country-specific effects reveals heterogeneity in the effect of democracy across countries. Apart from the effect of democracy, the estimation results indicate strong spatial dependence of military burdens across countries. Moreover, they provide statistical evidence for a peace dividend, for substitution effects in defense spending and for a negative effect on the military burden for countries when they exhibit a trade surplus instead of a trade deficit.     

Political transition to democracy

This paper argues that the crisis of electoral democracy in Zimbabwe and Cote d'Ivoire is a result of underlying structural and institutional deficiencies within national and regional multinational institutions. It assesses the extent to which they have been ‘enablers’ or ‘spoilers’ of electoral-based transitions to democracy. Yet it avoids generalisations of the security sector's involvement in political transitions. In terms of structure, the paper is divided into four sections. Section one will briefly discuss the theoretical perspectives of the election-democracy trajectory. It argues that although elections are a major variable for democracy, unless the ‘ecology of elections’ is conducive, elections may not be an instrument of transition to democracy. The second section analyses the militarisation of politics and the role of the security sector in aiding or stalling democratisation. Section three will assess the role of regional organisations such as the Southern African Development Community, Economic Community of West African States and the African Union in electoral-based political transitions in Africa. Lastly, the paper will discuss how the security sector and multinational African institutions can aid political transitions to democracy in troubled African countries.     

Democracy and peace: Reply to oneal and russett

The criticism of James, Solberg and Wolfson (JSW) (1999) by Oneal and Russett (OR) is not responsive to the methodologica] issues at stake. JSW argued that war is an endogenous feature of the world political and economic system. If its causes are to be measured, it must be as a structural equation in a simultaneous system. Wedded to the idea that “democracies never fight each other,” OR rely on a single equation to justify their view. JSW claim that such an equation may be an ad hoc reduced form with no causal implications unless the equation is explicitly identified as a structural equation. JSW expand the model to explain democracy and conflict as two endogenous variables. JSW do not claim to have discovered the true relationships between these variables by their minimal expansion of the structural relation. They do show that unless these (and other) variables are treated as part of a system, the results are unstable, contradictory, of minimal size and not a reliable guide to public policy.     

Do Democracies Support Violent Non-governmental Organizations Less Than Autocracies Do?

This study draws attention to the question: Do democracies fight indirectly through material support to violent non-governmental organizations (VNGOs) which wage intrastate war against other states in general and against democracies in particular, or are democracies less warlike by proxy? The main conclusions are: democracies are less warlike by proxy than non-democratic states, and the more democratic the regime the lower the probability that it will support VNGOs waging war against other states, both in general and against other democracies in particular. The results do not unequivocally support both the monadic or dyadic argument of democratic peaceful behaviour     

Autocracies and Economic Sanctions: The Divergent Impact of Authoritarian Regime Type on Sanctions Success

There is some consensus in the literature that economic sanctions targeting authoritarian regimes are less effective than those against democratic regimes. This line of research, however, assumes that autocratic regimes are monolithic and that they have similar capacities to resist foreign pressure. This study argues that the success rate of sanctions against dictatorships is contingent on institutional differences across different types of autocracies. I develop a theoretical model indicating that single-party and military regimes are less likely to concede to foreign pressure compared to democracies. This is because they effectively use various repressive tactics and positive inducements to endure the costs of the coercion. Sanctions against personalist regimes, on the other hand, are likely to be as effective as sanctions directed at democracies. Personalist regimes might be inclined to acquiesce to foreign pressure due to their lack of strong institutional capacity to weather the costs of the sanctions. Results from the selection-corrected models show that sanctions against military or single-party regimes are less likely to induce concessions relative to democratic target regimes. The findings also indicate that there is no significant difference in the success rate of sanctions against personalist regimes and democratic governments.     

MALAWI GENERAL ELECTION 2004

In the post-Cold World era, West Africa, like most other regions of the world, experienced significant shifts in its approach to, and understanding of security. The outbreak of brutal domestic conflicts in the sub-region and ECOWAS's subsequent deployment of its peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, marked a turning point in the sub-region's attempt to develop a security architecture that began in the 1970s. This paper argues that in the post-Cold War era, West Africa is in the process of evolving from a security complex to a security community. The inter-linked nature of the conflicts in the Mano River basin reinforced the security interdependence of member states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). These factors, coupled with the close cultural and historical ties, geographical proximity qualifies West Africa as a security complex. The adoption of the ECOWAS Protocol on Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution and Peacekeeping, the supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance and the ECOWAS Moratorium on Small Arms and Light Weapons are clearly aimed at the institutionalisation of conflict resolution mechanisms—a move away from the ad hoc approach of the 1990s. If the democratic peace theory holds true (that democracies do not fight each other), one could make the argument that democracies do not harbour dissidents from neighbouring states. Hence, the development and consolidation of a democratic ethos in the sub-region would lead to the eventual development of a security community.     

Capitalism & the “new wars”: free markets and societal insecurity before and after the cold war, 1970–2013

Critics of globalisation suggest that growing free-market conditions generate anomie, leading ultimately to what some term ‘new wars’ and new insecurities. Others argue that liberal economies dissuade violence since people gain from peace. This study argues for a micro perspective that views predatory economic policies driving higher investment in rebellion-specific capital, such as shadow economic activity that easily translates into insurgency in weak-state settings. Investment in the shadows determines survivability against superior state forces, and survivability determines rebellion, by definition. Using civil war onset data from 1970 to 2013, as well as the Global Peace Index (GPI) and several of its individual components, which capture societal insecurity above and beyond the absence of armed violence, this study finds that countries that are more capitalistic have a lower risk of civil war and societal insecurity. The results are robust to alternative models, testing methods, and uphold when examining several relevant subcomponents of the index, such as internal conflict, violent crime, homicides, ease of access to small arms, and political instability. Surprisingly, democracy tends not to be associated with peace but associates with increased criminality whereas strong autocracy reduces it, suggesting that capitalism, more than democracy, associates with conditions favourable to societal security, independently of a country’s level of development.     

The Illusion of Afghanistan’s Electoral Representative Democracy: The Cases of Afghan Presidential and National Legislative Elections

This article is the latest in a series of published articles systematically examining Afghan Presidential and legislative elections. Structural problems including fraud, ethno-linguistic block voting, and the Single Non-Transferable Vote have had significant impacts on the development of Afghan democratic elections. The challenge now facing the current Afghan government and future elections is the daunting task of uniting the Afghan people while not repeating the electoral mistakes of the past. The tricky balancing act of fostering an overarching national identity without being perceived as privileging particular identities requires strong leadership and a willingness to challenge traditional ethnic, linguistic, and religious norms when need be. Karzai and Ghani Administrations have seriously failed relative to this dynamic.     

Electoral Behavior in Civil Wars: The Kurdish Conflict in Turkey

This study analyzes the effects of political violence on electoral behavior by focusing on one of the longest lasting ethnic conflicts in contemporary times, the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. How do armed conflict and electoral institutions shape turnout in a civil war context? Building on an original data-set at the sub-national level, the study reaches two major conclusions. First, it shows rural displacement caused by political violence led to lower levels of turnout and severely hampered access to voting controlling for a wide range of socioeconomic and electoral system variables. Second, an unusually high electoral threshold aggravated this pattern of disenfranchisement and limited the avenues of nonviolent Kurdish political activism with negative implications for the resolution of the conflict.     

MONEY IN SOUTHERN AFRICAN POLITICS

“Lack of money is the root of all evil”

George Bernard Shaw

In a environment where party financing, private funding in particular, is generally a laissez-faire business, as in most Southern African countries, there is the real risk that interest groups and wealthy individuals will buy influence in political parties and in so doing erode public confidence in the political system. Because they are neither open to public scrutiny nor subject to any legislative restraints, huge private donations can, and often do, come with strings attached. This lack of transparency and openness, as well as mechanisms to prevent it, provides ample ground for influence peddling, where those who pay the piper call the tune. Left unchecked, this party funding scenario will continue to be a serious indictment of the region's democratisation projects, crippling democracy and stunting economic development. This article consid     

Comment: Why “an identified systemic model of the democracy‐peace nexus” does not persuade*

In their article in this journal, James, Solberg and Wolfson (1999) challenge our findings that two states are more likely to have peaceful relations if they are both democratic. They claim to develop a simultaneous system of two equations showing that peace and democracy foster each other, and that the effect of peace in encouraging democracy is stronger than that of democracy on peace. Their analysis, however, is flawed. Their research design employs measures of dispute and joint democracy that are inferior to those now common in the literature, and their equation for predicting peace is not properly specified. These problems distort their results. Even so, their results provide evidence of the pacific benefits of democracy. Analyses we conduct with a more completely specified model reveal stronger support for the democratic “ peace. Furthermore, a test of the effect of interstate conflict on democracy should be done at the national (or monadic) level of analysis; but James et al. perform a dyadic analysis. In a monadic test using vector autoregression, we find that disputes make no contribution to explaining the character of regimes. Even with their dyadic method, their finding that peace promotes democracy is not robust Including a crucial control variable, the ratio of militarily relevant national capabilities, that James et al. omitted, dramatically alters their findings.     

坚定不移走中国特色社会主义政治发展道路——学习胡锦涛总书记“七一”重要讲话体会

胡锦涛总书记在“七一”重要讲话中对坚定不移走中国特色社会主义政治发展道路进行了科学阐释。这既是对90年来我们党领导人民建设社会主义民主政治实践经验的科学总结,也是对未来我国社会主义政治建设的战略部署。中国特色社会主义民主政治发展道路,以党的领导、人民当家作主和依法治国有机统一为本质特征,具有严谨的制度架构、鲜明的特点和巨大的优势,是历史和人民的选择。在新的历史时期,坚持走中国特色社会主义政治发展道路,必须立足我国国情,使之越走越实;积极稳妥地推进政治体制改革,使之越走越宽;大胆吸收和借鉴人类文明成果,使之越走越活;不断推进民主政治的制度化、规范化、程序化,使之越走越稳。     

For Ethnic Group or Country? Evaluating Post-conflict Elections in Africa

The utility of post-conflict elections in sub-Saharan Africa has been the subject of lively academic and policy debates. While some scholars associate several electoral outcomes with votes for peace, others argue that post-conflict elections exacerbate existing cleavages and could reproduce the conditions that led to civil war if the right electoral system is not employed. This paper examines these contesting claims using electoral data in a comparative study of the first truly post-conflict elections in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The analysis shows that political leaders in both countries received votes across numerous cleavage lines in contradiction with an ethnic census.     

Hezbollah: A Proletarian Party with an Islamic Manifesto – A Sociopolitical Analysis of Islamist Populism in Lebanon and the Middle East

This article examines the rising contention between a global foreign policy promoting liberal democracy in the Middle East and Islamist rejectionism. It provides a sociopolitical analysis of the phenomena of radical Islamist politics while focusing on the experience of Hezbollah in Lebanon. It associates the growth of Hezbollah, a political movement seen in various forms in several countries, with social class dynamics that have been antagonised by social inequality, opportunistic leadership, the importation of Western-ordered democracy and by perceived foreign intervention. By examining the root dynamic of Hezbollah in Lebanon, this article argues that poverty has provided the fertile ground for the growth of Islamic populism as a revolutionary movement and has represented a major reason for the rejection of democratisation and political reform. A global foreign policy that seeks to uproot extremism in favour of state-building and the advancement of democracy in the Middle East needs to be reoriented so as to help undermine class inequality and to strengthen government-sponsored public services programmes for the underclass.     

Democracy for the rescue—of dictators? The role of regime type in civil war interventions

Intrastate conflicts, long eclipsing interstate conflicts, are often internationalized. This paper examines internationalized intrastate conflicts through the types of both the intervening and the embattled regimes. Do democracies, more or less than autocracies, support autocratic governments in their fights against rebels? This paper tests three hypotheses: (1) democracies support autocrats fighting rebels less than autocracies do. (2) Democracies support democratic governments fighting against rebels more than autocracies do. (3) The more democratic two states are, the higher the probability one would support the other’s fight against rebels. Covering all documented external support in intrastate wars (1975–2000), our findings support hypothesis one and two only partly and confirm hypothesis three. However, comparing the two major accounts of the Democratic Peace theory (DPT)—the normative and the structural—our findings corroborate only the former robustly. The paper thus helps enriching the insights of the DPT beyond interstate conflicts.     

Multilinear extensions and the banzhaf value

It is shown that the Banzhaf value can be obtained by differentiating the multilinear extension of a game at the midpoint of the unit cube. This gives us a composition theorem for the value of compound games. As an example, the values of the electoral college and presidential election “games” are approximated by the method of extensions.