Mourning Salazar: the ideologic oriented grief in the Portuguese newspapers during the dictatorship

After the end of the Soviet Union, the expectations of the population were still guided largely by the promises of Soviet welfare, while post-socialist governments could no longer maintain the respective policies. In this context, Kazakhstan presents a case where the government has, on the one hand, strong control over politics due to an authoritarian political regime and, on the other hand, more leeway in terms of social policy due to an oil boom that has boosted state revenues since the 2000s. Hence, tensions between popular expectations and neoliberal welfare reforms have made Kazakhstan’s social policy in important areas such as pensions and healthcare rather inconclusive. The political leadership, enjoying far-reaching control over politics and mass media, has invested much effort in managing public perceptions. However, if the generosity of state social policy falls substantially short of public expectations, this gap can cause widespread dissatisfaction with the political leadership, sporadically erupting in violent protests. High public pressure for a relatively generous social policy is thus a legacy of the Soviet welfare model, which has an important impact not only on social policy but also on broader political dynamics, even in authoritarian regimes.

Economic Reform and DemocracyCan The Middle East Compete? Henri Barkey (bio) Reforming stagnant, inefficient, and backward economies like those found throughout most of the Middle East with the aim of integrating them into a dynamic and expanding international market is a difficult endeavor. Adding political liberalization to the agenda results in a truly Herculean task. Yet economic reform and political liberalization are intimately linked. The countries of the Middle East are finding themselves under increasing domestic and international pressure to achieve progress along both of these dimensions. Although authoritarian regimes may initiate economic reform programs, their ultimate success depends not only on reductions in the size and role of the state but also—and to an even greater extent—on the development of pluralist politics. In most of the countries of the Middle East, particularly in the Arab world, it is the incumbent political regime that constitutes the greatest obstacle to both political and economic reform. The much discussed question of sequencing—that is, whether economic reform brings about democracy or vice versa—is not addressed here. Rather, this essay argues that even when authoritarian regimes such as those in power in the Middle East manage to initiate economic reform, its extent and duration are determined more by political considerations than by economic rationality. As a rule, political leaders are moved to implement economic reforms by one or more of the following conditions: 1) balance-of-payments crises, often accompanied by severe indebtedness; 2) runaway inflation and consequent dislocations in domestic production; 3) pressure exerted [End Page 113] by international financial institutions and powerful capitalist states, typically in the form of a refusal to extend any new loans; and 4) a decline in the state’s capacity to extract revenues from its citizens through taxation. In most developing societies beset by such difficulties, the first stage of reform consists of measures designed to redress macroeconomic imbalances. Devaluing the national currency, cutting budget deficits, freeing some prices, and generally opening up the economy are all examples of stabilization measures that have been successfully implemented by authoritarian as well as democratic regimes. The case of Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90) is often cited as evidence that authoritarian regimes may be better equipped than democratically elected governments to handle the initial stage of economic reform. Yet the record here is mixed. The patronage networks, rent-seeking behavior, and tendency to fall captive to narrow interests that are characteristic of many authoritarian regimes may all serve to derail reform efforts. What an authoritarian regime clearly cannot manage without fundamentally changing its character is the second stage of reform. This stage consists of institutional changes such as the development of stock markets; the liberalization of labor markets; the revamping of social security, social services, and retirement systems; large-scale privatizations, especially of state banks; the restructuring of state enterprises; the encouragement of competition within the domestic private sector; and the establishment of a coherent regulatory framework. Such second-stage tasks entail a major transfer of power from the state to civil society—a civil society that is weak or nonexistent in authoritarian states. The efficient functioning of capital and labor markets requires free flows of accurate information and the decentralization of financial resources. Democratic regimes are clearly more effective than authoritarian ones at generating and distributing unbiased information. Most important, every step that an authoritarian regime takes along the path of the second stage of reform limits its direct control over individuals and groups and is thus a nail in its own coffin. This means that whether or not an economic reform program progresses beyond the initial stage is a political decision. If real competition is allowed—as opposed to a rent-seeking simulacrum of capitalism featuring a tame, state-dependent bourgeoisie and a government that seeks to forestall political opposition through the strategic distribution of goods—then both an efficiently functioning market and a vigorous democracy are a good bet to emerge. In postcommunist Eastern Europe, a consensus in favor of real reform has sprung from the association of command-style economic practices with a repressive political system. In Latin America, the zeal for reform is rooted in...

Do political leaders influence the level of economic inequality in authoritarian countries? Building on previous studies on political leaders and authoritarian regimes, we argue that economic inequality is likely to decrease during the tenure of authoritarian leaders with personal experiences of economic hardship. Since authoritarian leaders have greater policy discretion than their democratic counterparts, their policy choices are less constrained by other political actors and institutions. As their material background makes authoritarian leaders more likely to favour introducing redistributive measures, they are expected to use such strategies for political survival, leading to a decrease in economic inequality. We created and analysed a new dataset on political leaders’ socioeconomic backgrounds in authoritarian regimes and found support for our arguments. In line with recent studies on political leaders and policy outcomes, our findings suggest that leaders’ personal experiences of economic hardship greatly affect their policy choices in authoritarian countries.

A change in Portuguese journalism occurred in the 60s. Despite the authoritarian and repressive regime of the Estado Novo, new trends began to mark the Portuguese newspapers. A less bureaucratic, more creative and experimental style, a focus on genres such as reporting and interviewing were identified in the Lisbon newspapers, where photography and new sources of information began to appear more frequently. This paper seeks, through a case study, to evaluate if these new trends were also manifested in the Porto press. Through the analysis of the “Crime da Rua do Sol”, an emblematic case of the city of Oporto, this article identifies the signs of change, especially in the Jornal de Noticias newspaper.

The cities of Guiyang and Kunming are known among legal scholars, practitioners, and policy makers for hosting two of China’s earliest specialized environmental tribunals, following serious water contamination in the two cities. However, the judicialization of environmental protection appears to be relatively nominal in Kunming and substantial in Guiyang. Why? We contend that, at a critical juncture, different political resources available to local leaders—including their past networks and experiences—led them to implement different strategies to deal with these crises. Under similar conditions, different political resources thus led to divergent outcomes of judicial empowerment. We use process tracing to describe the causal sequence in the adoption and application of policies of judicialization. Whether courts are empowered to operate proactively or conservatively is the result of the strategies of local actors in response to the policy agenda set forth by political leaders and constrained by political leaders’ available political resources. This study contributes to existing theories of court empowerment in authoritarian regimes that have largely relied on national-level or socioeconomic factors. Through a controlled subnational comparison in China, this article provides an alternative theory of divergent practices of court empowerment.

Civil society organisations have the potential to play an important role in challenging government in authoritarian regimes. The state, on the other hand, can react through repressive measures or use civil society to legitimise and consolidate the status quo. This article examines civil society in two Central Asian authoritarian regimes, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, following changes in political leadership. Using data gathered from a range of stakeholders including civil society representatives, international donors and independent mass media, we find that under new political leadership Kyrgyzstan has become overtly much more repressive towards civil society. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, has softened its external appearance towards civil society but has an underbelly of persecution. A change in political leadership within authoritarian Central Asia radically changed state–civil society relations.

Selectorate theory explains variation in political leaders’ tenure in office. More specifically, it explains why leaders who produce “good” policies stay in office for short periods of time while leaders who deliver “bad” policy can hold on to power for decades. This chapter presents an overview of selectorate theory, discusses the political institutions that lie at the center of it, including the selectorate and the winning coalition, and elaborates on the place that authoritarian governance has in it. In particular, the chapter uses selectorate theory to analyze autocracies and explains why autocratic leaders implement different sets of policies to obtain and keep the political support necessary to maximize tenure in office.

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the evaluation of recent research on post-communist political regime diversity in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It offers a snapshot of the literature which looks for explanations for this diversity in four sets of factors: pre-communist and communist legacies, transitional institutional choices, political leadership, and foreign influence. The findings are based on the political evolution of three countries: Slovakia, Belarus, and Macedonia. They are representative for all post-communist countries both in terms of regime trajectory and regional location. The author concludes that post-communist political regime diversity can best be explained when the political leadership in general and the top politicians’ ideology, in particular, are placed at the centre of the analysis. This explanation correlates well with all types of post-communist regime, whether democracy, dictatorship, or intermediate regime. The other factors – legacies, institutional choices, and foreign influence – at best, may act only as reinforcing variables in some cases.

What makes us divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’? How can we exert social influence over others? When does a peaceful protest turn into a riot? Why are some politicians heroes one day and villains the next? Where do we find the resources to resist authoritarian regimes? Taking these questions as a starting point, the book examines political conduct from a social identity perspective. Supported by over two decades of empirical research, this perspective distinguishes between our personal identity, which is prevalent when we think of ourselves as individuals, and our social identity, which comes to the fore when we think of ourselves as members of groups. The social identity perspective argues that our political behaviour is largely governed by our social identity, and discusses the implications this has for politics, particularly for social influence, crowd events, leadership, and authoritarian regimes. Accessible and engaging, the content covers a wide range of political topics, such as the way in which categorizing ourselves into groups influences how we perceive the social world, the implications of categorization for social influence, the development of crowd events, the dynamics of leadership, and the mechanisms underlying obedience under authoritarian regimes. The book will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students across a range of disciplines, as well as to political activists and leaders.

Singapore is the only city-state in the world that has successfully formed the infrastructure and prerequisites for active involvement in global transnational flows, which allows it to be interpreted as a global city-state, which determines the relevance of this study. The purpose of the research is to study the phenomenon of a global city-state through the prism of its political structure, the specifics of the political regime and public administration processes. The materials of the study were the current works of Russian and foreign researchers in the field of public administration, political science, and urban studies. The research methods used were general scientific approaches, as well as research concepts corresponding to the object and purpose of the study - a specific historical method, a systems approach, the concepts of neoliberalism, transregionalism, global city, and political leadership. The study identified the specifics of the political regime and state structure of Singapore, the characteristic features of the formation and development of a fully urbanized territory, and also examined the issues of the genesis of this territorial entity. It was revealed that the formation of Singapore as a city-state was determined by the specifics of colonial and post-colonial processes of the SEA macro-region of the world, a fully urbanized territory allows for its comprehensive development, based on a single state concept, implementing “smart city” technologies, and the political regime is characterized by features of authoritarianism, has a paternalistic nature. In the sphere of state structure of the global city-state of Singapore, significant specifics were revealed in the form of the formation of a power conglomerate of national and municipal levels of power.

Calls by political leaders, social activists, and international policy and aid actors for accountability reforms to improve governance have never been more widespread. For some analysts, the unprecedented scale of these pressures reflects the functional imperatives and power of liberal and democratic institutions accompanying greater global economic integration. This book offers a different perspective, investigating the crucial role of contrasting ideologies informing accountability movements and mediating reform directions in Southeast Asia. It argues that the most influential ideologies are not those promoting the political authority of democratic sovereign people or of liberalism's freely contracting individuals. Instead, in both post-authoritarian and authoritarian regimes, it is ideologies advancing the political authority of moral guardians interpreting or ordaining correct modes of behaviour for public officials. Elites exploit such ideologies to deflect and contain pressures for democratic and liberal reforms to governance institutions. The book's case studies include human rights, political decentralization, anticorruption, and social accountability reform movements in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. These studies highlight how effective propagation of moral ideologies is boosted by the presence of powerful organizations, notably religious bodies, political parties, and broadcast media. Meanwhile, civil society organizations of comparable clout advancing liberalism or democracy are lacking. The theoretical framework of the book has wide applicability. In other regions, with contrasting histories and political economies, the nature and extent of organizations and social actors shaping accountability politics will differ, but the importance of these factors to which ideologies prevail to shape reform directions will not.

The plague of repression that swept through Latin America in the 1960s and the 1970s left virtually no political system untouched. Even countries such as Chile and Uruguay that had a history of democratic regimes succumbed to military dictatorship. In the two volumes reviewed here, Silvia Dutrénit Bielous, an Uruguayan historian working in Mexico, offers two very different approaches to examine the relationship between the military and political parties under the military regimes in three countries of the Southern cone, as well as the role of those political parties during the subsequent transition to democracy. The volume entitled Diversidad partidaria y dictaduras offers in-depth analyses of the Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan cases. The second volume with the cryptic title El maremoto militar y el archipiélago partidario focuses exclusively on Uruguay and includes the author’s interviews with various Uruguayan political leaders about the dictatorship from 1973 to 1984.Interviews with politicians are always tricky, but the author tries to keep the self- serving statements of career politicians under control by asking some timely questions. In addition, her choice of political leaders is balanced and includes most of the key players in the transition process. There are no new revelations; however, several of the interviews give us insight into the character and personalities of Uruguayan politicians, such as Senator Jorge Batlle, Hugo Corres, Luis Lacalle, and Julio María Sanguinetti. Batlle, who could be Uruguay’s next President, displays an encyclopedic grasp of the individuals and motives of the people who were involved in the political process during Uruguay’s long nightmare; Hugo Cores continues to believe in his passionate and well-constructed leftist interpretation of events; Luis Lacalle, former President, displays his conservative roots; and Julio María Sanguinetti, shows the grasp of language that has twice made him Uruguay’s President.All those interviewed continue to insist that in the protracted discussions of the Club Naval that ultimately led to the military’s exit, the issue of human rights violations was never placed on the table. In addition, they confirm that triumvirates were formed by the leaders of Uruguay’s main political parties—Blancos, Colorados and the leftist coalition Frente Amplio—to make decisions and attempt to guide party policy during an exceptionally difficult period. In sum, this volume would only be of interest to those who study Uruguayan history and politics and, even then, only marginally.The first volume, on the other hand, with its thoughtful analysis of the Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan cases is worthy of any scholar’s attention. The restoration of democracy in these three countries has heightened our interest in political parties for two reasons: first, to understand their role during the transition from an authoritarian regime until the consolidation of democracy; second, to recognize the importance of political parties as institutions because even the military tried to either destroy or restructure them. The military’s desperate search for legitimacy—an effort that failed miserably in Argentina and Uruguay, but achieved moderate success in Brazil— prompted the dictatorships to think about, legislate, and ultimately recognize the role of political parties in their respective polities.Cesar Tcach handles the Argentine case in his chapter “Partidos políticos y dictadura militar en Argentina (1976–1983).” For this reader it was the weakest of the three contributions, offering little insight; although the chapter is thorough in its use of the newspapers of the period and provides a useful analysis of the power struggle within the radical party as the military collapsed, the author fails to make full use of the available literature on this topic.Silvia Dutrénit’s chapter on Uruguay, “Del margen al centro del sistema político: Los partidos uruguayos durante la dictadura,” is a solid account of the period of military rule in Uruguay from 1973 until 1984. This reviewer agrees with the author’s main thesis that Uruguayan political culture helped prevent the military from establishing legitimacy. However, while she also concedes that there are some scholars who argue that the transition in Uruguay was controlled by the military in terms of timing and outcome, she seems to ignore a third hypothesis. While the activities of the political parties, especially with regard to the 1980 plebiscite rejecting the military’s constitution, internal party elections of 1982, and the mass demonstration in late 1983 cannot be overlooked, the military’s failure to establish legitimacy stems as much from the failure of the dictatorship’s economic program as it does from Uruguay’s political culture.The sad reality is that civil society in Uruguay was atomized by the military that handed over a country in 1984–85 that was a shell of its former self. The political and social resurgence that ensued is a testament to the historic role of political parties, the democratic political culture, and the quality of political leadership, but it was a restoration that took place after the exhaustion of the military’s project.

Offline: Prescriptions for an Age of Apprehension

Although 35 years have passed since the democratic transition, there are several institutional and non-institutional factors demonstrating that Korean democracy has not sufficiently matured or consolidated. Among others, it is noteworthy to pay special attention to the problematic party politics and its formation process combined with the imperial presidential system.
 Against the background of premodern political culture endowing the president with a prerogative power, Korean political leaders tend to take authoritarian charismatic leadership as their political style, instead of rationally institutionalized leadership. The presidents and political leaders have shown authoritarian populist leadership during the authoritarian regime, and delegative populist leadership in the post-democratization era. They dominated state affairs and party politics, forming a monopolistic and factional party system.
 This article focuses on the problem of party politics featuring pre-modern party system and populist leadership clung to the old customs of personalized and factional politics in Korea, by emphasizing that both have been supported and strengthened through the party regulation since 1945. The finding is that in the Korean presidential system, party regulation and populist leadership have mutually influenced and are closely intertwined, resulting in malfunctioning party politics and democracy.

The social responsibility of the political elite is a fundamental component of effective public governance, ensuring citizen trust, transparency, accountability, and the state’s ability to respond promptly to contemporary challenges. The article highlights key aspects of the impact of political leaders’ social responsibility on the quality of the decision-making and societal trust. The authors analyze the main conceptual approaches to social responsibility of the politicians through the lens of democratic values, including ethics, respect for human rights, justice, and accountability. The factors determining the level of politicians’ social responsibility are examined, including tenure duration, personal qualities of the leaders, public oversight, and the influence of societal expectations and political culture. Special attention is given to the dependency of social responsibility on the nature of the political system: in democratic societies, effective mechanisms of public control and accountability enhance the responsibility of politicians, whereas these mechanisms are weakened in authoritarian regimes. A comprehensive approach to increasing the social responsibility of politicians is proposed, which includes legal, educational, civic, and partnership mechanisms. Legal regulation should ensure the transparency of political activities and introduce sanctions for violating principles of integrity. Political education promotes the awareness of both citizens and political leaders, fostering a culture of responsible governance. The role of public oversight is enhanced through modern technologies that provide transparency and access to information. Active participation of civil society institutions and partnerships between government, business, and communities are key elements in implementing joint social initiatives. Such collaboration helps to address the interests of all stakeholders, improves public governance effectiveness, and fosters trust in authority. The article emphasizes the importance of integrating social priorities at all levels of public policy to reduce social inequality, enhance citizens’ welfare, and ensure sustainable development of the state.