Post-Conflict Regimes and the Survival of Pro-Government Militias

This study investigates how deployment of pro-government militias (PGMs) as counterinsurgents affects the risk of conflict recurrence. Militiamen derive material and non-material benefits from fighting in armed conflicts. Since these will likely have diminished after the conflict’s termination, militiamen develop a strong incentive to spoil post-conflict peace. Members of pro-government militias are particularly disadvantaged in post-conflict contexts compared to their role in the government’s counterinsurgency campaign. First, PGMs are usually not present in peace negotiations between rebels and governments. This reduces their commitment to peace agreements. Second, disarmament and reintegration programs tend to exclude PGMs, which lowers their expected and real benefits from peace. Third, PGMs might lose their advantage of pursuing personal interests while being protected by the government, as they become less essential during peacetimes. To empirically test whether conflicts with PGMs as counterinsurgents are more likely to break out again, we identify PGM counterinsurgent activities in conflict episodes between 1981 and 2007. We code whether the same PGM was active in a subsequent conflict between the same actors. Controlling for conflict types, which is associated with both the likelihood of deploying PGMs and the risk of conflict recurrence, we investigate our claims with propensity score matching, statistical simulation, and logistic regression models. The results support our expectation that conflicts in which pro-government militias were used as counterinsurgents are more likely to recur. Our study contributes to an improved understanding of the long-term consequences of employing PGMs as counterinsurgents and highlights the importance of considering non-state actors when crafting peace and evaluating the risk of renewed violence.

Governments often supplement the regular military with paramilitaries and progovernment militias (PGMs). However, it is unclear what determines states’ selection of these auxiliary forces, and our understanding of how auxiliary force structures develop remains limited. The crucial difference between the two auxiliary types is their embeddedness in official structures. Paramilitaries are organized under the government to support/replace the regular military, whereas PGMs exist outside the state apparatus. Within a principal–agent framework, we argue that a state’s investment in a particular auxiliary force structure is shaped by available resources and capacity, accountability/deniability, and domestic threats. Our results based on quantitative analysis from 1981 to 2007 find that (a) state capacity is crucial for sustaining paramilitaries, but not PGMs; (b) PGMs, unlike paramilitaries, are more common in states involved in civil conflict; and (c) although both paramilitaries and PGMs are associated with regime instability, there is no significant difference between them in that context.

Forecasting models of state-led mass killing are limited in their use of structural indicators, despite a large body of research that emphasizes the importance of agency and security repertoires in conditioning political violence. I seek to overcome these limitations by developing a theoretical and statistical framework that highlights the advantages of using pro-government militias (PGMs) as a predictive indicator in forecasting models of state-led mass killing. I argue that PGMs can lower the potential costs associated with mass killing for a regime faced with an internal threat, and might hence “tip the balance” in its favor. In estimating a series of statistical models and their receiver–operator characteristic curves to evaluate this hypothesis globally for the years 1981–2007, focusing on 270 internal threat episodes, I find robust support for my expectations: including PGM indicators in state-led mass killing models significantly improves their predictive strength. Moreover, these results hold even when coefficient estimates produced by in-sample data are used to predict state-led mass killing in cross-validation and out-of-sample data for the years 2008–2013. This study hence provides an introductory demonstration of the potential advantages of including security repertoires, in addition to structural factors, in forecasting models.

How do wartime legacies affect repression after the conflict ends? Irregular forces support the government in many civil wars. We argue that if this link continues after the war, respect for human rights declines. As “tried and tested” agents they are less likely to shirk when given the order to repress. Governments might also keep the militias as a “fall-back option”, which results in more repression. Analyzing data from 1981 to 2014 shows that pro-government militias that were inherited from the previous conflict are consistently associated with worse repression, but newly created ones are not. Wartime pro-government militias target a broader spectrum of the population and are linked to worse state violence. New militias usually supplement wartime ones and use violence primarily against political opponents. This study highlights the detrimental impact of war legacies.

This article reviews the electoral accountability dimension as a constitutive mechanism of Paraguayan democracy since 1989, analyzing the factors that limit the representation contained in the administration of the Paraguayan government as a result of the electoral process. We provide an analytic contrast between the democratic principles that guide the Paraguayan electoral institutions and the way their designs are enforced, identifying the gap between formal and informal rules as determinants of political representation. We also describe the barriers that prevent effective access of the population to political participation and competition, the advantages possessed by traditional political parties and interest groups, as well as their implications for democracy. We also review the degree to which elected officials are representative of historically excluded social groups as a result, emphasizing the way women, indigenous and peasant communities have potentially limited power to exercise political influence due to limitations to participation by structural and institutional factors.

1. Web 2.0 Technologies and Democratic Governance.- Section I: Government Policy and Uses of Web 2.0 for Management of Service Delivery.- 2. Information Policy and Social Media: Framing Government-Citizen Web 2.0 Interactions.- 3. Micro-blogging: An Analysis of Government Issued Policies and Best Practices.- 4. The Use of Web 2.0 to Transform Public Services Delivery: The Case of Spain.- 5. Towards a Gov 2.0 society for all: European strategies for public service delivery.- 6. A Viability Model for Digital Cities: Economic and Acceptability Factors.- Section II: Web 2.0 as Tools for Mobilization, Protests and Governance.- 7. Online Collective Action and the Role of Social Media in Mobilizing Opinions: A Case Study on Women's Right-to-Drive Campaigns in Saudi Arabia.- 8. Webmonitoring and Strategic Issue Management: Dutch student protests against the 1040-hour norm.- 9. Web 2.0 as a Technological Driver of Democratic, Transparent and Participatory Government .- 10. Emergent Networks of Topical Discourse: A Comparative Framing and Social Network Analysis of the Coffee Party and Tea Party Patriots Groups on Facebook.- 11. Whither E-Government? Web 2.0 and the Future of e-Government.- Section III: Effects of Web 2.0 on Political Campaigns and Participatory Democracy.- 12. Campaigns and Elections in a Web 2.0 World: Uses, Effects, and Implications for Democracy.- 13. Measuring the effects of Social Media Participation on political party communities.- 14. Social media for political campaigning. The Use of Twitter by Spanish mayors in 2011 local elections.- 15. Government-Citizen Interactions Using Web 2.0 Tools: The Case of Twitter in Mexico.- 16. Secrecy versus Openness: Democratic Adaptation in a Web 2.0 Era.- 17. Blending social media with parliamentary websites: just a trend, or a promising approach to e-participation?.

Recent years have witnessed rising concern about the future of democracy, and the decline of public service broadcasting (PSB) has been named among the challenges. In a global move to neo-liberalism, the territory belonging to public service broadcasting is shrinking with less government investment. Drawing on the Western and Russian research data about the transformation of PSB, this paper will challenge the libertarian critique of PSB as a medium of political socialization from the Right, which asserts that proliferation of information channels eliminated the need for PSB, and that an individual needs to be left on her own to “freely” process the abundant information. It will also revisit the critique of PSB as a medium of political socialization from the Left, which points out that being in control of PSB, the bourgeois state cannot with necessity ensure that it truly serves the public interest, and moreover, PSB may potentially be a hegemonic tool for ideological control by the state. Bringing in the experience of the Russian TV system this paper will add a new dimension to the study of media as an instrument of political socialization and its implications for democracy. Keywords: Television – democracy – public sphere – political socialization

This special issue of Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics is the result of a two-day colloquium that took place in Heidelberg at the Internationales Wissenschafts Haus during October 2009. Thanks to funding through the project, Citizenship as Conceptual Flow : Asia in Comparative Perspective, part of the Heidelberg University, Cluster of Excellence, Asia and Europe in a Global Context, doctoral candidates and post-doctoral scholars were invited from universities across Germany and France to present and discuss papers and on-going research. A few core questions were posed as a basis for the proceedings, linking the three common themes of democracy, governance and citizenship: Do definitions and perceptions of democracy vary according to context and historical experience? Can governance be compared across time and space? How has the concept of citizenship ‘travelled’? The papers that were presented, amended and submitted have been divided into four sections. The first, “Religion and the State: implications for democracy, governance and citizenship” contains two articles that discuss the nature of secularism in Western Europe, emerging as it did within a historical context of state and nation-building projects. Both highlight challenges to western understandings and practices of secularism. In the second section titled, “Governance in post-conflict and post-colonial states”, each of the three papers examines conceptual and institutional arrangements developed to cope with conflict and transition. Section three, “Managing Diversity: legal and institutional arrangements” approaches the subject from a theoretical and empirical angle. The final section, “Exporting Institutions: democracy promotion and regional integration” consists of two papers that explore the degree to which European institutions can be transferred, either as deliberate policy (democracy promotion) or through processes of emulation (regional integration). While most of the papers in this collection are one-country studies or region-focused, there are strong comparative insights into processes of democratisation and transition that cut across time and space. Each of these studies allude to the importance of transfers between Europe and Asia, Europe and Africa, Europe and Latin America, the counter-flow between them, and perhaps increasingly, a dispersion of flow, as African countries, for example, begin to look to Asian counter-parts rather than Europe for institutional innovations. Furthermore, the contributions, either explicitly or implicitly, address the methodological and theoretical challenges of how to study and analyse hybrid forms of governance and innovative methods of citizen-making, such as the role that reconverted ex-combatants in Sierra Leone play. By bringing together a wide range of region and country-specialists, these papers reveal that divergent historical experiences, widely varied socio-economic and political contexts nevertheless yield common concerns relating to the designing of resilient institutions.

This article examines the links between three kinds of political dissatisfaction and four types of political participation during the early stages of the economic crisis in 2008-2009. Since economic crisis exacerbates negative political attitudes and thereby strains the legitimacy of the political system, it is im-portant to examine how citizens convey their grievances to political decision makers during such crisis. Recent decades have witnessed changes in patterns of political participation entailing that citizens abstain from traditional political participation in favor of non-institutionalized activities, but the implications for democracy are disputed since it is unclear what drives non-institutionalized participation. To ascertain what the changes mean for democracy during times of economic crisis, it is helpful to distinguish different kinds of political dissatisfaction with diverse implications for democracy. The data comes from the fourth round of the European Social Survey and include a total of 47489 respondents in 25 European democracies. The results suggest that only some kinds of political dissatisfaction affect the pro-pensity for political participation while others lead to passivity. Additionally, political dissatisfaction is not necessarily a major driving force behind the popularity of non-institutionalized participation since satisfied citizens are also involved in these.

This essay draws on my book, Democratic Governance (Princeton University Press, 2010), to provide a genealogy of governance and to explore its implications for democracy. My arguments can be quickly stated: governance rose and spread as a consequence of new modernist theories and the public sector reforms that were inspired by these theories; policy actors respond to the challenges of governance by supplementing representative institutions with yet more modernist expertise.

California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (“SGMA”) allows local entities that represent landowners, government agencies, or private companies rather than the public to take on exclusive power to regulate and manage imperiled groundwater resources. In at least some cases, the ways in which these entities are governed and controlled violates the one-person, one-vote requirement of the Equal Protection Clause, and even the requirement that local government representational structures have a rational basis. SGMA attempts to address a longstanding gap in California water regulation, the consequences of which have culminated in a statewide crisis. Despite its importance to the future of the state’s economy and environment, the law’s implications for democracy have largely been ignored. This note examines the ways in which SMGA invokes Fourteenth Amendment, and specifically, requirements for proportional representation in local government established by Avery v. Midland County and Board of Estimate v. Morris. It argues that voter accountability and proportional representation in groundwater governance are important to actually achieving the ultimate goal of the legislation: effective management and regulation of critically imperiled common pool resources in California. It also contributes to solving a bigger problem. Special districts comprise the most numerous sector of American government, with policy-making and administrative responsibility for vital environmental resources, infrastructure, and services. Better enforcement of the one-person, one-vote requirement in this sector will promote accountability and equity in local government throughout the United States.

Increasing the participation of Blacks in cancer research is a vital component of a strategy to reduce racial inequities in cancer burden. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is especially well-suited to advancing our knowledge of factors that influence research participation to ultimately address cancer-related health inequities. A paucity of literature focuses on the role of structural factors limiting participation in cancer research. As part of a larger CBPR project, we used survey data from a statewide cancer needs assessment of a Black faith community to examine the influence of structural factors on attitudes toward research and the contributions of both structural and attitudinal factors on whether individuals participate in research. Regression analyses and non-parametric statistics were conducted on data from 727 adult survey respondents. Structural factors, such as having health insurance coverage, experiencing discrimination during health care encounters, and locale, predicted belief in the benefits, but not the risks, of research participation. Positive attitudes toward research predicted intention to participate in cancer research. Significant differences in structural and attitudinal factors were found between cancer research participants and non-participants; however, directionality is confounded by the cross-sectional survey design and causality cannot be determined. This study points to complex interplay of structural and attitudinal factors on research participation as well as need for additional quantitative examinations of the various types of factors that influence research participation in Black communities.

Ten years ago, Robert Putnam published Making Democracy Work (MDW). The work was at the time heralded as a major break-through in political science methodology and analysis. Its focus on the history of civil society in the emergence of democracy and its novel combination of methods promised a new era in the study of democratic regimes. This article disputes that view and argues instead, that MDW is deeply flawed and illustrates the inadequacy of mainstream political science. The analysis in MDW, it is argued here, ignores both structural and historical factors in the emergence of democ racy. It also fails to capture the dynamic nature of 'culture' and turns the active into the passive, the fluid into the static. In addition to furnishing a weak explanation of Italian democracy, MDW is highly inappropriate for the study of post-colonial democracies where cultural, historical and structural factors such as the workings of the international economy are determinative of the kind of democracy that is likely to emerge.

This paper places communal identities in the context of representative politics in India’s plural democracy. It seeks to understand how social groups become politicised entities and what the implications are for democracy. It also attempts to move beyond the conception of community-based identity to encompass the multiplicity of identities that emerged in the past few decades and began to alter political agendas.

The Noken system has been implemented since 2004 so that it has been 21 years since it has experienced challenges and obstacles in its implementation so far, this election system has become a specialty for Papua Province due to several factors including geography and culture, the Noken system is considered not in accordance with the principles of democracy and disrupts political stability so that the purpose of this article is to examine the implementation of the noken system on the quality of democracy and political stability. By using normative legal research methods, namely assessing the harmony between legal norms and implementation in society, the results of the study show that although the Noken System is strengthened through the Constitutional Court's decision, but what cannot be denied is the occurrence of fraud in this system which leads to disruption of political stability because the right to vote is considered not to be carried out transparently and there is no guarantee of a deliberation result represented in this system as the principle of general elections, so it is necessary to adapt to the principles of general elections, not to abolish this system and try to adapt it to the true values of democracy.