Incumbent Elites Research Articles

Democratization by Elections? Competitive Clientelism in the Middle East

Abstract: This article reconsiders the relationship between authoritarian elections and democratization. Examining legislative elections in the Middle East, it argues that elections are best understood as "competitive clientelism," a competition between elites over privileged access to a limited set of state resources that they can then distribute to their clients. This drives the behavior of voters and candidates in systematic ways that promote proregime parliaments and allow incumbent elites to manage elections largely through institutional rules rather than extralegal manipulation. The article concludes by considering mechanisms that may more effectively help to foster democratization, given the logic of authoritarian elections.

Introduction: Resistance to globalization in the Arab Middle East

ABSTRACT The Arab region finds itself at a historical cross-road between resilience and resistance to globalization. Arab countries' short-term strategies to globalization are primarily determined by the diversification of their respective economies. Long-term adjustments to globalization are mitigated by existing social and political structures. While Arab states might seem exceptional in many ways, they display common features that have their origins in their history of state-formation. The key challenge for Arab states is to widen state revenues to include taxes, tariffs and other income and to increase the state's capacity to prepare effectively for times of fiscal crisis. International policies must take the interest of incumbent elites into account when proposing economic adjustment programmes and turn from a technical understanding of governance towards a political.

Mapping Pathways of Ethnic Conflict Onset: Preferences and Enabling Conditions

Recent quantitative studies of ethnic conflict tend to have characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Strengths are typical of sophisticated statistical work: the influence of many explanatory variables is examined across large datasets. Weaknesses are largely traceable to shortcomings of theory and measurement. Territorial and other ethnic conflicts are sometimes pooled with other types of internal conflict, which seem likely to have a different range of causes. Also, theory indicates that different conflict pathways have varying probabilities of giving rise to territorial ethnic conflict. These pathways involve different types of elite-level preferences, for either the outsider ethnic group or state side of a potential conflict, and for either incumbent or challenger elites. The pathways are also likely to be conditioned by different constraints. Yet little effort has been made to measure variation along these discrete pathways. More readily measurable variables, such as economic development and dependence on oil exports, often pick up predicted variation from multiple theoretical pathways. Regressions including such broad dependent and independent variables may deflate the estimated impact of discrete-pathway variables on ethnic conflict onset, and hence must be interpreted with care. There are significant practical barriers to measuring variation along the different conflict pathways; but further effort is necessary if the quantitative literature is to become more robust, easily interpreted and helpful in understanding specific cases.

Sustaining Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa

Why the persistence of authoritarianism in the Arab world? Leading approaches to this question highlight the importance of institutional arrangements for choices made by political activists and elites that served to perpetuate authoritarianism.1 These approaches tend to emphasize how incumbent elites utilize institutional arrangements to disrupt the formation of coalitions that threaten their hold on power. Incumbent strategies include blunt repression by highly developed state security forces, winner-take-all electoral systems that hinder the formation of pluralism from a single-party base, state limiting of opposition political party activities and funding, and divide-and-rule tactics that favor moderate groups and produce impotent forms of multiparty politics. By highlighting the importance of various in stitutional arrangements for choices made by political activists and elites in the Arab world, all of these explanations move beyond much of the gen eral literature on democratic transitions, which highlights the autonomy of actor choices during critical junctures and minimizes the analytical weight

The OSCE as an agent of socialisation? International norm Dynamics and political change in Central Asia

This article uses both rationalist and constructivist approaches to explain the OSCE's potential to socialise Central Asia to the norms of liberal human rights and democracy. Whereas from a rational point of view socialisation consists of a process of reinforcement, and its effectiveness depends on the balance between the international and domestic costs and benefits of norm compliance, the constructivist pathway emphasises the legitimacy and domestic resonance of the international norms, and the identity and cognitive prior attitudes of the target actors. By examining the explanatory factors for successful socialisation suggested by both mechanisms it is found that the prospects for domestic change are bleak and hampered by Central Asia's autochthon culture and institutions as well as the OSCE's ineffectiveness in providing tangible material and political incentives. Recommendations concentrate on a better understanding of the cost – benefit calculations of incumbent elites and on a more responsive attitude to Central Asia's non-European political culture.

Taiwan's State and Social Movements Under the DPP Government, 2000–2004

This article explores the evolution of social movement politics under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government (2000–2004) by using the perspective of political opportunity structure. Recent “contentious politics” in Taiwan is analyzed in terms of four changing dimensions of the opportunity structure. First, the DPP government opens some policy channels, and social movement activists are given chances to work within the institution. Yet other features of the political landscape are less favorable to movement activists. Incumbent elites' political orientation shifts. As the economic recession sets in, there is a conservative policy turn. Political instability incurs widespread countermoblization to limit reform. Last, the Pan-Blue camp, now in opposition, devises its own social movement strategy. Some social movement issues gain political salience as a consequence of the intervention of the opposition parties, but its excessive opportunism also encourages the revolt of antireform forces. As a result of these countervailing factors, social movements have made only limited gains from the recent turnover of power.

Rulers and Rules

Previous efforts to understand the creation of political institutions in newly democratizing states have largely ignored the importance of regime types in explaining institutional development. However, this article argues that the type of authoritarian regime in place at the onset of liberalization significantly influences the creation of electoral rules. Incumbent elites in formerly single-party regimes prefer electoral laws that concentrate legislative power in the hands of the dominant party, whereas monarchs prefer systems that allow representation to a wide range of parties. Consequently, the establishment of electoral institutions in monarchies and one-party states should differ. Examining the Middle East, this article finds that a distinct pattern of electoral institutions in monarchies and one-party states does indeed exist. Furthermore, these electoral institutions promote significant differences in legislative representation.

Political Development in 20th-Century Taiwan: State-Building, Regime Transformation and the Construction of National Identity

In the 20th century, Taiwan has experienced two cycles of regime evolution, during which the Japanese colonial regime and the Nationalist emigre regime consecutively dominated its political history each for about half a century.For our analysis, a political regime is defined as an ensemble of patterns that determines the methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors admitted to or excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions. See Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What democracy is... and is not,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1991). The two regimes, each wrestling with the challenge of subordinating the native society to its authoritarian rule, vision of nation-building and state-building agenda, travelled a comparable trajectory of institutional adjustment and adaptation. Each had shifted its heavy reliance on extensive use of coercive measures during the installation stage to selective co-optation, and to limited electoral opening as the incumbent elite tried to consolidate and partially institutionalize its rule.

Democratization and Institutional Change in Mexico

This article builds on previous work examining the incentives facing authoritarian elites to use central bank reform to constrain the economic policy choices of future governments. It suggests that because creating an autonomous agency is costly, authoritarian elites will only cede policymaking powers to an independent body commensurate with the degree of democratic threat that they face. When a transition is looming, insulation should be complete so as to tie the hands of successor governments to the greatest extent possible. But when this risk of replacement is milder, incumbent elites will be careful to design rules that continue to afford them some margin of maneuver as long as they remain in office. The Mexican central bank reform of 1993 is used as an illustration of the partial insulation strategy at work.

Constitutional amendments in Zambia: a challenge to democracy?

ABSTRACT Multi‐party elections which swept most of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s led the way for the establishment of democracy. The major concern now is the consolidation of democracy. The paper discusses the amendments to the 1991 Constitution of Zambia and their impact on democracy. The amendments, although well intentioned, provide a good example of an attempt by an incumbent elite at legitimizing its hold on power while denying others the right to participate in the process and, or challenge the power holders. The withholding of financial assistance by Zambia's major donors is not only a classic use of ‘aid’ to enforce adherence to democratic principles, but is symbolic of the failure of civil society and opposition parties on one hand, and the ruling elite on the other to reconcile their differences to accommodate various interests for the sake of democracy and political stability.

Social Cleavage, Political Division and Local Political Leadership Recruitment

Two major approaches to political leadership recruitment - one concentrating on the role of structural political variables and features of the incumbent elite and the other on the socioeconomic attributes of contenders and aspirants - are confronted. It is proposed that the core of the dispute between the two approaches lies in differing conceptions regarding the nature of the link between social and political divisions; the nature of this relationship is explored. Using Janda's (1980) measures for the social composition of party support, three modes of the relationship between social and political divisions are discerned and defined as non-structural, uni-structural and bi- or multi-structural parties. Each type is examined for its implications on the processes of local political leadership recruitment. The findings lend support to the two major hypotheses: (a) when political divisions are not based on social divisions, political variables are more useful in explaining political leadership recruitment; and (b) when political divisions are based on social divisions, socioeconomic variables explain more variance in leadership recruitment.