Social Constituencies Research Articles

Superpresidentialism and Political Party Development in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan

SINCE THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR many scholars have pointed to the weakness of the political parties in the states of the former Soviet Union.' Unlike some of the countries of post-communist Eastern Europe (such as the Visegrad states, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as the Baltic States), where relatively stable patterns of partisan competition have emerged, in most of the states of the former Soviet Union, it has been argued, only 'pseudo parties' have arisen. These 'pseudo parties' are seen as largely shifting coalitions of individuals, unanchored in post-communist society and incapable of performing even the most basic functions of political parties.2 Indeed, from this 'pessimistic' point of view, parties in the former Soviet Union are scarcely more than transient organisations with little continuity from one election to another, lacking coherent ideological programmes and reliable social constituencies.3 Many have argued that decades of totalitarian rule (more extreme and of longer duration in the Soviet Union than in Eastern Europe or the Baltic States) pulverised what little there was of civil society, a legacy that continues to retard the development of political parties. As Bielasiak notes, the 'numerous weaknesses of political society impede the formation and consolidation of a structured party system capable of providing informed choices to the electorate'.4 Others have pointed to the incentives generated by political structures, particularly the existence of 'superpresidentialism', which have also retarded the development of political parties.5 Unfortunately, most of the existing literature that relates superpresidentialism to party development in the countries of the former Soviet Union has focused only on single case studies, without the benefit of comparative perspective.6 Because of this tendency it is difficult to assess truly whether or not 'superpresidentialism' has the often cited retarding effect on party development. On the other hand, macro-comparative approaches that lump together all of the former communist states run the risk of conflating the effects of the electoral system and presidentialism on party development, especially since most parliamentary systems in post-communist Europe employ some form of proportional representation.7 The key then is to select cases that vary in terms of the degree of superpresidentialism but where variations in the electoral system are controlled. Finally, most studies that have pointed to the weaknesses of political parties in the countries of the former Soviet Union have relied

Board governance and company performance: any correlations?

There persists the belief that a firm’s only responsibility to society is to maximize profits without breaking the law, hence the role of corporate governance is to provide appropriate corporate control. Research suggests that there is a growing perception that corporations are social entities overall, answerable to social constituencies and that the role of corporate governance is to understand and adequately address the interest of such social and political constituents. A review of research studies in the area of corporate governance’s contribution to corporate performance reveals that there is no conclusive evidence of contribution. Moreover, it illuminates the need for a boarder criteria of performance and for the adoption of a political model of corporate governance in order to facilitate a corporation’s external accountabilities.

“Do the Right Thing:” Diverging Effects of Accountability in a Managerial Context

The need to justify one's decisions is a signal characteristic of decision making in a managerial environment. Even chief executives must communicate reasons for their actions. Yet, despite a significant amount of laboratory research on the effects of accountability on decision making, few studies have attempted to assess what affects accountability might have outside the lab for actual managers. In this paper, we use as subjects actual members of the professional account, research, and creative staffs of several advertising agencies in an experimental simulation of an advertising copy meeting. We demonstrate that accountability effects in complex, managerial decision contexts diverge considerably from those found in the lab. In particular, we find that accountability does not always lead managers to emphasize the most “objectively” accurate information, but instead can also encourage emphasis on information which is socially acceptable to the manager's key “constituencies” (those to whom they feel accountable, see Tetlock 1991). The social constituencies of accountable managers within a single organization can differ significantly. For example, members of an advertising agency's account service or research departments are likely to favor the quantitative, analytical decision styles of their supervisors, while members of the same agency's creative department are likely to favor empathy and personal judgment. Requiring managers with different constituencies to justify their responses can cause “policy bolstering,” the tendency to favor a process of decision making particular to one's own constituency. Thus accountability may sometimes make it more difficult for a diverse group to reach a consensus, and may not have the desired positive impact on decision quality. In an experiment simulating an advertising copy meeting, we first solicited managers' private judgments of 12 ads, then presented them with research data and asked each of them to make numerical predictions of how much consumers would like each ad. The experiment manipulated the diagnosticity of the available research and the degree to which managers expected to be held accountable for their predictions. We used hierarchical linear regression to analyze the results. Hierarchical linear regression allows us to estimate simultaneously a within-subjects model capturing individual weighting coefficients for private judgment and research, and a between-subjects model of the effects of department membership and experimental conditions on these judgment-policy weights. This analysis also controls for the varying degrees of precision in the within-subjects estimates, as well as for correlations between the within-subjects weighting coefficients. Key Findings. 1) Accountability had different impacts on the weighting schemes of members of account services and creative departments. Accountable research/account staff weighed research more in making their predictions than nonaccountable research/account staff. Accountable creatives, on the other hand, actually weighed research less than did nonaccountable creatives. 2) Because accountability caused subjects to attend assiduously to the research, the weight given private judgment reflected whether the data was diagnostic of the problem at hand. Accountable subjects presented with low-diagnosticity research reacted by emphasizing private judgment more heavily. 3) Accountability increased confidence in predictions; this effect was not dependent on the accuracy of subjects' predictions. Managerial Implications. We provide several suggestions and observations regarding current managerial practices, which may improve the impact of individual accountability on decision making.

Independents and Party Formation: Elite Partisanship as an Intervening Variable in Russian Politics

No modem democracy has existed without some type of political party. In fact, it is scarcely imaginable how democratic governance could function in nation-states with millions of inhabitants without political parties to frame electoral options, aggregate and articulate social demands, and translate them into public policy.' Given their centrality to modern democratic governance, political parties and party systems have received significant attention from scholars interested in democratic transitions. The literature on democratization has been engaged in an ongoing debate between structuralists and transitionists.2 In regards to party development during regime change, structuralists have focused on social prerequisites for the formation of a competitive party system and social cleavages upon which political parties can build their constituencies.3 The literature on transitions has tended to tie party formation to founding elections, emphasizing the importance of the timing and sequence of elections, the impact of electoral systems, and the favorable influence of elite pacts.4 Relatively little attention has been given to party building. Political parties are not born as nationwide organizations with networks of local organizations stretching across a state's territory. They typically start out as small, geographically concentrated organizations or as cliques of governing elites in the capital. Only with time, effort, and luck do parties expand their influence and organization, eventually contesting elections in all of a state's regions and at national, state, and local levels of electoral competition. This study addresses party building in democratization by examining the factors affecting elite partisanship in the Russian Federation. Russia is a particularly interesting case because its long history of Communist Party rule has produced a strong antiparty sentiment among elites and voters alike. The nascent Russian party system is a fluid conglomeration of parties with little continuity from one election to another. With the partial exception of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), even those parties that have shown some staying power lack the organizational form, coherent ideological program, and reliable social constituency of parties in established democracies and many democratizing states. Russian voters display a general lack of party identification. According to survey research, 78 percent of Russian voters do not have a party identification, compared with 13 percent in the United States and 8 percent in Great Britain.5 The weakness of Russian parties has

Ethnicity, ideology and geopolitics in Crimea

This paper considers the ethnic, ideological, and geopolitical crises that have engulfed the Crimean peninsula since 1991 and provides a preliminary explanation for the region's success in averting violent conflict to date. Focusing on the role of political entrepreneurs in mobilizing key social constituencies, it argues that the failure of competing elites to correctly identify and skillfully manipulate existing ethnic, ideological, and geopolitical cleavages in society significantly limited the effectiveness of their mobilizational appeals. The existence of cross-cutting cleavages and the failure of political entrepreneurs to bring these cleavages into alignment have played a central role in deterring violent conflict in the region.

The Populist Road to Market Reform: Policy and Electoral Coalitions in Mexico and Argentina

Governing parties face two fundamental tasks: they must pursue policies effectively, and they must win elections. Their national coalitions, therefore, generally include two types of constituencies—those that are important for policy-making and those that make it possible to win elections. In effect, governing parties must bring together a policy coalition and an electoral coalition. This distinction sheds light on how the transitional costs of major economic policy shifts can be made sustainable in electoral terms. It also provides a starting point for analysis of how two of Latin America's most important labor-based parties, the Peronist party in Argentina and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico, maintained electoral dominance while pursuing free-market reforms that adversely affected key social constituencies. Peronism and the PRI are conceived of as having encompassed historically two distinctive and regionally based subcoalitions: a metropolitan coalition that gave support to the parties' development strategies and a peripheral coalition that carried the burden of generating electoral majorities. This framework permits a reconceptualization of the historic coalitional dynamics of Peronism and the PRI and sheds light on the current process of coalitional change and economic reform.

The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World.

Introduction: the structure of Anglo-American political discouse 1. Law, Religion and Sovereignty 2. Constitutional Innovations and their English Antecedents 3. The genesis of political discourse 4. Transatlantic ties and their failure 5. The Commonwealth paradigm 6. Denominational discourse 7. The implications of theological conflict 8. Denominational dynamics and political rebellions Part I. The Conflict Between Laws: Sovereignty and State Formation in the Uniter Kingdom and United States: 1. Law, nationality and nationalism: monarchical allegiance and identity 2. The creation of the United Kingdom, 1536-1801: religion and the origins of the common-law doctrine of sovereignty 3. Sovereignty and political theory from Justinian to the English jurists 4. Natural law versus common law: the polarisation of a common idiom 5. Sovereignty, dissent, and the American rejection of the British state 6. Sovereignty and the New Republic: the American constitution in transatlantic perspective Part II. The Conflict Between Denominations: The Religious Identity of Early Modern Societies: 1. Before redefinition: politics and religion in the old society 2. Anglicanism as an agency of state formation: the question of establishment 3. Canon law, heterodoxy and the American perception of tyranny 4. The Anglican ascendancy as the hegemony of discourse 5. The Anglican dream: harmony and conflict in the English parish 6. The Anglican nightmare: sectarian diversity in colonial America Part III. Predispositions: Rebellion and its Social Constituencies in the English Atlantic Empire, 1660-1800: 1. Rebellions and their analysis in the Anglo-American tradition 2. Covenanters, Presbyterians and Whigs: resistance to the Stuarts in England and Scotland, 1660-1689 3. Colonial American rebellions, 1660-1689, and transatlantic discourse 4. The rights of Englishmen, the rhetoric of slavery, and rebellions in Britain and America, 1689-1760 5. The right of resistance and its sectarian preconditions in north America, 1760-1799 6. The rhetoric of resistance and its social constituencies in England and Ireland, 1733-1828: some transatlantic analogies 7. Denominations, social constituencies and their activation Part IV. Political Mobilisation: The American Revolution as a War of Religion: 1. The American Revolution as a civil war 2. Predispositions, accelerators and catalysts: the role of theology 3. Heterodox and orthodox in the Church of England 4. The divisions and disruptions of English dissent 5. Heterodoxy and rebellion in colonial America, 1760-1776 Conclusion: 'Desolating Devastation': The Origins of Anglo-American Divergence.

Social Constituency and Ideological Profile: Scottish Nationalism in the 1990s

Using data from the 1992 Scottish and British Election Surveys, the authors examine various models which might explain the changes in the level and type of Scottish National Party voting. In the analysis they are also concerned with voters for other parties who support the central SNP policy: independence, for Scotland. The protest, relative deprivation, identity, and new social movement models are stated and explored. The authors conclude that a major problem for the SNP is that the basic Scottish identity, to which the Nationalists want to appeal, is felt almost as strongly by Labour voters as by those who choose the SNP. The SNP has not been able to establish a reputation as a credible party of government which could take over the role of the spokesperson for the national community. At the same time, it is not likely to disappear as the major challenger in Scottish politics.

Knowledge acquisition as a constructive modeling activity

Knowledge acquisition is a constructive modeling process, not simply a matter of “expertise transfer.” Consistent with this perspective, we advocate knowledge acquisition practices and tools that facilitate active collaboration between expert and knowledge engineer, that exploit a serviceable theory in their application, and that support knowledge-based system development from a life-cycle perspective. A constructivist theory of knowledge is offered as a plausible theoretical foundation for knowledge acquisition and as an effective practical approach to the dynamics of modeling. In this view, human experts construct knowledge from their own personal experiences while interacting with their social constituencies (e.g., supervisors, colleagues, clients patients) in their niche of expertise. Knowledge acquisition is presented as a cooperative enterprise in which the knowledge engineer and expert collaborate in constructing an explicit model of problem solving in a specific domain. From this perspective, the agenda for the knowledge acquisition research community includes developing tools and methods to aid experts in their efforts to express, elaborate, and improve their models of the domain. This functional view of expertise helps account for several problems that typically arise in practical knowledge acquisition projects, many of which stem directly from the inadequacies of representations used at various stages of system development. to counter these problems, we emphasize the use of mediating representations as a means of communication between expert and knowledge engineer, and intermediate representations to help bridge the gap between the mediating representations themselves, as well as between the mediating representations and a particular implementation formalism. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Two Faces of Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe

During the past several years, radical right-wing populist parties have made impressive electoral gains in a growing number of West European countries. Their dramatic surge to political prominence has obscured the fact that these parties hardly form a homogeneous party group. Generally, it is possible to distinguish between neo-liberal and national populist parties. Both types of parties are a response to the profound economic, social, and cultural transformation of advanced societies interpreted as a transition from industrial welfare to postindustrial individualized capitalism. National populist parties are primarily working-class parties which espouse a radically xenophobic and authoritarian program. Neoliberal parties appeal to a mixed social constituency and tend to stress the marketoriented, libertarian elements of their program over xenophobic ones. Rather than being mere short-lived protest phenomena, radical right-wing populist parties are a reflection and expression of new political conflicts created by the transition to postindustrial capitalism.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past

The problem of commemoration is an important aspect of the sociology of culture because it bears on the way society conceives its past. Current approaches to this problem draw on Emile Durkheim and emphasize the way commemorative objects celebrate society's former glories. This article on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial deals with the way society assimilates past events that are less than glorious and whose memory induces controversy instead of consensus. The Vietnam War differed from other wars because it was politically controversial and morally questionable and resulted in defeat; it resembled other wars because it called out in participants the traditional virtues of courage, self-sacrifice, and honor. The task of representing these contrasting aspects of the war in a single monument was framed by the tension between contrasting memorial genres. Focusing on the discursive field out of which the Vietnam Veterans Memorial emerged, this analysis shows how opposing social constituencies articulated the ambi...

The Social Basis of the Microelectronics Revolution.

Part 1 The dominant social constituency of a technological process methodological aspects structure of the book. Part 2 The social basis of the United States research and development system from the Second World War to the present: the role of the military the aftermath of the Second World War crisis and loss of confidence the resurgence of the power complex contradictory trends the case against the military burden. Part 3 The social shaping of United States microtechnology from the Second World War to the mid 1970s: the legacy of the Second World War the government-military-led development of the post-war period 1945-mid 1960s - industrial control, computer systems, semiconductors the decline of government-military influence. Part 4 The current development of microtechnology: re-strengthening the links between corporate capital, government, the military and science the renewed influence of the military on the current development of microtechnology - the VHSIC and Sematech programmes, the strategic computing plan (SCP), the ICAM and man tech programmes, the strategic defense initiative (SDI) conflicting views about the wisdom of the renewed military drive. Part 5 The current development of microtechnology II: convergence of technologies and capital in the electronics industry - AT and T and IBM on a collision course, convergence of capital electronics competition on a global scale, evolution of United States, European and Japanese electronics markets, current trends in the global battle for control of electronics markets, global alliances in the battle for control of the electronics infrastructure. Part 6 Foundations of the future I: dissecting the dominant social constituency of the United States microtechnology, the science constituent, the capital constituent, the government and military constituents some conceptualizations of the United States social complex of power the power complex as dominant social constituency of microtechnology. Part 7 Foundations of the Future II: the present constituency of power - the path ahead searching for a new social constituency.

A comparative study of alternative options for local government and management in South Africa

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role and structure of local institutions in a future political order. It points out that the debate on the merits of centralised versus decentralised systems of local government depends largely on whether the society to be served by those institutions is homogeneous or heterogeneous. The problems of centralised, collective decision‐making increase, the more diverse the social constituency. It is suggested that a combination of special purpose and general purpose local authorities can minimise points of cleavage among this consistency, and maximise the political satisfaction of its members. The article goes on to examine alternative organisational models for local government in South Africa, focusing on decentralisation through geographic regionalism. The article concludes by stating that a twotiered system of government, incorporating a central government and a multitude of special and general purpose local authorities, will suffice in South Africa. Finally, the articl...

Medicine in the community: The ideology and substance of community medicine in Socialist Cuba

‘Medicine in the community’ is the name given in Cuba to the dominant model for health services organization at the area and sector levels in the regionalized structure of Cuban health promotion. The recent historical evolution of the model is here analyzed in terms of ideological and structural factors. From this perspective, the origin of medicine in the community is found to be related to a Cuban critique of community medicine in capitalist societies. But the substantive evolution of the concept is principally explained by reference to a critique of revolutionary Cuban health organization itself. The strength of this Cuban critique and also the strength of the consequently formulated model appear to be related to (1) social constituency formation in prior revolutionary years, (2) administrative separation of community health centers (or area polyclinics) from hospital administration. (3) commitment by the Ministry of Public Health to the area polyclinic as the focal unit of organization and (4) trends in Cuban society toward greater institutionalization, decentralization, and democratization of social forms. These trends coincided with increasing vitality of local government generally. The general elements of the model of medicine in the community are described and some implications are discussed.