State Political Elites Research Articles

Calabar Carnival

Calabar Carnival

Socio Cultural Reactions Before the Nationalitation of Dutch Railroad in Indonesia 1945-1958

The issue of the nationalization of Dutch companies (railroad), which strengthened in the early 1950s, had caused some concern among Dutch companies. The issue was rolled by leftists who were disappointed with some of the results of the Round Table Conference (RTC) in December 1949. There was a phenomenon of xenophobia among natives of something that smelled of foreign (Western) so that the government policies that emerged were rooted in this matter, starting from the Benteng program and the nationalization of the company foreign. This paper aims to parse the anti-foreign phenomenon before nationalization by emphasizing the socio-cultural aspects. If the political process is carried out by the state political elite, then the social process is carried out by other elements of society such as trade unions in the form of boycotts, strikes and demonstrations. While cultural action is carried out by elements of society such as artists and humanists who carry out a variety of artistic actions such as murals, propaganda graffiti, advertisements in the mass media or images that burn the spirit of warriors on the walls in the city area. Particularly among railways, various socio-cultural activities were carried out by the Djawatan Kereta Api (DKA) in the 1950s. This research uses historical research methods based on primary sources traced from archival institutions and libraries. Research results show that the phenomenon of xenophobia that occurred in the decade of the 50s is part of the national socio-political criticism expressed through various forms of social culture.

Lobistas, assessores de imprensa e relações-públicas norte-americanos que serviram o Estado Novo (1942-1974)

Em 1938, o Congresso Norte-americano aprovou a Lei de Registro de Agentes Estrangeiros (Osgood, 2002, p. 245), vulgarmente denominada por FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act], que obrigava todas as empresas e agentes nos EUA que trabalhassem para governos ou empresas estrangeiras a entregarem uma declaração anual da sua atividade no Departamento de Justiça. Foi através destes registos que pudemos verificar que, para além da Casa de Portugal de Nova Iorque, o regime português registou, entre 1938 e 1974, um conjunto de cinco entidades/indivíduos que prestaram serviços de comunicação, articulados com o SNI e o mais alto escol do Estado Novo, com o objetivo de tentar moldar a opinião pública norte-americana. Propomos, assim, um estudo longitudinal diacrónico, onde tentaremos descrever e interpretar a atuação destes agentes propagandistas na promoção da imagem do país, do regime e dos seus mais altos dirigentes – Salazar e Marcello Caetano.

Opportunistic legitimisation and de-Europeanisation as a reverse effect of Europeanisation

This paper will look at the concept of de-Europeanisation through the prism of the official relations between the EU representatives and the political elites in two countries – Bulgaria and Serbia. Here de-Europeanisation is defined as a process of deterioration of the quality of integration or more simply as 'it is worse than it was'. The article begins with a critical overview of the dominant theoretical approaches to enlargement Europeanisation. Then, from a theoretical perspective, the article explores the role of EU legitimisation for national political elites. While distinguishing between revolutionary and opportunistic legitimisation, the paper highlights the former, based on Bulgaria and Serbia. Going beyond the liberal political narrative of democratic backsliding in Central Europe, the article will approach critically the dominant Europeanisation assumption of the unequivocally positive effect of European integration on national political elites. Particularly, it will examine the relevance of the argument that in the case of rule of law and human rights, the existing formal Europeanisation not only does not lead to informal Europeanisation of the states, but it can also have a reverse effect through the preservation of pathological political practices and their infusion into the process of European integration. The research will use a qualitative method of analysis to juxtapose the official EU/nation state political elites' rhetoric with political practices at the national level in the context of rule of law and human rights. Based on the findings, the paper argues that the EU oriented institutionalised perspective of Europeanisation omits important interactions on a micro-level that lead to the accommodation of political practices contradictory to EU's fundamental political values. While these practices survive in the peripheries of the integration process, they have the potential to multiply and eviscerate the fundamental political practices and thus the EU's political system.

Quina, territorio y conflicto empresarial. Santander 1878-1882

<p>El artículo analiza el recurrente conflicto ambiental asociado con los derivados de la extracción maderera a partir de los enfrentamientos por el monopolio de las quinas en el occidente de santander y el sur de Bolívar, específicamente desde la perspectiva de la lucha entre las élites políticas federales y estatales que tomaron partido en el conflicto extractor protagonizado por los empresarios extranjeros aliados a cada uno de esos bandos durante una época de transición entre regímenes políticos. Esta guerra irregular desde 1878 hasta 1882 impidió a cada oponente el pleno dominio de baldíos y el cumplimiento de sus contratos.</p>

Arctic hierarchies? Norway, status and the high north

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on one potential motivation for a state's behaviour in international affairs, namely status-seeking, in order to shed light on Norway's Arctic politics and to discuss the role of hierarchies in Arctic politics more generally. The idea that a state's political elite seek national security and economic gain is well established in international relations (IR) literature. However, another key motivation of human behaviour – seeking status and respect – is frequently overlooked as a potential factor shaping states’ behaviour. The argument begins with a brief review of post-cold war Arctic politics followed by a discussion of the status-related literature in IR. Norway's position in the Arctic Council (AC) and in bilateral relations with Russia is then examined, with particular attention paid to the extent to which other Arctic states acknowledge and confirm Norway's status claims. Norway's status as an information provider, a convener and a bridge to Russia gives the country a degree of influence in Arctic multilateral settings. Given the Arctic region's relatively peaceful nature and the emphasis on circumpolar cooperation, space has been made for creative approaches to status. Size and military or economic greatness are not always decisive factors for taking a lead in today's Arctic politics.

Plano real, privatização dos bancos estaduais e reeleição

Este artigo procura explicar as transformações nas relações federativas, ocorridas no primeiro governo Fernando Henrique Cardoso. De acordo com a literatura do federalismo, durante o processo de redemocratização, os governadores de estado tornaram-se atores importantes, adquirindo extensos poderes de veto às ações do Executivo federal, especialmente às destinadas ao controle da crise econômica. Entretanto, o governo FHC foi capaz de estabilizar a economia e recentralizar parte das relações federativas. Como isto foi possível? A hipótese deste trabalho é que as dificuldades trazidas pelo Plano Real, as regras das dívidas estaduais e a reeleição aos cargos executivos mudaram as preferências das elites políticas estaduais, tornando atrativa para os governadores de estado a privatização das instituições financeiras estaduais, o que, no final, permitiu ao governo federal recentralizar parte das relações federativas brasileiras

Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia by Dejan Djokić (review)

566 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 2010 Although thisbook is about a single year in a single city, it is clear that the author isdealing with an enormous subject, and that it is impossible to cover all of the possible aspects. The Bolsheviks inPower is by and large concerned with the political history of theperiod; economic aspects receive less attention. Thus, for example, the establishment of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) ismentioned only fleetingly.Nevertheless, this isby far the best book on the revolutionary period inRussian history, and one which should be obligatory reading for every serious student of the subject. Department ofCentral andEast European Studies UniversityofGlasgow J. D. White Djokic, Dejan. Elusive Compromise:A History of InterwarYugoslavia. Hurst & Company, London, 2007. xvii + 311 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?20.00 (paperback). The conventional historiographical view of interwarYugoslavia, exemplified in Ivo Banac's seminal work TheNational Question inYugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1984), is of a state unified in haste at the end of the First World War and then fatally hobbled by a centralized political bureaucracy based in the (Yugoslav and Serbian) capital Belgrade. This system, enshrined in the 'Vidovdan Constitution' of 1921,was unresponsive to the state'smulti ethnic character and ultimately resented by a large part of its population. Central to this failure was the disharmony between Yugoslavia's two largest nationalities, the Serbs and the Croats. In Dejan Djokic's new history of the interwar kingdom, Elusive Compromise: A History ofInterwar Yugoslavia, the Serb/Croat nexus retains itsprimacy. How ever, whereas other analyses have emphasized the immovable structure of separate nationalities, already well developed amongst the South Slavs before the First World War, Djokic favours the historical agency of the state's political elite post-1918. The high politics of the interwarperiod are scrutinized to show that, rather than being doomed whilst still in its swaddling clothes, the failure of the South Slav state lay in the inability of its leaders to locate the 'elusive compromise' thatwould lead to a workable political framework acceptable to themajority of the population. Djokic confronts the existing historiographical emphasis on 'inter-ethnic conflict' (p. 1)with a thorough account of the interwar state's various parliamentary alliances, formations, and factions. The result is a detailed political history of interwarYugoslavia, told for the most part chronologically, although with significant thematic departures. The first two chapters, 'Death and Union' and 'The Volatile Twenties' focus on the end of the First World War, the circumstances of South Slav unification in 1918, and the firstdecade of theYugoslav state's political life.Chapters 3 and 4 analyse, frommultiple angles, the royal dictatorship (proclaimed on 6 January 1929 by King Alexander Karadjordjevic, it contin ued in a diluted form after the king's assassination in 1934).Djokic's argument is in full stride at this important historical juncture. Depicting first how various groups attempted to come to termswith the dictatorship (Chapter 3 REVIEWS 567 'Compromise with the Dictatorship?'), Djokic then charts the growing opposition movement to the king's suspension of democratic life (Chapter 4, 'The Serb-Croat Opposition'). In these chapters it ismade clear that the dictatorship cannot and should not be interpreted as an exclusively Serbian imposition, and that the anti-dictatorship opposition included both Serbian and Croatian components. In this way, Djokic dissolves homogeneous national blocks intomultilayered and ever-changing political formations, and it is in these formations, he contends, thatwe should seek for an explanation of the failure ofYugoslav integration. Chapter 5, 'The 1939Agreement', deals with the 'Cvetkovic-Macek Agreement' which allowed for the creation of the largely autonomous Croatian Banovina within Yugoslavia, and Chapter 6, 'The Aftermath', looks at how this concession led to counter claims throughout the country, especially in Serbia. There is a lot of information in this book. The devil is in the detail, and Djokic has a remarkable skill for narrating what is often a convoluted tale, and for discerning patterns and historical meaning inwhat may appear to be no more than a morass of political chicanery. A particularly nice touch is the repeated references to train journeys made by politicians of various party colour across the country, especially to and fromBelgrade and Zagreb...

De-terrorising the Palestinian national struggle: the roadmap to peace

This article follows the representation of Palestinian nationalism as a history of terrorism. This representation was produced in the Israeli media and academia, and broadcast by the state's political elite in international arenas. In the West, this image was accepted in many circles and affected the chances of the Palestinians having a fair hearing in the peace negotiations which began after the 1967 war. The article follows the construction of the equation of Palestinian nationalism with terrorism, assesses its impact on the peace process, and suggests the deconstruction of this narrative as the best way forward in future negotiations.

Prison's Spoilt Identities: Racially Structured Realities Within and Beyond

This article begins by seeking an explanation for the solidarity between Malay inmates and guards in perpetrating abusive and discriminatory treatment towards Malay transvestites. In the course of explaining an empirical phenomenon in the Singapore prison, this article has examined Singapore's history and ethnic demography, the ethnic Malay minority's lack of socio-economic development and modernisation vis-à-vis the ethnic Chinese majority, geo-politics, the ideology and strategic choices of the state's political elite and their implications for inter-ethnic interactions between Malays and Chinese. As this article will argue, prison culture, rather than being divorced from larger society, is in effect able to articulate and elaborate on the processes of social exclusion faced by ethnic Malay minorities and male transvestites in Singapore society. By shifting the conceptual focus from ‘prison in society’ to ‘prison of society’, a new analytical dimension of informal inmate culture and social structure has been realised; one which suggests immense possibilities for prison literature.

Parâmetros para uma análise empírica da relação entre idéias, elites e instituições

This article proposes a set of parameters for understanding political behavior in Brazil during the first part of the twentieth century. Starting from a precisely-defined political problem – the São Paulo state political elite’s adhesion to and ideological support for the Estado Novo regime – we will engage in more general reflections on the relationship between ideas, elites and political institutions. For these purposes, we give salience to two types of variables which enable us to locate political agents within social space, understand their mental dispositions, how they are formed, and what inspires and how they explain their actions. We refer here to structural variables, related to the general functioning of the political world, and historical variables, related to this specific political context. Keywords: ideology, political elite, Estado Novo.

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-93

We construct dynamic measures of the ideology of a state's citizens and political leaders, using the roll call voting scores of state congressional delegations, the outcomes of congressional elections, the partisan division of state legislatures, the party of the governor, and various assumptions regarding voters and state political elites. We establish the utility of our indicators for 1960-93 by (i) examining and, whenever possible, testing the assumptions on which they are based, (ii) assessing their reliability, (iii) assessing their convergent validity by correlating them with other ideology indicators, and (iv) appraising their construct validity by analyzing their predictive power within multivariate models from some of the best recent research in the state politics field. Strongly supportive results from each battery of tests indicate the validity of our annual, state-level measures of citizen and government ideology. Substantively, our measures reveal more temporal variation in state citizen ideology than is generally recognized.

Bright, Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier

Bright Radical Star traces the evolution of frontier Iowa from arguably the most racist free state in the ante-bellum Union to one of its most outspokenly egalitarian, linking these mid-westeners' extraordinary collective behaviour with the psychology and sociology of race relations. Personalities from a variety of political cultures - Yankees and New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and Ohioans, Southerners from Virginia and Maryland and North Carolina, immigrant Irishmen, Germans, Scandinavians - illuminate this saga, which begins in 1833 with Iowa officially opened to settlement, and continues through to 1880, the end of the pioneer era. Within this half-century, the number of Iowans acknowledging the justice of Black civil equality rose dramatically from a handful of obscure village evangelicals to a demonstrated majority of the Hawkeye State's political elite and electorate. How this came about is explained by Robert Dykstra, whose narrative reflects the precepts and methods of social, legal, constitutional and political history. Based largely on use of local resources, the book also offers quantitative analysis of Iowa's three great equal rights referendums, one held just before the war, one just after, and one at the close of Reconstruction. The book is designed to appeal to American historians, especially to historians of the frontier, the Civil War era, and African-American history; sociologists and others interested in historical perspectives of race relations in America should also find it useful.