Weak Opposition Research Articles

Finite Distributive Concept Algebras

Concept algebras are concept lattices enriched by a weak negation and a weak opposition. In Ganter and Kwuida (Contrib. Gen. Algebra, 14:63–72, 2004) we gave a contextual description of the lattice of weak negations on a finite lattice. In this contribution1 we use this description to give a characterization of finite distributive concept algebras.

Opposing the Lottery in the United States: Forces behind Individual Attitudes towards Legalisation in 1975

In the 1970s, opposition to the lottery started to fracture in the USA. This study examines causes of the fracture and historical factors that contributed to changes in individual attitudes towards legalisation. The opponents at the time held to traditional arguments against legalised lotteries—negative economic effects, costs to others and increased crime. Unlike the past, however, there was weak religious institutional opposition to lotteries. Individuals with a strong commitment to their religious affiliation were more resistant to pro-lottery arguments, but in most cases could be convinced to support the lottery. The pre-World War II generation remained steadfast against the lottery, but there was relatively greater support among the post-World War II generation. This study has examined the 1975 survey data using a logit model to predict future legalisation in states with large population samples. As expected, analysis of 1975 attitudes shows that states with low levels of opposition are likely to legalise lotteries earlier than states with high levels of opposition.

Erik Doxtader and Charles Villa-Vicencio, eds. Through Fire with Water: The Roots of Division and the Potential for Reconciliation in Africa. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, Inc, 2003. 405 pp. Maps. Notes. $29.95. Paper. - Carolyn Nordstrom. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 293 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography.

Erik Doxtader and Charles Villa-Vicencio, eds. Through Fire with Water: The Roots of Division and the Potential for Reconciliation in Africa. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, Inc, 2003. 405 pp. Maps. Notes. $29.95. Paper. - Carolyn Nordstrom. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 293 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 19.95. Paper. - Volume 48 Issue 2

Legitimacy‐Building in the Macau special administrative region: Colonial legacies and reform strategies

The retrocession of Macau to Mainland China's sovereignty since December 20, 1999 has initiated an unprecedented process of legitimacy‐building in the new Special Administrative Region. The Chief Executive, Edmund Ho, has implemented a multiplicity of reform strategies for the sake of consolidating his legitimacy. The twilight of the Portuguese colonial era was plagued by a rapid deterioration in law and order and the persistence in public maladministration, thus weakening the departing colonial regime's performance legitimacy seriously. As such, the political environment was conducive to Ho's herculean efforts at establishing his performance legitimacy. While the new Chief Executive's procedure legitimacy was enhanced by his election from an Election Committee composed of political elites, Ho's performance legitimacy has been buttressed by depoliticisation, economic development, civil service reforms, and new constitutional conventions. The abolition of the Municipal Councils in 2000 ran the risk of delegitimising the Ho regime. Yet, such delegitimisation was by no means serious given the relatively weak political opposition. Still, in the face of a more active and assertive citizenry, political reforms will have to be pondered and implemented by the post‐colonial regime in Macau. It will be necessary for the Macau government to utilise democratic reforms in a bid to preempt the increasingly vociferous demands for more participatory channels. The case of Macau corroborates the existence of a dialectical process of legitimisation, which has been strengthened mainly by depoliticisation and economic development, and delegitimisation, which is looming in the midst of a steadily growing political activeness on the part of the Macau people.

Life of the Party: The Origins of Regime Breakdown and Persistence under Single-Party Rule

This article develops a theory of single-party regime consolidation to explain the dramatic variation in longevity among these regimes. The strength of the opposition and rent scarcity during party consolidation, it argues, structure the choices available to elites as they decide how to build a support base. A weak opposition and ready access to rents makes a low-cost consolidation possible, but these conditions provide little incentive to build a robust coalition or strong party organization; this trajectory generates weak single-party rule that is likely to collapse in a crisis. Conversely, elites who face a powerful opposition and scarce rents have no choice but to offer potential allies access to policy-making and have powerful incentives to build a strong and broad-based party organization. Ruling parties that emerge from initial conditions like these prove more resilient during later crises. The author conducts an initial test of the argument against paired comparisons of Guinea-Bissau and Tanzania and of Indonesia and the Philippines.

Weak labor movements and opposition parties: Hong Kong and Singapore

This research aims to unravel the causes of why Hong Kong and Singapore have failed to achieve high degrees of democracy amid recession. It focuses on how their labor movements and opposition parties have failed to capitalize on the current economic crises to act as key mobilizing agents to mobilize the public support for democratic breakthroughs. The weaknesses in labor unions and fragility of opposition parties account, in part, for their failure to key as major mobilizing agent. In Singapore the internal division among opposition parties, and lack of resources among them, have blocked them from becoming credible political alternatives to the ruling party. In Hong Kong, the tension between pro-democratic parties and labor federations has further curtailed their leadership in pro-democratic mobilisation. Finally, the short durations of their economic crises have also left the two authoritarian states still resourceful enough to implement policies that have wooed public support.

Zanzibar's turbulent transition

On 29 October 2000, 10 million voters in 231 constituencies cast their votes for 13 political parties throughout Tanzania. The election on the Tanzanian mainland was predictably won by the ruling CCM (Party of the Revolution) against a divided and weak opposition. In Zanzibar, on the other hand, the CCM faced a fierce challenge from the CUF (Civic United Front) as approximately 450,000 people voted in 50 constituencies for the Union and Zanzibar Presidents, and candidates for the Union and Zanzibar Legislatures. The elections on Zanzibar were grossly mismanaged and deepened the growing political crisis in the United Republic of Tanzania. And indeed, on 27 January 2001, throughout the major cities of Tanzania, there were mass protests against the electoral coup on Zanzibar. The police killed between 30 and 70 people and wounded upwards of 600 people. Thousands fled to the mainland and more than 2,000 Zanzibaris, mainly Pembans, fled to Kenya as refugees (Human Rights Watch, April 2002).

The Dominant Party System: Challenges for South Africa’s Second Decade of Democracy

The existence of a dominant-party system in South Africa has raised growing concerns over its implications for the consolidation of democracy. This paper argues that while there appears to be no real threat to democracy in South Africa it does face several challenges, and successful democratic consolidation will depend upon alertness to signs of undemocratic practices associated with dominant-party systems. It is crucial to ensure that government remains accountable to its citizens. The ANC has demonstrated commitment to democratic principles and there remains sufficient debate and activism within society to keep a check on authoritarian tendencies. However, South African politics is characterised by weak opposition parties that continue to be associated with racial identity and hold little credibility amongst the electorate. South Africans also continue to vote in racial blocs, and the existence of a dominant party and a weak opposition has resulted in emerging voter apathy and withdrawal amongst some sections of the electorate. If the opposition is to fulfil its role in safeguarding accountability and democratic practice it must regain credibility and break away from racial politics to appeal to the African community. Civil society's role in ensuring government accountability is also pivotal, particularly in the absence of a strong political opposition. The left-wing members of the ANC and its allies face similar challenges - they must work to retain their leverage and political influence within the Tripartite Alliance.

Learning the Limits of Power: Privatization and State-Labor Interactions in Mexico

AbstractDespite repeated conflict with organized labor, the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) pushed an aggressive divestment agenda that transformed Mexico into Latin America's leading privatizer. Explanations of Salinas's achievements typically emphasize centralized presidential power (including control over the ruling party) and autonomy; technocratic and political savvy; and weak labor opposition. This article questions such a pure “capacity-outcome” approach. Of equal importance are the learning effects of repeated interaction between the state and labor, which changed the course of divestment struggles and thereby influenced their outcomes. Lessons learned in successive confrontations led to patterns of interaction conducive to widescale privatization. The article develops this argument through comparative analysis of major divestment episodes in the aviation, mining, steel, and telecommunications sectors.

Galileo Observations of Europa's Opposition Effect

During Galileo's G7 orbit, the Solid State Imaging (SSI) camera acquired pictures of the spacecraft shadow point on Europa's surface as well as a comparison set of images showing the same geographic region at phase angle α = 5°. Coverage, obtained at three spectral bandpasses (VLT, 0.41 μm, GRN, 0.56 μm; and 1MC, 0.99 μm) at a spatial resolution of 404 m/pixel, shows a 162 × 220-km region of Europa's surface located at 30°N, 162°W. We have used these images to measure the near-opposition spectrophotometric behavior of four primary europan terrain materials: IR-bright icy material, IR-dark icy material, dark lineament material, and dark spot material. The high spatial resolution of the G7 images reveal low-albedo materials in dark spots that are among the darkest features (17% albedo at 0.56 μm and 5° phase) yet found on icy Galilean satellites. While material of comparable albedo is found on Ganymede and Callisto, low-albedo europan materials are much redder. All europan surface materials exhibit an opposition effect; however, the strength of the effect, as measured by the total increase in reflectance as phase angle decreases from α = 5° to α = 0°, varies among terrains. The opposition effects of IR-bright icy and IR-dark icy materials which dominate Europa's surface are about 1.5 times larger than predicted from pre-Galileo studies. Low-albedo materials in dark spots exhibit unusually intense opposition effects (up to four times larger than bright icy europan terrains), consistent with the presence of a strong shadow-hiding opposition surge. The strengths of the opposition surges among average europan terrains systematically vary with terrain albedo and can be explained in terms of the simultaneous contributions of shadow-hiding and coherent-backscatter to the total opposition effect. Coherent backscatter introduces a narrow angular contribution (<0.2° wide) to all europan terrains while the presence of a shadow-hiding contribution is revealed by the fact that the opposition surge is especially strong in low-albedo terrain materials. Stratigraphically young ridges with relatively high topographic relief exhibit anomalously weak opposition surges that could be caused by the presence of relatively coarse-grained regolith, highly compacted particulates, exposures of solid ice, or some combination of these. Very-high resolution images (22 m/pixel) of young-appearing ridges suggest that downslope wasting of particulate cover exposes more lithified ice along ridge crests and wall escarpments. We propose that over time, erosion of ridge topography accompanied by accumulation of detritus and mantling by regolith cover results in more mature ridge surfaces of increasingly lower (mature) porosity. We interpret the dark, reddish color of dark ridges and lineaments as a particulate coating of low-albedo materials vented from (or collected adjacent to) reactivated ridge-margins and within lenticulae.

Latin America: Political economy and geopolitics since 1945

Abstract The paper argues that, while a historical resume of Latin America since 1945 is made difficult by the sheer scope of the topic, the exercise can be useful, if only to counter short‐term “amnesiac” assumptions. It divides the analysis into three sections; the economic, political and international. The first section, noting the significance of the pivotal decade of the 1940s, outlines the policies of import‐substitution which have characterized much (not all) of Latin America since that decade, and describes their subsequent replacement by the current “neo‐liberal” model. The second section tries to discern the political correlates of these contrasting economic models, arguing that, despite the wide variation in post‐1945 political trajectories, the import substituting industrialization model tended to favour certain groups and contained the potential for durable social coalitions. While neo‐liberalism similarly rewards its friends and punishes its enemies, its capacity to generate durable coalitions seems questionable; its association with democracy may be more contingent and cosmetic than often assumed; and the acclaimed “success” of certain neo‐liberal leaders (Salinas, Fujimori, Menem) may depend on negative factors—weak opposition, the political pulverization of society—as much as any positive and enduring legitimacy. Finally, the paper locates US policy towards Latin America within a broad historical context, seeing the Cold War as an episode whose passing may presage less afresh, “pluralist” vision from the north, than a search for simple stereotypes with which to interpret a complex and sobering reality.

Building on the Past?

From the standpoint of recent and prospective political reform, the most promising cluster of countries in Africa is in the central and southern region. Zambia has been in the forefront. Zambia's reintroduction of multi-party politics, following the end of the Second Republic and its one-party state, brought about a new ruling party and a new president. The outlook for consolidating a multi-party system, and developing the political parties further, can be assessed by way of comparison with the country's first experience of political pluralism, and of the reasons why that came to an end, in December 1972. Account should also be taken of the legacy of the Second Republic. The future of party politics in Zambia's Third Republic is uncertain, given the factionalism shown by all three main parties, the failure of the ruling party to maintain its early impetus and the weak opposition displayed by its rivals.

Explaining the Competitiveness of Gubernatorial Primaries

Political scientists have devoted considerable effort to explaining the extent of electoral division in democracies. In the American context, this interest has sparked research about the factors determining the nature of intraparty competition in the states. Two major explanations have emerged: the opposition hypothesis--which suggests that the strength of the opposition party is the principal determinant of intraparty competitiveness, with a weak opposition leading to strong competition--and the electoral structure hypothesis--which attributes the level of competition principally to the rules governing primaries. In particular, double (or runoff) primaries are held to offer greater incentives to politicians to compete than single primaries. Recent research about the factors determining the competitiveness of gubernatorial primaries has found stronger empirical support for the structure proposition than the opposition hypothesis. We reformulate these hypotheses in a model that presumes that electoral stru...

Political modernization in Slovenia in the 1980s and the early 1990s

Slovenia's history and geographical position have made its emergence from ‘real socialism’ idiosyncratic. The global political change that marked the end of Marxist‐Leninist rule was ushered in by a number of gradual changes concerning both modifications to Slovenia's political culture and the development of social factors. The new social movements played a key transformative role in the process of regime change, but it could not have been decisive without an evolution within the existing structure of power itself. The holding of free elections in the spring of 1990 confirmed the move to pluralism; but since the institutional framework remained substantialy unchanged, there is a risk, during the transition period, that a weak opposition will be overpowered by the strong executive emerging from the process of change.

Reform without revolt: the political economy of economic reform in the Gambia

The Gambia's Economic Recovery Program differed from most adjustment programs in sub-Saharan Africa because the economy quickly recovered and because the government implemented the reforms with remarkably little public opposition. This paper examines the politics of reform in The Gambia, focusing on both government decisions regarding reform and subsequent public reactions. The analysis highlights the importance of The Gambia's democratic political traditions, the rural political power base, the relationship with neighboring Senegal, weak opposition groups, strong leadership, and lucky breaks. The Gambia provides an example of a democracy that successfully implemented a strong reform program preceding a national election.

The Politics of Accountability: Executive Discretion and Democratic Control

Claiming to have established 'a first in parliamentary democracy,' Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed introduced Bill 35, The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund Act, to the provincial legislature on 14 April, 1976. Much of Lougheed's speech of introduction, and a considerable portion of his subsequent arguments during second and third readings of the bill, concerned the politics of parliamentary accountability. How much discretionary power should be vested in the provincial Executive Council (cabinet), and what legislative checks were being instituted to control AHSTF spending and to contain an undesirable accretion of executive powers? An uncharacteristically defensive Lougheed assured the assembled Conservative and opposition M LAs that the legislature itself would 'in essence, control the tap and hold the purse strings' of the Fund. But does it? Our paper evaluates this promise against the evidence of three years of performance since the passage of Bill 35. How is the Fund currently controlled? What constraints on executive power exist within the present statutory framework? Are the discretionary powers of the provincial cabinet and bureaucracy excessive? Beyond these questions there lies a broader set of issues: what is the real relationship between control of the Fund and the politics of development in Alberta? These are questions of more than parochial or academic interest. The ability of a small group of provincial politicians and civil servants to control the allocation of vast sums of public monies, subject, as we shall see, in practice to little more than an annual post facto legislative review, raises major questions about the politics of democratic accountability in Canada particularly in a province such as Alberta, with its tradition of overwhelming government majorities, tame legislative debate and weak opposition parties. The investment of the Fund, in other words, should not be divorced from the issues of how the investment decisions are made, and by whom. In Alberta, as we shall see, the questions of executive discretion and legislative control have been closely linked to differing conceptions of how the Fund should be invested and how much state intervention in the market place is acceptable. The problems of ministerial accountability and the containment of executive powers in a parliamentary system are complex matters which, at least in political theory, are probably more fundamental in the long run than the vexing allocative and distributive issues raised by