Studia Politica, vol. XVIII, no. 1, 2018
ARTICULI
PAVEL MAŠKARINEC, Strategic voting in Hungarian elections of 2014: Evidence for Duverger’s law (pp. 9-34)
Abstract
This article tests Duverger’s law through an analysis of the Hungarian parliamentary elections of 2014 which were held under the new compensatory mixed electoral system. The results show that while a strategic voting had a tendency to grow under Hungarian supermixed system in the period 1990–2010, in the elections of 2014 strategic voting was not a universal phenomenon under the plurality rule, as indicated by many violations of Duverger’s law in Hungarian single member districts. Our research confirmed that the effect of electoral institutions (institutional structure) is contingent and at the district level inhibited by country-specific conditions. However, as a new Hungarian compensatory mixed electoral system distributes seats not only by plurality rule in SMDs (nominal tier), but also via proportional representation (list tier), a further research should pay attention to cross-contamination of both tiers of electoral system, as a potential factor which moves Hungarian electoral competition substantially away from Duvergerian predictions.
Keywords
Hungary, parliamentary elections, party system, strategic voting, Duverger’s law
PAVEL MAŠKARINEC, Assistant Professor, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, maskarinec@centrum.cz.
VICTOR RIZESCU, Începuturile statului bunăstării pe filiera românească. Scurtă retrospectivă a etapelor unei reconceptualizări (The Beginnings of the Welfare State along the Romanian Path. A Brief Retrospective on the Stages of Re-conceptualization) (pp. 35-56)
Abstract
The article takes issue with the deeply entrenched historical conception about the shaping of social policies in pre-communist Romania, which indicates socialist politics and socialist-enlisted worker trade-unionism as the only significant agents of change, also depicting the non-socialist political forces of the time as participating to the process by merely employing the strategy of stern resistance and piecemeal concessions. The alternative view offered stresses the pivotal roles performed in the context by the ideological trend of socially-minded liberalism, by the movements of professional representation with petty entrepreneurial and white-collar constituencies and by the corporatist design for the representation of professional interests. The successive stages of the inquiry leading to the formulation of such interpretative theses ‒ and inaugurated as a research on the relation between fascist modernism and the corporatist vision of rapid economic growth under an authoritarian political cover in the local milieu ‒ are disclosed all throughout.
Keywords
Social policies, professional representation, corporatism, socialism, left liberalism
VICTOR RIZESCU, Associate Professor, University of Bucharest, victor.rizescu@fspub.unibuc.ro.
ELISABETA-CRISTINA DINU, Patterns of cleavage development in the late Ottoman Empire and Khedival and British Egypt: intrasocietal and extrasocietal determinants of opposition radicalization (pp. 57-86)
Abstract
The article analyzes the domestic dynamics of the political systems of the late Ottoman Empire and Khedival and British Egypt, in order to determine the causes of radicalization of the Egyptian Society of the Muslim Brothers (MB) and of the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as political parties in a comparative perspective. The study demonstrates that the nature of the two groups was determined by the constraints imposed by the political system upon party development. Constructed on the basis of the first predominant ideological cleavage, the political system and its actors were in turn shaped by the degree of penetration of foreign pressures into domestic politics. The first section of the article focuses on the impact of foreign pressures on the institutionalization of political cleavages, by examining modernizing reforms’ trajectories and elite development. The second section analyzes the CUP and the MB as emergent externally created parties originating from the synthesis of intrasocietal and extrasocietal dimensions of the political systems in which they emerged.
Keywords
The Committee of Union and Progress, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Political Parties, Radicalization, Islamism, Political Cleavage, Political Elites
ELISABETA-CRISTINA DINU, Research Assistant, Central European University, elisabetacrinadinu@gmail.com.
IVA SOJKOVÁ, China’s Official Development Finance Flows in Zambia under the Beijing Consensus (pp. 87-120)
Abstract
Chinese development finance flows provided to African recipients have gained a lot of attention for their volume and nature, representing an alternative approach to development. It is the aim of this article to examine the observance of the principles of China’s development model, the Beijing Consensus, through China’s Official Development Finance delivered to Zambia between 2000 and 2014. Due to a lack of information published on development finance flows by the Chinese government, the author uses AidData’s dataset, media, and government reports to verify the nature and amount of finance flows provided and their allocation in the country. The analysis demonstrates that apart from the “non-interference principle”, all the principles are observed when their adherence is limited to the purpose of the delivered projects. However, their observance is at the same time undercut by characteristics of the process of projects’ implementation and their allocation. There are also other Chinese activities further undermining the adherence. Although these activities are not directly associated with China’s ODF-like finance delivery to Zambia, they influence the successful observance of the examined principles in a negative way.
Keywords
China, Africa, development, Beijing Consensus, Zambia
IVA SOJKOVÁ, Ph.D. student, University of Hradec Králové, shivasjkv@gmail.com.
DRAGOȘ DRAGOMAN, Language Planning and the Issue of Minority Languages in Romania: From Exclusion to Reasonable Compromises (pp. 121-140)
Abstract
Language planning and control have played a prominent role in attempts of nation building in contemporary Romania, a nation-state formed in the early 20th century by binding together provinces that were previously part of multi-national empires. As a long-lasting process, language control stretches throughout many historical periods. In communist and post-communist era, it has largely interfered with the political logic of both socialist internationalism and post-socialist democratic citizenry. More recently, under the impact of the European Union’s expansion to the East and Romania’s integration to it, language control has switched from severe limiting minority languages to a fair acceptance of reasonable compromises with the official dominance of Romanian as national official language. Although Romania acknowledges several minority languages, the article focuses on the usage of Hungarian language, the most important minority language in Romania. The aim of the article is double. On one hand, it analyses political negotiations over the status and corpus of the Hungarian language, by assessing the importance of language policies in the broader context of the processes of historical reconciliation and neighbourhood policies between Romania and Hungary. On the other hand, it deals with the political cooperation between Romanian and Hungarian political parties in Romania during the democratic postcommunist transition.
Keywords
Language planning, post-communism, ethnic relations, Hungarian minority, democratization, Romania
DRAGOȘ DRAGOMAN, Associate Professor, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu / CEREFREA Bucharest Romania, dragos.dragoman@ulbsibiu.ro.
ÉRIC BRUNET, L’obsession gaulliste. Alain, François, Nicolas, Marine et les autres…, Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, 2016 (ANDRADA CREȚANU) (pp. 143-147)
PHILIPPE SANDS, Retour à Lemberg, Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, 2017 (CLARISA LUPU) (pp. 147-152)
SILVIA MARTON, FRÉDÉRIC MONIER ET OLIVIER DARD, Moralité du pouvoir et corruption en France et en Roumanie (XVIIIe - XXe siècle), Presse de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, 2017 (ALEXANDRA OPREA) (pp. 152-156)