Coalitional Presidentialism in Cross-Regional Perspective

Author(s):  
Paul Chaisty ◽  
Nic Cheeseman ◽  
Timothy J. Power

This chapter introduces the three regions—sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Former Soviet Union—and the nine countries—Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine—that provide the empirical material for the book. It introduces the two criteria used for case selection: 1) democratic competitiveness; 2) de jure and de facto constitutional provisions that empower presidents to be coalitional formateurs. It also introduces a variable that measures the salience of cross-party cooperation: the Index of Coalitional Necessity. Finally, it sketches the political landscape that has shaped the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism within each region, and it draws attention to important contextual differences between the nine country cases.

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-28
Author(s):  
Scott MacWilliam ◽  
Mike Rafferty

In development policy circles, corruption has become a pressing global issue. Yet the contemporary relationship between corruption and development is complex and contested. For many, corruption robs people of economic resources and social wealth, and denudes the state of important capacities. That is, corruption prevents or blocks development. For others, corruption often occurs in the process of development as the form in which a class of developers accumulates wealth. That is, corruption is a phase of development. This article explores the contested relationship through two case studies: in Sub-Saharan Africa; and in the former Soviet Union. The article also links contemporary debates about corruption and development with earlier thinking about capitalist progress and development.


Slavic Review ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 756-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Bunce

There were two good reasons to expect that developments after socialism, whether in the former Soviet Union or in east central Europe, would follow a roughly similar course. The first was the homogenizing effects of the socialist experience. In contrast to other regions of the world, such as Latin America and southern Europe, where dictatorships had also given way to more liberalized orders, the socialist regimes of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were remarkably alike in their form and functioning.


Author(s):  
Brian Stanley

This book charts the transformation of one of the world's great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. The book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. The book sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. The book provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom's fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe. It demonstrates how Christianity has had less to fear from the onslaughts of secularism than from the readiness of Christians themselves to accommodate their faith to ideologies that privilege racial identity or radical individualism.


1995 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 963-979 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew G. Walder

China's post-Mao economic reforms have generated rapid and sustained economic growth, unprecedented rises in real income and living standards, and have transformed what was once one of the world's most insular economies into a major trading nation. The contrast between China's transitional economy and those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union could not be more striking. Where the latter struggle with severe recessions and pronounced declines in real income, China has looked more like a sprinting East Asian “tiger” than a plodding Soviet-style dinosaur mired in the swamps of transition. The realization that reform measures and energetic growth continue even after the political crisis of 1989 has made China a subject of intense interest far outside the customary confines of the China field. Understood increasingly as a genuine success story, it is moving to the centre of international policy debates about what is to be done to transform the stagnating economies of Eastern Europe, and various aspects of its case now figure prominently in academic analyses ranging from theories of the firm and property rights to the political foundations of economic growth.


Author(s):  
Andrei Korobkov

Democratic transitions are especially complex in federal states and countries with multinational populations and compact, ethnic minority settlements; the increasing ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural heterogeneity of a society complicates the achievement of political compromises. In this sense, the post-Soviet newly independent states (NIS) face an especially complex transition pattern. Roman Szporluk, for example, enumerates three different transformations: the dissolution of the imperial structure and the resulting formation of independent states, the transition from a centralized to a market economic system, and the transition from authoritarianism to (at least ideally) a political democracy, with all three "combined or fused in the chaotic and extremely difficult process of formation and transformation of states and nations. " Thus the transition in the NIS is marked by simultaneous developments in the political, economic, social, religious, ideological, and cultural spheres, including the creation or re-creation of ethnic and other identities.


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