scholarly journals The role of political opposition: A pre-requisite for democracy

Author(s):  
Arif Khan ◽  
Saiful Islam ◽  
Muhammad Alam

No doubt for a democracy to be triumphant, multi-party system or, at least two party systems is obligatory. A country where there is one party system and lack observant and efficient opposition there are every chances for the incumbent party to become autocratic and domineering. One party system is most of the times susceptible to transform into dictatorship. Most of the times where there is one party system, the opposition is stifled and trampled and the dictatorship of the single party is established. Germany during Hitler’s rule and Italy during Mussoloni rule are the cases in point. One cannot imagine of a democratic set up without a healthy and watchful opposition. For the success of any parliamentary democracy, an effective opposition is must to carry out its functions courageously and effectively. The paper analyses the rights, responsibilities and obligations of opposition in a democratic system. For this purpose, the techniques adopted by the researcher for data collection include a detailed survey of the available literature covering different aspects of the topic. The internationally reputed authors and experts have been quoted. It is for the government to allow the opposition to fulfil their functions, which indicates a sign of democratic maturity on the part of government. The opposition has to focus on its democratic functions and if it fails to do so, it will be a sign of dysfunctional democracy.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Damir Kapidžić ◽  
Olivera Komar

Abstract This article examines the role of ethnicity and ethnic parties as stabilizing factors in Southeast European party systems. It compares two ethnically divided countries in Southeast Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ethnic identities that form the political cleavage are firm, and Montenegro, where they are malleable. Theoretically, it addresses the debate between scholars who either find stability or instability in East European post-communist party systems. The article traces the role of ethnicity in the formation and development of electoral contests and compares the two cases by utilizing measures of block volatility, based on analysis of official electoral data. We argue that party systems in ethnically diverse countries are stable at the subsystems level, but unstable within them. In BiH, firm ethnic identity stabilizes the party system by limiting competition between blocks, leading to closure. Malleable ethnic identity in Montenegro opens competition to non-ethnic parties seeking to bridge ethnic divisions, leading to more instability. We find that party system dynamics in ethnically divided new democracies depend on identity rigidity and cleavage salience, in addition to levels of heterogeneity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Olga Marques ◽  
Amanda Couture-Carron ◽  
Tyler Frederick ◽  
Hannah Scott

Many post-secondary institutions are developing policies and programs aimed at improving responses to sexual assault experienced by students. In some areas, such as Ontario, Canada, the government has mandated post-secondary institutions to do so. However significant these initiatives, they are predicated on the assumption that students trust, and want to engage with, the university following sexual violence. This study explores students’ perceptions of sexual assault policies and services on one mid-size university campus focusing specifically on how trust factors into reporting sexual victimization and using services. Findings show that students believe that sexual assault policies and programs exist, but this does not meanstudents are willing to use such resources or that they even trust that their university has students’ needs and interests at the fore. This paper discusses policy and programmatic considerations for building student trust in their post-secondary institutions to encourage student use of campus support.


Author(s):  
Pedro Teixeira ◽  
Leonor Teixeira ◽  
Celeste Eusébio

This chapter describes how Tourism 4.0 is a concept that combines tourism and the fourth industrial revolution, and although the literature in this field is very scarce, this concept has been explored in some research projects, such as the government-sponsored research project in Slovenian tourism. People with various kinds of access requirements represent a combination of challenges and opportunities for the tourism industry. Tourism 4.0 set up the main goals of making tourism accessible to everyone at any time. Therefore, this new phenomenon may have an essential role in the development of accessible tourism. The adoption of technological components in accessible tourism enables the development of a new technological solution that can facilitate access to tourism products for disabled people, contributing to the development of accessible tourism. The new term Accessible@Tourism 4.0 is the answer to the role of the fourth industrial revolution in accessible tourism, emphasizing the effect of Industry 4.0 components in the tourism sector.


2021 ◽  
pp. 193-213
Author(s):  
Christopher Cochrane ◽  
Jean-François Godbout ◽  
Jason Vandenbeukel

Canada is a federal parliamentary democracy with a bicameral legislature at the national level. Members of the upper House, styled the Senate, are appointed by the prime minister, and members of the lower House, the House of Commons, are elected in single-member plurality electoral districts. In practice, the House of Commons is by far the more important of the two chambers. This chapter, therefore, investigates access to the floor in the Canadian House of Commons. We find that the age, gender, and experience of MPs have little independent effect on access to the floor. Consistent with the dominant role of parties in Canadian political life, we find that an MP’s role within a party has by far the most significant impact on their access to the floor. Intriguingly, backbenchers in the government party have the least access of all.


Theology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
James Jones

In 1989, 96 Liverpool Football Club supporters were killed at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. It was the biggest sporting disaster in British football. The original inquests returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’. For over 20 years the families of the 96 and the survivors campaigned against this verdict. In 2010 the government set up an Independent Panel with myself as its Chair. Its remit after consultation with the families and survivors was to access and analyse all the documents related to the disaster and its aftermath and to write a report to add to public understanding. The Panel’s Report was published in 2012 and led to the quashing of the original verdicts and the setting up of fresh inquests. After two years and the longest inquests in British legal history, the jury gave its determination of ‘unlawful killing’. Here I reflect theologically on the public and pastoral role of the Church of England and its mission to wider society.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Harry Entebang ◽  
Richard T. Harrison

A nation’s economic growth has been associated with the role of entrepreneurship. While recognising the work of entrepreneurship on the mindset and behaviour of individual entrepreneurs, research into an organisational perspective of entrepreneurship continues to emerge due to unprecedented developments occurring around the world over the last two decades. Notably, past studies have postulated that entrepreneurial organisations tend to perform better than conservative organisations. In this vein, the Malaysian government has set up Government-linked companies (GLCs) to enable these entities to become more effective, efficient, and competitive, which can assist the government in strengthening its economy. On the other hand, despite considerable improvements, the overall performance of GLCs has been unsatisfactory. Given the hostility and dynamism of the business environment, GLCs have no other option but to improve and perform better. Recognising this, the purpose of the study is to determine the underlying forces forcing GLCs to improve and to identify forms of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) pursued by GLCs. Building on the outcomes of semi-structured interviews with senior managers in GLCs, the need for CE is fostered by competition and market pressure, technological changes, and increases in operation costs. Finally, future studies of CE in Malaysia may consider other aspects of CE, including issues and challenges in pursuing CE effectively within GLCs business environment.


Author(s):  
Mónica Méndez Lago

Using the most relevant indicators highlighted by the literature on party systems, such as the indexes of volatility, fragmentation, and ideological polarization in the electoral–parliamentary arena, this chapter analyses the development of the Spanish party system since the transition to democracy. It focuses on the different stages of its development, marked by the two main transformations it has experienced: the first in the 1982 elections with the collapse of the incumbent party, and, after a long phase of stability, the second transformation in 2014/15 with the emergence of two new national parties onto the electoral and parliamentary arena. One of the key questions the chapter addresses is why a party system that had remained quite stable for more than three decades since 1982, preventing newcomers from coming in, finally gave way to a transformation in the mid-2010s.


1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 1384-1405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Brass

This paper contributes to the substantive and methodological discussion of the issues concerning the causes of cabinet instability through analysis of data from Indian state politics. The focus of the analysis is on explaining the duration of Indian state governments in days with variables measuring the degree of fragmentation and cohesion in the party system, the composition of the cabinet, the characteristics of the opposition, and the role of ideological differences. A substantial amount of the variation in the durability of coalition governments is explained with variables that measure the degree of party system institutionalization and the extent of political opportunism, but ideological factors do not explain much of the differences in durability of governments. It is also found that none of the measures used can explain much of the variation in one-party majority governments for which, it is argued, explanations must be sought that focus on leadership skill and on relationships between leaders and factions in a dominant party.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Aditia Syaprillah

The state of judicial administration is formed in order to provide protection for justice seekers who felt indiscriminate with the decision made by judicial administration. Government policies have released with careful consideration on the interest of citizen, therefore district institutions have to be set up as a means for control system.Goal of this study is to analyze the role of state judicial administration to provide protection from indiscrimination for all citizens. The research methods used in this study are normative and doctrine approaches, which are statute approach and regulation approach. Government authority has taken by regulation cannot be operated freely.


Author(s):  
Zsolt Enyedi ◽  
Fernando Casal Bértoa

The study of political parties and party systems is intimately linked to the development of modern political science. The configuration of party competition varies across time and across polities. In order to capture this variance, one needs to go beyond the analysis of individual parties and to focus on their numbers (i.e. fragmentation), their interactions (i.e. closure), the prevailing ideological patterns (i.e. polarization), and the stability of the balance of power (i.e. volatility) in all spheres of competition, including the electoral, parliamentary, and governmental arenas. Together, these factors constitute the core informal institution of modern politics: a party system. The relevant scholarship relates the stability of party systems to the degree of the institutionalization of individual parties, to various institutional factors such as electoral systems, to sociologically anchored structures such as cleavages, to economic characteristics of the polity (primarily growth), to historical legacies (for example, the type of dictatorship that preceded competitive politics) and to the length of democratic experience and to the characteristics of the time when democracy was established. The predictability of party relations has been found to influence both the stability of governments and the quality of democracy. However, still a lot is to be learned about party systems in Africa or Asia, the pre-WWII era or in regional and/or local contexts. Similarly, more research is needed regarding the role of colonialism or how party system stability affects policy-making. As far as temporal change is concerned, we are witnessing a trend towards the destabilization of party systems, but the different indicators show different dynamics. It is therefore crucial to acknowledge that party systems are complex, multifaceted phenomena.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document