A Prayer for Democracy: Secretarian Violence and Regime Type in Indonesia

Indonesia has a long history of conflict with roots in ethnic, religious, communal and political difference. This was the inevitable consequence of unresolved tensions when the Republic of Indonesia was born in 1945. While a variety of differences over the nature of the state have emerged over the past 76 years, none have been more protracted or resistant to solution than those over religion. In a country where Islam commands the adherence of 87 percent of the population, but five other religions are officially recognized, it is not surprising that these divides should persist.

The Roots of China’s Assertiveness in East Asia

In order to analyse the main driving forces in Chinese foreign policy, this article advances a neoclassical realist argument detailing how certain domestic dynamics that develop between an authoritarian leadership and the society when the country is ‘rising’ constrain its foreign policy behaviour in complex ways. Subsequently, the derived analytical framework is applied in an analysis of China’s ‘assertive turn’ in East Asia. It shows how certain authoritarian regime concerns intensify as China’s great power capabilities and influence grow, resulting in a different room to manoeuvre for Beijing in East Asia, which both encourages and enables a more assertive foreign policy behaviour. In the foreign policy literature, there is general agreement that regime type matters and has explanatory power when seeking to specify the domestic restraints on states’ foreign policy. However, there is still a lack of systematic conceptualisation of the regime type variable and theoretical explanations for how it matters. The neoclassical realist argument on the foreign policy of rising authoritarian states developed in this article is a step in this direction bridging the research fields of international relations, comparative politics and area studies.

Determinants of health and education equality: evidence from post-Soviet states

PurposeThis article examines the determinants of social equality in the education and healthcare sectors in the 15 post-Soviet states. Focussing on regime type and civil society organisations (CSOs), it argues that countries where liberal principles of democracy are achieved or have a stronger civil society deliver a more equitable social policy.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical analysis rests upon a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis from 1992 to 2019. Data are collected from the Quality of Government (QoG) Dataset 2020 and the Variates of Democracy (V-DEM) Dataset 2020.FindingsThe findings demonstrate that while regime type only partially accounts for social equality, as electoral autocracies do not have more equitable social policy than close regime types and democracy weakly explains equality levels, the strength of CSOs is associated with more equality.Originality/valueThe article challenges dominant approaches that consider electoral democracy to be related to more equal social policy and demonstrates that de-facto free and fair elections do not impinge on social equality, while the strength of liberal and civil liberties and CSOs correlate with more equitable social policy.

More than just a regime type: how Southeast Asian countries respond to COVID-19

As early as the pandemic has spread to Southeast Asian countries and elsewhere, observers have been tempted to associate regime type with COVID-19 responses. This trend encompasses the debate between democratic vs. authoritarian regimes that has been particularly helpful in identifying the normative basis to global pandemic responses. However, it leads into an inquiry whether the comparison of regime as part of variable isolation is scientifically viable in assessing the public policy, given the fact that the comparative matrix is vague. The comparison between democracy and the authoritarian regime will not bring a fair debate, but only to insinuate epistemological obstacle due to socially constructed dichotomy between the two even if the authoritarian regime has done any good practice. Furthermore, such a dichotomy only reflects a binary oversimplification of reality, which neglects an alternative explanation. Drawing on the framework of typology of COVID-19 responses by Greer et. al. (2020)–which includes four key foci, i.e., social policies and crisis management, regime type, formal political institutions, state capacity–this article will extend the framework by applying to the case of Southeast Asian countries, where these countries share similar structure and challenges, yet some countries arguably have been more successful.

The Life Satisfaction of Informal Caregivers in Europe: Regime Type, Intersectionality, and Stress Process Factors

This research assessed the role of welfare state/family care regimes, intersecting social locations and stress process factors in influencing the life satisfaction of informal caregivers of care recipients with age-related needs or disabilities within a European international context. Empirical analyses were conducted with a sample of informal caregivers residing in Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Greece and the United Kingdom (n=6,007). Ordinary least squares and ordered logit regression models revealed that welfare state/family care regime, intersecting social locations, and stress process factors were independently associated with the life satisfaction of informal caregivers. Furthermore, there was some evidence to suggest that social location and stress process factors intervened in some of the relationships between regime type and life satisfaction. There was also some evidence that stress process factors intervened in the relationships between social location factors and life satisfaction. Overall, the results provide support for integrating welfare state/family care regime type and intersectionality factors into the stress process model as applied to the context of informal caregiving. The results also have policy and practice implications with regards to which social location and stress process factors explain specific disparities in life satisfaction between informal caregivers residing in different welfare state/family care regimes.

The Question of Membership

This chapter discusses the importance of understanding how regional communities such as the European Union decide which states are eligible to join. It surveys insights and gaps in existing scholarship. It then introduces the argument that membership norms—the community’s prevailing definition of which type of state is eligible for membership—shape collective decisions by empowering certain political positions and disempowering others. It briefly surveys competing explanations focused on treaty rules, geographic location, regime type, economic and security interests, and then outlines the empirical methods used to test these various arguments. Finally, it surveys the aims and content of the chapters that follow.

Rules and Military Regimes

This chapter evaluates the way in which three types of rules—operational, relational and constitutive—have functioned in three corporate military regimes, Argentina (1976–83), Brazil (1964–85), and Chile (1973–88). These regimes are compared one with another and with the communist single-party states. The chapter shows how the different rules operated in these different regimes, drawing out the different patterns of operation and thereby showing the variations that can occur within the one regime type. The chapter also raises the question of the relationship between observance of rules and regime survival.

Understanding Media Control in the Digital Age

Media control comprises multifaceted and amorphous phenomena, combining a variety of forms, tools, and practices. Today media control takes place in a sphere where national politics meet global technology, resulting in practices that bear features of both the (global) platforms and the affordances of national politics. At the intersection of these fields, we try to understand current practices of media control and the ways in which it may be resisted. This thematic issue is an endeavour to bring together conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions to revise the scholarly discussion on media control. First, authors of this thematic issue re-assemble the notion of media control itself, as not being holistic and discrete (control vs freedom) but by considering it from a more critical perspective as having various modes and regimes. Second, this thematic issue brings a “micro” perspective into understanding and theorising media control. In comparison to structural and institutional perspectives on control, this perspective focuses on the agency of various actors (objects and subjects of media pressure) and their practices, motivations, and the resources with which they exert or resist control. Featuring cases from a broad range of countries with political systems ranging from democracy to electoral authoritarian regime, this issue also draws attention to the question of how media control relates to regime type.

Theorizing NGO Mediation in Global Governance

This theoretical chapter summarizes how scholars in international relations and comparative politics have conceptualized the roles of NGOs in global governance and offers a new approach for studying NGO mediation. First, it surveys literatures on transnational advocacy networks, INGOs, and global governance institutions. Next, it introduces the concept of NGO mediation and incorporates insights from scholarship on regime type, state-society relations, and domestic social movements to enhance our insights into how NGOs mediate between domestic and global levels of governance. NGO mediation involves adapting and translating global governance norms and principles to domestic contexts. We identify three common mediation challenges and link these challenges to features of the domestic political context. Finally, the chapter previews the book’s argument and describes our research design.