INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2006: STABILITY,COMPROMISE AND SHIFTING CONTESTS OVER IDEOLOGY

The second year of President Yudhoyono's term in office was distinguished by continuing political stability and important democratic gains, including the continued implementation of direct elections of local government executives and the enactment of the Law on Governing Aceh. But if these achievements reconfirmed Indonesia's membership of the club of electoral democracies, the shallow roots of its democratic system were also apparent, especially in the weakness of the political party system. In preferring pragmatic cross-party deal making, the parties often played down their ideological commitments. Within society, however, ideological debates over the vexed issue of religion and the state intensified, and became an important part of the national political agenda. Amounting to an Indonesian version of the ‘culture wars’, such controversies were sparked by concerns that a proposed national bill on pornography and controversial regional by-laws were an indirect attempt to introduce Islamic law.     

Has Leviathan Been Bound? A Theory of Imperfectly Constrained Government with Evidence from the States

This paper develops a formal theory that combines power-maximizing “Leviathan” political parties with well-defined imperfections in the political process. The model implies that both parties tend to make government larger as their likelihood of electoral victory increases. Empirical tests on state-level data confirm this prediction. Racing the Leviathan hypothesis against alternative theories of party motivation indicates that both the Leviathan and the “contrasting ideologies” views have some degree of validity.     

Policy Makers' Preferences,Party Ideology,and the Political Business Cycle

We generate data on the relative preferences of policy makers for inflation and output stability and reexamine how policy makers and political parties behave for 24 countries by using this new approach. This behavior is essential in both the partisan cycle models and the opportunistic political cycle analysis. Our evidence suggests that right-wing parties exhibit a higher relative preference toward stabilizing inflation than left-wing parties. We obtain mixed results on the opportunistic behavior of incumbent parties. Finally, when we analyze the behavior of left and right ideologies separately, we find overwhelming support for party resemblance in the electoral year and strong evidence of opportunistic conduct by right-wing parties.     

SOCIAL CLEAVAGES AND ELECTORAL SUPPORT IN TURKEY: TOWARD CONVERGENCE?

Studies on Western democracies have shown that deep‐seated social cleavages stabilize the electoral behavior and thus reduce electoral volatility. But how do social cleavages affect a party system that is undergoing democratic consolidation, such as in Turkey? In this study, investigations were carried out on long‐ and short‐term relationships between social cleavages (religiosity, ethnicity, and sectarism) electoral volatility in Turkey during the 1961–2002 period. Cross‐sectional multiple regressions were applied to electoral and demographic data at the provincial level. The results showed that in the longterm, social cleavages on the whole have increased volatility rather than reduced it. The cleavage‐volatility relationship, however, has changed over time. Repeated elections have mitigated the volatile effect of social cleavages on the voting behavior, as political parties have become more representative of the existent social cleavages.     

SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM BY THE CARDOSO GOVERNMENT OF BRAZIL: CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS OF REFORM TEN YEARS AFTER “DEMOCRATIZATION”

This article has two purposes. The first is to analyze politically why the Cardoso government's social security reform could not be completed. Though democratic political systems (election and political party systems) were reintroduced after the re‐democratization in 1985, Brazil continued to suffer from elements of its traditional political culture such as corporatism, clientelism, nepotism, etc. These were the stumbling blocks for Cardoso's reform. The second purpose is to deepen understanding of Brazilian democracy by casting light on the behavior of political actors (the government, congress, and political parties) over social security reform issues under the Cardoso and Lula governments.     

Political Party Impacts on Direct Democracy: the 2015 Greek Austerity Referendum

On July 5, 2015, Greek voters were asked whether to approve or reject the terms of an austerity program offered by the European Union (EU) to resolve an ongoing financial crisis. With a turnout rate of 62.5% overall, 61.3% of Greeks voted “no.” While a majority of voters in every district opposed the bailout’s terms, the margin against the proposed austerity measures ranged from 51.2% in Lakonias to 73.8% in Chanion. This paper presents empirical evidence on the determinants of the “no” vote across Greece’s 56 electoral districts. Our analysis is grounded in public choice theories of why large numbers of people turn out to vote in mass elections. In addition to controlling for standard “instrumental” vote motives, we ask whether political party labels, which serve as summary measures of partisan positioning, and party platforms, which express partisan preferences on ballot questions, are salient in determining electoral outcomes. Holding constant the unemployment rate and average voter age (at the regional level) and the fraction of young people casting ballots for the first time on July 5, 2015 (at the district level), we find that the percentage of ‘no’ votes was reduced significantly by voter support for Greece’s leading pro-austerity party (New Democracy) in the previous nationwide election held in January 2015. In contrast, voter support in January for the anti-austerity party (Syriza), led by sitting Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, had no measurable impact on July’s referendum results. This finding offers support for both instrumental and expressive theories of voting and bolsters the claim that political parties can shape electoral outcomes on questions decided by an institution of direct democracy.     

Indonesian politics in 2011: democratic regression and Yudhoyono's regal incumbency

In 2011, a number of trends in Indonesian politics became clearer. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) has not become a more reformist and risk-taking president in his second term, contrary to the hopes of many, but has rather become more cautious, aloof and regal in style. He is irked by criticism and dislikes any disturbance to the authority of his rule. The political elite, often in concert with the SBY government, pushed through a range of democratically regressive measures, including allowing politicians to be appointed to the Elections Commission. The malaise within the party system deepened, with less than a quarter of the electorate professing any party affiliation. Most Islamic parties slid closer to the political periphery, and the largest one, PKS, was beset by controversy. Government and community responses to a brutal attack on the Ahmadiyah sect in early 2011 showed the limits of Indonesia's much lauded religious tolerance.     

The rise of neo‐liberal revolution in Britain: Thatcherism in the British conservative party

Recent theories of party change have emphasized interaction between political parties and their environment Employing this notion of interaction, this article has attempted to provide a more systematic analysis of the rise of Thatcherism in the British Conservative Party. It has demonstrated that while socio‐economic changes provided a primary source of the ideological change, there were internal processes within the party that perceived environmental pressure from the socio‐economic changes and actually pursued the task of the ideological change. First, environmental change in the socio‐economic arena provided an initial cause of the rise of Thatcherism in the British Conservative Party. Second, electoral defeats also played a significant influence in the rise of Thatcherism. Third, a replacement of party leadership was another significant intervening impetus of the ideological change.     

The changing dynamics of regionalism in South Korea's elections

One of the most persistent areas of discussion regarding South Korea's party and election systems is the continued elevation of regional personalities over political institutions. We seek to pour new wine into old bottles, however, by challenging a seldom‐considered assumption in Korean studies; that regionalism has exerted constant pressures across regime, province, and personality. There is a void in studying how transition to democracy has affected the dominance of personality‐based regionalism in Korean politics. We investigate democratization's impact on this phenomenon by examining the provincial distribution of legislative and presidential voting from 1971–2002. We employ a new indicator for personality‐based disproportionality, apply it to election outcomes at the provincial level, and find that the electoral impact of regionalism has changed over time across regimes, provinces, and political personalities. We find that regional voting disproportionality 1) increased immediately after transition; 2) has varied depending on personality and type of election; 3) is indeed low in provinces traditionally labeled as neutral; and 4) increased in the 2000 legislative election while declining in the 2002 presidential election.     

Monopoly aspects of political parties

Conclusions The standard economic model of a natural monopoly offers a useful conceptual means to examine some of the characteristics of political parties. The declining cost curves for producing political products are attributable to the indivisible nature of the majority asset. In the absence of subsidies, political parties can be expected to produce at the point where their marginal evaluation equals average cost. Thus, they have an incentive to seek subsidies in order to expand production to the point where marginal evaluation equals marginal cost. While this is optimizing behavior on the part of the individual party, it may not be optimal in competing for the majority asset, because this process decreases the value of resources that the other party has expended towards acquiring the asset. Parties will determine their optimal output calculating only the private costs and benefits to be secured through party competition, but will ignore the social costs caused by the externality they generate in competing for a fixed percentage of votes. As a result, optimizing behavior by the individual parties may lead to an excess of resources devoted to producing political decisions.     

Public sector enterprise disinvestment in India: Efficiency gains in a political context

India instituted a program of state enterprise disinvestment in 1991 as part of a sweeping reform initiative. This study analyses the effect of disinvestment on enterprise performance, conditioned on political context as characterized by the ideological leanings of the parties in power at state and central levels. Using stochastic frontier analysis, measures of firm efficiency are generated for 238 central public sector enterprises for the period 1991–1992 to 2010–2011. The relationship between efficiency so measured and disinvestment is then estimated using a two-stage instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity between firm efficiency and selection for disinvestment. Initial disinvestment is associated with substantial efficiency gains, but subsequent disinvestment much less so and the proportion of shares disinvested only loosely so. This may be explained by the transformative effect of initial stock market listing on accountability and profit orientation that is not repeated with further rounds of disinvestment. The effect of disinvestment on performance is stronger if the enterprise is located in a state governed by a right leaning party or one that is ideologically aligned with the party in power at the centre.     

Electoral rules and free trade agreements as a campaign issue: The case of political disputes over the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Japan

This study empirically examines what drives candidates to oppose a free trade agreement (FTA), focusing on the difference in electoral rules and progress of FTA negotiations. We use as case studies Japan's 2013 and 2016 Upper House elections, a main issue of which was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Candidates’ promises about the TPP are unrelated to whether they run for one-seat, multi-seat, or proportional representation constituencies. Candidates who have more rival candidates belonging to the same party are less supportive of the TPP, whereas candidates who face fiercer competition with rival candidates of other parties are more supportive. This result, however, is not observed after the conclusion of the TPP negotiations. The presence of agriculture in local economies relates to candidates’ opposition of the TPP before the conclusion of negotiations, but not thereafter. Conversely, candidates’ stances on the TPP are affected by their parties’ policies and own ideologies regardless of the different stages of promoting the TPP. These results indicate that the major determinants of candidates’ positions toward an FTA vary according to the changes in circumstances surrounding the FTA.     

民主党派参政议政与党的整合能力的研究

现代国家政治是一种政党政治,政党制度往往与政治制度直接相关。我国的政党组织结构模式是中国共产党领导的多党合作制。而在当前民主党派在性质、作用等方面都发生了新变化。面对新形势,要正确处理"执政"与"参政"的关系,民主党派充分履行参政议政职能等问题,要求执政党必须对整合社会能力进行开拓创新。     

Did the New Deal solidify the 1932 Democratic realignment?

The critical election of 1932 represented a turning point in the future electoral successes of the Democrats and Republicans for over three decades. This paper seeks to measure the importance of the New Deal in facilitating the Democrats' control of the federal government well into the 1960s. We test whether long-differences in the county-level electoral support for Democratic presidential candidates after the 1930s can be attributed to New Deal interventions into local economies. We also investigate more narrowly whether voters rewarded Roosevelt from 1932 to 1936 and from 1936 to 1940 for his efforts to stimulate depressed local economies. Our instrumental variable estimates indicate that increasing a county's per capita New Deal relief and public works spending from nothing to the sample mean ($145) would have increased the long-run support for the Democratic party by 2 to 2.5 percentage points. We further find that the long-run shift toward the Democratic party after 1928 was not a function of the Roosevelt landslide victory in 1932. Roosevelt's ability to win over voters during the 1936 and 1940 elections with New Deal spending, however, did matter for the long-term.     

Information and communications technologies in the two Koreas: Contrasts,commonalities, challenges

The purpose of this study is to review the relationship of electoral system and democracy in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. The study looks at the transformation process of the electoral system in each country, and performs a comparative study on post‐democratization electoral reforms using the concepts of competitiveness and fairness. It is found that electoral systems displayed low levels of competitiveness and fairness before democratization, but that their reforms have led to an increase in competitiveness and an improvement in fairness in all three countries. Also, while the post‐democratization electoral reforms have facilitated the above‐mentioned democratic virtues, there have been significant country differences in the details of their progress. The Philippines promoted the competitiveness of the electoral system by adopting a party list system and guest candidate system. Although Thailand and Indonesia showed competitiveness in their electoral systems, they prohibited the participation of non‐partisan candidates in elections for the sake of stability of party politics. The differences are reflections of their particular political histories and contexts.     

Strategic implications of the Soviet‐North Korean alliance

Abstract

Globalization is commonly defined as a strict economic path by most previous works, but it is really a fuzzy concept with unrestrained dimensions. While the ideological location of an incumbent political party is a powerful predictor of its policy position, the role of a political party in the globalization-growth nexus has never been fully empirically investigated. By applying Pedroni's panel cointegration technique instead of a time-series or traditional panel data approach, this paper aims to empirically re-examine the co-movement and the causal relationship among economic growth, the overall globalization index, and its three main dimensions—economic, social, as well as political integrations—by using panel data for 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for 1970 to 2006. Certainly, the political party variable is taken into account as the advanced test is promoted, and we finally discover that all variables move together in the long run. Based on the results of the panel causality test, though the evidence of short-run causality is very weak, it does show long-run unidirectional causality running from the overall index of globalization, economic globalization, and social globalization to growth. Finally, the critical role of the political party is deeply discussed in relation with our results.     

Rural tax reform and the extractive capacity of local state in China

China's fiscal arrangement in the 1980s has preserved local governments' incentive but the 1994 fiscal reform recentralized revenues. Since then, farmers' tax burdens have risen steeply and become a major challenge to the state legitimacy. How to account for the huge regional variation? Why were some localities able to tax more heavily than others? Based on a national survey of village governance in China, we examine farmers' burdens empirically and identify political and social factors that explain the local governments' ability to tax farmers. This paper suggests that developments since the 1990s have shown that it overstates local discretionary power and does not pay enough attention to societal forces in understanding local public finance.     

Hunting the Whale: More Evidence on State Government Leviathans

Caplan holds that governments are Leviathans, seeking to extend their power by increasing government expenditures beyond the level preferred by voters. We extend Caplan's model by examining the real (percentage) growth rates of government. We also examine whether government size increases at an increasing rate as the minority party weakens. We find evidence that supports and fails to support the original Leviathan hypothesis. We also fail to support our extensions of Caplan's hypothesis. Furthermore, our significant and contrary results have intuitively appealing interpretations. From these results, we conclude that the impact of political party power on government spending is ambiguous.     

Indonesian politics in 2010: the perils of stagnation

In the first year after President Yudhoyono's re-election, Indonesian politics continued to evolve in largely familiar patterns. Contrary to the expectations of some observers, Yudhoyono's strong popular mandate and his Democratic Party's newly won parliamentary plurality did not result in significant changes to the president's cautious style of governing or the fickle nature of president–parliament relations. Most political parties also opted for continuity over change, electing or re-electing established figures as leaders despite high levels of public dissatisfaction with their performance. The fact that the 2009 election failed to generate any new momentum for reform does not augur well for the remainder of Yudhoyono's second term. Although the basic parameters of Indonesia's democracy remain intact, political developments during 2010 have also confirmed a pattern of stagnation that is likely to see Indonesia barely muddle through as a reasonably stable yet low-quality democracy.     

Indonesian politics in 2012: coalitions,accountability and the future of democracy

Indonesia is a successful but flawed democracy: while the electoral process has worked well, the quality of democratic governance is less encouraging. Missing from the equation between elections and democracy is political accountability. Parties’ obsession with coalition building as a route to political power has made it difficult for voters to attribute success or failure to elected officials. Coalition government allows politicians to send contradictory messages, and in 2012 religious minorities – which are neither banned nor protected – have paid a heavy price for the lack of accountability and leadership. In Jakarta an outsider, Joko Widodo, won the gubernatorial election despite facing an incumbent backed by a broad coalition. His victory illustrates that coalition building does not guarantee success, and that the electorate is mature enough not to be swayed by appeals to religious and ethnic sentiment. This gives heart to those hoping to strengthen democracy and democratic values in Indonesia.