Suchergebnisse

What is the role of religion in tribal politics? Does religion shape tribal political imagination? If so, how and in what manner? Politically, tribal movements since the colonial period have been deeply rooted in religion, and even in post-independent India, they continue to inspire and shape tribal politics. The article argues that tribal politics and religion interact in complex ways. First, the article shows how groups and organisations incorporate religious ideas within their political ideology. Second, religion and politics also come into conflict with one another in terms of the use and interpretation of religious beliefs and commitments for political ends, mainly when it involves the use of violence. This is examined through the case of the Mizo movement for independence in northeast India, where religion was interwoven with the politics of identity, nationalism and violence.

AbstractA key element of the European Union's (EU) attempt to foster citizens' EU identification is its goal to improve citizens' quality of life via its Cohesion policy (CP). Although recent findings demonstrate that the allocation of CP money positively affects sub‐national parties' positions on EU integration and CP, we still do not know if sub‐national parties actually talk about CP issues in their manifestos. Using a unique data set based on manually coded 812 manifestos written by 95 different parties in 47 regions in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2016, it is argued that several party‐level characteristics are decisive for sub‐national parties' emphasis of CP issues. Even though sub‐national parties emphasize CP issues only to a small degree, the results of multilevel mixed‐effects Tobit regressions show that it is particularly regional government parties which emphasize CP issues when drafting their regional election manifestos.

The response of national, state-level political parties to the challenges of competing for power at the devolved, regional levels is a neglected research topic. This article seeks to remedy this by analysing how the British Labour Party has responded to these challenges at the sub-national level following UK devolution. British Labour remains formally a unitary party despite devolution. Nonetheless, the national party leadership has allowed the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties considerable freedom, in practice, to select candidates, conduct regional-level elections and implement some distinctive policies. Meanwhile, the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties have shifted significantly from being traditional, centralized parties with a single hierarchical organization towards being more pluralist, less hierarchical organizations.

Study on political elites in sub-national politics in post-1998 Indonesia did not pay much attention to identify the shifting or continuation of structural change in the post-New Order authoritarianism. From a case study in East Java, this article shows the change and continuation of political elite structure. Democratization does not necessarily produce significant changes that shift the position and privilege of the old political elites. Their organizational power might have declined, but their control over patron-client relationship remains strong. This is also finds that the political changes were, institutionally, not strong enough to cause the significant damage to the patron-client relationship developed during the New Order era. The democratization pressure has only caused the partial diversification of elites' political affiliation while the inter-intra elite power relations model has not changed much. This explanation provides a new contribution to the understandings on the dynamics and changes in the structure of political elites in sub-national politics in the era of democratization in Indonesia.

This article argues that Mexico, after nearly seven decades of highly centralized, presidentialist rule, is moving toward a political system in which power is contested actively & continuously between center & periphery. State governors & other subnational political actors have become more assertive in national politics, & they have greater financial resources under their control, due to fiscal decentralization. Now operating in an increasingly competitive electoral environment, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has switched to a primary system for selecting its presidential candidate that inevitably rewards the state & local PRI machines that deliver the vote for the winning candidate. Under these circumstances, the very different subnational political regimes that coexist inside Mexico may function more as obstacle to the completion of the democratic transition than as breeding grounds for further democratizing advances, as the "periphery" is often viewed in the contemporary Mexican political literature. Drawing on evidence from five types of center-periphery confrontations during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo, it is argued that the re-emergence in the 1990s of strong, subnational political regimes that are resistant to control by the President & other central political actors is likely to prolong Mexico's democratic transition & increase its unevenness. Adapted from the source document.