Pious Way to Politics: The Rise of Political Salafism in Post‐Mubarak Egypt

The Arab Spring has reshaped the Islamist landscape in the Middle East drastically. After decades of repression and exclusion, Islamist parties have taken power in Egypt, Tunis, and Morocco. However, the startling rise of Salafism (Salafiyya) remains the most visible feature of the new Islamist scene in the region. After decades of eschewing politics for theological and political reasons, Salafi movements and groups have rushed into electoral politics enthusiastically. They became keen to form political parties, contest elections, and vie for power. In Egypt, the Salafi parties fared well in the post‐revolution parliamentary elections and are a key player in drafting Egypt's new constitution. This article explores the rise of Salafism after Mubarak and examines its effects on the democratic transition in Egypt. It investigates the ideological and theological stance of Salafi movements and parties on politics and democracy in particular. The argument put forward is that the extraordinary political openness in Egypt after the revolution has pushed Salafis into everyday politics. Subsequently, Salafis have become more inclined to adopt a pragmatic and practical discourse. Based on field research, this article provides a thematic analysis of Egyptian Salafism and assesses its political future.     

“You Cannot Measure a Tzuultaq'a”: Cultural Politics at the Limits of Liberal Legibility

Abstract: In the past two decades, many Latin American nations emerged from twin crises of debt and dictatorship towards an uncertain marriage of fragile democracies and neoliberal policies. The focus of this article is on recognition for a limited set of rights for indigenous peoples known as neoliberal multiculturalism. Through a case study of a sacred place declaration by Q’eqchi’ Maya activists in rural Guatemala, I show the limits of liberal legibility. If an organized group in struggle engaged with the neoliberal state on its terms, their goals and actions would necessarily be circumscribed to its limited scope for recognition. In this case, however, multicultural neoliberalism did not encompass the full spectrum of Q’eqchi’ political activism. I argue that Q’eqchi’ cultural politics goes beyond neoliberal limits, using spirituality and territoriality to signal a broader politics of transfiguration.     

Religion and Politics in the Howard Decade

The interaction between religion and politics is varied, complex and often heated. It involves constitutional issues, voting behaviour, party composition and electoral competition, faith-based public administration, advocacy and lobbying by churches, mutual criticism by churches and the state, and the public presentation of religious values. This article is a comprehensive mapping and discussion of a range of the major religion and politics issues in Australia since the election of the Howard government in 1996. This has been a decade in which religion has had a higher political profile than at any time since the 1950s Labor Split. One feature has been the rise to prominence of Catholics in the Coalition parties, whereas they featured heavily on the other side during the Labor Split. It is a more intellectually interesting decade than the 1950s because the influence of religion has crossed denominational and faith boundaries from the mainstream Christian churches to the newer Evangelical Christian churches and to non-Christian religions such as Islam. The overall impact of religious intervention appears to have favoured the Coalition parties, but many unanswered questions remain about the motivation and impact of these developments, and there are numerous opportunities for further research.     

Introduction: not a normal election: roots and consequences

The March 2018 Italian general elections can be described as a historic turning point, another watershed moment in the turbulent history of contemporary Italian politics. After a stormy and complex legislative term, characterized by a variety of institutional and political phenomena, Italy has faced one of the most important electoral challenges since the return of democracy in the mid-1940s. After examining the major political events that led to the latest general elections, this introductory article presents and analyses the rules, the actors and the outcomes of the electoral contest that has seen the victory of two anti-establishment parties: the Five Star Movement and the League. In the concluding section, the article discusses the potential tensions that may emerge from the clash between the populist attitude of the new governing parties and the constitutional constraints of a liberal democratic regime.     

Politics of place: political representation and the culture of electioneering in the Netherlands,c.1848–1980s

Abstract

This article is a first attempt to explore how a politics of place has manifested itself in Dutch electoral culture since the middle of the nineteenth century. It aims to move beyond a narrow interpretation of a politics of place as an ‘old-fashioned’ feature of electoral politics to be associated with a distinct, long-gone era of political representation. Instead, this article shows how it was continuously negotiated. This gives us a better understanding of the changing nature of political representation in the Netherlands. Compared to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, local senses of community and their clash with ideology-based party politics were far less prominent. There was, however, on-going debate about the degree to which Parliament should reflect the various regions of the country, so that local party associations and voters could feel represented and address ‘their’ MP for issues pertaining to their locality. Moreover, after 1918 parties were concerned about the need to maintain political communication on the spot to counter lack of political involvement and feelings of alienation among the electorate. The article ends with a call for further reflection on the nature of clientelism in the Netherlands by exploring direct interaction between voters and their representatives.     

Towards a chequebook democracy? Business,parties and the funding of politics in Italy and the United States

This article seeks to establish to what extent Silvio Berlusconi's entry into electoral politics as leader of Forza Italia signals an ‘Americanization’ of Italian politics. It argues that Italian party democracy is moving in an ‘American’ direction in two ways. First, Italian party organizations are declining, leading to a more candidate-centred type of electoral politics. Second, the decline of parties is enhancing the ability of business to use its financial clout to tailor public policy to its own requirements. However, these trends do not have identical effects in Italy and the United States. This article will also show that this process of ‘Americanization’ interacts with the existing political praxis and institutional framework of Italian politics to produce an outcome which differs from both the traditional Western European model and the American model of party democracy. It will be concluded that this outcome seriously undermines representative democracy in Italy.     

Constituency interests without constituencies:: the geographical impact of candidate selection on party organization and legislative behavior in the 14th Israeli Knesset, 1996–99

The Israeli political system has recently undergone dramatic and significant structural changes, including the introduction of a new method of candidate selection known as primaries. This article focuses on this new method of candidate selection, which drastically reshaped the connection between the parties and their members, their voters and their representatives, and as a result completely undermined the organizational infrastructure of the parties that adopted primaries. This article describes the reforms that were enacted, assesses their ramifications and focuses on the geographical significance of the innovative aspect of constituency representation by individual parliamentarians, which the primaries injected into the unitary political parties, electoral system and political infrastructure in Israel during the 14th Knesset, 1996–99. In doing so, this article points to a lacuna in the political science literature concerning the relevance and consequences of candidate selection—i.e. intra-party elections—on political geography. The article argues that intra-party electoral reform is not only significant, but, from a political geography perspective, can prove to be as meaningful and consequential as systemic electoral reform.     

Electioneering,the Third Reform Act,and Political Change in the 1880s*

This article investigates the impact of the 1883–5 electoral reforms on the political culture of elections and electioneering in the constituencies, using the borough of Ipswich as its focus. It argues that historians have underestimated the extent to which the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884–5 transformed political cultures outside the countryside and large cities, and that the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 had a major impact on the modernisation of party organisation. Principally, however, it challenges the prevailing historical consensus that the basis of post‐reform constituency politics remained, to a large extent, local in nature, by suggesting that electioneering cultures were placed under considerable ‘nationalising’ influences from the early 1880s on. Rather than resisting these influences, the established Ipswich parties largely embraced them. Moreover, a general decline in corruption, and a general increase in the number of speeches reported in local newspapers from ‘carpetbagger’ candidates and national leaders, created a climate in which it was now more difficult for any constituency, however idiosyncratic, to insulate itself from ‘national’ politics.     

Political Dynasties in Thailand: The Recent Picture after the 2011 General Election

This article seeks to understand the patterns of family-based politics in Thailand’s 2011 House of Representatives election. The key question is whether the political dynasty, a sequence of political leaders who are considered members of the same family, is still a determining factor in Thai elections, and if so, to what extent compared to the past. Drawing on a rich set of data collected from election results between 1979 and 2011, this article argues that the political roles and influences of many political dynasties have become more complicated and have tended to increase, although some have experienced defeat in elections. The article finds that while belonging to a political dynasty could give new dynastic faces a better chance of winning a House election in their constituency than their non-dynastic counterparts, the most influential factor for electoral candidates in winning a House of Representatives election is belonging to the Pheu Thai Party or the Democrat Party. This article thus suggests that one of the best ways to avoid the monopoly of one or a few political families in Thai politics is to empower and support party members and eligible voters to meaningfully engage in political parties’ affairs and activities.     

Topographies of citizenship: Purhépechan Mexican women claiming political subjectivities

A variety of politics are waged through recourse to the language of ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’: from George W. Bush's selling of free trade for the Americas by invoking freedom and democracy, to the calls for citizenship and equality by popular movements throughout Latin America and other regions. This article links these paradoxical and transnational constructions of ‘citizenship’ to the daily economic and political struggles of indigenous women in rural Mexico. A transnational and what Cindi Katz calls a ‘topographical’ analysis of local processes deepens and complicates our understanding of local changes as they articulate with global dynamics, and it transforms how we conceptualize the global. Drawing on an ethnography of local gendered political transformation in Cherán, Mexico, I map processes visible locally onto spatialities of power and meaning across scales, weaving together various symbolic and material processes—the intentional actions and negotiations of individual women; the history of Cherán as a place and community; neoliberal economic globalization; and the effects of profoundly gendered and racialized nationalisms—in order to produce a situated knowledge of global citizenship politics. This approach highlights how women in Cherán, situated within global political economic relations and the symbolic horizons of ‘modernity’, transform the meaning and practice of citizenship and political subjectivity.     

“Fraudulent” Citizens of a Small Town: Occidentalism in Turkey

Abstract: By looking at the electoral politics in a small town in Turkey, this article aims to illustrate how the political scene is polarised with counterpoised representations of East and West, alongside Occidentalist aspirations. The division supplies a set of ready‐made explanations regarding “backwardness, poverty and corruption”. However, although different frameworks are employed in line with the political orientations of respective parties, particular political demands and courses of action are systematically dismissed. The poor and the repressed are hardly listened to. Yet worse, they are “explained” in advance by the antagonistic pair of the East and the West. This article is an ethnographic exploration of how their demands fall in neither side, and how attending them could challenge the existing political realm.     

Abortion law reforms in Colombia and Nicaragua: issue networks and opportunity contexts

This article analyses two instances of abortion law reform in Latin America. In 2006, after a decades-long impasse, the highly controversial issue of abortion came to dominate the political agenda when Colombia liberalized its abortion law and Nicaragua adopted a total ban on abortion. The article analyses the central actors in the reform processes, their strategies and the opportunity contexts. Drawing on Htun's (2003) framework, it examines why these processes concluded with opposing legislative outcomes. The authors argue for the need to understand the state as a non-unitary site of politics and policy, and for judicial processes to be seen as a key variable in facilitating gender policy reforms in Latin America. In addition, they argue that ‘windows of opportunity’ such as the timing of elections can be critically important in legislative change processes.     

The Politics of Recognition and Redistribution: Development,Tribal Identity Politics and Distributive Justice in India's Jharkhand

This article illustrates how the potential of recognition‐based politics to achieve distributive justice is determined by political structures and the power relations that constitute them. In response to Nancy Fraser's framework of social justice, it shows that the meaningful coordination of identity‐based claims with distributive justice is constrained — not only by the content of the claims themselves, but also because redistributive demands are subverted through competing pursuits for power and legitimacy between rival political factions. The article describes how the separate‐state movement for Jharkhand in Eastern India was de‐radicalized by three instruments, namely, the reservation system, cultural nationalism and state development discourse. This explains why distributive measures do not feature prominently in the Jharkhand state and why recognition politics has taken a disciplined form in the electoral mainstream while distributive politics continues to be pursued through violent and extra‐parliamentary means.     

Italian regionalism or ‘Padanian’ nationalism — the political project of the Lega Nord in Italian politics

The resurgence of regionalist political parties has had a considerable, though variable, impact on contemporary European politics in recent decades and there are numerous examples of such parties across Europe. In Italy, there are several regionalist parties, however, it is the emergence in the last 15 years or so, of the Northern League (Lega Nord) (LN) political party, in the North of Italy, which has given a new impetus to debates about the significance of regionalism in Italy as well as across Europe. This paper discusses the different approaches to defining regionalism as well as the common features and driving forces of contemporary political regionalist projects. It then focuses upon the political discourses of the LN in order to discuss the ways in which the party resembles other regionalist projects, while having certain key, distinct and rather unique differences. This is because the LN's political project is not based in an area that has historic claims to nationhood. Instead, the LN has attempted to invent an ethnicity for the North of Italy (or ‘Padania’) in order to justify its political claims for the protection of the economic interests of the region. ‘Padania’ (which is the Latin term which refers to the basin of the River Po), has never ‘existed’ as an administrative or political unit but the LN has attempted to construct (and invent) a geography and a history in order to justify its territorial and political claims.     

Social Policy,Inequalities and the Battle of Rights in Latin America

Targeted social policies and other more universal forms of social protection have shaped (the shifts in) the politics of popular support in Latin America. Since the early 2000s this has led to a tendency towards the election of left-leaning governments, stimulating stronger political pressure for more extensive redistribution. Yet despite a wide range of cash transfers, subsidies and other social policies, the ‘post-neoliberal’ ideal of welfare did not reshape the political and relational powers of citizens in the ways necessary to redress the structural determinants of poverty and inequality across the region. This article reveals a ‘dark side’ of social policy in Latin America, arguing that targeted and precariously funded welfare regimes are creating tensions between the socio-economic and ecological spheres that undermine inclusive citizenship and democracy.     

Australia's foreign policy links with Latin America: distant relations

In more recent years, Australia's relations with the countries of Latin America have taken on more importance as the trade and investment links between the two regions have grown. Besides this recent activity, Australia has a long history of diplomatic relations with the countries of Latin America, even though the links between the two regions have at times been fairly superficial. This relationship, like many others, has tended to concentrate on mainly trade relations and, despite Latin America's often turbulent political history, has not been affected much at all by political issues. The purpose of this article is to analyse the development of foreign policy links between Australia and the countries of Latin America in their formulative stage between 1901 and 1973.     

Change and Continuity in Irish Politics: The General Election of 2007

Bertie Ahern, the incumbent Taoiseach or Prime Minister of Ireland, was elected to a third term in the general election of 24 May 2007. While Ahern's party, Fianna Fáil, was able to retain its governing coalition, the level of support of some of the other parties changed dramatically. Fine Gael, the principal opposition party, saw its number of seats in the parliament, Dáil Éireann, increase by nineteen. Some of the minor parties did less well than expected or compared to previous elections. Only the Greens maintained their six representatives. As a result, they were rewarded with a share in the new government. This election suggests that, while Irish society is changing rapidly, the political system is changing more slowly and subtly. This article examines the election results in terms of the fate of the political parties and focuses on one constituency, Tipperary South, to illustrate trends in Irish electoral politics.     

STRATEGIES OF SINGLE-ISSUE INTEREST GROUPS

Using traditional models of electoral behavior one would not expect single-issue interest groups to have the impact on the American electoral system evident in recent elections. The difficulty in understanding their success lies in the assumption that the rational voter merely maximizes utility by choosing between the positions offered by the candidates/ political parties. Single-issue interest group activity has demonstrated, to the contrary, that it is possible for an assertive rational voter to successfully force candidates/ parties to take specific positions on issues and to form winning coalitions.     

'Institutional thickness', political sub-culture and the resurgence of (the 'new') regionalism in Italy – a case study of the Northern League in the province of Varese

In recent years, the 'regional scale' within the European Union (EU) has become more central within academic and policy debates. In particular, there has been an increased focus upon the importance of so-called 'institutional thickness' for regional development within the EU. Furthermore, the fact that in several European countries, regionalist political parties have made significant electoral gains has ensured that the 'regional question' in Europe has become even more prevalent. This paper explores the linkages between institutions and regionalist political parties by focusing upon the situation in Italy where the resurgence of political regionalism, centred on the Lega Nord (LN) or Northern League political party, has been particularly strong. In particular, the paper focuses upon the development of the LN in a particular province of Northern Italy, Varese. This section explores the ways in which the LN has developed institutionally and electorally and indeed whether the party has been able to develop a specific political sub-culture to replace the previous one associated with the Christian Democrat (DC) party, which was the main party in Varese before the landmark changes that took place in Italian politics in the early 1990s.