Opposition (politics)

Abstract: The widespread opposition to unprecedented austerity measures in Greece provides a unique opportunity to study the causes of mass protest. We report the results of a survey of the adult population, with two thirds of the respondents supporting protest and 29 per cent reporting actual involvements in strikes and/or demonstrations during 2010. Relative deprivation is a significant predictor of potential protest but does not play any role in terms of who actually takes part in strikes or demonstrations. Previous protest participation emerges as a key predictor of actual protest. We attempt to set these results in the context of Greece as compared with other countries facing similar challenges and discuss the implications for the future of austerity politics.

Abstract: In this article, the author assesses the nature and the impact of the May 2005 Ethiopian parliamentary elections on Ethiopian politics. The elections, although controversial and flawed, showed significant gains for the opposition but led to a crisis of the entire democratization process. The author revisits Ethiopian political culture in the light of neopatrimonial theory and asks why the political system has stagnated and slid back into authoritarianism. Most analyses of post-1991 Ethiopian politics discuss the formal aspects of the political system but do not pay sufficient attention to power politics in a historical perspective. There is a continued need to reconceptualize the analysis of politics in Ethiopia, and Africa in general, in more cultural and historical terms, away from the formal political science approaches that have predominated. The success of transitional democracy is also dependent on a countervailing middle class, which is suppressed in Ethiopia. Furthermore, political-judicial institutions are still precarious, and their operation is dependent on the current political elite and caught in the politics of the ruling party. On the basis of the electoral process, the post-election manoeuvring, the role of opposition forces, and the violent crisis in late 2005, the author addresses the Ethiopian political process in the light of governance traditions and resurrected neopatrimonial rule that, in effect, tend to block further democratization. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. (Comment by Tobias Hagmann: in African Affairs, vol. 105, no. 421 (2006), p. 605-612, with a reply by Abbink on p. 613-620.) [Journal abstract]

Abstract: ‘The crucial moral opposition’, Alasdair Maclntyre has recently claimed, ‘is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other. Part of the significance of the republican tradition analysed in this book lies in suggesting that this is a false dichotomy. I should like to end by underlining this point, seeking to do so by way of concentrating on the ‘republican’ theory of political liberty. I want in particular to focus on two distinctively ‘republican’ claims about liberty which are apt to be dismissed as paradoxical or merely confused, but which ought I think to be seen as constituting a challenge to our received views on the subject. First a word about what I mean by speaking, as I have just done, about our received views on political liberty. I have in mind the fact that, in recent discussions of the concept among analytical philosophers, one conclusion has been reached which commands a remarkably wide measure of assent. It can best be expressed in the formula originally introduced into the argument by Jeremy Bentham and recently made famous by Isaiah Berlin. The suggestion is that the idea of political liberty is essentially a negative one. The presence of liberty is always marked by the absence of something else; specifically, by the absence of some element of constraint which inhibits an agent from being able to act in pursuit of his or her chosen ends, from being able to pursue different options, or at least from being able to choose between alternatives.

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the impact of political constraints on economic reform plans, with special reference to the transition from centrally planned to market economies. We analyse the problem of an agenda-setting reform-minded Government facing a bureaucracy or industrial sector for which allocative efficiency requires redundancies and an increase in work intensity. The Government also tries to minimize the rents conceded to its heterogeneous workforce. We examine two types of political constraints: unanimity rule and majority rule, both in a one-period and a two-period horizon. The main results are the following. First of all, we show how adverse selection and time-consistency may generate the widely-observed feature of gradualism as an ingredient of an optimal reform. Second, under a majority rule, it is shown to be possible for the Government to obtain a majority vote for a reform scheme that intertemporally hurts majority interests. Indeed, the Government can improve rent extraction through the strategic use of the threat of future proposals: the group which expects to be in the minority tomorrow may accept concessions, while its votes can be used to extract rents from another group. These results suggest that, in a dynamic context, democratic constraints should not be overestimated as an obstacle against efficiency-enhancing economic reforms. The results of this paper may throw some light on the political economy of current reforms in Eastern Europe. Governments, and political decision-makers in general, always face political constraints when elaborating reform proposals. They know that the need to overcome potential opposition from various groups of the population constrains proposals for change. Political constraints vary, depending on the specific institutional structure of society, and are clearly different under a military dictatorship than under a parliamentary democracy. The role of political constraints seems particularly important in Eastern Europe today, where new democratic governments face the huge task of achieving the transition to a market economy. While the introduction of democracy may have removed some important obstacles to economic change (namely, the veto-power of a powerful nomenclatura under communist one-party rule), fears are expressed that it could potentially jeopardize economic reforms which may, during the transition period, hurt a majority of the population.' What can economic theory tell us about optimal economic reform under political constraints? This paper starts addressing this ambitious question by looking at structural reform, focusing on a restructuring of economic sectors which requires massive redundancies and a significant rise in labour productivity. Our model illustrates the case of planning