South Asia’s five largest countries—Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—have had very different experiences with democracy. In spite of these differences, their party systems exhibit several common features. First, two leading parties have tended to dominate politics over long periods of time in most South Asian countries. Second, these two parties typically anchor fragmented bipolar systems in which many very small parties combine to win substantial vote shares. Third, parties are seldom tied to voters through strong programmatic linkages. Fourth, parties tend to be more starkly differentiated from one another on the basis of ethnicity, though the type of ethnic identity that structures party systems varies across South Asia. Fifth, political dynasties dominate many of the region’s main parties. Of the main South Asian countries, India’s party system has received the most attention, with many arguing that its party system fundamentally changed with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014. However, in terms of many key indicators (competitiveness, number and size of major parties, importance of regional parties, party system nationalization), the 2014 national election largely resembled prior elections. The 2019 election represented a much starker departure from prior patterns. But, it is arguably still too soon to know whether India has fully transitioned to a durable new party system and what the characteristics of a new party system might be.
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Political Parties and Party Systems in South Asia
Adam Ziegfeld and Anurag Jain
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Rising China
Xiaoyu Pu and Ryan Walker
China’s emergence as a global power is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, fueled by state-led development and market-oriented reforms. However, this rise has not been without obstacles. Domestically, China faces multiple challenges in generating sustainable growth, including demographic changes and environmental concerns. Internationally, China has faced growing pushback from the West. There are varied interpretations of China’s foreign policy intentions. While Western narratives tend to portray China as a revisionist power seeking to replace the United States as the new global leader, its intentions are nuanced and contested. While China seeks to play an active role in international affairs, it is debatable if the dichotomy of status quo power and revisionist power accurately reflects China’s intentions. China’s foreign policy strategy has evolved over time, with earlier strategies emphasizing the reassurance of established powers and neighboring countries while prioritizing domestic development. Even if China’s foreign policy has become more assertive, there are elements of its continuity. Global reactions to China’s rise have been mixed. Many developing countries have welcomed China’s investment and economic partnership. However, other countries, particularly those in the developed world, have raised concerns about China’s military expansion, economic practices, and foreign policy challenges to their values and security. As China continues to rise, it will face opportunities and challenges in navigating the complex global landscape. Ultimately, the trajectory of China’s rise and its impact on the international system will depend on various factors, including China’s domestic and foreign policies, the responses of other major powers, and the shifting dynamics of global politics.
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Constitutions and the Rule of Law in Asia
Maartje De Visser, Victor V. Ramraj, and Arun Thiruvengadam
In the modern world, formal constitutions are ubiquitous as the legal foundation of the state, standing at the apex of the legal order. As they emerged in a North Atlantic context, constitutional law and the ideal of constitutionalism came to be associated with a liberal model of government in which the state, composed of its leaders and public officials, was limited by law. This model of a constrained government became encapsulated in the ideal of “rule of law”—distinguishing between autocratic systems that were ruled by “men,” on the one hand, and systems in which political leaders were constrained by law, on the other hand. In this model, the courts typically play a critical institutional role in keeping state power within constitutional boundaries. Although this “liberal” model of constitutionalism and the rule of law continue to dominate legal and political thought, the proliferation of postcolonial legal and political regimes, and competing understandings of government and the role of the state, have challenged the dominant liberal understanding of constitutions and the rule of law. Many of these challenges come from Asia, which encompasses a stunning variety of political regimes that shape the environment in which constitutionalism and the ideal of the rule of law acquire meaning. This makes Asia an ideal site from which to explore the contested notions of constitutions, constitutionalism, and the rule of law as powerful explanatory tools and, in some cases, important normative correctives to the liberal model.
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Election Manipulation in Russia
Cole Harvey
Since roughly the year 2000, corresponding with Vladimir Putin’s first election to the presidency, the integrity of elections in Russia has trended steadily downward. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, once a lively opposition party, has been mostly co-opted. Regional governors, who made a play for power in 1999, have become firmly integrated into the “power vertical” with its peak in the Kremlin. Genuine, independent opposition groups and individuals face increasing legal risks, and the most independent media voices have been shut down or driven out of the country. The legal electoral framework, including the electoral system and laws concerning party registration and ballot access, has been adjusted over time to suit the needs of the ruling party. On election day, large-scale fraud is common in several regions, while more dispersed forms of manipulation (like voter pressure) are common elsewhere.
The increasingly constrained electoral environment follows the deliberate consolidation of post-Soviet Russia’s patronage resources—the positions and institutions that enable their holders to distribute rewards and punishments to their clients—under the Kremlin’s control. At the same time, active civil society groups, opposition parties, and independent media have been able to impose costs on election-manipulating agents. As a result, despite a nationally consolidating authoritarian regime, areas of relatively freer elections have persisted over time. In these regions, more covert and dispersed forms of manipulation are the norm. New tools implemented after the COVID-19 pandemic, including electronic voting, may reshape the system by removing risks to election-manipulating agents and severely compromising electoral observation. Throughout the evolution of the system, the opposition remains inventive and has innovated its tactics alongside those of the ruling party.
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Federal and State Appellate Courts in the United States
Hayley Munir and Wendy L. Martinek
Appellate courts are part of both federal and state judiciaries. They serve to correct lower court errors but, more importantly, serve as key policymakers in their respective jurisdictions. The U.S. Supreme Court is the court of last resort in the federal system, though the U.S. courts of appeals (the primary intermediate appellate court in the federal system) is often the last stop for any federal appeal. Both are staffed by presidential nomination coupled with senatorial confirmation. The states exhibit considerable variation in the staffing, design, and function of their appellate courts. That variation encompasses staffing via appointive, electoral, and hybrid methods, as well organizational structures that may include more than one court of last resort (though the majority of states have only one such court) and may omit an intermediate appellate court (IAC; though the majority of states have at least one such court). Scholars know a great deal about the influences on decision making in the U.S. Supreme Court. They know less but still a considerable amount about how judges on the U.S. courts of appeals and state courts of last resort make decisions. Scholarly understanding of decision making on state IACs is quite limited.
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Human Rights
Kimberley Brownlee and Rowan Cruft
Human rights are claims that all human beings have to the protection of fundamental human needs, interests, and freedoms. Debates about human rights consider whether such rights exist, and if they do, whether they are necessarily institutional norms codifiable in law and correlated with government duties or are instead preinstitutional or natural in some sense. Debates about human rights focus on the moral and practical grounds for such rights, the subjects of human rights, the types of human rights—civil, political, social, material, collective—and the precise lists of rights that fall within these broad, overlapping types. Debates also address objections against human rights as a conceptual, normative, and practical framework. Objections focus on issues such as ethnocentricity, cultural imperialism, forfeitability, individualism, claimability, and an adversarial ethos, among others.
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Nationalism and Party System Formation in Southeast Asia
Andreas Ufen
Because the party literature is dominated by approaches with references to Western, especially European, party systems, it tends to neglect the specific circumstances of party system formation in colonial and postcolonial settings. This includes the role of agency, especially by foreign and Indigenous elites interested in crafting political, partisan cleavages. This can be studied by comparing Indonesia and Malaysia, two neighboring countries with many similarities but very different cleavage structures and trajectories. In British Malaya, Malay groups led by aristocrats reached independence rather smoothly through negotiations with the slowly retreating colonial power. The hegemonic national model was henceforth essentially Malay, royalist, and Islamic. Ethnic minorities and their respective cultures and languages were tolerated, with certain minority rights explicitly legitimated, but the national culture was leaning toward an exclusionary stance. The preindependence, elite-centered construction of an illiberal consociational arrangement and the parallel state violence against the leftist opposition resulted in postindependence political stability against a backdrop of restricted spaces for civil society coupled with conservative Islam and Malay chauvinism. The political left had already fundamentally been weakened beginning in 1957, and a conservative coalition of ethnically based, elitist parties dominated politics through semicompetitive elections. The major structures of the party system formed during the critical juncture in the late 1940s until the early 1950s existed until the mid-2010s before a slow disintegration of old coalitions and parties began. By contrast to British Malaya, in the Netherlands Indies a radically anticolonialist, well-rooted nationalist movement led by middle-class activists emerged, creating a fundamentally new notion of being “Indonesian” and supporting a religiously tolerant, multiethnic, democratic nation-state. After 1945, the movement was further instilled with nationalist passion by fighting an independence war against the returning Dutch. The period from 1945 until 1949 was marked by a number of social revolutions, and local aristocracies were substantially weakened. A mass-based and militant nationalist movement fighting against the colonial power resulted in social conflicts that were not settled at the time of independence. The path after the formation of the party system until the 1950s was interrupted by a long period of authoritarianism, but mass organizations such as Nahdatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, certain dynamics of interparty competition, and the attempt at solving political conflicts consensually still characterize party politics in Indonesia. In short, deep political cleavages produced a strongly polarized party system, resulting in a long period of authoritarianism and eventually a resurgence of old cleavages in a newly democratized polity after 1998.
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Regional Political Opposition in Russia
Julia Baumann and Jan Matti Dollbaum
Russia’s autocratization since 1999 has resulted in a diminution of political and electoral competition and the marginalization of regime opponents. Yet, while oppositional contestation has markedly decreased in national elections, regional and local races for a long time offered opportunities for electoral competition. Even if elections are organized in a way to ensure the victory of the incumbent party and candidates, at least before Russia’s full-scale invasion they provided oppositions with regular opportunities to organize and mobilize, which could serve to make the power holders’ political dominance more difficult, or, under certain circumstances, even pave the way for political contestants into a regional or local assembly.
The level of opposition activity and the type of opposition vary across Russia’s regions. Case study evidence from different regions illustrates how three interrelated factors shape opposition activity and success in a subnational context. First, structural conditions highlight the great differences among Russia’s regions and cities as to the openness of local politics to opposition actors, ranging from hegemonic polities with a high level of repression to more competitive units, where media, civil society, and political challengers can operate somewhat more freely. Second, next to the subnational political context, opposition activity is dependent on the choices of individual actors, with strategic coordination and cooperation across opposition forces; and third, the engagement of resourceful and ambitious political entrepreneurs can improve the electoral prospects of political contestants. The text closes with reflections of how the full-scale invasion of 2022 affects the conditions and choices of future opposition actors in Russia.
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Socialism
Andreas Albertsen and Jens Jørund Tyssedal
Socialism is a large and diverse political tradition, unified by opposition to capitalism. Economically, socialists also typically support common ownership or some form of social, democratic control over the bulk of the means of production. There are various views on whether this requires central planning or is compatible with some form of market economy. Others understand socialism as a set of values, and either way, those who understand socialism in economic terms are often motivated by what they see as the ills of capitalism and the values that can be realized in a socialist society in their pursuit of these economic changes. Socialist values include ending exploitation and alienation and replacing them with human flourishing and self-realization, community, distributive justice, equality, and freedom. Some also see socialism as the way to environmental sustainability, gender equality, and racial justice. The question of socialist strategy—how to achieve socialism—has often been posed as a dichotomy between reform and revolution. This inadequately captures the content of fundamental disagreements among socialists. Instead, the disagreement can be understood as varying views on the use of parliamentary democracy in a capitalist state, the pace of social change, and the nature of the envisioned changes.
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Russia’s Arctic Ambitions
Robert Orttung
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the Arctic a priority since taking power in 2000. He sees developing Arctic oil and natural gas resources as a key driver of Russia’s economy, the Northern Sea Route as shaping Russia’s geostrategic future, and an increased military presence as an indicator of Russia’s great-power status. Considering whether Russia will be able to realize these ambitions opens up a wide range of research questions that continue to be hotly debated more than a year after Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia’s authoritarian government has quashed independent movements among all parts of its population, and the Arctic’s Indigenous population is no exception. How these various groups can express their interests within a closed political system and what Indigeneity means in the Russian Arctic context animate work in this area. Energy is also a central theme for Russia because the country depends heavily on fossil fuel exports to power its economy and maintain standards of living. How will Russia adapt as the world moves slowly, but inexorably, away from its current reliance on fossil fuels and seeks greener forms of energy? Will Russia’s Arctic have a role to play in the new economy, or will it simply rely on state subsidies and an expanded military presence? As the global economy continues to shift, climate change and outside forces will have a growing impact on the Russian north. The Kremlin sees the Northern Sea Route as a vital link for East–West trade, but political, economic, and environmental uncertainties suggest there is little hope that the route will ever come near serving as a replacement for the Suez Canal. Similarly, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the escalating violence in both countries has ratcheted up the ongoing militarization of the Arctic and split the region into two competing blocs: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) versus Russia. In these conditions, what is the future for international diplomacy, the Arctic’s record for cooperation, and regional institutions like the Arctic Council? Having lost access to some Western technology and markets because of sanctions, the Russian north no longer benefits from its ability to balance between East and West, and it is growing more reliant on China. To what extent do the interests of these two countries coincide? While China may appreciate having Russia as a partner in countering the West, it has its own global ambitions, and cleaving too close to a chaotic and faltering Russia could limit what it can achieve. Overall, as the Putinist state looks increasingly distracted by the war effort, and as the global context around the Russian Arctic transforms, the future of Russia’s north is uncertain at best.
