Volume 14, Issue 1

It appears to be beyond dispute that Brazilian politics is overwhelmingly White. Recent surveys indicate that the proportion of people of colour in the federal parliament is around 20%. But despite such obvious marginalisation, little is known about the causes of this political under-representation. This paper attempts to shed light on the main filters driving out non-Whites, i.e. Blacks and Browns, from Brazilian politics. To this end, we have carried out a survey of the skin colour of candidates to a seat in the City Council of Brazil’s two largest cities: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, in the 2012 elections. Given the lack of official records on the race or skin colour of these candidates, we chose to submit their photos, made publicly available by the Supreme Electoral Court, to classification by a team of researchers. The results have allowed us to gauge the extent to which the political alienation of non-White Brazilians is due to: (a) bias in party recruitment; (b) differences in educational capital and personal wealth between White and non-White candidates; (c) inequalities in the distribution of party and electoral resources; or (d) the electoral preferences of voters themselves. Apparently, the electoral opportunities of Blacks and Browns reflect the difficulties that these groups face when trying to ascend to the small elite of candidates that have the biggest funding and the most votes.

The voter strength of right-wing populist parties is regularly attributed either to a feeling of threat from a high proportion of local foreigners or to the lack of opportunities for contact between the majority and the minority. This contribution is theoretically based on a synthesis of these perspectives, known as the Halo effect. Accordingly, it is not so much the local size of the local population, which is perceived as foreign, but rather its relative proportion in the surrounding countryside, which leads to a diffuse feeling of threat. The electoral success of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) at the level of the Swiss municipalities serves as a basis for the empirical investigation, which is conducted alternatively with the proportions of the foreign and Muslim population. For both groups, spatial multilevel regression models provide indications of a coexistence of direct negative effects of minority populations on the share of the SVP (in the sense of the contact hypothesis) and of Halo effects, with the direct effects appearing to be somewhat more pronounced. Socio-structural factors can reduce these correlations (high unemployment neutralises the negative effect of the proportion of foreigners) or intensify these correlations (a higher income level accentuates the Halo effect for Muslims).

Climate change is one of the major challenges of our time, and particularly so for agriculture. Agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change and, according to projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will experience alterations in production conditions in the future. The Norwegian government’s 2009 White Paper on climate policy for agriculture is based on the point of view that the agricultural sector can and should contribute to Norway fulfilling its climate policy commitments. This requires changes in farm operations and production methods, making the farmer an important agent when it comes to the implementation of climate change mitigation measures. In this article, I study Norwegian farmers’ climate change perceptions and priorities, and examine what it would take for them to consider implementing mitigation measures on their own farms. The analysis is based on a survey focusing on climate change from a representative sample of Norwegian farmers in 2011, the only survey of its kind conducted on this group so far. The results show that even if farmers perceive climate change as real and manmade, they do not appear to experience the changes as requiring immediate action. Moreover, farmers seem to view adapting to new environmental policy as a greater challenge than adapting to climate change itself. Farmers also appear to place production-related goals and managing the farm economy higher on the agenda than curbing emissions. Financial incentives, in the form of public support schemes or higher prices for food produced in a more environmentally friendly way, are factors which could increase the likelihood of implementing environmental measures on their own farms. A majority of farmers also believe that sectors other than agriculture should contribute more to cuts in greenhouse gases. Factors that most clearly explain the variation in attitudes to climate change are education levels, political or ideological factors, and the feeling of proximity; that is to say, to what extent one perceives climate change to be something that will affect one’s own productivity in the future. In order to fulfill environmental policy commitments in the agricultural sector, farmers’ motivation must be strengthened, and the focus should be placed on measures that view productivity goals, farm economies and mitigation measures in a wider context.

In the last decade, the propensity-to-vote (PTV) measure is being increasingly used in the research of electoral behavior. The purpose of this article is to explore the advantages and methodological issues of this measure, applying it for the analysis of the determinants of party choice in the 2016 Lithuanian parliamentary elections. In particular, the article explores the implications of using OLS regression for analysing a generic party with a stacked data matrix instead of cross-classified multilevel modeling.

In the post-Cold War international society, third-party intervention has become increasingly common across various spheres. What were previously assumed to be domestic or bilateral issues have become of great interest to foreign governments and international organizations. Disputes over history, whose intensification in many parts of the world is also a recent political phenomenon, are no exception. Regarding past atrocities by one country upon another, the “victim” side seeks recognition and redress from third parties, while the “perpetrator” side tries to prevent such interference. This paper investigates the causes of such intervention and the consequences of it for bilateral relations between the intervenor and the “perpetrator” country, using the conflict between Armenia and Turkey over the recognition of the 1915–1916 Armenian Massacre as genocide as a case study. The results reveal that countries with a Christian majority and a large Armenian population typically conduct such intervention, and that although third-party intervention affects bilateral relations negatively, the effect is only temporary.

Abstract: The purpose of the article is to identify the conditions that affect the success of the European Parliament’s amendments in the ordinary legislative procedure. In the first step, hypotheses were delineated predicting the impact of specific factors on the effectiveness of EP demands. Subsequently, they were verified using the logistic regression. The results revealed that the EP is more likely to be successful in this procedure if it applies the following negotiation techniques. First, it bundles several legislative proposals in one package. Second, it persuades the European Commission to support its amendments. Third, it negotiates the legislative proposals in trilogues. Fourth, it is cohesive during negotiations. Fifth, it prolongs negotiations with the Council until the end of parliamentary term. Sixth, it designates a rapporteur from a country acting at the same time as the Council Presidency. Seventh, it negotiates with the Council when the Presidency legislative workload is high.

This article defines public governance as the overall process of decision-making and implementation in solving public problems in a country, where public agencies or institutions initiate the process or are at least partially involved in the process. Under this definition, public governance can be classified into three modes according to the outcome: legal governance, performance-based governance, and consensus-oriented governance. Legal governance is a mode of governance close to Max Weber’s bureaucracy. Performance-based governance has focuses on how effectively and/or efficiently policy goals are achieved through decision-making and implementation. Finally, consensus-oriented governance is a mode of governance that calls for a political process to deal with various and conflicting interests. These three modes are different in terms of: who decides; the role of bureaucrats; the methods of decision making; and the nature of the interactions among actors. The critical factors that have a significant impact on the outcome of governance vary with each mode. Although in the real world, these three modes are often mixed and interrelated, it is necessary to distinguish them because it helps systematically analyze the phenomenon of governance. These three modes are particularly useful for understanding and analyzing the reality of governance in Korea and developing countries.