Running a newspaper, radio station or television outlet in Mexico usually means relying on a single, powerful client that spends exorbitant sums on advertising with a simple warning: “I do not pay you to criticize me.”
That client is the government of Mexico.
President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year in government money on advertising, creating what many Mexican media owners, executives and journalists call a presidential branding juggernaut capable of suppressing investigative articles, directing front pages and intimidating newsrooms that challenge it.
Despite vowing to regulate government publicity, Mr. Peña Nieto has spent more money on media advertising than any other president in Mexico’s history...
And that is just the federal money.
Leaders from all parties marshal hundreds of millions of dollars in state money for advertising each year, money they dole out to favored news outlets…
The result is a media landscape across Mexico in which federal and state officials routinely dictate the news, telling outlets what they should — and should not — report, according to dozens of interviews with executives, editors and reporters…
the PRI, pioneered this system during its 70 years in power. Former President José López Portillo explicitly laid out the government’s expectations decades ago — he was even quoted as saying that he did not pay the media to attack him — and the practice continued when the opposition claimed the presidency in 2000, then again in 2006…
But the government’s influence over the media goes well beyond the advertising spigot, with officials sometimes resorting to outright bribery. In Chihuahua, the former governor spent more than $50 million on publicity…
“The relation between the media and power is one of the gravest problems in Mexico,” said Javier Corral, the new governor of Chihuahua. “There is collusion, an arrangement, in terms of how the public resources are managed to reward or punish the media. It’s carrot and stick: ‘Behave well, and I’ll give you lots of money and advertising. Act bad and I’ll get rid of it.’”
Pick up a newspaper, tune into a radio station or flip on the television in Mexico and you are greeted with a barrage of government advertising. In some papers, nearly every other page is claimed by an ad promoting one government agency or another. At times, as much airtime is dedicated to venerating the government’s work as it is to covering the news…
The co-opting of the news media is more fundamental than any one administration’s spending on self-promotion, historians say. It reflects the absence of the basic pact that a free press has with its readers in a democracy, where holding the powerful accountable is part of its mission…
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in·ter·mit·tent Pronunciation: \-ˈmi-tənt\ Function: adjective Etymology: Latin intermittent-, intermittens, present participle of intermittere Date: 1601 : coming and going at intervals : not continuous ; also : occasional — in·ter·mit·tent·ly adverb Source: Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Intermittent Retrieved 15 May 2015
It's cold here n the north country. And snowy And we're about to be "invaded" bf the patter of little feet. So it's unlikely that I'll add to this blog for awhile.
Read the headlines and relevant articles from the 14 news sources I use
OR Remember that nearly all the over 4,200 entries here are indexed. Use the search box in the right hand sidebar to find a country or a concept that you're interested in. And, if your web browser allows it, there's a search box at the top left corner of the blog that will sort through key words. (The search box shows up on my Safari and Netscape browsers on my desktop computer but not on my laptop.)
If you find a bit of information that might be useful for teaching comparative politics, post it at the AP Comparative Government and Politics Facebook page or send me a note with the information.
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, on Tuesday said that 80 political parties submitted applications for registration ahead of the 2019 elections.
The INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, made this known on Tuesday… [He] said that the commission was also being asked to register independent candidates for the elections.
"As it is today, 80 more groups are seeking registration as political parties.
"We will continue to register them until the time scheduled by the Electoral Act for us to stop.
"The issue of Independent candidacy is still there too.
"Right now, we are thinking of how to design our ballot papers to take care of all the registered political parties.
"So far, the hardest was the Anambra election, where 37 political parties fielded candidates," the chairman said.
Mr. Yakubu said the commission was determined to ensure that the 2019 elections were free, fair and credible.
He added that INEC would give special attention to the voters' register…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
In the old-fashioned fox hunt, the whips rode alongside the hounds to keep them going in the right direction. They probably used whips sometimes. But Parliamentary whips are not supposed to be so physical when trying to keep MPs in line.
Dark rumours have been circulating around Westminster this week about the government whipping operation, with talk of misdemeanour lists to keep troublesome MPs in line, and alleged attempts to put pressure on those threatening to rebel on Brexit…
Julian Smith
An observer said Julian Smith, the relatively new chief whip, oversaw a military style “command and control” operation in which officer whips were expected to keep their “flock of MPs” under control.
Whatever the techniques deployed, their efforts were in vain after enough Conservative MPs stood firm on the question of a “meaningful vote” on the final Brexit deal to defeat the prime minister.
The loss was so humiliating, according to some sources, that it left Smith slumped against a wall in the voting lobbies, with tear-stained eyes…
But despite the claims and counter-claims, at least one Brexiter MP,… thinks this intake of Conservatives are being given a much easier ride than in days gone by. Another MP who has been in parliament for many years said the whips treated MPs with “kid gloves” in 2017 compared with under John Major’s premiership…
[S]ome claim that Smith has returned to the techniques of the old days. One MP said his team had “swallowed too many DVDs of Game of Thrones and House of Cards – and think that is how you behave”. “It is a mistake,” the MP added…
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Mexico’s Congress on Friday passed a law that strengthens the military’s role in fighting organized crime, defying an outcry from human rights groups, police experts and even United Nations officials who warned that the measure will lead to abuses.
The law, which President Enrique Peña Nieto is expected to sign, sets up a legal framework to deploy soldiers in regions controlled by drug gangs…
[C]ritics say the new rules will vastly expand military authority without checks and balances and offers no exit strategy to cede eventual leadership of the campaign to combat drugs to an effective police force.
“This bill effectively displaces the Constitution,” said Alejandro Madrazo Lajous, a constitutional expert at the CIDE, a Mexico City university. “It allows the president to unilaterally militarize any part of the country for any time he considers necessary or adequate without any control either by congress or the judiciary.”
Unlike the rest of Latin America, where long military dictatorships have left indelible scars, Mexico has had civilian control over the armed forces for the past century as part of an unspoken agreement that allows officers latitude over the areas they command.
The drug war has disrupted that equilibrium, opening the military to charges of human rights abuses and rattling commanders who have asked the government to restore “order and sense” to their mission.
Since former President Felipe Calderón first sent troops to fight drug gangs at the end of 2006, more than 200,000 people have been killed in the drug war and 31,000 people have gone missing, according to official statistics.
The violence has surged as Mr. Peña Nieto begins his final year in office. This year has been the deadliest in two decades, and the government has yet to announce any plan to confront the violence…
Since the law was first presented in congress two weeks ago, there has been outpouring against it. Human rights groups united in opposition, pointing to the rise in abuses committed by the military in the drug war. The government’s National Human Rights Commission and its transparency institute have opposed it. Presidents of major universities have spoken out against it.
The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, and the United Nations special rapporteur on arbitrary executions, along with other United Nations experts, also raised concerns…
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Royalties for oil extracted in Nigeria are paid to the national government. From there, the money is distributed to the states. (Does that help explain the dominance of the national government to you?)
Things must be bad when Nigerian states fund a national government program.
Dozens of Nigerian state governors on Thursday approved the transfer of $1 billion to aid the federal government’s fight against the deadly Boko Haram insurgency, signaling that previous announcements of victory over the Islamic extremists had come too soon.
Attacks have increased in recent weeks as Boko Haram turns to using women and children, often abducted and indoctrinated, as suicide bombers to target cities and towns in the country’s vast northeast.
Edo State Governor Godwin Obaseki said 36 state leaders approved the transfer of $1 billion from the Excess Crude Account, which is used to hold revenues from oil production and protect planned budgets from shortfalls…
Boko Haram’s eight-year insurgency has proven to be one of Africa’s more persistent threats, killing more than 20,000 people.
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The abolition of shuanggui is the most visible part of a sweeping reform that in effect sets up an entirely new branch of government. Called the National Supervision Commission, it is designed to streamline administration, improve the implementation of policy and eliminate protectionist rules in the cities and provinces…
Unlike most countries, China has two pyramids of authority, the state and the Communist Party. High-ranking officials belong to both. Mr Xi is state president and general secretary of the party. The party hierarchy parallels the state one and outranks it. For example, the politburo, a party committee of 25, is more important than the state council, composed of government ministers. The shuanggui system belongs to the party. Ordinary jails, the police and the courts are parts of the state.
The new supervision system will be a mixture of the two. At the top is the new commission, which the law says will be led by the Communist Party and share space and personnel with the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI). The CCDI is the party’s anti-corruption body and one of the most feared institutions in the country… Below the commission there will be a ladder of lower-level agencies that will work with courts and the procurators’ offices (ie, with the state judicial system). Like other government bodies, the agencies will report to the National People’s Congress, the rubber-stamp parliament, which is supposed to control them.
The new law would expand the CCDI’s powers. It will be allowed to investigate all officials, not just party members, and its mandate will include “improper conduct by state employees”, meaning that it will probe officials’ ethical standards and political beliefs, not just their compliance with the law…
If an expanded CCDI can improve law enforcement in this way, then many business people… will welcome the new system. But it is not clear whether it will improve the rule of law. What is really being abolished, says Jeremy Daum of the Paul Tsai China Centre at Yale Law School, is the pretence of the separation of party and state. Under the new system, suspects will not have the constitutional protection afforded to those accused of ordinary crimes. They will have no guaranteed access to a lawyer, for example…
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The UK and the EU have taken the first step in unwinding the treaty links between them. Now, it's on to the next steps. (If PM May can overcome the demands by some in Commons for a vote on the final treaties.)
EU leaders have agreed to move Brexit talks on to the second phase but called for "further clarity" from the UK about the future relationship it wants.
The first issue to be discussed, early next year, will be the details of an expected two-year transition period after the UK's exit in March 2019.
Talks on trade and security co-operation are set to follow in March…
While securing a deal in time for the UK's exit in March 2019 was realistic, [Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council] suggested that the next phase would be "more challenging and more demanding"…
The EU has published its guidelines for phase two of the negotiations… The three page document says the UK will remain under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and be required to permit freedom of movement during any transition period…
The EU and the UK both want a deal to be done, and while there has, inevitably, been grumpiness on both sides, they have, in the main, dealt with each other in good faith…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
One of Mexico’s most controversial and resilient political figures formalized his bid for the presidency Tuesday, vowing if elected to wean Mexico off U.S. agricultural imports, increase aid for students and the elderly and consider amnesty for drug war criminals.
AMLO
The announcement by leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was a surprise to no one. AMLO, as he is known to his hordes of supporters and detractors, has been running for president for well over a decade.
The mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005, he narrowly lost to businessman Felipe Calderon in the 2006 presidential race. Six years later, Lopez Obrador was defeated by Enrique Peña Nieto…
This time around, Lopez Obrador is leading in the polls, with a recent one showing him 12 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival…
Lopez Obrador became the face of the Mexican left thanks to his two previous campaigns and the months-long protest he led in the main square of Mexico City after his 2006 loss, which he blamed on vote fraud.
Jose Antonio Meade, a Yale-educated former finance minister and the likely PRI candidate, has an impressive background in energy and the economy but is unknown to much of the Mexican public…
Ricardo Anaya is the likely candidate for an unusual coalition formed by his conservative National Action Party, or PAN, and the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party…
Also in the mix is Margarita Zavala, a longtime PAN member — and the wife of former President Calderon — who left the party this fall to run as an independent…
But while Lopez Obrador has gone to lengths to portray himself as a man of the people who will stamp out the corruption of Mexico’s ruling elites, some complain that he has given few examples of how he’ll fix the problems.
“He projects an image of austerity that contrasts with the offensive ostentation of the rest of the political class,” academic Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez recently wrote in Reforma newspaper. “What is striking is the absence of concrete proposals to combat such a complex problem.
“The faith that Lopez Obrador has in Lopez Obrador explains his tenacity, his resistance, his secrecy, his coherence, his sectarianism,” Silva-Herzog said. “He has suffered a thousand injustices but has not been wrong once.”
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
Neil MacFarquhar, writing in The New York Times, thinks the election that's important in Russia is the one in 2024, not 2018. I'd keep in mind the fact that Putin's party has a majority in the Duma that's large enough to change the constitution whenever it (and Putin) desires.
Ask Russian analysts to describe the coming presidential election campaign, and their answers contain a uniform theme: a circus, a carnival, a sideshow.
What they do not call it is a real election.
With the victory of President Vladimir V. Putin assured, the real contest, analysts said, is the bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred fight to determine who or what comes after him by the end of his next six years in office, in 2024. What might be called the Court of Putin — the top 40 to 50 people in the Kremlin and their oligarch allies — will spend the coming presidential term brawling over that future.
When Mr. Putin confirmed last week that he would run again, he might as well have been firing the starting gun for the race toward his succession. He is barred by the Constitution from seeking a third-consecutive term, his fifth total, in 2024.
“The election itself does not matter at all,” said Gleb O. Pavlovsky, a
Pavlosky
political analyst and former Kremlin consultant. The people around the president, he added, “are deciding the question of who they themselves will be after Putin. That is the main motive behind this fight: It is a struggle for a place in the system after Putin is gone.”…
This jockeying for power is expected to offer all the drama that the March 2018 presidential race sorely lacks. Cloistered, for now, mostly behind the Kremlin walls, the intrigues are expected to burst into public view with increasing frequency as the end of Mr. Putin’s next term approaches…
“You cannot hide the enormous tension, the enormous degree of uncertainty within the Russian elite,” said Konstantin Gaaze, who contributes political analysis to the website of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a policy research organization. “They will do stupid things; they will blackmail each other; they will write reports about each other and bring them to Putin.”…
“Today we have Putin’s Russia,” Mr. Pavlovsky said. “If Putin is gone, Putin’s Russia also has to go. That is also a dangerous situation. His entourage understands this and wants to preserve Putin’s Russia after he is gone.”
So the various factions within the Putin Court will seek to convince the president to name an heir apparent who best preserves their collective interests…
The more Mr. Putin becomes a lame duck, analysts said, the less influence he may have in choosing a successor and the more Kremlin insiders will assert themselves…
“What matters now is your own potential independent of Putin,” Mr. Pavlovsky said, “because the moment is rapidly approaching when Putin will not be able to help you.”
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Mexican opposition leader Ricardo Anaya said on Sunday he would seek to win the presidency in a left-right alliance after stepping down as head of the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
Anaya
Anaya resigned as leader of the PAN on Saturday, a day after his party officially joined forces with the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the Citizens Movement party in the “For Mexico in Front” coalition.
If selected, Anaya will likely take on leftist former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and former Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade, who is seeking the nomination for the ruling centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
“This corrupt and inefficient PRI government has been an absolute national disaster,” Anaya said on Sunday…
The left-right coalition on Friday presented its official request with the electoral institute to compete in the July 2018 vote. The group must still pick its leader, with Anaya, who had been leader of the PAN since 2015, considered the front-runner…
Anaya, 38, has faced criticism in the Mexican press for his family’s “inexplicable” level of wealth, although he denies any wrongdoing.
In a voter poll published on Wednesday, Anaya came in second behind Lopez Obrador, who leads the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) party, but ahead of [PRI's] Meade…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
In a letter read out to the conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, by Communist Party publicity chief Huang Kunming, Xi said developments online were raising many new challenges to sovereignty and security, and China was “willing to work with the international community to respect cyberspace sovereignty and promote partnerships”.
The letter underscores Xi’s previous cyber sovereignty calls to the conference in which he has promoted the idea that all countries have the right to regulate the internet within their own borders…
Xi’s presidency has coincided with extraordinary growth and tighter censorship online in China. Tencent and Alibaba are now among the world’s most valued internet companies…
The growth has been in large part due to the widespread use of internet applications in China, making the country a leader in services from cashless payments to bike sharing…
The idea that each country has the right to censor and regulate the internet is taking root elsewhere. For example, Russia temporarily blocked Tencent’s social media app WeChat in May because it did not comply with local regulations…
China was also last in terms of internet freedom in a survey last month by Freedom House, a US pro-democracy group that lists Google among its funders…
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It appears that inequality in the UK, like that in the USA, is growing, and that government efforts to stem the growing divide are now a political issue. Has it always been so?
All four members of the board of the government's Social Mobility Commission have stood down in protest at the lack of progress towards a "fairer Britain".
Ex-Labour minister Alan Milburn, who chairs the commission, said he had "little hope" the current government could make the "necessary" progress.
The government was too focused on Brexit to deal with the issue, he said.
The government said Mr Milburn's term had come to an end and it had already decided to get some "fresh blood" in.
The commission is charged with monitoring the government's progress in "freeing children from poverty and ensuring everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their potential"…
In a report published last week, the commission said economic, social and local divisions laid bare by the Brexit vote needed to be addressed to prevent a rise in far right or hard left extremism…
The process of appointing a new chairperson and commissioners would begin as soon as possible, [the government] added…
Shadow cabinet office minister Jon Trickett said the resignations came as "no surprise".
"As inequality has grown under the Tories, social mobility has totally stalled," he said.
"How well people do in life is still based on class background rather than on talent or effort."
Analysis by BBC political correspondent Jonathan Blake
Sour grapes? Political point scoring?
Neither, according to the former Labour minister and his colleagues on the board who include a former Conservative education secretary.
Their frustration demonstrates the extent to which Brexit is all-consuming for the government.
Leaving the EU is taking up so much time, energy and effort that there is little capacity for anything else to get done.
Even on an issue which is a personal priority for the prime minister.
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
Mexico’s landmark anti-corruption drive, inaugurated by President Enrique Peña Nieto under intense pressure to answer the scandals jolting his administration, is being blocked by the government’s refusal to cooperate on some of the biggest cases facing the nation, according to members of the commission coordinating the effort…
Marred by scandals that have embroiled his administration, his allies and even his own family, Mr. Peña Nieto agreed to the creation of a broad anti-corruption system last year that was enshrined in the Constitution, a watershed moment in Mexico.
But after nine months of pushing to examine the kind of corruption that ignited public outrage and brought the new watchdog into existence, some of its most prominent members say they have been stymied every step of the way, unable to make the most basic headway.
After announcing the new system with great fanfare, they say, the government is now refusing to allow any serious investigations into its actions…
In principle, regular citizens are at the helm of the new system, giving them the power to ensure that it works in the interest of the Mexican people, not the government.
But in interviews, all five members of the special citizen commission recited a long inventory of obstacles placed before them by the government.
None of the 18 judges who are supposed to oversee anti-corruption cases have been appointed by lawmakers. The prosecutor empowered under the new system to pursue investigations independently has not been named…
A big part of the problem, the commission members contend, is that their power is rooted in title only. All significant decisions have to be made by a collection of seven agencies. But six of them come from different branches of government, leaving the citizen’s commission, which technically oversees the entire process, heavily outvoted…
For many Mexicans, the new anti-corruption system — and particularly the power of citizens to coordinate it — showed that the government, when pushed hard enough, might finally combat the impunity that defines much of life in Mexico.
But many civil society leaders, including some who helped engineer the creation of the anti-corruption system, say they have fallen prey to a familiar trick: The government creates a panel to address a major issue, only to starve it of resources, inhibit its progress or ignore it…
The anti-corruption drive is still missing its independent prosecutor, arguably the most important person in the entire operation. The selection has been frozen in the legislature…
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For decades, China's government has used the system of hukou permits to control where people can live. With population of Beijing reaching declared limits, the government needs to adjust the permit system.
China has passed an ordinance on its nationwide registration permit system to give hundreds of millions of its migrant workers living in cities far from their birthplaces access to welfare services such as compulsory education
The existing system of household registration has long been blamed for social instability; even those workers who have lived in adopted cities for many years are not entitled to the same benefits as locals because they do not have a household registration for their new places of residence.
Academics said the new system would improve migrant workers' right to basic welfare, including access to schooling, but more would have to be done before those with rural household registrations had the same privileges as their urban counterparts, or those leaving small towns and cities shared the benefits of permanent big-city residents.
The official ordinance has yet to be announced, but a draft, sent out for pubic consultation last year, promised residence permit holders who had moved to cities away from their birthplaces for at least six months would be eligible for nine basic public services… The ordinance is part of the Beijing efforts to reform the household registration system known as the hukou, which it had hoped to complete by 2020.
The residence permit system will allow migrants to become permanent residents if they meet certain requirements, such as staying in adopted cities for a long enough period, or making social insurance payments over a period of years… "Extra-large" cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai with populations of many millions, have the strictest requirements.
[Lu Jiehua, professor of sociology at Peking University] said the residence permit system was aimed at meeting the demands of more than 250 million migrant workers and eventually give them the same privileges as permanent residents.
The draft sets basic principles for all types of cities, but big cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou - with better social resources such as schools, hospitals and social benefits - will make it harder for immigrants to share equal entitlements.
"The Ministry of Public Security had hoped that it would be able to set up a new household registration system by 2020, but it now looks very unlikely that the reform will be completed by then," Lu said.
On the evening of November 18th a fire broke out at a warehouse-cum-apartment block in a shantytown in southern Beijing populated by migrants—poor workers from rural areas of China whom district officials sometimes call “low-end people”. Nineteen migrants died, including seven low-end children.
[The Bejing] city government has a maximum target size for the capital’s population: 23m in 2020, only 1m more than in 2016. To achieve this, the authorities have been booting out vulnerable people: migrants from the countryside. Their places of work are being closed down. Substandard housing, the only sort they can afford, is being condemned as unsafe. Activists say 3m migrants have been evicted from Beijing and other big cities in the past five years…
The day after the disaster Cai Qi, the Communist Party chief of Beijing municipality, announced a citywide fire-safety inspection. This quickly morphed into mass evictions, starting in the shantytown. The police went round nearby buildings that had been slated for demolition, handing out eviction notices and giving people a few hours to leave. Water and electricity supplies were cut off… The line of the dispossessed snaked into the night, looking for somewhere to rest. “It looks like Beijing is not for people like us,” said one…
Where to go? Where to go?
Hitherto in the capital, middle-class scandals and the travails of poverty have usually unfolded as if on different planets… Those concerned about posh schools or house prices rarely worried about the problems of migrants and vice versa… [but] a fierce online reaction has broken through the divisions that usually separate middle-class scandals from those affecting the poor…
Unusually, some of the criticism has been overtly political. More than 100 people, including public intellectuals, signed a petition saying the evictions were illegal, an abuse of human rights and “clearly the government’s responsibility”. With heavy irony, another commentator wrote that just one month after a five-yearly party congress in Beijing, the city government was providing a taste of the “splendid future” promised at the gathering…
At the congress Mr Xi argued that social inequality and the gap between rich and poor were the biggest problems facing China. In particular, party officials fear, younger migrants, born in cities to parents who themselves migrated in the 1980s, could prove a threat to social stability because they have had little or no education in their urban homes, no longer have connections to the countryside as their parents did and—for some of the men—will not be able to marry because of a skewed sex ratio. These are the people who are being evicted from Beijing.
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
I recently looked back to some of the first blog posts I wrote in 2006, when I started writing these blog posts. Here's one of those early messages that's especially appropriate for people beginning to teach comparative politics. (BTW I've now been retired for over 15 years.)
Appreciating ambiguity
Not long ago, someone asked me
why I stay involved with teaching comparative politics. After all, I
retired from high school teaching four years ago. My accountant says
that my book publishing venture is fortunately a hobby that pays for
itself. She tells me I could better help pay my youngest son's college
tuition if I was a greeter at Wal-Mart.
Part of my response to
explain why I keep working to promote teaching of comparative politics
is that I think the course is one of the more important courses students
can study.
The subject matter offers opportunities to expand our frames of reference.
Comparisons teach us that there aren't single, simple answers to big questions.
The comparative disciplines offer academic and intellectual methods for making sense out of variety and alternatives.
All these things are more and more important in today's global economics, politics, society, and culture.
Of
course it's easy for all of us to see evidence that reinforces what we
believe is true, so it wasn't difficult for me to see this message in
the March issue of Fast Company, a business journal.
Columnist
Dr. Kerry J. Sulkowicz answered a question about keeping up with
advances in technology and the effects of globalization. Maybe there is
advice here to offer your students.
"...[A]dvice
on how to cope with a world of fast and furious change. Bottom line:
You better have a taste for ambiguity and uncertainty.
"I'm
convinced that in the future, the most successful among us will be those
who understand that they are citizens of the world. Keeping up with the
effects of globalization takes both openness and work--openness to
learning, reading, and seeing the world, and work to adapt to the
competitive, intellectual, and cultural shifts before they bite you in
the rear...
"[T]he pace of technological development has long
outstripped our human capacity to use that technology, including our
brains' ability to process information and to do actual work...
"The
biggest variable in all this change is you, especially your personal
flexibility and your open-mindedness to listening and learning... I'll
go even further: With rapid globalization and technological innovation,
the more you can tolerate or even enjoy ambiguity, uncertainty, and
change, the more successful you'll be."
Teach comparative politics; teach ambiguity. (If you've read my book, you'll recognize that theme.)
Britain’s divorce negotiations with the European Union hit a major snag on Monday, when a hard-line Northern Ireland party that is a crucial ally of Prime Minister Theresa May pulled its support at the last minute from an agreement on the future of the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The abrupt decision, which appeared to take Mrs. May by surprise… derailed a draft deal between Britain and the European Union that is a prerequisite for moving on to the next stage of negotiations…
“Once again Theresa May has come out of Brexit talks with her tail between her legs,” said Tom Brake, a member of Parliament from the Liberal Democrats, an opposition party. “As each day goes by, it becomes clearer that the best deal for everyone is to stay in Europe. The people of the U.K. must be given a vote on the deal and an opportunity to exit from Brexit.”…
Mrs. May’s government appeared to have reached a compromise that would effectively allow Northern Ireland to behave as though it were to remain in the single market and customs union, while technically leaving, along with the rest of the United Kingdom…
The compromise was intended to help prevent the re-imposition of customs checks at the frontier, the land border between the United Kingdom and the European Union. That so-called “hard border” was once a major source of sectarian friction; it was dismantled after the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998 that ended decades of violence known as the Troubles. Observers fear that reimposing border controls could revive tensions.
But on Monday the Democratic Unionist Party, a faction that is crucial to the ability of Mrs. May’s Conservatives to command a majority in Parliament, rejected that compromise.
Party members acknowledge the case for continued economic links with Ireland, but are deeply suspicious of any proposals that would confer a special status on Northern Ireland, for fear of eventually making it possible for a United Ireland to emerge…
If the party were to withdraw its support from Mrs. May’s Conservatives altogether, that could topple the government and bring the Labour Party into power…
If there is no agreement reached to start the next phase of the Brexit talks, it would be nearly impossible to achieve a trade deal by March 2019, the deadline for completion of the process…
The rumored deal on the border with Ireland immediately set off an outcry in Scotland and in London, where a majority of voters voted to remain in the European Union…
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, demanded treatment similar to that Mrs. May proposed for Northern Ireland. London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, made the same case for his city, the majority of whose voters also opposed Brexit.
“Londoners overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and a similar deal here could protect tens of thousands of jobs,” he wrote on Twitter.
In the referendum, Northern Ireland also narrowly voted to remain in the European Union, but the territory was sharply divided, with heavily Protestant areas generally favoring Brexit while predominantly Catholic areas voting to remain in the bloc…
The biggest beneficiary of the situation appears to be the main opposition, the Labour Party. Its hard-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who has positioned himself as a prime minister in waiting, said the collapse of the draft agreement “provides further evidence that Theresa May’s government is completely ill-equipped to negotiate a successful deal for our country.”
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ONE custom in Mexico’s era of one-party rule was the dedazo (big finger), the president’s choice of his successor, who would inevitably be elected to a single six-year term. The authoritarian rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ended in 2000, but the dedazo returned on November 27th this year, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the president, chose his finance secretary, José Antonio Meade, as the PRI’s candidate in the presidential election to be held in July…
Mr Meade’s selection begins a seven-month race for a tough job. The next president will have to deal with a soaring crime rate, anger about corruption, a weak economy and Donald Trump, who may by then have decided to tear up or drastically change the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA)… Mr Peña’s successor will also have to decide whether to carry on with reforms of the economy, energy and education that he began.
Mr Meade is by no means guaranteed to win. On the contrary, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing populist who has twice run for president, is ahead in most polls. If his lead holds, he will win the one-round election…
Mr Meade will find Mr Peña’s endorsement to be a mixed blessing. The president is the least popular on record, with an approval rating of 26% (though that is more than double what it was earlier this year). Voters think he has done too little to fight crime and corruption and, after a conflict-of-interest scandal, they doubt his honesty. Five out of six voters say corrupt leaders are a “very big problem”…
In choosing him, Mr Peña went for somebody with little political baggage and lots of intellectual heft. Mr Meade is the first candidate for a major political party who does not belong to any party. An economist with a doctorate from Yale University, he has held more jobs in the cabinet than any living politician… Mr Meade is thought to be honest. According to a quickie survey after his nomination by GCE, a pollster, 23% of voters back him… That is not a bad start, considering that a third of voters have never heard of Mr Meade.
Yet to win he will need to perform a horribly tricky political balancing-act. He must attract voters from the PAN, the PRI’s long-time foe…
If Mr Meade has his way, the election will be a referendum not on Mr Peña’s record but on Mr López Obrador, whom opponents portray as a Mexican version of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro (see Bello). AMLO, as Mr López Obrador is often known, mixes justified anger at the corrupt political establishment with populist ideas, such as making Mexico self-sufficient in energy and food.
He appeals mostly to the half of Mexicans deemed poor; ie, who make less than $79 a month if urban (or $56 if rural)…
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A regulation to promote transparency in party affairs was reviewed and passed at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee on Thursday.
The meeting was presided over by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee.
Promoting transparency in party affairs is "an important step" for the implementation of the spirit of the 19th National Congress of the CPC and a must to developing intra-party democracy and socialist democratic politics, according to a statement issued after the meeting.
The move is of great significance in advancing strict party governance and strengthening intra-party supervision, it said.
Promoting transparency in party affairs should adhere to the right direction and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, said the statement.
Transparency in party affairs should be carried out in the practice of upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era and advancing the great new project of party building, it noted…
Efforts should be made to promote intra-party democracy to protect party members' rights to know, participate, vote and supervise, and to respond to the concerns of party members and the public in a timely manner.
All party committees should enhance their leadership over the work and carry out the regulation(for trial implementation) in light of realities, it said.
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
The UK has offered a larger potential "divorce bill" to the EU - which could be worth up to 50bn euros (£44bn), the BBC understands.
There has been no final agreement on a number but the offer was given a "broad welcome" by Brussels, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said.
No 10 has played down reports the final sum could be up to 55bn euros (£49bn)…
The UK is hoping to move on to talking about trade but the EU will only do this when it deems "sufficient progress" has been made on three areas - the so-called divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens in the UK after Brexit and the Irish border…
European Union trade routes are linked with 134,000 jobs in Scotland, according to new economic research…
The jobs in this latest Brexit assessment are reckoned to be dependent on trade.
It would be wrong to assume that they will disappear, just as it would be wrong to assume that a job supported by sales to other parts of the world will be more secure under future trading deals…
What the report shows is the starting point for a period of likely upheaval, in which the future trading relationships between Scotland and the rest of the UK, and much more so between the UK and the rest of the world, are re-aligned - perhaps radically so.
It's likely some sectors will suffer, and jobs will be lost. Others will grow…
We don't know any of this, because the shape of Brexit remains foggy. For now, most economists see the downside of this upheaval, or re-alignment of the British economy, being much more significant than any upsides…
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