<p>This is a study of whether it is possible for the governmental form of democracy to be ap-plicable in states that have not had democracy as their governmental form earlier in their political history. In this thesis the concept of liberal democracy is the major theory used as well as the concepts of rule of law and civil society. After giving a description of the con-cepts the thesis continues with two chapters that respectively describe and explain the states of Belarus and Cuba. The two states are going to be used in the analysis at the end of this thesis.</p><p>The analysis includes several conditions to asses if democracy exists. These conditions are derived from the chapters on democracy and rule of law. In the analysis the states of Bela-rus and Cuba are analyzed based on the conditions derived from the chapters on democra-cy and rule of law. The results of the concluding discussion are that the probability for de-mocracy to survive in Cuba is higher than in Belarus because Cuba seems to be transition from an authoritarian form of regime to a form o f democracy. In contrast to Belarus, Cu-ba seems to be willing to open up from seclusion and isolation, as well as listen to its people than what the state of Belarus is willing to do.</p>

This thesis sheds light on how the nonprofit sector developed in Taiwan, from under an authoritarian regime (1950s to 1980s) to the democracy today. It does so by asking two fundamental questions: First, why and how did Taiwan’s nonprofit sector emerge? Second, what are the forces that are shaping its development? In this study I advance four arguments. First, I argue that the nonprofit sector has passed through several distinct phases since democratization in the early 1980s. We will see that its transformation mirrors changing economic, social, and political developments in Taiwan. However, I also make three other related arguments about the nonprofit sector in Taiwan. My second argument is that the state and its institutions have profoundly shaped the nonprofit sector’s pattern of development. The state matters because political institutions and regulatory frameworks directly and indirectly structure the development of civil society, which is the organized non-state, non-market sphere in which nonprofits operate. To support this argument, I show how, in the 1980s and 1990s, the nonprofit sector was shaped by social movements, electoral competition, and privatization of social welfare. My third, or “third-party government,” argument—a concept first advanced by Lester Salamon—contends that, since the late 1990s, the nonprofit sector and state have become interdependent to make up for their corresponding institutional strengths and weaknesses. My fourth argument is that the current combination of economic downturn, social welfare devolution, and competition with for-profit enterprises has pushed nonprofits towards commercialization and marketization—a trend that offers significant benefits as well as pitfalls for the nonprofit sector.

Die nachfolgende Länderstudie ist während eines längeren Arbeitsaufenthaltes im Rahmen der internationalen Zusammenarbeit in Kamerun entstanden. Mit ihr versuchen wir, unsere persönlichen Eindrücke und täglichen Beobachtungen in einem Land zu verarbeiten, in dem offenbar alle Hoffnung darauf beruht, dass der alternde Staatspräsident Paul Biya seinen Abschied von der politischen Bühne nimmt und damit ein autokratisches, korruptes Regime sein Ende findet. Diese Hoffnung scheint mit der Erwartung von Francis Fukuyama verbunden zu werden, der 1992 nach dem Zusammenbruch des Sowjet-Imperiums das „Ende der Geschichte“ erklärte, in der Überzeugung, dass das demokratische Gesellschaftsmodell bald überall Einzug halten würde. Bekanntlich hat sich diese Erwartung als zu optimistisch erwiesen. Mit unserer Untersuchung versuchen wir aufzuzeigen, warum sich die Hoffnung auf eine gerechtere Gesellschaft trotz langjähriger Bemühungen westlicher Geber um die Stärkung der Zivilgesellschaft und die Dezentralisierung staatlicher Aufgaben auch in Kamerun kaum erfüllen wird. Ein „Ende der Geschichte“ lässt sich auch für die Zeit nach Paul Biya nicht prognostizieren. / After more the thirty years in office, the political career of the elderly Cameroon President Paul Biya seems to have come to an end. After gaining independence in 1960 Cameroon was quickly turned into a dictatorial police state under Paul Biya’s predecessor, Mr Ahmadou Ahidjo. A forced political liberalisation at the beginning of the 1990’s removed the existing one-party-system. However, in reality, little has changed regarding the country’s political situation as the newly granted democratic rights exist only on paper. Not only is Mr Biya the sole and unchallenged ruler of Cameroon, he is also the “glue” that binds the country together. Despite the country’s wealth of natural resources, government corruption and mismanagement has resulted in an elite with much wealth and a majority of people living in poverty. In spite of this, and even in face of ethnic and religious diversity, Cameroon is one of the most stabile countries in Africa. Civil war did not occur and Christians and Muslims live peacefully side by side. Therefore, the end of the rule of Paul Biya seems to offer both an opportunity as well as a threat to this nation’s future. The opportunity could be realized if democratically minded segments of the society succeed in installing a pluralistic regime that abolishes corruption and nepotism. In order to make this scenario more likely, western donors have begun to support the establishment of a civil society and, through decentralisation programs, strengthened the concept of democratic local self-governance. The treat is that with the disappearance of Paul Biya from the stage a dangerous political vacuum may result. As no successor seems to be in sight who is capable of leading the people and democratizing the country, there is a danger that Cameroon might follow the path of other African nations and fall into a state of turmoil and decay. This book offers an analysis of the mechanisms which have resulted in Cameroon remaining a fragile state even after fifty years of independence. At the same time - on the basis of examining the findings of transformation theories - the book explores the possibility of bringing about democratic changes to the country by critically examining the impact of the activities of the international donor community. Cameroon is often called the „Afrique en miniature“. This is why a great part of the results of this analysis are also useful for judging the political circumstances in other francophone countries in Africa. Therefore the significance of the book goes beyond the context of the situation in Cameroon.

Following the controversial Federal election in Ethiopia in 2005, in which the ruling party regained power amidst allegations of state-sanctioned violence, the World Bank, along with other bilateral donors, stopped providing Direct Budget Support. In 2006, the Bank formed an agreement with the Ethiopian Government for an International Development Association (IDA) grant for the Protection of Basic Services. The project design for the grant was one of the most complex in the Bank's operations worldwide and featured a component for the implementation of social accountability, financed by a Multi-donor Trust Fund. This thesis critically examines the evolution within the Bank of this policy of 'social accountability' in relation to aid. Situated within the literature on the re-politicisation of aid, it questions the plausibility of implementing such a policy in Ethiopia where the dominant party was seeking ways to extend its power over society. Fieldwork for this thesis was conducted at the World Bank in Washington D.C. and in Ethiopia: in Addis Ababa, and in the region of Tigray. The evidence assembled in this thesis is drawn from 135 semi-structured interviews and a range of primary source documents. Using an historical method, this thesis argues that the primary purpose of social accountability was rhetorical and the deployment of this language by actors was cynical. Not only did donors have a limited purchase on a complex social reality in Ethiopia, but they also tolerated the misuse of social accountability by the dominant party to extend the power of the state. What was produced in Ethiopia was radically outside of what donors imagined, although they were remarkably relaxed about this fact. This thesis challenges the conventional assumptions that actors in aid negotiations are rational and that aid programs involve the imposition of rationalising high-modernist schemes.

<p>This dissertation examines the role that scandals and print media played in Mexican politics between 1960 and 1988. It argues that, while political corruption was commonplace, journalists determined which transgressions would become flashpoints for public protest. By creating scandals, print journalists shaped political decision-making and debates about Mexico's democracy during the decades commonly associated with the country's political opening. As scandals circulated through Mexico City media, they catalyzed critical reassessments of legitimacy and gave public opinion greater weight in shaping processes of political decision-making. By forging new linkages between reading publics and ruling elites, reporters created an increasingly mediated form of Mexican citizenship. This dissertation also reveals that scandals not only reflected elite dissent, but also sharpened internal party divisions that eventually led to organized opposition in 1988 against the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the political party that held the Mexican presidency and most public offices for seventy-one years. </p><p>A history of print journalists sheds new light on how Mexico's one-party regime consolidated and retained power. Scholars increasingly emphasize the coercive aspects of the PRI's rule. However, this research indicates that the regime was divided, responsive to public opinion, and even contributed to the opening of Mexico's public sphere. This work also intervenes in the literature on Mexico's political transition. Scholars identify economic crisis as the catalyst for popular mobilizations and elite defection. This dissertation argues, however, that economic hardship was not new and would have failed to assume a larger political meaning without journalists' contributions. It was they who elevated quotidian episodes of political corruption by assigning them the significance of a rupture. Finally, this research highlights the blurred boundaries between civil society and the state. Journalists acted as intermediaries between ordinary Mexicans and political elites. At different moments reporters were civic protesters, while at others they acted as arms of the state. This history of journalists, then, offers new ways of imagining Latin American politics and the everyday practices of governance.</p><p>This study makes use of materials from Mexican journalists' private archives. New sources, such as leaked documents, correspondence, and newsroom memoranda and meeting minutes, challenge the pervasive image of a reactive and supine press. Congressional records, official meeting minutes, printed public relations ephemera, and domestic intelligence reports illustrate the ways in which ruling elites reacted to scandalous press articles. Political scandals sparked intense debate and sharpened internal party rivalries. These sources reveal that print journalism represented a key site of dissent, debate, and division during Mexico's political opening.</p> / Dissertation

Challenges to the legitimacy of established collective memory can prove so inflammatory that mass violence, ethnic cleansing and even genocide have followed in their wake. However, if few doubt that the ethno-nationalist memory wars during the 1980s collapse of Yugoslavia contributed to the real wars and ethnic cleansing witnessed in the 1990s, no previous research has been able to explain why this is so. This paper pinpoints the determinant variable and causal link between attacks on memory and subsequent mass violence (or a lack thereof). It uses a theoretical model that ties together memory, legitimacy and power to compare the cases of West Germany’s 1968 student movement and Serbia’s 1986-1989 anti-bureaucratic revolution before establishing that the level of prior state repression is one factor that determines whether memory challenges will turn violent. The paper recommends further theory building over the permeable boundary that separates state and civil society, particularly in terms of how accessible state functions are to those social movements that seek to challenge and delegitimise memory.

This thesis seeks for an explanation of social mobilisation by examining the nuts and bolts of the institutional design of democracies. Since the nature of executive-legislative relations in democracy is an important influence on the distribution of policy outcomes between actors in society, and consequently on the extent of support (or inclusion) of citizens to the way power is exercised, the present work investigates how pure presidentialism (and the whole range of institutional accessories that can be combined with this particular executive) affects the opportunities and constraints for social mobilisation. This is done by conducting a within-format comparison across pure presidential regimes in Latin America, where most pure presidential regimes are located. The thesis is grounded in both quantitative and qualitative methods of research. Quantitatively, protest events are measured across time and space and the parameters are estimated through pooled cross-sectional time-series models for count data. Qualitatively, three case studies are examined: Bolivia (electoral rules), Ecuador (non-legislative and legislative presidential power) and Venezuela (party system). The main findings of this study are: Within presidential systems social mobilisation is more likely to occur whenever: (1) presidents are selected in runoff elections in the assembly, and (2) constitutions allow the immediate re-election of the president. However, the prospects for social mobilisation are not significantly affected by the extent to which electoral formulae promote the entry of parties to the assembly. As regards to the relative powers of the presidency and the legislature, the extent of the decree and veto powers of the president do not affect the occurrence of social mobilisation. Instead, the probability of contentious action is greater whenever (3) the capacity of legislatures to censure and sanction the members of the executive is low; and (4) legislatures have weak authority over public spending. Lastly, it is shown that the probability of social mobilisation does not vary across majoritarian and minority governments; neither is social mobilisation susceptible to the levels of electoral volatility in the legislature. Rather, (5) social mobilisation is highest whenever the pro-presidential contingent in the legislature is dominated by one large political party. The thesis thus concludes by strongly advocating for the inclusion of the format of the executive as an important variable in the comparative study of social mobilisation and of the substantive outputs of a democracy, in general.

How do authoritarian stales foster civil society growth while keeping unruly organizations in line? This governance dilemma dogs every state that attempts to modernize by permitting civil society to pluralize while minding its potential to stir up restive social forces. This dissertation's main finding is that the Chinese party state the world's largest and arguably the most resilient authoritarian regime-has engineered a flexible institution of state control in which the "rules of the game" arc created, disseminated, and enforced outside of institutionalized channels. This dissertation demonstrates how the coercive apparatus improvises in an erratic manner, unfettered by accountability mechanisms. The regime does not necessarily pull the levers of hard control mechanisms-the tanks, guns, and tear gas-whenever dissenters cross a line of political acceptability. Instead, in keeping with its decentralized political system and its tradition of experimental policy-making, the Chinese state continually remakes the rules of the game which keeps potential rabble-rousers on their toes. Although the regulatory skeleton of state corporatism remains intact, flexible repression is the informal institution-the set of rules and procedures-that structures state-civil society interactions. Specifically, this institution is made up of three key practices: a) decentralization b) ad-hoc deployment c) mixed control strategies. These three practices manifest in two concrete strategies used to govern aboveground and underground civil society: fragmented coercion and controlled competition. Flexible repression enables the Chinese party-state to exploit the advantages of a flourishing third sector while curtailing its threatening potential. Through participant observation, interviews, and comparative case studies of aboveground and underground independent labor organizations, this dissertation accomplishes three goals. First, it identifies the within-country variation in state control strategies over civil society, which includes the above-ground sector as well as the underground sector of ostensibly banned organizations. Secondly, it traces the patterns of interactions between the state and civil society, generating hypotheses about the mechanisms of change. Finally, it identifies new concepts relevant for studying organized contention in authoritarian regime.. .... Overall, this dissertation contributes to the study of authoritarian state control and civil society contention, with an emphasis on the nexus between the two.

This study, which seeks to contribute to the shared-body of knowledge on media and war crimes jurisprudence, gauges the impact of the media’s coverage of the Civil Defence Forces (CDF) and Charles Taylor trials conducted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) on the functionality of civil society organizations (CSOs) in promoting transitional (post-conflict) justice and democratic legitimacy in Sierra Leone. The media’s impact is gauged by contextualizing the stimulus-response paradigm in the behavioral sciences. Thus, media contents are rationalized as stimuli and the perceptions of CSOs’ representatives on the media’s coverage of the trials are deemed to be their responses. The study adopts contents (framing) and discourse analyses and semi-structured interviews to analyse the publications of the selected media (For Di People, Standard Times and Awoko) in Sierra Leone. The responses to such contents are theoretically explained with the aid of the structured interpretative and post-modernistic response approaches to media contents. And, methodologically, CSOs’ representatives’ responses to the media’s contents are elicited by ethnographic surveys (group discussions) conducted across the country. The findings from the contents and discourse analyses, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic surveys are triangulated to establish how the media’s coverage of the two trials impacted CSOs’ representatives’ perceptions on post-conflict justice and democratic legitimacy in Sierra Leone. To test the validity and reliability of the findings from the ethnographic surveys, four hundred (400) questionnaires, one hundred (100) for each of the four regions (East, South, North and Western Area) of Sierra Leone, were administered to barristers, civil/public servants, civil society activists, media practitioners, students etc. The findings, which reflected the perceptions of people from large swathe of opinions in Sierra Leone, appeared to have dovetailed with those of the CSOs’ representatives across the country. The study established that the media’s coverage of the CDF trial appeared to have been tainted with ethno-regional prejudices, and seemed to be ‘a continuation of war by other means’. However, the focus groups perceived the media reporting as having a positive effect on the pursuit of post-conflict justice, good governance and democratic accountability in Sierra Leone. The coverage of the Charles Taylor trial appeared to have been devoid of ethno-regional prejudices, but, in the view of the CSOs, seemed to have been coloured by lenses of patriotism and nationalism.

This project seeks to trace the power of social media in serving as a virtual civil society in the Arab world, focusing on Egypt as a case study. This study aims to explore the role of social media in mobilising Egyptian activists across generations, and particularly in reaching out to people under the age of 35 who constitute around 50 per cent of the population. Studies preceding the 2011 uprising reported that young Egyptians were politically apathetic and were perceived as incapable of bringing about genuine political changes. Drawing on a range of methods and data collected from focus groups of young people under the age of 35, interviews with activists (across generations and gender), and via a descriptive web feature analysis, it is argued that online action has not been translated into offline activism. The role of trust in forming online networks is demonstrated, and how strong ties can play a pivotal role in spreading messages via social media sites. Activists relied on social media as a medium of visibility; for those who were not active in the political sphere, social media have been instrumental in raising their awareness about diverse political movements and educating them about the political process, after decades of political apathy under Mubarak’s regime. The most important benefit of using social media is the increased political knowledge and information available regarding the political situation in Egypt, despite many young people still confining their political activities to passive acts of ‘share’, ‘like’ or ‘post’ on social media. Activists have used social media to ensure visibility of their actions, not only nationally, but also regionally and internationally. There remains a strong need for offline organization and activism by using social media as a communication avenue, not necessarily as a catalyst for changing the political process. A number of problems associated with the use of such media in political deliberations concerning Egypt are highlighted, notwithstanding the positive effects of social media on the political socialisation of young Egyptians. One such problem is the lack of sustainability in online campaigns which should ideally convert into offline collective action. It can be argued that a sustainable civil society and a truly diverse public sphere rests on more sustainable, offline action, which can indeed bring about significant changes in the Egyptian political sphere.