China’s Evolving Industrial Policies – what does it mean for us?
Some welcome Chinese investments in Europe with open arms, others see it as a threat to national security. Matthew Ferchen visits NUPI to talk about what China's investment policy means for Europe.
The Relationship Between Narratives and Security Practices: Pushing the Boundaries of Military Instruments in Japan
Japanese security policy has undergone significant changes lately. Japanese policymakers have recently argued over advancing Japan’s Self-Defense Forces with new weapon systems. In particular, the Abe government has decided to pur- chase long-range cruise missiles for its new F-35A jetfighters, and to reconstruct a newly-built helicopter carrier into an aircraft carrier. While specific policy proposals continued di- viding policymakers and other stakeholders, the underlying story specifying Japan’s place in East Asia, the rise of China, the threat of North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs, the tight security relationship with the United States and the vulnerability of the Japanese archipelago has faced lit- tle core criticism. The lack of alternative national security narratives suggests the emergence of a Japanese security consensus in the mid-2010s. The strength of the narrative in deterring policymakers to refrain from critique, through the significant costs incurred by opposition, could also sug- gest a hegemonic narrative (but not necessarily a consensus). We find that the dominant narrative provided a necessary foundation for unorthodox policy proposals, which arguably enabled the Abe government to push through military in- strument expansions in the Self-Defense Forces, a move far from politically sustainable only a decade earlier.
There are very few BJP strongholds or Congress bastions in India. Data shows why
An important ongoing discussion in some political circles in India is whether the Election Commission should limit public access to the so-called Form 20 data, which reports the exact number of votes that each candidate receives in each polling booth in an election. The Form 20 data has been made available for the 2009 and the 2014 general elections, and also for the state elections held in recent years. The main reason offered by those who want to limit access to this data is that it is an important democratic principle that the vote is kept secret, and if the data reveals that most voters in a polling booth vote for the same party, it is no longer so secret how someone votes. This knowledge is important because it might allow powerful people to control the vote in a polling booth, undermining the freedom of the vote. Francesca R. Jensenius and colleagues discuss this in an op-ed published by The Print.
It’s a myth that 2014 election was exceptional in the vote share of winning candidates
Elections to the Lok Sabha are highly competitive. Indian politicians win with smaller margins than their counterparts in other countries with a similar electoral system, such as Canada and the United Kingdom. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, a candidate needs 50 per cent plus one vote to win the election if only two candidates compete for a seat. If there are three candidates who are equally strong, a winning candidate will need only one-third of the votes plus one additional vote. In India, usually a large number of candidates compete for each Lok Sabha seat, many of whom are non-serious. This makes it possible for several Indian politicians to get elected with a very low vote share. And, this may have important implications for their legitimacy and accountability as people’s representatives.
Political parties dominate India’s national elections, not candidates
A common perception regarding Indian politics is that it is the candidate, and not the party, who wins the elections. This makes it important for parties to pick the “right” candidates, and parties in India do spend enormous effort in local consultations and identity arithmetic while choosing who to allocate party tickets to. The belief that candidates win or lose elections has also led to many more independent candidates throwing their hat into the electoral arena. How do these independent candidates fare? In this piece, the writers show the impressive growth over time in the number of candidates, particularly independent candidates, standing for the elections, but also that there is a very small likelihood of an independent candidate actually winning a parliamentary seat. Parties dominate India’s national elections.
3 charts challenge lazy thinking on voter turnout and its link to literacy & urbanisation
India is known for a fairly high election turnout, but who turns out to vote in India, and why? In our last article, we discussed how constituency size, organisational networks, and social pressures may play a role in influencing voter turnout. Two other factors are commonly cited as having an impact on turnout: literacy and urbanisation. Our findings suggest that the impact of overall education levels and urbanisation on voter turnout in India may be more nuanced than what political observers have traditionally believed.
Why voters don’t turn up in larger numbers in Lok Sabha elections – all politics is local
Historically, national elections in India have had an average voter turnout of about 60 per cent, but there have been massive differences in turnout both across India and across different elections. Voter turnout is important for the legitimacy of democratic elections, and Indian elections are known for their high turnout. It is also crucial in determining who wins an election because the party preferences of those who vote occasionally are probably different from the party preferences of those who vote each time. There is great variation in voter turnout in India across constituencies and over time. This study shows that the size of the constituency also seems to have a large bearing on voter turnout.
This data shows why Indian MPs don’t truly represent their people
s the national elections of 2019 draw close, and incumbents prepare to face voters again, a straightforward question follows: how many people does a Member of Parliament really represent? On average, an Indian parliamentarian today represents constituencies with more than 1.5 million or 15 lakh eligible voters, or close to 2.5 million or 25 lakh citizens. This is more than the population of over 50 countries across the world and almost four times the number of citizens a Member of Parliament represented in the first Indian election in 1952. The sheer size of the electorate that each MP is supposed to represent may be seriously undermining representative democracy in India.
Improving Future Ocean Governance – Governance of Global Goods in an Age of Global Shifts
Japan’s G20 presidency in 2019 will take the lead in promoting environmentally sustainable economic growth and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As a gathering of coastal states, under Japan’s presidency the G20 will specifically work to reduce marine plastic pollution and support marine biodiversity. This policy paper highlights how oceans are governed spaces and points to the key role of the oceans in realizing the SDGs. We argue that the G20 can and should play an important role in addressing major governance gaps in ensuring the sustainable management of oceans. Recognizing that there are increased geopolitical tensions, and that we do indeed already have comprehensive multi-level governance systems in place to handle many aspects of the growing ‘blue economy’ and avoiding the tragedy of the commons, the G20 should primarily stress the need for full and effective implementation of existing instruments and measures at the national, regional and global levels and increased consistency across levels of governance. This would effectively address many of the challenges and make use of the opportunities of the oceans. However, the rapidly moving horizon of technological development and insufficient progress in mitigating global climate change represent new governance challenges that require renewed effort and innovative thinking for a sustainable future for the oceans. This policy paper provides recommendations as to how G20 states can: consolidate their own capacity and assist non-G20 states in taking responsibility for strengthening marine science and implementation of existing regulatory frameworks, exercise innovative global and regional leadership to address emerging opportunities and associated governance challenges and facilitate the meaningful involvement of the private sector and the public in ensuring a collective governance order around oceans.
EUNPACK Executive Summary of the Final Report & Selected Policy Recommendations. A conflict-sensitive unpacking of the eu comprehensive approach to...
Since adopting a ‘comprehensive approach’ to crisis management in 2013, the EU has spent considerable time and energy on streamlining its approach and improving internal coordination. New and protracted crises, from the conflict in Ukraine to the rise of Daesh in Syria and Iraq, and the refugee situation in North Africa and the Sahel, have made the improvement of external crisis-response capacities a top priority. But the implementation of the EU’s policies on the ground has received less scholarly and policy attention than the EU’s actorness and institutional capacity-building, and studies of implementation have often been guided primarily by a theoretical or normative agenda. The main objective of the EUNPACK project has been to unpack EU crisis response mechanisms and provide new insights how they are being received and perceived on the ground by both local beneficiaries and other external stakeholders. By introducing a bottom–up perspective combined with an institutional approach, the project has tried to break with the dominant line of scholarship on EU crisis response that has tended to view only one side of the equation, namely the EU itself. Thus, the project has been attentive to the local level in target countries as well as to the EU level and the connections between them. The research has been conducted through an inductive and systematic empirical research combining competencies from two research traditions that so far has had little interaction, namely peace and conflict studies and EU studies. A key finding in our research is that while the EU has been increasingly concerned with horizontal lessons learnt, it needs to improve vertical lessons learnt to better understand the local dynamics and thus provide more appropriate responses.