Oligarchic Party-Group Relations in Bulgaria
Oligarchic Party-Group Relations in Bulgaria

Author: Mihail Petkov

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-29

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 3319988999

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This book argues that the relationship between political parties, civil service and party insider groups in Bulgaria is oligarchic. It also argues that these oligarchic dynamics overlap with the parentela policy network, which is a relationship where a ruling party interferes with the civil service to the benefit of its own insider group. In Bulgaria, party-wide executive appointments attract businesses to seek insider status hoping to expand their activities through prejudiced regulatory inspections as one form of executive interference. Such inspections constitute a veiled attempt to coerce a business, which is in a direct market competition with the party insider or in party political opposition. Any such successful party-insider relationship forms an oligarchic elite, which then converts political access into capital and coerces its rivals into losing parliamentary elections. When ruling parties change, the cycle is repeated, as the newly formed elite seeks to check all and any rivals.

Legal-Economic Institutions, Entrepreneurship, and Management
Legal-Economic Institutions, Entrepreneurship, and Management

Author: Nezameddin Faghih

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 3030609782

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The study of dynamics of institutional change in emerging markets are subjects of great interest in contemporary political economy. The dynamics and quality of institutional change can have significant impacts on the long-run performance of economies, economic growth and development of nations, and play a fundamental role in societies. It provides a comprehensive understanding of legal-economic institutions, and sheds light on the way to global peace by producing a better understanding of the dynamics of historical change. Topics range from institutional uncertainty, hybrid market order and labor market institutions, to good governance of institutions and WTO rules as trade institutions, as well as entrepreneurship and institutional change in emerging markets, and the role of modern technologies. This edited volume emphasizes legal-economic institutions, and the role of management and entrepreneurship on dynamics, trends, and implications of institutional change in emerging markets. Presenting research articles by eminent scholars and experts engaged in education and research, who address and discuss the most recent issues in the field, they reveal new insights into the dynamics of institutional change for researchers interested in development of new theories and comparative studies, especially in the era of emerging markets. The book is appealing to a wide range of global audience, can serve as a useful reference work in education and research, offers innovative and productive discussions, and can satisfy scholarly and intellectual interests, regarding institutional development and a broad spectrum of its interactions with functioning of markets and economies.

The Public Legitimacy of Minority Claims
The Public Legitimacy of Minority Claims

Author: Plamen Makariev

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1317292685

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Problems involving minorities still constitute a significant challenge for public policies in countries such as the ones on the territories of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Unassimilated, facing the cultural "non-transparency" of their lifeworlds, and usually without autonomy, their problems are quite different from those in Western Europe and North America. This book presents a study of public policies concerning the national, ethnic, and religious minorities in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the opportunities available for applying the model of deliberative democracy to the domain of designing and realizing minority policies. It examines the possibility that minority groups can influence – and ideally even pre-decide – minority policies by legitimizing claims concerning their needs and rights in a way that leaves democratic public opinion no choice but to support them. Adopting a novel approach to the public legitimization of minority claims, it proposes that the general public’s evaluation of the credibility of minority claims should focus on the procedural qualities of the intra-group (ethical-political) discourses through which these claims are articulated and substantiated. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of public policy, minority politics, the politics of Eastern Europe, political theory and comparative politics.

Money Rules: Parties, Oligarchs and Funding Regulation in Post-Soviet Countries
Money Rules: Parties, Oligarchs and Funding Regulation in Post-Soviet Countries

Author: Fernando Casal Bértoa

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-10

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1040007627

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This book provides a comprehensive overview of the regulation of party finance in post-Soviet countries by leading academics and practitioners in the field. Through a series of cutting-edge chapters, using both original quantitative and qualitative data, it systematically sheds theoretical and empirical light on the way party funding regulation has evolved since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, as well as on the manner in which the legal regulation of party finances has had an impact (or not) on the evolution of party politics and democratic consolidation in the region. The book examines regulation in post-Soviet countries like Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia and Ukraine. In analysing the various dimensions of party funding regulation and their impact on political parties, party systems and democracy, it looks at the past and future, and makes recommendations on how legislation could be improved in order to further party development, party system stabilisation and democratic consolidation for all the countries in the region. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, practitioners and journalists interested in political party finance and anti-corruption, and more broadly to political parties, democracy and democratic governance, and post-Soviet/Russian and East European politics.

Media and Politics in New Democracies
Media and Politics in New Democracies

Author: Jan Zielonka

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0198747535

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How is power being mediated in new democracies? Can media function independently in the unstable and polarised political environment experienced after the fall of autocracy? Do major shifts in economic and ownership structures help or hinder the quality of the media? How much can new media laws alter old journalistic habits and political cultures? And how do new technologies impact the media and democracy? This book examines these questions, drawing on a vast set of data assembled by a large international project.

Crime-terror Alliances and the State
Crime-terror Alliances and the State

Author: Lyubov Grigorova

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0415506484

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This new book by Lyubov Mincheva and Ted Gurr examines the political economy of transborder violence on the European Periphery that poses grave threats to domestic and international security in Europe and elsewhere. The units of analysis are unholy alliances, i.e. hybrid transborder militant and criminal networks, which have been active in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. The concept of Unholy Alliances is extended to also include the trans-state criminal syndicates that arise in failed and dysfunctional states, or operate within the global illicit economy. It also addresses the question of what reigns supreme in securing the militants' long term success: money; or social endowment, including strong identity networks

Conflict, Mediated Message, and Group Dynamics
Conflict, Mediated Message, and Group Dynamics

Author: Stephen M. Croucher

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-11-06

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1498535496

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Conflict, Mediated Message, and Group Dynamics: Intersections of Communication establishes up a framework to explore the ways in which emotions enter a conflict scenario and investigate their role either as causes or consequences of conflict. The volume's chapters shed new light on the questions of the extent to which context on the one hand and culture-related dimensions on the other are conducive to conflict dynamicity and management either by calming emotions—and conflict—or by increasing their severity.

Debating the Past
Debating the Past

Author: ????? ????????

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 6155053006

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Cover -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1 Stambolov, the Russophiles, and the Russophobes in Bulgaria -- Initial Interpretations of the Stambolov Era -- The Marxist Historians on Stambolov's Regime -- Towards Stambolov's Rehabilitation -- After the Fall of the Communist Regime -- CITED LITERATURE -- CHAPTER 2 The Rule of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union and the "Worker-Peasant Alliance"--The Road to Power -- Agrarian Rule: Ideology and Reforms -- Interpretation and Assessments -- Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski -- The Agrarian Union and the "Unity of Action" with the Bulgarian Communist Party -- CITED LITERATURE -- CHAPTER 3 The Debate on Fascism and the Anti-fascist Struggles -- The Long Fascism and the Breaches in It -- "Monarcho-Fascism" -- Bulgaria and Hitler's Germany -- Anti-Fascism and the Struggle against Fascism -- After Communism -- CITED LITERATURE -- CHAPTER 4 September Ninth, "People's Democracy" and Socialism -- September Ninth -- "People's Democracy" (1944-1948) -- Socialism in Progress -- After Socialism, about Socialism: September Ninth Revisited -- The People's-Democratic Transition -- Georgi Dimitrov -- The Macedonian Question -- The Repressions -- Bulgarian Totalitarianism -- The Zhivkov Era and Descriptions of the System -- Socialist Modernization -- Aspects of the System -- CITED LITERATURE -- CONCLUSION The Truth and Objectivity Question in Bulgarian Historical Scholarship -- CITED LITERATURE -- Transliteration.

Post-Communist Mafia State
Post-Communist Mafia State

Author: B lint Magyar

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 6155513546

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Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ