When I walk down the street, I don’t see signs saying “Tedros for WHO” or “Vote Szócska.” The television and radio airwaves don’t have endless campaign commercials ending with the tagline, “I’m Flavia Bustreo, and I approve this message.” Sania Nishtar does not hold...
Canadian democracy rests in this man's hands. Yesterday I provided a fully superficial background and survey of developments regarding the 2011 Canadian Election. The short version is 1) We’ve had a...
Last year I was much better at blogging about the UK General Election. I thought it was going to be incredibly boring, but then there was the rise of a third party in an unexpected way which changed...
I am very, very ethnic.For those of you who weren’t following Canadian politics this week (I’m assuming that’s 98% of the Duck audience) the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC or “Tories”) took a lot...
International politics is such a bore these days, right? Good thing we have Canada to spice things up for us!There were two interesting developments yesterday for those living in the northern end of North America. First, it was announced that a Canadian, Maj. Gen. Charles Bouchard, will be heading up the NATO mission in Libya. My first thoughts about this were that the choice represents an interesting compromise. Canada, the (French?) vanilla ice-cream of the Western alliance (normally boring, but safe and reliable) represents a non-American and non-European choice. Yet, since the Americans...
Well, the entire UK General election and transition came and went in less time than it took to do a US Presidential transition. While the ending was a little bumpy with the “hung parliament” result but a full, formal coalition government has been formed and it is no longer ‘anarchy in the UK’. (Bad pun, yes. Could I stop myself? No.) So today the UK has a new Prime Minister and a coalition government. What can we say in the last JFGTUKE post? Cleggmania… not so muchThis I stating the obvious now, but the surge in popularity for the LibDems did not work in their favour. Certainly they...
So, in Duck ex-pat news it was announced that a general election (a big national election) will be held on 6 May 2010 this week in the UK. At stake are 13 years of Labour rule, debate as to how the economic “recovery” should be protected.Yet, despite the relative importance of the election, coming as it is during a time of insecurity, I have to say that it feels like basically no one is inspired by it. Politicians here have been hit by a year of expenses scandals (when it turned out that MPs were claiming everything from the installation of duck houses, to bath plugs and the occasional...
Afghans head to the polls today.Christian Brose at Foreign Policy's Shadow Government blog outlines a few worst case scenarios. One worst case outcome is the Iran scenario -- a disputed election result, allegations of fraud, and a drawn-out political fight laced with street protests and sporadic violence. This could be set off by either a narrow Karzai win or a suspicious Karzai blow-out (Ahmadinejad style). One could imagine days, even weeks, of protests by the losing candidates' supporters demanding a recount, or a revote if none is declared, ultimately leading to an unpopular Karzai...
I agree with Josh Tucker that Iran doesn't really fit the major categories of regime-type au currant in comparative politics, but, as I also suggest in comments, we should only lose sleep over that if we treat analytic types as filing boxes for cases rather than, say, as ideal-typifications. Still, if the analysis I'm seeing from reliable sources (and I, like Randy, have no idea what to make of the election outcome in Iran), it does seem that the regime engaged in some pretty brazen fraud of one form or another. If that's right, then we're looking at a familiar dynamic: while most observers...