Parliament on the Centre-Right, Government on the Left: Explaining Basque Exceptionalism
The Autonomous Elections of 2009 entailed a large change in Basque politics, given that the PNV, the party that had been governing the Basque institutions continuously since 1980, was removed from power by the PSE–EE. However, the Basques did not vote very differently compared to other elections, the majority voting for nationalist parties, as it has been doing since 1980, and for centre-right parties, as it had done at the beginning of the autonomy and as of 2001. In this article, we aim to explain how, despite this clear tendency towards nationalism and the centre-right, a leftist and non-nationalist party is currently governing in the Basque Country.
Continuidad y cambio en la política vasca: Notas sobre identidades sociales y cultura política
Son muy escasos en nuestro pais los estudios sobre cultura e identidad politicas, y la mayoria de los existentes han sido publicados fuera de nuestras fronteras. Por ser uno de los campos mas fructiferos de la ciencia y la sociologia politicas contemporaneas, parece pertinente la apertura de esta linea de investigacion para una mejor comprension del proceso de consolidacion democratica y, particularmente, del pluralismo polarizado vasco. A partir de una metodologia muestral se estudian las caracteristicas de la segmentacion politica, por un lado, y los soportes de violencia politica, por otro.
Arab Uprisings and the Outstanding Return to Democracy: Tunisia as a Model
In the wake of the Middle Eastern crises, the Tunisian case in focus has been doted as a unique phenomenon being that it was the Genesis of the revolution that ultimately spread across the Middle East like wild fire, but has eventually heralded a new dawn as democracy has incidentally returned to the Empire. This literature therefore looks closely at the extent to which the ‘DignityRevolution’ has been instrumental in the Middle East uprisings, which have brought an end to dynastic autocracies. The literature zeros in on the Tunisian uprising which has attracted global concerns, sympathy and has sparked interests in the international arena. The literature finds that the people hold colossal prospect in the uprising and its resultant effect, as it paved the way for the revolutionist to generate, gather and disseminate information on the condition of the entire region to the international community. The people in this context were of utmost importance and played a very crucial role in the creation of awareness, mobilization of protesters and utmost determining the direction of the uprising and also ensuring a speedy return to democratic rule. The paper submits that the role of the people in ensuring that the ruins of the uprising is not left littering around and democracy restored is highly commendable and should be a model for all other Arab countries involved in the revolution.