Judicial decision-making within political parties: A political approach

How do German intra-party tribunals manage internal conflicts? More specifically, why do they accept some cases for trial but reject others? Required by law to strictly adhere to implement rule of law standards, German intra-party tribunals are designed to insulate conflict regulation from politics. Meanwhile, research on judicial politics highlights the role of political and strategic considerations in accepting cases for trial. Building on the latter, we develop a theory that emphasizes tribunals’ political concerns such as winning elections. We test our hypotheses with a mixed-effects logit model on a novel data set covering 1088 tribunal decisions in six German parties from 1967 until 2015. Our findings indicate that political factors exert a strong effect on tribunal case acceptance. Tribunals are more likely to accept cases when suffering electoral loss and after losing government office. Moreover, tribunals dismiss cases more easily when their parties display relatively high levels of policy agreement

Endurance, resistance and resilience in the South African health care system: case studies to demonstrate mechanisms of coping within a constrained system

BACKGROUND: South Africa is at present undertaking a series of reforms to transform public health services to make them more effective and responsive to patient and provider needs. A key focus of these reforms is primary care and its overburdened, somewhat dysfunctional and hierarchical nature. This comparative case study examines how patients and providers respond in this system and cope with its systemic demands through mechanisms of endurance, resistance and resilience, using coping and agency literatures as the theoretical lenses. METHODS: As part of a larger research project carried out between 2009 and 2010, this study conducted semi-structured interviews and observations at health facilities in three South African provinces. This study explored patient experiences of access to health care, in particular, ways of coping and how health care providers cope with the health care system’s realities. From this interpretive base, four cases (two patients, two providers) were selected as they best informed on endurance, resistance and resilience. Some commentary from other respondents is added to underline the more ubiquitous nature of these coping mechanisms. RESULTS: The cases of four individuals highlight the complexity of different forms of endurance and passivity, emotion- and problem-based coping with health care interactions in an overburdened, under-resourced and, in some instances, poorly managed system. Patients’ narratives show the micro-practices they use to cope with their treatment, by not recognizing victimhood and sometimes practising unhealthy behaviours. Providers indicate how they cope in their work situations by using peer support and becoming knowledgeable in providing good service. CONCLUSIONS: Resistance and resilience narratives show the adaptive power of individuals in dealing with difficult illness, circumstances or treatment settings. They permit individuals to do more than endure (itself a coping mechanism) their circumstances, though resistance and resilience may be limited. These are individual responses to systemic forces. To transform health care, mutually supportive interactions are required among and between both patients and providers but their nature, as micro-practices, may show a way forward for system change

Relationships, intimacy and desire in the lives of lesbian, gay and bisexual youth in South Africa

This article answers the following questions: how do nine lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) young people in South Africa understand and talk about relationships, intimacy, and desire; what does this understanding and talk tell us about gender and sexuality in South Africa; and how useful is the metaphor of the ‘closet’ to understand how LGB youth talk about relationships, intimacy and desire? At the time of the study, they were between 16 and 19 years old and attending school in grades 10 to 12. We used in-depth interviews, which were more like conversations, where primarily open-ended questions focused on these young people’s experiences, and found that relationships of love and care, the desire for love and intimacy, and the ability to exist alongside and for others pervade these young people’s lives. In this regard, employing postcolonial and Southern theory we argue that the youth use the concept of the closet, but that they understand it differently. We also argue that the concept of the closet may not accurately capture the particular positions that youth occupy in society because the concept of the closet suggests separation rather than engagement. The notion of being separate from the surrounding community is anathema to and contradicts these nine young people’s worldviews and those of the communities in which they live

In from the Cold?:Left Parties and Government Involvement since 1989

Radical left parties – particularly their involvement in government either as full coalition partners or support parties to minority social democratic administrations – have not received as much attention as their counterparts on the far right of the political spectrum or, indeed, the Greens. This interview-based study, which focuses on the calculations made by left parties with a chance of getting involved in governing, suggests that this needs to change. It argues that, whatever the origins of these left parties, such calculations can fruitfully be explored by characterising them – just as we have begun to characterise the calculations of Green and radical right parties – as the kind of trade-offs between policy, office and votes that more mainstream political actors have been making ever since democracy was established in Europe. Similarly, other factors that impact on the calculations made by radical left parties thinking about government are unlikely to be exclusive to them. They include a history of coalition building at the subnational level, the views of trade unions, personal relationships with other party leaders, and finally their reading of how government involvement has impacted on their counterparts in other countries

‘A Very Internecine Policy’: Anglo-Russian Cold Wars before the Cold War

Whether or not each epoch is equal to God, as Leopold von Ranke once suggested, certainly each new generation of historians creates a new version of the past, one that suits its needs or tastes or that, at any rate, suggests itself as a plausible reconstruction of past occurrences. This is also relevant for the study of the post-1945 East-West conflict. The Cold War is generally seen as the key organising principle of the second half of the short twentieth century. So ingrained, indeed, is this view in the intellectual habits of today’s political leaders and commentators — and not a few scholars, too — that they tend to cast back wistful glances at the ‘familiar certainties of the Cold War and its alliances.