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Years after the 2011 uprising Egypt, it seems that the country’s non-Islamist parties are still included in the political game. After significant alterations in their political sphere by mid-2013 at the advent of the Muslim Brother exclusion and the subsequent discrediting of Salafi al-Nour party, non-Islamist parties took clear part in the mobilization for presidential elections (2014, 2018) and competed for legislative seats in 2015. Nonetheless, it is difficult to expect them to turn into long-term key political players with clear-cut ideological postures, unique platforms and strong grass root mobilization. With the exception of the electoral gains scored by numbered parties like Free Egyptians’ party and Nation’s Future in 2015 legislative elections, these parties seem to be lagging behind esp. in terms of their popular base; who became winners at the advent of the radical exclusion of the MB from July 2013 onwards.

This paper is based on archival research and guided by basic assumptions of rational choice institutionalism, mainly game-theoretic versions of the approach. It is divided into four sections, three of them are chronological and the last one is thematic.

Egypt’s non-Islamists engaged in the post-2011 political sphere, with strong Islamist rivals crippling their political chances in the first two years following the 2011 uprising. They surely capitalized on the exclusion and discrediting of the latter, but they suffered lack of ideological clarity and fragmentation from 2011 onwards with no enough evidence these weaknesses were surpassed after Islamists were “out of their way”. The only strand of non-Islamist parties which came out as “game winners” were those possessing the resources and enjoying overt “friendly” relations with al-Sisi regime. Nonetheless, internal conflicts inside key secularist parties shed light on their capacity to turn into long-term players in Egypt’s political sphere.

Very few papers were published on Egypt’s secularists parties after the 2011 uprising from the perspective of the alteration that occurred in their political environment affecting their political weight and gains. More generally, literature on non-ruling parties in authoritarian contexts mostly reduce these parties to secondary roles allocated by ruling regimes. The paper seeks to overcome both shortages.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of using proportional representation system on the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system within the period from 1997 to 2017, in which Algeria has experienced five legislative elections regularly every five years by testing a hypothesis about adopting the proportional representation system on the basis of the closed list during the foregoing legislative elections has obviously influenced the exacerbation of the Algerian party system’s fragmentation, compared to other factors.

The essence of the theoretical framework of this study is to address the effect of the electoral system as an independent variable on the party system as a dependent variable. The starting point for that framework is to reassess the “Duverger’s law,” which appeared since the early 1950s and has influenced the foregoing relationship, and then to review the literature on a new phase that tried to provide a more accurate mechanism for determining the number of parties and their relative weight, whether in terms of electoral votes or parliamentary seats. This means that researchers began to use a measure called the effective number of parties (ENP) for Laakso and Taagepera since 1979. The study elaborates the general concepts of the electoral system and the party system. It used Laakso, Taagepera index of the “ENP” to measure the phenomenon of fragmentation party during the five legislative elections from 1997 to 2017 in Algeria.

The results of the study reveal that the proportional representation electoral system – beside other factors – had clear impacts on the fragmentation of the Algerian party system by all standards, whether on the level of the apparent rise in the number of the parties represented in the Algerian parliament from 10 parties in 1997 election to 36 parties in 2017 election or according to the index of Laakso and Taagepera (ENP). The average number of effective number of electoral parties in the five elections was around 7.66, and the average number of effective number of parliamentary parties in the five elections was around 4.39, which puts Algeria in an advanced degree of the fragmentation of the party system.

This study about the phenomenon of the fragmentation of the party system, which is one of the new subjects in the field of comparative politics – globally and in the Arab world. Hence, the value of this study aims to shed light on this mysterious area of science, the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system during the period from 1997 to 2017.

The paper seeks to examine the evolution of, and assesses current trajectories of change in, the Algerian employee relations system.

The paper reviews a range of literature on employee relations in Algeria and draws on the authors' research over the years in the field, including recent interviews with unions' representatives.

The paper provides evidence to suggest that the Algerian system of employee relations is a product of interactions and intersections between historical circumstances and different institutional arrangements and configurations to enable the state to hold together its power and control over unions. The paper shows how the preferential treatment of the UGTA by the government created an uneven playing field favouring the UGTA over independent unions.

A major limitation of the paper is lack of strong empirical evidence.

The paper suggests that the single most important factor determining unions' ability to manoeuvre is the continuing support they obtain from the government and its institutions. The analysis provides practical suggestions for independent unions.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper on recent developments in employee relations in Algeria.

Recent events have rewritten the political risk map, for the immediate future and perhaps for the 21st century. Regional issues are charted and key risk factors are scored for 86 countries.

A European/Australian alliance has been announced for the protection and trading of digital intellectual property on the Internet. Europe's IMPRIMATUR and Australia's PROPAGATE projects, both major players in the emerging digital copyright market, have agreed in principle to joint technical development on the basis of open system architecture for Electronic Copyright Management Systems. The agreement covers digital material such as music, video, text and images.

Summarises and discusses findings of roundtable discussions on the opinions of the citizens of two Belgian (Flemish) cities about the policing and security policy in their cities. Citizens question the organisational and cultural readiness of their local police forces for the full‐scale development of community policing. In practice, problem‐oriented policing tends to dominate, whereby it is the police who define the problems to be tackled. Despite decentralisation of policy and participation procedures, the public complains about the lack of citizen democracy in government. Problems of transparency and participation are related to the plethora of projects and initiatives which have been launched by different authorities at different policy levels. Finally, the consensual vision of community policing is discussed since geographically decentralised policing and the encouragement of community involvement will logically confront the police with ever diverging socio‐economic and cultural interests in the neighbourhood.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate political influential spreaders in Twitter at the juncture before and after the Malaysian General Election in 2013 (MGE2013) for the purpose of understanding if the political sphere within Twitter reflects the intentions, popularity and influence of political figures in the year in which Malaysia has its first “social media election.”

A Big Data approach was used for acquiring a series of longitudinal data sets during the election period. The work differs from existing methods focusing on the general statistics of the number of followers, supporters, sentiment analysis, etc. A retweeting network has been extracted from tweets and retweets and has been mapped to a novel information flow and propagation network we developed. The authors conducted quantitative studies using k-shell decomposition, which enables the construction of a quantitative Twitter political propagation sphere where members posited at the core areas are more influential than those in the outer circles and periphery.

The authors conducted a comparative study of the influential members of Twitter political propagation sphere on the election day and the day after. The authors found that representatives of political parties which are located at the center of the propagation network are winners of the presidential election. This may indicate that influential power within Twitter is positively related to the final election results, at least in MGE2013. Furthermore, a number of non-politicians located at the center of the propagation network also significantly influenced the election.

This research is based on a large electoral campaign in a specific election period, and within a predefined nation. While the result is significant and meaningful, more case studies are needed for generalized application for identifying potential winning candidates in future social-media fueled political elections.

The authors presented a simple yet effective model for identifying influential spreaders in the Twitter political sphere. The application of the authors’ approach yielded the conclusion that online “coreness” score has significant influence to the final offline electoral results. This presents great opportunities for applying the novel methodology in the upcoming Malaysian General Election in 2018. The discovery presented here can be used for understanding how different players of political parties engage themselves in the election game in Twitter. The approach can also be adopted as a factor of influence for offline electoral activities. The conception of a quantitative approach in electoral results greatly influenced by social media means that comparative studies could be made in future elections.

Existing works related to general elections of various nations have either bypassed or ignored the subtle links between online and offline influential propagations. The modeling of influence from social media using a longitudinal and multilayered approach is also rarely studied. This simple yet effective method provides a new perspective of practice for understanding how different players behave and mutually shape each other over time in the election game.

The purpose of this article is to expand the discussion pertaining to Vimy beyond traditional historic and military circles and to illustrate that the site is a significant tourism attraction featuring evolving management and interpretation approaches. This is achieved by describing the commemoration of First World War sites and the evolution and transformation of visitor typologies at these sites. The conversation is framed within a discussion of the role of heritage dissonance in management. Since this article was written at the onset of the centennial of the Great War, an examination of the management of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, which includes a tourism perspective, is timely.

Consisting of participation observations and a review of literature, documentation, government reports and Web sites describing the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, this analysis is complemented by site visits and discussions with key personnel involved in the management of the site.

Because this article precedes the upcoming centennial of the Great War, an examination of the management of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, which includes a tourism perspective, is timely. The discussion and conclusion sections provide a suggestion of how dissonant heritage can be addressed, and present an argument for the inclusion of new technologies in the management and interpretation of First World War memorials and the celebrations associated with the centennial of 2014-2019 in order to embrace new visitor types.

This is a conceptual paper examining past and current management strategies of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial. No participants or manager was interviewed or surveyed.

Strategies to improve future management through the engagement of tourism researchers, new technologies and by addressing dissonant heritage are provided through literature review and on-site visits.

Currently, the management of the Vimy Memorial caters largely to a certain segment of Canadian population. The findings suggest that by addressing other components of Canadian society and even other combatants, the management and interpretation of the site could be greatly diversified and could eventually become a battlefield like Gettysburg or Gallipoli, where all combatants are recognized and honored.

This is the first paper examining the management of the Vimy Memorial from a tourism perspective.