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The purpose of this paper is to examine how political regimes and political transition affect government decisions to allocate budgets to the public health sector in Southeast Asia.

Ordinary least squares with fixed-effects model is adopted to examine the effect of political regime on public health spending.

Examining the allocation of public health budgets in Southeast Asian countries, the paper finds that a democratic government positively leads to an increase in public health budget allocation, while autocratic government negatively affects the allocation of public health budgets. Further, political liberalization contributes to an increase in budget allocation to the public health sector.

Democratic politics and economic development aim to distribute public resources to social policy, such as policy on public health.

This study aims to analyze the influence of political regime on economic growth.

The methodology was based on an inter-period comparison of the evolution of macroeconomic fundamentals in three different political regimes in Ecuador, a South American country.

The results showed that what determines the evolution of macroeconomic fundamentals is not the political regime that oversees it, but the size of a positive exogenous shock on the price of raw materials, which, by providing higher incomes, considerably increases the level of investment and net exports. However, the political regime does affect the distribution of income in sectors such as health and education.

As far as the authors know, this may be the first paper to explore the importance of a positive exogenous shock on a political regime for the case of primary-exporting Latin American economies, which are price takers subject to exogenous shocks.

This study aims to examine the relationship between political regimes and e-government performance, with a focus on governments’ perspectives of e-government. First, the authors use United Nations (UN) E-government Development Index (EGDI) to establish the current patterns of e-government performance across different regime types, and then develop their own typology of the various perspectives of different political regime types to e-government adopted in the literature. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between e-government performance and regime types.

This study adopts a mixed-method research approach that involves quantitative (statistical databases) as well as qualitative (interviews) methods to go beyond the statistics and obtain interpretations of explored patterns of e-government performance and regime types. The research instruments for this study include the Jupyter open-source software used for drawing the relevant correlations, and validating the results using expert interviews.

The results of the analysis support the research hypothesis that democracies have better e-government implementation than autocracies. The findings suggest that the type of a political regime has an influence on the conceptualization of e-government, the implementation of its practices and subsequently the assessment of its performance.

This study relies on the UN EGDI and data from previous literature. the UN Index only measures the supply side of government outputs without taking into consideration their impact on citizens, which does not provide a holistic view of the whole picture. Therefore, the UN EGDI rankings do not necessarily imply citizen satisfaction or improved e-government.

From a practice point of view, this study gives information to government leaders as well as technical experts on how the political regime influences the government’s performance in e-government. In fact, this paper bridges the gap between theory and practice by calling policymakers to take different regime worldviews and motivations into consideration before setting e-government strategies or even assessing e-government performance. Considering the current global digital transformation, it should be ensured that practitioners take these regime specifications into consideration. In the long term, the results of this research will prove that setting up e-government or e-participation platforms is not enough as technology alone is not enough to strengthen democracy or let alone stimulate citizen engagement. When dealing with e-government initiatives, the focus should be broadened beyond the technological aspect and take the social and political motivations of governments into consideration.

From a theoretical standpoint, this study calls for a more holistic e-government performance indicator that could take the regime perspectives into consideration and integrate them into its evaluation process. An indicator that can accommodate the different objectives pursued by different regime types. This could also be achieved by setting two indicators with each one matching the perspective of the specific regime type, which takes us to Ashby’s “Law of Requisite Variety” (1991). The Law of Requisite Variety states that “the system must possess as much regulatory variety as can be expected from the environment” (Ashby, 1956). This law has some implications for this study. It implies that the regime worldview influences the requisite variety depending on the political context where e-government is being implemented. Because we have two regime worldviews, we need to have at least two responses (in this case indicators) that consider the variety of political contexts. Therefore, through appreciating the differences between these two worldviews, this study recommends using the Law of Requisite Variety to investigate the influence of political regimes on e-government. In the same way, in our repertoire of responses, we should not assume that one discipline has the answer but have a variety of cross-disciplinary responses.

The contribution of this study lies in going beyond the statistical analyses of the UN EGDI to come up with possible interpretations of the reasons why political regimes differ in their e-government performance and what could be the reasons behind such variations. Based on analyzing correlations between e-participation performance and regime types, and interviews with experts, two different e-government perspectives could be identified: one for democracies and one for autocracies. Through identifying the relationship between these perspectives and the e-government performance of each regime type, this study provides governments and policy makers with new evidence that different regime types have different motivations for developing their e-government performance. Hence, e-government policies and strategies ought to match particular political contexts.

Data on economic variables are drawn from the International Financial Statistics (IFS) Yearbook (Edward, 2008; Carson, 2000, 2002, 2004; McLenaghan, 1992, 1995) published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Statistics Department (1964, 1973, 1981, 1983). The economic variables that I obtained from the IFS are GDP, gross domestic investment, and government expenditures. The IMF values for the variables are in current prices. The current values are non-comparable across countries due to the different amounts of inflation across nations over time. I converted all data to constant values with the year 1985 as a base year using the GDP deflator provided by the IFS. For countries that do not have GDP deflators for the period (1960–2002), I used the consumer price index (CPI)² provided by the same source. In addition, the values for the variables are converted from their respective national currencies to U.S. dollars. Some countries in Latin America posed problems when I conducted the conversion process because they arbitrarily changed their national currencies several times from 1960 to 2002. These currency changes made it very difficult in the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico to draw reliable conclusions from the empirical analysis. Several countries – Chile, Indonesia, Liberia, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Sudan, Tanzania, Zaire, and Zambia – have numerous missing values that made their time series fall below the required span for appropriate time series analysis. These nine countries were dropped from the NLS analysis, which reduced the number of countries involved in the NLS analysis to sixty countries. However, these nine countries were included in the CNTS analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically compare and contrast the effect of the nature of the political regime vs the political instability (PI) on real output in a group of countries from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the period 1980-2011. This part of the world has been going through a series of unstable political regimes and continuous PI events for over seven decades.

The author employs a time-series cross-sectional Prais-Winsten regression model with panel-corrected standard errors.

The author concludes that the relationship between the nature of the political regime and real output is mixed (negative and positive); this impact seems to get changed to a positive value whenever the regimes’ instability events are mitigated. However, the influence of PI on real output has a negative benchmark level. The author also notices that the effect of the political regime on real output is stronger over all the sample countries of the study. The results depart somehow from the previous studies’ findings. Therefore, the implication of the author’s conclusion is to investigate how and why the effects of these uncertainties turned positive.

The paper contributes to the literature from three perspectives. First, the author compares the effects on real output from different types of political system uncertainties. Second, the author extracts evidence on this topic from the most unstable region of the world, the MENA region. Third, the author uses a new econometric technique compared to the previous studies.

After the Korean War, South Korean politics was dominated by national security concerns. Reversing Carl von Clausewitz's well-known dictum, in South Korea, “politics is the continuation of war by other means.” Until the late 1980s, politics in South Korea was far from democratic. South Korea had five direct presidential elections (1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007) and six national assembly elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008) after the democratic transition of 1987. In 1992, a civilian candidate, Young Sam Kim, was elected president. Young Sam Kim (1993–1998) prosecuted and punished former generals turned presidents Doo Hwan Chun (1980–1988) and Tae Woo Roh (1988–1993) for corruption, mutiny and treason in 1995. Dae Jung Kim (1998–2003) was elected president in 1997. For the first time in South Korean political history, regime change occurred between a ruling party and an opposition party.

In this chapter, the change and continuity of civil–military relations through the fluctuating dynamics of the democratic transition and consolidation in South Korea is examined. A positive consolidation of democratic reform is one that, while securing indisputable civilian supremacy, grants the military enough institutional autonomy for the efficient pursuit of its mission. Civilian supremacy should be institutionalized not only by preventing military intervention in civilian politics but also by ensuring civilian control over the formation and implementation of national defense policy.

In sum, despite three terms of civilian presidency, civilian supremacy has not yet fully institutionalized. Although significant changes in civil-military relations did occur after the democratic transition, they were not initiated by elected leaders with the intention of establishing a firm institutional footing for civilian supremacy. South Korea's political leaders have not crafted durable regulations and institutions that will sustain civilian control over the military.

More than six decades, Korea is still divided. The most highly militarized zone in the world lies along the demilitarized zone. How to draw the line prudently between seeking national security and promoting democracy shall be the most delicate task facing all the civilian regimes to come in South Korea. That mission will remain challenging not only for civilian politicians but also for military leaders.

The main purpose of this study is to examine the political economy of financial development in Ethiopia, specifically, to test the empirical relevance of the interest group theory of financial development in the context of Ethiopia.

The autoregressive distributive lag model to co-integration is applied to Ethiopia’s time series data from 1990 to 2020 to identify the long- and short-run effects of the political regime characteristics on financial development of the country.

The findings reveal that the degree of democracy in the political system (a proxy for narrow elites) was found to have a significant positive effect on financial development in the long run but has negatively affected financial development in the short run. Similarly, the political regime durability indicator shows a positive and statistically significant effect both in the long run and short run. The macroeconomic policy indicators which are used as control variables in this study reveal significant effects on the financial development of Ethiopia. Generally, the finding supports the interest group theory of financial development.

This paper is the original work on the effect of political regime characteristics on financial development in Ethiopia. Thus, it brings substantial value to studying determinants of financial development as it goes beyond the conventional determinants by considering the role of political power in the process of financial development.

Social movements experience periods of intense activity and periods of abeyance, when collective action is very weak because of an inhospitable political climate. Non-democracies are extreme cases of hostile political environments for social movements. Drawing on a case study of the women’s movement in Franco’s Spain (mid-1930s to 1975) based on an analysis of published documents and 17 interviews, this paper argues that some non-democracies force social movements that existed prior to dictatorships into a period of abeyance and shape collective organizing in terms of location, goals, and repertoire of activities. Some social movements under prolonged non-democratic rule manage to link and transmit the aims, repertoire of activities, and collective identity of pre-dictatorship activists to those of post-dictatorship activists. This occurs mainly through cultural activities.