What you need to know about Putin’s popularity →

Daniel Treisman writing for the Monkey Cage:

From 2000 to 2010, Putin’s ratings had closely tracked Russians’ perceptions of the state of the country’s economy...

...However, the pattern changes in 2011, when presidential approval appears to de-link from perceptions of the economy. The question is why.

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In fact, support for the country’s leaders sank not just among hyper-modern, democratically-inclined Muscovites but among almost all social, geographical, and economic subgroups. Even in small towns and the countryside, approval dropped 10 points...

The argument that best fits the data sounds paradoxical given the pattern shown in the graph. Putin’s popularity fell because economics became not less but more important...

The data are far from definitive, so one should not bet the farm on this interpretation. But it fits better than most others. If it is correct, several implications follow...

What Causes Social Unrest? Apparently, Everything →

Several important points on the common differences between journalism and science:

If we’re to believe a recent article in Time on the protests bursting across Brazil, then the answer is, well, a lot of things. Here’s a list of all the “causes” of the recent Brazilian protests identified in the space of just a few hundred words: ...

Which is followed by a list of 11 "causes", any of which my be quite important, but...

We can’t learn a whole lot about the causes of mass protest by simply cataloging the conditions and things participants tell us about their motivations in cases where they occur. That information is useful, but not so much on its own.

To make real headway on causal analysis, we have to engage in contrasts. To learn about the origins of mass protest, for example, we need to compare cases where uprisings occur with ones where they don’t. Yes, income inequality is high in Brazil, but the same can be said for many of its regional neighbors. If inequality foments uprisings, why aren’t we seeing waves of mass protest in Honduras or Bolivia or Colombia or Paraguay?

The weakness of the Thai royalists →

All in all it looks like a case of the Southeast Asian “theatre state”. Image belies the reality. The royalists’ sound and fury signifies maybe not nothing, but that they are much weaker than they (and we) think they are...

To put it in old Marxist terms, the royalists still have an ideological hegemony, but real power is with the Thaksin camp, whose access to key ideological resources in Thailand is more limited, hence the skewed picture of reality.

So my view is that it’s getting closer to “game over” for the Democrats, and more broadly their royalist supporters.

But this certainly does not mean that there is not a strong possibility of violence, due to the miscalculation of the relative strengths of the two sides.

More parties back Algeria's Bouteflika for new term →

Should he announce he will run again, Bouteflika, who has governed Algeria since 1999, will almost certainly win due to the FLN nationalist party's dominant role and his backing from the party's machinery and its allies.

Opposition parties are still weak and most Algerians have little appetite for upheaval after the civil war with Islamist militants that killed around 200,000 in the 1990s.

The 2015 elections in Burundi: towards authoritarianism or democratic consolidation? →

After the end of the civil war in 2005 and the victory of the rebel group CNDD-FDD (National Council for the Defence of Democracy and the Forces for the Defence of Democracy), democracy and stability seemed closer than ever before. Since the end of the war, two elections have been deemed relatively free and fair, although far from perfect. Burundi’s new constitution also contains the formulae for a meticulous consociational division of power, which allows a minimum of ethnic, gender and political pluralism.

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This heritage is, however, increasingly under the attack of the ruling party, the CNDD-FDD, as explained previously on this blog. Their hold on power was facilitated by the opposition’s boycott of the 2010 elections. Since 2010, the ruling party has increased its efforts to close political space across the country. A law passed in June severely restricts media freedom. In addition, the ruling party has not been afraid to imprison journalists or kill members of the opposition.

The most worrying development, however, is the government’s recent attempt to revise the country’s constitution.

Thailand election: Several hurt in Bangkok gun battle →

The violence erupted during a stand-off between supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

The shots were fired as demonstrators blockaded a building where ballot papers are being stored, in an attempt to prevent their distribution.

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There was no word on who was responsible for the gunfire. It is was also unclear whether those struck were government supporters or opponents.

Before the attack, protesters had attacked a car and set off a series of small bombs.

In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis →

You'd never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government buildings. One of the three main opposition parties heading the campaign is the hard-right antisemitic Svoboda, whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok claims that a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" controls Ukraine. But US senator John McCain was happy to share a platform with him in Kiev last month. The party, now running the city of Lviv, led a 15,000-strong torchlit march earlier this month in memory of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose forces fought with the Nazis in the second world war and took part in massacres of Jews.

Lovely!

Reality's always more complex than the headlines. But sometimes decidedly more depressing, too...