Cambodia: Getting Away with Authoritarianism?
Cambodia: Getting Away with Authoritarianism?
复制标题
柬埔寨:摆脱威权主义?
DOI:
10.1353/jod.2005.0067
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发表时间:
2005
影响因子:
3.1
通讯作者:
D. Mccargo
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
D. Mccargo
What if a country holds an election but it proves not to matter? Cambodians voted nationwide in July 2003, only to see their polity’s three main political parties take almost a year to form a new administration. The long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) of Prime Minister Hun Sen won 47.4 percent of the popular vote but gained 59.3 percent of the seats in the National Assembly thanks to Cambodia’s unusual “highestaverage” system of proportional voting, which favors large parties. 1 The CPP’s two main rivals, the nominally royalist formation known by its French acronym of FUNCINPEC and the populist opposition Sam Rainsy Party (or SRP, named for its founder and leading personality) each won around about a fifth of the total vote and a similar share of seats in the 123-member National Assembly (the actual seat totals were 73 for the CPP, 26 for FUNCINPEC, and 24 for the SRP). Since Cambodia’s 1993 constitution stipulates that a two-thirds parliamentary majority is needed to form a government, the parties had to bargain in the election’s wake. Bargain they did, for 11 long months. All during this time Cambodia had no properly constituted government, but little changed. Power remained firmly in the hands of the CPP, which has ruled since the 1980s, initially under Vietnamese tutelage. It has such a tight grip that elections have become little more than a sideshow, helping to bolster the electoral-authoritarian regime that Hun Sen has built. In 1993, general elections overseen by the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC) helped to create the conditions for an end to the violence that had killed millions over the preceding Duncan McCargo is professor of Southeast Asian politics at the University of Leeds. His latest book is The Thaksinization of Thailand (with Ukrist Pathmanand, 2005). His essay “Democracy Under Stress in Thaksin’s Thailand” appeared in the October 2002 issue of the Journal of Democracy.