AHS Comparative Government

Over the past 30 years, more than 250 million people have moved from China's rural villages to the country's booming cities. Under China's tough hukou (household registration) system, almost all of this migration has been illegal. As a result, the migrants and their children have typically been excluded from the housing, health care and educational services made available to lawful residents of Chinese cities.

In December 2015, the Chinese government announced reforms to the hukou system. Under the reforms, as many as 100 million of the 250 million Chinese who have migrated, illegally, from rural villages to cities over the past thirty years may gain the legal right to reside in the cities where they live. In theory, this should improve the quality of life enjoyed by the migrants. But China's largest cities have been given wide latitude to fashion their own policies for addressing the status of their illegal residents, and those cities have no intention of giving legal resident status to their illegal residents, or to the children of those residents.

According to The Economist, rural migrants are currently eligible to gain lawful status only in China's smaller and less affluent cities. Illegal migrants living in such cities, however, are reluctant to seek lawful status because the benefit of doing so would not be great -- and because gaining hukou would mean giving up their ability to lease farmland in their home villages. At the same time, most illegal migrants in such big, wealthy cities as Beijing and Shanghai would be willing to give up the possibility of moving home to start farms if they and their children could gain legal status where they live -- but that is not on offer.

In short, although the Chinese government is pursuing hukou reform, its reforms have done little so far to reduce inequality between the legal residents of China's largest and most affluent cities and, well, everyone else:

https://www.economist.com/china/2020/08/19/changes-to-chinas-hukou-system-are-creating-new-divides

In 680 CE, Yazid ibn Mu'awiya defeated Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, at Kerbala, in modern Iraq. Both men had sought to become the Caliph, the temporal ruler of the world's Muslims. Yazid's victory allowed him to succeed his father as Caliph; the Umayyad Caliphate they established eventually ruled an empire that extended from modern Portugal to modern Pakistan. Husayn, however, was killed. The martyrdom of Husayn, more than any other event, crystallized the division of Islam into Sunni Islam (Muslims who supported the Umayyads) and Shi'ite Islam (Muslims who had supported Husayn's claim to the Caliphate). The political division between Sunni Islam and Shi'ite Islam deepened later, as the two major branches of Islam developed significant theological differences.

Shi'ite Muslims commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn during Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. Because Shi'ite Muslims are a relatively small proportion (10-15%) of the world's Muslim population, and becuase Shi'ite Muslims have often faced persecution at the hands of Sunni Muslims, the remembrance of Husayn's martyrdom has deep emotional resonance for many Shi'ites. The Shi'ite observation of Muharram focuses on the tenth of the month, Ashura (meaning "the tenth day" in Arabic), which is the anniversary of Husayn's martyrdom. (Sunni Muslims commemorate the deliverance of Moses and the Israelites from the Pharaoh's army on Ashura; some Sunni Muslims also commemorate the landing of Noah's Ark on Ashura).

In Iran, a predominantly Shi'ite country (more than 90% of Iranians are Shi'ite Muslims) in which most political power is exercised by the Shi'ite clergy, Muharram is observed with large public mourning processions and other mass gatherings. Despite the likelihood that holding such gatherings will hasten the spread of Covid-19 in a country that has already been hit hard by the pandemic, Iran's leaders insist that this year's observance of Muharram will be no different than in past years:

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/08/22/irans-clerics-argue-over-how-to-hold-the-festival-of-muharram

Please note the error in the title of the linked article. Muharrram is the name of a month and a period of remembrance; it is not a festival.

Africa has been declared free of wild polio:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53887947

The German Bundestag (parliament) is chosen in a mixed (or hybrid) electoral system that combines elections by plurality in single-member districts (also known as "first-past-the-post" elections) and elections by proportional representation. In theory, Germany enjoys the benefits of both first-past-the-post elections (deputies who represent a relatively small geographical area and who are directly accountable to the people who live in their district) and proportional representation (a parliament that includes parties representing a wide range of views, with representation in proportion to the share of the vote that each party won in the previous election).

In a parliamentary election, German voters vote twice. First, they vote for a representative from their district. Then they vote for a list of candidates nominated by one of Germany's political parties. Overall, representation in the Bundestag is proportional to the share of the vote won by each of the parties in the party list election. But the first representatives elected to the Bundestag are the victors of the single-member district elections; the candidates on the party lists are used to "top off" the seats each party holds in the Bundestag as a result of the single-member district elections so that the overall number of seats held by each party is proportionate to its share of the vote in the party list election (with the important exception that a party will generally not win additional seats in the Bundestag if its share of the vote in the party list election is less than 5%).

In the 1950s and early 1960s, West Germany had a fairly stable system of three major parties or party coalitions. Today, Germany has six major political parties or party coalitions. Due to Germany's scrupulously fair (but very complicated) electoral system, this has resulted in a sizeable increase in the number of Bundestag representatives:

https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/08/15/germanys-parliament-is-bursting-at-the-seams-it-may-get-bigger

Since Mexico's war on drug trafficking began in 2006, the country's strategy has often centered on arresting and prosecuting the leaders of the country's drug cartels. Arresting a drug kingpin, however, has often set off a bloody battle for control of the gang among his lieutenants. At the same time, dismantling an entire drug organization has often resulted in the establishment of a new gang in its place or, worse, in a battle between nearby cartels for control of the territory left vacant by the destruction of the gang that previously controlled it.

More than 150,000 Mexicans have died in organized crime-related homicides since the war on drug trafficking began in 2006. Yet the level of drug trafficking in Mexico remains unchanged -- and the power and wealth of the country's drug gangs has only grown. For these reasons, Mexico's current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has taken a less confrontational tack with the drug cartels. So far, he has little to show for his approach:

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2020/08/15/how-will-mexicos-president-handle-el-mencho-a-kingpin-on-the-rise

It may be that Mexico's war on drug trafficking is one that the Mexican government cannot win -- at least not so long as the market for drugs in the United States is insatiable and gun dealers in the southwestern US provide Mexico's drug gangs with military-grade weapons. Mexican drug gangs, after all, earn an estimated $20-30 billion annually by selling drugs in the US.

Alexei Navalny, Russia's best-known dissident, is in a coma in an Omsk hospital. Navalny's supporters allege that he has been poisoned. Navalny has been subjected to repeated arrests, physical attacks and prosecution on spurious charges since he began to criticize corruption in Russian government more than a decade ago:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53844958

Since 1999, when Vladimir Putin first became President of Russia, several dozen prominent reporters, politicians and political activists who publicly criticized Putin, the ruling United Russia Party, or the Russian security services, have been murdered. Most of these attacks have taken place in Russia; some have taken place in other countries, including Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Hong Kong police arrested ten prominent democracy supporters today. Among those arrested were Agnes Chow and Andy Li, both well-known activists; Wilson Li, a journalist; Jimmy Lai, the publisher of the territory's most widely-read newspaper; and two of Lai's sons:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53717843

In 2014, Scottish voters decided to remain in the United Kingdom by a 55% to 45% majority. That referendum, in the words of then-British Prime Minster David Cameron, was supposed to have settled the issue of Scottish independence "for a generation."

Since then, however, the United Kingdom has left the European Union, even though Scottish voters overwhelmingly supported remaining in the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum. (This fed a Scottish grievance, dating back to the 1980s, that the Scots are destined to be forever outvoted by their more numerous, and more conservative, English neighbors.) Scots also believe that their devolved government, led by Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, has done a better job of managing the Covid-19 pandemic in Scotland than the British government has done of addressing the pandemic in England. As a result, opinion polls in Scotland now show a clear plurality for independence.

Scottish parliamentary elections will be held in May 2021. Even though the Scottish Parliament is elected in a combination of single-member district plurality elections and regional proportional representation elections, it now seems likely that Sturgeon's pro-independence Scottish National Party will win an outright majority. If that happens, the next Scottish government might well seek a second referendum on Scottish independence:

https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/08/08/how-the-scottish-national-party-risks-turning-caledonia-into-catalonia

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in the United States in January. Seven months later, the disease is out of control. In every other advanced industrial country, the epidemic has been largely contained -- with significant flare-ups from time to time; the United States is "the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months." Indeed, the trajectory of the epidemic in the United States has been more similar to the course of the epidemic in Brazil and South Africa than it has been to the course of the epidemic in, say, Canada. Moreover, as in many developing countries that have been hit hard by Covid-19, the epidemic in the United States has disproportionately afflicted and killed the poor and members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups.

In an article published this morning, The New York Times attempts to explain this signal failure of American policy. The Times analysis focuses on two factors: 1) the American "tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions," and 2) the Trump Administration’s "[frequent and significant departures] from expert advice."

In short, a technologically sophisticated country with one of the world's highest standards of living has met the challenge of the Covid-10 pandemic less competently than any other affluent country and less competently than some middle-income countries. This article reveals how important both political culture and political leadership are in affecting how effectively governments address real problems. A deeper analysis still -- suitable for Comparative Government classes everywhere -- would look at why, exactly, American leadership in the crisis has been lacking relative to leadership in other countries.

Leonhardt, David. "The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus." The New York Times, The New York Times Co., 6 August 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html. Accessed 6 August 2020.