Search Results

The most important variable facilitating the Swedish parties' consensus on state funding was the constitutional reform of 1970. The constitutional reform strengthened the position of the bourgeois parties since it rendered minority governments (during which the centre-right opposition parties enjoyed more influence both in parliamentary committees and commissions of enquiry) more likely. Furthermore, the constitutional reform was an incentive for the bourgeois parties to cooperate more closely. Put differently, they could adopt an office-seeking strategy, which in turn facilitated a consensus on state funding to political parties. Prior to 1970, the Social Democrats electorally and organizationally dominated to an extent that allowed them to marginalize its competitors in questions of party funding. Exploiting the coordinative discourse on political corruption, the Social Democrats were able to discredit business donations to the bourgeois parties, leaving these no other choice than to agree to state funding.

The New York Times told of how starvation had hit the island following a violent hurricane and that the rioting began in the Carib Reserve. A Commission of Enquiry was established by the Colonial Office to enquire into conditions generally in the Carib Reserve and to make recommendations for the future welfare of the Caribs. This brought to Dominica and eventually to the Carib Reserve itself two men who were ‘visitors’ in the most official sense of that word, Chief Justice James Stanley Rae and Sir Sydney Armitage-Smith. However, Edward Carlyon Eliot made it plain that the man really responsible for the incident was a visiting Englishman, Douglas Taylor, who had stirred up trouble. Eliot was quietly relieved of his post shortly after the Commission reported. Taylor, however, settled on Dominica and became the leading 20th-century expert on Carib culture, consulted by many post-war visitors up to the time of his death in 1980.

In Britain, neither the institutional context nor parties' strategic goals provided any incentives for cooperation in questions of party funding. In the centralized Westminster model of democracy, the opposition's view could only influence policy through commissions of enquiry without any veto power which – with one notable exception (the 1998 Neill Committee) – had no practical impact. The parties themselves had no strategic interest in cooperating in matters of their own funding; they chose to pursue vote-seeking strategies in line with the institutional environment, most notably majority rule. However, an ever more intense communicative discourse on political corruption – in which the public plays a more important role – recently facilitated a consensus on rudimentary state funding to political parties and continues to exert pressure for further reform of the British party funding regime.

U.S. government officials assumed the helm of the new United Nations Committee on Narcotic Drugs and launched efforts to control the coca commodities market. Led by an American pharmaceutical executive, the CND sent a commission to the Andes in 1949 to study the “coca problem.” The U.N. adopted their recommendation that coca-leaf cultivation be limited to exports destined for North American pharmaceutical manufacturers’ laboratories. Presented as a scientific modernizing initiative, the recommendations stigmatized Aymara and Quechua consumption of coca leaves in their natural state, claiming this generated addiction, poverty, and underdevelopment. This constituted an attack on indigenous communities’ traditional involvement in coca consumption and trade, while promoting a drug regulatory regime that favored U.S. government and corporate interests.