| External Veto Actors, Public Opinion, and the Transformation of EU-Skeptic Parties in Croatia and Serbia |
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Andrew Konitzer, Samford University AbstractIn order to explain the creation of pro-European Union party consensus in former Yugoslav states, this paper presents a rational model of party change whereby public attitudes toward the European Union, combined with the use of external vetoes by European actors induce a conflict between party extroverts and introverts in EU-skeptic/anti-EU parties which leads either to a split in these parties or to a change to more pro-EU rhetoric. The model is applied to the cases of the Croatian Democratic Union, the Serbian Socialist Party and the Serbian Radical Party to account for changes in party rhetoric in these formerly Euro-skeptic and EU-skeptic/anti-EU parties. |



National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) is a non-profit organization created in 1978 to develop and sustain long-term, high-quality programs for post-doctoral research on the social, political, economic, environmental, and historical development of Eurasia and Central and Eastern Europe. More
Aesthetic Politics in St. Petersburg: Skyline at the Heart of Political Opposition
Alexei Yurchak, University of California, Berkeley
This working paper focuses on the plans to construct a skyscraper in St Petersburg, Russia, known originally as Gazprom-City and recently renamed into Okhta Center, and on the controversy that developed around these plans. The paper uses the skyscraper debates as a lens to discuss a particular "aesthetic politics" of St Petersburg, the meaning of "world cities" and "global architecture" in Russian and international contexts, post-Soviet forms of political and corporate governance, the mobilization of civic opposition to such projects and the ability of such urban protests to translate into a more unified and politically oriented opposition than has been possible in other contexts in Russia.