The Fourth Age of Political Communication: Democratic decay or the rise of phronetic political communication?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peter Aagaard

2016-11-01

Full Text Available The ‘fourth age’ of political communication is emerging. In the fourth age the logics of media and digitization shapes the public sphere, because algorithms and polarized drama increasingly determine what we become aware of in digital and mass media. The result may very well be a less informed public sphere. The emerging class of policy professionals has the opportunity to mix the logics of mediatization and digitization. While such a mix may very well lead to democratic decay, based on elitism, it may also hold fruitful potentials for a more democratic and ethical type of political communication, called phronetic political communication.

Political Intersectionality and Democratic Politics in the European Public Sphere

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Siim, Birte

2015-01-01

Public Sphere (EPS). It is inspired by results and reflections from the European Gender Project (EGP) , where intersectionality was used as an approach for analysing negotiations between gender and ethno-national diversity in selected European countries and in relation to the European Public Sphere....... The aim of the essay is to further deepen the theoretical and empirical understanding of intersectionality by reflecting on the relations between political intersectionality and democratic politics from a particular European perspective. It thus confronts theory and research findings concerning...... intersections of gender and ethnic diversity in political life at the national and transnational levels across Europe. In this context, political intersectionality refers to the framing of gender and ethnic diversity by major political actors as well as by activities of women’s and anti-racist organisations...

“Democratic Government”, Interest Groups and American Trade Politics

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Zhanyu Dong

2013-01-01

Full Text Available The study of American trade politics is of great significance when interpreting U.S.A. trade policies and understanding China-U.S.A. trade relations. In order to explain the mechanism of American trade politics, this paper constructs a new analytical framework of “democratic government-interest groups”, which argues that U.S.A. trade policies are not only the choices made by the democratic government between state interests and political private benefits, but also the outcomes of interaction between the U.S.A. government and interest groups. The case study of the U.S.A. trade policies toward China since the new century also demonstrates how the interaction between the government and interest groups ultimately shapes trade policies. Therefore, we need to understand the logic of American trade politics, generate more mutual benefits for our two countries, and work together to promote the bilateral free trade as well as the bilateral relations between China and the U.S.A.

Constitutional Politics, Constitutional Texts and Democratic Variety in Central and Eastern Europe

OpenAIRE

Blokker, Paul

2008-01-01

In the paper, it is argued that democratization in Central and Eastern Europe involves important forms of differentiation of democracy, rather than merely convergence to a singular – liberal-democratic, constitutional - model. One way of taking up democratic differentiation in post-communist societies is by analysing the constitutional documents of the new democratic orders, and the constitutional politics leading to the foundational documents. In a first step, the paper analyses constitution...

Democratic cultural policy : democratic forms and policy consequences

OpenAIRE

Gray, Clive

2012-01-01

The forms that are adopted to give practical meaning to democracy are assessed to identify what their implications are for the production of public policies in general and cultural policies in particular. A comparison of direct, representative, democratic elitist and deliberative versions of democracy identifies clear differences between them in terms of policy form and democratic practice. Further elaboration of these differences and their consequences are identified as areas for further res...

Can the EU’s constitutional framework accommodate democratic politics?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Scicluna Nicole

2017-11-01

Full Text Available The robustness of the EU’s constitutional framework – and its ability to accommodate democratic politics – is challenged as never before. The growing disconnect between formally democratic procedures and substantive choice is well illustrated by the Greek crisis. Since its first bailout in May 2010, Greece has held four general elections and a referendum. Yet, the anti-austerity preferences of the Greek electorate have not been effectively translated into policy.

Political Education in the Former German Democratic Republic.

Science.gov (United States)

Dumas, Wayne; Dumas, Alesia

1996-01-01

Investigates civic education curricular reform in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Discusses the problems inherent in reforming an entire educational system, from textbooks to teachers, originally designed for Marxist-Leninist purposes. Examines the German state educational structure and the role that the main political parties play in…

Political Values or the Value of Politics

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Simoska, Emilija

2016-04-01

Full Text Available This essay was motivated by the gap between proclaimed democratic principles and the perceptions of politics which are exhibited by the citizens in transitional countries -more specifically in the Republic of Macedonia. It is based on research data collected in the past few decades, which illustrate that, in their political actions, the citizens are highly motivated by personal benefits and profits, rather than by their internalized values and ideologies. Non-democratic, authoritarian values prevail, while politics is perceived as a value itself, in the most materialistic meaning of the word. It creates a suitable milieu for growth of corruption, nepotism and clientelism. The authors conclude that such a circulus vitsiosus is a corner stone of the Macedonian political regime, and an enormous obstacle for the advancement of the participative, democratic political culture in reality, in spite of its formal acceptance.

The Effect of Direct Democratic Participation on Citizens’ Political Attitudes in Switzerland: The Difference between Availability and Use

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Anna Kern

2017-03-01

Full Text Available According to advocates of direct democracy, it is important to involve citizens more directly in political decision-making processes in order to create a democratic linkage between citizens and the political system. Indeed, some studies have demonstrated that citizens who live in direct democracies have higher levels of trust in political institutions and a higher sense of political efficacy. However, not all empirical evidence confirms this relationship. In a recent article on Switzerland, it was shown that, while the availability of direct democratic rights enhances trust in political institutions, using those rights actually initiates distrust. In this paper I expand the analysis of Bauer and Fatke (2014 and test whether the different effects of availability of direct democratic rights and the frequency of their use also hold for broader measures of trust in political institutions and political efficacy. I find that, even though an increased use of direct democratic measures is associated with lower levels of confidence in authorities on the cantonal level, this relationship is no longer apparent when applying a more comprehensive measurement of trust in political institutions.

THE PLACE OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN A DEMOCRATIC STATE, THROUGH THE GLASS OF CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW

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Valentina BĂRBĂȚEANU

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Political parties are nowadays key actors in democratic societies, shaping social mentalities, creating and following ideologies, inducing common vision, establishing targets and ideals. Their main goal is gaining the political power by conquering the access to the highest levels of decision in the State. They are based on the freedom of association and, unlike other associations, they have a specific constitutional and legal position because they are defining and giving expression to the citizens' political will, in respect of the principles of democracy. Romanian Basic Law provides that political pluralism represents one of the supreme values of the Romanian State governed by the rule of law. In this context, the Constitutional Court has solved, over the years, various issues regarding the political parties. Authorities of constitutional jurisdiction in European countries have also been asked to express, one way or another, their opinion in connection with the activity of the political parties. Taking into consideration their importance for a healthy democratic system, the European Commission for Democracy through Law -Venice Commission has paid special attention to the complexity of aspects involved by the protection of democratic values.

Democratic socialism and the choices in the building of a political economy

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Claus Offe

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The holders of political power may choose among the myriad of institutional possibilities that exist between capitalism and socialism. After explaining why any system of production is mixed, this essay explores both why markets are frequently considered preferable to other arrangements and which are the “simple” wrongs associated with capitalist market economies. Among these “simple” wrongs, we find markets’ tendency to self-subversion, to permeate the whole of social life, and to inflict damage when it is permitted to markets to encompass the factors of production, like labor, natural resources, and money. Despite these “simple” wrongs, democratic socialists and social democrats believe that the political power mobilized within liberal democracies can cope with these side-effects by resorting to instruments like anti-trust legislation, market-constraining policies, and to the protection of the factors of production. Finally, the essay explains why social democrats and democratic socialists believe that liberal democracy, with its emphasis on liberty and equality, on the one hand, and on representation, contestation, and accountability, on the other, is the institutional arrangement that can best cope with the inherent pathologies of capitalist market societies

Political Ideology, Trust, and Cooperation: In-group Favoritism among Republicans and Democrats during a US National Election.

Science.gov (United States)

Balliet, Daniel; Tybur, Joshua M; Wu, Junhui; Antonellis, Christian; Van Lange, Paul A M

2018-04-01

Theories suggest that political ideology relates to cooperation, with conservatives being more likely to pursue selfish outcomes, and liberals more likely to pursue egalitarian outcomes. In study 1, we examine how political ideology and political party affiliation (Republican vs. Democrat) predict cooperation with a partner who self-identifies as Republican or Democrat in two samples before ( n = 362) and after ( n = 366) the 2012 US presidential election. Liberals show slightly more concern for their partners' outcomes compared to conservatives (study 1), and in study 2 this relation is supported by a meta-analysis ( r = .15). However, in study 1, political ideology did not relate to cooperation in general. Both Republicans and Democrats extend more cooperation to their in-group relative to the out-group, and this is explained by expectations of cooperation from in-group versus out-group members. We discuss the relation between political ideology and cooperation within and between groups.

Political Identity Convergence: On Being Latino, Becoming a Democrat, and Getting Active

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Leonie Huddy

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The majority of Latinos in the United States identify with the Democratic Party, a tendency with broad political implications as Latinos become an increasingly large segment of the population. Little research, however, has delved into the origins of this preference. In this research, we contrast two explanations for Latinos’ Democratic proclivities: an instrumental explanation grounded in ideological policy preferences and an expressive identity account based on the defense of Latino identity and status. In analysis of data from two large national datasets, the 2012 Latino Immigrant National Election Study and American National Election Study focused on Latino immigrants and citizens respectively, we find strong support for the expressive identity explanation. Hispanic and partisan identities have converged among Latinos in the United States to create a large number of Latino Democrats regardless of citizenship status. Those who identify strongly as Latinos and see pervasive discrimination against Latinos are the strongest Democrats, a process that further intensified over the course of the 2012 election. A strong partisan preference increased political campaign activity, though this activity level was modest overall. Relatively few Latinos had worked on a campaign or given money to a candidate; somewhat larger numbers had tried to convince others about a candidate or worn a button or displayed a sticker. Finally, some support was evident for an instrumental account. Latino support for government-provided health insurance in 2012 consistently increased support for the Democratic Party.

From Pericles to Plato – from democratic political praxis to totalitarian political philosophy

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Øjvind Larsen

2012-03-01

Full Text Available Plato is normally taken as one of the founders of Western political philosophy, not at least with his Republic. Here, he constructs a hierarchy of forms of governments, beginning with aristocracy at the top as a critical standard for the other forms of governments, and proceeding through timocracy and oligarchy to democracy and tyranny at the bottom. Following Karl Popper, the paper argues that Plato’s is a totalitarian philosophy that emphasizes the similarities between democracy and tyranny, which it considers to be the two worst forms of government. Plato’s denigration of democracy has dominated the tradition of political philosophy until recent times. This paper, however, shows that political philosophy in fact originates in democracy, especially as developed by the sophists and that philosophy is only a form of sophism with a similar origin in ancient Greek democracy. A discussion of Pericles’ funeral oration is used to show that Pericles presented a democratic political philosophy that can serve as a counterpoint to Plato’s political philosophy in the Republic.

The Political Role of the Ethnic Factor Democratic Republic of the ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This paper analyses the role of the ethnic factor in political choices in the Democratic .... 4 Decision no 031/CEI/BUR/06 on the announcing of provisional results of the 30 July .... is complicated when we add the purchasing of consciences.

An ethic for a politic of history in a democratic setting

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Warring, Anette Elisabeth

2013-01-01

The article argues that the point of departure for the societal role of historians and of the science of history should be an ethic for a politic of history in a democratic setting designed to increase the individual's autonomous power to take action. The article discusses what this implies...

Political Ideology, Trust, and Cooperation: In-group Favoritism among Republicans and Democrats during a US National Election

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Balliet, Daniel; Tybur, Joshua M.; Wu, Junhui; Antonellis, Christian; Van Lange, Paul A.M.

2018-01-01

Theories suggest that political ideology relates to cooperation, with conservatives being more likely to pursue selfish outcomes, and liberals more likely to pursue egalitarian outcomes. In study 1, we examine how political ideology and political party affiliation (Republican vs. Democrat) predict

The German federal election of 2009: The challenge of participatory cultures in political campaigns

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Andreas Jungherr

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Increasingly, political actors have to act in online communication environments. There they meet overlapping networked publics with different levels of participatory cultures and varying expectations of participation in the (remaking and co-production of political content. This challenges political actors used to a top-down approach to communication. Meanwhile, online users are increasingly politically involved as legislatures all over the world become more active in regulating communication environments online. These new political actors often share participatory practices and have high levels of new media skills. Now they are challenged to adapt these bottom-up participatory cultures to the traditional political environment. This paper examines these adaption processes by examining three examples from the campaign for the German federal election of 2009. These examples include the attempt of Germany's conservative party (CDU to encourage their supporters to adapt participatory practices, the German Social Democrats' (SPD top-down production and distribution of online content that mimicked the look and feel of user-generated content, and the bottom-up emergence of political flash mobs.

[The participation in health councils and its interface with politics culture].

Science.gov (United States)

de Oliveira, Lucia Conde; Pinheiro, Roseni

2010-08-01

The objective of this paper is to analyse the participation of current health councils in a city in the north-eastern of Brazil and its relationship with local political culture. The following theoretical presumption served as starting point: The practices adopted by health councils initiate a new institution that involves new social actors - the users - in the public sphere. The process of democratisation in the Brazilian society expands this sphere and leads to a confrontation of traditional and democratic political cultures. This is a qualitative research with the following data collection methods: documentary analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Within the evidence emerged, the dominance of traditional political culture resulted as one of the conditioning elements of participation practices in the Council, expressed in the authoritarianism and cooptation involving municipal managers and representatives of civil society. The majority of counsellors recognises the fragile power of the Council in terms of deliberative and fiscal issues. Despite confirming the frailties of the health councils, it is obvious that their importance in the democratisation of the relationship between State and civil society in the fight for the implementation of the right to health care.

Reorienting Deliberation: Identity Politics in Multicultural Societies

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Rebecca Mason

2010-03-01

Full Text Available Many political theorists argue that cross-cultural communication within multicultural democracies is not best served by a commitment to identity politics. In response, I argue that identity politics only interfere with democratic participation according to an erroneous interpretation of the relationship between identity and reasoning. I argue that recognizing the importance of identity to the intelligibility of reasons offered in the context of civic deliberation is the first step towards the kind of dialogue that democratic participation requires.

Transgender inclusion in state non-discrimination policies: The democratic deficit and political powerlessness

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Andrew R Flores

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Transgender people—people whose gender identity or expression is different from their assigned sex at birth—and their allies advocate for the inclusion of gender identity or transgender in state non-discrimination policies. These policies generally proscribe discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Courts and administrative agencies have determined discrimination against transgender people is a violation of existing statutes, but there remain efforts by advocates to seek policies that explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of transgender status, which are often the result of legislation going through the political process. A pluralist understanding of the political process theorizes that a majority coalition of minorities can offer social groups policies they support. This rests on the presumption that a majority coalition of minorities should rule. Any indication to the contrary may suggest a democratic deficit, whereby more than a majority is necessary for policy introduction. We find that there is a substantial democratic deficit regarding the inclusion of gender identity or transgender in employment non-discrimination policies. On average, state support for the policy must be 81% in order for the state to have a policy reflecting such sentiment. This leaves substantial implications for the political powerlessness of transgender people in the political process.

Young Women's Political Participation in Malawi | IDRC ...

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

IDRC's Democratic Governance, Women's Rights and Gender Equality initiative is ... They continue to be underrepresented in positions of power. ... social, economic, cultural and political situation of rural women in Malawi affects the political ...

Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes among Nation States.

Science.gov (United States)

Matthews, Luke J; Passmore, Sam; Richard, Paul M; Gray, Russell D; Atkinson, Quentin D

2016-01-01

Political and economic risks arise from social phenomena that spread within and across countries. Regime changes, protest movements, and stock market and default shocks can have ramifications across the globe. Quantitative models have made great strides at predicting these events in recent decades but incorporate few explicitly measured cultural variables. However, in recent years cultural evolutionary theory has emerged as a major paradigm to understand the inheritance and diffusion of human cultural variation. Here, we combine these two strands of research by proposing that measures of socio-linguistic affiliation derived from language phylogenies track variation in cultural norms that influence how political and economic changes diffuse across the globe. First, we show that changes over time in a country's democratic or autocratic character correlate with simultaneous changes among their socio-linguistic affiliations more than with changes of spatially proximate countries. Second, we find that models of changes in sovereign default status favor including socio-linguistic affiliations in addition to spatial data. These findings suggest that better measurement of cultural networks could be profoundly useful to policy makers who wish to diversify commercial, social, and other forms of investment across political and economic risks on an international scale.

The Media Protest of Neighbouring Associations, Promoter of Citizen Democratic Culture during Transition in Southern Spain

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Sandra Méndez-Muros

2018-02-01

Full Text Available In the current context of placing value on the neighbouring movement within the Spanish democratic Transition, we set out to confirm that the press actively participates in the growing conjunction of neighbouring issues with political content and contributes to the idea that this movement becomes a parameter of the democratic culture for the citizen during Transition. Since the conflict is newsworthy, we conduct a micro-social study of the neighbouring protest in the newspaper El Correo de Andalucía, published in the southern Spanish city of Seville. Through analysis of content, we study the informative flow and the repertoire of protest following a typology that distinguishes four formats (demonstrations, strikes, speeches and associations divided into two levels of conflict. The analysis sample consists of 33 texts published between November 1975 (Franco’s death and the accession to the throne of Juan Carlos I and June 1977 (the first democratic general elections. The main conclusion reveals that the newspaper becomes a platform that gives visibility to the neighbouring movement, normalising behaviours and procedure rules through the protest.

The democratizing impact of governance networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sørensen, Eva; Torfing, Jacob

2018-01-01

impact of governance networks. It claims that the initial celebration of the pluralization of public governance and the subsequent call for a democratic anchorage of governance networks should give way to a new concern for how governance networks can strengthen and democratize political leadership. Tying......Initially, governance networks were intended as tools for making public governance more effective. Yet, scholars have argued that governance networks also have the potential to democratize public governance. This article provides an overview of theoretical arguments pertaining to the democratizing...... political leadership to networked processes of collaborative governance fosters ‘interactive political leadership’. The article presents theoretical arguments in support of interactive political leadership, and provides an illustrative case study of a recent attempt to strengthen political leadership...

Degrees of democraticity

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Lars Bergström

2011-05-01

Full Text Available People have tended to load their different conceptions of democracy with their own political ideals; in this paper it is argued that normative and definitional questions should rather be separated, so that political philosophers and political scientists may adopt the same concept of democracy, even if they disagree normatively or politically. Moreover, it is argued that we should replace an absolute notion of democracy by a relativized notion, which allows for different degrees of democraticity. This facilitates the separation of normative and conceptual issues and it is convenient in contexts in which “democratic deficits” are discussed – as e.g. when democracy is to be implemented on a supranational level. Moreover, it has the consequence that democratic deficits are not necessarily bad. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1837342

Political Rationality

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Solhaug, Trond; Kristensen, Niels Nørgaard

The very idea about democracies is public participation in elections, decision-making and/or public engagement. The democratic participation distributes power among ordinary people and serve to legitimize decisions in public affairs and is a vital characteristic of a political culture.”The term...

The Fourth Age of Political Communication: Democratic decay or the rise of phronetic political communication?

OpenAIRE

Peter Aagaard

2016-01-01

The ‘fourth age’ of political communication is emerging. In the fourth age the logics of media and digitization shapes the public sphere, because algorithms and polarized drama increasingly determine what we become aware of in digital and mass media. The result may very well be a less informed public sphere. The emerging class of policy professionals has the opportunity to mix the logics of mediatization and digitization. While such a mix may very well lead to democratic decay, based on eliti...

Muslim Politics in Malaysia and the Democratization Process

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Lukman Thaib

2013-06-01

Full Text Available This article will address the Muslim politics in Malaysia in the light of the broader shifts towards democratization and Islamization by focusing on politics among the majority ethnic Malay community, followed an overview of the ideological rivalry between UMNO and PAS, with special reference to the electoral performances of these parties in the past three general elections (November 1999, March 2004 and March 2008 . It then explores the underlying reason for the perceived importance of Islam in understanding the voting trend among the Malay-Muslim electorate which raised the question to what extent was the discourse on Islam instrumental in persuading the Malays to switch their support from PAS to the UMNO during the 2004 elections, and in the process of continued participation as an ‘Islamic Party’ in Malaysian mainstream politics what factors were that encouraged the PAS leaders to compromises and to play by the ‘rule of democracy’. In the concluding part of the article the writer also provide with an overview on reform agenda of Civilizational Islam (Islam Hadhari under premiership of Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and the current Malaysia’s Transformation Programme (GTP under the leadership of Dato’ Sri Mohd Najib Tun Abdul Razak.

Revisiting Liberal Democratic Universalism: A Critical Rhetoric of the Liberal Democratic World Order

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Rose Joy E. Smith

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Liberal democracy has become the predominant political regime in the 21st century even in countries that have little or no history of ‘democratic structures and practices’. However, it seems as though setting up a functional, stable, and viable democratic state is harder than overthrowing autocratic rulers. This rhetorical criticism explores gridlocks that hamper the development of universal liberal democratic values by emphasizing the Western hegemonic status of defining what liberal democracy is. It is pertinent to look into this dominant role considering that it is through these values that actions, policies, and other values are to be construed and judged. This paper aims to (1 highlight the role of moral cosmopolitanism as the initial step of Western hegemony, (2 identify the paradox of defining liberal democracy as universal but treating it as a particular, and (3 discuss the ironies of democratic imperialism and its hindrance to self-determination. This paper hopes to shed some light in the importance of various interpretations, definitions, and adaptations of liberal democratic values depending on the context of the society incorporating, its culture, its values, and its identity, in order to find a more comprehensive definition of democracy.

Institutions and Cultural Diversity: Effects of Democratic and Propaganda Processes on Local Convergence and Global Diversity.

Science.gov (United States)

Ulloa, Roberto; Kacperski, Celina; Sancho, Fernando

2016-01-01

In a connected world where people influence each other, what can cause a globalized monoculture, and which measures help to preserve the coexistence of cultures? Previous research has shown that factors such as homophily, population size, geography, mass media, and type of social influence play important roles. In the present paper, we investigate for the first time the impact that institutions have on cultural diversity. In our first three studies, we extend existing agent-based models and explore the effects of institutional influence and agent loyalty. We find that higher institutional influence increases cultural diversity, while individuals' loyalty to their institutions has a small, preserving effect. In three further studies, we test how bottom-up and top-down processes of institutional influence impact our model. We find that bottom-up democratic practices, such as referenda, tend to produce convergence towards homogeneity, while top-down information dissemination practices, such as propaganda, further increase diversity. In our last model--an integration of bottom-up and top-down processes into a feedback loop of information--we find that when democratic processes are rare, the effects of propaganda are amplified, i.e., more diversity emerges; however, when democratic processes are common, they are able to neutralize or reverse this propaganda effect. Importantly, our models allow for control over the full spectrum of diversity, so that a manipulation of our parameters can result in preferred levels of diversity, which will be useful for the study of other factors in the future. We discuss possible mechanisms behind our results, applications, and implications for political and social sciences.

Maintaining Identity Political Culture In Indonesia

Science.gov (United States)

Fauzi, AM; Sudrajat, A.; Affandi, A.; Raditya, A.

2018-01-01

This study investigates the portrayal of traditional political cultures in West Kalimantan Province, a growing of election process. Results showed that Political life in Indonesia leads to modern political culture after experiencing a change of paradigm of political life. Political life in Indonesia leads to modern political culture after experiencing a change of paradigm of political life. Beginning Indonesia’s independence in the Old Order Phase, the politics used using the ideological paradigm, subsequent to the New Order Period used the political paradigm of unification and simplification of political parties but in practice it became the strategy of the State’s rulers to facilitate subjugating its citizens. After entering the reform era, several phenomena of political culture are displayed, some are using modern paradigm by giving women the widest possible role in political parties, and so on. Besides that there is the opposite of displaying and practicing traditional political culture, this is as it runs in West Borneo Province. The change of political culture in the modern direction is different from the political culture of the citizens in terms of who will be chosen, most West Borneo Province residents determine their political choice by using traditional patterns.

Comparing the democratic value of Facebook discussions across the profiles of Spanish political candidates during the 2011 General Election

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lidia Valera Ordaz

2017-03-01

Full Text Available This article examines the democratic value of user-generated comments on the Facebook profiles of three Spanish candidates during the Spanish General Election campaign of 2011 through a content analysis that operationalizes deliberative democracy. The findings show that these online spaces do not meet deliberative standards, but that they still serve democratic functions, such as citizen self-expression, democratic socialization and reinforcement of social cohesion among party activists and sympathizers. Moreover, results indicate that democratic value might vary depending on the size of the party where talk takes place. Political conversation on the walls of hegemonic candidates who belong to big consolidated political parties is mostly oriented towards self-expression and features some ideological diversity, so that individuals are sporadically confronted with diversity. For its part, talk on the Facebook profile of the minor candidate lacks fundamental disagreement but includes more in-group interaction, allowing minority ideological spheres for the cultivation of social cohesion and the construction of collective narratives in favorable discursive conditions.

Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes among Nation States.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Luke J Matthews

Full Text Available Political and economic risks arise from social phenomena that spread within and across countries. Regime changes, protest movements, and stock market and default shocks can have ramifications across the globe. Quantitative models have made great strides at predicting these events in recent decades but incorporate few explicitly measured cultural variables. However, in recent years cultural evolutionary theory has emerged as a major paradigm to understand the inheritance and diffusion of human cultural variation. Here, we combine these two strands of research by proposing that measures of socio-linguistic affiliation derived from language phylogenies track variation in cultural norms that influence how political and economic changes diffuse across the globe. First, we show that changes over time in a country's democratic or autocratic character correlate with simultaneous changes among their socio-linguistic affiliations more than with changes of spatially proximate countries. Second, we find that models of changes in sovereign default status favor including socio-linguistic affiliations in addition to spatial data. These findings suggest that better measurement of cultural networks could be profoundly useful to policy makers who wish to diversify commercial, social, and other forms of investment across political and economic risks on an international scale.

New social movements as a political subculture

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zwick, M.M.

1990-01-01

The contribution is based on a topical panel set especially adjusted to the requirements of political culture research, electoral research, and movement research. The book is centered around empirically verified findings of political-cultural modernization and differentiation processes, and the development of German political culture. It was possible to empirically confirm the main thesis in particular: The new social movements call for rigid and quick social changes in emancipatory, equalitary, ecological and fundamental-democratic orientation. Apart from the Greens, an independent political subculture has formed itself, which is, even in the present phase with little movement-specific mobilization, politically effective and empirically ascertainable. (orig.) [de

Political “genotype” as a structural element of political culture

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N. V. Karpova

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The article is devoted to the issue of genetic foundations of political culture in the context of the socio-political system changes. The author elaborates the concept of “political genotype” as a sustainable structural element of political culture that determines its content and the possibility of permissible variation. In this paper the main forms of existence of political genotype and its functions are also investigated; and “genetic” mechanism of political culture succession is explored.

DEMOCRATIZATION AND POLITICAL TRANSITION IN ARAB WORLD: PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES

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Ibrahim Kawuley Mikail

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Democracy and Democratization process was among the top priorities in the new post-cold war global agenda. This issue has convinced some undemocratic countries of Arab World to set up in quest for democracy and to assertively demand their long-denied socio-economic and political justice by the autocratic rulers for the region. Indeed, the current Arab spring is geared towards transition from undemocratic system (i.e. Monarchy and Military dictatorship to democracy. Secondary data was adopted in this study. The study revealed that humiliation, prolong monarchy/military dictatorship, lack of economic reform, globalization and proliferation of mass literacy were among the factors responsible for political transition in the region. Meanwhile, establishment of tenets of democracy (i.e. rules of law, human rights, freedom, etc. and insecurity, external domination and loss of lives were among the prospect and challenges of the transition. The paper recommended among others that there is need for political and economic reform in the Arab countries which would lead to transit to democracy.

Political mechanisms of democratization in modern Ukraine

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I. A. Tsurkanova

2014-07-01

Today, the political situation in Ukraine, strongly suggests that Ukrainian society is still prevalent understanding of the revolutionary democracy as freedom­destroying. However, in assessing the possible existence of democracy in modern conditions of development of Ukraine, among other principles, it is necessary to consider that in any case it should seek fundamental values and ideals not overseas ­ for the dales, and the private Ukrainian political history and culture.

Good governance and political culture: A case study of Bangladesh

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Syed Serajul Islam

2016-12-01

Full Text Available In a democratic system it is essential to have a competitive, and a tolerant party system, but Bangladesh has experienced an intolerant and a confrontational party system that has created a deadlock and brought uncertainty to the whole country. Since 1990, except 2014, Bangladesh has witnessed four systematic peaceful free elections, one each--in 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2008. On January 5, 2014, however, a controversial election took place in which major opposition political parties did not participate except the ruling alliance parties. The two dominant parties—the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP and the Awami League (AL—each won two previous free and fair elections, with the BNP winning in1991, and a BNP-led 4-party coalition in 2001, and the AL in 1996, and an AL-led 14 party alliance in 2008. However, from 2014 Bangladesh is heading towards an authoritarian system. All these are happening due to the lack of good governance. This article intends to emphasize that the political culture emanating from the party politics is retarding good governance in Bangladesh. This article argues that the cultural traits developed in the last four decades in various dimensions,, particularly in more recent years, have worked as an “earth-worm” in the fabrics of democracy in Bangladesh preventing ‘good governance’.

Sick of Health Care Politics? Comparing Views of Quality of Care Between Democrats and Republicans.

Science.gov (United States)

Scott, Kirstin W; Blendon, Robert J; Benson, John M

Improving the quality of care delivered by the U.S. health care system is a topic of important policy and political debate. Although public opinion surveys have shown concerns regarding the state of quality of care nationally, the majority of Americans are satisfied with the quality of care they personally receive. Studies have shown that Republicans and Democrats may differ in these views. We used a 2012 national survey of 1,508 American adults that captured perceptions of quality, political party, medical experiences, and self-reported interactions with the health care system due to an illness to examine these differences. Regardless of having a recent illness or hospitalization, Democrats generally expressed greater concerns about the country's state of health care quality relative to Republicans. Partisan differences also emerged when identifying the most important problems contributing to quality-of-care deficiencies in the nation. However, partisan differences were nonexistent on measures related to self-reported experiences with quality of care. Although their individual experiences with quality of care do not differ, Republicans and Democrats differ in their views on national quality-of-care issues. This may have implications for efforts to improve quality of care in the current polarized healthcare environment.

Political Culture, Values and Economic Utility: A Different Perspective on Norwegian Party-based Euroscepticism

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marianne S. Skinner

2010-08-01

Full Text Available Drawing on a content analysis of party manifestos and a survey of Norwegian MPs, this article examines the nuances in, and the causality of, the different Norwegian parties’ Euroscepticism. The study of the comparative party politics of Euroscepticism, which focuses on ideology and strategy, falls short of accounting for the Norwegian case, where, unlike other European countries, the parties’ Euroscepticism is exceptionally stable and appears across the political spectrum. Therefore, the article tests an alternative set of theories, drawn from the literature on opinion formation on European integration, to find a more suitable framework for analysing and explaining the motivation of Norwegian Euroscepticism. The analysis shows that Norwegian party-based Euroscepticism can be divided into three types when it comes to its strength and policy opposition, with the Centre Party and the Socialist Left Party on the ‘hardest’ end of the Euroscepticism scale, followed by the Christian Democratic Party and the Liberal Party, and finally, the Labour Party and the Progress Party. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that Norwegian Eurosceptic party stances on Europe are primarily driven by political values and political culture concerns, except for the Progress Party, which base its Eurosceptic motivation on economic utilitarianism and political culture.

Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times

OpenAIRE

Odih, Pamela

2010-01-01

Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times traces daringly transgressive convergences between cultural politics and global advertising media. It engages with a range of interpolations between cultural politics and advertising technologies including: the governmental rationality of neoliberal vistas, transgressive aesthetics and the cultural politics of representation, the political sign-economy of citizen branding, techno-political convergences between the social and political, and the...

Political Culture and Covalent Bonding. A Conceptual Model of Political Culture Change

OpenAIRE

Camelia Florela Voinea

2015-01-01

Our class of models aims at explaining the dynamics of political attitude change by means of the dynamic changes in values, beliefs, norms and knowledge with which it is associated. The model constructs a political culture perspective over the relationship between macro and micro levels of a society and polity. The model defines the bonding mechanism as a basic mechanism of the political culture change by taking inspiration from the valence bonding theory in Chemistry, which has inspired the ...

Cross-cultural Context and Politeness

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

朱芬

2012-01-01

In social interaction,politeness is a universal phenomenon existing in all languages.However,for social,ethnographic and even historical reasons,politeness strategies in a specific cultural context may vary from one to another.And for most time it is not language itself but different politeness strategies that lead to cross-cultural communicative failure.Knowing about these differences will help to overcome pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication.

The Democratic Vision of Carl Schmitt

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Pedersen, Søren Hviid

2013-01-01

The main purpose of this paper is to justify two propositions. One, that Schmitt’s political vision is indeed democratic and second, that Schmitt’s democratic vision, plebiscitary or leadership democracy, is better adapted to our modern political condition and the challenges confronting modern...

Political News and Political Consciousness

Science.gov (United States)

Schertges, Claudia

2007-01-01

This article deals with mass media in modern democratic societies, using the example of Israeli news reports in German television (TV) news. Central to this interest are processes of mediating politics: political socialisation and education; that is to say, empowering citizens via TV news to participate in democratic processes. The article…

Rethinking democracy and representation: a proposal to extend the democratic canon

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alejandro Monsiváis Carrillo

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Rethinking political representation is necessary to understand many contemporary democratic challenges. However, a widely accepted view states that democracy and representation are two irreconcilable principles, thus hindering the theoretical assessment of political representation's democratic relevance. According to this view, what democracy needs is more popular participation; instead, representation involves elitism and political detachment. In this paper I will argue that such a view is inaccurate. Through the reconstruction of the democratic ideal, and the discussion of the concept of political representation, I intend to show that processes of political authorization, accountability and public justification are both elements of political representation and expression of democratic politics.

Democratic values, emotions and emotivism

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Vranić Bojan

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to explore the relation between democratic values and emotions. The author argues that democratic values and emotional judgments are inter-reducible: political agents use emotional judgments to reflexively evaluate normative paradigms of political life. In the first part of the paper, the author describes the state of emotions in contemporary political philosophy and identifies Charles Stevenson’s ethical conception of emotivism as the first comprehensive attempt to neutrally conceptualize emotions in moral and political thinking. The second part of the paper explores the shortcomings of emotivism and finds an adequate alternative in Martha Nussbaum’s concept of emotional judgment as the one that contains beliefs and values about social objects. In the final part of the paper, the author identifies that moral and political disagreements emerge in democracies from ranking of the importance of political objects. The evaluation criteria for this type of ranking is derived from democratic values which are reducible to agents’ emotional judgments. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179076

Religion, politics and gender equality in Turkey: implications of a democratic paradox?

Science.gov (United States)

Arat, Yeşim

2010-01-01

This article examines the gendered implications of the intertwining of Islam and politics that took shape after the process of democratisation in Turkey had brought a political party with an Islamist background to power. This development revived the spectre of restrictive sex roles for women. The country is thus confronted with a democratic paradox: the expansion of religious freedoms accompanying potential and/or real threats to gender equality. The ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities has been the most visible terrain of public controversy on Islam. However, the paper argues that a more threatening development is the propagation of patriarchal religious values, sanctioning secondary roles for women through the public bureaucracy as well as through the educational system and civil society organisations.

Democratization and Political Change as Threats to Collective Sentiments: Testing Durkheim in Russia.

Science.gov (United States)

Pridemore, William Alex; Kim, Sang-Weon

2006-05-01

Durkheim argued that acute political crises result in increased homicide rates because they pose a threat to sentiments about the collective. Though crucial to Durkheim's work on homicide, this idea remains untested. The authors took advantage of the natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine this hypothesis. Using data from Russian regions (N = 78) and controlling for measures of anomie and other covariates, the authors estimated the association between political change and change in homicide rates between 1991 and 2000. Results indicated that regions exhibiting less support for the Communist Party in 2000 (and thus greater change in political ideals because the Party had previously exercised complete control) were regions with greater increases in homicide rates. Thus, while democratization may be a positive development relative to the Communist juggernaut of the past, it appears that the swift political change in Russia is partially responsible for the higher rates of violence there following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Exploring Women's Understanding of Politics, Political Contestation ...

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

Exploring Women's Understanding of Politics, Political Contestation and Gender Transformation in the Caribbean. IDRC's Democratic Governance, Women's Rights and Gender Equality initiative is supporting a body of comparative research on whether and how democratic processes and institutions are responding to ...

A Study of Democratic School Culture Perceptions of Sport High School Students

Science.gov (United States)

Isikgöz, Enes

2016-01-01

In this study; the perceptions of the students studying at sport high schools about democratic school culture were analysed in accordance with different variables. Participants of the research consisted of 216 students studying at Sport High Schools in Sakarya and Batman Provinces of Turkey. The data were collected with the Democratic School…

Irony and Politically Incorrect Humanitarianism

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Olwig, Mette Fog; Christiansen, Lene Bull

2016-01-01

trends, it can, in a local national setting, develop in ways that are contrary to the political correctness characteristic of global celebrity humanitarianism. In the Danish cultural context we found that anti-elitist cultural norms and social codes, rooted in local understandings of democratic inclusion...... and equality, must be inscribed into celebrity performances. This form of performativity is often achieved through ostensibly politically incorrect, unassuming and underplayed, irony. It is, however, an unenlightened democracy, unaware of those it excludes - i.e. the Other who is kept invisible through...

Democratization of Education as Prerequisite for Social Economic and Cultural Progress in a Multi-Cultural Society

Science.gov (United States)

Madumere, S. C.; Olisaemeka, B. U.

2011-01-01

This paper focuses on democratization of education as a prerequisite for social, economic and cultural progress in a multi-cultural society, such as Nigeria. Attempt was made to define and explain the major concepts in the paper. Education was explained as an instrument of democracy and as function of socialization, culture and economic…

Public Policies – Embodiments of Democratization Processes

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Dorina Ţicu

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Public policies are the most practical part of the triad polity-politics-policy. Public policies are related to the practical areas of planning, implementation and evaluation of the governmental activities. From this perspective, to talk about a perfect public policy (or which aspires to perfection means to speak about an efficient institutional system of a state as a sign of its degree of democratization. This article aims to explore “the cuisine” of democratic systems taking into account the applied perspective of public policy functionality, a type of functionality which is determined by a particular decision, by a kind of rationality or motivation of the actors involved or by a type of an organizational culture. Thus, the study of democracies involves an analytical approach developed at a micro level (the types of parties, institutional designs, election systems, public policies becoming indices of democratization for every state system.

Political System of the Great Cultural Revolution Reflected in Misty Poetry

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Špela Oberstar

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The article outlines Chinese literature following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in relation to Mao’s Communist policy. It presents the occurrence of Misty poetry as an opposition to the political ideology of the Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976. Misty poetry is understood as a spontaneous illegal poetic movement of individuals who veiled their political demands directed against Mao’s ideology in metaphors. This oppositional stance resembled the movement of 4th May 1919 which took place after the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty and criticised the traditional dominant ideology of Confucianism and sought democratization of the Chinese society. The same desire was shared by the Misty poets but this time under the dominance of the political ideology of the Chinese Communist Party in the period following 1942 which was indicated by Mao Zedong in his speech in Yan’an. Mao’s policy was repressive in nature since the role of literature and art, and thereby also poetry, was seen only as being utilitarian and was thus sealed in the dictated reflection of the class struggle. Therefore, in essence, the communist period laid its path to capitalism.

Development of Democratic Processes in the People’s Republic of China: Prospects of Transformation of the Political Regime

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alexey Alexandrovich Semenov

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Rapid economic growth of the PRC has brought new challenges and promoted social transformation in Chinese society. China suffers profound changes involving fundamental principles of public relations. The political regime in China is in a changeable condition, and continues to transform. Some decisions of the Chinese government affect not only the economy and public administration, but also in some ways human rights and political changes. Chinese political regime takes on the pending social problems and begins to gently lift old political bans. There is development of processes which at least by the formal features can be attributed to be democratic or quasi-democratic. However, despite a number of political changes and improving of human rights situation in last decades, China is still an illiberal state. Moreover, the level of repression in China has increased in the last few years. All of these actions raise questions about the political future of China. The scale of the socio-economic changes that have occurred in the PRC is so significant, that the maintaining of the existing governance structure is not possible. Rapid economic growth reduced public discontent at the disregard to fundamental human rights. Yet the “economic miracle” is coming to an end, and the country desperately needs economic and political reforms. Lack of reforms or its incorrect implementation can put the existing system out of balance, which will lead to adverse effects not only in China but also in the world. Depending on the reforms we can assume several scenarios for further development of the PRC.

Re-imagining democratic citizenship education: Towards a culture of ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

After a decade of implementing liberal conceptions of democratic citizenship education in public schools in South Africa, questions need to be asked about its credibility and success. We commence this article by analysing the Department of Basic Education's (DoBE, 2011) recently produced Building a culture of ...

Is John Locke a democrat?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Svensson, Palle

  Over recent years there has been a tendency to present John Locke as an equalitarian democrat (Ashcraft) and being close to the political views of the levellers (Waldron). This is not a completely new interpretation (Kendall, 1941), but contrasts with the prevalent view presented in textbooks (......, criteria for a democratic process, and the institutions of polyarchy. The conclusion has implications for the relationship between political liberalism and constitutionalism on the one hand and democracy on the other....

Between the Managerial and the Democratic University: Governance Structure and Academic Freedom as Sites of Political Struggle

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dalie Giroux

2016-03-01

Full Text Available In this article we argue that the university cannot fully contribute to democratic life without being both an institution whose governance is collegial and based on principles of equality, equity, inclusion, transparency, and accountability, and a vector of critical thinking closely linked to academic freedom. Based on this understanding of the ‘democratic university,’ we seek to highlight some of the key tensions between the ‘managerial university’ and the democratic university, as reflected in institutional structures, regulations, legal frameworks, and principles. In order to achieve this objective, we identify two sites of political struggles from which it is possible to examine the interaction between a managerial and a democratic conception and practice of the university. The first of these sites is the bicameral governing structure, membership, rules, and regulations of the University of Ottawa. The second site is academic freedom in Canada, which we will discuss by comparing the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ (CAUT Statement on Academic Freedom (CAUT, 2011 with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada’s (AUCC Statement on Academic Freedom (AUCC, 2011. By stressing the necessary link and positive relationship between democratic governance and academic freedom, the article offers a normative evaluation of the impact the managerial reengineering of Canadian universities has had on the possibility and practice of a more democratic university.

The Politics of Virtue: A New Compact for Leadership in Schools.

Science.gov (United States)

Sergiovanni, Thomas J.

1995-01-01

The politics of division arises from applying formal organizational theories of governance, management, and leadership to schools. Rational-choice theory and cultural pluralism lack the unifying power of civic virtue. Creating a politics of virtue requires that we renew commitments to our nation's democratic legacy. Principals must practice…

“But the forest does know it...” Persistence of omusitu in the BaNande culture and thought (Democratic Republic of Congo)

OpenAIRE

Francesco Remotti

2016-01-01

The BaNande, farmers of the hills of the North Kivu (Democratic Republic of the Congo), call themselves proudly abakondi, the young and strong men who cut down the trees, who destroy the forest. Almost their entire culture is based on the principle of the “cut” (eritwa), as well as their social and political organization is due to the historical achievement of their territory wrested from the forest. Even the erotic activity is designed with the typical categories of abakondi. But the traditi...

Influencing Republicans' and Democrats' attitudes toward Obamacare: Effects of imagined vicarious cognitive dissonance on political attitudes.

Science.gov (United States)

Cooper, Joel; Feldman, Lauren A; Blackman, Shane F

2018-04-16

The field of experimental social psychology is appropriately interested in using novel theoretical approaches to implement change in the social world. In the current study, we extended cognitive dissonance theory by creating a new framework of social influence: imagined vicarious dissonance. We used the framework to influence attitudes on an important and controversial political attitude: U.S. citizens' support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 36 Republicans and 84 Democrats were asked to imagine fellow Republicans and Democrats, respectively, making attitude discrepant statements under high and low choice conditions about support for the ACA. The data showed that vicarious dissonance, established by imagining a group member make a counterattitudinal speech under high-choice conditions (as compared to low-choice conditions), resulted in greater support for the Act by Republicans and marginally diminished support by Democrats. The results suggest a promising role for the application of vicarious dissonance theory to relevant societal issues and for further understanding the relationship of dissonance and people's identification with their social groups.

The Promotion of Democratic Behavior and the Role of Media

Science.gov (United States)

Khan, Muhammad Saqib; Khan, Irfanullah; Khan, Ahmad Ali; Jan, Farooq; Ahmad, Riaz; Rauf, Hamid

2015-01-01

This study is conducted to measure the influence of social media over the democratic behavior of the students. Social media is the main component of political participation in democratic societies and the study of democratic behavior is a highly specialized sub-field in political and social science. The study was concerned with the reasons that to…

A Politically Liberal Conception of Formal Education in a Developing Democracy

Science.gov (United States)

Çelik, Rasit

2016-01-01

As discussed by John Rawls, in a well-ordered society, a public political culture's wide educational role bears the primary responsibility for developing reasonable individuals for the stability of a politically liberal society. Rawlsian scholars have also focused on the stability and enhancement of developed liberal democratic societies by means…

Social Mobilization and Reaffirmation of Democratic Participation : The Brotherhood as Expression of a New Relational Culture

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Helen Crystine Corrêa Sanches

2016-05-01

Full Text Available Democracy represents a fundamental right for citizens. Democracy and citizen par- ticipation are developing and they complement each other, given that there is no demo- cracy without the active and conscious participation of citizens in the political process. This democratic participation occurs through tools that enable the practice of citizenship, and, among them, the social movements stand out. There is a direct relationship between the social movements and democracy: whilst the social movements exist only in demo- cratic systems, democracy requires the participation of civil society with the state. The social movements consist on a structured organization that has the purpose of uniting people to defend and promote rights, containing social identity and a particular way of thinking and acting collectively to achieve the common good and a new sort of life. The particularities of the social movements let one glimpse that the major expression of civic participation contributes to a cultural change in society, given that, with common goals, the differences are overcome, encouraging a relatedness which looks for ethics, sharing and fraternity. The understanding of fraternity in its various forms – historical, political, legal and ethical – contributes to a development in respect among people, acceptance of socio-economic and cultural differences, emphasizing the feeling of a group belonging. This way, this article aims to analyse social movements and its cooperation in building a new relational culture, more Humane, Fair And Fraternal.

Non-formal Education and Its Role in Establishing a Democratic Culture within Indonesian Heterogeneous Society.

Science.gov (United States)

Tampubolon, Mangatas

2003-01-01

Examines nonformal education's part in expanding democratic culture in Indonesia; discusses contextual constraints on democracy, use of nonformal education for literacy and life skills development, and the influence on developing citizen awareness of responsibilities in a democratic society. (Contains 28 references.) (SK)

The msi and the role of fascism in Italian political culture

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Ferran GALLEGO

2013-05-01

Full Text Available This paper analyzes the role of the italian social movement in Italy (MSI in the twentieth century. The key to understand its influence would lie in the peculiarities of the political regime emerged from the ruins of fascism. With the proclamation of the republic many fascists enrolled in the ranks of the christian Democrats and other parties of the right, leaving the MSI as sole heir of fascism. That did not stop working with the christian Democrats through the strategy of «inserimento». When the christian Democrats began their approach to the italian socialist Party, the MSI was clearly excluded and located in a relatively marginal position. Its later resurgence may be explained considering the radical changes in italian politics in the sixties and seventies; circumstances which favoured the arrival of Giorgio Almirante as leader of MSI in 1969. In that period, the MSI presented itself as the political party of restored order and ready to fight subversion (communist itself. During the 80s, the MSI moved between the ‘strategy-Party Protest’ leaded by Almirante and the idea of a ‘civil society Party’ defended by Rauti. In the end, the MSI, after the change of leadership of Almirante by Gianfranco Fini, began a new path which stated loyalty to the values of fascism, strengthened by the crisis of communism. This MSI new discourse eased its growth in circumstances in which the traditional parties and the Italian Republican system as a whole were practically about to collapse. Subsequently, the post-fascist Alianza Nacional emerged; a political formation which later on merged into Forza Italia, leaded by Silvio Berlusconi.

Normalization of Racism through the Language of Democracy: the Case of the Slovenian Democratic Party

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Ana Frank

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The article addresses the question of what kind of discursive strategies enable political parties the proliferation of racist and xenophobic ideas, in terms of a democratic society and within established politics. Theoretically, it is based on studies of racism, populism and the radical right. In the empirical part, elements of racism and (radical-right populism in the discourse of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS are analysed, with particular focus on the othering discourse. The discourse analysis includes interviews of party representatives and texts published on party’s websites. The SDS discourse analysis shows that the party articulates social problems through the use of nationalist, nativist and essentialist arguments, and proliferates and normalizes xenophobic and racist ideas by reproducing minorities and political opponents as threats to the Slovenian culture, values and lifestyle, as well as threats to the party itself.

Political Culture and the Nature of Political Participation in Egypt.

Science.gov (United States)

1980-06-01

political socialization . Political-cultural values are gradually internalized within the society and political behavior is largely reflective of...the extent to which the regime used education as a means of political socialization : Socialism is articulated as a Muslim theory of socialism. The head... political socialization except for a brief period during the mobilization program of Ali Sabri. Egypt’s party system has been more relevant for

Paradigms of Interaction Between Culture and Politics

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Morteza Bahrani

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Political thought as a normative knowledge seeks a good society and the means for its realization. Accordingly, every intellectual paradigm introduces us a social and individual situation which is the best. This model, itself requires a dramatic change in the culture and flourishes it. In another words, there is a necessary relationship between the elements of political thought and the culture in every society. This relationship is twofold, so it is impossible to indicate whether which aspect is the first. So every paradigm feeds some special elements into the current culture of society, while there is it feedback. It is important that political thought goes in search of condition for cultural flourishing which is according whit the criteria of good society. This paper focuses on most important paradigm in political thought history and shows the trend in which indicates the relationships between political thought and culture. This trend looks at human beings as "citizen", then "the individual"; and in the modem era, paradigms of "critical modem", "postmodern", and "communitarian" has a key role in prospering the realm of culture.

The impact of political culture on the functioning of democracy: analysis of ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville

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I. I. Prokopchuk

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Based on the works of the French scientist A. de Tocqueville analyzed systematically constructive and destructive influence on political culture and the institutionalization of democracy in the society. In Tocqueville’s works may be divided into 2 patterns of political culture: a American liberal-democratic; b French authoritarian. Generalized thinker idea of values, based on which the American political culture of his time as follows: 1. Man put on an equal footing with the public. 2. Spread «spirit of the law» for all American society in general. 3. Understanding people, which is the main subject of politics and power source, as a combination of highly developed, independent, self-sufficient individuals. 4. Policy - one of the areas of self-realization and even for the average individual. In the system of value orientations policy covers the Americans first place or not. 5. Antypaternalizm in settings in which people, to the government and its agencies include disbelief, with potential worries, turning to government assistance only when absolutely can not do without it. 6. Social life is characterized by pluralism. In civil Sus-ety, there are many «power points» impact on the state by the parties, associations, media, opposition. 7. The political behavior of Americans is characterized by an open, constructive. A common policy is not the only type of collective participation (through parties and associations, but also individual. 8. The tendency of American political culture to the center, which was manifested in the unpopularity of political extremism as a type of political behavior on the part of leaders, parties, mass. 9. Legitimate functioning of the political opposition. This opposition political organizations in the United States in peace and enjoy his political activities only through legal means. 10. Formation of «money» elite and its deliberate removal of professions-term politics. Generalized Tocqueville features that define

Political participation as an integral part of individuals’ identity

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G. G. Udzhmadzhuridze

2014-07-01

Author examined the main types and forms of political participation. The most common types are involved in the elections, the relationship with political organizations and visiting congresses of political organizations. It is established that political participation of individuals across the all variety of its manifestations, is an expression of civic culture of a particular society. In many states for citizens there is the usual practice of political participation, but only in democratic countries individuals will do this voluntarily and without coercion. Only voluntary political participation and awareness of it, is a manifestation of personal attitudes and beliefs. The author traced that political participation as an integral part of political culture is transmitted from generation to generation through the institutions of socialization in society. The most effective institutions of socialization influence on young people. The political socialization research has revealed the transfer of political ideals and habits between generations.

The Influence of the Democratic Pattern on the Media System in Romania

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Daniela Aurelia Popa

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Starting from the assumption that media is tightly related to the political system of the respective country, we will focus on the aspects that define democracy and determine the profile of the journalist’s role in a democratic system. A good political system has the duty to accomplish two things: to create governments that ensure the well being of the citizens, through a civil society based on legislation and free changes in the market and to protect the citizens against corruption. We will provide a comparative analysis of the roles that journalists play in a democratic society. Our paper deals with the way in which the relation between the media and the political class is perceived in a democracy. This role is often defined by syntagms that focus on the journalists’ rights and not on their responsibilities. Without a clear establishment of the obligations assumed by press professionals, these syntagms allow abuses. This paper will deal with the following aspects: the relation between the media and the political class, the transition of the Romanian media from totalitarianism to democracy, the free market of ideas, and the influence of journalists’ professional culture.

Techno-political and sectorial culture in a semi-peripheral context: nuclear development in Argentina (1945-1994)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hurtado, Diego

2013-01-01

Considering Argentina as a semi-peripheral country, the present article analyzes the establishment of a nuclear culture and a nuclear technopolitical regime -aimed at seeking technological autonomy and regional leadership as well as the promotion of a national nuclear industry- that have the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission as institutional epicenter and kept some of their main traits and orientation until the beginnings of the 1990s. The article focuses mainly on three aspects: the development of nuclear research reactors; the processes of decision-making about the purchase and construction of the country's two power nuclear plants; and the way the various political regimes that Argentina went through -democratic, semi-democratic and dictatorial periods- and regimes of accumulation -sustitutive industrialization and, since the last military dictatorship, economic deregulation- impacted and left their mark on the evolution of the nuclear technopolitical regime. Within this last point, international pressures are assumed as a crucial component. (authors) [es

Democratic Legitimacy and the European Union

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Holzhacker, Ronald

2007-01-01

This is an introduction to a Special Issue that first considers representative and deliberative conceptions of democratic legitimacy in the EU, and then presents empirical research on how the institutions of the EU are attempting to increase the democratic legitimacy of the multi-level political

Class, Culture and Politics

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Harrits, Gitte Sommer

2013-01-01

Even though contemporary discussions of class have moved forward towards recognizing a multidimensional concept of class, empirical analyses tend to focus on cultural practices in a rather narrow sense, that is, as practices of cultural consumption or practices of education. As a result......, discussions within political sociology have not yet utilized the merits of a multidimensional conception of class. In light of this, the article suggests a comprehensive Bourdieusian framework for class analysis, integrating culture as both a structural phenomenon co-constitutive of class and as symbolic...... practice. Further, the article explores this theoretical framework in a multiple correspondence analysis of a Danish survey, demonstrating how class and political practices are indeed homologous. However, the analysis also points at several elements of field autonomy, and the concluding discussion...

Politeness Principle in Cross-Culture Communication

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Yongliang

2008-01-01

As we all know, different people hold different views about politeness. To be polite, Leech thinks you should follow "Politeness Principle" while Levinson suggests paying attention to others' "Face Wants". Sometimes what the Chinese people considered to be polite may not be true according to western culture. In order to…

Political science factor in information culture

OpenAIRE

Baranov G.

2017-01-01

The value of political science in information culture of society reveals; the main indicators of the public status of political science are investigated; the main functions of political science in the activity of actors of society are characterised.

Ross-Cultural Aspects of Metaphorical Framing in Political Discourse

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tatyana V. Andryukhina

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The article examines cross-cultural aspects of metaphorical framing in political discourse. The author notes the importance of conceptual metaphor in framing the conceptual domain of politics, political discourse as a whole, its perception as well as political reality itself. The author shares an opinion that the metaphorical structure of basic concepts of a nation always correlates with its fundamental cultural values. However, the examination of political discourse from the cross-cultural perspective reveals the cases of metaphor uses that don't meet the requirements of cultural coherence and may lead to negative cognitive and communicative consequences. Along with admitting a wide discrepancy between metaphorical models in western and oriental political discourse, the author gives some examples of metaphorical coherence as well as its violation in a number of basic metaphors in American, British and Russian political discourse. To illustrate how cross-cultural factors determine the specific character of metaphorical framing, the article analyses the dynamic character of metaphorical models that can realize diverse scenarios in different national varieties of political discourse. An observation is made about the dependence of metaphoric scenarios in different national varieties of political discourse on the cultural, historical, social and political components of the national cultural cognitive map. The latter is heterogeneous as it is structured by the objectified individual, group, and national verbal and nonverbal experience. This explains, for instance, why there are examples of similarity as well as discrepancy between metaphorical framing in ideologically different party varieties of political discourse within the national political discourse as well as in the rhetoric of politicians belonging to different generations. The observations are illustrated by cross-linguistic data proving the dynamic character of metaphorical models, their

Democratization in the Gulf Monarchies and American Civil Society

OpenAIRE

Azam, M. Nazrul Islam and Muhammad; Azam, Muhammad

2015-01-01

The paper deals with the efforts made by American private sector and civil society actors after 2000 to popularize democratic values and norms in the six Gulf states, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The study is focused on areas including politics, education, culture, media, human rights, and women empowerment. The paper also deals with approaches adopted, goals and objectives set and strategies devised and employed by the American NGOs regardi...

Democratization in the Gulf Monarchies and American Civil Society

OpenAIRE

Azam, M. Nazrul Islam and Muhammad

2010-01-01

The paper deals with the efforts made by American private sector and civil society actors after 2000 to popularize democratic values and norms in the six Gulf states, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The study is focused on areas including politics, education, culture, media, human rights, and women empowerment. The paper also deals with approaches adopted, goals and objectives set and strategies devised and employed by the American NGOs regardi...

Social Networks and Political Parties in Chile

OpenAIRE

Adler Lomnitz, Larissa

2002-01-01

This paper describes the origin and evolution of two Chilean political parties (the Radical Party and the Christian Democrat Party) through the analysis of the social networks that originated and composed them. The aim of this study is to propose a model of national political cultures on the basis of the structure of social networks related to power and of the symbol system, which legitimizes it. The structure of social networks, horizontal and vertical, are based on reciprocal or redistribut...

Chinese Debates on the Democratization Process

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peer Møller Christensen

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The new economic importance of the Chinese economy has created Chinese expectations that the country will be able to regain a political and cultural position in the world in accordance with this economic status. But for China to become a respected member of world society, one of the most severe obstacles is its, from a western perspective, undemocratic political system. The article describes the lively debate going on among Chinese intellectuals of diverse political-ideological convictions about what kind of democracy should be the model for China’s future political system. The liberally oriented intellectuals want a political system very much like American liberal constitutional democracy, while intellectuals on the left side of the political spectrum want a democracy with a clear socialist basis. Although Chinese intellectuals form a minority in society, these intellectual debates are sure to have influence on both public opinion and opinions and attitudes among political decision makers inside the Chinese Communist Party. Further investigations will have to establish to what degree the perceptions of China's political future and democratization are reflected in the political attitudes among the Chinese in general, and how they are perceived inside the confines of political decision making in the Chinese Communist Party. Only then will it be possible to answer the questions: "What kind of democracy do the Chinese want?" and "What kind of democracy are the Chinese going to get?"

Exposure to the American flag polarizes democratic-republican ideologies.

Science.gov (United States)

Chan, Eugene Y

2017-12-01

Some prior research has suggested that exposure to the American flag tilts Americans towards Republicanism, while others have proffered that it brings outs a common 'together' perspective instead. We explore a third possibility - that it may actually polarize Americans' political ideology. It is generally accepted that exposure to an environmental cue can shift attitudes and behaviours, at least partly or temporarily, in a manner that is consistent with that cue. Yet, the same cue can mean different things to different people. In the same vein, given how national identity and political ideology are intertwined in the United States, we hypothesize that the American flag should heighten different political beliefs depending on individuals' political ideology. To Democrats, being American is to support Democratic values, but to Republicans, being American is to support Republican values. The American flag thus should heighten Democrats of their Democratic identity, and it should heighten Republicans of their Republican one. The results of an experiment with 752 American respondents who were representative of the US population supported this polarizing effect of the American flag. The theoretical and policy implications of the findings are offered. © 2017 The British Psychological Society.

On the multidimensionality of political competition: Measuring political competition in a Bartolinian Way

OpenAIRE

Bühlmann, M; Zumbach, D

2011-01-01

Political competition plays a crucial role in the democratic cycle, be it as a possible mainspring of political participation or as the essential element of democratic accountability and responsiveness. Thus, it is not surprising that many scholars focus on the impact and meaning of political competition. Unfortunately, such is very often misspecified as a unidimensional concept. At least since Stefano Bartolini's seminal paper Collusion, Competition and Democracy (1999, 2000), however, th...

Democrats and republicans can be differentiated from their faces.

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Nicholas O Rule

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Individuals' faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex, much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we found that individuals' political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These data suggest that perceivers' beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others' political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chance guessing.

The Blunt Tool: Inappropriateness of the Concept of Transition for the Analyses of Democratic Consolidation

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Dražen Lalić

2010-01-01

Full Text Available The article is analyzing the inappropriateness of the “classical” theories of transition for the analyses of democratic consolidation in the contemporary post-communist societies, including the Croatian one. The authors are claiming that the aforementioned theories are insufficient for a subtle explanation of the recent ongoing major political and social changes in the post-communist societies. The article is stressing the most characteristic examples of the “bluntness”, i.e. of the inappropriateness of the transition theory basic concepts for the analyses of democratic consolidation, as well as of the socio-cultural and socio-structural assumptions and other important concepts related to the post-communist transition phenomenon. Furthermore, the article is exposing the problems connected with various interpretations of the phases of the transition period in relation to the cleavage between the institutional constitution of the democratic system and the democratic deficit characteristic of the post-communist states. Finally, the article is bolding the necessity of re-conceptualization of the basic concepts of the theory of transition; however, not towards the construction of a new theory, but rather towards the adaptation of the existing theory to the recent social and political processes in the contemporaneous post-communist societies.

The Populist Catharsis: On the Revival of the Political

OpenAIRE

Azmanova, Albena

2018-01-01

The upsurge of populist movements and the entry of populist parties into parliaments and\\ud governments over the last decade has been condemned as being the cause of the sorry\\ud state of democratic politics in western societies. As populism erodes the liberal political\\ud culture of consensus-building through deliberation that achieves inclusive diversity, the\\ud verdict goes, it undercuts the very foundation of liberal democracies. Taking my distance\\ud from this diagnosis of our current pr...

Deployment of the Military in Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Implication for Democratization in Sri Lanka

Science.gov (United States)

2016-12-01

political leadership , interparty alliances, and legislatures by which society constitutes itself politically to select and monitor democratic government... democratically elected civilian leadership .” Matei, “New Conceptualization,” 31. Young posits expertise, essential duties, responsibility, and corporateness as...CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION: IMPLICATION FOR DEMOCRATIZATION IN SRI LANKA by Don Kapila Sarath Kumara Dolage December 2016 Thesis Advisor: Anshu

Civic Political Culture, Participatory Governance and Political ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Prof

This study x-rayed the significance of civic political culture on participatory governance and its .... The literature on participatory governance theory assumes that deliberation is key to effective .... factors and capture all considerations involved in making certain that citizen interests .... vital element in any organization.

Reflecting on democratic and responsible citizenship. Where do the media step in?

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Oana BĂLUŢĂ

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Citizenship is one notion that generated debates and, on occasion, contradictory positions within academic community, opening the doors not only for political scientists, but for practitioners, activists, politicians as well to step in. The paper aims to explore and highlight how sociologists, political scientists and mass media practitioners envisage responsible and democratic citizenship in Romania. Reviews of literature developments on citizenship in connection with democracy and participation, and perspectives of local journalists, sociologists and political scientists on the intersection of media and responsible citizenship allowed me to highlight key inner marks of responsible and democratic citizenship. The final part of the paper proposes a process of (rethinking citizenship, emphasizing few propositions with a decisive role when drafting responsible and democratic citizenship: citizenship cannot be separated from participation, active participation; citizenship is correlated with political interests; 3. Active citizenship is democratic and responsible citizenship; citizenship has both a private and a public dimension.

Democratic Learning Processes: Conceptual and Historical Challenges

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Christensen, Ann-Dorte; Rasmussen, Palle

2009-01-01

In this article democratic learning is conceptualised with inspiration from two academic traditions, one being the conceptions of citizenship, political identities and deliberative democracy in political sociology; the other theories and research on social and lifelong learning. The first part......'s empowerment and inclusion in the Danish democratic model. On the background of these two analyses the authors finally discuss some current democratic problems with integrating the diversity represented by ethnic minority groups. The discussion emphasizes the learning theory perspective on the initiative...... of the article outlines the authors' understanding of the core concepts involved. In the second part these conceptual discussions are related to two themes: the question of public adaptation of historical experiences in connection with the German reunification and the learning perspectives related to women...

BRICS Countries and Democratic Contagion

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Anna Bruno

2015-05-01

Full Text Available The article explores whether the interstate dynamics of the BRICS can activate those processes of convergence of politicalregimes and practices known as “democratic contagion.” As this contagion was experienced during the “third wave” ofdemocratization, mainly because of homogeneity among states and structural conditions for democratic attraction, theBRICS are not likely to repeat these dynamics. On the contrary, the only real constitutional homogeneity among the BRICScountries is the standard of non-interference in the internal affairs of each member. Non-interference also means abstainingfrom any initiative to condition the transformation of political regimes in consideration of the same interstate cooperation. Thedynamics of the BRICS shows that different political regimes can promote institutionalized forms of interstate cooperationwithout any mutual contamination at the constitutional level. The theories of “transition” and “democratic contagion” areinsufficient to understand these dynamics in the context of the BRICS; for this reason, the theory of democratic transitioncannot provide an adequate analysis of BRICS. With its members “split in unity,” as an institution the BRICS suggests anevolution toward a model of “not eurocentric dependence” that can overcome the “peripheral realism” of the role of eachstate in its own foreign policy.

Democratization in Malawi

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Emmanuel, Nikolas G.

2013-01-01

a political conditionality approach. Few countries have felt the weight of conditionality as much as Malawi did in the 1990s. Here, donors were able to use aid sanctions to successfully encourage democratization, while strengthening the demands of domestic opposition forces. This paper argues that three...

Policy and Culture: From Machiavelli’s Political Philosophy to Kipling’s Political Prophecies

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Konstantin M. Dolgov

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The article is concerned with interrelationship of policy and culture, in particular N.Machiavelli's political philosophy and its reflection in some short stories by R.Kipling, one of the most recognized representatives of the British imperial thought. Policy and culture have traditionally been considered almost incompatible spheres of human activity as policy tended to become more and more severe, cynical, "dirty", while culture aspired to develop supreme values and perfect ideals. Sometimes the direct confrontation between policy and religion, policy and morals, policy and law, policy and literature, policy and art in the broad sense of the word could occur. The greatest Renaissance masters - Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael etc. - actively opposed any evil manifestations: evil ideas, evil words, evil doings, expressing in their masterpieces the highest ideals and values. However, these ideals and values drastically diverged from the reality, political and public relations of the time, the "dirty" policy conducted by the rulers of numerous Italian principalities. It is no coincidence that N.Machiavelli develops his new political philosophy aiming not only to create the strong unitary state, but also to overcome this "dirty" policy at least to a certain extent. Therefore, describing the mechanism of the "dirty" policy that opposes high culture, N.Machiavelli introduces a new political philosophy which should be based on the highest ideals and values. As far as literary art is concerned, one can easily see that such world famous novelists as Kipling, Chekhov, Maupassant and many others reflected in their short stories that very longing for highest values and ideals which are almost absent in political doctrines and political practice. The true policy is necessarily based on the true culture and its values and ideals, whereas the true culture is indispensably connected with the true policy.

The conservation and dissemination of information - A democratic issue

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Torbacke, J.

1996-01-01

The societal function of the historians are pointed out, to describe and explain, in cooperation with the archives, the chain of political, economic, social and cultural events that has shaped the country's history. The lessons of the past, whether pleasant or unpleasant, should be passed on to the posterity. Open information is an important element in a democratic society and is normally one of the criteria that distinguishes democracy from autocracy. In the closed and controlled information society all that is hushed up and covered up leads to bitterness and rage among the citizens

The conservation and dissemination of information - A democratic issue

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Torbacke, J [Stockholm Univ. (Sweden). Dept. of History

1996-12-01

The societal function of the historians are pointed out, to describe and explain, in cooperation with the archives, the chain of political, economic, social and cultural events that has shaped the country`s history. The lessons of the past, whether pleasant or unpleasant, should be passed on to the posterity. Open information is an important element in a democratic society and is normally one of the criteria that distinguishes democracy from autocracy. In the closed and controlled information society all that is hushed up and covered up leads to bitterness and rage among the citizens.

Democratizing the world health organization.

Science.gov (United States)

van de Pas, R; van Schaik, L G

2014-02-01

A progressive erosion of the democratic space appears as one of the emerging challenges in global health today. Such delimitation of the political interplay has a particularly evident impact on the unique public interest function of the World Health Organization (WHO). This paper aims to identify some obstacles for a truly democratic functioning of the UN specialized agency for health. The development of civil society's engagement with the WHO, including in the current reform proposals, is described. The paper also analyses how today's financing of the WHO--primarily through multi-bi financing mechanisms--risks to choke the agency's role in global health. Democratizing the public debate on global health, and therefore the role of the WHO, requires a debate on its future role and engagement at the country level. This desirable process can only be linked to national debates on public health, and the re-definition of health as a primary political and societal concern. Copyright © 2013 The Royal Society for Public Health. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Politics of the Omnivores: Elite Culture, Popular Culture, and Libertarianism

NARCIS (Netherlands)

D. Houtman (Dick); P.H.J. Achterberg (Peter)

2004-01-01

textabstractPaper prepared for the workshop Collapsing Cultural Canons: Elite Culture, Popular Culture, and Politics in Late Modernity Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Marseille, France, October 28-29, 2004

Educational Conservatism and Democratic Citizenship in Hannah Arendt

Science.gov (United States)

Mihaila, Ramona; Popescu, Gheorghe H.; Nica, Elvira

2016-01-01

The purpose of this article was to gain a deeper understanding of Arendt's educational philosophy, her perspective of political involvement as a kind of political education, and natality as the fundamental nature of education. The current study has extended past research by elucidating Arendt's view of participatory democratic politics, her…

Political Ideology, Trust, and Cooperation

Science.gov (United States)

Balliet, Daniel; Tybur, Joshua M.; Wu, Junhui; Antonellis, Christian; Van Lange, Paul A. M.

2016-01-01

Theories suggest that political ideology relates to cooperation, with conservatives being more likely to pursue selfish outcomes, and liberals more likely to pursue egalitarian outcomes. In study 1, we examine how political ideology and political party affiliation (Republican vs. Democrat) predict cooperation with a partner who self-identifies as Republican or Democrat in two samples before (n = 362) and after (n = 366) the 2012 US presidential election. Liberals show slightly more concern for their partners’ outcomes compared to conservatives (study 1), and in study 2 this relation is supported by a meta-analysis (r = .15). However, in study 1, political ideology did not relate to cooperation in general. Both Republicans and Democrats extend more cooperation to their in-group relative to the out-group, and this is explained by expectations of cooperation from in-group versus out-group members. We discuss the relation between political ideology and cooperation within and between groups. PMID:29593363

The Political Nature of Digital Cultural Heritage

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Quincy McCrary

2011-02-01

Full Text Available Collecting organizations such as libraries and museums are vehicles for shifting paradigms of knowledge and power. Digital technologies are also implicated with historical transformations in language, society, and culture. To discuss the digital is to engage simultaneously with an impressive array of simulacra, instantaneous communication, ubiquitous media, and global interconnectedness (Cameron & Kenderdine, 2007. Digital cultural heritage can be viewed as a political concept and practice, the relations between communities and heritage institutions as mediated through technologies, the reshaping of social, cultural, and political power in relation to cultural organizations made possible through communication technologies, and the representation and interpretation of digital cultural heritage. The following paper will address each of these concerns, outlining current scholarship on the topic and critically engaging with the content.

International Contexts for Political Education.

Science.gov (United States)

Harber, Clive

1991-01-01

Uses international examples of the ways in which political learning takes place--indoctrination, political socialization, and political education--to suggest that open and democratic political education is not common, even in democracies. (SK)

Race, Culture, and Pluralism: The Evolution of Dewey's Vision for a Democratic Curriculum

Science.gov (United States)

Fallace, Thomas

2012-01-01

In this historical study, the author traces the evolution of Dewey's vision for a democratic curriculum. Prior to 1916, Dewey was a linear historicist, meaning that he conceptualized culture as moving linearly through three distinct stages--savagery, barbarianism, civilization--that corresponded with stages of child development. Dewey's suggested…

Тhe National Idea in the Japanese Political System Formation

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Лусине Арменовна Мелконян

2018-12-01

Full Text Available The article reveals the meaning and components of the concept of «national idea» in the Japanese understanding, the relationship between the national idea and the state’s foreign policy iplementation process, as well as the peculiarities of the Japanese political system. Domestic and external factors that had a significant impact on the process of forming the political culture of Japan, which at first glance has certain contradictions but which through the synthesis of social and political elements of the external world and its traditions made it possible to become a modern industrialized democratic state, are also researched.

Political Transmigrants: Rethinking Hmong Political Activism in America

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Nengher N. Vang, Ph.D

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Since the initial resettlement of the Hmong in the United States in the mid-1970s, they have maintained strong political and military relationships with the Lao People‘s Democratic Republic (LPDR. Yet, there is little research on that relationship and the involvement of the Hmong in the United States in political developments in Laos. Most works on Hmong political activism have focused on the electoral participation and representation of Hmong Americans in relation to American domestic politics. In this article, using archival, ethnographic, and interview data that I have collected between 2006 and 2009 in Laos, Thailand, and the United States, I describe and analyze the non-domestic or transnational form of Hmong American political expression and participation. I argue that Hmong political activism in America not only was transnational from the outset, but that their transnational involvement in political developments in Laos and their relations with the Lao PDR government also had a significant impact on their ethnic politics. Many Hmong political activists made their entry into ethnic politics through the door of transnational politics, and many were motivated by transnational political issues to participate in domestic American politics. By exploring their transnational involvement in political developments in Laos and their relations with the Lao PDR government, we get a more complete and dynamic understanding of Hmong political activism in the United States than is possible by focusing exclusively on domestic and electoral participation. Examining their transnational politics also allows us to see the transnationality of not only their culture, identity, and community but also that of their political activities and aspirations.

(Im)Politeness in Cross-Cultural Encounters

Science.gov (United States)

House, Juliane

2012-01-01

In this article I will first discuss the notions of "politeness" and "impoliteness" including a multilevel model of politeness and impoliteness that relates universal levels to culture- and language-specific ones. Given this framework and my earlier postulation of a set of parameters along which members of two linguacultures differ in terms of…

Cultural political economy and urban heritage tourism

OpenAIRE

Su, Rui; Bramwell, Bill; Whalley, Peter A.

2018-01-01

The paper explains a cultural political economy “framing” for interpreting heritage tourism in urban contexts. Key ideas behind this research perspective are explained and illustrated through discussion of past research studies of urban heritage tourism. It is underpinned by a relational view of the inter-connectedness of societal relations, and an emphasis on taking seriously both the cultural/semiotic and the economic/political in the co-constitution of urban heritage tourism’s social pract...

Democratizing English as an International Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Deneire, Marc

The aim of this paper is threefold. The first section shows how the political uses of language engendered by both western-style liberalism on the one hand and various forms of nationalism on the other lead to the negation of democratic ideals. Because of the current international situation, political aspects of language are receiving more and more…

Lives and Political Field. An Analysis of the Power Structure of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD

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Max Reinhardt

2011-05-01

Full Text Available This article discusses methods and results of an explorative study of two generations of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD: the two generations comprise, on the one hand, older and younger members of the postwar generation who witnessed the Second World War as young soldiers or as children, and on the other hand, the generation that was born in the 1950s and has mainly been responsible for shaping policy for some years. The aim of my dissertation was to analyze the ability of the social democratic leadership to represent the full range of party members and (base voters by comparing two generations, using a sample of political leaders and the habitus/field-analysis inspired by Pierre BOURDIEU. The basis of the analysis were partly biographical, partly theme-focused interviews, as well as a range of sources and already published literature regarding the biographies of these political leaders. The following article is based on my dissertation and is focused on a description of selected theoretical implications, on the description of the essential criteria for selecting the sample and on some of the methods used. These are an analysis of the life, life and field effects, the factions and the development of types of political leaders. I will present some results to exemplify the methods used. They show that the ability of the SPD to represent the full range of party members and (base voters and the power structure of the SPD have changed, thus threatening the party’s status as a "Volkspartei." URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1102197

Eastern European Political Socialization Modeling Research: A Literature Review

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Camelia Florela Voinea

2014-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents empirical modeling research on political socialization of the citizens in the new Eastern European democracies. The political socialization issue offers a comparative perspective over the modeling methodologies in analytical paradigms. Eastern European political culture research has revealed features of the electoral behavior and political participation which can be identified in different degrees in all the new democracies in the area: passivity with respect to political activity of parties, elites and institutions, political apathy or lack of reaction to anti-democratic actions, skepticism or distrust in institutions, scarce participation to social movements. Several authors explain the actual political behavior of the Eastern European citizens’ and their low social and political involvement by the (political culture heritage of the communist regimes in which they lived for a long time, and which keeps shaping their political attitudes towards the state, civil society, government and institutions. Research issues in the analysis of political participation are traditionally based on statistics analyses of empirical evidence coming from public surveys. However, scarcity ofempirical data from the communist periode with regard to (political socialization, values and beliefs represent a major obstacle towards a better understanding of the historical roots of current behaviors and attitudes. Scarcity of observational data might be overcome by computational and simulation modeling.

Elements of European Political Culture in the Central Asian National Outskirts of the Russian Empire: Perception Specifics of Foreign Cultural Innovations (late 19th – early 20th

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Yuliya A. Lysenko

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The article considers the main results of political modernization in the Central Asian national outskirts of the Russian Empire taken place in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The concept “Central Asian national outskirts” includes Stepnoy and Turkistan Governorate Generals, the two administrative-territorial entities founded in the 1860s as a result of a complete joining of the Kazakh camping grounds of the Junior, Middle and Elder zhuzhes; after the Kokand and Khivinsk khanates inhabited by nomads ( the Kirghiz, the Kara-Kalpaks as well as the settled population (the Uzbeks were conquered. The analysis of the sources and materials conducted by the authors asserts that the political modernization of the Central Asian national outskirts proposed by the Russian Empire was carried out in line with the fundamental characteristics of West European civilization and the basis of its political culture. Thus the system of local government was established and the democratic electoral system was introduced by means of expanding the voter’s base, with the region’s population participating in social and political life. The principles of bourgeois ideology based on such concepts as “equality”, “freedom”, “self-determination” were also formed. However, the political modernization of the Central Asian national outskirts should not be considered as complete. Up to 1917 the political sphere of the region’s population was characterized by the predominance of traditional mores, values and laws, whereas clan ideology, tribalism and Muslim ethno-consciousness were characteristic of the social sphere. All these factors affected the process of adapting to western political culture. The institutionalization of the new structures did not go along with the de-institutionalization of the traditional ones, and so resulted in the combination and coexistence of the traditional and modern structures.

Constitutional Openness in 1991, Ethnic and Cultural Diversity, and Political System: a Philosophical-Political Approach

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Nelson Jair Cuchumbé Holguín

2012-08-01

Full Text Available The multicultural approach seems to be the most praiseworthy instrument through which the acknowledgement of cultural diversity could renew the deontic structure legitimised by the socio-political order in Colombia. Facing a State model based on the denial and exclusion of diversity, the multicultural State allows for pluralism to be articulated into it. In this way, the formation of political unity becomes a matter determined by dialogue, mutual acknowledgement and cultural enhancement. Nevertheless, the multicultural interpretation lacks plausibility if the formation of the State is understood in a pragmatic and universalistic way. From this perspective, the inclusion of the Other is likely only if social actors promote interactions regulated by a political culture based on constitutional principles, active participation, public deliberation and the organisational ability of communities. A shared political culture of this nature seems unavoidable if the purpose is to form a citizenship more suited to living in a democracy.

Contentious political pressure and democratisation in Nigeria - a ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

. E J Duru, I A Uno. Abstract. The paper is on contentious political pressures and democratization in Nigeria - A focus on MOSOP. The aim is to show the impact of contentious political pressures on the process of democratization in Nigeria ...

JOURNALISTIC COVERAGE OF POLITICAL AND FINANCIAL CRISES AND THE “ISSUE” OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION

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Isabel Ferin Cunha

2013-06-01

Full Text Available This article analyzes the relationship between news coverage, political communication, crises and corruption, focusing on Western democracies and particularly Portugal. Firstly, political communication and news coverage are discussed, based on the assumption that the commoditisation of the goals of media and information companies has resulted in changes in the balance between the political and media fields. Within this perspective, attention is devoted to the consequences of these changes in Western democracies, taking into consideration not only certain aspects that tend to subvert underlying principles of representative democracy, but also the emergence of new social movements craving greater democratic participation in the public sphere. In addition, this study examines the concepts of crisis and political corruption, seeking to identify the historical and cultural elements that correlate the two phenomena in Western democracies, especially in Portugal. Finally, it addresses the processes of exposing corruption phenomena and their legal implications, as well as the principles of transparency of information and the consequences upon democracy.

Journalistic coverage of political and financial crises and the “issue” of political corruption

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Isabel Ferin Cunha

2013-06-01

Full Text Available This article analyzes the relationship between news coverage, political communication, crises and corruption, focusing on Western democracies and particularly Portugal. Firstly, political communication and news coverage are discussed, based on the assumption that the commoditisation of the goals of media and information companies has resulted in changes in the balance between the political and media fields. Within this perspective, attention is devoted to the consequences of these changes in Western democracies, taking into consideration not only certain aspects that tend to subvert underlying principles of representative democracy, but also the emergence of new social movements craving greater democratic participation in the public sphere. In addition, this study examines the concepts of crisis and political corruption, seeking to identify the historical and cultural elements that correlate the two phenomena in Western democracies, especially in Portugal. Finally, it addresses the processes of exposing corruption phenomena and their legal implications, as well as the principles of transparency of information and the consequences upon democracy.

Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Henrik Kaare

Do aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers – thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the political process and a crucial precondition...... in the political process do not by definition undermine politics’ content of reason. Instead, a differentiation must be made between a multiplicity of aesthetic forms of intervention – some of which tend to weaken the political judgement of citizens while other forms tend to stimulate competent judgement....... This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of political science, sociology, media studies, and cultural studies....

Perceptions of others' political affiliation are moderated by individual perceivers' own political attitudes.

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John Paul Wilson

Full Text Available Previous research has shown that perceivers can accurately extract information about perceptually ambiguous group memberships from facial information alone. For example, people demonstrate above-chance accuracy in categorizing political ideology from faces. Further, they ascribe particular personality traits to faces according to political party (e.g., Republicans are dominant and mature, Democrats are likeable and trustworthy. Here, we report three studies that replicated and extended these effects. In Study 1a, we provide evidence that, in addition to showing accuracy in categorization, politically-conservative participants expressed a bias toward categorizing targets as outgroup members. In Study 1b, we replicate this relationship with a larger sample and a stimulus set consisting of faces of professional politicians. In Study 2, we find that trait ascriptions based on target political affiliation are moderated by perceiver political ideology. Specifically, although Democrats are stereotyped as more likeable and trustworthy, conservative participants rated faces that were categorized as Republicans in Study 1a as more likeable and trustworthy than faces categorized as Democrats. Thus, this paper joins a growing literature showing that it is critical to consider perceiver identity in examining perceptions of identities and traits from faces.

Perceptions of others' political affiliation are moderated by individual perceivers' own political attitudes.

Science.gov (United States)

Wilson, John Paul; Rule, Nicholas O

2014-01-01

Previous research has shown that perceivers can accurately extract information about perceptually ambiguous group memberships from facial information alone. For example, people demonstrate above-chance accuracy in categorizing political ideology from faces. Further, they ascribe particular personality traits to faces according to political party (e.g., Republicans are dominant and mature, Democrats are likeable and trustworthy). Here, we report three studies that replicated and extended these effects. In Study 1a, we provide evidence that, in addition to showing accuracy in categorization, politically-conservative participants expressed a bias toward categorizing targets as outgroup members. In Study 1b, we replicate this relationship with a larger sample and a stimulus set consisting of faces of professional politicians. In Study 2, we find that trait ascriptions based on target political affiliation are moderated by perceiver political ideology. Specifically, although Democrats are stereotyped as more likeable and trustworthy, conservative participants rated faces that were categorized as Republicans in Study 1a as more likeable and trustworthy than faces categorized as Democrats. Thus, this paper joins a growing literature showing that it is critical to consider perceiver identity in examining perceptions of identities and traits from faces.

Perceptions of Others' Political Affiliation Are Moderated by Individual Perceivers' Own Political Attitudes

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Wilson, John Paul; Rule, Nicholas O.

2014-01-01

Previous research has shown that perceivers can accurately extract information about perceptually ambiguous group memberships from facial information alone. For example, people demonstrate above-chance accuracy in categorizing political ideology from faces. Further, they ascribe particular personality traits to faces according to political party (e.g., Republicans are dominant and mature, Democrats are likeable and trustworthy). Here, we report three studies that replicated and extended these effects. In Study 1a, we provide evidence that, in addition to showing accuracy in categorization, politically-conservative participants expressed a bias toward categorizing targets as outgroup members. In Study 1b, we replicate this relationship with a larger sample and a stimulus set consisting of faces of professional politicians. In Study 2, we find that trait ascriptions based on target political affiliation are moderated by perceiver political ideology. Specifically, although Democrats are stereotyped as more likeable and trustworthy, conservative participants rated faces that were categorized as Republicans in Study 1a as more likeable and trustworthy than faces categorized as Democrats. Thus, this paper joins a growing literature showing that it is critical to consider perceiver identity in examining perceptions of identities and traits from faces. PMID:24781819

Cross-Cultural Variation in Political Leadership Styles

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Paramova, Petia; Blumberg, Herbert

2017-01-01

Guided by gaps in the literature with regard to the study of politicians the aim of the research is to explore cross-cultural differences in political leaders’ style. It compares the MLQ (Avolio & Bass, 2004) scores of elected political leaders (N = 140) in Bulgaria and the UK. The statistical exploration of the data relied on multivariate analyses of covariance. The findings of comparisons across the two groups reveal that compared to British political leaders, Bulgarian leaders were more likely to frequently use both transactional and passive/avoidant behaviours. The study tests Bass’s (1997) strong assertion about the universality of transformational leadership. It contributes to the leadership literature by providing directly measured data relating to the behaviours of political leaders. Such information on the characteristics of politicians could allow for more directional hypotheses in subsequent research, exploring the contextual influences within transformational leadership theory. The outcomes might also aid applied fields. Knowledge gained of culturally different leaders could be welcomed by multicultural political and economic unions, wherein understanding and allowances might aid communication. PMID:29358986

Cross-Cultural Variation in Political Leadership Styles.

Science.gov (United States)

Paramova, Petia; Blumberg, Herbert

2017-11-01

Guided by gaps in the literature with regard to the study of politicians the aim of the research is to explore cross-cultural differences in political leaders' style. It compares the MLQ (Avolio & Bass, 2004) scores of elected political leaders (N = 140) in Bulgaria and the UK. The statistical exploration of the data relied on multivariate analyses of covariance. The findings of comparisons across the two groups reveal that compared to British political leaders, Bulgarian leaders were more likely to frequently use both transactional and passive/avoidant behaviours. The study tests Bass's (1997) strong assertion about the universality of transformational leadership. It contributes to the leadership literature by providing directly measured data relating to the behaviours of political leaders. Such information on the characteristics of politicians could allow for more directional hypotheses in subsequent research, exploring the contextual influences within transformational leadership theory. The outcomes might also aid applied fields. Knowledge gained of culturally different leaders could be welcomed by multicultural political and economic unions, wherein understanding and allowances might aid communication.

Cross-Cultural Variation in Political Leadership Styles

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Petia Paramova

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Guided by gaps in the literature with regard to the study of politicians the aim of the research is to explore cross-cultural differences in political leaders’ style. It compares the MLQ (Avolio & Bass, 2004 scores of elected political leaders (N = 140 in Bulgaria and the UK. The statistical exploration of the data relied on multivariate analyses of covariance. The findings of comparisons across the two groups reveal that compared to British political leaders, Bulgarian leaders were more likely to frequently use both transactional and passive/avoidant behaviours. The study tests Bass’s (1997 strong assertion about the universality of transformational leadership. It contributes to the leadership literature by providing directly measured data relating to the behaviours of political leaders. Such information on the characteristics of politicians could allow for more directional hypotheses in subsequent research, exploring the contextual influences within transformational leadership theory. The outcomes might also aid applied fields. Knowledge gained of culturally different leaders could be welcomed by multicultural political and economic unions, wherein understanding and allowances might aid communication.

Digital Culture, Education and Public Sphere

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Luiz Roberto Gomes

2016-02-01

Full Text Available In the context of the so-called digital culture, this paper discusses the issue of education and the political implications of the distance learning expansion movement in Brazil. In addition to the advances in the democratization of the access to information through the mediation of information and communication technologies (ICTs, which should be recognized as an effort to spread a certain “political culture”, this does not necessarily mean, as Habermas (2003b recalls, that the effective political participation of citizens is assured, especially in light of recurrent dislocation between the political public sphere and civil society. What are the interests behind the phenomenon of digitization of culture? And what is the purpose of education in this new cultural context? As an expression of contemporary social life, digital culture generates structural changes, not only in the form of transmission and access to culture, but also in the very concept and attitude towards culture, with decisive political implications for education. That leads us to think, for example, about the differences between the concepts of education present in the classical Greek Paideia culture, in the modern culture of Bildung, and in the contemporary educational model increasingly subservient to the ICTs we now have.

Revitalisasi moral kewarganegaraan dalam ungkapan Jawa sebagai sumber pembentukan civic culture dan politic culture

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Yoga Ardian Feriandi

2017-11-01

Full Text Available This article aims to understand and multiply the moral values that exist in the expression of Java. Of the values excavated the hope can be a reference as the formation of civic culture and politic culture. The type of research used in this research is qualitative research, with descriptive-critical method, which in his explanation more emphasis on the power of data analysis on existing data sources. This study is based on library research. The object of the studies in the form of notes, transcripts, books, Journal of Research and so on which is linked to the study of Javanese culture, civic culture and politics culture. From the results of the discussion then known some phrases like aja dumeh, mendhem jero mikul dhuwur, jer basuki mawa bea. Having moral universal citizenship values so as to become a reference in order to form the civic culture which could further impact on politics culture as an effort to civil society in the Republic of Indonesia.

Education in the new practice of democratic citizenship: databases of John Dewey

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Giannina Burlando

2015-10-01

Full Text Available The bases of the political art of John Dewey or his new practice of democratic citizenship are reviewed. Dewey is acknowledged as one of the most prominent of the American philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. He is also the most influential due to endowing philosophy a public task, namely, political and educational concern. From the instrumentalist method applied to the political area, crucial postulates in the major writings of Dewey are selected to revitalize the meaning and draw up the practical impacts of the central element of his political philosophy: ‘the collective power of democratic community’.

Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives in Science Education

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

education research to question whether conventional research approaches, foci and theoretical approaches are sufficient in a world of science education that is neither politically neutral, nor free of cultural values. Attention is not only on the individual learner but on the cultural, social and political......This book presents a collection of critical thinking that concern cultural, social and political issues for science education in the Nordic countries. The chapter authors describe specific scenarios to challenge persisting views, interrogate frameworks and trouble contemporary approaches...... to researching teaching and learning in science. Taking a point of departure in empirical examples from the Nordic countries the collection of work is taking a critical sideways glance at the Nordic education principles. Critical examinations target specifically those who are researching in the fields of science...

Oligarchization and extractivism. Locks against the democratization of environmental politics in Chile

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Alejandro Pelfini

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this article is to show that the modernization of Chile’s environmental institutions (called Nueva Institucionalidad Ambiental, introduced in 2009/2010 consolidates the informal networks that have traditionally linked its main actors (investors, State and experts. Consequently, it is a public policy that despite the incorporation of governance standards marked by accountability, transparency and public participation does not contribute to the formation of citizenship and public agenda around models of development and use of natural resources, but limited to assess/ mitigate/legitimize pre-established agendas, introduced by productive, extractive or infrastructure investment projects. In our view, this is due to the tendency to oligarchization of the Chilean political system and of the domination of elites in general and the persistence of an accumulation model based on the extraction of natural resources. Both serve as a structural lock that bolts any substantive change of environmental policy in a more democratic direction

The cultural transformation and political organization of the Ignalina NPP region

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Daugirdas, V.

1998-01-01

The Ignalina NPP region which can be identified with the Visaginas region is rather interesting from the point of view of various scientific investigations. Since long time this land has been in the contact zone of Baltic and Slavonic cultures. Most of the newest phenomena of society development are there rather closely related with the building of NPP. In our opinion the Visaginas region is in the initial stage of development at present by its cultural and political-geographical traits it stands out even in the context of Northeast Lithuania. This is a region distinguished by a particularly high variety of political attitudes and cultural contacts. The political view of the present inhabitants of the region is a result of complicated cultural evolution - the cultural orientation determines the political outlook. Though the political views of the Lithuanian population are still in the stage of development we may assert that the East Lithuanian region already in 1990 stood out as a region of left political views. This view is determined by a mixed national composition. The non-Lithuanians have tradition of supporting the left political forces, their political left-expression is more inert. The fact, that the general activity of voters in Visaginas and its region is relatively low, demonstrates the indifference of some voters to the political development of Lithuania. The status of self-government isolated Visaginas both from the life of its region and Lithuania on the whole - not only politically or culturally but administratively as well. The town is converting into a closed social unit. The problem of the cultural integration of Visaginas region remains of topical importance. In order to prevent the self-isolation it is necessary to faster the sense of civil self-expression, encourage the development programs of the region. (author)

The Digital Dimension of European Cultural Politics: Index, Intellectual Property and Internet Governance

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Nanna Thylstrup

2011-10-01

Full Text Available The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW have become dominant fields for European Union (EU politics. What used to be at the outer fringes of the EU policies has now taken centre stage. The transnational and dialogical structure of the Internet has hardwired it for international cultural politics, yet the very same structure also works to erode the very territorial foundation of traditional cultural politics. Given the delicate and complex terrain cultural politics traverse in international politics, and the trailblazing progression of the Internet, it seems on-line cultural politics is not just the application of existing cultural politics to cyberspace but a new field to be explored, analyzed and taught. The present article maps a constituent European cultural boundary on the WWW as the EU has circumscribed it and places this cultural node within a wider array of Europeanization and globalization processes.

School education and democratic management of teaching: perspectives

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Máximo Augusto Campos Masson

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The article discusses the management of education from the debate on the democratic management of social institutions, in particular, the school. It reflects on the changes that have occurred in the school due to the presence of new students belonging to the subaltern classes and the possibility of the democratic management of teaching being an important instrument for overcoming school failure. It discusses aspects of Brazilian legislation on the theme and the possibilities arising from the growth of political conservatism oppose initiatives to democratic management of education.

Peoples Democratic Party in the Fourth Republic of Nigeria

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Aliyu Mukhtar Katsina

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Their nature and functions make political parties central to democratic governance especially in the new democracies of Africa that face the challenge of building strong and enduring democratic institutions. It is accepted that the existing trend in most of these democracies of one big party dominating the political space weakens democracy and undermines its prospects for consolidation. Big parties—usually the ruling ones—exhibit tendencies such as absence of internal democracy that are antithetical to democratic governance. While observations such as these are incontestable, there is little understanding into the nature, character, ideology, and internal structure of big parties generally. In this article, I attempt to address this concern. Specifically, I examine the nature, structure, and ideology of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP, Nigeria’s ruling party at the federal level with considerable strength at local level between 1999 and 2015. Relying on data obtained from multiple sources, I investigate the process of its formation, the nature of its ideology, internal organization, its electoral strength, and how absence of internal democracy contributed significantly to its defeat in 2015 general elections.

From metaphysical to political: Does political culture make Rawls's principle of tolerance morally relativistic?

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Vranić Bojan

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to analyze Rawls's conception of political (public culture, exploring whether his principle of tolerance (Political Liberalism falls in moral relativism. The analysis consists of three sections. Firstly, the author introduces different critical accounts on Rawls's theory and identifies where they go wrong. Secondly, the author delineates the intellectual tradition of social liberalism from which sprang Rawls's conception, showing that he significantly alters the key ideas of dominant liberal justice of the Western world. In the final section of the paper it is argued that Rawls's idea of political culture is a cornerstone of just society and the spring of tolerance, providing arguments in favor of the idea that Rawls's conception of political liberalism is not morally relativistic but it is, however, in line with liberal pluralism.

Art as a Cultural Politics and Diplomacy

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Dicky Rezadi Munaf

2017-05-01

Full Text Available As a creative activity, art cannot be merely understood as an individual expression, but a social stage, in which common aesthetic experiences are socially built. Being a social product, art is a medium of various socio-political interests, particularly the interests of a particular community or institution. By employing a participatory research method, this paper is aimed at understanding of how art is used by a particular state’s institution for two interrelated functions. Internally, art is used to create social cohesion and commonality, to enhance work‘s productivity and creativity in the institution. Externally, art is practiced as form of cultural diplomacy, to promote national political, economical and cultural interests in the context of international relation. The conclusion of the research is that the functions of art in the context of state‘s institution are as a form of esthetic experience, institutional and community building, cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy. Keywords: Art, Aesthetic, Institution, Cultural Diplomacy, National Security and Safety.

GLOBALIZAÇÃO E O DÉFICIT DEMOCRÁTICO DAS INSTITUIÇÕES REPRESENTATIVAS BRASILEIRAS / GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT OF BRAZILIAN REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS

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Murilo Gaspardo

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Due to globalization, the state lost its monopoly on political mediation. For example, it began to share decisions with multiple stakeholders, internal and external, and is not able to control several variables that interfere in national life. This has impacts on the functioning and legitimacy of representative institutions. However, there are paradoxes that accompany them since their beginnings, and semi-peripheral states, like Brazil and other Latin Americans, have some historical-cultural issues such as internal and external sovereignty locks, patrimonial, clientelist, and populist political culture and a society precariously integrated, with deep inequalities, which also explain the problems of democracy. Thus, the purpose of this research was to investigate which characteristic features of the democratic deficit of the Brazilian representative institutions were in fact caused or exacerbated by globalization. Thus, we sought to overcome simplistic analyzes, which attribute all the problems of contemporary democracy to globalization, or else insist on restricting the field of analysis of the limits established by the representative democratic model of territorial base, which presents potential explanatory limited in a context of political polycentrism, and in that the representative institutions reveal themselves incompatible with the demands of social mediation.

Asynchrony of political culture in the context of modernization of the contemporary Russian society

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Konovalov Valery Nikolaevich

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Russia is a country in which political culture takes in different stages of development. In the social and cultural life are combined two basic forms - the traditional type of political culture and modern political culture. There is asynchrony in the political culture, which creates a serious problem of managing Russian society.

Presentation of political Alliances in the Romanian audiovisual media

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Flaviu Calin RUS

2011-01-01

Full Text Available This material wishes to highlight the way in which the main political alliances have been formed in Romania in the last 20 years, as well as the way they have been reflected in the media. Moreover, we have tried to analyze the involvement of journalists and political analysts in explaining these political events. The study will focus on four political alliances, namely: CDR (the Romanian Democratic Convention, D.A. (Y.E.S. - Justice and Truth between PNL – the National Liberal Party and PD - the Democratic Party, ACD (the Centre-Right Alliance between PNL and PC – the Conservative Party and USL (the Social-Liberal Union between PSD – the Social Democrat Party, PNL and PC.

Dialectical Method and the Critical Political Economy of Culture

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Brice Nixon

2012-05-01

Full Text Available This article argues that the quality that defines critical political economy is its critical method. Definitions of the critical political economy of culture are considered and shown to focus on specific theoretical concerns while not fully addressing the fundamental issue of method. Method is here discussed in terms of the way human reason is used to produce knowledge. A critical method for Marx is a historical materialist dialectical method, thus this paper argues for a deeper consideration of the Marxist dialectical method in relation to critical political-economic theorizing. Sources for methodological consideration from Marx to 20th-century Western Marxists are outlined. The potential contribution of the Marxist dialectical method in the continued development of the critical political economy of culture is demonstrated by showing the possibility of developing a complementary critical political economy of consciousness. Smythe’s theorizing of audiences as workers is considered as a useful starting point, and its potential development through incorporation of the work of other critical scholars of media and culture is outlined.

Cross-cultural comparison of political leaders' operational codes.

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Dirilen-Gumus, Ozlem

2017-12-01

This study aims at comparing operational codes (namely, philosophical and instrumental beliefs about the political universe) of political leaders from different cultures. According to Schwartz (2004), cultures can be categorised into 3 dimensions: autonomy-embeddedness, egalitarianism-hierarchy and mastery-harmony. This study draws upon the 1st dimension (akin to the most popular cultural dimension of Hofstede: individualism-collectivism) and focuses on comparing the leaders of autonomous and embedded cultures based on how cooperative/conflictual they are. The main research hypothesis is as follows: the leaders of embedded cultures would be more cooperative than the leaders of autonomous cultures. For this purpose, 3 autonomous cultures (the UK, Canada and Australia) and embedded cultures (Singapore, South Africa and Malaysia) cultures were chosen randomly and the cooperativeness of the correspondent countries' leaders were compared after being profiled by Profiler Plus. The results indicated that the leaders of embedded cultures were significantly more cooperative than autonomous cultures after holding the control variables constant. The findings were discussed in the light of relevant literature. © 2016 International Union of Psychological Science.

Dressing down the front line: How political discussion of teachers affects their political and institutional trust

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bech, Emily Cochran

We know that government performance and the tone of political debate can affect citizens’ trust in state institutions and political leaders, which have long been known to underpin democratic sustainability. But how does political debate about public employees affect their confidence in political...

The cultural evolution of democracy: saltational changes in a political regime landscape.

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Lindenfors, Patrik; Jansson, Fredrik; Sandberg, Mikael

2011-01-01

Transitions to democracy are most often considered the outcome of historical modernization processes. Socio-economic changes, such as increases in per capita GNP, education levels, urbanization and communication, have traditionally been found to be correlates or 'requisites' of democratic reform. However, transition times and the number of reform steps have not been studied comprehensively. Here we show that historically, transitions to democracy have mainly occurred through rapid leaps rather than slow and incremental transition steps, with a median time from autocracy to democracy of 2.4 years, and overnight in the reverse direction. Our results show that autocracy and democracy have acted as peaks in an evolutionary landscape of possible modes of institutional arrangements. Only scarcely have there been slow incremental transitions. We discuss our results in relation to the application of phylogenetic comparative methods in cultural evolution and point out that the evolving unit in this system is the institutional arrangement, not the individual country which is instead better regarded as the 'host' for the political system.

Judging Political Hearts and Minds: How Political Dynamics Drive Social Judgments.

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Cornwell, James F M; Bajger, Allison T; Higgins, E Tory

2015-08-01

We investigated how judgments of political messengers depend upon what would benefit one's preferred candidate. In Study 1a, participants were asked to evaluate the warmth and competence of the writer of a pro- or anti-Obama political message for the 2012 presidential election (Obama/warm; Romney/competent). When judging the messages, warmth was emphasized by Democrats and competence by Republicans. Study 1b replicated these effects for messages about Romney as well. Study 2 examined the 2004 presidential election where perceptions of the party candidates' warmth and competence reversed (Bush/warm; Kerry/competent). There competence was emphasized by Democrats and warmth by Republicans. Study 3 showed that varying the warmth and competence of each party's prospective candidates for the 2016 election influences whether warmth or competence is emphasized by Democrats or Republicans. Thus, differences between Republicans and Democrats in emphasizing warmth or competence reflect a dynamic motivated cognition that is tailored to benefit their preferred candidate. © 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Peak Politics: Resource Scarcity and Libertarian Political Culture in the United States

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Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew

My dissertation uses the "peak oil" movement as a lens to analyze the convergence of apocalyptic environmental thinking and libertarian political culture in the recent United States. The "peak oil" movement was a twenty-first century American social movement of Americans who came to believe that oil depletion and other environmental problems would lead to the imminent collapse of global industrial society. Dedicated adherents developed a rich subculture, primarily online, and prepared themselves for the "post-carbon" future by conserving energy, changing occupations, and even purchasing land. Drawing on surveys of over 1,500 participants, ethnographic research, discourse analysis of peak oil websites and literary analysis of subcultural fiction, my research reveals a group of mostly white, male, liberal Americans struggling with the perceived threat of economic, environmental and geopolitical decline while the country undergoes a broad shift in political culture: the continued rise of libertarian ideals, accelerated by the influence of Internet technology. I view this apocalyptic subculture in the context of petroleum dependence, eco-apocalyptic discourses, the environmental discourse of "limits to growth," white masculinity, climate change, and the influence of conservative individualism on American political culture.

Resolving the dilemma between equality and liberty: the Swedish political system

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Nathalie BLANC-NOEL

2013-06-01

Full Text Available Swedish democracy ranks very high in international democracy indexes. It fascinates political scientists from all over the world because it seems to have resolved a fundamental political dilemma: the choice between equality and liberty, without the historical inconvenient of regimes which favoured too much equality - but killed liberty, or regimes which favoured liberty - but failed to make citizens equal... The "'egalitarian pluralism" practiced in Swedish political system is rooted in a specific political culture. This culture has opted for popular sovereignty and comes from the ancient peasant society. Lutheran values and the absence of feudalism paved the way to the search for equality and the edification of a strong State. In the 20th century, the Social-democrats endorsed the traditional Swedish values and prolonged them in the so-called Swedish model, with social policies allowing more equality along with more individual autonomy. Nowadays, the model is evolving, coping with globalization, and the definition of equality is under discussion.

RELIGIOUS DEMOCRATIZATION IN INDONESIA: STRENGTHENING THE PRO-CEDURAL AND SUBSTANTIAL RELIGIOUS DEMOCRACY

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Eka Hendry AR.

2013-06-01

Full Text Available Inspired by the book of Michael Mann about the dark side of democracy that discusses the paradox between the ideality of democratic values and empirical realities of violence in the name of freedom (democracy, this paper begins with the exposure of the paradox, such as the rise of the violent conflict between groups of people (both ethnic and religious-based and the high prevalence of violence between religious groups in Indonesia. Even worse, a very wrenching violence involves state actors (rulers. This paper tries to understand the roots of the paradox, with a look at how the relationship between state and religion and the religious community trend of Indonesia (especially Muslims. The author argues that the democratization of religion is a solution to the issues. To answer what kind of religious democracy lives in Indonesia, the author analyzes through a religious procedural (or constitutional democratic dimension and religious substantial democratic dimension. The phenomenon of disobedience of law and system and the euphoria of law-making that reflects “intolerance” in several places in Indonesia display the fundamental issue in the religious procedural democracy. Whereas in the context of religious substantial democracy, the prevailing trend of religion that serves as a political and economic vehicle and ignores religion as a substantial aspect of the behavior of the Indonesian society has resulted in the marginalization of religious position and function. Then, the infiltration of the model of political Islam has also led to alienation of the character of the Islamic society of Indonesia, from a democratic pattern to a revival (radical one. In this light, the author needs to present a strategy to encourage religious democracy in Indonesia, structurally through formulating the ideal relation model between state and religion and culturally through a substantial pattern of religion embedded with the character of Indonesian religious

Cultural Governance and the Crisis of Financial Capitalism

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Jean-Louis Fabiani

2014-02-01

Full Text Available Cultural policies in Europe were designed, albeit in significantly different ways national and ideological lines, as an additional component of the Welfare State. They were supposed to bring about democracy in cultural consumption by removing the obstacles on the road to giving access to symbolic goods. Since the 80s and the neo-liberal turn, this democratic imperative has declined, and was even labeled a complete failure, and new goals for cultural policy emerged: developing the conditions for a creative society, supporting city branding, and encouraging private sponsorship. This change in political justification created new contradictions and some disenchantment among the professionals who were, in growing numbers, employed in the cultural sector. The current crisis of capitalism has two main consequences. Shrinking budgets add new limits on cultural policy as culture tends to be identified as a ’supplement of soul’ when basic needs are no longer addressed and new claims for full democratic access to cultural resources.

Recognizing Politics in the Nursery: Early Childhood Education Institutions as Sites of Mundane Politics

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Millei, Zsuzsa; Kallio, Kirsi Pauliina

2018-01-01

In his inspirational article titled 'Bringing politics into the nursery', Peter Moss argues for early childhood institutions to "become" places of 'democratic political practice'. In this article, the authors add to Moss's call and argue that these institutions are sites of 'mundane political practice', containing various attitudinal…

Is additional conditionality preventing EU accession? Serbian democratic 'step back'

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Milenković Miloš

2013-01-01

Full Text Available European Union integration of Western Balkan countries in conditioned on the fulfilment on the set of criteria aimed at profound societal change. However, there is a number of additional criteria within the EU enlargement policy for the Western Balkans and Serbia in particular. We have already designated this process as 'culturalization' of accession criteria. It comprises of alterations of criteria from initial, identity-neutral and technical issues to coming to terms with the legacy of identity conflicts in the Balkan region. These conditions pose a significant challenge to political institutions in a not yet consolidated democracy. In this article we analyze how, as a result of additional conditioning, the EU accession, instead of enjoying social consensus, has reopened identity issues, divided the society and boosted discourses on 'sovereignty', 'double standards of international community' and 'injustice' perpetrated to Serbia at the time of disintegration of Yugoslavia. Serbia is in a paradoxical situation we refer to as democratic deadlock - it is in need of consolidated democracy in order to achieve political stability and stable government capable to implement EU reforms, while the instability itself is a result of additional criteria for EU accession (and reactions to it. It is a theoretically intriguing case of additional criteria preventing fulfilment of the basic accession requirements. It is further analyzed how this observed tendency can be redirected through slight alteration of beneficiaries of EU incentives aimed at facilitating cultural change. In order to viably change the political community, external assistance process needs to be as inclusive as possible. It is argued that external assistance should not only cover main political, economic and legal actors, but also include cultural actors, especially culturally legitimate elites.

Gender, religion and democratic politics in India.

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Hasan, Zoya

2010-01-01

This article examines the impact of identity politics on gender equality. More specifically it explores the paradoxical and complex relationship of religion and politics in a multi-religious society and the complicated ways in which women's activism has both reinforced and challenged their gender identities. Contrary to the argument that religious politics does not always negate gender equality, the article argues that the Hindu religious politics and women's activism associated with it provides a compelling example of the instrumentalisation of women to accomplish the political goals of the Hindu right. It also examines the approach and strategies of influential political parties, women's organisations and Muslim women's groups towards legal reform and the contested issue of a uniform civil code. Against those who argue that, in the current communal conjuncture, reform within Muslim personal laws or Islamic feminism is the best strategy for enhancing the scope of Muslim women's rights, the article argues that such an approach tends to freeze identities within religious boundaries. It shows how women's and minority rights are used within the politics of religion to sideline the agenda of women's rights.

Sarajevo: Politics and Cultures of Remembrance and Ignorance

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Adla Isanović

2017-10-01

Full Text Available This text critically reflects on cultural events organized to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War in Sarajevo and Bosnia & Herzegovina. It elaborates on disputes which showed that culture is in the centre of identity politics and struggles (which can also take a fascist nationalist form, accept the colonizer’s perspective, etc., on how commemorations ‘swallowed’ the past and present, but primarily contextualizes, historicizes and politicizes Sarajevo 2014 and its politics of visibility. This case is approached as an example and symptomatic of the effects of the current state of capitalism, coloniality, racialization and subjugation, as central to Europe today. Article received: June 2, 2017; Article accepted: June 8, 2017; Published online: October 15, 2017; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Isanović, Adla. "Sarajevo: Politics and Cultures of Remembrance and Ignorance." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 14 (2017: 133-144. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i14.199

Measuring the democratic anchorage of governance networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fotel, Trine; Sørensen, Eva; Torfing, Jacob

There has been a growing debate about the democratic problems and potentials of governance networks among political scientists and public managers. While some claim that governance networks tend to undermine democracy, others argue that they have the potential to improve and strengthen democracy....... This debate is found wanting in two respects. First of all, there has been far too little discussion about what democracy means in relation to pluricentric governance networks. Second, the current debate builds on the assumption that it is possible to give a clear-cut answer to the question of the democratic...... problems and merits of governance networks. This assumption is highly questionable, and prevents a more nuanced assessment of the democratic performance of governance networks. As such, it diverts the focus of attention away from the fact that governance networks may be democratic in some respects...

Cultural citizenship and real politics : the Dutch case

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Boomkens, Rene

2010-01-01

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, politics and everyday life in the Netherlands became polarized, under the influence of several conservative and populist movements that reflected a growing distrust of government and 'politics as usual', and a xenophobic and cultural conservative

Pentecostalism and Politics in Neoliberal Chile

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Martin Lindhardt

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Este artículo investiga las relaciones históricas y contemporáneas entre el Pentecostalismo y la política en Chile. La primera parte del artículo provee un resumen histórico del crecimiento y consolidación de la religión Pentecostal en relación a diferentes ambientes políticos. En este artículo se esclarecen además las diferentes posturas Pentecostales hacia la esfera política. En particular hago hincapié, en cómo surge una cultura de desencanto político en el Chile post-dictatorial que crea un vacío simbólico, el cual trae como consecuencia el nacimiento de movimientos religiosos. En la segunda parte de este artículo se discute las posibles afinidades entre el Pentecostalismo, como una cultura religiosa, y los principios democráticos. El argumento es que a pesar de que el Pentecostalismo puede contener algunas cualidades democráticas, también existe una compatibilidad notable entre la visión teísta e individualista Pentecostal acerca de los cambios sociales, y un orden social neoliberal, en donde la indolencia política se expande y en donde predomina un sentido de progreso individual y no colectivo. English: This article explores historical and contemporary relationships between Pentecostalism and politics in Chile. The first part of the article provides an historical account of the growth and consolidation of Pentecostal religion within changing political environments and sheds light on Pentecostal stances to and involvements with the political sphere. In particular, it focuses on how a culture of political disenchantment has emerged in post-dictatorial neo-liberal Chile, creating a symbolic void that can be filled by religious movements. The second part of the article discusses possible affinities between Pentecostalism as a religious culture and democratic principles and values. It argues that although Pentecostalism may contain certain democratic qualities, there is also a striking compatibility between, on the one

A toolbox for democratic and parcticipatory methods in education

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kolfschoten, G.L.

2012-01-01

With the trends in the use of social software and social media, a more informal and democratic online culture is developing, especially in younger generations. This culture is increasingly conflicting with traditional teaching styles. One of these trends involves the introduction of more democratic

Trade unions and liberal values: struggle or complementarity in a democratic society?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

O. I. Tupitzya

2014-02-01

Thus, viewing the political position of trade unions in a modern democratic society suggests that the trade union units are fully capable to absorb some elements of liberal doctrines. This indicates a broad base complementarity and mutual conceptual foundations of trade unionism and democratic society.

Political institutions as substitute for democracy: a political economy analysis of economic growth

OpenAIRE

Pereira, Carlos; Teles, Vladimir Kühl

2009-01-01

This manuscript empirically assesses the effects of political institutions on economic growth. It analyzes how political institutions affect economic growth in different stages of democratization and economic development by means of dynamic panel estimation with interaction terms. The new empirical results obtained show that political institutions work as a substitute for democracy promoting economic growth. In other words, political institutions are important for increasing economic growth, ...

Role of the Knowledge in the Political Socialization of Adults

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Bogomir Novak

1996-12-01

Full Text Available The author analyses a thesis of the ambivalent structure of the knowledge and the political socialization, the school's knowledge and the political socialisation dilemma in recent circum­ stances. The adults socialize themselves in postsociali­stic transition for a new system of democracy in the independent state of Slovenia. The adults are cleaved between nostalgia for the past and neces­sity of (active adaptation in present. Our political culture has a low level because the knowledge was not consider as a value. A new democratic political culture already arises in the postsocialist countries. The knowledge, which we get through the social relationships and logical, critical thinking, has double structure: it is repetition and creativi­ty, the knowledge for power over extern, physic world and knowledge for human, psycho-social world, partialised and holistic knowledge. The adults, who are included in process of long-life education addes the Jack of school knowledge with learning of contemporary knowledge. In this way they resocialize themselves for accomplish­ ing of the complex tasks of the postsocialist socie­ty.

Liberian Political Culture | Yoder | Lagos Notes and Records

African Journals Online (AJOL)

As Liberians seek to restore their nation, much of the emphasis has been on formal political systems such as elections, the executive, regional authorities, the military, the judiciary, or the national legislature. The following essay argues that it will be equally important to understand and reshape Liberia's political culture ...

Democratization and Transitional Justice in Brazil

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maria Paula NASCIMENTO ARAUJO

2016-05-01

Full Text Available Brazil experienced a long process of political transition featured by an intense game of political and social forces, in which different actors with different democratization projects clashed. Despite the leadership of the transition process have been in the hands of conservative elites linked to the military dictatorship, broad sectors of the oposition and of the lefts, as well as representants of social movements, disputed the transitional space and expanded the initial design of the regime. This long transition —marked by negotiations, frustrations and resilience— reflected on the transitional justice model adopted by the country. Almost 30 years after the end of military dictatorship, the Truth Commission established by President Dilma Rousseff in 2012, drew attention to issues related to memory, justice and reparation and showed that the democratization process, in some respects, is still incloncluded. This article aims to restore this historical process highlighting some of its characteristics and specificities.

From Dissensus to Conviviality: The New Cultural Politics of Difference in Turkey

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Oliver Kontny

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Political developments in Turkey have sparked unprecedented international media attention after the failed coup d'état in July 2016. Coverage tends to focus on the draconic crackdown and restrictions that include academic work and cultural production. This article highlights articulations of dissensus from among the vivid community of cultural producers and takes a look at the uneasy relation between cultural politics, cultural policies and Kulturkampf. Drawing on work by Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Rancière and Cornel West, I attempt to discuss the theoretical dimensions of a new cultural politics of difference in Turkey that seeks to negotiate alterity and work towards a culture of conviviality in the face of ever-increasing adversities.

Perceiving political polarization in the United States: party identity strength and attitude extremity exacerbate the perceived partisan divide.

Science.gov (United States)

Westfall, Jacob; Van Boven, Leaf; Chambers, John R; Judd, Charles M

2015-03-01

An important component of political polarization in the United States is the degree to which ordinary people perceive political polarization. We used over 30 years of national survey data from the American National Election Study to examine how the public perceives political polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties and between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. People in the United States consistently overestimate polarization between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. People who perceive the greatest political polarization are most likely to report having been politically active, including voting, trying to sway others' political beliefs, and making campaign contributions. We present a 3-factor framework to understand ordinary people's perceptions of political polarization. We suggest that people perceive greater political polarization when they (a) estimate the attitudes of those categorized as being in the "opposing group"; (b) identify strongly as either Democrat or Republican; and (c) hold relatively extreme partisan attitudes-particularly when those partisan attitudes align with their own partisan political identity. These patterns of polarization perception occur among both Democrats and Republicans. © The Author(s) 2015.

Political scandal and the politics of exposure : from Watergate to Lewinsky and beyond.

OpenAIRE

Welch, S. E.

2007-01-01

The paper advances an interpretation of political scandal and its place in democratic politics, taking the scandals of the ‘Watergate era’ in American politics as its evidential basis. The interpretation focuses on an aspect of political scandal that has been neglected in existing treatments, namely the politically constructed rather than epistemologically simple nature of scandalous ‘exposure’. The career of the ‘smoking gun’ in the Watergate era provides illustration. The paper goes on to r...

Democratic Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa

African Journals Online (AJOL)

there was general consensus that the “democratic experiment” had taken root in Africa ... African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance is of particular importance in this context. The .... of governmental work through results in the interests of citizens. ... declarations impact on the reality of political rule in Africa?

Democratizing Rural Economy: Institutional Friction, Sustainable Struggle and the Cooperative Movement

Science.gov (United States)

Mooney, Patrick H.

2004-01-01

Sustainable development demands institutions manage the conflicts and struggles that inevitably arise over material and ideal interests. While current cooperative theory privileges the economic element, a political economy of cooperation emphasizes cooperatives' tentative bridging of economic and political spheres with a democratic ethos. The…

Democratic survival in Latin America (1945-2005

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Aníbal PÉREZ-LIÑÁN

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Why do democracies survive or break down? In this paper, it returns to this classic question with an empirical focus on Latin America from 1945 to 2005. The argument deviates from the quantitative literature and a good part of the qualitative literature on democratic survival and breakdown. It is argued that structural variables such as the level of development and inequalities have not shaped prospects for democratic survival in Latin America. Nor, contrary to findings in some of the literature, has economic performance affected the survival of competitive regimes. Instead, it is focused on the regional political environment and on actors’ normative preferences about democracy and dictatorship and their policy radicalism or moderation. It is argued that 1 a higher level of development did not increase the likelihood of democratic survival in Latin America over this long time; 2 if actors have a normative preference for democracy, it is more likely to survive; and 3 policy moderation facilitates democratic survival.

FROM CONVENIENT HIBERNATION TO CIRCUMSTANTIAL DESPERATION: HATE SPEECH, PARTY POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND THE NIGERIA’S 2015 GENERAL ELECTIONS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mike Omilusi

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Until a few months to the 2015 general elections, many political parties that have conveniently hibernated for a better part of their existence, perhaps owing to lack of proper organizational structure or support base, uncoordinated programmes or were registered because of pecuniary gains or admittance of anticipated poor electoral outing, suddenly began to jostle for political space. The main opposition party and the ruling party were either perfecting a merger processes or engulfed in internal wrangling such that communication with the electorate on fundamental issues became inconsequential. In fact, the two dominant parties, the Peoples Democratic Party and All Progressive Congress only produced their presidential candidates less than five months to the election; and the electoral campaign assumed desperate contestation in a climate of prejudice and intolerance. Hate speeches and violence were the hallmarks of their electoral campaigns. The 2015 general elections therefore, offer a unique context to interrogate the place of party political communication in an emerging democracy and specifically how hate campaigns among political gladiators/contending parties could generate violence, and if not tamed, derail democratic consolidation. This essay affirms that hate speech is not only inspired by some social circumstances but also part of a general democratic process. It attests to the fact that Nigerian politicians have become more desperate and daring in taking and retaining political power; and more intolerant of opposition, criticism and efforts at replacing them. Relying extensively on secondary sources with the aid of descriptive and narrative tools, this essay concludes that the political culture of a country determines the behavior and attitude of the population towards the political system and that democratic transition from one administration to another, particularly in emerging democracies, has often been accompanied by violence

Gifted Education's Reflection of Country-Specific Cultural, Political, and Economic Features

Science.gov (United States)

Frantz, Roger S.; McClarty, Katie Larsen

2016-01-01

Educational policies and practices are influenced by cultural, political, and economic factors, and this is also true of specialized educational approaches such as gifted education. Factors such as a country's cultural tendency toward egalitarianism or meritocracy, whether the political system is centralized or decentralized, and the degree to…

The Comparison of Politeness Strategies in Chinese Culture and in Eng-lish Speaking Context

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

李庆龄

2015-01-01

In contemporary society, as the development of globalization a growing tendency of how to communication effective⁃ly between different culture and languages has becoming a matter of fact. Even though a great number of communication strate⁃gies used to reduce the culture shock, obstacles in cultural exchanges still remains due to the culture differences. Politeness theory, as an important communication strategy, is still the most important and influential theory for cross-cultural communication. While there still has a few controversial arguments being conducted. It results in the issue of this article:Is there different compar⁃ing Chinese culture with English Speaking Culture in Terms of Politeness Strategies? In this paper, I will present a general review of classic politeness theories including Brown&Levinson, Leech’s research in English speaking culture and Gu and Xu’s findings in Chinese culture. Among their theories some specific politeness strategies such as face-saving strategy, politeness principle and its maxims will be used to give an image of the difference between Chinese culture and English speaking culture in terms of po⁃liteness strategies. In the definition of‘politeness’, two characteristics are worth mentioning:universality as well as culture-specif⁃ic. Therefore the article concludes by the arguing that, in spite of a few similarities, there are differences between in Chinese cul⁃ture and in English speaking context in politeness.

Legitimacy, Political Disaffection and Discontent with (Democratic) Politics in the Czech Republic

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Linek, Lukáš

2016-01-01

Roč. 8, č. 2 (2016), s. 51-73 E-ISSN 1803-8220 R&D Projects: GA ČR GA13-29032S Institutional support: RVO:68378025 Keywords : Czech politics * political disaffection * regime legitimacy Subject RIV: AD - Politology ; Political Sciences http://acpo.vedeckecasopisy.cz/publicFiles/001208.pdf

Political Culture and Risk Analysis: An Outline of Somalia, Tunisia, and Libya

Science.gov (United States)

2016-11-21

unrest, outside stakeholders will always have concerns regarding any signs of institu- tional, economic, political , and social instability . From...predictability, stability , continuity, and security, 40 Political Culture and Risk Analysis MCU Journal serving as a filter for all subsequent (collective...armed conflict and its accompanying instability has remained. 46 Political Culture and Risk Analysis MCU Journal The 30 years preceding 1991 was

Intervention in Multi-cultural Organizatioons - Prevention of accidents as political change processes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dyhrberg, Mette Bang

1999-01-01

workplaces and the contribution communicates ongoing work with such a method, including political, cultural and structural elements. A selective study of literature within safety culture, corporate culture and organisational theory has shown that the safety culture approach can benefit from...... the organisational culture approaches of Alvesson and Geertz and organisational theory dealing with political processes (Pettigrew, Knights). The implicit models of organisation and man within mainstream safety culture approaches seems to be too rationalistic compared with day to day life of organisations...

Democratic Decentralization Reforms and Their Unintended Consequences in Postslavery Northern Benin,

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hahonou, Eric Komlavi

2017-01-01

The paper retraces the recent political emancipation of the Gando, a group of people from Northern Benin whose servile status had been an argument for placing them at the margins of their society and excluding them from political participation. Since the recent democratization process that took p...

Styling the revolution: masculinities, youth, and street politics in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Doreen

2011-01-01

This article explores the changes to urban political culture in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1998 to the present. By tracing the contributions of youth activists, and middle-class university students in particular, to the production of the street as a political and public space, the author demonstrates to what extent the democratized post-Suharto era naturalizes the place of youth in nationalist politics. Central to this inquiry of youth identity formation is the elision of class and gender as analytical categories. Student movements in 1998 and after have relied on a specific masculine style that draws on both the authenticity of nationalist historical narratives and the street as the domain of the People, and in the process masks potentially contentious class and gender differences among progressive activists.

The Commitment of Senior Civil Servants to Democratic Freedoms and Equality

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Miro HACEK

2012-02-01

Full Text Available In modern democracies, senior civil servants have outgrown their classic role of mere implementers of orders given by politicians. Both senior civil servants and politicians serve the same democratic state, and both are heirs to the democratic evolution. Our hypothesis is based mainly on the historically developed division of labor between bureaucracy and politics. Senior civil servants have never been tasked with creating the conditions for more democracy in the state, but instead with creating the conditions for a more effective and successful state. Given that political bodies in which politicians operate have been established as the institutionalized personification of democracy, the task of politicians is above all the promotion of democracy, its values and norms. We have tested that hypothesis on the case of Slovenian senior civil servants and politicians and found out, that both elites are favorable to political freedoms and political equality.

Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium.

Science.gov (United States)

Giroux, Henry A., Ed.; Myrsiades, Kostas, Ed.

The chapters in this collection show how and why the critical functions of democratically informed civic education must become the core of the universitys mission. Part 1, "Higher Education and the Politics of Corporate Culture," contains; (1) "Franchising the University" (Jeffrey J. Williams); (2) "Vocationalizing Higher Education: Schooling and…

Politics of place. Political representation and the culture of electioneering in the Netherlands, c. 1848-1980s

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kaal, H.G.J.

2016-01-01

This article is a first attempt to explore how a politics of place has manifested itself in Dutch electoral culture since the middle of the nineteenth century. It aims to move beyond a narrow interpretation of a politics of place as an ‘old-fashioned’ feature of electoral politics to be associated

ICTs and Political Life.

Science.gov (United States)

Robbin, Alice; Courtright, Christina; Davis, Leah

2004-01-01

Presents a literature review that covers the following topics related to information and communications technologies (ICTs): (1) theories of ICTs and how they frame political life; (2) normative democratic theory and concepts; (3) e-political life; and (4) research on e-government, e-governance, and e-democracy; (Contains 276 references.) (MES)

Driving forces of main landscape change processes from past 200 years in Central Europe - differences between old democratic and post-socialist countries

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Skokanová Hana

2016-03-01

Full Text Available The article compares and points out differences in driving forces of four main landscape change processes that shaped post-socialist countries and old democratic countries of Central Europe during the last two centuries. Studying landscape change processes and corresponding driving forces helps in understanding patterns of present landscape and can help among others in better prediction of future landscape change trends. Here, the presented results are based on review of scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 2000 and 2014. Driving forces affecting these processes were grouped into four categories. Economic forces drove mainly agricultural intensification; agricultural land abandonment and urbanisation and were pronounced especially in the second half of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century. Technological driving forces affected agricultural intensification especially in the 19th century and the second half of the 20th century while cultural driving forces had the biggest impact on urbanisation at the beginning of the 21st century. Political driving forces affected agricultural intensification, urbanisation as well as agricultural land abandonment and were pronounced mainly during the second half of the 20th century in the post-socialist countries. Political forces in the form of subsidies drove agricultural extensification at the beginning of the 21st century. The drivers for the agricultural intensification as well as urbanisation seem to be similar for both old democratic and post-socialist countries. In contrast, agricultural land abandonment in the old democratic countries was driven by technological, cultural and economic driving forces while in the post-socialist countries the political driving forces were mainly responsible. Changes in systems for subsidies and changes in the agricultural commodity markets are also responsible for different frequencies and rates of extensification of

Democratic Miseducation: Preparing Students for Democracies That Do Not Exist.

Science.gov (United States)

Vaughan, Geoffrey M.

The political educator takes the perspective that, in Thomas Hobbes's phrase, "man is not born fit for society." To make him so fit, contemporary political educators seek to develop individual autonomy and democratic affect, which would have the added task of reforming all of society in the future. The current consensus holds that the…

An outline for Serbian political tradition in the work of Slobodan Jovanović

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Bazić Jovan R.

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The paper presents considerations of the research on the Serbian political tradition in the work of Slobodan Jovanović (1869-1958, a famous Serbian lawyer, historian, writer and politician, who had a very important role in the development of the Serbian political thought. His work is extensive and varied, but in essence, it relates to the whole of political life in Serbia in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Almost all the elements that make up the Serbian political tradition can be observed in his work. All these elements are contained in the discussion of political institutions in the 19th century Serbia, the rule of the Obrenović dynasty, political parties and party leaders, political ideas and movements in Serbia and Yugoslavia, extreme political behavior and Serbian national character. Jovanović found the origins of Serbian political tradition in the epic poetry and the Kosovo myth, as well as in the poetry of Njegoš. This was a decisive factor in the formation of general ideas about the Serbs as a freedom-loving, heroic and justice-loving people. At the same time, this is where the origins of the idea of Serbs as a disunited nation can be found. Jovanović paid the greatest attention to issues concerning the content of Serbian political tradition, namely: constitutional system, political institutions, parliamentary life, inter-party struggles, political events, the role of the individual in politics and culture, authoritarianism and political violence. He pointed to the political ideas that were coming from the West and which were accepted with mistrust by the patriarchal Serbian society. He appreciated the role of political parties in the democratization of political life, but he also warned of the dangers that threatened national unity: party favouritism and intolerance. In the analyses of the Serbian national character, Jovanović was of the opinion that the Serbs are predominantly a

Political Communication in Malaysia: A study on the Use of New Media in Politics

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pauline Pooi Yin Leong

2015-10-01

Full Text Available To gain and retain political power, politicians use the media to persuade the masses to vote and support them, especially during elections. Barisan Nasional (BN has successfully used the media to maintain its power for the past 57 years, making it the longest-serving elected government in the world still currently in office. However, the emergence of the Internet has challenged the status quo. The purpose of the research was to investigate how new media has influenced the political process and communication strategies in Malaysia and its impact on the political landscape. The researcher interviewed 19 respondents: politicians, bloggers and media consultants from both sides of the political divide. The findings showed that new media, especially Web 2.0, has expanded the public sphere and enabled more Malaysians to participate in the democratic process, through information dissemination, mobilisation or crowd-sourcing. However, the cyber-war between BN and the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR has caused confusion and disinformation, affecting the quality of democratic decision-making. Nevertheless, new media has enabled more voices to emerge and challenge the political hegemony.

Federalism in Nepal: Divergent Perception and Convergent Requirement for Democratic Consolidation

Science.gov (United States)

2013-03-01

without a law for sexual harassment , and one study says that there are still about 85 discriminatory laws and 137 discriminatory legal provisions.147...procedures because federalization and democratization of the state are mutually supportive, a lesson learned from India and Spain. Only political...supportive, a lesson learned from India and Spain. Only political understanding at the highest possible levels and compromise of political interests

Democratic Deliberation Procedures : Theoretical and Practical Issues

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tutui Viorel

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract : In contemporary political philosophy, the focus of the most important controversies is on the deliberative model of democracy. These controversies concern not only the theoretical problem of providing the best justification for a deliberative model of democratic legitimacy, but also the practical problem of designing the best deliberative procedure that will secure the implementation of deliberative democracy. In this paper I will present and analyze some of the most important deliberative designs: deliberative polls, citizens’ juries, consensus conferences and planning cells. I argue that these deliberative events can have a significant impact on the political behavior of a democratic community. However, I explain that all of them have only a limited influence on the policy-making activities in local and central governing structures. This is the reason why I believe we could only supplement and never fully replace the traditional aggregative procedures of democracy (voting and bargaining with a deliberative design.

Electoral Violence and Democratization Process in Nigeria: A Reference of 2011 and 2015 General Elections

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lawrence I. EDET

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The general account of Nigeria’s post-independence electoral processes has always been characterized by violence. Nigeria’s 2015 general elections marked the fifth multi-party elections in the country and the second handover of civilian administrations since the inception of the Fourth Republic democratic experiment in 1999. This account cannot be analyzed without issues of electoral violence. Electoral violence had been a permanent feature of Nigeria’s democratic process, except 2015 general elections where the international observers described as a “significant improvement” over the previous elections in terms of violence related cases. Electoral related violence in the country particularly in 2011 got to an unprecedented dimension resulting in destruction of lives and property worth millions of naira. This paper expatiates on electoral violence and its general implications on the democratization process in the country, with major emphasis on the 2011 and 2015 general elections. The paper argued that the high incidence of pre and post electoral violence in the country within the periods has to do with the way Nigerian politicians regard politics, weak political institutions and weak electoral management body as well as bias nature of the security agencies, etc. However, the paper examined the general implications of electoral violence on democratization process and how the country can handle the electoral process to avoid threats associated with the electoral violence. Archival analysis, which widely extracted data from newspapers, journals, workshop papers, books, as well as publications of non-governmental organizations was adopted for the study. The major significance of this study is to expose the negative implications associated with electoral violence and how it can be curbed. The position canvassed in this paper will serve as a useful political literature for political leaders, policy makers and the general reading public who

Corruption, political culture and negative social capital in Brazil

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marcello Baquero

2015-08-01

Full Text Available One of the problems in strengthening Brazilian democracy has been the endurance of continued corruption on the part of state officials. The result has been the institutionalization of a political culture, which shows a growing alienation, and apathy of citizens regarding politics. This behavior has its origins in citizens´ perception that the state and public authorities cannot be trusted producing an inertial democracy with low stocks of social capital. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corruption practices by state authorities and the structuring of a defective political culture in Brazil. The working hypothesis is that serious cases of institutionalized corruption are possible due to invisible social ties created among public authorities, producing social capital of a negative nature, which constraints the effective advancements in Brazilian democracy.

Dialogue, Eurocentrism, and Comparative Political Theory: A View from Cross-Cultural Intellectual History.

Science.gov (United States)

Shogimen, Takashi

2016-01-01

Comparative political theory is an emerging sub-field of political theory; it is a response to the dissatisfaction with the prevalent Eurocentric mode of political theorizing in the age of globalization. A methodological characteristic of comparative political theory is cross-cultural engagement through dialogue with foreign political ideas. The present paper argues that the dialogical mode of cross-cultural engagement is distinctively European. While the dialogical engagement with foreign worldviews constitutes a mainstream of the European literary tradition, it is largely absent, for example, from the Japanese counterpart. Despite its anti-Eurocentric motivations, comparative political theory is methodologically rooted in the European tradition.

The cultural politics of eating in Shenzhen.

Science.gov (United States)

O'Donnell, Mary Ann

2010-01-01

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, construction in Shenzhen symbolized both the transformation of Chinese socialism and the concomitant integration of Chinese society into global capitalist networks. This article tells the story of Shenzhen from the perspective of this first generation of immigrants, the so-called Old Shenzheners, who use nostalgia about food to define, debate, and ultimately retreat from conversations about what Shenzhen culture was and what it ought to be. Their food nostalgia is part of a larger cultural tradition of Chinese alimentary politics and has allowed Shenzheners to indigenize capitalist globalization to make the city their own. Old Shenzheners' food nostalgia represents an important moment in the Chinese transition to a post socialist political economy, redefining what it means to be both Chinese and global in a post–cold war world order.

Democratization of philosophy of technologies

OpenAIRE

Arun Kumar Tripathi

2015-01-01

Technology is a form of culture. Technology is shaping the theoretical framework of our social existence. The technological form of life is part and parcel of culture, just as culture in the human sense inescapably implies technologies. There are unfathomable effects of technology on human culture and society. This paper presents the background and the editorial introduction to the special issue: symposium on Education, Technology, & Democracy: Democratization of Technologies.

Political model of social evolution.

Science.gov (United States)

Acemoglu, Daron; Egorov, Georgy; Sonin, Konstantin

2011-12-27

Almost all democratic societies evolved socially and politically out of authoritarian and nondemocratic regimes. These changes not only altered the allocation of economic resources in society but also the structure of political power. In this paper, we develop a framework for studying the dynamics of political and social change. The society consists of agents that care about current and future social arrangements and economic allocations; allocation of political power determines who has the capacity to implement changes in economic allocations and future allocations of power. The set of available social rules and allocations at any point in time is stochastic. We show that political and social change may happen without any stochastic shocks or as a result of a shock destabilizing an otherwise stable social arrangement. Crucially, the process of social change is contingent (and history-dependent): the timing and sequence of stochastic events determine the long-run equilibrium social arrangements. For example, the extent of democratization may depend on how early uncertainty about the set of feasible reforms in the future is resolved.

Border Encounters: American Cultural Politics and the U.S.-Mexico Border

OpenAIRE

Reimer, Jennifer Andrea

2011-01-01

AbstractBorder Encounters: American Cultural Politics and the U.S.-Mexico BorderbyJennifer Andrea ReimerDoctor of Philosophy in Ethnic StudiesUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor José David Saldívar, Co-ChairProfessor Laura E. Pérez, Co-ChairBorder Encounters: American Cultural Politics and the U.S.-Mexico Border is a transnational, interdisciplinary cultural study of the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border that argues for the critical role of the international border in the racial past, p...

Towards a "Critical Cultural Political Economy" Account of the Globalising of Education

Science.gov (United States)

Robertson, Susan L.; Dale, Roger

2015-01-01

This paper outlines the basis of an alternative theoretical approach to the study of the globalisation of "education"--a Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) approach. Our purpose here is to bring this body of concepts--critical, cultural, political, economy--into our interrogation of globalising projects and…

Political culture, the dimensions of exercising citizenship and the participation in public life

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Celene Tonella

2012-03-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to think about the elements of exercising citizenship, of political culture and of subjective values that influence political phenomena. The relationship between cultural values and political dynamics still constitutes a controversial issue among political scientists, yet, increasing links between the variables can be perceived. Authors such as Putnam (2000 and Moses (2010 emphasize the importance of the attitudes of the citizenry. The analysis is based on data collected by a survey (2010 conducted with the population of three cities that constitute the so-called urban sprawl of the Metropolitan Region of Maringá: Sarandi, Paiçandu and Maringá. Classical themes were presented in researches on political culture, as well as controversial issues such as the decriminalization of marijuana, the legalization of abortion, among others.

Performing Politics

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Troy R. E. Paddock

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Walter Benjamin’s observation that fascism turns politics into aesthetics is, by now, a well-worn idea. This article argues that Benjamin’s critique of politics can apply just as much to the modern democratic politics of the United States. Borrowing from Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Carl Schmitt, this article suggests that modern political discourse in the United States does not follow the classical liberal ideal of rational discourse in the marketplace of ideas within the public sphere. Instead, contemporary politics has become spectacle where images and slogans replace thought and debate in a 24/7 news cycle and political infotainment programs. The result is that progressives and conservatives have their own political “ecospheres” which enable them to have their own perspective reinforced, and debate is replaced by straw man arguments and personal attacks.

The Women's Studies Center--A Women's-Led NGO Deepening Democracy in Chile: Educating Women through Personal Empowerment and Political Agency.

Science.gov (United States)

King, Caroline

This paper explores how the Women's Studies Center (Centro de Estudios de la Mujer, CEM), a feminist, women-led nongovernmental organization (NGO), is contributing to socio-cultural change in Chile 11 years after the country's democratic transition. CEM merges the theoretical and the practical, and the personal and the political through education…

Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

P H Stoker

democratic control of military and security institutions is strategic to democratisation for two main reasons: firstly because these institutions have a peculiar intimate relationship to political power and secondly because their security functions, including the management of insecurities that may be generated by democratisation ...

Does cultural exposure partially explain the association between personality and political orientation?

Science.gov (United States)

Xu, Xiaowen; Mar, Raymond A; Peterson, Jordan B

2013-11-01

Differences in political orientation are partly rooted in personality, with liberalism predicted by Openness to Experience and conservatism by Conscientiousness. Since Openness is positively associated with intellectual and creative activities, these may help shape political orientation. We examined whether exposure to cultural activities and historical knowledge mediates the relationship between personality and political orientation. Specifically, we examined the mediational role of print exposure (Study 1), film exposure (Study 2), and knowledge of American history (Study 3). Studies 1 and 2 found that print and film exposure mediated the relationships Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness have with political orientation. In Study 3, knowledge of American history mediated the relationship between Openness and political orientation, but not the association between Conscientiousness and political orientation. Exposure to culture, and a corollary of this exposure in the form of acquiring knowledge, can therefore partially explain the associations between personality and political orientation.

Democratic and Republican physicians provide different care on politicized health issues

Science.gov (United States)

Hersh, Eitan D.; Goldenberg, Matthew N.

2016-01-01

Physicians frequently interact with patients about politically salient health issues, such as drug use, firearm safety, and sexual behavior. We investigate whether physicians’ own political views affect their treatment decisions on these issues. We linked the records of over 20,000 primary care physicians in 29 US states to a voter registration database, obtaining the physicians’ political party affiliations. We then surveyed a sample of Democratic and Republican primary care physicians. Respondents evaluated nine patient vignettes, three of which addressed especially politicized health issues (marijuana, abortion, and firearm storage). Physicians rated the seriousness of the issue presented in each vignette and their likelihood of engaging in specific management options. On the politicized health issues—and only on such issues—Democratic and Republican physicians differed substantially in their expressed concern and their recommended treatment plan. We control for physician demographics (like age, gender, and religiosity), patient population, and geography. Physician partisan bias can lead to unwarranted variation in patient care. Awareness of how a physician’s political attitudes might affect patient care is important to physicians and patients alike. PMID:27698126

From Representation to Participation: A More Democratic European Union?

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Marcela Monica Stoica

2012-05-01

Full Text Available The present paper analyzes the evolution and characteristics of the democratic process in theEuropean Union from the perspective of political science using the recent theories in this field. Following theentry into force, the Treaty of Lisbon establishes the principle of participatory democracy that puts the focusof the European citizen, a citizen who is actively involved in European Union life, strengthening EU - citizenrelationship. The essence of participatory democracy is the destruction of political apathy and the maximizingof active participation of citizens in the democratic tasks. So, the basic principle of the participatorydemocracy is solidarity. The results of this analysis show that although participatory democracy is establishedin the European law, citizens are less involved in the decision-making in EU and are more and moreindividual, contradicting thus the very foundations of this type of democracy.

Political control and perceptions of corruption in Icelandic local government

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Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Political control is an important value of democratic governance and without it democratic accountability can hardly mean much. This is why a number of authors have seen politicization of public service appointments and greater control by the centre as a potential counterweight against trends in recent decades towards more networked and less hierarchical organizational forms of directing public policy. It may help to reassert democratic control. The option of strengthening political control, however, has not been much studied with regard to its likely effects on corruption. Power has the potential to corrupt unless adequately controlled and strengthening political power in a networked environment may create a structure of temptation which conventional deterrents to corruption are unable to curb. The impact of strong political leadership on corruption is here studied in the context of Icelandic local government, making use of institutional variations in the office of Mayor, which provide a unique opportunity for testing the effects of strong political control on corruption. The analysis indicates that municipalities with strong political mayors are likely to be associated with perceptions of corruption even when other factors, such as the structure of temptation and deterrents, are accounted for.

Relansarea proiectului de integrare europeană presupune o luptă politico-culturală cu ideologia neoliberală. Interviu cu Profesorul Angelo Chielli (The revival of the European integration project requires a political and cultural struggle with the neoliberal ideology

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Sorin BOCANCEA

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The conflicts within the European Union have always been and will always be purely political. The concentration of power in the hands of independent and supranational authorities leads to their removal from the control of the political institutions and democratic procedures. A revival of the European integration project could be based on a tough politico-cultural fight in a position to undermine the neoliberal ideology. Restarting the process of European integration cannot be the fruit of a ghostly economic recovery or stabilization of the balance states, but only as a result of a change in perspectives and objectives. To further be a viable project, the European Union needs some changes. Politically, it must be a question of political conflict recovery, reunification of alternative forces and proposing a different idea of Europe compared with that of the markets, specific to the neoliberalism. In the ideal contents plan, the concept of solidarity needs to be re-proposed, as a legal principle that allows the establishment of links outside those of family or community type. In this respect, solidarity is not only a guardianship, but even a direct exercise of freedoms.

Political discussions with family and friends

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Levinsen, Klaus; Yndigegn, Carsten

2015-01-01

Young people's engagement in political discussions with parents and friends represents a significant component of the political socialization process and can be seen as an activity where they learn some very basic democratic skills. Based on data from qualitative interviews and a questionnaire su...

Social Networks and Political Parties in Chile

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Adler Lomnitz, Larissa

2002-09-01

Full Text Available This paper describes the origin and evolution of two Chilean political parties (the Radical Party and the Christian Democrat Party through the analysis of the social networks that originated and composed them. The aim of this study is to propose a model of national political cultures on the basis of the structure of social networks related to power and of the symbol system, which legitimizes it. The structure of social networks, horizontal and vertical, are based on reciprocal or redistributive forms of exchange, on what is being exchanged and on the articulation between networks. In every society there are symmetrical and asymmetrical exchanges, which produce horizontal and vertical networks. These networks interact among themselves to form the social fabric. The dominance of some over others and how they combine, delineate the character of the political culture (authoritarian vs. egalitarian. Chile is a multiparty country within which there are cohorts of horizontal groups of friends, who informally exercise a central control over their members and create invisible boundaries setting them apart from others, in which leadership is under constrains. The result is both a strong presidential system based on an almost fanatic legitimacy, combined with factionalism and a strong parliamentary system.

Political Representation in Africa: Towards a Conceptual Framework*

African Journals Online (AJOL)

sulaiman.adebowale

2006-08-29

Aug 29, 2006 ... Political representation as a central component of democratic ... require attention from African scholars, civil society, political leaders and policy- ..... and their constituents' attitudes to representation, from style of doing poli-.

The left and the democratic stability in Latin America: the ideology of the Bolivarian Revolution and its impact on the political processes in Venezuela and Latin America

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José Enrique MOLINA V.

2010-10-01

Full Text Available One of the main areas of work in Comparative Politics and Political Theory has been the determination of the variables associated with the stability/instability of political systems in general, and democracy in particular. This paper focuses on one of these variables. One with newly acquired importance after the recent electoral successes by the left, but that nevertheless has not been in the spotlight of scholarly analysis: ideological polarization. Particularly, ideological polarization brought about by the attempt to pursue by the government a leftist political project. The main focus is on the ideological project pursued by the Venezuelan Bolivarian Government and its association with the political instability of 2002 and 2003. The paper considers this topic taken into account mainstream theoretical approaches on political stability, and the experience of previous Latin American leftist governments. The paper reaches the conclusion that in Latin America the attempt to implement a socialist program by a democratically elected government, if it is done without meaningful social and political negotiation, and with authoritarian overtones, is likely to lead to intense political instability and to the ultimate failure of the proposed social change.

Beyond Democratic Tolerance: Witch Killings in Timor-Leste

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Rebecca Strating

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Newly democratising states experience challenges in reconciling “traditional” or “customary” dispute resolution practices with newly established state-based legal systems based on the rule of law. For Timor-Leste, these tensions are pronounced in continuing debates concerning the killing or injuring of women accused of witchcraft. Defences of extrajudicial punishments tend to conflate democracy with local support and fail to deal with the key institutions of democratic systems, including the rule of law, political equality, and civil rights. In Timor-Leste’s case, where equality and social rights were incorporated into the Constitution as fundamental governmental obligations, localised extrajudicial punishments threaten internal and external state legitimacy and highlight the difficulties of ensuring the primacy of state-based institutions. Extrajudicial punishments challenge Timor-Leste’s capacity to consolidate new liberal democratic political institutions.

Political repression, civil society and the politics of responding to AIDS in the BRICS nations.

Science.gov (United States)

Gómez, Eduardo J; Harris, Joseph

2016-02-01

The policy responses to human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) nations have played out amid radically different political environments that have shaped state-civil society relations in critical ways. In contrasting these different environments, this article offers the first comparison of the policy response to AIDS in the BRICS nations and seeks to understand the way in which political context matters for conditioning the response to a major epidemic. Using a comparative historical approach, we find that while collaborative state-civil society relations have produced an aggressive response and successful outcomes in Brazil, democratic openness and state-civil society engagement has not necessarily correlated with an aggressive response or better outcomes in the other cases. Response to the epidemic has been worst by far in democratic South Africa, followed by Russia, where in the former, denialism and antagonistic state-civil society relations fuelled a delayed response and proved extremely costly in terms of human lives. In Russia, a lack of civil societal opportunity for mobilization and non-governmental organization (NGO) growth, political centralization and the state's unwillingness to work with NGOs led to an ineffective government response. Top-down bureaucratic rule and a reluctance to fully engage civil society in democratic India substantially delayed the state's efforts to engage in a successful partnership with NGOs. Nevertheless, China has done surprisingly well, in spite of its repressive approach and narrow engagement with civil society. And in all cases, we find the relationship between state and civil society to be evolving over time in important ways. These findings suggest the need for more research on the links between democratic openness, political repression and policy responses to epidemics. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press in

The Democratic Invention. A Reading of Lefort.

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Matías Sirczuk

2014-12-01

Full Text Available In this paper I will present the way in which Lefort interprets modern democracy as a new form of society in regard to the sources of law and legitimacy. Lefort is a thinker who is difficult to place within the context of contemporary political theory: he not only defends democracy against Marxism but also thinks that this form of society cannot be circumscribed within the limits of the modern state, nor be understood through the categories that the tradition of political philosophy has developed to distinguish between political regimes. Lefort combines the defense of democracy with a radical critique of the established order. He identifies the democratic invention with the institution of a dynamic that makes, by right, the radical questioning of law the source of political legitimacy.

Public sphere as assemblage: the cultural politics of roadside memorialization.

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Campbell, Elaine

2013-09-01

This paper investigates contemporary academic accounts of the public sphere. In particular, it takes stock of post-Habermasian public sphere scholarship, and acknowledges a lively and variegated debate concerning the multiple ways in which individuals engage in contemporary political affairs. A critical eye is cast over a range of key insights which have come to establish the parameters of what 'counts' as a/the public sphere, who can be involved, and where and how communicative networks are established. This opens up the conceptual space for re-imagining a/the public sphere as an assemblage. Making use of recent developments in Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory - most especially drawn from DeLanda's (2006) 'new philosophy of society' - the paper sets out an alternative perspective on the notion of the public sphere, and regards it as a space of connectivity brought into being through a contingent and heterogeneous assemblage of discursive, visual and performative practices. This is mapped out with reference to the cultural politics of roadside memorialization. However, a/the public sphere as an assemblage is not simply a 'social construction' brought into being through a logic of connectivity, but is an emergent and ephemeral space which reflexively nurtures and assembles the cultural politics (and political cultures) of which it is an integral part. The discussion concludes, then, with a consideration of the contribution of assemblage theory to public sphere studies. (Also see Campbell 2009a). © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013.

Nationalist political culture in the maelstrom of the Great War

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María Inés Tato

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Nationalist political culture is based on a transverse and versatile substratum of ideas, beliefs and attitudes that can be combined with different political traditions. During the First World War, some of its basic components burst into the Argentine public debate and were shared and, at the same time, disputed by diverse social and political sectors. Furthermore, they nourished the ideological and political polarizations of the wartime. Through the analysis of these issues, this article aims to contribute to the knowledge of a period scarcely explored in the study of nationalism in Argentina.

A Survey on Power and Political Culture in Kalile va Demne

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J Dehghanian

2011-04-01

Postmodernist thinkers, especially Michel Foucault, make it clear that power and political culture are so complicated and affect private and social life. It is possible to claim that there is a meaningful relationship between people’s deed and power in each society. In this article, we take a look at political culture and power in Kalile va Demne and will analyze its effects on people’s thoughts and deeds.

The political reference point: How geography shapes political identity.

Science.gov (United States)

Feinberg, Matthew; Tullett, Alexa M; Mensch, Zachary; Hart, William; Gottlieb, Sara

2017-01-01

It is commonly assumed that how individuals identify on the political spectrum-whether liberal, conservative, or moderate-has a universal meaning when it comes to policy stances and voting behavior. But, does political identity mean the same thing from place to place? Using data collected from across the U.S. we find that even when people share the same political identity, those in "bluer" locations are more likely to support left-leaning policies and vote for Democratic candidates than those in "redder" locations. Because the meaning of political identity is inconsistent across locations, individuals who share the same political identity sometimes espouse opposing policy stances. Meanwhile, those with opposing identities sometimes endorse identical policy stances. Such findings suggest that researchers, campaigners, and pollsters must use caution when extrapolating policy preferences and voting behavior from political identity, and that animosity toward the other end of the political spectrum is sometimes misplaced.

Computational and Simulation Modeling of Political Attitudes: The 'Tiger' Area of Political Culture Research

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Voinea, Camelia Florela

2016-01-01

Full Text Available In almost one century long history, political attitudes modeling research has accumulated a critical mass of theory and method. Its characteristics and particularities have often suggested that political attitude approach to political persuasion modeling reveals a strong theoretical autonomy of concept which entitles it to become a new separate discipline of research. Though this did not actually happen, political attitudes modeling research has remained the most challenging area – the “tiger” – of political culture modeling research. This paper reviews the research literature on the conceptual, computational and simulation modeling of political attitudes developed starting with the beginning of the 20th century until the present times. Several computational and simulation modeling paradigms have provided support to political attitudes modeling research. These paradigms and the shift from one to another are briefly presented for a period of time of almost one century. The dominant paradigmatic views are those inspired by the Newtonian mechanics, and those based on the principle of methodological individualism and the emergence of macro phenomena from the individual interactions at the micro level of a society. This period of time is divided in eight ages covering the history of ideas in a wide range of political domains, going from political attitudes to polity modeling. Internal and external pressures for paradigmatic change are briefly explained.

Is evidence-based medicine about democratizing medical practice?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Thorgård, Keld

2014-01-01

The authoritarian standpoint in medicine has been under challenge by various groups and researchers since the 1980s. The challenges have been ethical, political and medical, with patient movements at the forefront. Over the past decade, however, a deep challenge has been posed by evidence......-based medicine (EBM), which has challenged the entire strategy of medical treatment from the point of view of a self-critical, anti-authoritarian and hereby also (it has been claimed) a more democratic medical practice. Previously, the challenges arose out of the patient rights perspective. EBM, by contrast......, was taken to challenge the way doctors consider their medical practice as a whole. The present paper puts this claim of democratization into a historical context. Two dimensions of the democratization hypothesis are discussed and it is argued that they are insufficient to capture the substantial changes...

El discurso político de Manuel Fraga durante la Transición. Aplicaciones metodológicas / The political discourse of Manuel Fraga in the process of Democratic Transition. Methodological applications

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Antonio Pantoja Chaves

2010-06-01

Full Text Available Resumen: Para finalizar con esta serie de artículos sobre el análisis de los discursos de los líderes más importantes del proceso de Transición democrática en España, en esta entrega nos centramos en la figura política de Manuel Fraga Iribarne. Su trayectoria estuvo marcada por una activa participación institucional durante los últimos años del régimen de Franco, reconducida hacia una realidad política y social consensuada por los principios democráticos.Summary: To end this series of articles on the analysis of the speeches of the most important leaders of the democratic transition process in Spain, in this issue we focus on the political figure of Manuel Fraga Iribarne. His career was marked by active institutional participation over the last years of the Franco regime, redirected towards a political and social consensus for democratic principles.

Silent Politics – How local chambers of commerce in the Philippines fail to foster democratisation

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Basanta, Thapa

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Philippine democratic consolidation stagnates despite a vibrant civil society. A comparative exploration of three local chambers of commerce in the Visayas and Mindanao reveals that, contrary to established typologies, it is the decidedly non-confrontational stance towards government that keeps the chambers as civil society actors from contributing to democratic consolidation. Further, it becomes apparent that working within the existing clientelistic political structures is the most efficient strategy for interest groups to achieve political goals, while publicly confrontational strategies, which may be most conducive to democratic consolidation, can result in heavy political and economic costs.

Cosmopolitan democracy: conceptual deficits and political errors

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Sérgio Costa

2005-01-01

Full Text Available Both the appeal to some universal ethics and the evocation of a global civil society constitute the core of the "cosmopolitan democracies" theories, presented as either reality data or political desideratum. The paper aims at showing that in the terms formulated by the cosmopolitan democrats both ideas rely on evolutionist presuppositions. Institutions, values, and cultural ways of life effective on societies situated in the northern hemisphere end up being regarded as both per se superior and models for general application. Against such reorganization of the world, the paper indicatively cites necessary precautions in order to have both the international cooperation of social actors and the globalisation of human rights contribute towards overcoming particularisms in the several regions, taking into consideration, at the same time, the cultural particularities of the different regional contexts.

Transportation management and security during the 2004 Democratic National Convention

Science.gov (United States)

2005-01-05

The transportation operations plan for the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston, Massachusetts, was not a typical transportation plan driven by goals such as mobility and air quality. The DNC was the first national political convention...

Politics for cities, cities for the political. About possibility (and necessity of radical urban politics

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Wiktor Marzec

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Essay faces the problem of determinacy of global capitalism processes for the reality of urban political life. The city is naturally communitarian form of human life and seems to be the place where radical pro-community politics could be undertaken. Already existing and operating forms of power could fruitfully influence the city social relations. Values and norms of conduct are broadly delegated on the urban space and materiality, thus conscious shaping of city space has severe consequences for community life. If a crisis of the political partly has its roots in metamorphoses of the cities, then also remedies, rising from the urban materiality and reestablishing political subjects, could be thought. City, as most real place of political life could be either reduced to the aggregate of consumers or reestablished as a political community. Due to this is the place where undesired course of action could be stopped, hence precisely here the radical democratic politics can emerge.

The Puzzle of Democratic Monopolies: Single Party Dominance and Decline in India

OpenAIRE

Dasgupta, Aditya

2016-01-01

How to explain political monopolies in democratic institutional settings? Dominant parties in countries with robust formal democratic institutions are surprisingly frequent, yet poorly understood. Existing theories explain away the puzzle by characterizing dominant parties as `catch-all' parties that survive on the basis of historically imbued mass voter legitimacy. This dissertation develops a theory of how dominant parties in fact routinely win free and fair elections despite counter-majori...

The impact of democratic transitions on the representation of women in the national parliaments of southern Africa

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kessel, van W.M.J.; Maloka, E.

2001-01-01

This chapter examines what democratic transition in the 1990s has meant for women in southern Africa. It focuses in particular on the impact of democratization processes on political participation by women, notably women's representation in parliament in Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius,

Workers Without Borders? Culture, Migration and the Political Limits to Globalization

OpenAIRE

Sanjay Jain; Sumon Majumdar; Sharun Mukand

2008-01-01

This paper examines the role of cultural factors in driving the politics and shape of migration policy. We show that there exists a broad political failure that results in inefficiently high barriers restricting the import of temporary foreign workers and also admitting an inefficiently large number of permanent migrants, but not enough to fill any labor shortage in the economy. We show that countries that are poor at cultural assimilation are better positioned to take advantage of short-term...

The short communism's journey into democracy: an appraisal of Romanian democratization

OpenAIRE

Ionescu, Alexandra

2009-01-01

Two decades after the demise of communism, one can draw a state of the art of democratization in Romania. The task of building democracy was not only an endeavor of institutional engineering, but also a re-conceptualization of the intellectual resources of politics, as well as a re-conversion of the instruments and modes of government. Romanian democratization meant simultaneously unraveling the state and the regime and separating the state and the society. Both processes were grounded in the...

Homegrown Democracy, Homegrown Democrats

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Norman K. Denzin

2005-02-01

Full Text Available Written on the eve of the 2004 American presidential election, this political narrative offers a critical reading of two models of democracy: Instant-Mix imperial democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb, criticized by Arundhati Roy, and Garrison Keillor’s Homegrown Democrat. Keillor’s pastoral view of democracy is anchored in LakeWobegon, his imaginary utopian community. His homegrown democracy is narrow, provincial, and White. The author concludes that he must look elsewhere for his alternative view of democracy.

Theoretical bases of formation of political consciousness of the citizens of Ukraine - as the actual direction of the development of the mainstreaming political sociology

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K. U. Kublik

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Analyzing the political life through political ideology and political culture should pay attention to political consciousness, which presents set of theoretical positions, views, opinions, attitudes, values orientation, etc. that are implemented in the process of implementing functions of political power. Because postulates political ideology are implemented using some mechanism, election campaigns and public opinion, their analysis is undoubtedly one of the major directions of political sociology. At the present stage of creation of the state of Ukraine, formation of the Institute of civil society is important to the study of the mechanism of formation of political consciousness of the nation. On the state of political consciousness influenced by processes not only within the country but also in the international arena. The growing interdependence of countries and peoples, General threat to the existence of humans and the General difficulties on the path of human progress lead to the «globalization» of all the forms of public consciousness, including political. A shift from confrontation to mutual understanding and cooperation means considerable changes in the political consciousness and politics subjects of international cooperation. These are not only the state but also directly peoples, peace­loving democratic mass movements, people of good will on all continents. Consolidation of their efforts is able to resist all forms of hegemony and dictates, any policy which is conducted from a position of strength.

Learning Democratic Global Governance.

Science.gov (United States)

Haavelsrud, Magnus

1996-01-01

Outlines a model process of developing knowledge from within different groups and cultures to allow more equitable participation of all world societies in the definition of global governance. Reviews concepts relevant to education's contributions toward learning and creating democratic global governance. Discusses the educational utility of…

Feyerabend on politics, education, and scientific culture.

Science.gov (United States)

Kidd, Ian James

2016-06-01

The purpose of this paper is to offer a sympathetic reconstruction of the political thought of Paul Feyerabend. Using a critical discussion of the idea of the 'free society' it is suggested that his political thought is best understood in terms of three thematic concerns-liberation, hegemony, and the authority of science-and that the political significance of those claims become clear when they are considered in the context of his educational views. It emerges that Feyerabend is best understood as calling for the grounding of cognitive and cultural authorities-like the sciences-in informed deliberation, rather than the uncritical embrace of prevailing convictions. It therefore emerges that a free society is best understood as one of epistemically responsible citizenship rather than epistemically anarchistic relativism of the 'anything goes' sort-a striking anticipation of current debates about philosophy of science in society. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The political reference point: How geography shapes political identity

Science.gov (United States)

Feinberg, Matthew; Tullett, Alexa M.; Mensch, Zachary; Hart, William; Gottlieb, Sara

2017-01-01

It is commonly assumed that how individuals identify on the political spectrum–whether liberal, conservative, or moderate–has a universal meaning when it comes to policy stances and voting behavior. But, does political identity mean the same thing from place to place? Using data collected from across the U.S. we find that even when people share the same political identity, those in “bluer” locations are more likely to support left-leaning policies and vote for Democratic candidates than those in “redder” locations. Because the meaning of political identity is inconsistent across locations, individuals who share the same political identity sometimes espouse opposing policy stances. Meanwhile, those with opposing identities sometimes endorse identical policy stances. Such findings suggest that researchers, campaigners, and pollsters must use caution when extrapolating policy preferences and voting behavior from political identity, and that animosity toward the other end of the political spectrum is sometimes misplaced. PMID:28207906

The political reference point: How geography shapes political identity.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Matthew Feinberg

Full Text Available It is commonly assumed that how individuals identify on the political spectrum-whether liberal, conservative, or moderate-has a universal meaning when it comes to policy stances and voting behavior. But, does political identity mean the same thing from place to place? Using data collected from across the U.S. we find that even when people share the same political identity, those in "bluer" locations are more likely to support left-leaning policies and vote for Democratic candidates than those in "redder" locations. Because the meaning of political identity is inconsistent across locations, individuals who share the same political identity sometimes espouse opposing policy stances. Meanwhile, those with opposing identities sometimes endorse identical policy stances. Such findings suggest that researchers, campaigners, and pollsters must use caution when extrapolating policy preferences and voting behavior from political identity, and that animosity toward the other end of the political spectrum is sometimes misplaced.

European Union: Gender and politics

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Žunić Natalija

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Political representation is the central issue in contemporary debates on the level of democracy in political institutions and processes in the European Union. Underrepresentation of particular groups in political institutions, decision-making and policy-making processes is perceived as the problem of justice, legitimacy and effectiveness in democratic societies. In this paper, the author analyzes the gender aspects of democratic decision-making processes and political representation of women in the EU member states. The social, historical and political dimension of women's efforts to obtain and promote their civil status and political rights have been the framework for developing the principle of gender equality as one of the founding EU principles. In the past hundred years, one of the most significant trends in politics has been the expansion of formal political representation of women. Yet, even though it has been more than a hundered years since women won their political rights in the 19th and the 20th century (the right to vote and the right to be voted, gender differences in political rights are still a substantial part of debate. Today, women's political representation is still inadequate and their political capacity and power have not been exercised to a sufficient extent (or proportionally through their actual representation in parliament. In March 2012, the European Commisision published a report on gender equality in different areas of social life; the Eurobarometer survey shows that women are generally underrepresented in politics. In national parliaments, only one out of four MPs is a woman. In the European Parliament, three out of ten parliamentarians are women. The statistics shows a huge discrepancy among the EU Member States in terms of women's representation in parliament (44.7% in Sweden as contrasted to 13.3% in Romania. The prevailing view in many studies is that post-industrial democracies are deficient as they have failed

National Integration, Citizenship, Political Participation

African Journals Online (AJOL)

USER

attainment of a successful democratization process and national stability. ... insecurity, sectarian violence, ethnic strifes, political instability and threats of .... of nation-states out of disparate socio-economic, religious, ethnic and geographical.

Teachers as curriculum leaders: towards promoting gender equity as a democratic ideal

OpenAIRE

Simmonds, Shan

2017-01-01

Curriculum is a site of political, racial, gendered, and theological dispute. Teachers who acknowledge this and see the implications for democratic living embrace their teaching practice as curriculum leaders and participate in complicated conversations. With the focus on gender equity as a democratic ideal, this article explores the lived experiences of some South African female teachers. From the findings, it became evident that some teachers still experience their school contexts as pervad...

News Media Consumption and Political Behavior in Latin America

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ryan Salzman

2015-01-01

Full Text Available News media are an important factor in any democratic society. Research focused on developed democracies has paved the way for analysis in the context of less well-developed democracies. The project endeavors to continue that investigation into whether and how news media consumption affects democratic behavior among individuals in a region comprised of developing democracies: Latin America. Employing rich survey data available from the 2008 Latin American Public Opinion Project, traditional analyses are used to test one of the most basic questions for political communication researchers: Does news media consumption motivate or depress political participation? The results indicate that, on average, news media mobilize political participation, albeit to different degrees per medium and participation type. This seems to happen because those media socialize Latin Americans to value political participation.

Infrastructural relations: Water, political power and the rise of a new 'despotic regime'

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Veronica Strang

2016-06-01

Full Text Available It is 60 years since Karl Wittfogel highlighted a key relationship between political power and the ownership and control of water. Subsequent studies have suggested, commensurately, that exclusion from the ownership of essential resources represents a fundamental form of disenfranchisement – a loss of democratic involvement in societal direction. Several areas of theoretical development have illuminated these issues. Anthropologists have explored the recursive relationship between political arrangements and cosmological belief systems. Narrow legal definitions of property have been challenged through the consideration of more diverse ways of owning and controlling resources. Analyses of material culture have shown how it extends human agency, as well as having agentive capacities itself; and explorations of infrastructures have highlighted their role in composing socio-technical and political relations. Such approaches are readily applied to water and the material culture through which it is controlled and used. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research on water in Australia and the UK, this paper traces changing relationships between cosmological beliefs, infrastructure and political arrangements over time. It suggests that a current trend towards privatised, transnational water ownership potentially opens the door to the emergence of new 'despotic regimes'.

Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Andersen, John; Siim, Birte

2004-01-01

identities. Politics of empowerment has to do with the agency and mobilisation dimension of social and political change. The title of the book "Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment" address the leitmotiv: namely to discuss plussumgame between politics of inclusion and politics of empowerment......The objective of the book is to analyse different politics of inclusion and empowerment and the different paradigms of inclusion/exclusion in order to underline the close link between politics of scoial equality and politics of recognition of ciultural difference. Politics of inclusion is thus...... theproductive/innovative linkage of politics of redistributuin and politics og resognition, whnich over a longer time span creates sustainable paths of democratic and social development, which increases the capacity to handle both conflicts about economic resources and life-chances and conflicts about...

Cultural, Political, and Social Dimensions of Identity among Student

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rahmatollah Sedigh Sarvestani

2010-01-01

Full Text Available As various Iranian theorists emphasis, challenge between tradition and modernity is among the most affective phenomena on Iranian identity. Thus, in the present study, different dimensions of Student’s identity have been evaluated regarding this challenge. According to the main hypothesis, student’s identity is a hybrid of traditional and modern elements. Each dimension of identity (either modern or traditional has been studied from the social, cultural, and political aspects. The study has been carried using questionnaire in 6 universities in Tehran –including University of Tehran, Shahid Beheshti, Allameh Tabatabaei, Sharif University of Technology, Al-Zahra, and University of Applied Science and Technology. Results show that in social and cultural aspects, modern elements of identity prevail, while in the political aspect it is the traditional elements that prevail. In another word, religion-politics blend and authoritarianism play crucial role in students’ identity rather than tendency to civil society. In addition, students’ identity is not simply a one-dimensional structure, but a bi-dimensional construction within which both modern and traditional elements are involved.

The political context of social inequalities and health.

Science.gov (United States)

Navarro, V; Shi, L

2001-01-01

This analysis reflects on the importance of political parties, and the policies they implement when in government, in determining the level of equalities/inequalities in a society, the extent of the welfare state (including the level of health care coverage by the state), the employment/unemployment rate, and the level of population health. The study looks at the impact of the major political traditions in the advanced OECD countries during the golden years of capitalism (1945-1980)--social democratic, Christian democratic, liberal, and ex-fascist--in four areas: (1) the main determinants of income inequalities; (2) levels of public expenditures and health care benefits coverage; (3) public support of services to families; and (4) the level of population health as measured by infant mortality. The results indicate that political traditions more committed to redistributive policies (both economic and social) and full-employment policies, such as the social democratic parties, were generally more successful in improving the health of populations. The erroneous assumption of a conflict between social equity and economic efficiency is also discussed. The study aims at filling a void in the growing health and social inequalities literature, which rarely touches on the importance of political forces in influencing inequalities.

The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education

Science.gov (United States)

Stoddard, Jeremy

2014-01-01

Despite the potential for media and technology to act as a democratizing force and the challenges to democracy posed by partisanship and the explosion of political media spending, media education and the preparation of active citizens in schools is virtually nonexistent. This essay presents the case for revitalizing media education for the age of…

22 CFR 67.4 - Description of functions and procedures.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... Enterprise. (2) Democratic governance and political processes. NED seeks to promote strong, stable political parties committed to the democratic process. It also supports programs in election administration and law... strong democratic civic culture, including support for publications and other communications media and...

Aspects of democracy and democratisation in Zambia and Botswana : exploring African political culture at the grassroots

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Binsbergen, van W.M.J.

1995-01-01

The current discussion on democratization in Africa tends towards Eurocentrism in that it pays insufficient attention to the analytical and methodological implications of cultural imperialism, localization, wrongly claimed universality, and the social price of relativism. Conceptually, formal

Political Education and School Organization

Science.gov (United States)

Hawley, Willis D.

1971-01-01

Major issue raised in this paper is whether schools are providing students with the type of programs and environment that foster the full development of interest in, and capacity for, democratic politics. (Author)

L'Universite du 21e siecle: culturelle ou "excellente"? = The 21st Century University: Cultural or "Excellent"?

Science.gov (United States)

Lenoir, Yves

2000-01-01

When the nation-state was the dominant political and economic entity, the university was an institution of culture, essential for forming the national identity. In this era of globalization, universities teach economic liberalism and serve the interests of supranational corporations with little regard for democratic principles. Academics must…

An Analysis of the Factors Influencing the Political Culture of the Students of Parsabad Islamic Azad University

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohammadreza Hatami

2013-03-01

Full Text Available Political culture is one of the most important phenomena of social life in modem era, with an undeniable influence on the political conduct of the members of the society. It is also one of the main pillars and principles of the growth and development of society. Belief in political equality, trust, feeling of security, and national and ethnic loyalty, are among significant elements closely related to political culture and society development pattern. The present study aims to analyze the factors influencing the political culture of the students of Parsabad Islamic Azad University. The main question addressed in this study concerns the factors which influence the political culture of the students of Parsabad Islamic Azad University. The hypotheses of the study suggest that variables such as ethnicism, religiousness, political motivation, personality and socioeconomic status have a significant relationship with political culture. The survey methodology - correlation between variables - and interview, as the means for collecting data to answer the questions, are utilized in this study. Also the statistical method and the SPPS software are used to analyze the data. The results of the study indicate that none of the hypotheses of the research was confirmed except for the relationship between the political motivation and the political culture. This shows that the temporal and spatial condition of Parsabad and, consequently, that of the students are different from the temporal and spatial conditions of the theories presented in this study.

Persuasive territories in European cultural politics:

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Thelle, Mikkel; Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde

2011-01-01

Purpose – This paper aims to view the concept of persuasive technology as a framework for discussing cultural politics on the internet. Taking digital collections as a point of departure, the cases of Europeana and Google Books are to be discussed as promoting different assemblies of information......, practice and identity politics. Through this discussion the study aims to show how the internet becomes territorialized through persuasive mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach – The study applies different concepts on the cases, derived from different fields of social theory, such as “soft power......”, “assembly” and “folksonomy” in order to question the traditional view of persuasive technology as a concept instrumental to, for example, marketing agendas. Targeting the relation between policy and everyday practice, the paper aims to open a discussion of persuasive technology deeply embedded in digital...

Specifics of horizontal and vertical relations in Ukrainian political communication on the background of the party building’s process, political science theory and requirements to Ukrainian political context

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K. Y. Odarchenko

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The specifics of horizontal and vertical relations in Ukrainian political communication on the background of the party building’s process has been analysed. Aims of this article are: 1 determination of the subjectivity of political communication; 2 disclosure of the main features of internal politics and communications; 3 setting the essential features of the political parties’ status after peaceful protests in Ukraine 2013-2014 year; 4 explanation of the actual gap that has horizontal and party political communication in Ukraine. Political modernization, capacity of Ukrainian political parties has been characterized. It has been shown that Maidan didn’t influenced tools of creating political parties and their typology greatly. Maidan as a political component was weak and did not respond to the challenges, which Ukrainian political system faced to. The weakness was in the fact that leaders of the oppositional political camp would rather keep old then implement real political change of the political system , which was adapted by the old oliharcial clan. Public sector was not able to identify their environment with new political leaders, nor with a mass movement, based on the creation of new organized political force. It has been found that in a democratic society communication is effective only if it is not only technically modern, interactive, two-way, but if it is consistent to other democratic demands, such as legal and moral control of society over the media, maintenance of basic pluralism, direct contact between senders and recipients of information, feeds decentralization, respect of freedom of expression and privat opinion. Summary of the political communication in Ukraine has to move away from thinking of policy and bureaucratic political consciousness. Otherwise, the simulation is effective and efficient for countries and regions where political communication can become a daily political farce communication in public space.

A Democratic Vietnam; Not in the United States’ Core Interests

Science.gov (United States)

2013-11-01

Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) intends to make any democratic reform or improve its long track record of suppressing freedom of speech or human rights...to suppress freedom of speech to maintain its political monopoly and tight control of the country. Although the Doi Moi policy has fostered...China share very similar political and economic designs, to include the problems of corruption and repression of freedom of speech . Many postulate

“All for the sake of Freedom”: Hannah Arendt’s Democratic Dissent, Trauma, and American Citizenship

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Frank Mehring

2011-12-01

Full Text Available

As an intellectual Jewish immigrant, Hannah Arendt’s work is informed by two key factors: the failures of German intellectuals regarding the rise of fascism and the promise of American democracy. Arendt was haunted by the past and the memories of how the democratic structures of the Weimar Republic had been undermined, manipulated, and finally transformed into a totalitarian terror regime. The issues of freedom, equality, and the shortcomings of democratic societies form a transcultural nexus in her oeuvre. This reading of Arendt will reveal how her efforts to deal with a transatlantic traumatic past shaped the felt need to voice democratic dissent in the United States. While much has been said about her theoretical groundwork on the mechanisms of totalitarian systems, Arendt’s living conditions as a naturalized foreigner, her enthusiasm for American democracy, and her refusal to return to Germany have been largely neglected. Arendt is usually rooted firmly in a European philosophical context. She has been canonized as one of the foremost philosophical thinkers from Germany on the emergence of totalitarian systems and the Holocaust. This transatlantic force field looms large over the second half of the twentieth century in the realm of culture and politics. Among her fellow intellectual émigrés and exiles such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, or Fraenkel, Arendt stands out. She decided not to return to the new democratic Germany with its Grundgesetz fashioned along the lines of the American Constitution. Instead, she insisted on becoming naturalized and used her transnational background as a basis to address democratic gaps from the vantage point of an American citizen. First, Mehring shows in which ways Arendt identified herself as an American and wished to become recognized as an American citizen. Second, he reconnects Arendt’s democratic dissent with her efforts to become recognized as an American citizen.

DEMOCRATIZING JOURNALISM? Realizing the Citizen's Agenda for Local News Media

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Costera Meijer, I.

2010-01-01

Media scholars and journalists expect local media to function as vital institutions for the creation and maintenance of a democratic political and public arena and a general sense of social cohesion and public connection (Aldridge, 2007; Couldry et al., 2007; Franklin, 2006; Rosenstiel et al.,

Twenty years of revolutionary democratic Ethiopia, 1991 to 2011

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hagmann, Tobias; Abbink, Jon

2011-01-01

This paper introduces a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies devoted to a review of Ethiopia's 20 years of “revolutionary democracy”. The collection brings together 11 articles exploring differing aspects of Ethiopia's political experience since 1991. This introduction begins...... with a short summary of these 11 papers, but then moves to a substantive review of Ethiopia's political history over the past two decades, featuring consideration of the extent of transformation and continuity under the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the importance...

Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives in Science Education

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

This book presents a collection of critical thinking that concern cultural, social and political issues for science education in the Nordic countries. The chapter authors describe specific scenarios to challenge persisting views, interrogate frameworks and trouble contemporary approaches to resea......This book presents a collection of critical thinking that concern cultural, social and political issues for science education in the Nordic countries. The chapter authors describe specific scenarios to challenge persisting views, interrogate frameworks and trouble contemporary approaches...... to researching teaching and learning in science. Taking a point of departure in empirical examples from the Nordic countries the collection of work is taking a critical sideways glance at the Nordic education principles. Critical examinations target specifically those who are researching in the fields of science...... conditions and contexts in science education. The different chapters review debates and research in teacher education, school teaching and learning including when external stakeholders are involved. Even though the chapters are contextualized in Nordic settings there will be similarities and parallels...

Curbing Electoral Violence in Nigeria: The Imperative of Political ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Both domestic and international political sociologists based on empirical investigations argue that the greatest obstacle to democratic consolidation in. Nigeria is electoral violence. This is as a result of the rascal politics that the political elites engage in. Sometimes, the violence is intra-party, and most of the time, it is ...

Democracy, Education and the Need for Politics

Science.gov (United States)

Straume, Ingerid S.

2016-01-01

Even though the interrelationship between education and democratic politics is as old as democracy itself, it is seldom explicitly formulated in the literature. Most of the time, the political system is taken as a given, and education conceptualized as an instrument for stability and social integration. Many contemporary discussions about…

Democratic accountability and the votes for nuclear energy

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bradbury, F

1980-10-01

Political aspects of nuclear energy figured in United Kingdom elections during the 1970s as the issue of risks aroused popular interest. The failure of such a complex issue to make an impact at the polls reflects certain electoral inadequacies in the democratic process in that too much time elapsed between opportunities for citizens to express their will and this resulted in pressure groups replacing referenda. Nuclear issues illustrate the dilemma of risk assignment and risk assignment when the perception of risks is not balanced by clear information about the benefits. True democratic accountability would allow citizens to vote directly on each major issue rather than periodically electing a representative with a package of unrelated positions. 7 references. (DCK)

Gender inequality in education : political institutions or culture and religion?

OpenAIRE

Cooray, Arusha; Potrafke, Niklas

2010-01-01

We investigate empirically whether political institutions or culture and religion underlie gender inequality in education. The dataset contains up to 157 countries over the 1991-2006 period. The results indicate that political institutions do not significantly influence education of girls: autocratic regimes do not discriminate against girls in denying educational opportunities and democracies do not discriminate by gender when providing educational opportunities. The primary influences on ge...

Structure of Political Success Factors as an Indicator of Political Direction in Electoral System Development

OpenAIRE

Panina, Nataliia

2005-01-01

The article presents a conceptual model of democratic electoral system development and analysis of empirical data on factors of political success in the electoral situation. Various participants of the electoral process (population, politicians, journalists, government employees, analysts-politologists) evaluated the political success factors; and comparative analysis of these evaluations made it possible to determine the main vectors (“reverse” and “manipulative-mystifying”) affecting deviat...

Political Anger: The Basis for Contemporary Lack of Civility in ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The incidence of political anger and its dynamics calls for concern in the political arena. It has left in its trail all forms of casualties and threat to political and democratic stability in Nigeria. This paper argued that high stakes in politics, limited avenues for ventilating anger, the tendency to focus on majority ethnic groups while ...

On the position of the Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on the Agrarian Reform

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Drakić Gordana

2012-01-01

Full Text Available One of the most important issues in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was the process of the agrarian reform. The agrarian reform was a complex state measure with an economic, social and political aspect. All political parties, due to political reasons, spoke in favor of the resolution of the agrarian issue through agrarian reform. Political parties kept in mind the large number of those individuals interested in the agrarian reform, as well as the fact that majority of the voters were farmers, when they formulated their position towards the reform. The Democratic Party was one of the most influential political party in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The paper presents the basic concepts related to the agrarian reform and agricultural policy in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that represented the Democratic Party.

Psychology of democracy and democratization: Experience from Central and Eastern Europe

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Klicperová-Baker, Martina

2012-01-01

Roč. 47, Supplement (2012), s. 694-694 ISSN 0020-7594. [International Congress of Psychology /30./. 22.07.2012-27.07.2012, Cape Town] Institutional support: RVO:68081740 Keywords : political psychology * democratization * Central and Eastern Europe Subject RIV: AN - Psychology

Zora’s Politics: A Brief Introduction

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Ernest Julius Mitchell II

2013-09-01

Full Text Available In his introduction to reading Zora Neale Hurston’s politics, Mitchell argues that contemporary scholarship has misread Hurston in significant ways, distorting Hurston’s work and reputation to serve contesting political agendas; thus, in recent years, she has been associated with “a bewildering array of affiliations: republican, libertarian, radical democrat, reactionary conservative, black cultural nationalist, anti-authoritarian feminist, and woman-hating protofascist.” Recuperating Hurston from this impossible political melee of labels, Mitchell argues, requires a careful reading of Hurston’s work dating from her earliest pieces in the late 1920s, as well as surveying her many yet to be published manuscripts and letters; it requires recognition of the transnational and comparative lens through which she reported on political maneuvers and military histories, as well as reading not only her strong criticisms but also her silences, ironic phrasings, and nuanced critiques in her writings on global colonial enterprises. Mitchell’s introduction to the two Hurston essays here reprinted, “I Saw Negro Votes Peddled” (1950 and “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism” (1951—courtesy of the American Legion Magazine—is set in the larger frame of his assertion that Hurston’s work should be read with a deep appreciation of her staunch anticolonialism. Tracing her political philosophy through her views of how race and religion are used to valorize an international culture of violence that serves imperialistic and colonial ends, Mitchell takes his reader on a tour of Hurston’s transnational commentary—from the US occupation of Haiti, to the Spanish and British on the Florida peninsula; from Communist Russia and China, to election practices in the US—to set the stage for our encounters with these rarely read Hurston essays. Reading Mitchell’s “Zora’s Politics: A Brief Introduction” provides a firm foundation for a more

Parents' views on sex education in schools: How much do Democrats and Republicans agree?

Science.gov (United States)

Kantor, Leslie; Levitz, Nicole

2017-01-01

More than 93 percent of parents place high importance on sex education in both middle and high school. Sex education in middle and high school is widely supported by parents regardless of their political affiliation. Using data from a large diverse sample of 1,633 parents of children aged 9 to 21 years, we examined whether views on sex education differed by parents' political affiliation. More than 89 percent of parents that identified as Republicans or Democrats support including a wide range of topics in sex education including puberty, healthy relationships, abstinence, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and birth control in high school. In middle school, 78 percent or more of both parents that identified as Republicans and Democrats support the inclusion of those topics. Controlling for key demographic factors, parents that identified as Democrats are more likely than those that identified as Republicans to support the inclusion of the topics of healthy relationships, birth control, STDs, and sexual orientation in both middle and high school. However, a strong majority of Republican parents want all these topics included in sex education. Sex education which includes a broad set of topics represents an area of strong agreement between parents of both political parties.

Parents' views on sex education in schools: How much do Democrats and Republicans agree?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Leslie Kantor

Full Text Available More than 93 percent of parents place high importance on sex education in both middle and high school. Sex education in middle and high school is widely supported by parents regardless of their political affiliation. Using data from a large diverse sample of 1,633 parents of children aged 9 to 21 years, we examined whether views on sex education differed by parents' political affiliation. More than 89 percent of parents that identified as Republicans or Democrats support including a wide range of topics in sex education including puberty, healthy relationships, abstinence, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs and birth control in high school. In middle school, 78 percent or more of both parents that identified as Republicans and Democrats support the inclusion of those topics. Controlling for key demographic factors, parents that identified as Democrats are more likely than those that identified as Republicans to support the inclusion of the topics of healthy relationships, birth control, STDs, and sexual orientation in both middle and high school. However, a strong majority of Republican parents want all these topics included in sex education. Sex education which includes a broad set of topics represents an area of strong agreement between parents of both political parties.

Y. Laberge on Raphael-Hernadez and Steen’s AfroAsian encounters: Culture, History, Politics.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

2008-12-01

Full Text Available Heike Raphael-Hernadez and Shannon Steen,  Eds. AfroAsian encounters: Culture, History, Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2006.  xxiii + 342 p. An overlooked, interdisciplinary, often innovative book, Afroasian encounters: Culture, History, Politics offers a collection of seventeen new essays related to the African-Asian intersections, cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural theories. In terms of emerging disciplines, we already had Atlantic studies (or "Trans-Atlantic studies", an i...

Special Report: Political Violence and Democratic Uncertainty in Ethiopia

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Smith, Lahra

2007-01-01

The pardon and release of thirty-eight political detainees, mostly from the leadership of the main opposition party, may give impetus to political negotiations in Ethiopia after more than two years crisis and stalemate...

Phatic Communication Politness of Greating Arek Culture on Account Instagram: Pragmatic

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karina Sofiananda Armaza Faraba

2018-05-01

Full Text Available Language politeness is the starting point of acceptance in speech events (Sumarlam., 2017:181. There are good intentions are meant or delivered in unfavorable or impolite ways, both in terms of word choice and external factors (intonation, mimic, pantomimic, etc. will be interpreted differently. The data in this research is oral speech in the form of caption or writing contains cultural greetings Arek. It can be seen from the classification of data posting in account instagram @aslisuroboyo. Phatic communication of the Arek culture society consists of rek, arek, ndasmu, koen, cok, ndeng, a, gaes, lur, jembuk, bez. It uses the scale of language politeness from Brown and Levinson skala the speaker and hearer relative power (the scale of social status ratings between speakers and speech partners or commonly referred to as the rank scale of power or power rating and the philanthropic scope of Robin Lakoff is the politeness scale of equality or kesekawanan refers to a friendly attitude and always maintain friendship between one person to another in order to be polite.

Religion, culture and political corruption in Nigeria

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dhikru A. Yagboyaju

2017-10-01

Full Text Available For so long, development theories and practices have either deliberately neglected or simply overlooked the possible interconnections between religion, culture and the attainment of development goals. Against this background, this article reviews the literature on corruption, as a major factor of underdevelopment in Nigeria, particularly as it relates to religion and culture in the country. In its analysis, this article argues that corruption in Nigeria, especially in view of the country’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious status, must be conceived as a phenomenon transcending legal, political and economic boundaries. The study adopts an interpretative and descriptive methodology for its analysis.

Deliberative Democracy, Active Citizenship and Critical Culture: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Contemporary Political Philosophy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francisco Arenas Dolz

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to defend an adequate reading of Aristotle’s deliberative rhetoric that allows us to understand practical rationalization as a process of interpretation of human actions. After the consideration of rhetoric as a general human ability that is indispensable for political coexistence, the impact of the Aristotelian rhetorical proposal is pressed, not just as a defense of the importance of rhetoric in a democratic society, but also as a novel attempt to understand what it means to speak of practical rationality.

Obama cares about visuo-spatial attention: perception of political figures moves attention and determines gaze direction.

Science.gov (United States)

Mills, Mark; Smith, Kevin B; Hibbing, John R; Dodd, Michael D

2015-02-01

Processing an abstract concept such as political ideology by itself is difficult but becomes easier when a background situation contextualizes it. Political ideology within American politics, for example, is commonly processed using space metaphorically, i.e., the political "left" and "right" (referring to Democrat and Republican views, respectively), presumably to provide a common metric to which abstract features of ideology can be grounded and understood. Commonplace use of space as metaphor raises the question of whether an inherently non-spatial stimulus (e.g., picture of the political "left" leader, Barack Obama) can trigger a spatially-specific response (e.g., attentional bias toward "left" regions of the visual field). Accordingly, pictures of well-known Democrats and Republicans were presented as central cues in peripheral target detection (Experiment 1) and saccadic free-choice (Experiment 2) tasks to determine whether perception of stimuli lacking a direct association with physical space nonetheless induce attentional and oculomotor biases in the direction compatible with the ideological category of the cue (i.e., Democrat/left and Republican/right). In Experiment 1, target detection following presentation of a Democrat (Republican) was facilitated for targets appearing to the left (right). In Experiment 2, participants were more likely to look left (right) following presentation of a Democrat (Republican). Thus, activating an internal representation of political ideology induced a shift of attention and biased choice of gaze direction in a spatially-specific manner. These findings demonstrate that the link between conceptual processing and spatial attention can be totally arbitrary, with no reference to physical or symbolic spatial information. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Fundamentalists toward democracy? Empirical analysis of fundamentalist attitudes and democratic attitudes in the Middle East

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kazem Hajizadeh

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Huntington asks an important question in The Third Wave: if traditional Islamic values and beliefs have significantly retarded democratic progress in the past, to what extent are they likely to continue to do so in the future? Unlike Huntington’s work, this paper is primarily a micro-level analysis. It seeks to show how Muslim people interpret and evaluate Islam and democracy. So we want to attach more data to Huntington’s theory and wish to demonstrate that non-democratic political space and authoritarian governments in Muslim countries can’t be explained by the features of Islam; there are considerable reasons and facts to convince scholars to look for other factors. The results illustrate nearly all Muslims tend to Islam and democracy at the same time. It seems Large populations of moderate fundamentalists in Muslim countries are appearing who struggle to actualize Islamic teachings in a democratic political model.

Democracy and Cultural Psychology

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jensen, Steffen Moltrup Ernø

2016-01-01

This paper discusses a theme touched upon in Robert Innis’s article on cultural psych- ology and philosophy, namely how we, within cultural psychology, seem to be undecided about how best to provide value on a societal level. It is discussed how psychology has provided us with several valuable...... tools for examining and understanding our own exist- ence, despite the fact that it is also a field that has seemed to be in one crisis after another since its inception. It is argued that cultural psychology is an intellectual tech- nology that allows us to peek under the hood of society, which...... is of utmost importance in today’s society, where democratic ideals are under severe pressure. Corporations, industries, and privileged individuals exercise increased control over political processes, having created obscure systems by which they operate. It is concluded that cultural psychology needs to find...

The Romanian Social Democratic Party versus the authoritarian monarchy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Florin Grecu

2014-09-01

Full Text Available The article approaches the Romanian social-democratic collaboration during 1938-1940 with the authoritarian monarch regime. Even though the party leaders had diverging political views, regards to the acceptance or the non-acceptance of the authoritarian regime, the influential PSDR members held leading positions within the single party and the corporate parliament and within the union structures. The positions were offered by the regime, so that the union leaders would stop instigating workers to go on strike, and to accept the governmental policies. The freedom of speech and the political actions were ceded to the monarch, who governed at the place of the political parties and he controlled the unions, by using the guilds.

Relationships between Political Development and Intervention

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

London, David T

2006-01-01

.... The Congo's political development from the 1700s to 1960 resulted in a democratically elected Congolese administration that at the time of independence was unable to operate the national government or the economy...

Analysis of the Russian political tolerance in society-government relations

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A. V. Korolevska

2014-08-01

Full Text Available The high culture of tolerance accelerates political socialization, improves the qualities of a citizen, a sense of ownership of public affairs, instilling respect for democratic values. Relevance of the work is determined by processes that occur in today’s society and that lead not only to confusion but to destruction of public relations. The article reviews the state of political tolerance in the system of relations society – authorities in Russia. Based on opinion polls statistical analyzes to determine trends in contemporary ensure political tolerance is conducted. Due to correlation between support for Putin and the perception of the political situation in the country as well is determined existence. Fixes sustainable public discontent actual situation in the country, however, people do not use the opportunities for political activism. Almost two thirds of Russians believe that the interests of the government and society in do not match. The low percentage of respondents believe that the political course of the country’s leadership in the interests of ordinary people. There is a steady trend to an agreement among the Russian population to concentrate power in his hands. There is a slight increase of the population of those who are ready to connect to solve their problems in life forms of protest activity.

In conclusion: Political representation ans legitimacy in the European Union

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Schmitt, Hermann; Schmitt, Hermann; Thomassen, Jacques J.A.

1999-01-01

The purpose of this book is to expand knowledge of political representation in the EU and of the legitimacy of its political order. In this concluding chapter, a summary is given of what has been learned on these two subjects and what this says about the EU as a developing democratic political

Political regimes, political ideology, and self-rated health in Europe: a multilevel analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Huijts, Tim; Perkins, Jessica M; Subramanian, S V

2010-07-22

Studies on political ideology and health have found associations between individual ideology and health as well as between ecological measures of political ideology and health. Individual ideology and aggregate measures such as political regimes, however, were never examined simultaneously. Using adjusted logistic multilevel models to analyze data on individuals from 29 European countries and Israel, we found that individual ideology and political regime are independently associated with self-rated health. Individuals with rightwing ideologies report better health than leftwing individuals. Respondents from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics report poorer health than individuals from social democratic, liberal, Christian conservative, and former Mediterranean dictatorship countries. In contrast to individual ideology and political regimes, country level aggregations of individual ideology are not related to reporting poor health. This study shows that although both individual political ideology and contextual political regime are independently associated with individuals' self-rated health, individual political ideology appears to be more strongly associated with self-rated health than political regime.

Political Parties and Innovation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bischoff, Carina Saxlund; Christiansen, Flemming Juul

2017-01-01

parties themselves as well their impact on potentially innovative public decisions. One major expectation is that hierarchical parties with centralized leadership make more efficient decisions but that sustainable innovation outcomes promoted by collaborative efforts are easier to obtain for decentralized...... political parties with participatory internal democratic processes....

The Democratic Potential of Theatre Talks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Louise Ejgod

2014-01-01

approach to a target-oriented approach to audience development in which the content of the performance should be matched with certain audience segments. And fourth, the article points to an outcome of the experience related to the challenging of one own view point and thus expanding ones horizon....... of democratization of culture and the democracy theory by James S. Fishkin. The analysis is based on the empirical material of 31 theatre talks carried through as a part of an audience development project and is focused on four different aspects of the democratic potential of theatre: First, how the theatre talks...

The Context and Provenance of Democratization in Ghana (1990-1992

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Thomas Maxwell Aidoo

2009-12-01

integración económica y política. Visto de esta forma, la ola de democratización en Ghana puede ser explicada como una respuesta a la exclusión y una vía para facilitar la integración.__________________ABSTRACT:In the last decade and half of the twentieth century, a consensus emerged that the difficulties that have slowed down Africa’s development are more political than economic. Political scientists and Africa’s development partners, consequently, suggested democratization and good governance as means of bringing Africa out of underdevelopment.  Accordingly, since 1990, a wave of democratization has engulfed most of Africa.  This paper examines the context and origins of the democratization process in Ghana.  The politics of Ghana underwent a most rapid process of transformation between 1990 and 1992. The period witnessed the obliteration of a decade of military dictatorship.  There was a reinstallation of pluralist politics and constitutional rule.  At the same time, a dramatic growth of civil society became discernible.   The paper identifies two developments, elite and mass struggles for political and economic incorporation respectively, and external pressures, as having played the dominant role in this process.  It highlights the political forces and actors that shaped the restoration of constitutional/democratic rule in Ghana.  The paper addresses the concern that the movement toward democracy in Ghana in the 1990s arose as a demand by politically and economically marginalized elements for incorporation.  The political and economic marginalization occurred in conditions of political monolithism, coercive authoritarianism, and economic slump or, in the words of Claude Ake (2000, “persistent underdevelopment”.  The demand for incorporation occurred on two levels - on the level of elites as demand for political assimilation and on the level of the masses as demand for economic assimilation.  Thus, political monolithism and persistent

Past and present energy societies. How energy connects politics, technologies and cultures

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Moellers, Nina; Zachmann, Karin (eds.)

2012-07-01

Abundant, salutary, problematic - energy makes history. As a symbol, resource and consumer good, it shapes technologies, politics, societies and cultural world views. Focussing on a range of energy types, from electricity and oil to bioenergy, this volume analyzes the social, cultural and political concepts and discourses of energy and their implementation and materialization within technical systems, applications, media representations and consumer practice. By examining and connecting production, mediation and consumption aspects from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, the book offers an innovative view on how energy is imagined, discussed, staged and used.

Political Corruption And Poverty In Nigeria | Faloore | African Journal ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

From preindependence era to date, political corruption and its attendant problems in forms of vote buying, election rigging and manipulation, outright embezzlement by politicians have negatively affected the lives of Nigerians. This has led to increased political apathy and distrust in the country's fledging democratic ideals.

Scientific literacy for democratic decision-making

Science.gov (United States)

Yacoubian, Hagop A.

2018-02-01

Scientifically literate citizens must be able to engage in making decisions on science-based social issues. In this paper, I start by showing examples of science curricula and policy documents that capitalise the importance of engaging future citizens in decision-making processes whether at the personal or at the societal levels. I elucidate the ideological underpinnings behind a number of the statements within those documents that have defined the trajectory of scientific literacy and have shaped what ought to be considered as personal and societal benefits. I argue that science curricula and policy documents can truly endorse scientific literacy when they embed principles of democratic education at their core. The latter entails fostering learning experiences where some of the underlying assumptions and political ideologies are brought to the conscious level and future citizens encouraged to reflect upon them critically and explicitly. Such a proposal empowers the future citizens to engage in critical deliberation on science-based social issues without taking the underlying status quo for granted. I end up the paper by situating the preparation of scientifically literate citizens within a framework of democratic education, discuss conditions through which a curriculum for scientific literacy can serve democratic decision-making processes, and provide modest recommendations.

Crafting a Democratic Enclave on the Cyberspace: Case Studies of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yangyue Liu

2011-01-01

Full Text Available As an antithesis of “authoritarian enclave” which has been well-established in the comparative politics literature, “democratic enclave” points to the institution of a state or the unambiguous regulatory space in society “where the authoritarian regime’s writ is substantively limited and is replaced by an adherence to recognizably democratic norms and procedures” (Gilley 2010. In this sense, the Internet space, embodied by information and communication technologies, has great potential to play such a role, since its “inherited” properties of decentralization and anonymity would inevitably breach the authoritarian rules. However, a closer look at three Southeast Asian states, Malaysia, Singapore and the “New Order” Indonesia whose regimes were characterized by authoritarianism when Internet was initially developed, reveals different trajectories. In the “New Order” Indonesia and Malaysia, the governments consciously left the Internet space uncontrolled; the online media developed independently, vibrantly, and professionally, especially in the Malaysian case; and there were strong connections between online and offline contentious politics. These elements made the Internet space in Indonesia and Malaysia a successful case of democratic enclave. Based on these criteria, however, the Internet space in Singapore has not achieved similar status. This paper analyses the different outcomes of enclave creation on the cyberspace among these countries. It argues that elite conflict and the strength of civil society are the two major factors that shape the differences. In this sense, the political contexts are of great importance for the understanding of Internet’s political impacts.

The cultural politics of biomedicine in the Caribbean

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Paul E. Brodwin

1998-01-01

Full Text Available [First paragraph] Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad. JULIE M. FEINSILVER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xx + 307 pp. (Cloth US$ 45.00, Paper US$ 17.00 The Blessings of Motherhood: Health, Pregnancy and Child Care in Dominica. ANJA KRUMEICH. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994. iii + 278 pp. (Paper NLG 47.50 Disability and Rehabilitation in Rural Jamaica: An Ethnographic Study. RONNIE LINDA LEAVITT. Rutherford NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1992. 249 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.50 Based on research in three Caribbean societies, these books explore the contours of biomedicine ("Western" or scientific medicine as a cultural system and an instrument of state power. On a theoretical level, the authors take up the blurred boundaries between Western biomedicine and other forms of healing as well as the political meanings and contradictions hidden behind everyday clinical routines. Their particular research projects, however, ask what has happened to the dream of universally accessible medical care in the past twenty years in the Caribbean region. The books focus on a community-based pediatric disability program in Jamaica(Leavitt, maternal and child health care in Dominica (Krumeich, and Cuba's national project of medical modernization (Feinsilver. Specific diseases or clinical outcomes are less at issue than the cultural and political dimensions of planned health development and the social transformations it sets into motion on both local and national levels.

Capacity, Debility and Differential Inclusion: The Politics of Microfinance in South India

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Vandana Chaudhry

2018-02-01

Full Text Available This article uses a critical disability lens to map how differential inclusion shatters the promise of democratizing capital in microfinance. Based on an ethnographic study of disability microfinance projects of the World Bank in India, it traces the dynamics of inclusion through the exclusion of debilitated bodies that cannot be capacitated within the neoliberal logic of entrepreneurship. A disability perspective brings into relief the pernicious ways that microfinance operates through webs of ableism, capitalism, and other axes of power and domination. It builds upon and contributes to the ongoing debates on microfinance as a form of neoliberal populism by showing what disability has to say about political futures amidst globalizing desires for inclusion, social mobility, and democratizing access to capital. Examining disability as a culturally-specific configuration of precarity and marginalization that is deepened by microfinance programs allows us to challenge the inclusionist claims of finance capital, and re-envision ethically and socially responsible frameworks. Generating culturally grounded knowledge on disability in the global south, this article also makes an important contribution to the field of disability studies, which scholars have argued remains implicated within the hegemony of 'scholarly colonialism' (Meekosha, 2011.

TALKING POLITICS ONLINE WITHIN SPACES OF POPULAR CULTURE : THE CASE OF THE BIG BROTHER FORUM

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Graham, T.S.

2010-01-01

Talking politics online is not bound to spaces dedicated to politics, particularly the everyday political talk crucial to the public sphere. The aim of this article is to move beyond such spaces by examining political talk within a space dedicated to popular culture. The purpose is to see whether a

CULTURA POLÍTICA E ESTUDOS DE PODER LOCAL

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Maria Salete Souza de Amorim

2007-12-01

Full Text Available There is a debate on contemporary Political Science suggestions that cultural values are important elements in the analysis of the political process. The debate is enhanced by the recognition that, besides the institutions, the cultural aspects contribute to the strength of the democratic system. Based on these arguments this article seeks to evaluate the quality of democracy based on thelocal power studies, verifying the indicators of reliance and political participation in the construction of a democratic political culture. The results of this research confirmed that the skepticism and the citizens’ withdrawal from the political sphere compromise attitudes and behaviors favorable to democracy.

The recent process of decentralization and democratic management of education in Brazil

Science.gov (United States)

Santos Filho, José Camilo Dos

1993-09-01

Brazilian society is beginning a new historical period in which the principle of decentralization is beginning to predominate over centralization, which held sway during the last 25 years. In contrast to recent Brazilian history, there is now a search for political, democratic and participatory decentralization more consonant with grass-roots aspirations. The first section of this article presents a brief analysis of some decentralization policies implemented by the military regime of 1964, and discusses relevant facts related to the resistance of civil society to state authoritarianism, and to the struggle for the democratization and organization of civil society up to the end of the 1970s. The second section analyzes some new experiences of democratic public school administration initiated in the 1970s and 1980s. The final section discusses the move toward decentralization and democratization of public school administration in the new Federal and State Constitutions, and in the draft of the new Law of National Education.

A Renormalization Group Like Model for a Democratic Dictatorship

Science.gov (United States)

Galam, Serge

2015-03-01

We review a model of sociophysics which deals with democratic voting in bottom up hierarchical systems. The connection to the original physical model and technics are outlined underlining both the similarities and the differences. Emphasis is put on the numerous novel and counterintuitive results obtained with respect to the associated social and political framework. Using this model a real political event was successfully predicted with the victory of the French extreme right party in the 2000 first round of French presidential elections. The perspectives and the challenges to make sociophysics a predictive solid field of science are discussed.

National narration and Politics of Memory in post-socialist Georgia

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Dundua Salome

2017-04-01

Full Text Available The article is dedicated to analyse the politics of so called “historical memory” during the state-building and nation-building process in post-socialist Georgia After the Rose Revolution 2003, the new government that aimed at building the “new Georgia,” implementing radical changes in many key spheres, including institutions, readdressing the totalitarian past, faced number of problematic manifestations in political and cultural life in this post-Soviet country. The “politics of memory” became one of the key factors of reconstructing of “new, democratic, western Georgia”. This process can be evaluated as leading toward state nationalism. Analyzing the politics of memory, symbolism is the most notable attitude and that is why former President Mikheil Saakashvili used commemorative ceremonies continuously. The authors argue in favour of approach, that the so called “memory politics” is the integral part of one’s legitimacy building, but at the same time, it can be used as tool for reconsidering of Polity’s future and mobilization of population under the “citizenship” umbrella towards the strong loyalty to the actual and future state-building.

The Political Economy of Crisis and the Crisis of Political Economy: The Challenge of Sustainability

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Graham Murdock

2015-10-01

Recent developments in the organisation of capitalism have given renewed urgency to critical political economy’s core concern with the shifting relations between capital, state and civil society and placed issues around communications and culture at the centre of debate. Successive responses to the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s and the 2008 financial crisis have extended marketization, consolidated corporate control over public culture, displaced and casualised labour, escalated product promotion, placed consumption fuelled by personal debt at the centre of models of growth, and generated rapidly widening inequalities in access and agency. At the same time, the political instabilities following the end of the Cold War have licenced a move from selective to saturation surveillance that has given the major capitalist states unprecedented entry into intimate life. The critical political economy culture and communications has seized the moment and produced powerful accounts and critiques of these shifts and their implications for democratic life. The first part of the paper offers a critical overview of this work. With some notable exceptions however, critical political economies of communications have not fully incorporated the climate crisis into their analyses. Yet communication systems, particularly digital systems, are central to the unfolding climate crisis, not simply as central spaces of public information (and misinformation and debate, but as arrays of infrastructures and machines that consume resources and power and foster patterns of use and disposal that exacerbate problems of waste and pollution and reinforce patterns of inequality, with those least able to cope likely to be the most affected. The second part of the paper expands on this argument The third and final part follows the implications of this analysis through arguing that critical communications policy not only needs to address the problem of curbing corporate and state abuses of control

Political conditions and life expectancy in Europe, 1900-2008.

Science.gov (United States)

Mackenbach, Johan P

2013-04-01

The rise of life expectancy in Europe has been a very uneven process, both in time and space. This paper aims to identify instances in which major political conditions are likely to have influenced the rise of life expectancy, focusing on formation and dissolution of states and supranational blocs and on differences between political regimes (democratic vs. authoritarian non-communist and communist rule). Data on life expectancy, cause-specific mortality and political conditions were compiled from existing data sources. Possible relations between political conditions and life expectancy were studied by direct comparisons of changes in life expectancy in countries with different political conditions but similar starting levels of life expectancy. We found that formation and dissolution of states often went together with convergence and divergence of life expectancy, respectively, and that otherwise similar countries that did or did not become part of the Soviet bloc had distinctly different life expectancy trajectories. Democratically governed states had higher life expectancies than authoritarian states throughout the 20th century. The gap narrowed between 1920 and 1960 due to rapid catching up of infectious disease control in both non-communist and communist authoritarian states. It widened again after 1960 due to earlier and more rapid progress in democratic states against cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, motor vehicle accidents and other causes of death that have become amenable to intervention. We conclude that the history of life expectancy in Europe contains many instances in which political conditions are likely to have had a temporary or more lasting impact on population health. This suggests that there is scope for further in-depth studies of the impact of specific political determinants on the development of population health in Europe. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Atomic-powered democracy: Policy against politics in the quest for American nuclear energy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Williams, R.W.

1993-01-01

This dissertation focuses on the relationship of American nuclear energy to democracy. It examines whether the nuclear policy processes have furthered the legitimacy-government accountability and citizen participation-which the democratic institutes are based. Nuclear policy and its institutions have placed severe limitations on democratic practices. Contravened democracy is seen most clearly in the decoupling of policy from politics. Decoupling refers to the weakening of institutional linkages between citizens and government, and to the erosion of the norms that ground liberal democracy. Decoupling is manifested in policy centralization, procedural biases, technical rationality, and the spatial displacement of conflict. Decoupling has normative implications: While federal accountability was limited and citizen participation was shackled, other major groups enjoyed privileged access to policy making. The decoupling of nuclear policy from politics arose within the context of US liberal-democratic capitalism. The federal government pursued its own goals of defense and world leadership. Yet, it was not structurally autonomous from the hegemony of the political-economic context. Economically, the Atomic Energy Act did not permit federal agencies to directly invest in power plant construction, and did not authorize them to commercially generate electricity. Private industry was structurally placed to domesticate the atom. Politically, the liberal-democratic system hampered an unquestioning pursuit of atomic energy. Federal institutions have been forced to heed some of the anti-nuclear concerns. The pervasive influence of the US political economy on nuclear policy has come to transgress democracy. Nuclear power's growth faltered during the 1970s. The political and economic constraints on federal actions have limited the means available to revive a becalmed nuclear industry; this has exerted strong pressure on federal institutions to decouple policy from participation

The Noisy Counter-Revolution: Understanding the Cultural Conditions and Dynamics of Populist Politics in Europe in the Digital Age

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Lars Rensmann

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The article argues for a cultural turn in the study of populist politics in Europe. Integrating insights from three fields—political sociology, political psychology, and media studies—a new, multi-disciplinary framework is proposed to theorize particular cultural conditions favorable to the electoral success of populist parties. Through this lens, the fourth wave of populism should be viewed as a “noisy”, anti-cosmopolitan counter-revolution in defense of traditional cultural identity. Reflective of a deep-seated, value-based great divide in European democracies that largely trumps economic cleavages, populist parties first and foremost politically mobilize long lingering cultural discontent and successfully express a backlash against cultural change. While the populist counter-revolution is engendered by profoundly transformed communicative conditions in the age of social media, its emotional force can best be theorized with the political psychology of authoritarianism: as a new type of authoritarian cultural revolt.

The democratic horizons of the museum: Citizenship and culture

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Dahlgren, P.; Hermes, J.; Witcomb, A.; Message, K.

2015-01-01

Change is sweeping through the world of museums, technologically, financially, and ideologically, impacting on the sociocultural evolution of their roles and status. We seek to contribute to ongoing reflections by offering a conceptual framework that links museums with democratic theory, to

Democratic Republic of Congo A Fertile Ground for Instability in the Great Lakes Region States

Science.gov (United States)

2017-06-09

ravaged by a brutal armed conflict. In comparison to the three past presidents, Joseph Kabila has managed to restore political stability and calm to much...DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO-A FERTILE GROUND FOR INSTABILITY IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION STATES A thesis presented to the Faculty of...From - To) AUG 2016 – JUNE 2017 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Democratic Republic of Congo-A Fertile Ground for Instability in the Great Lakes Region

Digital Politics: Mobilization, Engagement, and Participation

OpenAIRE

Koc-Michalska, K.; Lilleker, Darren

2017-01-01

The article provides insights into the driving forces that underpin new forms of political participation. Digital technologies offer opportunities for engaging in a wide range of civicallyoriented activities, each of which can contribute to deeper democratic engagement. Conventional acts of political participation are argued to be driven primarily by intrinsic motivations relating to self-efficacy and empowerment with participants feeling they can have influence over decision makers. Little r...

Political Consensus and Fiscal Outcomes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Houlberg, Kurt; Holm Pedersen, Lene

2015-01-01

It is becoming difficult to maintain consensus in a period of economic austerity, and this possibly challenges the ability of democratic institutions to take decisions on tough economic questions. In order to find out how political consensus influences fiscal outcomes, this article sets out...

Energy technology and American democratic values

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Thompson, G.M.

1988-01-01

Today, the benefits of liberal democracy have increasingly been cast into doubt. The debate over alternative energy policies illustrates the problems associated with liberal democracy. For many, it is the realization that energy choices and the selection of social and political values amount to much the same thing. Simply put, energy policy decisions, and the concomitant energy technologies, carry implications of an ethical, social and political nature. The argument of the social and political effects of energy technology flows from the more general thesis that all forms of technological practice condition social and political relations. That is, technological systems, beyond performing the specific functions for which they were designed, act upon and influence social and political arrangements. Seen in this light, energy technologies are as important to the promotion and preservation of this country's political values as are its institutions and laws. Further, there is evidence to suggest that this country's cherished democratic value of freedom is slowly being eclipsed by the values attendant to corporate capitalism and its singular pursuit of growth. It is this dominance of economic values over political values which provides the environment within which the technological debate is waged. Ultimately, tracing the historic linkage between property and liberty, it is concluded that the preservation of our freedom require new thinking regarding the present configuration of ownership patterns. The questions surrounding energy policy serve to illuminate these concerns.

A Functional Approach to Televised Political Spots: Acclaiming, Attacking, Defending.

Science.gov (United States)

Benoit, William L.; Pier, P. M.; Blaney, Joseph R.

1997-01-01

Articulates a theoretical framework for understanding the fundamental functions of political advertising (acclaiming, attacking, defending) which occur on the twin grounds of policy considerations and character. Applies this theory of political discourse to presidential general election television spots from 1980-1996, finding that Democrats and…

Muslim Political Elite and the Revival of the Left in Indonesian Politics (1996-2001

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ahmad Suhelmi

2006-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract: Based upon elite interviews, document analysis and library research, this study analyses the responses of the Indonesian Muslim political elite to the phenomena of the emergence of the alleged communist Partai Rakyat Demokratik (People’s Democratic Party and the flourishing of the Leftist books in Indonesia during 1996-2001 which is one of the most critical historical phases in Indonesian politics that witnessed significant political changes affecting the life of Indonesians in general and Muslims in particular. The adverse responses of most Muslim political elite to the revival of the Left are basically driven by the interweaving of theological, historical and political factors as well as traumatic historical experience. With the passage of time, there have been significant changes, and strained relations between Islamic political groups and the Leftists have thawed but not eliminated.

POLITICAL COERCION IN THE REFORMATION ERA IN BULELENG REGENCY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF CULTURAL STUDIES

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Pande Made Suputra

2012-11-01

Full Text Available During the reformation era much political coercion took place in Buleleng Regency, Bali.Such political coercion occured repeatedly in the general election referred to as Pemiluconducted in 1999 and 2004, and in the election conducted to directly vote for district headsreferred to as Pilkada in 2007. It is interesting to investigate this phenomenon. The problems inthis study are formulated as follows: (1 what factors causing political coercion to take place inthe general election and in the election conducted to directly vote for district heads; (2 how ittook place; and 3 what ideology leading to it and what implications it had on the socio-cultureof the people living in Buleleng Regency?The practical theory, the theory of coercion and the theory of ideology were eclecticallyadopted to establish and analyze concepts. Qualitative method is employed and the data neededwere collected by observation, in-depth interview, and documentation study.The results of the study show: first, the factors causing political coercion to take placevaried; second, six cases of political coercion in Buleleng Regency did not take place suddenly,but through processes and were related to the cultural coercion inherent within local individualsand groups; third, they took place through semiologic deconstruction related to themeaningfulness provided by the common people and political elites to the ‘pemilu and pilkada’.Thus, the ideologies responsible for political coercion were paternalism, binary opposition ,pragmatism and ‘premanisme’ (the broker of coercion ; fourth, the implications the cases ofpolitical coercion had on the people in Buleleng Regency were: the pattern of kinship becamebroken, the culture of physical coercion shifted to the culture of symbolic and economiccoercion; a new consensus was established.The conclusions withdrawn in this study show that the characteristics of the politicalcoercion taking place in Buleleng Regency during the reformation

Transformation of conceptual basis of political science under cultural and historical context

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O. S. Tokovenko

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The paper is submitted to a scientific discussion the possibility of considering the idea of political science, based on the criteria of intellectual integrity and disciplinary unity. In this context, generally accepted among professionals and political scientists idea that political science as a scientific discipline occurs in the early twentieth century and its conceptual framework is still in a state of development, and a long preceding period should be characterized as a period of political thought is being challenged. The main idea that is being proved is recognition the existence of such scientific discipline as political science requires recognition of the existence of specific inherent ideals of science, cognitive standards, rules, procedures, explanations, etc. They allow political thinkers from the ancient world as well as modern researchers to combine it into a single, unique, different from others in their methodological principles and heuristic potential Science. It is convinced that the existence of intellectual integrity and disciplinary unity in Political Science is possible due to the existence of the ideals of scholarship, which are closely related to the cultural and historical context in which Political Science is being developed. The possibility of applying such disciplinary and integrated approach is considered as an example of the impact that was made by changes of the Great French Revolution and its consequences on transformation of the conceptual framework of Political Science.  It is concluded that the consideration of the peculiarities of political thought development in the social and cultural contexts related to the events of the Great French Revolution and its consequences argues that political science is responsive to changing the social context, makes changes in categorical apparatus, introduces the new field of scientific inquiry, actualized subject field. These actions are due to the specific disciplinary unity

Nigeria and Democratic Progress by Elections in Africa

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Giovanni Carbone

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Elections do not always advance democratisation, yet they can. We outline a democratisation-by-elections model according to which the opportunities for political change opened up by each electoral round build on previous election-related democratic progress. We focus on Nigeria, interpret the recent executive turnover in light of previous elections, and set the country within the comparative context of Africa’s democratisation. Using a new Africa Leadership Change dataset, we use election-related events to examine the diverse routes that African regimes have taken since 1990. The analysis highlights two major syndromes: democratic stagnation and recession. In a sizeable group, however, the institutionalisation of democracy has been making gradual progress. While there is no predetermined way to advance democracy, the reiteration of elections can be instrumental in such advancement.

Political culture, national identity and nuclear energy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bayer, F.

2013-01-01

The paper 'Political culture, national identity and nuclear energy. The austrian controversy on nuclear energy between 1978 and 1986 within the national assembly' identifies the roots of the broad rejection of nuclear technologies in contemporary Austria within the controversy on neclear energy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The close result of the referendum in November 1978 on the commissioning of the nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf - understood as a moment of severe polarisation - serves as a starting point for the investigation. In recent studies the explosion of the reactor in Chernobyl in April 1986 is considered the turning point of the austrian controversy and therefore marks the end of the examined period. Reviewing the history of nuclear energy in Austria the paper sheds light on events and aspects which turn out to be important for the rejection of nuclear technologies in contemporary Austria. On the one hand the analysis of the nuclear debate within the national assembly focuses on ways in which nuclear technologies were made sense of and ascribed with meaning and describes them as a sociotechnical imaginary. Next to highlighting the construction of national identity within these processes the analysis on the other hand explores the role of consensus and mutual action within the political culture of the Second Republic and its implications for the nuclear controversy. The integration of different perspectives enables to pinpoint several key aspects of the austrian nuclear controversy for the development of a broad rejection of nuclear technologies in the post-chernobyl era: the obligation to reach a consensus between the political parties, a specific set of ideas described as the imaginary of a ‘nuclear free Austria’ and its specific relations to national identity. (author) [de

Foucault's Political Challenge

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bang, Henrik

2014-01-01

If one reads Michel Foucault "backward," so to speak, one can sense the contours of a "big narrative" of "the political" which is founded on the claim that "Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhesia" (Foucault, 2011, p. 336). What Foucault is doing with this sentence is breaking the circle...... from showing how obedience is incompatible with a politics of truth. The unity created by centralized domination, he holds, is democratically "false," however legitimate it may be. There can be no real democracy where laypeople are commanded to hand over their capacity and right to govern themselves...

How to Exist Politically and Learn from It: Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Democratic Education

Science.gov (United States)

Biesta, Gert

2010-01-01

Background/Context: In discussions about democratic education, there is a strong tendency to see the role of education as that of the preparation of children and young people for their future participation in democratic life. A major problem with this view is that it relies on the idea that the guarantee for democracy lies in the existence of a…

Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Democratic Ideal

OpenAIRE

Karine Nyborg; Inger Spangen

1997-01-01

In traditional cost-benefit analyses of public projects, every citizen’s willingness to pay for a project is given an equal weight. This is sometimes taken to imply that cost-benefit analysis is a democratic method for making public decisions, as opposed to, for example, political processes involving log-rolling and lobbying from interest groups. Politicians are frequently criticized for not putting enough emphasis on the cost-benefit analyses when making decisions. In this paper we discuss t...

RUSSIA’S ‘FOREIGN AGENT’ LAW: A RESPONSE TO AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC PROMOTION POLICY

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Vijay Kumar

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Recently passed the Russian ‘Foreign Agent’ law against foreign funding of NGOs and civil society has attracted criticism from almost every quarter. From home to abroad all party concerned (i.e., civil society organizations, NGO groups, donor countries (especiallyAmericaand European countries as well as some Russian opposition political parties are of the view that this bill has been introduced to scuttle the independent civic activities and in this way unconstitutional. However on the basis of overall analysis of ‘Foreign Agent’ law in the context of American democratic promotion policy this paper is of the view that this law simply cannot be characterized as anti-democratic, which is against the very basis of freedom and rule of law, by the anti-democratic Russian government but it should be seen as extension of same challenge which American democratic promotion policy is facing around the whole world. It is because of its illegal and unconstitutional method of regime change policy, with the help of foreign funded NGOs, and civil society which has compelled various countries includingRussiato resort this type of law. It is important to note that the promise of peace, stability and prosperity by the democratic promotion protagonists after the fall ofSoviet Unionhas not been realised till today. Instead what post-Soviet states are witnessing today is emergence of chauvinist nationalist government in respective countries which witnessed colour revolution. Whole region is now plunging into economic turmoil, ethnic nationalism, rise of religious fundamentalism and identity politics. Recent overthrow of legitimate Viktor Yanukovych government inUkraineand subsequent decision by incumbent government to exclude Russian as administrative language can be sited as example. That is why former American Republican Congressman Ron Paul is of the view that “US‘Democracy Promotion’ Destroys Democracy Overseas’’. In this context this paper

Resurgent Military Political Adventurism in West Africa: Implications ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The democratization efforts of the 1990s in West Africa appeared to have put paid to military political adventurism which had been the plague of that region since independence in the 1960s. But since the year 2000 there has been a resurgence of military intervention in the politics of some West African states and this calls ...

«…And still there are lights in front of us»: the reformatory demo-cratism of V. Korolenko

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Владимир Владимирович Блохин

2010-12-01

Full Text Available The article gives a seaway of the social political views of a well known Russian writer V. Korolenko. The author of the article proves that the political doctrine of Korolenko is very close to reformatory democratism of N.K. Mikhailovsky.

PoliticAPP: Towards a Categorization of Mobile Apps in Political Communication

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Pablo VÁZQUEZ SANDE

2016-06-01

Full Text Available This article is an analyze of all mobile apps that are available in the field of Spanish political communication, with the aim to develop a pioneering categorization of these platforms according to various criteria as promoters, aims pursued or areas of performance. It includes also a critical review from which it is concluded that these app reproduce classic communication patterns with the voters. That means that the implementation of these channels seems to have been due more to political marketing than to boost democratic participation or to introduce an horizontal outline of a new relationship between politicians and citizens.

Political Regimes, Political Ideology, and Self-Rated Health in Europe: A Multilevel Analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Huijts, Tim; Perkins, Jessica M.; Subramanian, S. V.

2010-01-01

Background Studies on political ideology and health have found associations between individual ideology and health as well as between ecological measures of political ideology and health. Individual ideology and aggregate measures such as political regimes, however, were never examined simultaneously. Methodology/Principal Findings Using adjusted logistic multilevel models to analyze data on individuals from 29 European countries and Israel, we found that individual ideology and political regime are independently associated with self-rated health. Individuals with rightwing ideologies report better health than leftwing individuals. Respondents from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics report poorer health than individuals from social democratic, liberal, Christian conservative, and former Mediterranean dictatorship countries. In contrast to individual ideology and political regimes, country level aggregations of individual ideology are not related to reporting poor health. Conclusions/Significance This study shows that although both individual political ideology and contextual political regime are independently associated with individuals' self-rated health, individual political ideology appears to be more strongly associated with self-rated health than political regime. PMID:20661433

The transformation of the Swedish political party system in the late 20th/early 21st century

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Ryabichenko Arkady

2013-09-01

Full Text Available This article studies the process of transformation of the Swedish political party system in the 1980s. The study aims to develop a typology of the Swedish political party system before and after the transformation processes commenced. The article identifies the key prerequisites for such transformation: the crisis of social democracy and an increase in the nationalist attitudes in the society caused by the negative repercussions of the system of integration of migrants into the society based on the multiculturalism principles. The interethnic tension manifested itself in the wide support for the Swedish Democrats Party in the 2010 parliamentary election. From a political party system dominated by social democrats, the Swedish political party system turned into one with two leading parties – the centre-left Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party and the centre-right Moderate Party. The Swedish Democrats position themselves as an alternative to the two party blocs headed by the dominating parties (the Alliance and the Red-Green. The study employs an interdisciplinary approach in the framework of science synthesis. Its results can be of practical significance for politicians, social activists, and academicians.

The Political Economy of Neoliberalism and Illiberal Democracy

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Garry Jacobs

2017-10-01

Full Text Available The unprecedented opportunities missed at the end of the Cold War have come back to haunt and taunt us in the form of misshapen ideologies and misconceived policies. Discredited notions discarded by history once again raise their heads to be finally buried or bury us. Despite the rhetoric of the Washington Consensus, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism and dissolution of Soviet authoritarianism did not mark a final vindication and victory for Western democratic neoliberalism. They only removed the antagonist who had compelled Western ideologues to moderate their actions to counterbalance the obvious humanistic appeal of socialism. Blinded by their own propaganda, theorists, politicians and the general public have embraced a course that threatens the stability and sustainability of Western society. Globalization, financialization, global mergers and acquisitions, shadow banking, international tax havens, the policy bias favoring energy-intensive automation, maximizing share-holder value, state capture, oligarchy and plutocracy have fueled soaring levels of economic inequality and insecurity. More importantly, they have shaken the roots of the social consensus that is the foundation of modern liberal democracies: polarizing and destabilizing society and throwing political processes into chaos. The notion that economics can be divorced and insulated from politics is an illusion. There is no economy without politics and law. A return to unbridled capitalism is threatening the culture of liberal values and the functioning of democratic institutions. Even mature democracies show signs of degenerating into their illiberal namesakes. The historical record confirms that peaceful, prosperous, free and harmonious societies can best be nurtured by the widest possible distribution of all forms of power—political, economic, educational, scientific, technological and social—to the greatest extent to the greatest number. The aspiration

O clientelismo nos pequenos municípios brasileiros

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Hemerson Luiz Pase

2012-06-01

Full Text Available This study aims to analyze the influence of political culture on behavior and attitude of legislators, highlighting the observation of the phenomenon of political patronage in small municipalities. The problem to be discussed is that the political culture of the councilors of small municipalities? The hypothesis to be tested states that the members of the legislature has a political culture incongruent with democratic consolidation, marked mostly by clientelism. It is used as the methodological assumption bibliographic references and quantitative data collection. The results demonstrate that the guarantee of individual favors and especially differential access to public services is currency among politicians and local people, even if recognized by lawmakers as illegal practice, which reveals a political culture incongruent with democratic consolidation.

The Politics of African Industrial Policy

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Whitfield, Lindsay; Therkildsen, Ole; Buur, Lars

in the early stages of capitalist transformation that also experience the pressures of elections due to democratization, this book provides four in-depth African country studies that illustrate the challenges to economic transformation and the politics of implementing industrial policies....

Socialization and Political Culture of Women in Positions of Popular Election. Municipality Presidents in Tlaxcala, Mexico

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María Eugenia Chávez Arellano

2016-07-01

Full Text Available In this paper we address the forms of socialization and political culture of some women who had positions of representatives of municipalities in rural communities in Tlaxcala, México. We presume that the ways of assuming and exercising power are closely linked to a  political culture that begins in the family and secured in various social spaces such as school, political parties or unions. The analysis in this paper is based on testimonies obtained from 14 women who were municipal presidents between 1992 and 2010, a period that frames the beginning of political alternation in Mexico.

Towards a More Democratic Regime and Society? The Politics of Faith and Ethnicity in a Transitional Multi-Ethnic Malaysia

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Kikue Hamayotsu

2013-01-01

Full Text Available The rising antagonistic attitudes and tension between the Malay majority and ethnic and religious minorities in Malaysia since 2007 is intriguing because it has occurred when society experienced an unprecedentedly large-scale and assertive multi-ethnic pro-democracy movement. This article argues that precisely these assertive and confident civil and political societies – and their emphasis on equal rights and equitable development for all Malaysians – have put the traditional Malay and religious elites on the defensive. The pro-democracy movement and the prospects of regime change have threatened not only the party-dominant regime but also – and more importantly – the constitutional and institutional foundations of ethnic exclusivism and privileges. Moreover, two Malay-based parties, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO and the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS, are viewed as giving too many political concessions to the non-Malay communities to gain an electoral advantage, making the traditional Malay and religious elites even more defensive of their position and power. As a result, religious issues are excessively politicised, further deteriorating the already complicated inter-ethnic relations of the country. The prospects for achieving a democratic regime and society appear grim, although hopes have run high since the electoral rise of the multi-ethnic opposition.

Policy without politics: the limits of social engineering.

Science.gov (United States)

Navarro, Vicente

2003-01-01

The extent of coverage provided by a country's health services is directly related to the level of development of that country's democratic process (and its power relations). The United States is the only developed country whose government does not guarantee access to health care for its citizens. It is also the developed country with the least representative and most insufficient democratic institutions, owing to the constitutional framework of the political system, the privatization of the electoral process, and the enormous power of corporate interests in both the media and the political process. As international experience shows, without a strong labor-based movement willing to be radical in its protests, a universal health care program will never be accepted by the US establishment.

The Political as Presence: On Agonism in Citizenship Education

Science.gov (United States)

Tryggvason, Ásgeir

2017-01-01

In recent years, an agonistic approach to citizenship education has been put forward as a way of educating democratic citizens. Claudia W. Ruitenberg (2009) has developed such an approach and takes her starting point in Chantal Mouffe's agonistic theory. Ruitenberg highlights how political emotions and political disputes can be seen as central for…

Technological Determinism and Permissionless Innovation as Technocratic Governing Mentalities: Psychocultural Barriers to the Democratization of Technology

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Taylor Dotson

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Despite no shortage of thoughtful analysis concerning how to more democratically develop and assess new technologies, practical progress toward democratized innovation has been paltry. This state of affairs suggests that the barriers to such democratic ends merit more attention. Building upon calls to more seriously examine citizens’ understandings of technology as autonomous or deterministic, this paper characterizes the assumptions, beliefs, and patterns of thought undergirding technological determinism and permissionless innovation as technocratic governing mentalities. That is, they contribute to the biasing of political discourses, practices, and organizations toward non-decision making and adaptation with regards to technological change. Indeed, permissionless innovation is quickly becoming the motto of those aiming to legitimate a “hands-off” approach to the sociotechnical “disruptions” sought by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Moreover, this paper explores how STS, as both an academic and political endeavor, might better respond to the challenges these modes of thinking present. Drawing upon relevant work within social psychology and communications, several fruitful avenues for engaged research regarding undermining technocratic governing mentalities become apparent. Not only is there a pressing need for accessible and parsimonious counternarratives to technological determinism and permissionless innovation but also rhetorical strategies for making the democratization of technological appear continuous with aspects of status quo systems. Finally, given that technocratic governing mentalities are likely to have practical and material roots, inquiry should be directed toward understanding how different sociotechnical arrangements impact citizens’ perception of the desirability and feasibility of democratizing technology.

Forms of Political Participation and Subjective Well-being: A World Survey

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Benjamín Temkin

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Subjective well-being has been described as perhaps “the ultimate dependent variable” of the social sciences. Thus, it is understandable that much of the empirical research on the subject has focused on the identification of its correlates. In this paper we utilize the sixth wave of the World Value Survey carried out in sixty countries between 2010 and 2014, to evaluate the relationship between different types of political participation and the subjective well-being of citizens, Our research partially confirms the hypothesis that, when controlling for the democratic or undemocratic character of political institutions, conventional political participation is positively and significantly associated with life satisfaction, while unconventional conflictive political activities show the opposite relationship to well-being. On the other hand, the democratic nature of state institutions is universally and consistently related to higher levels of personal well-being among individuals.

Demokratikleşme Sürecini Tamamlayamamış Toplumların Ekonomik ve Siyasi Açıdan Değerlendirilmesi: Sürdürülebilir Demokrasi( Evaluation of The Societies, Which Did Not Complete Democratization Process, in Terms of Economical and Political Perspectives: Sustainable Democracy

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Nurdan KUŞAT

2011-01-01

Full Text Available Democracy is the indispensable political regime of 21 century societies. While 20. century century takes place in history as that many countries met with democracy, 21 century seems to be a candidate that will be remembered together with the interventions to the democratic process with a panic to lose the democracy. In each century, with different improvements and different forms, the military-political power, or in other words, the military-civilian relations, has taken place in the agendas of the countries. In history this relationship between the military and political power, exhibits a model which is sometimes moderate and sometimes with conflicts. Finally, it is easy to set up a democratic regime, but it is difficult to make it sustainable. This study is trying to explain to the countries that are willing to digest representative democracy, what to do to make it sustainable.

Pillars of the Republics: Early Monuments and the Politics of Memory in the Post-Colonial Americas

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Stefan Rinke

2014-06-01

Full Text Available When trying to explain the success of democracy in the United States in 1831 Tocqueville used the comparative method in singling out the most important explanatory factors. He concluded that it were not the natural circumstances like absence of envious neighbors or the availability of natural resources which decided about success or failure of democratic institutions. According to Tocqueville, Latin America boasted the same favorable preconditions and yet he noted: “There are no nations upon the face of the earth ... more miserable than those of South America”. If we translate “customs” into the modern term of political culture we can see that Tocqueville’s explanation is still very much in currency in the social sciences. Indeed, historians of Latin America have frequently argued that the problem of the comparative underdevelopment of the region in part has to be explained by the resistance of traditional socio-cultural structures to modernization. According to this point of view, traditional attitudes and mentalities helped to perpetuate a political culture that proved an obstacle to democracy from the very start.

Social education politics in a Europe of inequalities

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Javier Bascuñan Cortés

2013-07-01

Full Text Available The aim of this research is to analyse some indicators which allow us to understand the current state of social education politics in Europe, with special reference to Spain. Some European and Spanish social and educational policies which try to confront the challenges of the current financial crisis are also explained. Some deficiencies, failures and contradictions attached to the process of the construction of European citizenship are pointed out. Some key topics which seem to foresee a deeper social and democratic crisis apart from the economic one are tackled. It is explained how the new forms of inequality evidence the failure of some of the important declarations of intent and objectives of the European Union. The subjection of social and democratic aspects to neoliberal economy —i.e. the negation of ideologies— is questioned. To conclude, some key topics are proposed as the central axis through which it could be possible to redefine the content of social education politics in Europe and Spain and to set the bases of a new democratic European citizenship

The political origin of pension funding

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Perotti, E.; Schwienbacher, A.

2007-01-01

This paper argues that historical political preferences on the role of capital markets shaped national choices on pension reliance on private funding. Under democratic voting, a majority will support investor protection and a privately funded pension system when the middle class has significant

The Role of W.L. Mackenzie King in the Development of the Canadian Political Culture (Dedicated to His 140th Anniversary

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Sokov Ilya Anatolyevich

2015-04-01

Full Text Available The author of the article analyses the role of Canada’s Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King in the creation of the unique Canadian political culture. The basis for this political culture was represented not only by the British political system, the adopted ideology of English classical liberalism, but also the national historical and cultural traditions connected with one and a half century existence of two nations on the North American continent. The author confirms that the Liberal Party and Mackenzie King as its leader decided upon the wide modernization of the Canadian society in the conditions of the post-war reconstruction in 1920s. This process would have been impossible without the reorganization of the political culture. The change of political practice allowed the autonomy to obtain more rights and the sovereignty. That is why M. King held two posts during almost the whole period – as Prime Minister and as Minister of Foreign Affairs. This approach helped him to have significant influence on the external political aspect in the development of the Canadian political culture. The author of the article points the main seven directions in the political activity of Mackenzie King which contributed to the creation of the unique Canadian political culture. The author concludes that the influence of Mackenzie King on the creation of the Canadian political culture was crucial in the second half of the 20th Century.

Equal rights as the center of democratization

OpenAIRE

Alan Gilbert

2010-01-01

Well-stated modern political or democratic theory is rights-based. Meaningful democracy rests as a precondition on the equal rights of citizens. This idea stems from Rousseau’s distinction between a general will*one which is impersonal and tends toward equality, that is, the equal basic rights of citizens*and a transitory will of all. For instance, absent equal basic rights, one might imagine a possible world in which what I have called a self-undermining series of wills of all, or the ...

THE POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC DIMENSION OF CULTURE: INTELLECTUALITY AND ART DURING THE CULTURAL COLD WAR

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FRANCISCO J. RUIZ DURÁN

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The central paradigm of the Cold War was a battle of ideas, not a military, economic or political battle. This article analyses the contribution of intellectuals and artists to the propaganda war during the 20th century. It is argued that culture proved to be a very effective weapon back then. Left-wing intellectuals who were contrary to the Soviet Union project forged a novel no-communist thinking that, being supported by the US intelligent services, succeeded in the creation of a new Worldwide cultural paradigm in the context of the Cultural Cold War.

Politics in Transition Economies; Consequences of a Clan Culture

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gërxhani, K.; Schram, A.J.H.C.

2000-01-01

We study the politico-economic interaction in a country in transition from a communist regime to a democratic, free market system, to wit, Albania. It is argued that the politico-economic system there is characterized by the existence of clans. Both the communists and the first democratically chosen

Adult Development Theory and Political Analysis: An Integral Account of Social and Political Change in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

OpenAIRE

Elke Fein

2010-01-01

I propose a reading of social, political and discursive change in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia which is inspired by an integral, above all developmental perspective. In view of explaining Russia’s current political trajectory, I make several arguments. First, I claim that Russian politics are still to a large extent determined by the effects of a threefold crisis of sense-making. Neither the collapse of the Soviet empire, nor the question of how to define democratic government nor the lack o...

Economic and political hybridity: Patrimonial capitalism in the post-Soviet sphere

OpenAIRE

Robinson, Neil

2013-01-01

Hybridity in non-democratic states can be economic as well as political. Economic hybridity is produced by the same kind of pressures that create political hybridity, but the relationship between economic and political hybridity has not been as much studied by political scientists. This article uses the concept of patrimonial capitalism to look at economic hybridity, its stability and relationship to political hybridity. Using examples from Russia and other former Soviet states it argues that...

Political System of the Great Cultural Revolution Reflected in Misty Poetry

OpenAIRE

Špela Oberstar

2014-01-01

The article outlines Chinese literature following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in relation to Mao’s Communist policy. It presents the occurrence of Misty poetry as an opposition to the political ideology of the Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Misty poetry is understood as a spontaneous illegal poetic movement of individuals who veiled their political demands directed against Mao’s ideology in metaphors. This oppositional stance resembled the movement of 4th May 1...

Narrated Political Theory: Theorizing Pop Culture in Dietmar Dath’s Novel Für immer in Honig

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Georg Spitaler

2013-12-01

Full Text Available In recent decades, debates on the relationship between pop culture and the political have transgressed academia and have even been prominent in pop (media discourses and texts, including pop literature. Amongst the contributions at the inter-section of art, theory and entertainment are the novels and essays by the German author Dietmar Dath. Taking the example of his novel Für immer in Honig (Berlin 2005/2008, it will be discussed how the book reloads and theorizes pop culture, and how a common cultural-theoretical narrative of de-politicized pop is challenged by the imaginative narratives of the novel. It will be argued that Dath’s references to affective ‘mattering maps’ of pop culture, that on the one hand tend to fall into the pitfalls of exclusive ‘pop sophis-tication’, nevertheless play a key role for his aesthetical/theoretical project of political emancipation, and that these references can be viewed as examples of why popular passions matter for the formation of political identities/subjectivities as well as for the production and reading of political theory.

The Practice of Equality: A Critical Understanding of Democratic Citizenship Education

Science.gov (United States)

Ruitenberg, Claudia W.

2015-01-01

This essay proposes a conception of citizenship that highlights its political aspects. Based on the work of Balibar, Rancière, and Biesta, it is argued that democratic citizenship education must include the education of equality. This means that students must have the opportunity to experience not only the membership aspect of citizenship that…

Socialization and Political Culture of Women in Positions of Popular Election. Municipality Presidents in Tlaxcala, Mexico

OpenAIRE

María Eugenia Chávez Arellano; Verónica Vázquez García

2016-01-01

In this paper we address the forms of socialization and political culture of some women who had positions of representatives of municipalities in rural communities in Tlaxcala, México. We presume that the ways of assuming and exercising power are closely linked to a  political culture that begins in the family and secured in various social spaces such as school, political parties or unions. The analysis in this paper is based on testimonies obtained from 14 women who were municipal presidents...

Democratic Governability in the Andean Region : Political and ...

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

... exacerbated social and political unrest, and in some cases led to violent confrontation. ... IDRC invites applications for the IDRC Doctoral Research Awards ... cooperation agreement to support joint research projects in December 2017.

Creating A Nationwide Nonpartisan Initiative for Family Caregivers in Political Party Platforms.

Science.gov (United States)

Scribner, Ben; Lynn, Joanne; Walker, Victoria; Morgan, Les; Montgomery, Anne; Blair, Elizabeth; Baird, Davis; Goldschmidt, Barbara; Kirschenbaum, Naomi

2017-06-01

Policymakers have been slow to support family caregivers, and political agendas mostly fail to address the cost burdens, impact on employment and productivity, and other challenges in taking on long-term care tasks. This project set out to raise policymakers' awareness of family caregivers through proposals to Republican and Democratic party platforms during the 2016 political season. The Family Caregiver Platform Project (FCPP) reviewed the state party platform submission process for Democratic and Republican parties in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We built a website to make each process understandable by caregiver advocates. We designed model submissions to help volunteers tailor a proposal and recruited caregiver advocates participating in their state process. Finally, we mobilized a ground operation in many states and followed the progress of submissions in each state, as well as the formation of the national platforms. In 39 states, at least one party, Republican or Democrat, hosted a state party platform process. As of September 2016 FCPP volunteers submitted proposals to 29 state parties in 22 states. Family caregiver language was added to eight state party platforms, one state party resolution, two bipartisan legislative resolutions, and one national party platform. The FCPP generated a non-partisan grassroots effort to educate and motivate policymakers to address caregiving issues and solutions. Democratic party leaders provided more opportunities to connect with political leaders, with seven Democratic parties and one Republican party, addressing family caregiver issues in their party platforms. © 2017, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation © 2017, The American Geriatrics Society.

The Effect of Translations on Cultural Change from The Ottomans to The Turkish Republic

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Fatih ŞİMŞEK

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The innovation movement in the Ottoman Empire, which lasted more than a hundred years, involved an intense translation activity in nearly every field. These translation activities eventually led to the creation of cultural, literary and political works in the Western model. The ideas and thoughts which changed the Ottoman Empire into a democratic republic arose from these westernization movements. During the early years of the Turkish Republic, culture, literature, politics and law were all guided by translations from the Western world. This paper seeks to examine how government-led innovation movements took place in fields such as the military, law, literature and culture during the transition period between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, and describe the translation methods which were at the centre of these movements. It will discuss how these translation-oriented innovations shaped the target society in the defined period, the way the target culture was directed and how the government-led cultural change, which did not take into account the cultural norms of the target society and traditions, affected the society.

Do Digital Social Networks Foster Civilian Partecipation among Millenials? Kitchenware Revolution and 15M Democratic Regeneration Cases

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Igor Calzada

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Nowadays “education for citizenship” is presented as a solution for many of the political, social, and co-existential issues in Western democratic societies in order to tackle dysfunctionalities produced by globalization, populism, migration, information and communication technologies (ICTs, and violence. At the same time, particularly among “millennials” or “digital natives”, lack of civil commitment and apathy toward politics as a whole contrasts with their intensive usage of digital social networks, or social media. By examining in-depth the scientific literature about the potential conceptual correlations between the use of “digital social networks” and civilian participation among “millennials”, this paper explores two widely studied paradigmatic events of democratic regeneration: the “Kitchenware Revolution” in Iceland after the financial collapse on 6 October 2008, and the “15M Movement” in Spain after 15 May 2011. Despite the substantial relevance that digital social networks played in both cases, this paper wonders to what extent digital social networks foster millennials’ civilian participation, when, paradoxically, they seem to be the population target who contests the status quo but who is not actually being represented democratically in the formal political system. The author concludes that digital social networks could initially foster civilian participation, but they should be seen as a new artefact that, itself, does not necessarily lead to a better political representation of millennials. As well, this paper argues against the widespread assumption regarding the correlation between socioeconomic and educational status and Internet usage factors of millennials when it comes to civilian participation, particularly in extreme political mobilisation events such as the Kitchenware Revolution and 15M.

Unconsciously Indigenous Leadership: The Role of Cognitive Disequilibrium in Preparing Democratic Educational Leaders

Science.gov (United States)

Farmer, Tod Allen

2008-01-01

This paper focuses on the role of cognitive disequilibrium in preparing democratic educational leaders. Followers emerge into leaders with what are many times unconsciously socialized norms and values indigenous to their local culture. One of the roles of a democratic leadership preparation program is to challenge these unconsciously accepted…

Ethics and legality in the Romanian political marketing

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Poţincu, C. R.

2010-11-01

Full Text Available In a democratic system, the legal framework is a guarantee of the favourable development of several activities, including those regarding the implementation of the promotional techniques used in the political marketing.

Colombia: security and conflict 2000-2014. Two political projects in dispute

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Fernando Galindo Rodriguez

2016-12-01

Full Text Available This paper analyzes, from a multi-dimensional point of view, the elements on which the concept of security in Colombia has been articulated in the last decade. Study the policy of Democratic Security of Alvaro Uribe Velez (2002-2010 and the policy of Democratic Prosperity of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2014 from a socio-political perspective. Although both policies share military elements, each one aims to consolidate a different political country project. The first one relates to rebuild a country based on a Security State and on an authoritarian praxis. The second one aims to stop the consolidation of the first one and take up again the liberal foundations of the Political Constitution of 1991 that, in addition, allow them continued exercise of the historical hegemony of national political power that was interrupted in 2002. Elements that contribute to broaden understanding of the current national context and the peace process.

Discourse, the political and the ontological dimension

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Allan Dreyer; Sonnichsen, André

2014-01-01

In this interview, Ernesto Laclau discusses his theoretico-political endeavour from the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; questions of radical democratic subjectivity; the social order, sedimentation and change; and finally his relationship to the work of Michel Foucault....

Rhetoric Tradition and Democracy: Isocrates’ Role in Ancient Greek Political Idea. Start Point of Western Political Philosophy

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Shokri Mehdi

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Political participation and the public education that have always been deployed to support the incipient progress of the civic life are revived in the modern political discourses. It has been believed that the age of pre-Socrates was the age of the Sophists whose acrid fallacy works occupied the political sphere, a malaise in government. However, speaking non-traditionally in the modern pedagogical system, there were some pre-Socratic thinkers and political philosophers/orators who’s works are the backbone of modern discourse on this matter. It will be examined whether any part of the classical rhetoric apparatus can be recovered and put to a good practice in the modern education and modern political participation. This point will be illustrated, furthermore, in this paper by alleging the importance of rhetoric, its role in Ancient Greek Democracy, and its influence on the modern concepts of power and democracy, as a continual element in a historical-political life. The further consideration is whether there was any democratic Polis existed in Ancient Athens and then, if there was, what characteristics it consisted of. Moreover, whether such concept can or should be considered in modern political discourses. In this sense, the liberal, non-dogmatic strain of the sophistry of Isocrates tradition urges us to indicate that the findings of this educational principles are, if not necessary, but adjutant complementary metes to our modern political knowledge of the states. In the end, it is inquired to see comparatively that how the tradition of rhetorical art and the concept of power in the Ancient Greek society have pertained to the modern democratic elements and whether we are able to empower this influential element in modern states.

Practising Political Care Ethics: Can Responsive Evaluation Foster Democratic Care?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Visse, M.A.; Abma, T.; Widdershoven, G.

2015-01-01

This paper examines if and how responsive evaluation as a deliberative approach can serve as a guide for a politically oriented care ethics. A political care ethics puts the assignment of responsibilities and the inclusion of multiple perspectives of people at the centre of care. It honours the

Leading Democratically

Science.gov (United States)

Brookfield, Stephen

2010-01-01

Democracy is the most venerated of American ideas, the one for which wars are fought and people die. So most people would probably agree that leaders should be able to lead well in a democratic society. Yet, genuinely democratic leadership is a relative rarity. Leading democratically means viewing leadership as a function or process, rather than…

Henan - the model: from hegemonism to fragmentism:portrait of the political culture of China's most populated province

OpenAIRE

Heberer, Thomas; Jakobi, Sabine

2000-01-01

"Henan is China's most populous province. It has long played a strategic role in Chinese history and in more recent decades has played a prominent part in the country's politics. In this paper we explore aspects of the history and political culture of Henan, particularly the collective memory or consciousness of its people, and trends in its recent political history. We focus in particular on specific cultural features and local patterns of socio-economic development, both to highlight import...

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mitchell, Timothy; Jaquet, Christophe

2013-01-01

How oil undermines democracy, and our ability to address the environmental crisis. This book is a French translation of 'Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil' originally published by Verso Edition (New York, US, ISBN 978-1781681169). Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called 'the economy' and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy-the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of

Aesthetics, Affect, and Educational Politics

Science.gov (United States)

Means, Alex

2011-01-01

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Ranciere. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Ranciere's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a…

Journal Editorship: Mentoring, Democratic, and International Perspectives

Science.gov (United States)

Mullen, Carol A.

2011-01-01

This essay builds on a review of studies in education. Journal editorship is explored from the mentoring, democratic, and international perspectives. Trends are examined within the publishing culture around these three editorial functions. Theoretical groundwork is provided for exploring contemporary journal editorship and its challenges and…

The Sæby Riot of 1818 - Popular Protest and the Political Culture of late Danish Absolutism

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mührmann-Lund, Jørgen

A microhistorical analysis of a popular riot in the small Danish town Sæby in 1818, showing the political culture of the period and especially the break with absolutist patriarchalism.......A microhistorical analysis of a popular riot in the small Danish town Sæby in 1818, showing the political culture of the period and especially the break with absolutist patriarchalism....

The Banyamulenge of the Democratic Republic of Congo: A cultural community in the making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S.L. Rukundwa

2004-10-01

Full Text Available In recent years the name Banyamulenge has become associated with a warrior group in Eastern Congo because of the role some of its community members played in the war against the Mobutu regime. Researchers have been intrigued by the political motivations which unfortunately do not cover the cultural aspects of this community. This article attempts to document the cultural heritage of the Banyamulenge community. Many of the practices and traditions have become obsolete. The article explains the Banyamulenge cultural way of living, and how the divine was traditionally revealed to them in the form of human deities. Burnt sacrifice was part of community worship. The article documents what has been learnt from elders about the oral tradition, the cultural and religious realities of the community.

Sport in the German Democratic Republic and the People's Republic of China. A Sociopolitical Analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

McIntyre, Thomas D.

1985-01-01

The use of sports in the German Democratic Republic and the People's Republic of China is both propagandist and ideological. International sports competition can enhance the country's image and domestic sport is a means of political socialization. (DF)

On Tour with the Prince: Monarchy, Imperial Politics and Publicity in the Prince of Wales's Dominion Tours 1919-20.

Science.gov (United States)

Mort, Frank

2018-03-01

The stage managers of ritual and the media transformed the British monarchy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, consolidating its image as splendid and popular and also as more accessible and quasi-democratic. Historians have emphasized that these processes of modernization largely began in Britain. This article locates the origins of democratized royal ritual in the white dominions, especially after 1918. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were political and cultural laboratories where royal advisors and British and dominion politicians launched experiments in the practice of progressive empire and innovatory styles of informal ceremonial, which had a long-term impact on imperial and later Commonwealth relations. Focusing on the Prince of Wales's early dominion tours, the article argues that though royal diplomacy followed earlier itineraries in efforts to consolidate the racialized British world, it also threw up new and unintended consequences. These registered the rapidly changing international order after the collapse of the European monarchies, together with the demands of the prince's own modernist personality. Faced with republican and socialist opposition in Australia and Canada, the touring prince was drawn into competing forms of nationalism, as dominion politicians and journalists embraced him as representing domestic aspirations for self-government and cultural recognition. It is argued that modern royalty personified by the Prince of Wales problematizes the history of twentieth-century public reputations defined by the culture of celebrity. The British monarchy was forced to confront both the constitutional claims of empire and the politics of dominion nationalism, as well as the pressures of international publicity.

Socio-political, cultural and economic preferences and behaviour of the social and cultural specialists and the technocrats. Social class or education?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Güveli, A.; Need, A.; Graaf, N.D. de

2007-01-01

Do the social and cultural specialists differ from the technocrats and other social classes with respect to their socio-political, cultural and economic preferences and behaviour? If they do, is this attributable to their level and field of education? The social and cultural specialists are assumed

Análise Crítica Semiótica e Economia Política Cultural | Critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bob Jessop

2010-09-01

Abstract This article defends the idea of a Cultural Political Economy – CPE, exploring the constitutive role of semiotics in economic and political activities and in the social order in general. This approach is post-disciplinary: it adopts the "cultural turn" in economic and political research, while not ignoring the articulation between semiotics and the interconnected materialities in economics and politics, within broader social formations. This approach is illustrated in the Knowledge-Based Economy – KBE as a master-discourse in accumulation strategies at different scales, state projects and hegemonic views, and diverse functional systems and professions, as well as in civil society. Keywords semiotics; economy and politics; cultural political economy; knowledge economy; cultural turn

An analytical framework for a political economy of football

OpenAIRE

Grant, Wyn

2007-01-01

A political economy of football has become more essential as the game has been colonized by elements of the business class. There is a tension between its profit maximizing understanding of football and a more community oriented, democratic vision that seeks to pursue government policy goals. The insights of economics and politics are both necessary to understand the political economy of football, but they should not be hybridized. Economics allows us to understand the distinctive characteris...

The Impact of Globalization on Political Development in Nigeria ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The Impact of Globalization on Political Development in Nigeria (1999-2007) ... PROMOTING ACCESS TO AFRICAN RESEARCH ... This problem is analyzed in view of attenuated democratic institutions, inefficient public service, and rent ...

Reversing Plato’s Anti-Democratism: Castoriadis’ “Quirky” Plato

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hamblet, Wendy C.

2008-12-01

Full Text Available This paper considers the conflicting "loves" of Cornelius Castoriadis--his love for the ancients, and especially Plato, and for the common person of the demos. A detailed study of Castoriadis' analysis of Plato's Statesman exposes that Castoriadis attempts to resolve the paradox by rereading Plato as a radical democrat. I argue that this unorthodox reading is at best "quirky, " (a charge Castoriadis levels at Plato at worst a groundless sophism. However, I conjecture that Castoriadis' reading may not constitute a serious attempt to describe a Platonic politics, so much as a prescriptive reading of what otherwise might have been, given certain strands of political generosity evident elsewhere in Plato's corpus.

The value of political parties to representative democracy

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kölln, Ann-Kristin

2015-01-01

Political parties play a major role in democratic processes around the world. Recent empirical research suggests that parties are increasingly less important to citizens. Simultaneously, classic and contemporary theories of representative democracy specifically still minimally incorporate accounts

Politics in the Postnational Constellation. An Approach to Habermas’s Conception of the State

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Juan Carlos Velasco

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The steady loss of sovereign power of the national states and the correlative transition to a post-national constellation are, according to Habermas, among the major trends that characterize the current state of affairs in the world in political terms. Against this geopolitical background in which clear guidelines remain to be defined, Habermas outlines a possible political response with a democratic design: he suggests to recover the cosmopolitan project of Kant and to expedite the constitutionalization of the international sphere. One of the biggest challenges in this regard consists in reconciling the need for global governance of common affairs of humanity with demands for democratic participation. The configuration of a post-westphalian democratic practice in accordance with a multi-level structure of international relations could be a plausible solution.

Political Socialization, Tolerance, and Sexual Identity

Science.gov (United States)

Avery, Patricia G.

2002-01-01

Key concepts in political socialization, tolerance, groups, rights and responsibilities can be used to understand the way in which young people struggle with sexual identity issues. Educators may promote greater tolerance for homosexuality among heterosexuals by situating sexual identity issues within a broader discussion of democratic principles.…

MAPPING CHILDREN'S POLITICS: SPATIAL STORIES, DIALOGIC RELATIONS AND POLITICAL FORMATION.

Science.gov (United States)

Elwood, Sarah; Mitchell, Katharyne

2012-03-01

This article confronts a persistent challenge in research on children's geographies and politics: the difficulty of recognizing forms of political agency and practice that by definition fall outside of existing political theory. Children are effectively "always already" positioned outside most of the structures and ideals of modernist democratic theory, such as the public sphere and abstracted notions of communicative action or "rational" speech. Recent emphases on embodied tactics of everyday life have offered important ways to recognize children's political agency and practice. However, we argue here that a focus on spatial practices and critical knowledge alone cannot capture the full range of children's politics, and show how representational and dialogic practices remain a critical element of their politics in everyday life. Drawing on de Certeau's notion of spatial stories, and Bakhtin's concept of dialogic relations, we argue that children's representations and dialogues comprise a significant space of their political agency and formation, in which they can make and negotiate social meanings, subjectivities, and relationships. We develop these arguments with evidence from an after-school activity programme we conducted with 10-13 year olds in Seattle, Washington, in which participants explored, mapped, wrote and spoke about the spaces and experiences of their everyday lives. Within these practices, children negotiate autonomy and self-determination, and forward ideas, representations, and expressions of agreement or disagreement that are critical to their formation as political actors.

The Democratization Process in the Western Balkans in the Last 20 Years: Interethnic Relations and Security Implications

OpenAIRE

Katerina Veljanoska; Oliver Andonov; Goran Shibakovski

2014-01-01

The process of democratization in Western Balkans is connected with the process of state-building before and after the reconstruction. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, the region became a brutal battleground as different nation-based groups fought to define the boundaries of a set of new states in the Balkans. One of the key challenges related to the democratization of the Western Balkan countries is resolving the issues with their neighbours. However, political pragmatism and bilateral rela...

Self-esteem, political efficacy, and perceived parental attitudes

OpenAIRE

Okçu, Tuba Nur; Okcu, Tuba Nur

2007-01-01

This thesis proposes to test the following three hypotheses: perceived political efficacy positively correlates with self-esteem; self-esteem positively correlates with perceived democratic parental attitude; and, lastly, self-esteem negatively correlates with perceived protective-demanding and perceived authoritarian parental attitudes. Two questionnaires (Q1 and Q2), each measure perceived political efficacy, selfesteem,and perceived parental attitudes. In Q2, the items of self-esteem and p...

Voters’ Perception of Cultural Elements in Political Advertising for the April 2011 General Elections in Nigeria

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Patrick Nkemdilim Ijeh

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Popular appeals explored by political advertisers for elections include showing a clearunderstanding ofpressing societal issues and demonstrating the possession of appropriate responsesto them as well as emphasis on experience relevant to the position being sought or one’s track recordsin other spheres of human endeavour. In addition to the aforementionedappeals, this study observesthat some political advertisers for the April 2011general elections in Nigeria incorporated culturalelements such as native languages; cultural dressing; emphasis on candidates’ cultural affinities bybirth, history, marriage and chieftaincy titles; cultural music and dances; cultural norms, values andideologies; as well as visits to and endorsements of candidates by traditional rulers. Voters perceivedthis in good light and majority indicated that they were attracted by these cultural elements to thepolitical advertisements and learnt about the candidates from them. However, a minority of themindicated that these incorporated cultural elements actually influenced their voting decisions. Thesefindings, emanating from a content analysis of selected political advertisements for the elections,tally with the notion of agenda setting theory of mass communication that the media can tell peoplewhat to think about but never what to think.

Political elites and foreign policy : democratization in Indonesia

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wibisono, Aria Teguh Mahendra

2009-01-01

In the investigation, the domestic sources of foreign policy analytical framework were used to analyze the dynamics of elites in foreign policy making. After analyses of the results of mostly personal interviews and historical materials, it was determined that political elites do matter in foreign

Making Citizens of the World: The Political Socialization of Youth in Formal Mass Education Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Wiseman, Alexander W.; Astiz, M. Fernanda; Fabrega, Rodrigo; Baker, David P.

2011-01-01

Unique cross-national data on adolescents' civic skills, knowledge, and political attitudes are used to examine the democratic processes of modern mass schooling, effects of national political systems, and patterns of youth political socialization in 27 nations. Compared to the generally weak reported effects on mathematics and reading…

The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina

OpenAIRE

Brysk, Alison

2013-01-01

Revised edition of 1994 out-of-print Stanford University Press study of human rights protest, social change, and democratization in Argentina.  A symbolic politics analysis of the truth commission, trials, and policy reform in Latin America's most sweeping transition of the 1980's.

Stabilization, Extraversion and Political Settlements in Somalia

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hagmann, Tobias

-central Somalia. Existing analyses have focused predominantly on local actors and internal dynamics to account for the continuous political disorder in the former Somali Democratic Republic since 1991. In contrast, this study highlights the role of external aid in dysfunctional statebuilding efforts in Somalia...

Overcoming the Obstacles to Establishing a Democratic State in Afghanistan

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Young, Dennis O

2007-01-01

.... This project looks at several of those obstacles to democracy in Afghanistan, to include the absence of a democratic history and tradition, an endemic culture of corruption, a pervasive narcotics...

PKS’ DEMOCRATIC EXPERIENCES IN RECRUITING MEMBERS AND LEADERS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ahmad Ali Nurdin

2011-08-01

Full Text Available This paper focuses on the views of democracy and the implementation of democratic rules in real politics by the Islamic political party that has a democracy platform in Indonesia, Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS. I examine PKS views on the relationship between Islam and democracy and its manner of recruiting members and leaders to show that this Islamic political party is not a threat to democracy at all. PKS believes that democracy goes to the roots of Islam and the Indonesian context in which they exist; and that it is a good political tool for an Islamic party like PKS to achieve its political goals. Taking the process of recruitment of members and leaders of PKS as examples, the paper also shows that the commitment of PKS to strengthening democracy in Indonesia could be seen in their process of recruiting leaders. PKS has practiced democratic rules in their internal party activities, particularly in the way they used to recruit their members who would be nominated as parliamentary members and how they choose their own leaders. However, it is necessary to note that in terms of member recruitment and expanding the cadres of the party, the PKS seems to have a special strategy; that is, encouraging their cadres to have big families. [Artikel mengulas pandangan Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS mengenai demokrasi dan implementasi nilai-nilai demokrasi dalam kehidupan politik. Dalam artikel ini, relasi Islam dan demokrasi serta metode PKS dalam merekrut anggota dan pemimpin partai akan dibahas. PKS sama sekali bukanlah ancaman bagi demokrasi. PKS percaya bahwa prinsip demokrasidapat ditemukan dalam Islam dan konteks Indonesia. Bagi PKS, demokrasi membuka ruang kesempatan bagi partai politik Islam untuk mencapai tujuan politiknya. Selain itu, artikel ini juga mengulas proses rekrutmen anggota dan pemimpin partai. Rekrutmen petinggi PKS memperlihatkan komitmen PKS terhadap penguatan demokrasi di Indonesia. PKS sudah mempraktekkan prinsip demokrasi dalam

Catalyzing Political Engagement: Lessons for Civic Educators from the Voices of Students

Science.gov (United States)

Longo, Nicholas V.; Drury, Christopher; Battistoni, Richard M.

2006-01-01

This article analyzes the comparative impact of three educational interventions aimed at increasing students' political engagement, two at the undergraduate level and one at the high school level. Findings from interviews with student participants in these programs indicate that political competencies are best acquired through democratic practice,…

Does Political Ideology Affect Economic Growth?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bjørnskov, Christian

2005-01-01

This paper asks the question whether political ideology affects economic growth. Voters may demand inefficient levels of redistribution and government intervention, and they may care too little for aspects that really matter for the economy. Their norms and perceptions of society might, via...... their political ideology, affect economic performance. The paper presents evidence suggesting that rightwing societies have grown faster in the last decades than other democratic societies. Further analysis suggests that these societies develop better legal systems and less government intervention, which in turn...

Do political budget cycles really exist?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Klomp, J.G.; Haan, de J.

2013-01-01

Most recent cross-country studies on election-motivated fiscal policy assume that the data can be pooled. As various tests suggest that our data for some 70 democratic countries for the period 1970–2007 cannot be pooled, we use the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator to test whether Political Budget

PHYSICAL EDUCATION - PHYSICAL CULTURE. TWO MODELS, TWO DIDACTIC

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Manuel Vizuete Carrizosa

2014-10-01

Full Text Available Physical Education is currently facing a number of problems that are rooted in the identity crisis prompted by the spread of the professional group, the confrontation of ideas from the scientific community and the competing interests of different political and social areas, compared to which physical education has failed, or unable, to react in time. The political and ideological confrontation that characterized the twentieth century gave us two forms, each with a consistent ideological position, in which the body as a subject of education was understood from two different positions: one set from the left and communism and another, from Western democratic societies.The survival of these conflicting positions and their interests and different views on education, in a lengthy space of time, as a consequence threw two teaching approaches and two different educational models, in which the objectives and content of education differ , and with them the forms and methods of teaching. The need to define the cultural and educational approach, in every time and place, is now a pressing need and challenge the processes of teacher training, as responsible for shaping an advanced physical education, adjusted to the time and place, the interests and needs of citizens and the democratic values of modern society.

About Politeness, Face, and Feedback: Exploring Resident and Faculty Perceptions of How Institutional Feedback Culture Influences Feedback Practices.

Science.gov (United States)

Ramani, Subha; Könings, Karen D; Mann, Karen V; Pisarski, Emily E; van der Vleuten, Cees P M

2018-03-06

To explore resident and faculty perspectives on what constitutes feedback culture, their perceptions of how institutional feedback culture (including politeness concepts) might influence the quality and impact of feedback, feedback seeking, receptivity, and readiness to engage in bidirectional feedback. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, five focus group discussions with internal medicine residents, three focus group discussions with general medicine faculty, and eight individual interviews with subspecialist faculty were conducted at Brigham and Women's Hospital between April and December 2016. Discussions and interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim; concurrent data collection and analysis were performed using the constant comparative approach. Analysis was considered through the lens of politeness theory and organizational culture. Twenty-nine residents and twenty-two general medicine faculty participated in focus group discussions, and eight subspecialty faculty participated in interviews. The institutional feedback culture was described by participants as: (1) a culture of politeness, in which language potentially damaging to residents' self-esteem was discouraged, and (2) a culture of excellence, in which the institution's outstanding reputation and pedigree of trainees inhibited constructive feedback. Three key themes situated within this broader cultural context were discovered: normalizing constructive feedback to promote a culture of growth, overcoming the mental block to feedback seeking, and hierarchical culture impeding bidirectional feedback. An institutional feedback culture of excellence and politeness may impede honest, meaningful feedback and may impact feedback seeking, receptivity, and bidirectional feedback exchanges. It is essential to understand the institutional feedback culture before it can be successfully changed.

ISSUES OF LEGITIMIZING POLITICAL POWER IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: MAX WEBER AND KARL JASPERS

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Nicolae IUGA

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The issue of legitimizing political power has specific dimensions determined by the historical context. In the period following the First World War, democratic regimes dramatically collapsed due to ample protest movements against the political establishment from different countries, but also as a result of a serious political legitimation crisis, thus making way for the rise of totalitarian regimes of Fascism and Nazism. That time debates on the problem of legitimization political power are symptomatic. Due to the general perception regarding corruption in politics and to the political incapacity to deal with social problems, we can witness a decrease of trust in contemporary democratic regimes.In order to exemplify, in a brief expositive manner, my paper will present the topic of political legitimation approached by Max Weber and Karl Jaspers, in a selection of relevant texts issued by both authors during 1919-1931. The aim of this paper is to highlight the actuality, the validity of Weber’s and Jasper’s statements and also their capacity to give pertinent responses to questions such as: What role do the common values play in the legitimating of power in a democratic society? Are there any kinds of limits regarding the electoral legitimation? How can we make the difference between a legitimate appeal and an illegitimate one, between civism and terrorism?

Democratic Public Discourse in the Coming Autarchic Communities

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gheorghe-Ilie Farte

2010-12-01

Full Text Available The main purpose of this article is to tackle the problem of living together – as dignified human beings – in a certain territory in the field of social philosophy, on the theoretical grounding ensured by some remarkable exponents of the Austrian School − and by means of the praxeologic method. Because political tools diminish the human nature not only of those who use them, but also of those who undergo their effects, people can live a life worthy of a human being only as members of some autarchic or self-governing communities. As a spontaneous order, every autarchic community is inherently democratic, inasmuch as it makes possible free involvement, peaceful coordination, free expression and the free reproduction of ideas. The members of autarchic communities are moral individuals who avoid aggression, practice self-control, seek a dynamical efficiency and establish (together with their fellow human beings a democratic public discourse.

When politics froze fashion: the effect of the Cultural Revolution on naming in Beijing.

Science.gov (United States)

Obukhova, Elena; Zuckerman, Ezra W; Zhang, Jiayin

2014-09-01

The authors examine the popularity of boys' given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in the sociology of culture emphasizes the importance of endogenous processes in explaining fashion, their analysis demonstrates two ways in which politics shaped cultural expression during the Cultural Revolution: by promoting forms of expression reflecting prevailing political ideology and by limiting individuals' willingness to act differently. As argued by Lieberson and developed further in this article, the second condition is important because endogenous fashion cycles require a critical mass of individuals who seek to differentiate themselves from common practice. Exogenous factors can influence the operation of the endogenous factors. The authors discuss the implications of their study for understanding the nature of conformity under authoritarian regimes and social conditions supporting individual expression.

Nuclear Information Democratization

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Savić, Dobrica

2013-01-01

Nuclear information (Nl) interests people for many reasons, with energy supply, safety, and security being at the top of the list. Democratizing nuclear information has its roots in the growth of a knowledge-based economy, the knowledge worker as a user of nuclear information, developments in information and communication technologies (ICT), and the impact of internet growth. Results of democratization are apparent in the process of information creation, in how nuclear information is distributed and accessed, and in the conditions for using the information found. The International Nuclear Information System (INIS) both reflects and contributes to these trends. Nuclear information falls under the overall umbrella of scientific and technical information (STI). It is highly specialized, but it follows general principles and trends of STI. The world of STI has its own culture and its own long-established rules of use and existence. These have brought us many inventions and improvements, introduced important technological changes, and made our lives and work much easier and more pleasurable. However, the world is constantly changing, and the traditional closed STI environment, including the world of nuclear information, is not keeping up with today’s changes. (author)

Democratic parenting: paradoxical messages in democratic parent education theories

Science.gov (United States)

Oryan, Shlomit; Gastil, John

2013-06-01

Some prominent parent education theories in the United States and other Western countries base their educational viewpoint explicitly on democratic values, such as mutual respect, equality and personal freedom. These democratic parenting theories advocate sharing power with children and including them in family decision making. This study presents a textual analysis of two such theories, the Adlerian model of parent education and the Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) model, as they are embodied in two original bestselling textbooks. Through content and argumentation analysis of these influential texts, this study examines the paradoxes inherent in these two theories when they articulate how to implement fully democratic principles within the parent-child relationship. We discover that in spite of their democratic rationale, both books offer communication practices that guide the child to modify misbehaviour, enforce parental power, and manipulate the child to make decisions that follow parental judgment, and thus do not endorse the use of a truly democratic parenting style. We suggest, as an alternative to the democratic parenting style, that parents be introduced to a guardianship management style, in which they do not share authority with children, but seek opportunities for enabling children to make more autonomous decisions and participate in more family decision making.

Pushing at the boundaries of the body: Cultural politics and cross-gender dance in East Java

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Christina Sunardi

2009-12-01

Full Text Available Cross-gender dance in East Java has captivated me as a strategy that performers use to negotiate multiple ideas about manhood and womanhood as well as tensions between official ideologies and social realities, expectations about performers’ onstage personas and offstage lives, and competing aesthetic sensibilities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regency of Malang and analysis of performers’ verbal discourse, I address issues of the body, perception, agency, and senses of self, foregrounding performers’ insights into their practices’ meanings, the cultural impact they have as artists, and reasons behind multiple perceptions of gender. To examine relationships between larger cultural forces and performers’ views, I use generation as an analytical framework. I consider performers in three generations – the 1940s-1960s, the 1970s-1990s, and the 1990s to the present. That these generations correlate closely to three political periods in Indonesian history – Old Order (1945-1965/6, New Order (1966-1998, and Reformation Era (1998-present – has led me to make three related arguments. First, the political and cultural climate has affected the discourse through which musicians and dancers expressed their perceptions about the performance of gender. Second, performers have rearticulated larger cultural and political discourses in their own ways, thereby asserting their own senses of gender. Third, performers have affected the political and cultural climate by pushing at the boundaries of maleness and femaleness onstage and in their daily lives, making on- and offstage spaces fluid and complementary sites of cultural and ideological production.

Southeast Asia’s Democratic Developmental States and Economic Growth

OpenAIRE

Michael T. Rock

2015-01-01

How has democracy impacted growth in Southeast Asia? This question can be answered by demonstrating how political elites in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand crafted quite unique democratic developmental states that enabled them to provide the public goods and public policies to maintain high growth. Because of this, growth under democracy has been as high as it was during the heyday of these polities’ developmental autocracies. Moreover, as there was no single dominant pathway to the construc...

Democracy and social justice: Implications for school leadership in ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Jwan

Inclusion of democratic school leadership principles in teacher training programmes and an inculcation of .... appreciate the social, cultural and political role of schooling as follows: ...... democratic organizational landscape. Educational.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICAL INSTABILITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: THE CASE OF TURKEY (1987-2006

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SELİM ŞANLISOY

2013-06-01

Full Text Available Economy and policy are always in mutual interaction. Especially the fact that sharp judgement between economical variables and democratization cannot be put forward shows that the relationship between political instability and economical variables should be analysed. In recent studies political stability or instability variables including more comprehensive variables instead of democratization variables have been used. The main aim of this study is to analyse the effects of political instability often experienced in Turkey’s conditions on economic growth. Here in terms of the analysis of variables (data time series a model with single equation was established and within the framework of this model some analyses were carried out with the help of main and control variables. To the findings, in accordance with the literature, it is verified that there is a reverse relationship between political instability and economic growth in Turkey and in the light of the findings, some policy suggestions are also made.

Ciudad, cultura democrática y educación. / City, democratic culture and education.

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María Isabel Pavez Reyes

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Una conferencia de la autora, en el marco del movimiento por una educación pública de calidad, equitativa e inclusiva que emergió en Chile en el segundo semestre de 2011, donde se intenta relacionar la esencia de la ciudad occidental a la hora actual, con la necesidad de una mayor cultura democrática y de espacios públicos para el reconocimiento del otro como portador de una respuesta particular a interrogantes comunes. / A lecture by the author as part of the movement for a better public education, that emerged in Chile in the second half of 2011, which attempts to relate the essence of the western city to the current time, the need greater democratic culture and public spaces for the recognition of others as a carrier of a particular response to common questions.

On the Political Sociology of the Imperial Greek City

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Arjan Zuiderhoek

2010-11-01

Full Text Available Elements of oligarchy, democracy, and hierarchy coexisted in the polis of Roman times, and the survival of the democratic element may reflect the prospering of small businessmen with their own political interests.

Political Anthropology and Anthropology of Politics: An Overview

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Suresh Dhakal

2012-06-01

Full Text Available In this short review, I have tried to sketch an overview of historical development of political anthropology and its recent trends. I was enthused to prepare this review article as there does not exist any of such simplified introduction of one of the prominent sub-fields in cultural anthropology for the Nepalis readers, in particular. I believe this particular sub-field has to offer much to understand and explain the recent trends and current turmoil of the political transition in the country. Political anthropologists than any other could better explain how the politics is socially and culturally embedded and intertwined, therefore, separation of the two – politics from social and cultural processes – is not only impossible but methodologically wrong, too. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/dsaj.v5i0.6365 Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 5, 2011: 217-34

The Problems of Tourist Sustainability in Cultural Cities: Socio-Political Perceptions and Interests Management

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Antonio Alvarez-Sousa

2018-02-01

Full Text Available The aim of this article is to analyse the social and political capacity of cities affected by cultural tourism. An investigation is carried out into the state of the situation in saturated destinations, the problems this poses to tourist sustainability and the positions of the various different interest groups. In Europe, many cultural cities-cum-tourist hotspots have reached such high levels of socio-political saturation that the resident population’s capacity for carrying tourism has become overstretched. This has led to a state of irritation among the local population. Social movements now include this on their agenda but the various different interest groups (residents, political groups, entrepreneurs, management bodies all react differently. We present data relating to the case of Barcelona, with analyses of residents’ and tourists’ opinions, the actions of social mobilization carried out by pressure groups, media repercussion and the reactions of the business sector and political groups. We examine data collected from surveys and opinions carried in the media. The sustainability and management of interests indicate changes in both the number and the type of tourists, the occupation of public spaces, the distribution of profit among entrepreneurs, residents and the political and economic model of society in the future.

The Genesis of Secular Politics in Medieval Philosophy: The King of Averroes and the Emperor of Dante

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Sabeen Ahmed

2016-12-01

Full Text Available In contemporary political discourse, the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric often undergirds philosophical analyses of "democracy" both at home and abroad. This is nowhere better articulated than in Jacques Derrida's Rogues, in which he describes Islam as the only religious or theocratic culture that would "inspire and declare any resistance to democracy" (Derrida 2005, 29. Curiously, Derrida attributes the failings of democracy in Islam to the lack of reference to Aristotle's Politics in the writings of the medieval Muslim philosophers. This paper aims to analyze this gross misconception of Islamic philosophy and illuminate the thoroughgoing influence the Muslim philosophers had on their Christian successors, those who are so often credited as foundations of Western political philosophy. In so doing, I compare the ideal states presented by Averroes and Dante – in which Aristotelian influence is intimately interlaced – and offer an analysis thereof as heralds of what we might call the secularization of the political, inspiring those democratic values that Derrida believes to be absent in the rich philosophy of the Middle Ages.

Democratic School Leadership Reforms in Kenya: Cultural and Historical Challenges

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Jwan, Julius; Anderson, Lesley; Bennett, Nigel

2010-01-01

In this article we discuss students', teachers' and school principals' perceptions of democratic school leadership reforms in Kenya. The article is based on a study that was conducted in two phases. In phase one (conducted between September and December 2007), interviews were undertaken with 12 school principals in which understandings of…

Civil Society, Democratic Space, and Social Work

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Neelmani Jaysawal

2013-10-01

Full Text Available Civil Society envisages the growth of civilization in a way that the society is in “civilized form.” It has been prominent in Social science since time immemorial. Till 18th century, it was synonymous with the state or political society. It was more or less direct translation of Cicero’s Societas’ Civilis and Aristotle’s Koinonia politike. According to Karl Marx, “Civil Society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of development of productive forces.” Civil Society is an arena where modern man legitimately gratifies his self-interest and develops his individuality, but also learns the value of group action, social solidarity which educates him for citizenship and equips him to participate in the political sphere of the state. It provides “networks of civic engagement” within which reciprocity is learned and enforced, trust is generated. An active and diverse civil society plays a valuable role in advancement of democracy. It seeks to ensure that citizen’s interests are taken seriously. The social work intervention may not be democratically envisaged until it is promulgated by civic engagement through Civil Society. Methodology: This is a descriptive study which consists of secondary source of data collection based on reports, books, periodic journals, web-based articles. There have been utilized three case studies for reaching the findings of study. This article will highlight on role of civil society in providing democratic space and assisting social workers to ensure inclusive growth through conglomeration of state and individuals.

Political Campaigns Get Personal with Students

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Hermes, J. J.

2007-01-01

On Election Day in 2006, some students at the University of Texas at Austin were prodded by startlingly personal calls from Democratic Party supporters. As political campaigns look to corral young voters, those calls could be a harbinger of things to come in 2008: campaigns going after students through contact information that public colleges are…

Intervention in Multi-cultural Organizations -Prevention of Accidents as political change processes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dyhrberg, Mette Bang; Kamp, Annette; Koch, Christian

1999-01-01

mainstream safety culture approaches is over rationalististic compared with day to day life of organisations. A simplistic model of mans behaviour, and too abbreviated understanding of the total set of goals and means in action in organisation and rather simple change management models flaws the safety...... of an organisation as a Multi-cultural Organisation. Second on change processes as political processes where the needed change have to be negotiated and reshaped....

Members of Parliament on Facebook: Towards an Understanding of the Pros and Cons of Online Political Conversations

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sørensen, Mads P.

2016-01-01

at political party meetings and at public meetings and hearings. However, the rise of new social media like Facebook provides new, interesting platforms for these conversations—and many opinion makers and scholars have high expectations for their democratic potential. This chapter examines what happens when......Key to the idea of a democratic public sphere has always been the ongoing conversations among citizens and between citizens and politicians (Koch, Mansbridge, Habermas, etc.). The conversations between politicians and citizens in the Danish political system have traditionally taken place...

Between relativism and pluralism: Philosophical and political relativism in Feyerabend's late work.

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Heller, Lisa

2016-06-01

Relativism is one of the most problematic terms associated with philosophical discourse, with Feyerabend considered among the most important twentieth century theorists subscribing to it. This paper provides a detailed overview of relativist positions advanced in Feyerabend's mid-to-late work and investigates the associated epistemic and political applications. Emphasis is placed on how Feyerabend supported certain aspects of relativism, and at what stage he rejected others. It is noted that Feyerabend had already imposed limitations on relativism in Farewell to Reason, in which he entertained the possibility of epistemic definition within stable contexts, and advanced the notion that opportunities and equality associated with political and cultural units could only be valid within a democratic system. In Conquest of Abundance, political relativism is largely discarded, while epistemological relativism is increasingly treated as an appeal for diversity in all areas. In this re-reading of his work, it becomes clear that Feyerabend was already advocating a moderate form of epistemic and political relativism in the middle of his career, which he subsequently developed in the direction of "ontological pluralism" in his later work. This paper thus shows that Feyerabend's relativism should not be completely rejected, but rather that it continues to offer interesting food for thought. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Sortition, rotation and mandate:: conditions for political equality and deliberative reasoning

OpenAIRE

Owen, David; Smith, Graham

2018-01-01

The proposal to create a chamber selected by sortition would extend this democratic procedure into the legislative branch of government. However, there are good reasons to believe that, as currently conceived by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, the proposal will fail to realize sufficiently two fundamental democratic goods, namely political equality and deliberative reasoning. Through analysis of its historic and contemporary application, we argue that sortition needs to be combined with oth...

The significance of communication means of the internet in contemporary politics

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Арам Грачиаевич Восканян

2013-12-01

Full Text Available In the given article on the basis of comparative analysis is studied the dual nature of the widespread approaches to influence of media sphere upon political processes by the example of actual events in western countries and Arab world. The authors investigate mobilization, integration, democratization and intervention capabilities of the modern media sphere. The practices of application of the new media means by the leading countries as specific tools of soft power strategies at national and international levels have been thoroughly analyzed in the article. The authors come to conclusion that in the modern world the functional apparatus of the Internet despite it architectural openness and infinite socio-political potential is limited by the activities of media elites that hinder true civil participation. Untimely proclaimed democratic character of media sphere is weaken by commercialization and consumerism of media space. The category of “feedback” as an important mobilization tool has situational character and has the short-term impact upon political views and perceptions.

The Relationship between Islam and Democracy in Turkey: Employing Political Culture as an Indicator

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Toros, Emre

2010-01-01

During the last decade the agenda of local and global politics is heavily marked by the encounter of two powerful currents, namely democracy and political Islam. On the one hand Islam as a religion itself is facing a cultural dialectic between a modern and an authentic form, producing a synthesis which is only to be criticized again by a new…

Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives in Science Education

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

conditions and contexts in science education. The different chapters review debates and research in teacher education, school teaching and learning including when external stakeholders are involved. Even though the chapters are contextualized in Nordic settings there will be similarities and parallels...... that will be informative to the international science education research community.......This book presents a collection of critical thinking that concern cultural, social and political issues for science education in the Nordic countries. The chapter authors describe specific scenarios to challenge persisting views, interrogate frameworks and trouble contemporary approaches...

Pluralismo cultural e cidadania democrática Cultural pluralism and democratic citizenship

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Ferran Requejo

1999-08-01

Full Text Available Com base no exame da questão do "multiculturalismo" da perspectiva do pluralismo em sociedades democráticas, discute-se, num registro normativo, a tensão intrínseca à combinação desses termos, para finalmente enfrentar a dimensão institucional do problema.On the basis of an examination of the question of "multiculturalism" from the perspective of pluralism in democratic societies the tension intrinsic to the combination of these terms is discussed in its normative dimension. Finally, the institutional dimension of the problem is addressed.

On Enthusiasm in Politics: 12 Hypotheses

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Valerio Romitelli

2013-12-01

Full Text Available The author suggests twelve hypothesis to revive enthusiasm as a political category and, finally, to restate the possibility of political action. The enthusiasm of the masses was in this perspective the essential political element of ''The Glorious Thirties'' following the Second War World, characterized by this tension to realize a greater social justice. It would have been also at the base of the ''Long Sixty- eight'' and of the processes of decolonization. Enthusiasm is thus thought in opposition both to the monopolistic pretension of political innovation forwarded by communist parties in the past and to the exclusive competence on political-economical decisions claimed today by democratic élite. Rethinking the enthusiasm that animated these historic sequences of the Twentieth century should offer the possibility to respond to «the sad passions» that dominate the era of neoliberal administration of global democracy.

The Double Conditioning of Political Participation: Grassroots Politics on Facebook. Conjunctions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Schou, Jannick; Farkas, Johan; Hjelholt, Morten

2015-01-01

Th e emergence of social network sites as a part of everyday life has given rise to a number of debates on the demo-cratic potential aff orded by these technologies. Th is paper addresses political participation facilitated through Facebook from a practice-oriented perspective and presents a case...... of Facebook to facilitate political participation. Th e study fi nds that user participation on the Facebook page is ‘ double conditioned’ by the material structure of the social network site on the one hand and by the discourses articulated by the organisation and users on the other. Finally, the paper...... discusses the fi ndings and raises a number of problems and obstacles facing participatory grassroots organisations, such as Fight For Th e Future, when using Facebook....

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM IN THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA: EVOLUTIONS, VULNERABILITIES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR MODERNIZATION

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MÎNDRU VALERIU

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The article analyzed the evolution of the political system in Moldova. The authors note three stages of the formation and consolidation of the political system in the country which have directly infl uenced the political domain and democratization of the society. The analysis is based on the legislative experience of other countries and the opinions of experts.

A Translocal Perspective: Mustang Images in the Cultural, Economic and Political Landscape.

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Dalke, Karen

2010-12-14

Translocal spaces are created out of the process of globalization whereby interventions such as electronic media and migration radically change social relations and breakdown the isomorphism of space, place, and culture [1]. This approach is useful in examining the controversy surrounding the mustang. This paper explores how different social constructions influence the management of mustangs as they move between the local and national level. At each cultural level, political, economic, and environmental issues converge encouraging the emphasis of some cultural constructions over others. These socially constructed images give insight into what the mustang means to a post-industrial culture and it may simultaneously contribute to the animal's eventual demise.

Public attitudes toward biofuels. Effects of knowledge, political partisanship, and media use.

Science.gov (United States)

Cacciatore, Michael A; Binder, Andrew R; Scheufele, Dietram A; Shaw, Bret R

2012-01-01

Despite large-scale investments and government mandates to expand biofuels development and infrastructure in the United States, little is known about how the public conceives of this alternative fuel technology. This study examines public opinion of biofuels by focusing on citizen knowledge and the motivated processing of media information. Specifically, we explore the direct effects of biofuels knowledge and the moderating effect of partisanship on the relationship between media use and benefit vs. risk perceptions in the following four domains: environmental impacts, economic consequences, ethical/social implications, and political ramifications. Our results suggest that more knowledgeable respondents see fewer benefits of biofuels relative to risks, and that Democrats and Republicans are affected differently by media use when forming opinions about biofuels. Among Democrats, greater attention to political media content leads to a more favorable outlook toward the technology across several domains of interest, while among Republicans, an increase in attention to political content has the opposite effect. Possible reasons for these results, as well as implications of the findings at the intersection of politics and the life sciences, are discussed.

On New Beginnings and Democratic Legitimacy

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Signe Larsen

2013-06-01

Full Text Available This paper sets out to discuss the enigma of revolutionary new political beginnings of constitutional orders. The problem is that when a political community is constituted, the act of constituting per definition is unconstitutional or extra-legal. For this reason the question of new beginnings is a political and not a legal question. The question of what the authority of the constituent act is presents an important question since the constitution is the fundamental law from which the legitimacy or authority of all other laws is derived. The problem for this paper is whether and in what way it is possible to think new beginnings that are not merely institutionalizations of factual relations of domination or arbitrary acts of violence. This problem is discussed on basis of two revolutionary theories in the tradition of constituent power—Emmanuel Sieyès and Hannah Arendt—that both understand power to emanate from below and not from above whereby they both, though in different way, present arguments against the understanding that new beginnings merely are institutionalizations of relations of domination and arbitrary acts of violence. The question of whether and to what extent they are successful and whether their theories are democratic will finally be discussed.

The Digital Editions of Revista Estudos Feministas (and the Democratization of the Access to the Scientific and Scademic Production

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Sônia Weidner Maluf

2008-01-01

Full Text Available In this article we describe the electronic editions of Revista Estudos Feministas and our contribution towards a politics of democratization of the access to scientific and academic production. After a brief description of the three spaces of electronic editions of REF (the Electronic Library Scielo, the Scielo Social Science Portal and the Feminist Portal, we discuss the contribution of gender and feminist studies for the democratization of the access to the scientific and academic production.

Patronage Politics and Clientelism in Housing Welfare: The Case of Gawad Kalinga (GK Villages in Parañaque City, The Philippines

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Prince Aian G. Villanueva

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Patronage politics has become a defining charac-teristic of the Philippine political landscape. Clientelism, a form of patronage, is often studied as disadvantageous in governance and democratic consolidation. While the patron-client framework remains the most influential among schools of thought that explain Philippine politics, transforma-tions in a clientelist exchange are evident given changes in political, cultural and economic settings. Using this frame of new clientelism, we look at and revisit the structure of patronage in the provision of housing welfare in the Philippines, focusing now on the roles of three important actors— the nongov-ernmental organization, the state through the local government and the recipients or beneficiaries— in an urban setting, thus deviating from the traditional conception of patronage and clientelist politics. This relationship of clientelist exchange is presented in our Accomplice-Principal-Accessory (APA model ofclientelism, with the local government unit of Parañaque City as accomplice, the Gawad Kalinga (GK as the principal agent, and the recipients or beneficiaries as accessories in the provision of hous-ing welfare.

Psychological aspects of political tolerance among adolescents.

Science.gov (United States)

Sotelo, M J; Sangrador, J L

1997-12-01

This study concerns 273 Spanish adolescents, aged between 14 and 17, 125 boys and 148 girls. The measured variables were political tolerance, liking for several groups, political experience, cognitive moral reasoning, support for democratic norms, support for violent groups, identification with a group of friends, identification with a religious group, and identification with a soccer team. The objectives of this work were (a) to establish groups of adolescents based on the relationship between their willingness to extend rights to several groups and their liking of these groups, (b) to know the personality characteristics of tolerant and intolerant adolescents, and (c) to set up correlations between age and total tolerance, total liking, and the variables correlated with tolerance. The main findings are that older and younger adolescents belong to different groups, with respect to tolerance, and something similar can be said about boys and girls. Intolerant adolescents perceive themselves as anxious, insecure, solitary, and obstinate. Significant positive correlations between age and political experience, rated support for democratic norms and ratings for identification with a group of friends were found. On the contrary, there were significant negative correlations between age and rated support for violent groups, identification with a religious group, and identification with a soccer team.

Political ideologies as shapers of future tourism development

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Craig Webster

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to identify the link between political ideology and the management of tourism in countries. The authors stipulate that the predominant political ideology in the country influences the nature and logic of state interventions in the tourism industry. Design/methodology/approach – The paper elaborates several case studies from various countries – Bulgaria, Cyprus, Scandinavia, Russia, USA, China, Japan, Indonesia, and North Korea. Findings – Countries with predominant (neoliberal ideology do not typically interfere in tourism regulation, while nationalism leads governments to stimulate inbound and domestic tourism. Communist ideological approaches tend to be burdensome, inhibiting growth while stressing the promotion of the socialist achievements of a country. Countries that are traditionally thought of as social democratic have been evolving in recent years to regulate tourism in ways that are more liberal in nature than social democratic. Practical implications – Political ideologies shape the acceptability of government support for private tourist companies, legislation in field of tourism, limitation/stimulation of inbound/outbound tourist flows. For the future the authors expect greater politicisation of tourism, active tourism “wars” between countries, greater control of governments on populations, thriving nationalism, “aggressive” environmentalism. Originality/value – This is one of the first papers to discuss the impact of the political ideology on the management of tourism at the national level.

Comparison of Women's Political Participation in Korea and China

OpenAIRE

Minjeoung Kim

2016-01-01

This paper deals with the comparison of women's political participation in Korea and China. Korean women are participated more in higher education. As the economic development and the women's social participation can enhance the possibility of women's political participation in advanced democratic countries, in Asian countries such as Korea and China in which Confucianism prohibited women to participate in public life and the process of nation building is different from western countries, the...

Deaf Culture and the Cochlear Implant Debate: Cyborg Politics and the Identity of People with Disabilities.

Science.gov (United States)

Cherney, James L.

1999-01-01

Examines the potential benefits and limitations of cyborg politics. Explores depictions of cyborgs in science fiction stories and examines the deaf culture's arguments in the cochlear-implant debate. Investigates the current viability of cyborg politics as a mode of advocacy for people with disabilities. (SC)

Republican reforming policy and democratic modernization | El reformismo republicano y la modernización democrática

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Glicerio Sánchez Recio

2003-12-01

Full Text Available This study focuses on the survival of Republican values in our present-day democratic system, values which have been analysed from a dual perspective: on the one hand, the current interest in the principles and values fostered by centre-left governments and organizations during the Second Republic, and on the other, the presence of these principles and values in our present-day democratic system. Consensus, social reform, political pluralism, devolution, and educational and cultural advancement, besides being democratic values and principles, are currently pointing towards a specific way of understanding politics and public affairs, understood as proximity and service to, and respect for all citizens. Moreover, there are similarities between the two regimes; in both cases, the immediate political background was marked by a dictatorship, both expressly declared an intention to establish themselves as democracies and subsequently underwent a transitional process marked by consensus, and both had similar aims. However, there are also significant differences between the two, not only in terms of the system of government, but also the attribution of State powers, the declaration of rights and the way these were put into practice, and the limits of consensus. While we cannot talk of continuity between the two regimes, the Second Republic may be seen as a short-lived precedent to the current democratic system, and one which succumbed to the strength of anti-democratic organizations and interests. | Este trabajo trata de la pervivencia de los valores republicanos en el régimen democrático actual, que se han analizado desde una doble perspectiva: el interés que despiertan los principios y valores activados por los gobiernos y organizaciones del centro izquierda durante la II República, y la presencia de esos mismos principios y valores en el ordenamiento democrático actual. Consenso, reformismo social, pluralismo político, descentralización del

MAPPING CHILDREN’S POLITICS: SPATIAL STORIES, DIALOGIC RELATIONS AND POLITICAL FORMATION

Science.gov (United States)

Elwood, Sarah; Mitchell, Katharyne

2015-01-01

This article confronts a persistent challenge in research on children’s geographies and politics: the difficulty of recognizing forms of political agency and practice that by definition fall outside of existing political theory. Children are effectively “always already” positioned outside most of the structures and ideals of modernist democratic theory, such as the public sphere and abstracted notions of communicative action or “rational” speech. Recent emphases on embodied tactics of everyday life have offered important ways to recognize children’s political agency and practice. However, we argue here that a focus on spatial practices and critical knowledge alone cannot capture the full range of children’s politics, and show how representational and dialogic practices remain a critical element of their politics in everyday life. Drawing on de Certeau’s notion of spatial stories, and Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic relations, we argue that children’s representations and dialogues comprise a significant space of their political agency and formation, in which they can make and negotiate social meanings, subjectivities, and relationships. We develop these arguments with evidence from an after-school activity programme we conducted with 10–13 year olds in Seattle, Washington, in which participants explored, mapped, wrote and spoke about the spaces and experiences of their everyday lives. Within these practices, children negotiate autonomy and self-determination, and forward ideas, representations, and expressions of agreement or disagreement that are critical to their formation as political actors. PMID:25642017