Search results

In recent years, we have witnessed a drastic wave of totalitarian regimes, as noted by Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) in the book entitled How Democracies Die. The authors provide historical examples of democratic rupture in the last one hundred years: from Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s to the current populist wave of right-wing extremism in Europe, preceded by the military dictatorships of Latin America in the1970s. The dizzying growth of Brazil's new right wing, particularly the democratic far right, which is spearheaded by current president Jair Bolsonaro as the "honest politician" who stands in opposition to the corrupt political class. Regarding the present context of abuse of power, denial, and fake news, I decided to reflect upon the issue of ethics, more specifically of ethical critique in political discourse.

AbstractConfidence in the scientific community became politically polarized in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century, with conservatives displaying lower confidence in scientists than liberals. Using data from the General Social Survey from 1984 to 2016, I show that moral and economic conservatives played distinct but complementary roles in producing this divide. I find that moral conservatives exhibited low confidence in scientists before any substantial division existed between self-identified political conservatives and liberals on this issue. However, as moral conservatism increasingly consolidated under the label of political conservatism, a negative association between political conservatism and confidence in the scientific community emerged. Economic conservatives, by contrast, previously held disproportionately high confidence in scientists, but this positive relationship wanes in the beginning of the twenty-first century. These findings suggest that interpreting political polarization requires attention to the multiple dimensions along which political attitudes are organized and ideological coalitions are formed.

"The growing exploration of political life from an aesthetic perspective has become so prominent that we can now speak of an "aesthetic turn" in political theory. But what does it mean and why an aesthetic turn? This collection of essays aims to answer such questions from a variety of perspectives, to think in a new way about the possibilities and weaknesses of democratic politics. The book first outlines the theoretical motivations and historical conditions that led to the turn to aesthetics. Essays then call attention to the presence of aesthetic themes and arguments in political theory as well as to parallels between theories of aesthetics and politics, revealing how much political theory can gain from making use of aesthetic modes of thought. They demonstrate that much of what is essential to democratic politics can in fact only be disclosed through aesthetic theorizing. A significant contribution to the contemporary debate in political theory, The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought will appeal to all students interested in the interdisciplinary crossroads of aesthetic and politics"--

The exceptional relevance of the state in party finance in contemporary European democracies is not only of particular importance for the way in which parties organize, but also has a bearing on the normative connotations associated with the place of political parties in modern democracy. The contention of this article is that the increasingly prominent role of the state in the funding of parties should be understood in the context of, and has been legitimized by, an ideational transformation by which parties have gradually come to be seen as necessary and desirable institutions for democracy. Moreover, the direct involvement of the state in internal party affairs has contributed to a transformation of parties from the traditionally voluntary private associations towards parties as public utilities. A comparison of the practice of public funding and public control on party finance in the older liberal democracies with more recent cases of democratization shows that the newer European democracies in particular provide unequivocal testimony of such a new conception of parties and democracy.

A question asked by some of the great scholars of religion, including Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, & Sigmund Freud, is "What is the nature of religion?" This study presents two linked arguments; in fact, one is generated from the other. First, it is assumed that in addition to the institutionalized conventional type of religion, there exists another type of religiosity in contemporary Western democracies -- alternative religiosity. The second argument concerns the question of relationships between religious meaning systems & political belief systems. One of the most long-standing findings in the study of politics is that the more religious people become, the stronger their objections to the democratic way of thinking. Religiosity in many societies (for example, Israel & the US) delegates believers to the spheres of the political Right. Although we have had much research on conventional religions & political attitudes, this is not the case for alternative religions. It would be reasonable to assume that those belief systems that developed as alternatives to the formal religions would be characterized differently; however, their implications for political attitudes are similar. Adapted from the source document.

French anthropologists gave Michel Foucault's works a very different, rather cool reception, from that of their North American counterparts, who turned Foucault into an essential reference. This difference deserves to be analysed because it is symptomatic of the differences in perspective between US and French anthropology. At a deeper level, it posits the question of the relations between philosophy and anthropology. In the case of US anthropology, Foucault's reflection on the relationships between power and knowledge influenced the critical thinking that developed at the end of the twentieth century. This article shows what impact Foucault's writings on power have had on recent developments in political anthropology: today, his concepts of governmentality and bio-politics are having a remarkable impact and we find them applied in many empirical studies. Adapted from the source document.

BY FAILING TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF THE POLITICAL CONTEXT, ALL THREE MAJOR COMPETING APPROACHES TO DECISION-MAKING, ANALYTICAL, COGNITIVE, AND MOTIVATED, EXHIBIT SERIOUS DEFICIENCES IN EXPLAINING DECISIONMAKING BEHAVIOR IN THE POLITICAL ARENA. IN PARTICULAR, FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND THE DECISION-MAKER'S PERCEPTION OF THE CONSTRAINTS OF THE POLITICAL CONTEXT MAY RESULT IN LABELLING AS ERROR OR DISTORTION BEHAVIOR WHICH IS QUITE REASONABLE WHEN VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THAT CONTEXT. IN ORDER TO REMEDY THESE DEFICIENCIES, PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES ABOUT DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES MUST BE COMBINED WITH THE INSIGHTS OF POLITICAL SCIENTISTS INTO THE NATURE OF THE POLITICAL PROCESS TO DEVELOP A SPECIFICALLY POLITICAL THEORY OF DECISION-MAKING. SUCH A GENUINELY INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION BETWEEN POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY COULD RESULT IN A THEORY OF POLITICAL DECISIONMAKING WHICH TRULY BELONGS IN THE REALM OF POLITICAL COGNITION.

First edition, July, 1945. ; For further reading: p. 32. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Arguing that a complete understanding of the functioning of modern liberal democracies entails analysis of the challenges facing political parties, key findings from empirical political science are reviewed & directions for future theory & research are outlined. Focus is on recent changes within & between Western European polities -- particularly those related to European integration -- & the challenges these pose for political party functioning as purposive organizations, including shifts in political values, national political cultures, socioeconomic transformations, the structures of political communication, & political issues & policy agendas. The mobilization & linkage functions of political parties in relation to the wider society are explored, along with parties' internal structure, organization, & behavior. Figures. K. Hyatt Stewart

The role of the state in providing food subsidies to consumers has a long though sometimes ignoble history. In ancient Egypt, wheat prices were maintained by government storage schemes (chapter 13), and the value of cheap, ample food supplies for political stability was evidenced in the "bread and circus" era of the Roman Empire. However, detailed policy calculations connecting subsidies to production and nutritional status confront contemporary government leaders with ever more complex and confusing policy considerations (chapter 2). ; PR ; IFPRI1 ; DGO

Social scientists have long studied international differences in political culture and communication. An influential strand of theory within political science argues that different types of political systems generate different parliamentary cultures: Systems with proportional representation generate cross-party cohesion, whereas majoritarian systems generate division. To contribute to this long-standing discussion, we study parliamentarian retweets across party lines using a database of 2.3 million retweets by 4,018 incumbent parliamentarians across 19 countries during 2018. We find that there is at most a tenuous relationship between democratic systems and cross-party retweeting: Majoritarian systems are not unequivocally more divisive than proportional systems. Moreover, we find important qualitative differences: Countries are not only more or less divisive, but they are cohesive and divisive in different ways. To capture this complexity, we complement our quantitative analysis with Visual Network Analysis to identify four types of network structures: divided, bipolar, fringe party, and cohesive.