Search results

Pierre Manent is viewed as a French thinker that develops in modern times the liberal tradition of political thinking. One of the most important issues of Manent's thinking that was not enough underlined it is the relationship between religion an politics and how this evolved from the beginning of Christianity until the main consequences of modernity. Manent view on religion and politics is the core of this paper analysis. The main contributions of Manent, such as Naissances de la politique moderne. Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (1977), Histoire intellectuelle du lib.ralisme (1987) La cit. de l'homme (1994), Cours familier de philosophie politique (2001), La raison des nations. R.flections sur la d.mocratie en Europe (2006) are analyzed from this perspective. Our conclusion is that in the way Manent deals with the relationship between politics and religion there are some constants that may be found in all his work. These are: the relationship between the Church and the different forms of political organization in Europe (Civitas, Imperium, monarchy); the fact that Christianity is one of the few current relevant concepts for political, due to the failure of totalitarian ideologies; the idea that secularization in Europe is not irreversible; we live in "an age of separations", and Church-State is one of these separations; we witness the religion transformation process and the .tat la.que cannot survive to .tat-nation; the role of Islam in modern societies and his perpetual finding of a political form; the relationship between Judaism, state and nation; the issue of the Christian identity of Europe.

Public access to accurate and reliable information is vital for democracies and the media play a key role in informing citizens about the political process. While a large body of research shows that media exposure influences electoral behavior, less is known about the factors that shape people's propensity to actively search information about politics in the media. Based on explanatory models of political participation and using public opinion survey data, the results show that material endowments and education along with motivational variables largely explain why some people are more prone to seek political information in the media. The results illustrate the importance of defining media exposure to political messages as a form of cognitive involvement in politics as this analytical strategy provides valuable insights into the socio-economic inequalities that bias public access to information.

Article shows how to change the public opinion of voters according to televised political leaders. Combining the results of monitoring television with opinion polls have shown the strategies they had TV stations in election campaigns and the effectiveness of these strategies.

This study consists in an analysis of the modern Romanian conservatism's evolution. Starting with the semantic definition of the term "conservative", the author sketches the circumstances of its use in the Romanian political language in the middle of the 19thcentury and later in political practice. The author highlights that in the 50's and the 60's decades of the 19th century there was a great interest in a precise definition of the term in the political vocabulary. It was the time when "conservative" together with its antonym "liberal" were two political terms just entering the political language. Also in Romania, the conservatism defined its identity from the ideas of natural progress, organic evolution, order and legality in the spirit of the ideas of E. Burke, already common in the political imagology of the European conservatism. At the beginning of the 20th century Romanian conservatives continued to use the specific vocabulary and ideas of the former century, trying to unveil the consequences of the forced modernisation of the country, so that later, after the First World War, to disappear as a party from the political stage; conservative doctrine persisted in a fragmentary form in the interwar period.

The article explores the way political participation, representation and governance
are conceptualized and rationalized by the Romanian legislation on parties. The
plurality of parties was initially set up as a way to discipline and organize the
political pluralism manifest in society in order to contain it within the boundaries
imposed by the Constitution. This disciplinary vocation of parties was confirmed
and reinforced by the laws enacted in 1996 and 2003 that embedded parties into
a functional vision of democracy where they were explicitly endowed with
the public mission of ensuring the political integration of Romanian citizens.
The detailed rationalization of parties' mission to organize citizens' political
participation and to contain the expression of their political will contrasted
sharply with both the ambiguity of their governmental role within the "eclectic"
institutional design of the Constitution, and with their organizational friability.

In the article the author tackles a contemporary issue that is important for institutional strengthening of the Republic of Moldova. Developing a mechanism for efficient interaction of institutions of state power with political parties, ruling ones and in opposition, with the groups of interests, especially those institutional and associative, represents a strategic objective for the Republic of Moldova. Assessing institutions with "rules of the game", the contemporary political science updates the significance of the Constitution for organisation and good unfolding of the political process, for ensuring stability and at the same time dynamism of the socio-political system. The conclusions of the investigation of complex issues like dynamic political processes, functionality of political institutions in conditions of instability / political crisis, contain an educational, instructive message, important for the political actors of the Moldovan society.

The article shows the way in which the journal Conservatorul Constanţei illustrated the main subject of local political debate in 1909-1912: the issue of the political rights for the citizens of Dobrudja. This debate is significant as it unfolds in the same time as the consolidation of the local branch of the Conservative Party, as well as the participation of its representatives to the parliamentary elections in 1912. These are the first elections in which the citizens of Dobrudja take part, after they were reintegrated within the frontiers of the Romanian state (1878) and after they obtained political rights (1912).

The unification process for the workers' movements was the final step for the communists in their effort to gain total control of the political power. The tactics of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) were labeled "the salami tactics" because the party progressively eliminated all their enemies and used conjectural allies -such as the social democrats (PSD)- in order to reach their aim. This article describes the process whereby the organization of the PCR in alliance with the PSD obtained political power in the period 1945-1948 in the Ialomiţa county. The author focuses his analysis on two types of actions: the violent overtake of the local power (including mayors, police officers, governmental representatives, etc.) and the unification of the PCR and PSD in order to achieve a Single Workers' Party, in which the communists prevailed. As a result of the unification process, according to the official records, almost 7% of the population in this county was a member of the Single Workers' Party in February 1948. The Ialomiţa County is a very interesting, yet paradigmatic case, because in that period the region was a predominantly agricultural, with a small working class (2%), and the communists could not seize power by legal means. The study mainly relies upon local archival documents and upon the contemporary local media reports, which are carefully examined to discern between actual relevant data and their propagandistic content.

By analyzing the parliamentary debates of 1866-1867 on foreigners' (notably Jews) requests for naturalization and property rights, this article tries to identify the parliamentarians' answers to the following questions: On what grounds were foreigners accepted as Romanian citizens? How did the parliamentarians define the foreigner? What was required from a foreigner in order to become a citizen? The overall objective is to identify some major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation, circumscribed around the primordial character of the "union" and of "nationality", with a special focus on the solutions proposed by the liberals. The argument is that the Parliament, by its vote, instead of granting citizenship rights, merely established the conditions according to which one could become a Romanian. In other words, the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to recognize the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a "given", than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. It seems that citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. In engaging the parliamentary debates about naturalization, the article attempts, first, to draw more nuanced conclusions about the lately much-debated character of citizenship in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. And second, such an analysis may provide a better understanding of the nature of political representation during the same period.