Suchergebnisse

This paper discusses the unintended consequences for local communities of major EU-wide policies. It focuses on agriculture-related policies, namely on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with a secondary focus on animal welfare and food safety legislation. A case study of the Greek island of Ikaria is used to explore this theme. More specifically, the case examines the impacts from the implementation of these policies on the livelihoods of traditional goat pastoralists and their relationship with other inhabitants of Ikaria, as well as on the delicate ecosystem of the island. The effects of progressive reforms of the CAP and the introduction of stringent food safety and accompanying animal welfare rules illustrate the ways in which the law and politics of the EU intertwine and translate into unintended consequences such as environmental degradation and the erosion of traditional practices, leading to loss of community cohesion. ; BENELEX Working Paper No 24.-- Forthcoming in: Cardwell, P. and Grangers, M-P. (eds) Research Handbook on the Politics of EU Law. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

This paper aims to present a history of the Portuguese political poster in two key moments of twentieth century Portuguese politics, the moment of the establishment of the 'Estado Novo' (or New State) i.e., Salazar's authoritarian and quasi-fascist dictatorship which ran from 1933- 1974, and the period of the Revolution of April 25 of 1974, which overthrew the previous regime. The two distinct ideologies give rise to two contrasting modes of visual discourse. This is particularly evident in posters made in the two revolutionary moments (1933-1938 and 1974-76). These reveal ruptures in relation to the visual discourses of posters made in the periods before and after these dates. The paper shows how the posters offer a particular kind of lens on the two contrasting revolutionary moments; a way of looking at how the two revolutions attempted to communicate to and connect with the Portuguese people in whose name and one whose behalf—ostensibly in the first case, substantively in the second—the revolutions were undertaken. In terms of the understanding of activism and revolutionary graphics a contribution is made to understanding how revolutions of left and right contrastingly 2 present themselves—and how, through the use of poster, they evoke or extol particular kinds of political subjects and political orders.

This article examines the recent pattern and progress of health care reform in affluent democracies, focusing in particular on Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. Its main contention is that efforts to reform health care in advanced industrial states have been marked by a paradoxical pattern of 'reform without change and change without reform', in which large-scale structural reforms have had surprisingly modest effects yet major ground-level shifts have, nonetheless, frequently occurred as a result of decentralized adjustments to cost control. The main task of the article is to investigate the reasons for and effects of this puzzling pattern by plumbing the largely unexplored theoretical territory between comparative health policy analysis and cross-national research on the welfare state. Along the way, the article develops a simple model of the politics of reform that helps explain cross-national variation in legislative and policy outcomes – particularly outcomes that occur through decentralized processes of internal policy 'conversion' and policy 'drift', rather than through formal legislative reform. It also takes up a number of other intriguing issues raised by recent trends: why, for example, market reforms are clustered in centralized political and medical frameworks; why these reforms have generally enhanced state authority rather than market autonomy; why, despite fragmentation, decentralized political and medical systems shifted towards an expanded government role; and why significant retrenchment of the public-private structure of health benefits occurred in the United States.

Recent literature on "soft authoritarianism" has called into question the extent to which policy, rather than personality and patronage, sets the direction of elite politics in the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). This strand of thinking argues that the state's direction toward "reform" is not as coherent as commonly believed, a relevant model for examining the role of the state-owned print and online press as an arm of Vietnam's post-communist marketization project. It argues that Party leaders, facing a breakdown of consensus across the spectrum of political and business elites, are using the press in an attempt to manage a growing number of voices in the political system, but that reporting on many political and corruption scandals has simply become unmanageable for state leaders. Under this paradigm, policy debates between "reformers" and "conservatives" in Vietnam fall short of explaining press censorship. This semidemocratic concept of the media's role opens up room for a wider understanding of civil society under transitional regimes in Asia. This paper draws on twenty-nine interviews with Vietnamese journalists, editors, media executives, Vietnamese and foreign journalism trainers, and government officials from 2010 to 2011, as well as an analysis of press coverage and internal newsroom documents.

The article argues against the widespread view that OSCE long-term missions should be constrained in their use of public diplomacy. The case rests on arguments that link the emergence of post-international politics to the need for a transformation of diplomatic practices. Missions need to engage in more and better public diplomacy because, in their host countries, subnational actors have the capacity to derail (or advance) the implementation of OSCE standards, even if national governments support (or oppose) mission goals. Diplomats who operate in such an environment cannot confine themselves to mission-to-government communication in their attempts to promote international security through domestic reforms. To illustrate the argument that missions have to reach out to local audiences in order to be effective agents of domestic change, a case study of the mission to Croatia is presented. Shortcomings in the mission's approach are pointed out, and it is argued that recent improvements in the implementation of OSCE standards are related to changes in the mission's diplomatic practices. In the conclusion, the article identifies steps the OSCE can take to enable and encourage missions to pursue more and better public diplomacy.

Today, exclusion resides inside the State and political regimes as a paradox. Exclusion presupposes the formation of the subjectification process. of politics where the subjeet looks to be recognized. This claim for institutional creation of the so called "equality spheres" has led to a new source of exclusions,allowing the establishment of temporarY and spatial positions in contemporary democracies. It allows us to see the transformation of democracy: a radical erosion of the political order due to an increase of monópolizing confliet, such as high social costs for the State when it responds to exclusion. ; En la actualidad, el tema de la exclusión se manifiesta en el interior de los Estados y regímenes políticos democráticos como una de sus principales paradojas. Es decir, la exclusión presupone la formación de un proceso de subjetivación de la política donde aparecerá el deseo del sujeto en busca de su reconocimiento. Este reclamo por la producción institucional de las llamadas "áreas de igualdad" ha ocasionado el nacimiento de nuevas fuentes de constitucionalización de la exclusión, a la vez que ha creado formas simbólicas que permiten fundar posiciones espaciales y temporales que operan como una política de las oposiciones frente al proceso informático de legitimación en las democracias contemporáneas. Esto perrnite poner en evidencia algunas transformaciones recientes de la democracia: la radical erosión del orden político a causa del conflicto creciente por monopolizar su universo interpretativo, así como los altos costos sociales y procedimentales que paga el Estado al momento de otorgar parcialmente una respuesta de continuidad a la exclusión, pues precisamente esta última no puede concluirse en el horizonte de expeetativa, antes bien, en el espacio de experiencia del orden político democrático.