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Abstract: East is East and West is West? Comparing Party System Stability in Europe 2008–2019This article compares trends in party system stability in Central/ Eastern Europe (CEE) and Western Europe, to see if recent studies indicating that the two regions have become more similar hold when the results of outcomes of several post-financial-crisis elections are taken into consideration. Further, it enquires into the underlying causes of electoral volatility and whether they differ between the two regions. In all, 82 parliamentary elections in 25 EU countries 2008–2019 are analyzed as regards electoral volatility (Pedersen's Index) and support for new parties ('volatility type A'). The results show that, when the most likely confounding variables are controlled for, a significant difference between the two regions remains, but also that there is a converging trend on both indicators. Moreover, whereas electoral volatility in the West is driven by the level of corruption together with the effective number of parties, unemployment and economic growth as well as the number of effective parties are the main factors explaining the same phenomenon in CEE. There is also evidence that volatility in CEE, unlike in Western Europe, is also driven by a path-dependent logic, where previous volatility scores explain subsequent ones. That finding may have implications for the prospects of future party system stabilization.

Resandefolket har nästan aldrig fått vara med i böcker för sin egen skull och har sällan fått huvudroller. De har plattats till för att fullgöra stereotypens grundläggande uppgift: att spegla huvudpersonerna och deras problem. Det har, enligt stereotypens logik, oftast skett genom att ?tattarna? fick utgöra förskräckande avvikelser från det normala eller något exotiskt och lockande. På så sätt normaliserade de det normala. De skapade trygghet eller kanaliserade längtan.00Redan när den svenska romanen fick sitt breda genombrott fick resande- eller romanifolket en plats i den. De resande benämndes ?tattare? och fogades in även i de stora, kanoniserade författarskapen, allra först i Carl Jonas Love Almqvists Tre fruar i Småland från 1842.00?Tattar?-motivet lever kvar i svensk skönlitteratur. Ofta är bilden av ?tattarna? lika förgrovad och förenklad som förr. Men undantag finns. Bland de böcker som visar gedigna kunskaper om gruppens historia utmärker sig Sven Rosendahls Gud fader och tattaren som utkom redan 1951 och Ragnar Järhults Andreas och Emilia. En tattarroman (1984).00I den här boken följs ?tattar?-motivet genom drygt åttio skönlitterära prosaverk skrivna av flera stora namn i den svenska litteraturhistorien: August Strindberg, Stig Claesson, Eyvind Johnson, Majgull Axelsson, Kerstin Ekman, Sara Lidman med flera. Verken relateras alla till det som är känt om resandefolkets historia och kultur

The paper aims to critically analyse media discourse on the "Venus" female nude exhibitions, organized annually in Kraków between 1970 and 1991. By analysing discourse that legitimised nudity in the public sphere, the paper sheds light on ways in which attitudes toward sexuality and the body changed during the so-called Gierek decade. The source base consists primarily of press publications, newsreels, and photo books from the 1970s. As the paper demonstrates, there were three dominant frameworks of discussing nudity in state-socialist Poland: artistic, pornographic and educational. Moreover, historical discourse analysis allows us to observe the role female nudes played in setting the stage for the Polish sexual revolution in the second half of the 1980s.

Reachable knowledge, which is a collection of socially negotiated constructs and narratives, imposes limits on possible ways of understanding the world around us. A dominant discourse becomes a boundary of cognition. The contemporary discourse on male sexual identity cements and limits it to a homosexual or heterosexual version. The socio-cultural rules producing hetero- and homosexuality can be particularly well viewed in the example of men who identify as heterosexuals yet have sex with other men. This article provides a recipe for the effective union of heterosexuality with homosexual desire, free of the danger of social stigma. At the same time, the article attempts to disclose how the development of male sexuality is restricted by modern modes of knowledge production in regard to male sexuality and by forcing men to practice their sexuality in a pre-specified manner. The article also gives voice to alternative ways of understanding male sexuality, especially through the lens of fluidity, changeability, and vagueness.

Artists and scholars have long been interested in the relations between art and science. However, on account of the diverse and transgressive nature of these relations, they may escape attempts to classify them in accord with the traditional divisions of academic disciplines, which are so characteristic of contemporary times. These divisions also prove inadequate for consideration of the rapid technological and socio-cultural changes destabilizing the mutually autonomous territories of art and science. The author thus attempts to respond to the need for new conceptual frames that will allow the existing forms of collaboration between artists and scholars to be revealed and systematized in a more cross-sectional and reflective manner. For this purpose she proposes a new typology—a model organizing phenomena in which art combines with science.

The aim of the text is to sketch the dynamics of contemporary culture, focussing on the concept of participation. General remarks are accompanied by illustrations taken from ethnographic study on music lovers faced with evolution of musical media (vinyl records, CDs, files). Following Marek Krajewski, the author rejects the traditional notion of "participation", and uses his redefinition of the term. He stresses three dimensions of cultural participation: 1. participation as socialization; 2. participation as reshaping the participants themselves, which makes material traces; 3. participation as metaparticipation, ie. the modifying of the conditions of participation. At the same time, three crucial dimensions of the notion of "culture" are taken into consideration, which enables us to analyze the participation understood in the proposed way from a triple perspective: 1. participation takes place within culture, culture enables participation to occur; 2. culture is a resource used in the process of participation; 3. culture as "something beyond interaction" emerges in the course of participation. The author argues that thinking of participation in this way, the contemporary culture is to be viewed as clash between many heterogeneous forces, where constructing and maintaining stable areas is the exception rather than a rule. This is why it is so important to study of how the orders of participation are stabilized. Various forms of institutionalized reflexivity are ubiquitous in contemporary culture. Our culture is tyrannized by information, and the acceleration connected to it.