Suchergebnisse

AbstractHuman rights advocates continue to use shaming as a central tool despite recognizing its declining effectiveness. Shame is indeed a potent motivator, but its effects are often counterproductive for this purpose. Especially when wielded by cultural outsiders in ways that appear to condemn local social practices, shaming is likely to produce anger, resistance, backlash, and deviance from outgroup norms, or denial and evasion. Shaming can easily be interpreted as a show of contempt, which risks triggering fears for the autonomy and security of the group. In these circumstances, established religious and elite networks can employ traditional normative counter-narratives to recruit a popular base for resistance. If this counter-mobilization becomes entrenched in mass social movements, popular ideology, and enduring institutions, the unintended consequences of shaming may leave human rights advocates farther from their goal.

Abstract
In the third wave of democratic changes in the early 1990s when the Central and Eastern European (CEE) political landscape changed radically and the democratisation processes started in the eastern part of the continent, Slovenia was one of the most prominent countries with the best prospects for rapid democratic growth. Slovenia somewhat luckily escaped the Yugoslav civil wars and towards the end of the 20th century was already on the path towards a stable and consolidated democracy with the most successful economy in the entire CEE area. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Slovenia had a simple and straight-forward political goals, i.e. to join the European union as soon as possible, thus consolidating its place among the most developed countries within the region. After some setbacks, this goal was accomplished in (so far) the biggest enlargement to the Union in May 2004. But what happened after Slovenia managed to successfully achieve its pair of major political goals? In this chapter, we search for an answer to this question and find out why Slovenian voters are increasingly distrustful not only of political institutions, but why so-called new political faces and instant political parties are so successful and why Slovenian democracy has lost a leading place among consolidated democracies in CEE.

Abstract
The author conducts a comparative analysis of authoritarian liberalism's concepts in contemporary political theory. The paper deals with the main directions of interpretation of authoritarian liberalism in the framework of methodological approaches and conceptual models of neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, political liberalism, J.-W. Mueller's 'restrained democracy', J. Habermas' 'legitimation crisis', C. Crouch's 'post-democracy', C. Macpherson's 'participatory democracy', M. Wilkinson's 'dedemocratisation and delegalisation', W. Streeck's 'democratic capitalism crisis' and G. Majone's 'crypto-federalism'. The basic analytical concept is the idea of authoritarian economic liberalism, first proposed by H. Heller and K. Polanyi. This paper will sub-stantiate that in crisis and transformational periods the actualisation of authoritarian liberalism corresponds to the fundamental tension between market capitalism and representative democracy. The author conceptualises authoritarian liberalism as the practice of dedemocratisation and restrained democracy, which results in the regionalisation of radical protest against the supranational regime of political integration in Europe. Latent political authoritarianism strengthens economic liberalism, which, in turn, reinforces the further EU's 'liberal authoritarian transformation'. Authoritarian liberalism restricts traditional forms of representative democracy, contributing to the reanimation of populism and political radicalism. The authoritarian restriction of representative democracy can lead not only to the strengthening of market capitalism, but also to the revival of reactionary forms of 'new nationalism' and illiberalism. Today, the EU's regime is transformed from a nominally rule-based structure supported by market discipline into a 'discretionary order' reinforced by bureaucratic power. The EU's transnational solidarity can become a democratically legitimate tool for a de-escalation of tensions between market capitalism and representative democracy.

Abstract
What is the best electoral system to increase the number of political parties represented in Parliament? This article answers the question using data from all the elections in Macedonia since 2002, and by making simulations of the results according to different electoral systems. In principle, we found that the electoral model that would bring most parties to the Macedonian Parliament is the Droop and Hare used in one electoral district. Moreover, the article answers the question how favourable different electoral systems are to larger/smaller parties. We find that the following is the order of electoral systems from most to least favourable for larger parties: Imperiali highest averages, D'Hondt, Sainte-Laguë, Largest remainders – Imperiali, Danish, Largest remainders – Droop, Largest remainders – Hare.

Abstract
Social networking services (SNSs) can significantly impact public life during important political events. Thus, it comes as no surprise that different political actors try to exploit these online platforms for their benefit. Bots constitute a popular tool on SNSs that appears to be able to shape public opinion and disrupt political processes. However, the role of bots during political events in a non-Western context remains largely under-studied. This article addresses the question of the involvement of Twitter bots during electoral campaigns in Japan. In our study, we collected Twitter data over a fourteen-day period in October 2017 using a set of hashtags related to the 2017 Japanese general election. Our dataset includes 905,215 tweets, 665,400 of which were unique tweets. Using a supervised machine learning approach, we first built a custom ensemble classification model for bot detection based on user profile features, with an area under curve (AUC) for the test set of 0.998. Second, in applying our model, we estimate that the impact of Twitter bots in Japan was minor overall. In comparison with similar studies conducted during elections in the US and the UK, the deployment of Twitter bots involved in the 2017 Japanese general election seems to be significantly lower. Finally, given our results on the level of bots on Twitter during the 2017 Japanese general election, we provide various possible explanations for their underuse within a broader socio-political context.

Abstract
This paper provides an outline about Hungary's, Poland's, Slovakia's and Czechia's relationships to the Mashriq region, especially Jordan, Israel and Egypt. The Central and Eastern European countries are considered both individually and collectively in the Visegrád group (V4). Therefore quantitative and qualitative indicators are examined. As one result it was found that in most cases the V4 had no common interests and consequently did not formulate common positions. But finally, the results of this work suggest that the migration crisis has indeed increased the interest of the Visegrád countries in the Mashriq and has accelerated their involvement to some extent both in the Mashriq region and within the European Union.

Abstract
The Europeanised, progressive intelligentsia in East-Central Europe (ECE) made a fundamental mistake in the nineties that amounts in some ways to the 'treason of intellectuals' and the basic reassessment of these naïve illusions has only begun nowadays. Motivated by the radical change in the 'miraculous year' (1989) the progressive intellectuals uncritically accepted and supported the Europeanisation in that particular form as it entered into the chaotic days of the early nineties, since they naively thought that its negative features would automatically disappear. In good faith, they created an apology for the established neoliberal hybrid and they sincerely defended this perverse Europeanisation against the increasing attacks of the traditionalistnativist narrative. With this action they have been unwillingly drifting close to the other side by offering some ideological protection for the 'really existing' neoliberal hybrid instead of criticising this deviation from genuine democratisation in order to facilitate its historical correction. However, due to the emergence of the neoliberal hybrid, the 'external' integration by the EU has resulted in the 'internal' disintegration inside the ECE member states. There has been a deep polarisation in the domestic societies and after thirty years the majority of populations in the ECE countries feel like losers, and they have indeed become losers. This controversial situation needs an urgent reconsideration, which is underway both in the EU and in the ECE as a self-criticism of the progressive intelligentsia. Thus, this paper concentrates on the reconsideration of the main conceptual issues of Europeanisation and Democratisation in ECE.1

AbstractAs the so-called liberal international order has come under duress, the problem of 'peaceful change' has reappeared on the agenda of International Relations (IR), mainly in a realist guise drawing upon E.H. Carr and Robert Gilpin's renditions of the problem. Making a conceptual archaeological intervention, this paper recovers long-neglected multidisciplinary debates on 'peaceful change' taking place in the tumultuous interwar period. It concurs that peaceful change is an IR problem par excellence, central to academic debates in the burgeoning interwar discipline, but also a more complex conceptual figure than posterity portrays it. The paper explores the debates between negative and positive conceptions of peaceful change, between political, legal-institutional and communitarian mechanisms of peaceful change, and different policies of peaceful change, particularly its troubled relationship to appeasement. The paper concludes that the interwar debate on peaceful change, while highly embedded in its context, does offer IR an alternative and more aspirational perspective on the problem of power and order transitions.

AbstractThe world's understanding of the action needed to advance human rights is deeply structured by the 'respect, protect, and fulfill' framework. But its potential is significantly undermined by a narrow conception of 'respect' for human rights. This paper systematically addresses these weaknesses and advances an original alternative. It first provides a historical account of the 'do no harm' conception of 'respect' in the political context of the late Cold War. It then analyzes this conception's empirical functioning today, using the example of unauthorized migration along the US–Mexico border. These points illustrate an overarching theoretical argument: the responsibility to respect human rights should be based on a responsibility not to dehumanize, rather than exclusively on a duty to do no harm. This involves the consideration of each person as a moral equal, the elevation of human rights practice as a basis for judgment inside of a moral agent's self, and the rejection of state-centrism as the basis for all political responsibility. This argument has implications traversing the theory and practice of human rights, including: the ability to translate and embed into practice the new meanings of 'respect,' 'protect,' and 'fulfill'; and the need to re-consider the contemporary significance of 1980s liberalism.