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Book: pp.54; digital file. ; This is a collection of short essays on the potential workings and outcomes of the Unicity scheme then proposed by the Manitoba provincial government, and attempts to give careful consideration and critique of the scheme. Essays are written by researchers and academics from the University of Winnipeg, members of the local media and the private sector. The paper argues that amalgamation into a regional government will have both positive and negative effects. Generally, the provision of equitable levels of services and effective planning for the entire region are viewed positively, while the potential for Unicity to become too unwieldy and too under-representative of marginalized communities is seen as a cause for concern. An additional criticism that arises from these essays, is that partisan politics will become more firmly rooted at the municipal level in Winnipeg, on account of Unicity's proposed parliamentary-style city council. The test of Unicity, therefore, is the degree to which the proposed community committees and ward representation are able to flourish. The editor concludes by saying that the Unicity has the potential to be a framework for a new, more democratic style of politics through greater citizen engagement. This end must be actively pursued, he writes, otherwise the new framework will be governed by the same old politics that characterized Greater Winnipeg in recent years.

A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics.In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies.Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

What should we expect--and not expect--from the government in times of crisis? 'Big government didn't work,' says veteran journalist and political analyst Marvin Olasky. 'And it is clear that a new paradigm for responding to national crisis has emerged. Private and faith-based organizations have stepped in and politics will never be the same.'.

Democratic Situations challenges researchers and students in Science & Technology Studies and related fields to treat democracy as an empirical phenomenon. This means leaving behind off-the-shelf theoretical notions of democracy that may have travelled into STS unexamined. The alternative strategy pursued in this volume is to pay as much analytical attention to the study of democratic politics as STS has previously offered to familiar topics of science and technology.
This timely collection of empirical stories and conceptual inventions leads the way by showing how the making and doing of democracy can be placed at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American participatory democracy, such as elections, bureaucracies, public debate and citizen participation, into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are shaped, contested and warped in practice. The fact that Euro-American participatory democracy is often upheld as an ideal for the rest of the world makes it all the more important to study how it is a situated, distributed, material, emergent, heterogenous, fragile and at times faltering figure and project.
Through situated analyses, the authors demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical ideals and schemes of conflict, institutions, or deliberation. Instead, the volume offers an urgently needed empirically driven renewal of our understanding of democratic politics in a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19.
The twelve chapters are organised into three sections. The first part, entitled Interfaces of technodemocracy, focuses on how democratic politics is co-shaped by its interfaces with more or less rigid institutions and bureaucracies. The second section, Technosciences, democracy and situated enactments of participation, emphasises the relationships between science and public participation. The third part called Reconfigurations of democratic politics with new nonhuman actors focuses on the role of material objects, especially new digital technologies, in democratic politics.

Aspects of political culture, i.e. concerns with the 'subjective' dimension of politics including dominant political orientations, perceptions and interpretations, always have been particularly relevant with regard to the case of Germany and its great variety of political regimes during the last century. This is true both with regard to political science and practical politics. This volume provides a comprehensive overview concerning the major historical legacies, regional and sub-cultural variations, and current problems of democratic orientations, national identity and relationships to the outside world

In 'Contending Orders', Geoffrey Swenson proposes a new way to understand how state and non-state authorities interact by exploring the full range of legally pluralist environments - combative, competitive, cooperative, and complementary. Drawing upon insights from Afghanistan and Timor-Leste, two countries with extensive legal pluralism, he identifies and critically examines commonly used strategies in legally pluralistic environments. Swenson also illustrates how national and international actors can better engage non-state justice systems.

Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different from what occurred in Europe. In States and Power in Africa, Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Herbst's bold contention-that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent-is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed ev

Thesis (Ph.D. (Development Administration))--National Institute of Development Administration, 2019 ; In any country with a political system based upon democracy, it has been conventional wisdom that center-left or progressive regimes tend to expand welfare programs, while center-right or conservative governments are more likely to dismantle the welfare state. However, in reality, any political party with a distinct political position on welfare policies is usually put under public scrutiny, which makes it risky for them to simply follow their traditional beliefs, without taking into account public reactions over welfare-related decision-making. Arguably, even conservative parties take progressive approaches—contrary to their beliefs—towards the welfare state, especially when elections are around the corner. In terms of the partisan effect on the welfare state, South Korea is an interesting example in the sense that parties from different political backgrounds have had the opportunity to run the country for almost the same amount of time during the last twenty years, which is the period that this study focuses on in regard to politics, socioeconomic conditions, and the welfare state. Based on data ranging from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s, the relationship between the welfare state and political/socioeconomic conditions is evaluated alongside policy implications, revealing the extent of the political progressivism of South Korean politics in relation to welfare development. The study reveals that South Korea's social policies are not free from path dependence, similar to other welfare states. South Korea has witnessed a conservative party radically adopting progressive welfare plans in order to maintain its political power and ditching them soon after being elected as the party in power. The country also witnessed a progressive party losing power and having almost no chance to implement the welfare policies it had drafted in accordance with its progressive beliefs. In South Korea, conservative parties, ...