Suchergebnisse

The international academic community is currently exploring the development of the intelligence studies domain as a social science project. The current position paper argues for a project to connect, in content terms, the Romanian political science with the domain of intelligence studies. It takes into account the international and local context, and presents some of the benefits to be generated by the intersection of these two domains.

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.

Thanks to theoretical advances in the natural sciences and the decreased cost of computer technology, computational modeling is becoming an increasingly popular tool in the social sciences. Due to its relative novelty and somewhat marginal position in most disciplines, however, research of this kind has primarily focused on methodological challenges posed by applications to social phenomena. By contrast, the method's theoretical foundations are still relatively poorly understood and many theoretical possibilities remain unexplored by computational scholars. At the same time, social theorists, following in the footsteps of Georg Simmel's pioneering contributions a century ago, have developed a process-based research tradition that anticipates the scientific practices of today's computer-based research. In short, if the sociological process theorists have been computational modelers avant la lettre, the latter can be seen as process theorists "après la lettre".

This article is based on three hypotheses. First, the legal requirements for
establishing political parties in Romania are among the most restrictive in Europe.
Second, electoral participation decreased globaly during the last two decades;
however, when a party succeeded in registering and endorsed a non-ideological
position, the electoral participation slightly increased; so, if the legal requirements
will be relaxed, new parties might emerge and a greater participation to the
elections might be taken into consideration. Third, the current legal procedure
for registering political parties contradicts the constitutional provisions on the
freedom of association and the right to be elected. In the light of this findings, the
article suggest a revision of the current legislation.

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.

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 investigates the political mechanisms specific to contemporary Romanian politics and political parties, as well as those social representations related to gender roles and the
definition of family that have contributed to maintaining a low level of women participation in
Romanian politics after 1989. In a first part, it sets the conceptual context through a review of the
main theoretical approaches for the political representation of women, with an emphasis on
gender studies' cognitive dimension. Second, it connects a quantitative evaluation of women's
presence in the Romanian post communist parliament with a qualitative analysis of public (i.e.
mass media) discourse of the rejected legislative proposal to introduce gender quotas in various
political and social processes. The author finds that, beyond the dynamics of political elites'
recruitment and the functioning of the political "game", the ideological options and social
representations that emphasize the differences between men and women, as well the central role
of family in building gender roles play an essential part in maintaining a low number of women
within the Parliament.