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.

The article presents the prison in terms of symbols: how it shows space, as time is divided and how spatial and time management architecture affects social relationships between prison inmates, staff and others.

During the first half of the 19th century, social public care was organized along two directions: commitment of professional beggars, without a family, in specialized institutions, and home assistance of beggars with families (by a monthly pension and by an annual change of clothes). The article relies on archive documents, such as potential beneficiaries' help requests, administrative documents issued by the authorities, lists of help beneficiaries, inquiries, etc. It presents aspects related to the practical functioning of the social assistance: types of beneficiaries, pension distribution procedures, abuses and frauds. The legal limitations of the administrative rigidity of the pension system were strictly defined, even before the assessment of the real needs in society. This is the reason the efficiency of the pension system was lower than expected both by the authorities and the beneficiaries.

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".

The article surveys the various stances taken in interwar Romania towards the contemporary international - particularly French - trends of legal and political theory meant at counteracting the shortcomings manifested by the legislative patterns of Napoleonic provenance when confronted with the exigencies of expanding associational life and the need of growing state intervention in the sphere of the relations between economic factors. The crisscrossing visions of federalist syndicalism and, respectively, juridical socialism - exposed most conspicuously by the legal philosophers Léon Duguit and Emmanuel Lévy - are shown to receive various evaluations in the local milieu, from the part of authors connected with the leading journal of the Romanian Social Institute and otherwise (and always by reference to the predicament of social reform in the national space). It is highlighted that the impact of the ideas involved in the debate was broader and more diffuse than one could assume when taking into consideration only the outspoken - and partly obsolete - objectives and premises of the argumentations in question.

The author tackles the controversial problem of the relation between theory and ideology in Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' political writings. The article is structured into two main parts: the first one is focused on Marx's vision of a revolutionary intellectual as a base for the development of both theory and ideology. The second one deals with Marx's posterity, as it was established by the contribution of Friedrich Engels.

This article is following the evolution of the understanding of the concept of "property" in the Catholic Church's social doctrine, during a period of 120 years, starting with the pontificate of Leo XIII and ending with the one of Pope Benedict XVI. Being about the various understandings related to the concept of "property" in the Church's social doctrine, only the official discourse of the popes will be followed (magisterium) together with the input brought by the Second Vatican Council in interpreting and defining the concept.

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.

The present article brings to the fore several details, which had been either unknown, or only partially familiar to the Romanian historiographers. The author refers to academic trajectories of the 14 young Romanians (almost half originating from Bucharest or Iaşi), who obtained their PhD in political and administrative sciences at the Free University of Brussels between 1885 and 1899. Over a third of them were also doctors in law. Of the 92 PhDs in political science awarded in Brussels between 1885-1899, the Romanians were on the second position in a formal hierarchy of the students who were not of Belgian descent. The foreigners counted 51 students, and the list was dominated by the Bulgarians, who had obtained 21 diplomas, while the Japanese held a distant third place with merely 4 PhD degrees.

The study aims to carry out an analysis from demographic perspective for the city of Arad during the years 1767-1768. It is based on two documents that contain mainly statistical data with which it is possible to emphasize aspects related to some demographical behaviour in Arad. Information about the deceased, newborns and marriages registered, about the share of different ethnicities and confessions help us to outline the image of Arad, in which, during the XVIIIth century has been seen a clear process of modernization and demographic growth.

The article presents the way the first Associations and Foundations are set up in Romania, focusing on the tight circle of people dedicated to the domain and specialized on the road, staying forever in the NGO sector, moving from one organization to another or working for more than one at the same time. From lack of legislation to unclear regulations, NGOs struggle on their path with logistical issues which influenced their performance, public image, their projects and mostly their results. The author identifies the outcome as determined by the struggle to access grants, the NGO agenda versus financer's agenda, the absence of grants for a specific type of issues, the shortage of the professionalized staff, the challenge of working with volunteers, the compulsory annual reports and financial reports to the Government authorities.

The implementation of the principles of local democracy has proven to be one of the most complicated tasks of the political and administrative reform in the Republic of Moldova. To overcome this situation, it is important to develop and substantiate theoretically such concepts as "local power", "the subject of local power", "local territorial collectivity". A clear scientific definition of those notions would serve as a foundation for developing an appropriate legal framework and public policy in the field. In order to elucidate the notions mentioned above, the existing essential approaches in the contemporary social sciences regarding the public territorial collectivities have been analyzed. The factors affecting the formation and existence of the local territorial collectivities have also been emphasized. Two types of authorities: private and public have been briefly considered. This paper analyzes the concept of "local authority" in contrast to the term "territorial administrative unit" with which the legislator operates in the Republic of Moldova. It was concluded that the concept "local collectivity" is more acceptable because it is the appropriate expression of the phenomenon of the territorial organization of public power in general, as opposed to the concept "administrative unit" which refers only to the territorial organization of state public power. So, from this point of view, the territorial administrative units and the local territorial collectivities are two different phenomena. In a strictly legal sense, the territorial-administrative unit is an inhabited territory which has no heritage (in the territory there is the state property or another kind of heritage) and it is administered by an official appointed by the state. The local collectivity has its own heritage that is managed on its own account and in order to solve local problems. The issues belonging to state power can be delegated to local authorities by sending financial and material resources needed to achieve them. A territorial community of the residents becomes local authority if it possesses and uses democratic institutions, creates bodies of self administration on the basis of the elective principle, takes binding decisions for the community, and has its own financial and material resources in order to regulate the internal life. These indicators make public territorial collectivities to be different from the territorial administrative units, in which only administrative methods of management are used. The defining elements of the identity of a local collectivity, such as: a) name, b) territory, c) population, d) the public authority of the eligible authorities, e) the Statute, f) the distinctive insignia of the local collectivity, have been identified. These elements make the local territorial collectivity to be distinguished from other similar collectivities.