Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe neoliberal depoliticization of economic policy is commonly seen as consisting of "supply‐side" practices of removing, denying, and closing avenues for public action of politicians and societal actors. I argue that this view overlooks "demand‐side" practices that actively encourage action in the private sphere through constructing and legitimating private action channels for societal actors to attend to their economic needs and wants. These channels are crucial for the depoliticization of economic policy since their declining effectiveness can stimulate processes of repoliticization. This article focuses on higher education in Israel as a case study of such a channel. Higher education has been constructed institutionally and legitimated discursively by politicians and bureaucrats as a channel for action in the private sphere, by employing the logic of education as human capital. The declining effectiveness of this private action channel contributed to the eruption of mass protest in 2011 which repoliticized economic policy.Related Articles

Wang, Yingyao. 2017. "." Politics & Policy 45 (): 194‐223. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12200/abstract


Temple, Luke,
Maria T. Grasso,
Barbara Buraczynska,
Sotirios Karampampas, and
Patrick English. 2016. "." Politics & Policy 44 (): 553‐576. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12161/abstract


Zamponi, Lorenzo, and
Lorenzo Bosi. 2016. "." Politics & Policy 44 (): 400‐426. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12156/abstract
Related Media
Syllabus:
Nichanian, Daniel. 2015. "Antipolitics." University of Chicago. https://www.danielnichanian.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/AntipoliticsSyllabus_Nichanian.pdf


Wood, Matt. 2017. "Depoliticization: What Is It and Why Should It Matter?" SPERI: Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/09/07/depoliticisation-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter/

The way that the economy, politics and ideology interact to maintain stability or bring about change is a central concern for political economy. The social bloc perspective, as elaborated by Amable and Palombarini, provides a promising framework with which to address this question due to its attempt to combine an emphasis on the economic structure with a more central role for politics and ideology. This article argues, however, that the social bloc perspective still retains a rather functional understanding of these two concepts. We contend that a neo-Gramscian approach focusing on hegemonic struggles and adopting a complex conceptualisation of class can overcome these functionalist tendencies, because it perceives politics and ideology as crucial factors in the formation of social groups and the emergence and actions of social blocs. We further claim that a neo-Gramscian approach has broader applicability. To ground our claims empirically, we analyse a case which cannot be accounted for by the social bloc perspective. This is a case in which two social blocs composing different social groups with rivalling worldviews shared some meaningful ideological beliefs and cooperated politically to realise them.

AbstractIn recent years the study of populism has followed a "pure" political track, typically employing an ideological perspective. We argue that such a perspective downplays material aspects of populism and limits the ability to analyze populism in government. In order to reinvigorate interest in and concern with the political economy of contemporary populism we rely on the emerging growth model approach in comparative political economy to study the political economy of populism in government. We situate populist socio‐economic policies, understood as those policies aiming at improving the material welfare and wellbeing of "the people", within a growth model analysis whose main insight is the association of economic growth with dynamics in the division of national income between labor and capital. Our empirical analysis of three successive governments of Israel led by the Likud populist party between 2009 and 2018 demonstrates the utility of this approach for the study of populism in government.

Purpose
Scholars have identified various uses of Facebook by activists and social movements in political activism and beyond. They overlooked, however, the possibility that social movements may take advantage of certain capabilities provided by social media platforms, while neglecting others, thereby creating differences in patterns of use between movements. The purpose of this paper is to investigate these differences and to assess the role of the lived experience of activists and supporters in shaping them.


Design/methodology/approach
This study compared two protests in Israel with respect to activists' use of social media, the class profile of participants and the leadership's demands and their resonance among various social groups. Each case was analyzed by combining thematic and quantitative analysis of online data from Facebook pages and of offline data from various sources.


Findings
The two protests exhibited distinctively different patterns of use of the capabilities provided by Facebook. These differences are associated with the lived experience of protest participants and of the individuals the movement leadership sought to mobilize.


Originality/value
This study is the first to show that successful public policy protests can exhibit distinctive use patterns of social media for political activism. It also identifies lived experience as an important factor in shaping these patterns.

Existing analytical frameworks for the study of Israel's political sociology and political economy tend to view the Israeli society as polarized into a neo-liberal secular and peace-seeking elite and religious ethno-republican social groups. The turn to ethno-republicanism following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, and two neo-liberal economic programs in 2002 and 2003, exposed the limitations of those approaches. We suggest that a Neo-Gramscian approach provides a better theoretical framework for the analysis of the early years of the twenty-first century. We argue that during the years 2001–2006 a hegemonic project was constituted which succeeded in combining neo-liberal and ethno-republican elements. This project was based on a relatively stable socio-political alignment of social groups, primarily drawn from the Jewish middle class. In order to establish our argument, we characterize the project and analyze the position of the main social groups in Israeli society relative to it.