Suchergebnisse

Forschungsleitende Hypothese und Fragestellung war die Annahme, dass durch Repressalien hinsichtlich nicht-etablierter Intellektueller und deren Unfreiheit denken, veröffentlichen und v. a. kritisieren zu können, sich in China keine Zivilgesellschaft herausbilden kann.

The article analyses the consequences of elite polarization at the mass level in the centre-periphery dimension. We analyse the rapid rise in support for independence in Catalonia, focusing on the role of party competition around the centre-periphery cleavage. We argue that mainstream actors' adoption of centrifugal party strategies with respect to the national question produced a polarizing dynamic in the party system that eventually caused voters' attitudes regarding the centre-periphery issue to harden. Indeed, we posit that this increase in mass polarization was a consequence of party agency that subsequently helped to drive attitudes regarding independence. To test this hypothesis, we measure centre-periphery polarization (as perceived by voters) by adopting two different perspectives—inter-party distances (horizontal polarization) and party-voter distances (vertical polarization)—and then run logistic regressions to explain support for independence. The findings show an asymmetrical effect on polarization. While the centrifugal strategy implemented by Catalan regionalist parties paved the way for a radicalization of voters on the Catalan nationalist side, among voters for non-regionalist parties, attitudes towards independence were initially less conditioned by this polarization. The results provide evidence of the political effects of elite polarization.

The following volume is a compilation of student-produced texts written over the course of a semester-long Q-Team research-based learning class at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The aim of this course was to explore the various understandings and definitions of Yugoslav culture through the prism of its representations found primarily in the archives of the German Foreign Service, compelling the students to design and carry out original research projects in line with their personal academic interests. This exercise has resulted in a series of five co-authored papers treating a multitude of topics addressing the concept of culture in the Yugoslav context, as seen through the eyes of diplomatic staff, based in majoritarily on research conducted in the political archives of the German Foreign Service.

In Polen ist eine neue gesellschaftliche Bewegung entstanden, die trotz Corona-Pandemie in Massen auf den Straßen der polnischen Städte protestiert. Wird sie etwas in der polnischen Politik verändern? Aufgrund der großen Unsicherheit infolge der Corona-Pandemie, aber auch des angedrohten Vetos der polnischen Regierung gegen das EU-Haushaltspaket ist es schwer, vorherzusagen, welche Ereignisse Chancen haben, in allernächster Zeit auf eine echte politische Veränderung in Polen hinzuwirken. Zweifellos wird aber eine wesentliche kulturelle Veränderung eintreten - die Abkehr der Polen, insbesondere der jungen Menschen, von der Religiosität und das zunehmende Bedürfnis, die Gleichheit der Geschlechter sowie auch der LGBT+-Personen zu garantieren. Diese kulturelle Veränderung treibt die gesellschaftliche Bewegung an, die vom Netzwerk "Landesweiter Frauenstreik" (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet) organisiert wird. Sie kann der wichtigste Faktor sein, der dem Regierungslager der Vereinigten Rechten (Zjednoczona Prawica) in den kommenden Wahlen die Macht entzieht - unabhängig davon, ob die Wahlen ins Frühjahr 2021 vorgezogen oder regulär erst in drei Jahren stattfinden werden. Allerdings wird auch viel davon abhängen, inwieweit die Opposition fähig sein wird, das Potential der Bewegung zu nutzen.

COVID-19 hit Russia during a decisive period for securing the future of Vladimir Putin's regime. The Kremlin is still pursuing its main goal while dealing with the pandemic and its economic impact: keeping costs low and shifting responsibilities to others. Although this strategy is leading to a growing gap between the Russian state and its citizens, it is unlikely that the regime will change its course. It will rather become more repressive, making Russia an even more difficult partner for the EU.

Este artículo compara los discursos de reconciliación nacional que han predominado en Chile y España después de dictaduras políticas de largo alcance. La polisemia de estos discursos se analizó observando una selección de hechos históricos claves en ambos países, desde las respectivas transiciones políticas hasta la actualidad. Los resultados permitieron distinguir distintas disposiciones para la reconciliación que coexisten y se modifican en los dos casos. Estas clasificaciones se agrupan en disposiciones "abiertas" y "cerradas" hacia la reconciliación, que existen de manera combinada a través del tiempo. Se demostrará, por ejemplo, que en España han prevalecido las disposiciones cerradas en casi todo momento desde el inicio mismo de su transición política, lo que aquí se problematizará como una de las explicaciones de la persistencia de un "modelo de impunidad".

Un elemento importante en las relaciones Estado-sociedad es la forma en que los Estados regulan los comportamientos individuales a través de diferentes tipos de sanciones; ejemplo de ello es el modo en que los Estados intentan modificar la conducta de las personas hacia las drogas ilegales. A partir del marco conceptual propuesto por Knill, Adam y Hurka (2015) para el análisis de las políticas morales en Europa, este artículo explora los diferentes estilos estatales de regulación de las drogas ilegales en Sudamérica. Los autores mencionados proponen una clasificación a partir de la consistencia entre los límites legales que se imponen a ciertas conductas y las consecuencias que implican para los ciudadanos que deciden no cumplir tales límites, lo que resulta en cuatro estilos estatales de regulación: autoritario, autoritario-benevolente, permisivo-punitivo y permisivo. Se toma la legislación vigente en el subcontinente para comparar las diferentes medidas que los Estados imponen ante la posesión de drogas ilegales y las sanciones que conllevan. Si bien se trata de un trabajo descriptivo, este mapa nos permite ver que en Sudamérica prevalecen leyes severas en relación con esta práctica. El trabajo contribuye al estudio de los estilos estatales de regulación al enfocarse en otra región geográfica.

In this study, I look at two types of political actors commonly described as 'populist' in literature—namely, rightwing populists and technocratic leaders like France's Emmanuel Macron and the Czech Republic's Andrej Babiš. While both types of political actors tend to emerge as a response to a decline in trust in established parties and adopt platforms with anti-establishment and monist elements, they also possess noticeably different qualities. Unlike rightwing populists, technocrats lack a distinctive ideological profile and tend to adopt more inclusive rhetoric by appealing to a broadly-defined community of people. When contrasted with supporters of rightwing populists, empirical analysis of supporters of Macron's and Babiš' parties shows that the two have few commonalities. Relatively few examples of such political leadership, the lack of a distinct ideological profile and the variation of their support bases suggest that one should use caution when conceptualizing technocratic populists as a distinct theoretical type.

Think tanks, or policy advice institutions, are civil society organizations producing and delivering social analysis to policymakers and the wider public. Their aim is to influence policy in a given direction. Compared to most other civil society organizations, they hold relatively privileged positions, both in terms of wealth (on average bigger budgets and staffs), political influence (their very raison d'être), knowledge (educational level of the staff), and social networks. Thus, it seems beyond dispute that think tanks adhere to the elite of civil society. This article focuses on think tanks' negative self-identification, on their reluctance to accept labels. Not only are think tanks unwilling to take on the elite designation, some of them also deny being part of civil society, and some go one step further in denying identification with the think tank community. These multiple denials are expected if we recall Pierre Bourdieu's observation that "all aristocracies define themselves as being beyond all definition" (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 316). The analysis focuses on how this definitional ambiguity is discursively constructed. Think-tankers are often described as situated in an interstitial space between such fields as politics, civil society, media, market, and academia. While this intermediary position is the source of their unique role as converters of various forms of capital, it also complicates the identity formation of think tanks. The argument is illustrated by Polish think tanks and the data consists of original interviews with think tank leaders. The article provides a novel perspective on think tanks and on civil society elites.

The author analyses the pattern of governance of the right-wing parties in Poland between 2015 and 2019. It bears many features of a concentration of powers as a method of achieving desired goals in the sphere of political competition and public policy along with the use of informal components. The manifestation of concentration of power is centralisation, understood as the transfer of functions of the state from the lower (in particular local government) levels to the higher, as well as strong interference of the central government in many areas of public life that previously remained apolitical.

The literature frequently presents populists and technocrats as antagonistic. Although undoubtedly there are good historical examples that confirm this tension, in this article we propose that the relations between economic technocrats and populists are less conflictive than usually assumed and cohabitation a more common outcome than expected. We argue that two conditions moderate conflict between populists and economic technocrats, leading not only to their cohabitation but to cooperation between them: the programmatic mandate of populists and the economic context of their rise to power. We analyse the relations of economic experts with nine populist presidents in contemporary Latin America to show this argument's soundness.

This paper focuses on the analysis of contemporary theories of culture and cognition in cultural sociology. It identifies two major research traditions within cognitivist cultural sociology, based on micro-individualist and collectivist modes of sociological explanation respectively. Two prominent theoretical frameworks within the "micro-individualist" tradition are then critically examined: Stephen Vaisey's dual-process models of culture in action and Omar Lizardo's typology of cultural kinds. It is argued that both frameworks, although well-defined and theoretically insightful, are prone to unwarranted microfoundationalist reductionism. The paper then proceeds to evaluate the presuppositions of the explicitly "collectivist" Zeru-bavelian paradigm of cultural sociology, as well as a series of recent contributions to the field by scholars representing the neo-Durkheimian "strong program". Both are argued to contain problematic assumptions about the location and means of transmission of cultural content. It is concluded that neither "micro-individualist" nor "collectivist" theories of culture and cognition can provide an adequate account of how culture and cognition interrelate since both frameworks are based on explicitly reductionist social ontologies. The article then calls for the adoption of Tuukka Kaidesoja's "naturalized critical realist" social ontology that seeks to overcome these philosophical biases. The paper examines two major sources of Kaidesoja's ontological doctrine, namely Mario Bunge's systemic materialist ontology and the "distributed cognition" perspective. The article then seeks to outline a preliminary sketch of an alternative account of culture that involves the generation, transmission, and transformation of representational states across different media within distributed cognitive systems.