Suchergebnisse

On the whole we can claim that in the last almost sixty years there was a significant change in Croatian-Hungarian trans-border relationships. State-governed cooperation was replaced by project-controlled co-operations under the guidance of local-governments and the civil sphere. Unfortunately, stock and human workforce deficit very often obstructs success. Besides it is a permanent problem in our country that state politics has a great influence on local-government politics. So in a certain euroregion the success of operation highly depends on where the local-governments and civil organization belong to politically and on the leaders' ability to validate their interests. As a result of stock deficit mentioned previously project-based co-operations occurred.1 But these ad hoc project associations are not able and won't even be able to use union sources efficiently and generate any kind of long-term regional development. ; On the whole we can claim that in the last almost sixty years there was a significant change in Croatian-Hungarian trans-border relationships. State-governed cooperation was replaced by project-controlled co-operations under the guidance of local-governments and the civil sphere. Unfortunately, stock and human workforce deficit very often obstructs success. Besides it is a permanent problem in our country that state politics has a great influence on local-government politics. So in a certain euroregion the success of operation highly depends on where the local-governments and civil organization belong to politically and on the leaders' ability to validate their interests. As a result of stock deficit mentioned previously project-based co-operations occurred.1 But these ad hoc project associations are not able and won't even be able to use union sources efficiently and generate any kind of long-term regional development.

As a motivational factor of action, political efficacy is an important predictor of political behaviour. The term was invented to capture the extent to which people feel that they can effectively participate in politics and shape political processes. Today, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the individual-level factors (socio-demographic variables, political preferences etc.) that shape the level of internal and external dimensions of political efficacy. However, while it is widely demonstrated that media consumption influences the level of political efficacy, the country-level media context factors affecting it have rarely been studied. This paper reports the findings of extensive research on how two crucial features of the media context, the political significance of the media and the level of political parallelism in the media system, shape the level of external and internal political efficacy. The investigation draws upon the dataset of the seventh round (2014 – 2015) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and includes more than twenty-two thousand respondents from nineteen European democracies. The research hypothesizes that in countries where the media play a more important role, people have lower levels of external and higher levels of internal political efficacy. Political parallelism, which shows the extent to which media outlets are driven by distinct political orientations and interests within a particular media system, is expected to directly increase both external and internal political efficacy. Its indirect effect is also hypothesized, arguing that partisan media amplifies the winner-loser gap in political efficacy as a kind of "echo chamber". The findings show that in countries where the media play a major role in shaping political discourse, people have lower levels of external political efficacy, while the political parallelism of the media system indirectly affects the external dimensions of political efficacy. Internal political efficacy is, however, not related to these context-level factors.

One striking aspect of the coronavirus crisis was the poor response of the right-wing populist leaders to the pandemic in countries such as the US, Britain, and Brazil. Despite this fact, the continuing voter support right-wing populist leaders attract across countries with different socio-economic traits is puzzling. In this paper, we argue in favour of a cognitive anthropological view of populism scholarship. Cognitive and evolutionary anthropology shows that mental systems common to all humans shape the way we understand the world, making some ideas more plausible than others regardless of their levels of accuracy. Even though the action of 'building a wall' to keep illegal migrants away can prove ultimately unfeasible and does not address real immigration issues, due to our cognitive evolution, it makes intuitive sense as a plausible option to reducing immigration. Populist leaders exploit our cognitive intuitions by providing such intractable but oftentimes intuitively-plausible ideas in order to get elected or to promote preferred policies. Furthermore, we intuitively admire powerful individuals and tend to defer to authoritative and charismatic figures as an evolutionary strategy for acquiring valued skills and negotiating hierarchies. As a result, by committing to the intuitively-plausible policies populist leaders promote, such as 'building a wall', they give additional credence to the political beliefs that are based on our cognitive intuitions, effectively increasing their plausibility for the "common folk".

This paper is aimed at analysing the impact of the crisis of the liberal international order on the transatlantic relations. Both the EU and the US have vital interest to maintain the existing international order, however regarding certain foreign policy goals we witness an increasingly divergent approach to world politics. This is the case with the Middle East, where the EU acts as a global player based on historical ties, while the United States have recently started a gradual disengagement from the region. The so-called post-American Middle East have its own opportunities as well as challenges for the European diplomacy. This article focuses on the differences between the EU and the US foreign policy goals related to the Middle East. It primarily addresses the Iranian nuclear program and the Middle East Peace Plan recently launched by the US. The author argues despite some differences in interests, the EU and the US do not perceive the region in an entirely different way.

This contribution offers a reminder of the state of political forces in France and the course of the health crisis, which initially took place in a context of strong political tensions, particularly as a result of the controversial pension reform decided by Macron. The COVID crisis allowed populist parties to develop 'naming' and 'blaming' strategies, initially mobilized in different proportions, to attack the President of the Republic Macron. The analysis shows that the decision to introduce a lockdown led the two leaders of the parties described as populist to harden their criticism to similar proportions but also to 'claim' rapid responses to the crisis. These speeches are also part of the medical polemics that will have been omnipresent throughout the pandemic. Finally, we observe that these strategies have not been beneficial to the populist parties, since during the municipal elections the two parties did not manage to take advantage on this health and political sequence.