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Democratic Principles (democratic + principle)
Selected Abstracts,Model Tribes' and Iconic Conservationists?DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2008The Makuleke Restitution Case in Kruger National Park ABSTRACT This article investigates how the Makuleke community in Limpopo Province achieved iconic status in relation to land reform and community-based conservation discourses in South Africa and beyond. It argues that the situation may be more complex than it first appears, and the ways in which the Makuleke story has been deployed by NGOs, activists, academics, conservationists, the state and business may be too simplistic. The authors discuss historical representations of the Makuleke ,tribe' against the backdrop of their experiences of living in the borderland Pafuri region of the Kruger National Park prior to their forced removal. After investigating the ways in which the chieftaincy, and its relation to communal land, has been strengthened by local mobilizations against threats from the neighbouring Mhinga Tribal Authority, the authors suggest that a central tension in the Makuleke area is the conflict between democratic principles governing the legal entity in control of the land (i.e., the Communal Property Association), and traditionalist patriarchal principles of the Tribal Authority. The article shows how these restitution-linked processes became implicated in the establishment in 2002 of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. The authors also argue that the image of the Makuleke as a ,model tribe' is both a product of changing historical circumstances and a contributor to contemporary discourses on land restitution and conservation. [source] Why the democratic nation-state is still legitimate: A study of media discoursesEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2009ACHIM HURRELMANN Focusing on media discourses, this article maps the communicative reproduction of legitimacy in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Switzerland. It argues that political communication constitutes a distinctive dimension of legitimation that should be studied alongside public opinion and political behaviour. Research on legitimation discourses can help us understand why the legitimacy of established democracies remains stable in spite of the challenges of globalisation: Delegitimating communication tends to focus on relatively marginal political institutions, while the core regime principles of the democratic nation-state, which are deeply entrenched in the political cultures of Western countries, serve as anchors of legitimacy. These democratic principles also shape the normative benchmarks used to evaluate legitimacy, thus preventing a ,de-democratisation' of legitimation discourses. Finally, the short-lived nature of media interest as well as ritualistic legitimation practices shield the democratic nation-state from many potentially serious threats to its legitimacy. [source] Democrats with adjectives: Linking direct and indirect measures of democratic supportEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 5 2007ANDREAS SCHEDLER Since people may entertain competing democratic ideas and ideals, however, the academic community ignores the extent to which standard questions capture citizen support for liberal democracy. To solve the validity problems associated with direct measures of democratic support, this article proposes linking them to more concrete, indirect measures of support for democratic principles and institutions. It employs the statistical technique of cluster analysis to establish this linkage. Cluster analysis permits grouping respondents in a way that is open to complex and inconsistent attitudinal profiles. It permits the identification of ,democrats with adjectives' who support democracy in the abstract, while rejecting core principles of liberal democracy. The article demonstrates the fruitfulness of this approach by drawing a map of ,illiberal democrats' in Mexico on the basis of the country's 2003 National Survey on Political Culture. [source] Legal Basis and Scope of the Human Rights Clauses in EC Bilateral Agreements: Any Room for Positive Interpretation?EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 1 2001Elena Fierro It is well known nowadays that the European Community includes a so-called human rights clause into the framework agreements that it concludes with third countries. It is also widely recognised that, in virtue of the relevant provisions of the Vienna Convention on the Law of the Treaties, such a clause grants the Community a right to suspend the agreement should human rights and/or democratic principles be breached. The question to be explored in the present paper is whether, in the light of its legal basis, the clause fulfils a mere ,negative' or ,sanctioning' function or, by contrast, there is room for the pursuit of positive measures of active promotion of human rights,that is the granting of technical and financial aid. It is argued here that the clauses present an ideal starting point for the pursuit of a comprehensive human rights policy at the EU level. Such a policy should encompass positive measures in the first place, systematic dialogue in the second, and suspension or negative measures of less extent only as ultima ratio in particularly grave cases which cannot be addressed through ordinary (dialogue and aid) routes. [source] Nation Building and Women: The Effect of Intervention on Women's AgencyFOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 1 2008Mary Caprioli Regardless of the primary motive, international military intervention aimed at nation building is partly intended to establish democratic societies. And scholars have demonstrated that intervention does have a positive impact on democratization. With democratization generally follows greater support for human rights. Feminist scholars, however, have questioned definitions of democracy in which at minimal, women's political rights are absent. This brings into question the impact of intervention on the status of women. Particularly in both Iraq and Afghanistan women's rights have become prominent in the post-invasion American political rhetoric. Since intervention seems to be associated with the spread of democratic principles, we seek to discover whether intervention actually moves societies toward gender equality. We examine all six cases of completed military intervention aimed at nation building in sovereign states during the post Cold War period. Three of the cases,El Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia,evidence democratic change; whereas, the remaining three states,Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia,remain undemocratized. We test the extent to which intervention has or has not improved women's equality and find no dramatic effect, either positive or negative, of intervention on the status of women in any of the six states. [source] The Democratic Legitimacy of the European Union Committee SystemGOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2002Mark Rhinard This article investigates both the operation and the democratic legitimacy of the European Union committee system. This vast but rarely studied system is an important site of European governance, exercising an increasing amount of policy responsibility while also providing the essential arenas necessary for supranational problem solving. Despite their contribution to the success of the "European project," committees are increasingly coming under attack, notably for their lack of democratic credentials. The article employs original empirical research based on interviews and internal documentary evidence to answer a timely question: does the EU committee system strike an appropriate balance between the values of system effectiveness and democratic legitimacy? Following the application of a set of democratic principles to EU committees, the article finds that a poor balance has been struck between effectiveness and democracy. The article concludes with some operational suggestions for improving this balance in the short-to-medium term. [source] Explaining the Enforcement of Democracy by Regional Organizations: Comparing EU, Mercosur and SADCJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 3 2010ANNA VAN DER VLEUTEN Regional organizations sometimes intervene to preserve democracy in one of their Member States. When a regional organization has developed a democratic identity, non-intervention in case of violation of democratic principles would damage its credibility domestically and internationally. Nonetheless, violations of democratic principles sometimes go unsanctioned. Building on case studies of (non-)interventions by the EU, Mercosur and SADC, we show that the ideational costs of pressure by third parties and the interests of the regional leading powers can explain the enforcement of democracy by regional organizations. Third party pressure remains ineffective, however, when there is a clash between regional identities. [source] Social Citizenship in the European Union: Nested MembershipJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 1 2001Thomas Faist The ,European social dimension' offers a strategic entry point for analysing the development of citizenship in the European Union (EU). The first part of this contribution discusses the functions of social citizenship in this emerging multi-level governance network. Second, the analysis deals with two prominent and stylized paradigms that have sought to grasp the new multiple-level quality of social citizenship in the EU: residual and post-national concepts of membership in liberal democracies and advanced welfare states. Although each of these approaches captures selected elements of social citizenship, they are unable to deal with rights and duties in multiple governance levels in a satisfactory way. Therefore, the discussion moves to an alternative concept,nested citizenship. This means that European citizenship is nested in various sites: regional, state and supra-state forms of citizenship function in complementary ways,while the associated norms, rules and institutions are subject to constant revision and further development on all governance levels. Third, the analysis shows that the concept of nested citizenship can help to overcome the fruitless dichotomy of Euro-optimism and Euro-pessimism concerning social policy and citizenship. This discussion suggests a conception of European social citizenship as a common project, evolving towards common present- and future-oriented understandings of substantial rights and democratic principles in the EU. [source] The Right and the Righteous?JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 1 2001Domestic Politics, European Norms, the Sanctions Against Austria In February 2000, 14 EU Member States collectively took the unprecedented step of imposing bilateral sanctions on their Austrian EU partner. How can this be explained? Was it, as the 14 governments argued, because the inclusion in the Austrian government of Jörg Haider's extreme right FPö opposes many of the ideas making up the common identity of the EU? Or, were the sanctions motivated, as the Austrian government argued, by narrow-minded party political interests that lurked beneath the rhetoric of shared European norms and values? Our analysis suggests that, without the particular concerns about domestic politics of certain politicians, it is unlikely that the sanctions against Austria would have been adopted in this form. On the other hand, without the recent establishment of concerns about human rights and democratic principles as an EU norm, it is unlikely that these particular sanctions would have been adopted collectively by all member governments. Thus, while norms might have been used instrumentally, such instrumental use only works, in the sense of inducing compliant behaviour, if the norms have acquired a certain degree of taken-for-grantedness within the relevant group of actors or institution. [source] Australian Democracy and Priveleged Parliamentary SpeechPOLITICS, Issue 2 2001Lisa Hill This article responds to recent cases of parliamentary speech which reflect the ascendancy of a totalising ,mainstream' approach to public discourse and a political leadership that may, at times, be overly attentive to the majority-rule dimension of democracy. These developments spark a more general discussion of the phenomenology of privileged parliamentary speech, the role of speech freedoms in liberal democratic orders and the duties of parliamentary representatives within them. I make two general conclusions. First, the ways in which we normally argue and think about free speech will not generally apply to the speech of parliamentarians because their speech rights cannot be universalised. Secondly, even if parliamentary speech could be treated as standard speech there would be no legitimate defence (from a liberal democratic point of view) for a strictly populist approach to its use since this could undermine the deliberative function of parliament and lead to the violation of other important liberal democratic principles. [source] Judicial Hegemony: Dworkin's Freedom's Law and the Spectrum of Constitutional DemocraciesRATIO JURIS, Issue 3 2002Brian Donohue Ronald Dworkin's Freedom's Law offers a solution to a thorny problem in American constitutional law. He argues that the authority of the American Supreme Court to make the final determination on constitutional questions is consistent with democratic principles. In this paper, I try to show that his solution is unsatisfactory because it permits the possibility of a judicial usurpation of authority that is inconsistent with his characterization of democratic principles. Freedom's Law is also a bold attempt to offer prescriptions for constitutional democracies generally. By drawing a distinction between two concepts of authority, I object to this effort. I argue that Dworkin's analysis assumes the operation of a conception of authority that I label the pyramid model. I also introduce a bipolar model of authority and try to show its application to the Canadian constitutional scheme. On this basis, I conclude that his prescriptions are relevant only for a portion of the spectrum of constitutional democracies. [source] Local Knowledge as Trapped Knowledge: Intellectual Property, Culture, Power and PoliticsTHE JOURNAL OF WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Issue 1 2008Chidi Oguamanam Discourses of local knowledge and categories of rights claimants thereto are embroiled in complex conceptual and analytical morass. The conceptual quandary around local knowledge is diversionary from the historically rooted hierarchies of culture, power and politics that have subjugated it. Claims to local knowledge are challenged from several dimensions, including arguments from cultural cosmopolitanism, intellectual property rights and aspects of liberal democratic principles. An interesting new site for this power play is the emergent bioprospecting framework of access and benefit sharing. In this context, sophisticated external intermediaries, who have asymmetrical power relationships with custodians of local knowledge, now constitute a new threat to the genuine aspirations of indigenous and local communities. Recently, local knowledge claims are conflated with propertization of culture raising concerns over the asphyxiation of the public domain. Making the claims or claimants to local knowledge the scapegoats of our troubled public domain undermines the source of the problem. In a way, the current anemic state of our public domain can be blamed on unwholesome expansion of intellectual property and unidirectional appropriation of local knowledge by external interests. The reality of cultural cosmopolitanism requires an intellectual property order that is responsive to the contributions of local knowledge. [source] | |||||||||||||