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Political Culture (political + culture)
Selected AbstractsDemocrats 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] Tobias Smollett's ,Ode to Independence' and Georgian Political CultureJOURNAL FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES, Issue 1 2003MATTHEW McCORMACK First page of article [source] 4.,Can Historical Responsibility Strengthen Contemporary Political Culture?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Article first published online: 18 FEB 200, Jenny Tillmanns This paper deals with the question of historical responsibility. It can be subdivided into whether historical responsibility exists, consequently what it is about, and then how it can be put into practice. I am raising these questions as a third-generation German against the background of the Holocaust. In this paper I unfold various views and thus dimensions of historical responsibility, which I finally complement in the form of six models of historical responsibility. These models provide a multilayered perspective on and approach to the philosophical and practical dimensions of historical responsibility and, as a consequence, are of relevance to contemporary political culture. [source] Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War by K. A. CuordileonePEACE & CHANGE, Issue 1 2007Andrea Friedman First page of article [source] Political Culture in Israel in the Era of Peace: The Jewish Underground Organization and the Conscientious Objection Movement, 1979,1984PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2002Shlomo Reznik First page of article [source] National Threat and Political Culture: Authoritarianism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the September 11 AttacksPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2005Andrew J. Perrin This paper uses published letters to the editor of major U.S. newspapers to investigate the cultural effects of a major national threat: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It is based on a hand-coded, stratified random sample of 1,100 letters to the editor published in 17 major papers in the United States (544 pre-September 11, 556 post-September 11). The letters are drawn from a population of 8,101 published letters. Degrees of both authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism, as well as the general salience of questions of authoritarianism, rose significantly in the post-attack period. The paper suggests that, instead of a simple threat-authoritarianism causal link, authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism are paired elements of political culture that are invoked together in the face of a national threat. [source] The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany , By Jonathan ZatlinTHE HISTORIAN, Issue 2 2009Kristie Macrakis No abstract is available for this article. [source] When Children Kill: Penal Populism and Political Culture by D.A. Green and Child Pornography and Sexual Grooming: Legal and Societal Responses by S. OstTHE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 2 2010DAVID WILSON No abstract is available for this article. [source] The Role of Mexico's Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture: From Tlatelolco to the "Philanthropic Ogre" by John KingTHE LATIN AMERICANIST, Issue 2 2009Nathanial Gardner No abstract is available for this article. [source] When Popular Participation Won't Improve Service Provision: Primary Health Care in UgandaDEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 2 2005Frederick Golooba-Mutebi Advocates of participatory approaches to service delivery see devolution as key to empowering people to take charge of their own affairs. Participation is portrayed as guaranteeing the delivery of services that are in line with user preferences. It is assumed that people are keen to participate in public affairs, that they possess the capacity to do so, and that all they need is opportunities. Using evidence from ethnographic research in Uganda, this article questions these views. It shows that, to succeed in the long term, devolution and participation must take place in the context of a strong state, able to ensure consistent regulation, and a well-informed public backed up by a participatory political culture. [source] Monetary circulation in Central Europe at the beginning of the early modern period: attempts to establish a shared currency as an aspect of the political culture of the 16th century (1524,1573) , By Petr VorelECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2007Ian Blanchard No abstract is available for this article. [source] Differentiating the democratic performance of the WestEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2003JOE FOWERAKER It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructed Database of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the ,rest'. The Database is designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy. [source] Does a critical mass exist?EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2002A comparative analysis of women's legislative representation since 1950 It has often been argued theoretically that a ,critical mass,' ranging from 10 to 35 per cent women, is needed before major changes in legislative institutions, behaviour, policy priorities and policy voting occurs. This paper examines one of the less-explored dimensions of the critical mass concept: Is there a process by which women reaching a critical mass of the legislature accelerates the election of further women? Using data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union and International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, we analyze this question for 20 industrialized democracies over a period of half a century, longer than any other relevant research. Descriptive results indicate that gains in women's representation have been incremental rather than a critical mass accelerating the election of women to legislatures. In a multivariate analysis of the percentage of women in the lower house of the legislature, the critical mass is tested against established explanations of women's gains in seats: institutional rules, egalitarian political culture, political parties and economic development. Of two measures of the critical mass theory, one has no impact and the second results in only a small increase in women's gains. Far from being clearly demonstrated, critical mass theories need empirical testing. [source] Identity Politics and the Domestic Context of Turkey's European Union AccessionGOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 4 2006Necati Polat This article observes a transformation in the largely essentializing, decontextualized form of identity politics that long defined political cosmology in Turkey, now in the process of negotiating accession to the European Union (EU). Accordingly, identity politics , not only the bread and butter of both Kurdish nationalism and Islamism, but also a justification for exhortations towards a limited, authoritarian democracy by Kemalists, the major power holders , is receding in favour of a civic, non-divisive political culture enabled by the EU anchorage. In danger of losing the longstanding centre,periphery configuration in an enhanced, participatory democracy and, concomitant with it, the periphery clientelism created by the waning identity politics, Kemalist nationalists, Islamists and Kurdish separatists appear to have stopped squabbling among themselves and joined forces against Turkey's EU bid. [source] Household, politics and political morality in the reign of Henry VIIHISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 217 2009David Grummitt Late fifteenth-century England, it has recently been suggested, experienced its own ,pre-Machiavellian moment', when the rules of politics and political morality were redefined in the crucible of civil war. Moreover, this was part of a wider western European shift in the nature of politics and one with which Henry, as an exile in Brittany and France, was personally acquainted. The Spanish ambassador's comment, therefore, that the king wished to rule in the ,French fashion' can be interpreted in terms of politics and morality as well as government and administration. This article will argue that the redefinition of political morality in Henry's reign centred upon a redefinition of the nature of the household and the role of household servants. It was manifested through changes in the institution of the royal household itself (the development of the privy chamber and financial machinery of the chamber) and through conflict over the role and meaning of the household. The unease and crisis around this redefinition of one of the cornerstones of late medieval political and social life was also reflected in discourse, such as in the poems of Skelton and in contemporary chronicles. Despite this disquiet, the alteration in political culture was lasting and defined the practice of politics throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century. [source] ,The pooreste and sympleste sorte of people'?HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 208 2007The selection of parish officers during the personal rule of Charles I The successful implementation of Charles I's personal rule relied much on the co-operation of parish officers whose workload increased significantly in the sixteen-thirties. There is little evidence that the mounting pressure and conflicting loyalties Charles I's reform projects caused resulted in widespread unwillingness to serve as parish officer or led to a changing social composition among office-holders. Local customs continued to determine the appointments of officers. The frequent use of rotas in allocating parish offices, the fact that many parishioners served several terms of office, and the presence of men from all social strata of local communities among parish officers all suggest that Caroline parochial government was considerably inclusive and that the village élites continued to serve for crown and parish. Consequently, parish offices, including the demanding office of petty constable, did not experience a loss of prestige during the personal rule, but parishioners served because they accepted their turn or appreciated the status of the office. Many contemporaries may also have valued parish offices because they provided opportunities to adapt government policies to the political culture of the parish and to enforce only selectively some of the controversial schemes of the sixteen-thirties. [source] Steps toward nationhood: Henry Laurens (1724,92) and the American Revolution in the South*HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 200 2005James J. Kirschke Henry Laurens's political career ranks among the South's crucial contributions to the Revolution and American nationhood, contributions that historians have largely neglected. This article attempts to estimate this Southern role through an examination of Laurens's life and letters, and the political culture of his home state, South Carolina. Laurens and others in the South, despite an incongruous commitment to slavery, gave the emerging nation a distinctly Southern stamp by advocating state federalism, the sovereignty of the people through democratic legislature, and a strong executive. [source] ,A Very Sensible Man': Imagining Fatherhood in England c.1750,1830HISTORY, Issue 319 2010JOANNE BAILEY Fathers are at once everywhere and nowhere in the historiography of eighteenth-century England. They interact with children in family history, bear authority in histories of women, gender and marriage, use the role to demonstrate virility, and the capacity for household mastery and citizenship in the history of masculinity, and are metaphors in political culture. Yet there is little sustained work on what constituted the key attributes of fatherhood before 1830. This article shows that the ideal father in the period c.1750 to 1830 was tenderly affectionate, sensitized and moved by babies; he provided hugs, material support and a protective guiding hand. Engrossed in his offspring to the exclusion of much else apart from his wife and national duties, he offered his children a moral example and instruction and possessed a deep understanding of his children's personalities. The genesis of this imagined fatherhood lay in fundamental eighteenth-century concerns about social, class, gender and familial relationships, and national strength. His form and the language used to describe him owed much to the combined forces of the culture of sensibility and of general Christian ideals antedating Evangelical revival. [source] Henry VII in Context: Problems and PossibilitiesHISTORY, Issue 307 2007STEVEN GUNN Clearer understanding of Henry VII's reign is hindered not only by practical problems, such as deficiencies in source material, but also by its liminal position in historical study, at the end of the period conventionally studied by later medievalists and the beginning of that studied by early modernists. This makes it harder to evaluate changes in the judicial system, in local power structures, in England's position in European politics, in the rise of new social groups to political prominence and in the ideas behind royal policy. However, thoughtful combination of the approaches taken by different historical schools and reflection on wider processes of change at work in Henry's reign, such as in England's cultural and economic life, can make a virtue out of Henry's liminality. Together with the use of more unusual sources, such an approach enables investigation for Henry's reign of many themes of current interest to historians of the later Tudor period. These include courtly, parliamentary and popular politics, political culture, state formation and the interrelationships of different parts of the British Isles and Ireland. [source] Sovereignty, Supremacy and the Origins of the English Civil WarHISTORY, Issue 288 2002D. Alan Orr This article integrates the concept of sovereignty with religious perceptions of misrule in the years leading up to the English Civil War. Existing revisionist narratives have emphasized the consensual nature of early Stuart political culture, especially the central role of the ,common law mind' in determining the proper place of potentially rival political vocabularies of natural law, civil law and absolutism. This article argues alternatively that the concept of sovereignty and in particular the contested relationship of sovereignty to ecclesiastical governance stood at the centre of the emerging conflict. The primary mode of ,opposition' to the policies of Charles I's personal rule (1629,40) was erastian: it presumed that control over the doctrine and discipline of the established church was for all intents and purposes a mark or right of sovereignty in the same manner as power of war and peace, power of appointing magistrates, or coinage. Seen in this light the ecclesiastical innovations of the personal rule constituted a treasonable attempt on the part of the Laudian episcopate to erect an ecclesiastical state within a state. The English Civil War was a war of religion in the sense that a significant number of those who waged it operated under the assumption that religion was the rightful provenance of the civil magistracy of king in parliament. [source] The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United StatesHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2003Gerald Zahavi Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a "systematic" revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over-reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the "new political history",an attempt to apply social-science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history,as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War-era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex-Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed,in part,out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth-century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra-class versus inter-class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social-science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade-long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left-wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo-Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. [source] Trauma, ideology, and the future of democracyINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES, Issue 2 2006Nancy Caro Hollander Abstract This article uses aspects of psychoanalytic theory to explain how the convergence of unconscious mechanisms and ideology in the post-9/11 political culture enabled the US government to secure consensual support for domestic and foreign policies that attack democracy and make the world more dangerous rather than safer. The author argues that the Kleinian and Lacanian traditions, along with critical social theory, shed light on the psychopolitical dynamics of a bystander population and help to explain the psychic and social factors that permit the emergence of critical social conscience. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Democratic Leaders and the Democratic Peace: The Operational Codes of Tony Blair and Bill ClintonINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2006MARK SCHAFER Do the beliefs of leaders make a significant difference in determining if democracies are peaceful and explaining why democracies (almost) never fight one another? Our comparisons of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton reveal that both leaders view democracies as more friendly than nondemocracies, and they have significantly less cooperative beliefs toward the latter than toward the former, a difference that extends to the behavior of their respective governments during the Kosovo conflict. We also find that individual differences in the operational codes of the two leaders matter in the management of conflict with nondemocracies; the leaders exhibit opposite leadership styles and behavior associated with the domestic political culture of the two states. Overall, these results support the dyadic version of the democratic peace and suggest that the conflict behavior of democratic states depends upon the beliefs and calculations of their leaders in dealing with nondemocracies. [source] The Nexus of Market Society, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace: Interdisciplinary Theory and EvidenceINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2003Michael Mousseau Drawing on literature from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, an interdisciplinary theory is presented that links the rise of contractual forms of exchange within a society with the proliferation of liberal values, democratic legitimacy, and peace among democratic nations. The theory accommodates old facts and yields a large number of new and testable ones, including the fact that the peace among democracies is limited to market-oriented states, and that market democracies,but not the other democracies,perceive common interests. Previous research confirms the first hypothesis; examination herein of UN roll call votes confirms the latter: the market democracies agree on global issues. The theory and evidence demonstrate that (a) the peace among democratic states may be a function of common interests derived from common economic structure; (b) all of the empirical research into the democratic peace is underspecified, as no study has considered an interaction of democracy with economic structure; (c) interests can be treated endogenously in social research; and (d) several of the premier puzzles in global politics are causally related,including the peace among democracies and the association of democratic stability and liberal political culture with market-oriented economic development. [source] A Socio-Political and -Cultural Model of the War in Afghanistan1INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2010Armando Geller We present a simulation model of current conflict-torn Afghanistan in which a system-dynamics model is coupled with an agent-based model. Agent-based modeling techniques are applied to model individual cognition and behavior as well as group formation processes. System-dynamics modeling is used for representing macro conflict processes, such as duration of violence and combat success ratio. The cognitive and behavioral processes are couched in a socio-cultural context and feed into the system dynamics processes. This affords us exploring the relationship between local socio-culturally-driven cognition and behavior and (dynamic) macro properties of armed conflict. We demonstrate the importance of analyzing conflict-torn Afghanistan from an interplay of adapting "traditional" socio-cultural mechanisms, political culture and power structures, and politico-economic macro-processes. We find that variations in the conflict's superstructure can be explained through variations in socio-culturally dependent structures. The model indicates limitations with regard to classical prediction, but is promising with regard to explanatory-driven pattern forecasting. [source] Islam and Human Rights: A Case of Deceptive First AppearancesJOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 2 2002Daniel Price It is a common belief that Islamic-based government, when serving as an ideological foundation for government, facilitates the poor protection of human rights. However, most studies of the relationship between Islam and individual rights have been at the theoretical and anecdotal levels. In this article, I test the relationship between Islam and human rights across a sample of 23 predominately Muslim countries and a control group of non-Muslim developing nations, while controlling for other factors that have been shown to affect human rights practices. I found that the influence of Islamic political culture on government has a statistically insignificant relationship with the protection of human rights. [source] Civil Society or the State?: Recent Approaches to the History of Voluntary WelfareJOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2002Alan Kidd Since the 1970s a drift away from state corporatist solutions to social welfare problems has had its parallel in an academic rediscovery of the voluntary sector. Revived confidence in non,statutory approaches often assumes two things. Firstly, that voluntary action is a vital component in civil society and that civil society itself is an attribute of liberal democracy. These ideas are central to the perceived ,crisis of the welfare state'. They are also related to debates about political culture and the future of democracy with the institutions of civil society cast positively as ,schools of citizenship'. Secondly, it is frequently assumed that there is an opposition in principle between the voluntary and the statutory and in some quarters an assumption (reversing an earlier presumption about the rationality of state welfare) that voluntary action is the superior mechanism (at least morally). The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, I want to reflect on the revival of interest in the role of the institutions of civil society in the history of welfare provision. Second, I will survey some recent approaches to voluntary action and ,civil society'. Third, in the process of this survey I discuss the relevance of these approaches to the study of past states of welfare. [source] State, Citizen, and Character in French Criminal ProcessJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2006Stewart Field This paper charts some major differences in the way in which evidence of the defendant's character is treated in France when compared with practice in England and Wales. Such evidence is more pervasive and visible (especially in the most serious cases) and its relevance is more broadly defined. Further, its presentation is shaped by a developed and positive conception of the French citizen. In part, these differences may be explained by differences in procedural tradition: the unitary trial structure in France, the dominance of fact,finding by the professional judiciary, and the rejection of general exclusionary rules of evidence. But a full explanation requires French legal culture to be understood in the context of French political culture. This reveals a very different conception of relations between state and citizen to that of Anglo-Saxon liberalism. As a result the legitimacy of trial is seen in terms of the rehabilitation of the accused as a citizen of the state rather than simply the punishment of a particular infraction. [source] A Reform Without Losers: The Symbolic Economy of Civil Service Reform in Uruguay, 1995,96LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2004Francisco Panizza ABSTRACT This article analyzes the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions in the 1996 reform of the civil service in Uruguay. Beneath the appearance of a process led by technocratic principles, the reform's agenda and content were shaped by legitimating principles, strongly institutionalized interests, and the political legacy of earlier failed reform attempts. Reformers sought a strategy of a reform "without losers," which, instead of gathering support for adoption and implementation, sought to minimize opposition. This deliberately low-profile strategy left people unaware of the reform's achievements and thereby reinforced a political culture that has made resistance to change both a political virtue and an inescapable condition. [source] Conspiracy, history, and therapy at a Berlin StammtischAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2006DOMINIC BOYER In this article, I analyze conspiratorial knowledge in discussions of East German politics and history around a Berlin Stammtisch (regulars' table). The Stammtisch is a venerable, mostly masculine institution of German political culture that defines an intimate fraternal space within which social knowledge and political judgments are articulated, negotiated, and contested. Here, I am particularly interested in how talk of the "covert agencies" and "hidden relations" operating behind the scenes of political life in East Germany merged with more general and contemporary concerns about the relationship of Germanness to history. Whereas other anthropologists have emphasized the importance of conspiratorial knowledge as a mode of revealing otherwise obscure social and historical forces, I show how, in this context, conspiratorial knowledge operates in a different way to displace, dampen, or interrupt associations of contemporary Germanness with an imagined cultural inheritance of authoritarianism. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||