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Representative Institutions (representative + institution)
Selected AbstractsThe Creation and Empowerment of the European Parliament*JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2003Berthold Rittberger Up until now we have lacked a systematic, theoretically guided explanation of why the European Union, as the only system of international governance, contains a powerful representative institution, the European Parliament, and why it has been successively empowered by national governments over the past half century. It is argued that national governments' decisions to transfer sovereignty to a new supranational level of governance triggers an imbalance between procedural and consequentialist legitimacy which political elites are fully aware of. To repair this imbalance, proposals to empower the European Parliament play a prominent though not exclusive role. Three landmark events are analysed to assess the plausibility of the advanced theory: the creation of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, the acquisition of budgetary powers (Treaty of Luxembourg, 1970) and of legislative powers through the Single European Act (1986). [source] Iron ladies, men of steel: The effects of gender stereotyping on the perception of male and female candidates are moderated by prototypicalityEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2009Joris Lammers Women remain a minority in politics. In nearly all countries, including parliamentary democracies, women are still underrepresented in national parliament and other representative institutions. Research has argued that there is a bias against women in elections. Here we study the process behind this phenomenon by investigating the effect of a candidate's gender and gender prototypicality on judgment of the suitability of this candidate in elections. The first experiment shows that when voters think topics that stereotypically demand male characteristics (e.g., competitiveness) are important, they prefer male candidates, while they prefer female candidates when topics that stereotypically demand female characteristics (e.g., pro-sociability) are important. Experiment 2 replicates this and shows that this effect is fully reversed for counterprototypical (i.e., in physical appearance) candidates. This supports a stereotyping as prediction account, and has important theoretical and practical implications. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Manufacturing Reputations in Late Eighteenth-Century BirminghamHISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 181 2000Nigel Stirk This article examines the importance of local reputation and collaborative commercial politics for the business practices of individuals in industrializing Birmingham. It is suggested that shared ideas about quality standards, free trade and the national interest were instrumental in encouraging businessmen to work together to establish local representative institutions. Furthermore, these normative conceptions of how trade should be conducted reflected particular interpretations of the history of Birmingham and of individual enterprise. It is concluded that the particular geography of a provincial town was central to the application of principles and abstract ideas. [source] Changing sources of support for women's political rights*INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 184 2005Katherine Meyer Much research investigating changes in women's political rights focuses on the presence or absence of improvement that is evident in national and international policies or on gender proportionality in representative institutions at international, national, and local levels. Public opinion about women's rights is an important corollary to this research because it underpins the legitimacy of policies and representative bodies. However, if examined alone, changes in public opinion over time yield an incomplete picture of women's situation, just as changes in policies and representation do. Factors that lie behind statistics about trends in women's rights matter, and it is essential to figure out if the sources of support for women's political rights shift over time. We employed data from Kuwait in the years surrounding the Beijing +5 conference to illustrate how the absence of change in public opinion about women's rights can hide important social dynamics that figure into the development of policies and practices affecting women. Whereas support for women's rights was evident among the most numerous and advantaged Kuwaiti citizens in 1994, it rested less with the general public and more with citizens involved in social networks and those who had particular political and cultural agendas by 1998. [source] Moral Pluralism, Political Justification and Deliberative DemocracyPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2000Ian Chowcat We can make progress in political justification if we avoid debates about the extent of moral pluralism. Just by having a political view we are committed to its realization but also to its defence upon justifying grounds. It would be inconsistent to seek to realize my view in ways that undermined my ability to justify it. Yet justifying a view implies that I am open to challenges to it, and that perpetually draws me potentially into dialogue with all others, regardless of my will, and into structures which allow an inclusive dialogue to take place, with decisions being made, on the basis of open public discussion, with which I may disagree. Thus a form of deliberative democracy, probably with representative institutions, is justified, without any normative assumptions being made. [source] Front and Back Covers, Volume 23, Number 5.ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 5 2007Ocotober 200 Front and back covers caption, volume 23 issue 5 Front cover The front cover illustrates Julie J. Taylor's article on the outcome of the San people's court case against the Botswana government. The photo shows Roy Sesana, leader of the San organization First People of the Kalahari and chief appellant in the case, with Gordon Bennett, the San group's lawyer, at the start of the case in July 2004. In the course of the last century, the San or Bushmen of southern Africa became possibly the most studied indigenous group in the world. In addition to suffering land dispossession and violence during the colonial period, their image in the West has long been that of exotic and innocent ,Other', fuelled over time by the work of scientists, anthropologists and filmmakers among others. In recent years the San have become part of wider debates about indigeneity, poverty and development, often in relation to land rights. Many San have formed their own representative institutions and have also entered into relationships with national and international NGOs to campaign for their rights as an indigenous minority. From 2004, San claims to land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana drew unprecedented attention in the international media, due in part to the efforts of local NGOs and the British-based advocacy group Survival International. After protracted court proceedings and much controversy, the case finally came to an end in late 2006. At first sight the outcome appeared to offer victory to San applicants, but matters in the Central Kalahari are far from resolved, raising questions about the role of advocacy groups and the fate of marginalized San groups elsewhere. Back cover (IM)PERSONAL MONEY Roboti of Giribwa Village, Trobriand Islands (above) is seen wearing the armshell Nanoula and the necklace Kasanai. Both have been circulating in the kula for at least a century and were already famous when Malinowski saw them. He was sure that these valuables were not money because they were not an impersonal medium of exchange, but Marcel Mauss, in a long footnote to The gift, wrote: ,On this reasoning there has only been money when precious things have been really made into currency , namely have been inscribed and impersonalised, and detached from any relationship with any legal entity, whether collective or individual, other than the state that mints them, One only defines in this way a second type of money , our own.' This exchange was in some ways the high point of economic anthropology. The world of national currencies issued and controlled by states and banks must now come to terms with innumerable virtual instruments such as those seen flashing on the screens of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (below). But, as the current ,sub-prime mortgage' crisis shows, these anonymous money instruments are still closely linked to personal credit. The challenge facing anthropologists today is to renew the legacy of Mauss and Malinowski in ways that illuminate such matters of universal practical concern. In this issue, Keith Hart argues that money, like society itself, is and always has been both personal and impersonal. A pragmatic anthropology should aim to show that the numbers on people's financial statements constitute a way of summarizing their relations with society at a given time. The next step is to explain how these numbers might serve in building a viable personal economy. When we are able to take responsibility for our own economic actions, we will understand better the social forces impinging on our lives. Then it will become more obvious how and why ruling institutions need to be reformed for all our sakes. [source] Populisms old and new: the Peruvian case,BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2000John Crabtree Abstract President Fujimori is often seen as exemplary of the Latin American "neopopulist". Having inherited a country in crisis, he managed to engineer profound changes in the economic sphere, legitimising his government through a direct rapport with the mass of the population that marginalised representative institutions. This article seeks to place this "neopopulism" in an historical context by focusing on the socio-economic and political characteristics that have sustained a tradition of populism in Peru. It argues that "top-down" styles of political mobilisation have long had a debilitating effect on the development of a representative party system, and that populist traits can be traced through regimes of widely differing ideological orientations. [source] Legislatures, Legitimacy and Crises: The Relationship Between Representation and Crisis ManagementJOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2010Alastair Stark This article presents a theoretical argument that the study of representation can yield important insights for crisis analysts. The argument is presented through a claim that the representative systems, legislatures and individuals of a state , defined here broadly as ,representative institutions', should be factored into political analyses of crisis management, as they provide a lens for novel explorations of crisis issues. In particular, the use of parliamentary perspectives, and the examination of specific legislature functions during crises, can lead to valuable insights into the legitimacy dynamics that characterize political crisis episodes. [source] | ||||||||||