Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times offers a unique and timely reflection of the critical debates around the institutionalisation of feminist and gender-focused ideas and norms into policy. Many states and non-governmental organisations are increasingly invested in 'feminist policymaking' at the domestic and international levels. Yet, this liberal (feminist) agenda is also vastly disputed by critical, intersectional and decolonial voices on the one hand, and by anti-gender movements around the world on the other. Indeed, while opposition to 'gender ideology' is mounting (...) from reactionary, religious and secular forces, feminist policymaking is also being challenged in important ways from within. Thus, this book situates feminist policymaking in a challenging and 'turbulent', global context. This book explores feminist policymaking in multiple areas of policy, examining various gender-focused programmes that states and international organisations have undertaken in the last decade, offering critical interventions and rethinking the relationship between feminism and policy. The book not only reflects on the advances of feminist policymaking globally, but also critically assesses the intersectional challenges embedded within it and lying ahead. It moves the field forward by creating opportunities, based on lived experiences, for re-imagining the transformative potential of the nexus between feminism and policymaking. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing to the fore the voices of both academics and practitioners, the book is the product of an international collaboration, forging links and dialogue that are increasingly necessary to question some of the exclusionary, militaristic and hierarchical assumptions of policymaking which is labelled as feminist. Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times will be of interest to all scholars, students and practitioners interested in the role of gender in policymaking and concerned with contestations around gender-focused projects. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore and understand the Albanian Party System. The analysis will cover the period from the collapse of the communist regime in 1991 until 2014. It will try to investigate what forces drive the battle of the parties, what cleavages 'divide' society and consequently the party system as well as which are the parties that count the most. in order to assess this, the paper will focus on the parliamentary parties and will relay on (...) various theoretical concepts of the contemporary literature on political parties. First it will draw on Sartori's concept of 'relevance' in order to understand whether all the parliamentary parties over the course of twenty four years of pluralism are important or not and what weight do they have. Then it will use the Laakso - Taagepera index of the Effective Number of Parties to understand how power is distributed within the parliament. (shrink)

Elements of the relation between religion and politics are standard themes in political theory: toleration and free exercise rights; the parameters of separation of church and state; arguments for and against constraints imposed on religious discourse by philosophic norms of public reason. But religious parties and partisanship are no part of political theory, despite contemporary interest in value pluralism and in liberal democratic theory's capacity to address multicultural, religious, and ethnic group claims. This essay argues that religious parties are missing (...) elements in discussions of identity politics. They play an important role not just in expressing but also in constructing and mobilizing religious political identity. Political activity linked to parties is a principal way of bringing diffuse, politically unorganized groups, whose leaders are self-appointed and not regularly accountable for the way they represent co-religionists in political life, into the democratic mainstream. With political organization and especially partisanship, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes. (shrink)

Thinkers committed to an ideal of public reason are suspicious of religiously informed political activity as it undermines democratic political legitimacy. This paper considers Jürgen Habermas’s recent shifts on this question in light of the history of Europe’s religious parties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These parties made a real and lasting contribution to Europe’s democratization and their history suggests ways in which Habermas and other defenders of public reason misunderstand the nature of democratic political legitimacy.

This paper explores the theoretical basis of the third party’s duty of justice as to grave human rights violations, presenting role obligations as the best complement to the literature. It begins with discussions on agents of justice in duty-based theories, notably O’Neill’s account on global justice, and rights-based theories, which are both included in the institution-centred perspective. I claim that these studies have failed to consider an individual duty bearer’s motive, autonomous reasoning and integrity in relation to justice, all of (...) which constitute serious lacunae for the effective accomplishment of responsibility. To supplement, I introduce the distinction between responsibility and commitment, and acknowledge that combining the two is the desirable condition for recognising the duty of justice. Finally, I argue that the role obligations undertaken through personal acceptance of an institution-based role or a commitment-based role related to human rights norms adequately explain third parties’ duty to protect others from serious harm. (shrink)

Modern democracy is impossible without political parties. They are necessary in the process of the construction of the political class and building of relations between politicians and ‘ordinary people’. So, in Poland in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries the significance of parties is also very important. Their history is older than the history of the reborn Poland. Especially in Galicia, an autonomous province of the Hapsburg empire, we can see the activities of many politicians. A part of them in (...) 1895 declared the birth of the Popular Party which is a constant element of the Polish political scene. The second traditional current is the socialistic movement, which is also always legally active in Poland. These two camps represent, in simplification, the ‘two Polands’—the first more traditional, conservative and provincial, and the second more progressive, ‘European’ and urban. Actually, in the typical consciousness of a Polish citizen, the political representation of the ‘black’ country is the party Law and Justice of Jarosław Kaczyński, and the ‘red’ country admires the Citizen Platform with Donald Tusk as a leader. But probably the idea of a twoparty system, like in the Anglo-Saxon world, is still very distant to reality, because in the European continent, the tradition of pluralism in a policentric version is still very significant. In Poland, even in the period of the ‘real socialism’ this conception of the organization of political life was realized, though naturally in the specific version. There were three legal parties and the Polish United Workers’ Party (the PUWP) was the most important. From 1976, the PUWP in the light of the Constitution had the official hegemony in the Republic. It is possible to compare this situation with the period 1926–39, when, after the coup d’état by Marshal Piłsudski, the Government still won in the election and the official elite wanted to create a stable political force with a perspective of permanent rule. But we must remember that between the wars opposition always was legal. In our times of demoliberalism, this is quite normal (though under the Constitution, unconstitutional parties, for example, communist or fascist, are unacceptable); however, interesting is the fact that when you observe sine ira et studio the evolutional trend of the Polish political system, you easily find the tendency of the ‘stabilization’ of the party system in the way of legal operations. From 1997, the laws concerning political parties have changed the possibilities of the conquest of seats in the Seym. Actually, only the parties having 5 per cent (or 8 per cent in coalition) of votes can gain the representation in the Diet. So it is possible to claim that the little parties today are in a more complicated situation than in the first years after the ‘operation of Round Table’ in 1989. The contemporary system is maybe more stable, but less liberal. There are theoreticians who note the danger of the alienation of the political class in the situation of the renewal of the alienation of the political elite, which de facto is more connected with the state than with the society. Many theoreticians emphasize that in the future the role and the character of political structures will be profoundly different from today. Maybe they are prophets, but we can expect that the Polish political parties or ‘post-parties’ and also political structure as a whole will have many similarities with their actual equivalents, because the mentality of the Polish nation, including the politicians, is more or less enduring. (shrink)

Over the past four decades the world has seen a 'Green awakening'. Green parties have been elected to parliaments and councils all over the world, and in many cases have played a part in national and local government. A common set of Green priorities has been promoted by Green internationalisation and these parties are playing an increasing role at all levels of political decision-making. Will the Green awakening continue or will Greens be corrupted by power? What impact has Green politics (...) had? Will Green thinking be able to compete with other ideologies in coping with the problems of the 21st century? Green Parties, Green Future analyses these issues on the basis of the experience of Green parties from all parts of the world. Per Gahrton, a sociologist and veteran of Green politics, provides the whole story of the expansion and development of the Greens worldwide, from local environmental groups to national and global decision-makers. This is essential reading for anyone who is or wants to be involved in a political movement that is challenging the more traditional parties for a progressive future. (shrink)

The present text aims at mapping out a synopsis of the main political parties from Romania after 1989 on the one hand, and at pointing out the way in which their activity interferes with religion, on the other hand. To this point we have endeavored to place emphasis on the role played by the church within the Romanian society, as well as the main paths of influence the clerical representatives may exert upon the political life, occasionally voluntarily, yet involuntarily for (...) the most part. (shrink)

Some societies tolerate or encourage high levels of chickenpox infection among children to reduce rates of shingles among older adults. This tradeoff is unethical. The varicella zoster virus (VZV) causes both chickenpox and shingles. After people recover from chickenpox, VZV remains in their nerve cells. If their immune systems become unable to suppress the virus, they develop shingles. According to the Exogenous Boosting Hypothesis (EBH), a person’s ability to keep VZV suppressed can be ‘boosted’ through exposure to active chickenpox infections. (...) We argue that even if this hypothesis were true, immunization policies that discourage routine childhood varicella vaccination in order to prevent shingles for other people are unethical. Such policies harm children and treat them as mere means for the benefit of others, and are inconsistent with how parents should treat their children and physicians should treat their patients. These policies also seem incompatible with institutional transparency. (shrink)

In this letter, the author denounces the hypocrisy of members of the Israeli Peace Now Movement, who seem surprised, even angry, at the eruption of a second Intifada in the Occupied Territories. “A conquering army is using tanks and helicopter gunships to disperse demonstrations. What is so hard to understand here?... Seven years of deceptions and violations of agreements, and the Palestinians rise up. What is so hard to grasp?” he asks.

This book explores the goals, strategies and impact of Green actors in the European Community, with case studies including the important German Greens. It looks at the relationship between movements and parties, and at the Greens' alternative of a Europe of the Regions.

SUMMARY The research focuses on the three main political parties in Albania, namely Socialist Party, Democratic Party and Socialist Movement for Integration. Its objectives are to measure the Intra-Party Democracy(IPD) in the Albanian political parties and to explore the meaning that party members attach to it. The IPD is understood and broken down into categories and sub-categories so that parties in particular and all interested actors in the field of political parties and democracy could understand, which component of IPD parties (...) are performing better and where they are performing worse. IPD is measured against two dimensions: inclusiveness and decentralization. Inclusiveness denotes the extent to which party members have the right to express their opinions and participate in the decision-making process. With decentralization is understood the process which makes possible the decentralization of the decision-making process from the highest national party level to party sub-national levels and party members. In a decentralized party, subnational party units enjoy a certain level of autonomy from the party in the center. The analysis is based on both primary and secondary data. Content analysis of party statutes particularly focuses on measuring IPD, while focus groups with party members and interviews with high-ranking officials of the political parties are used to explore the meaning that party members have on IPD, as well as validate content analysis findings. The main findings are: -/- Content Analysis of Party Statutes: Parties do have rules that govern their internal life, however these rules need to be improved in order to strengthen IPD. Especially problematic were the provisions for the role of the executive committee and party president, which provide these two institutions, especially the leader of the party with powers that don’t hold him/her accountable to the party members and middle level organs. Furthermore, members were not sufficiently involved in the procedures of candidate nominations for MPs, in the election of the national Executive and Executive Committee and in the election of the Party President. The analysis also finds that voting procedures are not sufficiently at place to allow members express their will and participate in the decision-making process and that members are not or little consulted in terms of programmatic issues. The analysis of the relationship between the national and subnational levels of party organization revealed that the center of the party has accumulated power to the detriment of the subnational units which enjoy little autonomy in the decision-making process. -/- Focus Groups and Interviews: The study finds that party members linked system-level democracy with IPD and that they have a very clear understanding if IPD: what it is and how it could be achieved. They linked IPD with the structure and organization of the party, seeing it as an important instrument that allows for decentralization of power and integration of rank and file into the decision-making process. The party members considered the statute as an important educational political tool and invoked it whenever disputes rose or decisions had to be taken. They linked IPD with the electoral system and considered that closed list proportional was a system that strengthened the power in the hands of the few at the party top executive level and weakened IPD. (shrink)

The risks to groups posed by research involving human beings—including genetics research—should be conceived of as a species of third-party risks. The important task of protecting third parties from the risks posed by the conduct and the findings of research should not be assigned to IRBs because they are not designed or equipped to handle such a broad responsibility. The serious problems raised by third-party risks require an integration of policy-making and regulation that is beyond the scope and competence of (...) IRBs. (shrink)

Class, Party, Social Movement - Class, « Race », Gender The ruling class is a hydra with two heads : “finance” and “elite”. The popular struggle for emancipation is thus not merely a confrontation between two classes. It is rather a game with three players. Itsultimate horizon is not “socialism”, a term which still carries the connotation of a “top-down” process,but “communism”. It presupposes the convergence between the apparently disparate conflicts whichare being played out in modern society. And, to begin, (...) the struggle calls for the deciphering – drawing on a concept from contemporary materialist feminism- of the “consubstiantiality” of the socialrelations of class, “race”, and gender. In such conditions, the party of emancipation is not merely aclass-based organisation. It is also, and equally, a feminist, an internationalist, and an ecological party.This party of social movement presupposes a “new ethos of party”. (shrink)

This article focuses on the relationship between social movements and political parties in the context of populist challenges to constitutional democracy. There are many reasons for the current plight of democracy but I focus here on one aspect: the decline of mainstream political parties, the emergence of new forms of populist movement parties and the general crisis of political representation in long consolidated Western democracies. This article analyses the specific political logic and dynamics of social movements – the logic of (...) influence, and distinguishes it from that of political parties – the logic of power. It addresses transformations in movements, parties and their relationships. It looks at the shifts in movement and party types that constitute the political opportunity structure for the emergence of new populist movement party forms and relationships, focusing on the hollowing out and movement-ization of political parties. Contemporary populist movement parties are not the cause of the hollowing out or movement-ization of political parties. Rather they are a response to the crisis of political representation exemplified by hollow parties and cartel parties. But it is my thesis that thanks to its specific logic, populism fosters the worst version of movement party relationships, undermining the democratic functions of both. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that only the victim of a wrong can forgive that wrong. Several philosophers have recently defended “third-party forgiveness,” the scenario in which A, who is not the victim of a wrong in any sense, forgives B for a wrong B did to C. Focusing on Glen Pettigrove's argument for third-party forgiveness, I will defend the victim's unique standing to forgive, by appealing to the fact that in forgiving, victims must absorb severe and inescapable costs of distinctive (...) kinds, a plight that third parties do not share. There are, nonetheless, significant, even essential, roles played by third parties in making forgiveness possible, reasonable, or valuable for victims of serious wrongs. I take a closer look at the links between victims, wrongdoers, resentment, and forgiveness in showing why the victim alone can forgive. (shrink)

Political parties have been the subject of a recent resurgent interest among political philosophers, with prominent contributions spanning liberal to socialist literatures arguing for a more positive appraisal of the role of parties in the operation of democratic representation and public deliberation. In this article, I argue for a similar re-evaluation of the role of political parties within contemporary republicanism. Contemporary republicanism displays a wariness of political parties. In Philip Pettit’s paradigmatic account of republican democracy, rare mentions of political parties (...) often stress their tendency to lead to factionalism or corruption. Others working in the republican tradition such as Richard Bellamy and Ian Shapiro provide more extended discussion of the role of parties, but limit their theoretical function to enabling electoral competition. I argue that political parties play a far more significant role in promoting non-domination than this. In addition to enabling electoral competition, I show that political parties are also essential to the effective operation of two other components of republican democracy: contestation and interest-formation. I further argue that understanding political parties in these terms is compatible with republican democracy more generally, addressing the worry that parties will produce factional rather than common-good oriented public decisions. (shrink)

Political parties seem inclined to dogmatism. Understanding party politics via a plural-subject account of collective belief explains this phenomenon. It explains inter-party outrage at slight deviations from the party line and dogged refusals to compromise. It also aligns with an alternative theory of political representation. I argue that party dogmatism is unlikely to change and can be a democratic good. I conclude that not parties but patriots counteract the democratic ills of dogmatic party politics.

Souvent considérée comme un point aveugle de son œuvre, la question du parti constitue pourtant une composante centrale de la pensée de Marx. En prenant en compte l’expérience militante qui fut la sienne tout au long de sa vie, cet article entreprend de montrer que Marx a développé non pas une mais deux théories du parti bien distinctes. La thèse décisive formulée à la fin des années 1840 dans le Manifeste du parti communiste – celle d’un parti communiste conçu comme (...) fraction éclairée d’un parti ouvrier plus large – disparaît en effet de l’horizon stratégique de Marx au cours des années 1860, cédant la place à une réflexion centrée sur la construction du parti de classe, dans laquelle l’idée même d’une distinction fonctionnelle entre parti ouvrier et parti communiste perd son sens. Opposant alors de façon systématique le parti à la secte, Marx cherche à penser les conditions de possibilité d’une activité politique autonome de la classe ouvrière plutôt qu’une organisation fondée sur une doctrine pré-constituée. (shrink)

While prior ecolabel research suggests that consumers’ trust of ecolabel sponsors is associated with their purchase of ecolabeled products, we know little about how third-party certification might relate to consumer purchases when trust varies. Drawing on cognitive theory and a stratified random sample of more than 1200 consumers, we assess how third-party certification relates to consumers’ use of ecolabels across different program sponsors. We find that consumers’ trust of government and environmental NGOs to provide credible environmental information encourages consumers’ use (...) of ecolabels sponsored by these entities, and consumers do not differentiate between certified versus uncertified ecolabels in the presence of trust. By contrast, consumers’ distrust of private business to provide credible environmental information discourages their use of business association-sponsored ecolabels. However, these ecolabels may be able to overcome consumer distrust if their sponsors certify the ecolabels using third-party auditors. These findings are important to sponsors who wish develop ecolabels that are more credible to consumers, and thus encourage more widespread ecolabel use. (shrink)

Often the target of uninformed or hostile criticism, the Enlightenment has been characterized as "shallow and pretentious intellectualism" and "unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition." In this provocative book--at once a scholarly study and a vigorous polemic--Peter Gay sets out to shatter old myths, to sort out illusion from reality, and to restore the men of the Enlightenment--Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot--to the esteem they deserve.The nine related essays in The Party of Humanity fall into three divisions: three are on Voltaire, presenting (...) the great philosophe as a tough-minded, realistic man of letters who tried to reshape his world, rather than as a merely brittle and shallow wit. Then, three essays discuss the French Enlightenment as a whole and seek for the unity underlying the diversity of tempers and attitudes among its leaders. The last three, which include Mr. Gay's well-known critique of Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, challenge some widely accepted views of the Enlightenment. The longest chapter here is a detailed examination of Rousseau and his reputation among his interpreters.What all nine essays have in common, apart from their portrayal of the philosophes as serious and engaged partisans of humanity, is that they are essays in the social history of ideas; they all treat ideas as inseparable from the specific social and cultural setting from which they emerge, and which they affect. (shrink)

From within a “systemic approach” to deliberative democracy, political parties can be seen as crucial actors in facilitating deliberation, by playing epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions that are central to the deliberative ideal. However, we point out that if we assume a purely outcome-oriented conception of the role of parties within a deliberative system, we risk losing sight of a central tenet of deliberative democracy and of its distinctive principle of legitimacy, namely, that citizens must be able to exercise critical (...) reflection on the grounds of democratic decisions. We argue that parties have a special responsibility in making a deliberative system meet this requirement, and that such special role can be fulfilled only if parties’ programs, values, and strategies are shaped through intra-party deliberation. On the grounds of this discussion, we define a model of intra-party deliberation that is based on the principles of mutual acceptability, pluralism, and publicity. (shrink)

This paper articulates a functionalist account of intra-party democracy (IPD). Like realist critics, we insist that IPD practices be evaluated on the basis of whether they facilitate resistance to domination and capture at the level of the polity as a whole, and therefore accept certain realist worries about IPD. Yet realists neglect the possibility that wealthy interests could control the political agenda by capturing all viable parties simultaneously-and that mass-facing IPD could counter this threat of oligarchic agenda capture. Taking this (...) as the key function of IPD within broader democratic systems, we conclude that inclusionary party reform is less urgent in more flexible party systems, where dissenters are better able to resist this threat from within the framework of inter-party competition. Regardless of the context, meanwhile, we also conclude that mass-facing IPD practices should aim at enabling ordinary members and supporters of a party to resist agenda capture by oligarchic interests. Though we stop short of defending any particular set of reforms, we reject the emphasis of recent IPD advocates on individualized forms of deliberative participation, in favor of a more oppositional and collectively-oriented approach-on the grounds that the latter is more likely to encourage the development of effective institutions of countervailing power. (shrink)

This paper challenges a common dogma of the literature on forgiveness: that only victims have the standing to forgive. Attacks on third-party forgiveness generally come in two forms. One form of attack suggests that it follows from the nature of forgiveness that third-party forgiveness is impossible. Another form of attack suggests that although third-party forgiveness is possible, it is always improper or morally inappropriate for third parties to forgive. I argue against both of these claims; third-party forgiveness is possible, and (...) in some cases it is morally appropriate for third parties to forgive (or refuse to forgive) wrongdoers for wrongs done to victims. I also propose an explanation of third parties’ standing to forgive: third parties have the standing to forgive when it is appropriate for them to take wrongs done to victims ‘personally’. While appropriately ‘taking a wrong personally’ does not require seeing oneself as a victim, it typically does require being in some form of personal relationship with victims. Thus, while the standing to forgive is not grounded exclusively in having been wronged, the prerogative to forgive is normally limited to victims and their loved ones. And once we recognize the importance of third-party forgiveness in our moral lives and the norms that govern it, we can more easily adjudicate between competing accounts of the nature of forgiveness.​. (shrink)

Third-party fairness maintenance could win some reputational benefits, and it includes two methods: punishment and compensation. We predicted that the third parties' preference between punishment and compensation are affected by whether they are free to choose between the two methods, and the affection could be interpreted through reputational benefits. The present study includes two sections. In Study 1, the participants acted as fourth parties who were asked to rate the reputations of the third parties who had chosen different response methods (...) to an unfair result of the dictator game. The results showed that there was no reputational difference between the two methods when third parties were not free to choose, but the reputation of compensation was better when third parties were free to choose. In Study 2, the participants acted as third parties. The participants were asked to choose a method to respond to an unfair result of the dictator game. There were two reputational contexts: secret and open. The results showed that when third parties were not free to choose, they had no preference between the two methods under the two reputational contexts, but when third parties were free to choose freely, they prefer punishment under the secret context but prefer compensation under the open context. This study systematically reveals a reputational interaction between fourth and third parties, and verifies the affection of reputational benefits on the third parties' preference between punishment and compensation. (shrink)

In parliamentary systems, legislative parties are the building blocks for executive coalitions. A standard assumption in the large literature on coalition politics is that legislative parties form fixed units from one election to the next. Under some conditions, however, this assumption falls flat. For instance, about one-fourth of legislators in the Italian lower house switched parties between 1996 and 2001. How is legislative party switching linked to the politics of executive coalitions? This paper examines how government composition affects the direction (...) of party switching, and how party switching affects the reallocation of cabinet office. I devote in-depth scrutiny to Italy. Subsidiary country cases, chosen to maximize institutional variation, are Australia, Britain, Canada, France, and Spain. (shrink)

This essay weaves together the history of political and legal thought, contemporary democratic theory, and recent debates in legal scholarship to examine the ambivalent relationship between political parties and democracy. Celebrated as a structural necessity for the mechanics of democratic government, political parties are also handled with suspicion for their hybrid nature—neither entirely public nor completely private—and for their always-possible regression into factions. Anti-factionalism, I show, has been a powerful ideal driving constitutional imagination and practice over the centuries, from antiquity (...) (with its emphasis on parts and its horror over factions), to the age of democratic revolutions (with its signature anxieties about divisions), up through the present. However, this long historical process has not extinguished the long-lived concern with the nature and implications of party spirit, nor has it made party democracy completely safe from revamped forms of factionalism. Two manifestations of factional politics stand out in the contemporary political landscape: authoritarian regime changes and populist constitutionalism. While the former is easy to diagnose but hard to prevent, the latter exemplifies a torsion of the constitutional and democratic imagination from within. Despite their differences, both scenarios remind us that constitutions need to envision mechanisms to prevent parties from undermining the liberal democratic order they have been designed to serve. At the same time, they call for renewed attention to the study of parties in the domains of democratic theory and constitutional scholarship. (shrink)

En partant du problème des partis, conçu comme un dialogue entre partenaires, nous ferons ressortir le tissage de sa structure avec des considérations religieuses et éthiques; puis nous reconsidérerons l’argument dit « du pari » en l’interprétant, mutatis mutandis, comme une préfiguration de la théorie des jeux plutôt que comme la résolution d’un problème de probabilité, ce qu’il est plus évidemment sous la plume de Fermat qui, à la limite, ne résout pas le même problème que Pascal, quoique les deux (...) épistoliers aient pu en avoir l’impression. (shrink)

The article uses the 2010 political success of the Tea Party phenomenon as a jumping-off point to examine a number of ideological tropes and rhetorical devices in American politics. It argues that the political language of the Tea Party is not – as is often assumed – empty moralizing at the expense of intellectual depth, but rather draws on a wide variety of American political and intellectual themes and traditions. The article uses the campaign literature and polemic of key Tea (...) Party affiliates – Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul – as entry points to discuss the movement’s political strategies and interpretation of the role of government, individual liberty, American exceptionalism, constitutionalism, the free market, and the common people. In placing these discussions in their historical and intellectual context, the article argues for taking the Tea Party’s political message seriously, not least as a reflection of prevalent democratic concerns and frustrations with the American political system in its current incarnation. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relation between communication and preservation of social norms guarded by third-party sanctions. In 2001 Jonathan Bendor and Piotr Swistak derived deductively the existence of such norms from a simple boundedly rational choice model. Their analysis was based on a perfect public information case. We take into account communication and analyse at the micro level the process of production and interpretation of information on which decisions are based. We show that when information is fully private and we (...) allow for communication a state of anomie can result. If some social control mechanisms are available, social stability can be maintained. The less efficient the social control mechanisms however, the more restrictive rules will be needed to sustain the social norms. Furthermore not all cognitive strategies for interpreting received messages are equally effective. Strategies based on reputation are better than strategies based on profit analysis. (shrink)

One under-theorized aspect of "multiculturalism and the antidiscrimination principle" is religious and ethnicity based political parties. With political organization, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes. When the struggle for empowerment is "waged within the world of democratic politics" it is waged through parties. That is the associational form modern democracies have settled on for participation, representation, and governing, and for countervailing power and regular opposition. Particularist parties and bloc voting are key instruments of political conflict and, (...) as important, of political integration. This Paper looks at the challenges these parties pose to democracy; specifically, at the principal reasons given for banning parties from participation in electoral politics. I identify four categories of justification for disqualification: violent overthrow, incitement to hate, altering the character of the nation, and outside support or control. This is a preliminary to setting out regulative principles of "defensive democracy.". (shrink)

Before proceeding, I would like to clarify briefly two interpretative premises, one methodological and one normative, which sustain my argument. Understanding the transformations facing constitutional democratic societies is a demanding task. These transformations, whose multiple causes are socio-economic not merely political, reflect on the one hand in the decline of mass party form of organization and on the other in the success of populism as not simply a movement of contestation but as a ruling power. In this article, I will (...) suggest that the successes of populism are connected to the decline of organized parties, the pillar of constitutional democracy as it emerged after 1945. It is impossible to predict whether populism will succeed in becoming the new form of democracy. It is, however, certain that contemporary representative governments are facing astonishing mutations and the decline of the party form of representative unification of claims and ideas is one of them. My argument relies upon a phenomenology of populism as a movement that is strong in proportion as organized parties are weak, which actually capitalizes on a revolt against intermediary bodies such as parties. 1. (shrink)

We analyze some normative relations as instances of a general schema of relations among a finite number of parties; in this schema parties can play various roles grouped into two main conceptual layers, called 'subject position' and 'object position'. Relying on the theoretical apparatus introduced, we develop a new symbolic representation for normative reasoning which constitutes an alternative to approaches available in the literature. Our contribution includes a semantic characterization for a series of logical systems built over the proposed framework.

In this paper, I do several things. First, I present a definition of ‘corruption’ as ‘abuse of power that builds or maintains the abuser’s power’, arguing that this definition is more generally applicable than other definitions offered in the literature and that it highlights a crucial property of corruption, namely its tendency to metastasise, presenting a more and more serious danger to society. To defend the emphasis I place on this tendency, I then argue that corruption (as commonly understood) frequently (...) produces three mechanisms pushing it to reproduce: self-perpetuation by the corrupt actors to protect themselves, formation of networks between corrupt actors which ensnare new participants, and normalisation of specific kinds of abuse of power in the corrupt actors’ social environments. From here, I turn to political parties, arguing that they present fertile soil for the mechanisms just described. In their stead, I argue for sortition—a system whereby legislators are randomly selected from the population at large. I make the case that each of the three metastatic mechanisms I have described would have much more difficulty taking root in a sortitional-democratic system than in an electoral-democratic one, before concluding by responding to a major potential objection to such a proposal’s feasibility—namely, that sortitional juries would be less competent than elected legislatures—and presenting a sketch of a sortitional-democratic system setting out how it could discharge the government’s executive functions, in addition to the legislative functions already covered. The paper as a whole, in addition to its explicit arguments, may be considered to make an implicit case for non-ideal over ideal theory, in that it attempts to show the importance of that quintessentially non-ideal factor, corruption, to the nature of any political order. (shrink)

Utility of third party funding is an undeniable fact, especially where a party is under financial strain, yet its increased usage in private arbitration has given rise to a number of substantive and procedural issues. In view of this, the present paper attempts to map the growing utility or otherwise of the mechanism of third party funding, and analyses its various nuances and legal sustainability within the framework of international arbitration. Further, an attempt is made to analyse the ways and (...) means of ameliorating the utility of third party funding and for enhancing its acceptance in the global arbitration community. (shrink)

Conventional narratives hold that parties are “the orphans of political philosophy” and that systematic normative justifications of parties and partisanship have emerged only in recent years in the West. This article aims to show that when antiparty sentiments were prevalent in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western societies, a systematic justification of party politics existed in China. Western antipartyism in that time shifted from an older accusation that parties were divisive and subversive to a “progressive antipartyism” that portrayed parties as (...) elitist and antidemocratic “machines.” In China, however, although proparty intellectuals faced the first type of antipartyism, the “progressive” type was relatively absent, as there weren’t any mature party machines in the first place. Far from being a hindrance to democracy, parties comprised of public-spirited elites were justified as an instrument for political founding: transforming passive subjects under an imperial despotism into modern active citizens in a constitutional democracy. (shrink)

The ongoing expansion of new communication technologies is inseparably linked to the transformation of political communication. The new thinking behind communication is embedded directly in the code of popular social networks. Can a formal political party successfully implement a decentralized mode of communication based on personal connections and weak social ties, or is it against the very logic of both the hierarchical organizations and the technology itself? Our case study describes the vast spectrum of various types of behavior of political (...) actors on Twitter through computer-assisted analysis of Twitter communication in Czech Republic before the elections to the European Parliament in May 2014. The research is based on the concept of connective action, as defined by Bennett and Segerberg. Preliminary results show an emerging typology of campaign strategies, from formal and centralized campaigns on one hand to various hybrid overlaps of traditional and new forms of communication on the other. (shrink)

: Four principal arguments have been offered in support of requiring public and private third-party payers to help fund medical research: (1) many of the costs associated with clinical trial participation are for routine care that would be reimbursed if delivered outside of a trial; (2) there is a need to promote scientific research and medical progress and lack of coverage is an impediment to enrollment; (3) to cover the costs of trials expands health care and treatment options for the (...) sick; and (4) it is beneficial for private insurers to cover the costs associated with cancer clinical trials because doing so makes such companies more attractive to consumers. Although many see third-party-payer coverage as a victory for patients and for the future of research, requiring coverage of services provided in a trial beyond those that would be provided to a comparable patient outside the research context raises a number of concerns. (shrink)