The State Awaking Or Stealing?

The 2020 parliamentary elections in Croatia were held in an atmosphere marked by fear and anxiety because of negative consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, and riddled with other unresolved socio-economic and political issues. Therefore, choosing appropriate political slogans that would reflect positive messages of hope, encouragement, and safety to the Croatian people seemed of utmost importance. This paper identifies and discusses political discourse strategies behind the creation of selected billboard slogans used in the pre-election period by different political parties and platforms. Taking into account the results of the elections, the research focuses on the negative reactions to the content of the slogans in the Croatian public space. For this purpose, a corpus of readers’ online comments was built and subjected to a computer sentiment analysis. The results show that the majority of citizens in the research sample created negative mental images of political agents and the policies they promote. Further investigation of the reasons for the negative perception and evaluation revealed that the politico-historical and situational contexts play a significant role in shaping the public opinion, specifically in times of crises and threats to public health and wellbeing.

Framing socio-political controversy: The 2012 Spanish labor reform as a case study of cascading activation

In February 2012, the Spanish Government approved an aggressive labor reform. Many political agents committed to emphasis framing, highlighting certain aspects of the topic to persuade their publics with their definitions of the situation. Some generic frames suggested an individualistic approach to the labor market, while some others called for collective action. Following the cascading activation model, this research attempted to identify the flows of frames from the elites to the media outfits. A content analysis was conducted with the materials disseminated in February 2012 by the government, the two main Spanish unions, the confederation of employers, and four print media. Differences and similarities were found through bivariate analyses between the categories of the codebook. Although clear cascades emerged from the unions to the online daily Público.es, and from the government to Larazón.es, generally the media frame building processes did not limit to just depicting the frames of an elite.

Coalition-Based Gender Lobbying: Revisiting Women's Substantive Representation in China's Authoritarian Governance

While research on women's substantive representation in legislatures has proliferated, our knowledge of gender lobbying mechanisms in authoritarian regimes remains limited. Adopting a state-society interaction approach, this article addresses how women's interests are substantively represented in China despite the absence of an electoral mandate and the omnipresence of state power. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article maps out the intertwining of key political agents and institutions within and outside the state that mobilize for women's grievances and demands. We find that representation of women's interests in China requires the emergence of a unified societal demand followed by a coalition of state agency allies navigating within legislative, executive, and Party-affiliated institutional bodies. The pursuit of women's interests is also politically bounded and faces strong repression if the lobbying lacks state alliances or the targeted issue is considered “politically sensitive” by the government.

Five Republics and One Tradition

Like many countries around the world, Chile is undergoing a political moment when the nature of democracy and its political and legal institutions are being challenged. Senior Chilean legal scholar and constitutional historian Pablo Ruiz-Tagle provides an historical analysis of constitutional change and democratic crisis in the present context focused on Chilean constitutionalism. He offers a comparative analysis of the organization and function of government, the structure of rights and the main political agents that participated in each stage of Chilean constitutional history. Chile is a powerful case study of a Latin American country that has gone through several threats to its democracy, but that has once again followed a moderate path to rebuild its constitutional republican tradition. Not only the first comprehensive study of Chilean constitutional history in the English language from the nineteenth-century to the present day, this book is also a powerful defence of democratic values.

Becoming British East Asian and Southeast Asian: Anti-racism, Chineseness, and Political Love in the Cultural and Creative Industries

This article advances work on the ‘British Chinese’ by reconfiguring the boundaries of the field and expanding it beyond the cultural and linguistic transformations of an ‘ethnic community’. Instead, I examine new pan-Asian political formations and situate them within wider anti-racist organising in Britain. First, I examine the birth of ‘British East and Southeast Asianness’ as an emphatically political identity that contests racialised notions of ‘the Chinese’ as a passive model minority and repositions us as political agents of change. Second, I examine the crafting of a political community, in which a pan-Asian identity emerges as a contestation of the borders of ‘Chineseness’ and its policing, while maintaining a Chinese hegemony. Third, I identify distinct political repertoires of anti-racism within this ‘community’, a more radical and a more integrationist approach, which highlights the challenges of political mobilisation, and is shaped by a continued abject status. Finally, I examine the role of political love and care as a means of mobilisation, through which a radical politics of affirmation and refusal is crafted. In doing so, I re-envision the political horizons of the so-called ‘British Chinese’, while shedding light on the current complexities, transformations and solidarities of communities within and beyond Chineseness.

Antiglobalismo e Colonialidade: Uma Abordagem Decolonial Sobre a Política Externa Brasileira no Governo Bolsonaro l Antiglobalism and Coloniality: A Decolonial Approach on Brazilian Foreign Policy Under Bolsonaro Government

Embora o Brasil tenha participado da chamada onda rosa na América Latina na primeira e em parte da segunda década dos anos 2000, o país passou a experimentar nos últimos anos um movimento crescente de agentes políticos ligados à Direita, que culminou na eleição de Jair Bolsonaro em 2018. A Política Externa do Governo Jair Bolsonaro apresenta algumas rupturas em relação à Política Externa Brasileira das últimas décadas, dentre elas um alinhamento automático aos Estados Unidos da América. Neste estudo, analisamos a forma como conceitos da teoria decolonial introduzidos por Aníbal Quijano e Walter Mignolo, como eurocentrismo e colonialidade do poder, podem auxiliar na compreensão do alinhamento automático com os Estados Unidos observado no Governo Bolsonaro.Palavras-Chave: Política Externa Brasileira; Governo Bolsonaro; Teoria Decolonial.ABSTRACTAlthough Brazil participated in the so-called pink wave, in Latin America, during the first and part of the second decade of the 2000s, the country has experienced, in the last years, a growing movement of political agents linked to the Right-Wing, which culminated in the Jair Bolsonaro´s election in 2018. The Foreign Policy of Jair Bolsonaro Government presents some ruptures in relation to the Brazilian Foreign Policy of the last decades, among them an automatic alignment to United States of America. In this study, we analyze how concepts of decolonial theory introduced by Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, such as Eurocentrism and coloniality of power, can help to understanding the automatic alignment to United States observed in Bolsonaro Government.Keywords: Foreign Policy; Bolsonaro Government; Decolonial Theory. Recebido em: 03/04/2021 | Aceito em: 05/07/2021.

A democracia representativa no Brasil: uma análise da atuação dos deputados federais frente aos índices de desenvolvimento de seus estados e a região geográfica que ocupam

Purpose – This study seeks to verify whether the performance of Brazilian Congressional Representatives is related to MHDI and GDP per capita indices and the regions they represent. Methodology – Regarding the performance of the parliamentarians, the data used were those made available by the Transparência Brasil portal and analyzed using the multivariate exploratory non-hierarchical cluster analysis technique K-means. Federative Units were divided into clusters according to the similarities they presented with respect to the variables that made up the analysis. Findings – After the analyses, we were able to determine that there is no relation of equivalence between the performance of representatives in Congress and the observed research development indices (MHDI and GDP per capita) with states of different regions and quite distinct conditions of development making up the same group of analysis. Originality/value – The researched data, or even the identification of transparency actions demonstrates the wide variety of analysis possibilities that are available in terms of discussions of the performance of political agents and their respective returns for the population. We would suggest that future studies can use other data or other reports displayed in the transparency portals of various spheres of government. Other research possibilities can be developed based on qualitative analyses of the effective representativity of the projects proposed by these representatives of the people.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Poverty: Culture and Welfare State Development in Britain, Denmark and France

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

A call to arms: Hero–villain narratives in US security discourse

The rhetoric leaders use to speak to domestic audiences about security is not simply bluster. Political agents rely upon stories of enmity and threat to represent what is happening in the international arena, to whom and why, in order to push national and international security policy agendas. They do so for the simple reason that a good story is a powerful political device. This article examines historical ‘calls to arms’ in the United States, based on insights from archival research at US presidential libraries and the United States National Archives. Drawing on narrative theory and political psychology, the article develops a new analytic framework to explain the political currency and staying power of hero–villain security narratives, which divide the world into opposing spheres of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Shifting the conceptual focus away from speakers and settings towards audience and affect, it argues that the resonance of hero–villain security narratives lies in the way their plot structure keeps the audience in suspense. Because they are consequential rhetorical tools that shape security policy practices, the stories political agents tell about security demand greater attention in the broader field of international security studies.

YouTube Podcasting, the New Orality, and Diversity of Thought: Intermediality, Media History, and Communication Theory as Methodological Approaches

The chapter investigates a new kind of YouTube phenomenon, the extended dialogue podcast, by combining three transdisciplinary approaches: (1) an intermedial analysis, (2) a media-historical analysis, and (3) a communication-theoretical analysis. The objects of study are the YouTube shows The Joe Rogan Experience and Hur kan vi? (a Swedish version of Rogan’s show). The shows air live on YouTube, which means that they are inherently multimodal, combining sound, moving images, occasional expositions of websites, and the viewers’ written commentaries. The shows are characterized by a strong emphasis on dialogue between the hosts and the invited guests, and by an extended duration, sometimes spanning over three hours of talk. Both shows are politically controversial, since the intention behind them is to challenge political correctness and self-censorship in mainstream media and public discourse. In order to understand the shows as digital objects, the chapter analyzes their specific mix of medialities and modalities. To understand them as historical phenomena, the chapter investigates how the shows relate to earlier media types, focusing on orality and its relation to literacy. And, finally, to understand the shows as political agents, their role in contemporary debates on media, power, and knowledge is the target of analysis.