The Background

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Celia E. Schultz

This chapter sets the stage by sketching the political landscape of Rome in the mid-first century BCE and laying out what can be known of Fulvia’s family. Attention is paid to the deepening divisions within Roman politics (equestrians vs. the senate, optimates vs. populists) and the formation of the so-called First Triumvirate. The chapter considers the possibility that Fulvia’s mother, Sempronia, is to be identified with the Catilinarian conspirator of the same name, and it addresses the question of whether Fulvia’s image appears on several Roman coins. The chapter describes what life was like for a young girl in an aristocratic Roman household and how Fulvia’s first marriage likely came about.

Author(s):  
Mark Bovens ◽  
Anchrit Wille

Cleavage formation in the nineteenth and twentieth century was based on religion and class. To what extent can we observe an emerging social and political cleavage along educational lines across Europe in the twenty-first century? We use a broad notion of cleavage and look at educational patterns of segmentation, stratification, and segregation; differences in political preferences; and to what extent these educational differences are reflected in the political landscape. We construct an index of cleavage formation that aims to measure to what extent the various differences along educational lines are merging. The degree to which the contours of this new divide have been crystallized is stronger in western and northern countries than elsewhere in Europe. This analysis forms the basis of our selection of six West European countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, and the UK.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.


Author(s):  
Stephan Haggard ◽  
Robert R. Kaufman

From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and postcommunist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? This book takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, the book engages with theories of democratic change and advocates approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the book argues that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change. Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five cases of reversion to autocracy since 1980, the book shows how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains. Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, this book explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.


Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Davey

Lady Mary Derby (1824–1900) occupied a pivotal position in Victorian politics, yet her activities have largely been overlooked or ignored. A Female Politician places Mary back into the political position she occupied and offers the first dedicated account of her career. Based on extensive archival research, including hitherto neglected or lost sources, this study reconstructs the political worlds Mary inhabited. Her political landscape was dominated by the machinations and intrigues of high politics and diplomacy. As this book uncovers, her political skill and acumen were highly valued by leading politicians of the day, including Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, and she played a significant role in many of the key events of the mid-Victorian era. This included the passing of the Second Reform Act, the formation of Disraeli’s 1874 government, the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878, and Gladstone’s 1880–1885 government. By exploring how one woman was able to exercise influence at the heart of Victorian politics, this book considers what Mary’s career tells us about the nature of political life in the mid nineteenth century. It sheds new light on the connections between informal and formal political culture, incorporating the politics of the home, letter-writing, and social relations into a consideration of the politics of Parliament and government. A Female Politician is a rich investigation of how a woman, with few legal or constitutional rights, was able to become a significant figure in mid-Victorian political life.


Author(s):  
Paul Chaisty ◽  
Nic Cheeseman ◽  
Timothy J. Power

This chapter introduces the three regions—sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Former Soviet Union—and the nine countries—Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine—that provide the empirical material for the book. It introduces the two criteria used for case selection: 1) democratic competitiveness; 2) de jure and de facto constitutional provisions that empower presidents to be coalitional formateurs. It also introduces a variable that measures the salience of cross-party cooperation: the Index of Coalitional Necessity. Finally, it sketches the political landscape that has shaped the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism within each region, and it draws attention to important contextual differences between the nine country cases.


Author(s):  
Jack Santino

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.


2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Visconti

ABSTRACTVoters’ ideological stances have long been considered one of the most important factors for understanding electoral choices in Chile. In recent years, however, the literature has begun to call this premise into question, due to several changes in the Chilean political landscape: the current crisis of representation, the high programmatic congruence between the two main coalitions, the decline in the political relevance of the dictatorship, and the rise of nonprogrammatic electoral strategies. In addition to these transformations, Chile switched to voluntary voting in 2012. This article studies whether ideology still informs electoral choices in Chile in an era of voluntary voting. It implements a conjoint survey experiment in low-to-middle-income neighborhoods in Santiago, where voters would be expected to be less ideological. It shows that candidates’ ideological labels are crucial for understanding the electoral decisions of a large part of the sample, particularly among likely voters.


Author(s):  
Umberto Laffi

Abstract The Principle of the Irretroactivity of the Law in the Roman Legal Experience in the Republican Age. Through an in-depth analysis of literary and legal sources (primarily Cicero) and of epigraphic evidence, the author demonstrates that the principle of the law’s non-retroactivity was known to, and applied by, the Romans since the Republican age. The political struggle favored on several occasions the violation of this principle by imposing an extraordinary criminal legislation, aimed at sanctioning past behaviors of adversaries. But, although with undeniable limits of effectiveness in the dynamic relationship with the retroactivity, the author acknowledges that at the end of the first century BC non-retroactivity appeared as the dominant principle, consolidated both in the field of the civil law as well as substantive criminal law.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 632-638
Author(s):  
Stephanie A Bryson

This reflexive essay examines the adoption of an intentional ‘ethic of care’ by social work administrators in a large social work school located in the Pacific Northwest. An ethic of care foregrounds networks of human interdependence that collapse the public/private divide. Moreover, rooted in the political theory of recognition, a care ethic responds to crisis by attending to individuals’ uniqueness and ‘whole particularity.’ Foremost, it rejects indifference. Through the personal recollections of one academic administrator, the impact of rejecting indifference in spring term 2020 is described. The essay concludes by linking the rejection of indifference to the national political landscape.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document