The Problem

Author(s):  
Richard S. Katz ◽  
Peter Mair

Most conventional conceptions of what democracy is and of how it should be organized imply particular characteristics and functions for parties and party systems, and particular kinds of relationships among parties, citizens, and the state. Our contention is that the party government model so conceived, while quite powerful prescriptively, has only a marginal connection to the way parties and party system really work in the early twenty-first century. Our basic argument is that at the level of party systems, the mainstream parties, and most minor parties as well, have effectively formed a cartel. While the appearance of competition is preserved, in terms of political substance it has become spectacle—a show for the audience of audience democracy.

2020 ◽  
pp. 303-314
Author(s):  
Stefan Manz ◽  
Panikos Panayi

This chapter begins by highlighting the main findings of the book, including the globalization of internment by the Empire during the Great War and the consequences for individuals and their families, but also the fact that Britain treated those it had incarcerated in a humane way. The chapter examines the return to Germany, its consequences for individuals, and the way in which the German authorities dealt with the former residents of the British Empire. These people, who may not have seen their homeland for decades, made efforts to preserve the memory of their experiences, along with former civilian and military prisoners who came from other states at war with Germany. While the memory of internment may have survived into the interwar years, it disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century, but came back to life in the early twenty-first century, inspired by the centenary of the Great War.


Author(s):  
Anne Vallely

Within the Jaina tradition, the ideal and most celebrated death is a voluntary, fully conscious fast which aims to “scratch out the body” for the sake of the soul. Called sallekhanā, the fast is understood to be the pinnacle of nonviolence, because it entails the complete eradication of the passions that are the root cause of violence. But above all, sallekhanā is understood by Jains to be heroic; it is the ultimate culmination of a courageous life dedicated to the soul’s emancipation from the cycle of birth and death. The equation of sallekhanā with heroism is an ancient one in the Jain imagination, and continues to govern the way in which the religious death is understood and practiced by Jains in the early twenty-first century. This chapter explores the central role that heroism plays within the ritual fast to death and, more fundamentally, within the Jain tradition.


Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Pritchard

In this essay, I trace a rhetorical affinity between feminist postmodern theory and an Enlightenment narrative of development. This affinity consists in the valorization of mobility and the repudiation of locatedness. Although feminists deploy this rhetoric in order to accommodate differences and to accustom readers to the instability that results from such accommodation, I show how this rhetoric works to justify Western colonial development and to efface women's very different experiences of mobility in the early twenty-first century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 189-198
Author(s):  
David Thackeray ◽  
Richard Toye

We explore the ongoing importance of election promises since 1997. Even if the way that promises are disseminated has changed with the growing importance of the internet and social media in campaigning, expectations surrounding manifestos remain roughly those that were set during the twentieth century. And yet the Brexit controversy has arguably created an acute crisis in trust in politicians’ promises and uncertainty about the authority of election manifestos. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, manifestos enjoyed a more central role in the 2017 and 2019 elections than they had achieved at other elections during the early twenty-first century, not least because of the ambiguities of the mandate provided by the referendum.


Author(s):  
Linda Freedman

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.


Nature ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 488 (7412) ◽  
pp. 495-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kääb ◽  
Etienne Berthier ◽  
Christopher Nuth ◽  
Julie Gardelle ◽  
Yves Arnaud

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