Government Response to Man‐made Hazards

1977 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Williams

THE BUSINESS OF LIVING IS INESCAPABLY HAZARDOUS, EVEN IN THE advanced industrial societies, for all that life within them has now become less nasty, brutish and short. In fact, the very process of technological innovation which has made possible the unprecedented affluence of these societies has also led to quite new dangers. In consequence, securing a reasonable balance between the advantages and disadvantages of innovation has now become an important government objective, and a vital one in the case of any technical development whose potentially dysfunctional effects would be catastrophic. It is with the political issues bearing upon the maintenance of this balance that this article is mainly concerned. Its scope is restricted for reasons of logic as well as of convenience to the specifically physical man-made hazards of industrial societies, and the unique psychological problems which these societies are often said to present are therefore not considered.

Author(s):  
Vasilis Kostakis ◽  
Chris Giotitsas

The still raging financial crisis of 2007–2008 has enabled the emergence of several alternative practices concerning the production, circulation and use of money. This essay explores the political economy of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Specifically, we examine the context in which this digital currency is emerging as well as its nature, dynamics, advantages, and disadvantages. We conclude that Bitcoin, a truly interesting experiment, exemplifies "distributed capitalism" and should be mostly seen as a technological innovation. Rather than providing pragmatic answers and solutions to the current views on the financial crisis, Bitcoin provides some useful and timely questions about the principles and bases of the dominant political economy.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-45
Author(s):  
Vasilis Kostakis

The still raging financial crisis of 2007–2008 has enabled the emergence of several alternative practices concerning the production, circulation, and use of money. This essay explores the political economy of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Specifically, we examine the context in which this digital currency is emerging as well as its nature, dynamics, advantages, and disadvantages. We conclude that Bitcoin, a truly interesting experiment, exemplifies “distributed capitalism” and should be mostly seen as a technological innovation. Rather than providing pragmatic answers and solutions to the current views on the financial crisis, Bitcoin provides some useful and timely questions about the principles and bases of the dominant political economy. A ECONOMIA POLÍTICA DO BITCOINResumoO aquecimento da crise financeira de 2007-2008 permitiu o surgimento de várias práticas alternativas em matéria de produção, circulação e uso do dinheiro. Este ensaio explora a economia política do ecossistema Bitcoin. Especificamente, vamos examinar o contexto em que essa moeda digital está emergindo, bem como a sua natureza, dinâmica, vantagens e desvantagens. Concluímos que Bitcoin, uma experiência verdadeiramente interessante, exemplifica "capitalismo distribuído" e deve ser visto principalmente como uma inovação tecnológica. Em vez de fornecer respostas e soluções pragmáticas para os pontos de vista atuais sobre a crise financeira, Bitcoin fornece algumas perguntas úteis e oportunas sobre os princípios e as bases da economia política dominante.


Author(s):  
Sona N. Golder ◽  
Ignacio Lago ◽  
André Blais ◽  
Elisabeth Gidengil ◽  
Thomas Gschwend

Voters face different incentives to turn out to vote in one electoral arena versus another. Although turnout is lowest in European elections, it is found that the turnout is only slightly lower in regional than in national elections. Standard accounts suggest that the importance of an election, in terms of the policy-making power of the body to be elected, drives variation in turnout across elections at different levels. This chapter argues that this is only part of the story, and that voter attachment to a particular level also matters. Not all voters feel connected to each electoral arena in the same way. Although for some, their identity and the issues they most care about are linked to politics at the national level, for others, the regional or European level may offer the political community and political issues that most resonate with them.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-35
Author(s):  
Anna Friberg

The article explores some of the composite concepts of democracy that were used in Sweden, primarily by the Social Democrats during the interwar years. Should these be seen as pluralizations of the collective singular democracy or as something qualitatively new? By showing how these concepts relate to each other and to democracy as a whole, the article argues that they should be considered statements about democracy as one entity, that democracy did not only concern the political sphere, but was generally important throughout the whole of society. The article also examines the Swedish parliamentarians' attitudes toward democracy after the realization of universal suffrage, and argues that democracy was eventually perceived as such a positive concept that opponents of what was labeled democratic reforms had to reformulate the political issues into different words in order to avoid coming across as undemocratic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-71
Author(s):  
Melissa Chakars

This article examines the All-Buryat Congress for the Spiritual Rebirth and Consolidation of the Nation that was held in the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in February 1991. The congress met to discuss the future of the Buryats, a Mongolian people who live in southeastern Siberia, and to decide on what actions should be taken for the revival, development, and maintenance of their culture. Widespread elections were carried out in the Buryat lands in advance of the congress and voters selected 592 delegates. Delegates also came from other parts of the Soviet Union, as well as from Mongolia and China. Government administrators, Communist Party officials, members of new political parties like the Buryat-Mongolian People’s Party, and non-affiliated individuals shared their ideas and political agendas. Although the congress came to some agreement on the general goals of promoting Buryat traditions, language, religions, and culture, there were disagreements about several of the political and territorial questions. For example, although some delegates hoped for the creation of a larger Buryat territory that would encompass all of Siberia’s Buryats within a future Russian state, others disagreed revealing the tension between the desire to promote ethnic identity and the practical need to consider economic and political issues.


1966 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Holden

I. The Political Meaning of Ethnic ConflictIf politics “in its broadest sense” is conceived as the “distribution of advantages and disadvantages among people” (Froman, p. 3), then the ultimate penalty is subordination (total exclusion from advantages) and the ultimate reward is dominance (total monopoly of advantages). The effort to change the balance of advantages and disadvantages between groups is the nexus of political conflict. In such conflict, ethnicity is a particularly important variable, precisely because it is one criterion found throughout the world by which groups are regularly assigned superior and inferior places.


Res Publica ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
Guido Dierickx

This contribution should be seen as an attempt to retrieve information from restcategories, such as «does not know» and «no answer».  From these, and from other data as well, we constructed 10, mostly summating, indexes of political ignorance. Among them is an index of objective ignorance, that is about political events, persons and situations.  The others aim at more subjective dimensions. Does the respondent feel informed about the political process : about government and party performance, partisan congeniality, modalities of voting, local politics social problems, political issues ?There seems to be some evidence in favor of the following hypotheses.1. The indexes tend to compensate each other: respondents who score low on one index, do not necessarily score low on the next one.2. I t is difficult to ascertain the validity of an index of objective ignorance. Moreover it does by no means express all the (relevant) dimensions of political information.3. A mong indexes of subjective ignorance one should distinguish between «policy» and «political» information ; the latter seems to refer to a situation where strictly political rules of the game, a.o. those of political conflict, prevail.4. Of all indexes the «political issues» index showed the most discriminating power, as well as the most expected associations.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Pyszczynski ◽  
Pelin Kesebir ◽  
Matt Motyl ◽  
Andrea Yetzer ◽  
Jacqueline M. Anson

We conceptualized ideological consistency as the extent to which an individual’s attitudes toward diverse political issues are coherent among themselves from an ideological standpoint. Four studies compared the ideological consistency of self-identified liberals and conservatives. Across diverse samples, attitudes, and consistency measures, liberals were more ideologically consistent than conservatives. In other words, conservatives’ individual-level attitudes toward diverse political issues (e.g., abortion, gun control, welfare) were more dispersed across the political spectrum than were liberals’ attitudes. Study 4 demonstrated that variability across commitments to different moral foundations predicted ideological consistency and mediated the relationship between political orientation and ideological consistency.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
Kevin Rogan

Critical data studies have made great strides in bringing together data analysts and urban design, providing an extensible concept which is useful in visualizing the role of local and planetary data networks. But in the light of the experience of Sidewalk Labs, critical data studies need a further push. As smart cities, algorithmic urbanisms, and sensorial regimes inch closer and closer to reality, critical data studies remain woefully blind to economic and political issues. Data remains undertheorized for its economic content as a commodity, and the political ramifications of the data assemblages remain locked in a proto-political schema of good and bad uses of this vast network of data collection, analysis, research, and organization. This paper attempts to subject critical data studies to a rigorous critique by deepening its relationship to the history thus far of Sidewalk Labs’ project in Quayside, Toronto. It is broken into sections. The first section discusses the material reality of Kitchin and Lauriault’s (2014) data assemblages and data landscapes. The second section investigates data itself and what its ‘inherent’ value means in an economic sense. The third section looks at the way the understanding of data promoted by the data assemblage effects smart city design. The fourth section examines the role of the designer in shepherding this vision, and moreover the data assemblage, into existence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Katarina Damjanić

The main goal of this paper is to indicate the importance of the issues of vagueness and dissociation in discourse interpretation. The discourse that is taken into consideration is the discourse of political news written in the English language. This particular discourse is widely available to readers and deals with important political issues, which is why the choice of words and phrases should ideally be unbiased and accurate. If not, the readers may misinterpret the discourse and have a wrong impression of the political issue. In this research, newspaper articles are taken as an example of political news discourse. All articles analyzed were written in online British and American broadsheet and tabloid newspapers and they all dealt with the migrant crisis and 2019 Hong Kong protests. By taking into consideration the political context and the theoretical framework used in this research, 44 instances considered to be examples of vagueness and dissociation were identified, which were found in 14 newspaper articles.


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