Who do the people want to govern?

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882110500
Author(s):  
John R Hibbing ◽  
Elizabeth Theiss-Morse ◽  
Matthew V Hibbing ◽  
David Fortunato

Relative to the well-developed theory and extensive survey batteries on people’s preferences for substantive policy solutions, scholarly understanding of people’s preferences for the mechanisms by which policies should be adopted is disappointing. Theory rarely goes beyond the assumption that people would prefer to rule themselves rather than leave decisions up to elites and measurement rests largely on four items that are not up to the task. In this article, we seek to provide a firmer footing for “process” research by 1) offering an alternative theory holding that people actually want elites to continue to make important political decisions but want them to do so only after acquiring a deep appreciation for the real-world problems facing regular people, and 2) developing and testing a battery of over 50 survey items, appropriate for cross-national research, that extend understanding of how the people want political decisions to be made.

Author(s):  
Monica Prasad

Problem-solving sociology attempts to use the traditions of sociological research to solve real-world problems, and uses the attempt to grapple with real-world problems as a way to reformulate understandings of society and renew or reinvent those traditions. This book provides advice for how to turn an interest in solving major social problems into research projects that begin to do so. The book provides suggested methods and tools, models of successful problem-solving research conducted by established scholars as well as by undergraduate and graduate students, defenses against some common objections, and an exploration of where this kind of work fits in contemporary sociology.


Author(s):  
. Harpal ◽  
Gaurav Tejpal ◽  
Sonal Sharma

In this time of instant units, Mobile Ad-hoc Network(MANET) has become an indivisible part for transmission for mobile devices. Therefore, curiosity about study of Mobile Ad-hoc Network has been growing because last several years. In this report we have mentioned some simple routing protocols in MANET like Destination Sequenced Distance Vector, Active Source Redirecting, Temporally-Ordered Redirecting Algorithm and Ad-hoc On Need Distance Vector. Protection is just a serious problem in MANETs because they are infrastructure-less and autonomous. Principal target of writing this report is to handle some simple problems and security considerations in MANET, operation of wormhole strike and acquiring the well-known routing protocol Ad-hoc On Need Distance Vector. This short article will be a great help for the people performing study on real world problems in MANET security.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Muganiwa

The paper argues that children face challenges in growing up and fitting into their societies and that these challenges need to be addressed with care. These challenges, which are complicated by the effects of colonialism, war and economic crises in the context of Zimbabwe, are portrayed in the novels Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga 1989), The Book of Not (Dangarembga 2006), The Uncertainty of Hope (Tagwira 2006) and Running with Mother (Mlalazi 2012). In analysing the characters of the children portrayed in these four novels, the vulnerability of children, regardless of their age, is demonstrated. The child characters strive to help their parents and be useful citizens and yet at times this contrasts with their desire to be sheltered and treated as children. This contradiction is best exhibited in teenagers who try to fashion their own identity that is separate from the people around them but who still require guidance to do so.


Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ueli Haefeli ◽  
Fritz Kobi ◽  
Ulrich Seewer

Based on analysis of two case studies in the Canton of Bern, this article examines the question of knowledge transfer from history to transport policy and planning in the recent past in Switzerland. It shows that for several reasons, direct knowledge transfer did not occur. In particular, historians have seldom become actively involved in transport planning and policy discourses, probably partly because the academic system offers no incentive to do so. However, historical knowledge has certainly influenced decision-making processes indirectly, via personal reflection of the actors in the world of practice or through Switzerland's strongly developed modes of political participation. Because the potential for knowledge transfer to contribute to better policy solutions has not been fully utilized, we recommend strengthening the role of existing interfaces between science and policy.


Author(s):  
Koen Damhuis

Trump, Wilders, Salvini, Le Pen—during the last decades, radical right-wing leaders and their parties have become important political forces in most Western democracies. Their growing appeal raises an increasingly relevant question: who are the voters that support them and why do they do so? Numerous and variegated answers have been given to this question, inside as well as outside academia. Yet, curiously, despite their quantity and diversity, these existing explanations are often based on a similar assumption: that of homogeneous electorates. Consequently, the idea that different subgroups with different profiles and preferences might coexist within the constituencies of radical right-wing parties has thus far remained underdeveloped, both theoretically and empirically. This ground-breaking book is the first one that systematically investigates the heterogeneity of radical right-wing voters. Theoretically, it introduces the concept of electoral equifinality to come to grips with this diversity. Empirically, it relies on innovative statistical analyses and no less than 125 life-history interviews with voters in France and the Netherlands. Based on this unique material, the study identifies different roads to the radical right and compares them within a cross-national perspective. In addition, through an analysis of almost 1,400 tweets posted by Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, the book shows how the latter are able to appeal to different groups of voters. Taken together, the book thus provides a host of ground-breaking insights into the heterogeneous phenomenon of radical right support.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5491
Author(s):  
Melissa Robson-Williams ◽  
Bruce Small ◽  
Roger Robson-Williams ◽  
Nick Kirk

The socio-environmental challenges the world faces are ‘swamps’: situations that are messy, complex, and uncertain. The aim of this paper is to help disciplinary scientists navigate these swamps. To achieve this, the paper evaluates an integrative framework designed for researching complex real-world problems, the Integration and Implementation Science (i2S) framework. As a pilot study, we examine seven inter and transdisciplinary agri-environmental case studies against the concepts presented in the i2S framework, and we hypothesise that considering concepts in the i2S framework during the planning and delivery of agri-environmental research will increase the usefulness of the research for next users. We found that for the types of complex, real-world research done in the case studies, increasing attention to the i2S dimensions correlated with increased usefulness for the end users. We conclude that using the i2S framework could provide handrails for researchers, to help them navigate the swamps when engaging with the complexity of socio-environmental problems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 294
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi ◽  
Fernando García ◽  
Carles Marín Lladó

During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro’s narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump’s was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people’s ability to work.


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