scholarly journals President and Assemblies—25 Years After Shugart and Carey’s Book: Introduction to Special Issue

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-11
Author(s):  
Anna Fruhstorfer ◽  
Gianluca Passarelli
Keyword(s):  
Regime Change ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Balancing Efficiency

Why are some institutions capable of enhancing democracy, while others struggle under pressure? Shugart and Carey wrote their seminal book Presidents and Assemblies at a crucial time in modern history in an effort to answer these fundamental questions. Because of bold claims and huge theoretical and conceptual contributions, their timely publication became the starting point for a new way to think about institutional specifications and types of political systems. And although their examples are by now dated, the idea of “trade-off” or “balancing efficiency and representativeness” still speaks to the fundamental questions of regime change and democratic sustainability. While their study made clear that there are distinctions between system types, they also argued that not a specific type is more conducive or damaging to democracy; rather specific institutional configurations lead to a vulnerability of a political regime. Twenty-five years after the first publication of Presidents and Assemblies, this special issue uses this argument and reconnects Shugart and Carey’s book with the recent debate on individual attributes of legislative–executive relations and their effect on democracy. This article serves as an introduction and highlights the rationale and the major themes that run through the contributions to the special issue.

scholarly journals Toward Multi-Level Governance in China? Coping with complex public affairs across jurisdictions and organizations

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edoardo Ongaro ◽  
Ting Gong ◽  
Yijia Jing
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Multi Level

This special issue argues for the applicability of the conceptual framework of Multi-Level Governance to the political–administrative regime of China, provided significant adaptations and qualifications are developed. The application of Multi-Level Governance to China enables to account for global influences as well as for the involvement of non-governmental actors in public policy making. More radically, we suggest in this introductory article that the development of Multi-Level Governance may be interpreted as a way of enhancing the societal legitimacy of the political regime under the conditions of new authoritarianism. We conclude this article by drawing a fascinating yet possibly hazardous and overstretched parallel; that is, the development of Multi-Level Governance may be part and parcel of a process of building political legitimacy in China, just as it may be a way of exploring paths for the renewal of beleaguered traditional liberal democracy in Europe. Albeit along profoundly different trajectories, China and Europe might adopt Multi-Level Governance arrangements for a very purposive course of action: enhancing the legitimacy of the respective and very diverse political systems and buttressing their very foundations. This suggests a strongly normative and purposive application of Multi-Level Governance.

scholarly journals The Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Religious Exercise: Preliminary Remarks

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Adelaide Madera
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Legal Contexts

Since 2020, the spread of COVID-19 has had an overwhelming impact not only on our personal lives, but also on domestic regulatory frameworks. Influential academics have strongly underlined that, in times of deep crisis, such as the current global health crisis, the long-term workability of legal systems is put to a severe test. In this period, in fact, the protection of health has been given priority, as a precondition that is orientating many current legal choices. Such an unprecedented health emergency has also raised a serious challenge in terms of fundamental rights and liberties. Several basic rights that normally enjoy robust protection under constitutional, supranational, and international guarantees, have experienced a devastating “suspension” for the sake of public health and safety, thus giving rise to a vigorous debate concerning whether and to what extent the pandemic emergency justifies limitations on fundamental rights. The present paper introduces the Special Issue on “The crisis of the religious freedom during the age of COVID-19 pandemic”. Taking as a starting point the valuable contributions of the participants in the Special Issue, it explores analogous and distinctive implications of the COVID-19 pandemic in different legal contexts and underlines the relevance of cooperation between religious and public actors to face a global health crisis.

Special Issue: Trade-off Analysis of Software Quality Attributes

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claes Wohlin ◽  
Lars Lundberg ◽  
Michael Mattsson
Keyword(s):  
Software Quality ◽  
Quality Attributes ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Trade Off

Inequality and the division of labor: the Davis-Moore theory reexamined

1999 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Dennis H. Wrong
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Market Model ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Occupational Selection ◽  
Limited Scope

Social inequality has long been subject to theoretical dispute with moral and political overtones. The most recent debate was over the argument of American sociologists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore that unequal rewards were ‘functionally’ necessary to maintain a complex division of labour. Their theory has gained new credibility as a market model of occupational selection assuming competition among self-interested individuals. Its abstractness and limited scope need recognition, but it remains a valuable starting point for the consideration of inequality.

Editorial: Refashioning stories for celebrity counterpublics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Ted Talks

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.

The Totalitarian Model Revisited

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujian Guo
Keyword(s):  
Regime Change ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Formal Modeling ◽  
Theoretical Problem ◽  
Refined Model ◽  
New Model ◽  
Macro Model ◽  
Communist Countries

A theoretical problem in defining “regime identity” of a political regime in conceptual and comparative terms is that there are no generally accepted theoretical criteria that could be used to demarcate the beginning and ending of a political regime and to assess the nature of a regime change in communist and post-communist countries. This article attempts to address the significance of this problem, revisit the utility of the totalitarian model, and develop a refined macro-model that can serve as the means to solve the problem and as reference points to define regime identity, assess and measure the regime change in theoretical and comparative terms. The refined model can serve both to observe, explain, and predict the regime change in general and to enrich our understanding of specific cases in particular. Based on the insights yielded by the new model, other researchers could modify this model by using techniques of formal modeling or by dropping some features while retaining others of the model.

scholarly journals GRAPE, Solar Terrestrial Physics in an operational environment

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgiana De Franceschi ◽  
Maurizio Candidi
Keyword(s):  
Space Environment ◽  
Ionospheric Scintillation ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Operational Environment ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Earth Space ◽  
Near Earth Space ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Space Data

<p>[…] The collection of papers that forms this special issue represents the whole amplitude of research that is being conducted in the framework of GRAPE, while also connecting to other initiatives that address the same objectives in regions outside the polar regions, and worldwide, such as the Training Research and Applications Network to Support the Mitigation of Ionospheric Threats (TRANSMIT; www.transmitionosphere.net), a Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) Marie Curie Initial Training Network that is focused on the study of ionospheric phenomena and their effects on systems embedded in our daily life, Near-Earth Space Data Infrastructure for e-Science (ESPAS), an FP7-funded project that aims to provide the e-Infrastructure necessary to support the access to observations, for the modeling and prediction of the near-Earth Space environment, Concept for Ionospheric Scintillation Mitigation for Professional GNSS in Latin America (CIGALA) and its follow-up and extension Countering GNSS High-Accuracy Applications Limitations due to Ionospheric Disturbances in Brazil (CALIBRA), both of which are funded by the European Commission in the frame of FP7, for facing the equatorial ionosphere and its impact on GNSS. The main objective of the present Special Issue of Annals of Geophysics is to collect recent reports on work performed in the polar regions and on the datasets collected in time by the instrumentation deployed across various countries. This collection will set the starting point for further research in the field, especially in the perspective of the new and very advanced space system that will be available in the next few years. […]</p>

Uncertainty, Profit, and the Limits of Markets

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110358
Author(s):  
Roni Hirsch
Keyword(s):  
Allocative Efficiency ◽  
Market Model ◽  
Perfect Competition ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Knowledge Uncertainty ◽  
Market Benefits ◽  
Capitalist Democracies ◽  
The Ideal

The neoclassical market model is the overwhelming basis for contemporary views of markets as fair, efficient, or both. But is it an appropriate starting point? The article draws on Frank Knight’s 1920s work on the economics of uncertainty to show that the ideal of perfect competition conceals a tacit trade-off between equality and certainty. Largely undetected, this trade-off continues to govern financialized capitalist democracies, evading normative and political debate. By explaining how markets and firms resolve the problem of uncertainty, Knight shows that all supposed market benefits, even allocative efficiency, are not costless to society. More specifically, Knight argued that modern markets are premised on a tacit agreement between a handful of “daring” entrepreneurs and the “risk-averse” public: the former agree to carry the uncertainties of business-life in return for a substantially larger share of its power and rewards. Despite the highly static assumptions of neoclassicism, therefore, and its linked assumption of perfect knowledge, uncertainty is far from absent in modern economics. It is built into firms and markets and manifests itself as a steep social and material hierarchy.

Chapter 4 The General Formula for Capital

Capital ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Marx
Keyword(s):  
General Formula ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in...

scholarly journals Taxation and Corporate Payout Policy

2006 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Monica Singhania
Keyword(s):  
Regime Change ◽  
Total Sample ◽  
Growth Potential ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Dividend Payout ◽  
Tax Preference ◽  
Tax Regimes ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dividend Tax

This study examines the dividend trends of 590 Indian companies over the period 1992–2004 of all manufacturing, non-government, non-financial, and non-banking companies listed on BSE for which there was no missing financial information over the period of the study. Dividend payout has been chosen for the purpose of examining the impact of taxation on dividend policy. Analysis was done for the full period under consideration, immediate one year of tax regime change, and immediate three years of tax regime change so as to conclusively establish the results and also to note the variations in results over different time frames, if any. For the purpose of this study, the sample was classified on the basis of dividend history, industry, and size. Of the 590 companies, 240 companies were regular payers—the companies that had paid dividend regularly without ever skipping the payments throughout the period of the study. According to tax preference or trade-off theory, favourable dividend tax should lead to higher payouts. The Union Budget of 1997 made dividends taxable in the hands of the company paying them and not in the hands of the investors receiving them. The corporate dividend tax aimed at improving the economic growth and flexibility by eliminating the tax bias against equity-financed investments thereby promoting saving and investment. The new system aimed at reducing the tax bias against capital gains in the earlier tax system, encouraging investment, and enhancing the long-term growth potential of the Indian economy. As compared to the earlier tax regime where the recipient shareholder paid the tax on the dividend received primarily on the basis of marginal tax slab rate applicable to him/her (varying between 0% to 30%), in the current structure of corporate dividend tax, the dividend paying companies pay dividend tax at a flat rate of 12.5 per cent as of financial year 2005–06. Implicitly, the present corporate dividend tax regime can be termed as a more favourable tax policy. The analysis of influence of changes in the tax regime on dividend behaviour reveals the following: Trade-off or tax preference theory does appear to hold true in the Indian context in the case of both the total sample companies as well as the regular payers. While in the case of total sample companies, the results are significant for the entire period of study and the immediate three year period, in case of regular payer, the results are significant for all the three time periods analysed. Though the results are somewhat mixed, it can be largely inferred that there is a significant difference in average dividend payout ratio in the two different tax regimes. There are wide industry-wise and size-wise variations in empirical findings visible over the period of study.

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