scholarly journals Allied Constructive Criticism?

Politeja ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (6(63)) ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Magdalena Góra

The main aim of the article is to answer the question of how the involvement ofthe European Union (EU) in its immediate neighbourhood, and in particular the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), is perceived by American foreignpolicy experts. What aspects of EU activities are assessed positively, and which are the most controversial? Particular attention is paid to the key challenges that the EU has been facing in recent years – the Ukrainian crisis and the political consequences of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, with a special focus on migration pressure in the Mediterranean region. The analysis focuses how EU roles are perceived by American political actors. As the most important international actor, the views of the United States regarding the EU’s activity have a significant influence on what the EU does. The study is based on interviews conducted with experts and political actors of American foreign policy in 2015 and 2016.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511987543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Jungherr ◽  
Ralph Schroeder ◽  
Sebastian Stier

There has been a recent surge of political actors and groups challenging the legitimacy of established political institutions and mass media. We argue that this wave is no accident; rather, it is driven by digital media. Digital media allow outside challengers to route around social institutions that structure political discourse, such as parties and legacy media, which have previously held a monopoly on political coordination and information distribution. Digital media have weakened the power of these institutions, allowing outsiders to maintain extreme positions that formerly would have been filtered out or suppressed by institutions structuring political discourse. In this article, we explicate mechanisms linking digital media to the rise of outsiders by discussing the successes of a diverse set of challengers fighting for attention and representation in the different political contexts of the United States, Germany, and China. We thus provide a novel explanation that systematically accounts for the political consequences of digital media.


Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Mary Coleman

The author of this article argues that the two-decades-long litigation struggle was necessary to push the political actors in Mississippi into a more virtuous than vicious legal/political negotiation. The second and related argument, however, is that neither the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Fordice nor the negotiation provided an adequate riposte to plaintiffs’ claims. The author shows that their chief counsel for the first phase of the litigation wanted equality of opportunity for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as did the plaintiffs. In the course of explicating the role of a legal grass-roots humanitarian, Coleman suggests lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, describing the tradeoffs as part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and the need to move HBCUs to a higher level of opportunity at a critical juncture in the life of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. Throughout the essay the following questions pose themselves: In thinking about the Road to Fordice and to political settlement, would the Justice Department lawyers and the plaintiffs’ lawyers connect at the point of their shared strength? Would the timing of the settlement benefit the plaintiffs and/or the State? Could plaintiffs’ lawyers hold together for the length of the case and move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy? Who were plaintiffs’ opponents and what was their strategy? With these questions in mind, the author offers an analysis of how the campaign— political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education—unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 69-80
Author(s):  
D.G. SELTSER ◽  

The purpose of the article is to clarify the place and role of the decree in the general course of the political process and highlight its direct consequences for the fate of the CPSU and the USSR. The scientific literature on the topic is analyzed. It is concluded that scientists draw a direct connection between the final events of the history of the USSR – Yeltsin's decree about departisation, degradation of the CPSU, resistance to the Emergency Committee and the liquidation of the CPSU / USSR. The author describes the stages of the personnel actions of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. In his opinion, the nomenclature system was expected: «construction» of the elite (1985–1987), elections in the party (1988–1990), elections in the state (1989–1990), decree about departisation (1991). The decree is seen as the final stage in the denationalization of the party. The CPSU, having lost power and property, ceased to be a state. The content of the decree, the behavior of political actors in connection with its adoption and the political consequences of the decree are considered. In conclusion, it is concluded that the decree was a domino effect, a provocation to the instant collapse of the USSR.


1992 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gibson

I demonstrate that the intolerance of ordinary citizens matters for real politics even if strong linkages to policy outputs do not exist. In particular, the model I test posits that cultural intolerance constrains the liberty of individual citizens. Focusing on how people perceive political freedom, several hypotheses coupling tolerance and freedom are explored. Data from a national survey show that tolerance and freedom are connected. Those who do not feel free to express themselves politically are more likely to be intolerant of others, to have less heterogeneous peer groups and less tolerant spouses, and to live in less tolerant communities. Ultimately, the importance of mass political intolerance in the United States is that it establishes a culture of conformity that seems to constrain individual political liberty in many important ways.


Author(s):  
Olha Y. Kravchuk ◽  
Volodymyr I. Zabolotnyuk ◽  
Yuliia V. Kobets ◽  
Oksana I. Lypchuk ◽  
Ivanna I. Lomaka

The article examines the impact of the coalition approach in US policy on integration processes in Europe in the post-bipolar era. The aim of this article was to identify the peculiarities of the political situation in the world after a period of escalation of the nuclear conflict. It involved an analysis of sources in the field of coalition approach research in the United States, as well as a comparison of its impact on the political situation and European Union law. The author concluded that there is a lack of proper research in the field of the impact of the coalition approach in US policy in the post-bipolar era, and its impact on integration processes in Europe. Comparing the experience of the EU and the US, it was determined that the awareness of nuclear danger affected the development of a coalition approach in US policy. The study resulted in the identified specifics of the EU’s security policy under the influence of the US coalition approach, where the need to ensure stability and armed security is crucial. Prospects for further research include identifying US influence on Eastern countries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eckehard Olbrich ◽  
Sven Banisch

The paper explores the notion of a reconfiguration of political space in the context of the rise of populism and its effects on the political system. We focus on Germany and the appearance of the new right wing party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). The idea of a political space is closely connected to the ubiquitous use of spatial metaphors in political talk. In particular the idea of a “distance” between “political positions” would suggest that political actors are situated in a metric space. Using the electoral manifestos from the Manifesto project database we investigate to which extent the spatial metaphors so common in political talk can be brought to mathematical rigor. Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new populism in Western Europe and the United States with respect to a new political cleavage related to globalization, which is assumed to mainly affect the cultural dimension of the political space. As such, it might replace the older economic cleavage based on class divisions in defining the dominant dimension of political conflict. An explanation along these lines suggests a reconfiguration of the political space in the sense that 1) the main cleavage within the political space changes its direction from the economic axis towards the cultural axis, but 2) also the semantics of the cultural axis itself is changing towards globalization related topics. In this paper, we empirically address this reconfiguration of the political space by comparing political spaces for Germany built using topic modeling with the spaces based on the content analysis of the Manifesto project and the corresponding categories of political goals. We find that both spaces have a similar structure and that the AfD appears on a new dimension. In order to characterize this new dimension we employ a novel technique, inter-issue consistency networks (IICN) that allow to analyze the evolution of the correlations between the political positions on different issues over several elections. We find that the new dimension introduced by the AfD can be related to the split off of a new “cultural right” issue bundle from the previously existing center-right bundle.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-107
Author(s):  
Paul Dumouchel

Focusing on existing ‘autonomous’ weapons systems and their uses replaces speculations about future developments and about what robots will or will not be able to do, with attention to the way these weapons are changing and have already changed warfare. The aspects of these transformations that will interest me in this paper are some of the political, organizational and social consequences of the introduction and deployment of various automatic and autonomous weapons systems. Beyond the questions of responsibility and legality, I want to look at the ways in which these weapons change countries’ ability to project power, on how they affect the composition of armed forces, the power relationships within them, and their relations with other major political actors.


Subject The prospects for finalising TTIP. Significance While the EU as a whole -- the European Commission, most member states and a majority of members of the European Parliament (EP) -- appears to remain committed to a wide-ranging agreement with the United States, there are growing indications that public opposition may render the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement politically unviable. Impacts TTIP is estimated to raise the EU's GDP by 0.5%. European governments may decide that such a modest growth boost is not worth the political problems generated by the negotiations. If implemented, its terms could serve as a blueprint for future trade agreements between the EU and other countries. The deal's prospects will be diminished by the US election cycle's appeals to protectionist sentiment.


2015 ◽  
pp. 26-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamil Ławniczak

“Taking ideas seriously” means not only to consider their causal and constitutive role in the study of social phenomena, but also to analyse how and why certain ideas gain or lose prominence within political institutions and discourses. One approach to these issues builds upon the notion of policy paradigms, which influence the results of policy-making process by shaping the political actors’ understanding of problems that need to be solved and limiting available policy options. This article attempts to show how the ability to modernise the EU governance within the paradigm of European integration heading towards “an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” has been called into question by the crisis which began in 2008. Two potential new paradigms of integration are considered: first one suggests controlled disintegration and differentiation of EU structures, second one proposes a reinterpretation of federalism as a way to reconsolidate the Union.


Author(s):  
Sergei A. Samoilenko ◽  
Andrey Miroshnichenko

This chapter contributes to scholarship in the fields of media ecology and political communication by investigating the effects of the Trump bump in media-driven democracy. Specifically, it explains how the media's obsession with Donald Trump allowed them to capitalize on his political brand, which in turn contributed to changing the tone of political discourse in the United States. The effects of mediatization, including click-bait framing, increased negativity, and person-centered media coverage, had a distinct impact on the behavior of political actors and the political system as a whole. The dominance of marketing logic in contemporary media democracies provides a compelling argument for critical investigation of brand appropriation in political communication and its impact on the state of democracy. This chapter advocates for the further investigation of the current media ecosystem in order to move toward a public deliberation model that would support enhanced media literacy and citizen engagement in public policy debates.


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