scholarly journals Unequal inequalities? How participatory inequalities affect democratic legitimacy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Serup Christensen ◽  
Janette Huttunen ◽  
Fredrik Malmberg ◽  
Nanuli Silagadze

Democratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, i.e. that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, and it is therefore important to examine how participatory inequalities affect these attitudes. We here contribute to this research agenda with survey experiments embedded in two surveys (n=324, n=840). We here examine 1) whether citizens consider participatory inequality to be an important democratic principle, and 2) how gender and educational inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and the perceived usefulness of the participatory input. The results show that citizens generally consider participatory inequalities to be important, but only gender inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and usefulness. Hence it is important to consider the type of inequality to understand the implications.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Oliver Westerwinter

Abstract Friedrich Kratochwil engages critically with the emergence of a global administrative law and its consequences for the democratic legitimacy of global governance. While he makes important contributions to our understanding of global governance, he does not sufficiently discuss the differences in the institutional design of new forms of global law-making and their consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance. I elaborate on these limitations and outline a comparative research agenda on the emergence, design, and effectiveness of the diverse arrangements that constitute the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance.


2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Lidström

Although not entirely clear with regard to definitions and delimitations, the article by Savitch and Adhikari opens up for a comparative research agenda of considerable importance for better understanding the preconditions for how the metropolis can be governed. Their suggestion that public authorities are important for solving collective problems in the metropolitan areas is also relevant in a European context. There is already a tradition in Europe to establish cooperative arrangements between metropolitan local governments for tasks that requires a larger territorial scale, but Savitch and Adhikari direct our attention to private law arrangements, i.e. inter-municipal corporations. Also in Europe, these have become increasingly common, which may be understood in the light of the increasing marketization of local government. Although lacking in democratic legitimacy, they provide more flexibility and may also include private businesses in their governing body. However, knowledge about their occurrence and functions is limited, which calls for further, systematic and comparative research. In particular, it should be investigated whether they, as in the US, are more common in the metropolitan areas with the strongest resources.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 473
Author(s):  
Maria De Loudes de Carvalho Fragoso ◽  
Vitória Régia Fernandes Gehlen ◽  
Tarcísio Augusto Alves da Silva

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo discutir a condição das mulheres em situação de desastres naturais. A problemática está relacionada às enchentes e inundações ocorridas na Região da Mata Sul de Pernambuco e busca, a partir da análise bibliográfica, verificar como as mulheres em situação de vulnerabilidade socioambiental que vivenciaram as enchentes e inundações respondem aos impactos destrutivos desses eventos para ao final podermos apresentar uma agenda de pesquisa relacionada ao problema.  O trabalho, de caráter teórico, foi construído a partir do levantamento de dados bibliográficos e seu resultado conclui que a vulnerabilidade aos desastres é socialmente construída e está relacionada a padrões socioeconômicos, culturais, ambientais, de segurança e de acesso a informação, sendo suas consequências distribuídas de forma desigual entre homens e mulheres. No enfrentamento das catástrofes as mulheres, mesmo sendo vítimas de danos maiores que os homens adotam diferentes estratégias e tentam reconstruir a teia que liga as suas vidas a responsabilidade na manutenção e reprodução da família. Observa-se na região carência de implementação e execução de políticas públicas direcionadas ao atendimento as mulheres em situação de emergência provocada por desastres naturais. Por fim, o artigo indica a relevância de uma agenda de estudos sobre as desigualdades de gênero na Mata Sul como forma de evidenciar os impactos negativos provenientes do desastre socioambiental ocorrido na Região, o qual atinge de formas diferenciadas a vida feminina e masculina.Palavras - chave: Desastres naturais, Desigualdades de gêneros, Gênero e Meio Ambiente, Políticas Públicas. The Women Condition Facing Situations of Natural Disaster ABSTRACTThe present paper has as objective the discussion about the condition of women in situations of natural disasters. The problem is related to the floods in the Mata Sul Region of Pernambuco and, from the literature analysis, it search to verify how women, in situation of socioenvironmental vulnerability, that have experienced flooding respond to destructive impacts of these events to, it the end, it be possible to present a research agenda related to the problem. The work, of a theoretical character, was built from the bibliographic data collection and its result concludes that the vulnerability to disaster is socially constructed and it is related to socioeconomic, cultural, environmental and security patterns and pattern of access to information, being their consequences unevenly distributed between men and women. In coping with catastrophes, women, even being victims of further damage that men, they adopt different strategies and try to reconstruct the web that connects their lives responsibility in the maintenance and reproduction of the family. It is observed in the region lack of implementation and execution of public policies directed to the treatment of women in emergency situations caused by natural disasters. Finally, the article indicates the relevance of a research agenda about gender inequalities in the Mata Sul as a way to highlight the negative impacts of the environmental disaster occurred in the region, which affects in different ways the male and female life.Keywords: Natural disasters, gender inequalities, Gender and Environment, Public Policy.


Author(s):  
Joseph Lacey

This introduction presents the central problematic of the book, justifies the comparative approach that is employed in later parts of the project, and outlines the main arguments developed throughout the work. The problematic is referred to as the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems (LFT), which predicts problems for democratic legitimacy and political identity formation for political communities that operate without a common language. As multilevel and multilingual political systems with claims to democratic legitimacy, Belgium and Switzerland are identified as two of the best available cases to test the validity of the LFT, with a view to informing the nature of and prospects for democratic legitimacy in the EU.


Author(s):  
Joseph Lacey

Centripetal democracy is the idea that legitimate democratic institutions set in motion forms of citizen practice and representative behaviour that serve as powerful drivers of political identity formation. Partisan modes of political representation in the context of multifaceted electoral and direct democratic voting opportunities are emphasized on this model. There is, however, a strain of thought predominant in political theory that doubts the democratic capacities of political systems constituted by multiple public spheres. This view is referred to as the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems (LFT). Inadequate democratic institutions and acute demands to divide the political system (through devolution or secession), are predicted by this thesis. By combining an original normative democratic theory with a comparative analysis of how Belgium and Switzerland have variously managed to sustain themselves as multilingual democracies, this book identifies the main institutional features of a democratically legitimate European Union (EU) and the conditions required to bring it about. Part I presents a novel theory of democratic legitimacy and political identity formation on which subsequent analyses are based. Part II defines the EU as a demoi-cracy and provides a thorough democratic assessment of this political system. Part III explains why Belgium has largely succumbed to the centrifugal logic predicted by the LFT, while Switzerland apparently defies this logic. Part IV presents a model of centripetal democracy for the EU, one that would greatly reduce its democratic deficit and help to ensure that this political system does not succumb to the centrifugal forces expected by the LFT.


Author(s):  
Jonas Linde ◽  
Stefan Dahlberg

This chapter provide an overview of the growing stock of research on the relationship between quality of government and political support. After having been surprisingly absent from the research agenda dealing with support and legitimacy, a growing number of studies have come to demonstrate the importance of impartiality in the implementation of public policies for political support and democratic legitimacy. After outlining a framework for analysis of political support and a discussion of different aspects of quality of government in this body of research, we take a closer look on a number of important contributions that have demonstrated the explanatory power of quality of government when it comes to analyses of variation in political support. In doing so, we distinguish between studies that have assessed the effects of quality of government on the system level (e.g. countries’ level of corruption) and analyses investigating the relationship between individuals’ perceptions of the quality of government and political support.


2015 ◽  
pp. 251-276
Author(s):  
Matthias Lievens ◽  
Emilie Bécault ◽  
Antoon Braeckman ◽  
Jan Wouters

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (7) ◽  
pp. 1671-1706
Author(s):  
Başak Çalı ◽  
Betül Durmuş

AbstractThis article traces the evolution of judicial self-government practices (JSG) in Turkey and argues that the frequent changes in JSG are part of a broader trajectory of experimental constitutional politics. The Council for Judges and Prosecutors has experienced sharp turns since its establishment in 1961, respectively in 1971, 1982, 2010, 2014 and 2017. During this period, Turkey experienced different forms of judicial councils ranging from co-option, hierarchical and executive controlled judicial council models to a more pluralistic model. The Justice Academy of Turkey has also not been immune from this experimentalism. The article discusses the endogenous relationship between these often short-lived experiments of JSG and their impacts on the independence, accountability, and legitimacy of the judiciary and public confidence in the judiciary. The article then turns to the repercussions of JSG on separation of powers and democratic principle. It focuses on the implications of the ambiguous position of the Council in the state structure for the separation of powers, and the revived debate on democratic legitimacy of JSG after the 2017 constitutional amendments.


2020 ◽  
pp. 003232171989903
Author(s):  
Julia Jennstål ◽  
Katrin Uba ◽  
PerOla Öberg

Citizens’ adherence to deliberative civic values fulfils a vital function in deliberative democratic systems. We propose a way to measure the prevalence and variations of such values as a first step to better understanding how this works. Based on survey data, we demonstrate that, in Sweden, adherence to the values of reasoning and listening is stronger than adherence to the strategic rhetorical, non-deliberative values. This may have important implications for our understanding of how deliberation and democracy work in this particular context. There are also, however, important individual-level variations of adherence to deliberative civic values related to age, education, gender and Swedish background. Taken together, this opens up for a new research agenda where comparative analyses of deliberative civic values and how it relates to political behaviour are particularly encouraged.


2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha M McKinney ◽  
Katherine M Marconi ◽  
Paul D Cleary ◽  
Jennifer Kates ◽  
Steven R Young ◽  
...  

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