Animal Agora

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-735
Author(s):  
Sue Donaldson ◽  

Many theorists of the ‘political turn’ in animal rights theory emphasize the need for animals’ interests to be considered in political decision-making processes, but deny that this requires self-representation and participation by animals themselves. I argue that participation by domesticated animals in co-authoring our shared world is indeed required, and explore two ways to proceed: 1) by enabling animal voice within the existing geography of human-animal roles and relationships; and 2) by freeing animals into a revitalized public commons (‘animal agora’) where citizens encounter one another in spontaneous, unpredictable encounters in spaces that they can re-shape together.

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafont

This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative mini-publics such as citizens' juries, Deliberative Polls, and citizens' assemblies. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative mini-publics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of mini-publics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawing from a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, I propose several uses of mini-publics that could enhance the democratic legitimacy of political decision-making in current societies.


2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-259
Author(s):  
Etienne Verhoeyen

Met dit boek levert Frank Seberechts een nagenoeg volledige studie af van een van de minder fraai kanten van de Belgische samenleving in 1940: de administratieve arrestatie en de wegvoering naar Frankrijk van enkele duizenden personen (de ‘verdachten’), Belgen of in België verblijvende vreemdelingen. De extreem-rechtse en pro-Duitse arrestanten hebben na hun vrijlating dit feit politiek in hun voordeel uitgebaat, waardoor volledig in de schaduw kwam te staan dat de overgrote meerderheid van de weggevoerden joodse mensen waren die in de jaren voor de oorlog naar België waren gevlucht. Dat het beeld van de wegvoeringen niet volledig is, is grotendeels te wijten aan het feit dat de meeste archieven die hierop betrekking hebben tijdens de meidagen van 1940 vernietigd werden. Met name de politieke besluitvorming over de wegvoeringen vertoont nog steeds schemerzones, zodat het vastleggen van verantwoordelijkheden ook vandaag nog een gewaagde onderneming is.________Deportations and the deported during the Maydays in 1940 By means of this book Frank Seberechts provides an almost complete study of one of the less admirable sides of Belgian society in 1940: the administrative arrest and the deportation to France of some thousands of people (‘the suspects’), Belgians or foreigners residing in Belgium. The extreme-right and pro-German detainees politically exploited this fact after they had been freed, but this completely overshadowed the point that the large majority of the deported people were Jews who had fled to Belgium during the years preceding the war. This incomplete portrayal of the deportations is mainly due to the fact that most of the archives relating to the events had been destroyed during the Maydays of 1940. The history of the political decision-making about the deportations in particular still shows many grey areas and it is therefore still a risky business even today to determine which people should be held accountable.


Author(s):  
Takeuchi Ayano

AbstractPublic participation has become increasingly necessary to connect a wide range of knowledge and various values to agenda setting, decision-making and policymaking. In this context, deliberative democratic concepts, especially “mini-publics,” are gaining attention. Generally, mini-publics are conducted with randomly selected lay citizens who provide sufficient information to deliberate on issues and form final recommendations. Evaluations are conducted by practitioner researchers and independent researchers, but the results are not standardized. In this study, a systematic review of existing research regarding practices and outcomes of mini-publics was conducted. To analyze 29 papers, the evaluation methodologies were divided into 4 categories of a matrix between the evaluator and evaluated data. The evaluated cases mainly focused on the following two points: (1) how to maintain deliberation quality, and (2) the feasibility of mini-publics. To create a new path to the political decision-making process through mini-publics, it must be demonstrated that mini-publics can contribute to the decision-making process and good-quality deliberations are of concern to policy-makers and experts. Mini-publics are feasible if they can contribute to the political decision-making process and practitioners can evaluate and understand the advantages of mini-publics for each case. For future research, it is important to combine practical case studies and academic research, because few studies have been evaluated by independent researchers.


2003 ◽  
pp. 61-85
Author(s):  
Simo Elakovic

The crisis of modernity as the crisis of the political is seen by the author primarily as a crisis of the "measure" of the criterion of political decision making and action. This crisis is understood in the first place as a crisis of self-awareness and practice of the ethos. Machiavelli was the first to attempt a solution to this problem by introducing the concept of virtus, which became the fundamental principle of modern political philosophy. However, many modern and contemporary interpreters of Machiavelli's thought often ignore the social and political context in which the political doctrine of the Florentine thinker arose. Namely, Machiavelli's effort to find an authentic form of the political act that would make possible a harmonization and stabilization of the dramatic political circumstances then prevailing in Italian cities required a reliable diagnosis and adequate means for a successful therapy of the sick organism of the community. The epochal novelty in Machiavelli's political theory was the shift from the ancient theorization of virtue to its modern operationalization. Nevertheless, this shift is often interpreted as a radical opposing of the Greek concept of arete to the Roman virtus, which is crudely and simplistically reduced to bravery and strength necessary for taking and keeping political power. Hegel in his political philosophy travels an important part of the road - unconsciously rather than consciously - along with Machiavelli and Shelling. This particularly holds for his understanding of the necessity of strength and bravery in the process of operationalizing the spirit of freedom in history through the mediation of "negation" as "the power of evil". The mediation of subjectivity and substantiality, according to Hegel, takes place in the state by the brutal bridling of the world spirit where not just individuals but whole peoples are sacrificed - toward freedom, i.e. its realization in the community of the ethos. The "trouble of the times" is a consequence of the separation between I and the world (Entzeiung) and stems from a reduced political reason which lacks the criterion of the ethical totality for political action and decision making. By the separation of the ethos this reason get routinized and political action is reduced to naked technique of winning and keeping political power. In the concluding segment of the paper the author points to some global consequences of the crisis of political decision making in the historical reality at the end of 20th century.


Author(s):  
Makhsad Isabayev Bakhodirovich ◽  

In this scientific article, international and national legislation on citizens decision-making processes has been investigated, to what extent is the importance of public control in the process of political decision-making, the implementation of citizens' participation in local government directly by itself or through elected representatives (political institutions). Also, practical proposals aimed at increasing the participation of public structures in decision-making were made.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-91
Author(s):  
M.Yu. Martynova ◽  
◽  
D.M. Feoktistova ◽  
◽  

the author analyzes the problems of the activity and development of the political elite. The current political situation in Russia puts forward new requirements for the functioning of the management system of state institutions and determines the need for professionally trained, highly moral personnel of the modern political elite. The paper considers the possibility of introducing modern and progressive mechanisms of interaction between the government and society – crowdsourcing, which involves the wide involvement of citizens with an active civic position and public associations in the process of public discussion and political decision-making.


Author(s):  
Marcus Maurer

Political agenda setting is the part of agenda-setting research that refers to the influence of the media agenda on the agenda of political actors. More precisely, the central question of political agenda-setting research is whether political actors adopt the issue agenda of the news media in various aspects ranging from communicating about issues that are prominently discussed in the news media to prioritizing issues from the news media agenda in political decision making. Although such effects have been studied under different labels (agenda building, policy agenda setting) for several decades, research in this field has recently increased significantly based on a new theoretical model introducing the term political agenda setting. Studies based on that model usually find effects of media coverage on the attention political actors pay to various issues, but at the same time point to a number of contingent conditions. First, as found in research on public agenda setting, there is an influence of characteristics of news media (e.g., television news vs. print media) and issues (e.g., obtrusive vs. unobtrusive issues). Second, there is an influence of characteristics of the political context (e.g., government vs. oppositional parties) and characteristics of individual politicians (e.g., generalists vs. specialists). Third, the findings of studies on the political agenda-setting effect differ, depending on which aspects of the political agenda are under examination (e.g., social media messages vs. political decision making).


Author(s):  
Jonathan Preminger

Placing the developments previously discussed in a wider context, Chapter 12 explores the individualization of politics and the juridification of labor law, as well as the contingent and unstable link that new representative organizations have with political decision-making forums. The chapter reviews research into the transformation of politics, including the turn away from political (democratic) institutions in general and towards a reliance on “expert” institutions, and suggests that these connected processes – the NGO-ization of worker representation and the disintegration of the party-union link – reflect the breakdown of a core premise of neocorporatism: that being a worker was congruent with being a citizen. The union could once count on the labor party to fight its corner in the political sphere because the union’s members were also members of the political community, but now the political community is no longer congruent with the “worker community” – the labor force.


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