institutional politics
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2021 ◽  
pp. 391-404
Author(s):  
Dermot Hodson ◽  
Uwe Puetter ◽  
Sabine Saurugger

The establishment, consolidation, and transformation of EU institutions—in short, EU institutional politics—is the subject of this book. This chapter asks how the different institutions surveyed are situated along the five dimensions of EU institutional politics: (1) intergovernmental vs supranational; (2) international vs transnational; (3) separate vs fused; (4) followers vs leaders; and (5) legitimate vs contested. We show that while tension between supranational and intergovernmental bodies remains a key dimension of EU institutional politics, the four other institutional dimensions have become more pronounced, especially as the crises facing European integration have become more salient over the past twenty years. These crises have not had a homogenous or unidirectional effect on EU institutional politics. The chapter also looks to the future of EU institutions, including institutional tensions over EU–UK relations after Brexit and the Conference on the Future of Europe.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Dermot Hodson ◽  
Uwe Puetter ◽  
Sabine Saurugger

The European Union (EU) cannot be understood without reference to its institutions. But scholars differ on the questions of what precisely EU institutions are, what they do, and why they matter. This chapter defines EU institutions as decision-making bodies. It refers to the notion of EU institutional politics as the sphere of informal and formal rules, norms, procedures, and practices that shape such decision-making. The chapter explores how different theoretical traditions—international relations, integration theory, new institutionalism, the separation of powers, governance, public policy and administration approaches, and critical perspectives—think about EU institutions. Drawing on these traditions, this chapter encourages readers to think about EU institutions along five dimensions: intergovernmental versus supranational, international versus transnational, separated versus fused power, leaders versus followers, and contested versus legitimate. Seeing how the Union’s decision-making bodies move within and between these dimensions offers a deeper understanding of why EU institutions matter.


2021 ◽  
pp. 299-320
Author(s):  
Ana E. Juncos

This chapter examines the institutional arrangements in the European Union’s (EU’s) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The chapter first charts the historical development of this policy, with foreign policy cooperation being one of the last policy areas to emerge at the EU level. Thus, many of the institutions operating in this area have only been recently established, including the High Representative, the European External Action Service, and many of the administrative bodies supporting the implementation of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, which comprises the EU’s civilian and military operations. The chapter then analyses the main institutional actors involved in the CFSP, focusing on their ability to shape the decision-making and implementation of this policy. The following sections also examine the five dimensions of EU institutional politics and how these play out in this particular area, highlighting the key challenges the EU faces in becoming a fully fledged international actor.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Mohamed Salih

The debate on the decline of democracy is not new. It can be traced to the period between the First and Second World Wars, and it resurfaced during the 1970s, followed by the most spectacular dem- ocratic resurgence in human history. This lecture focuses on the current debate on the decline of democracy and downward trends in major democracy assessment indices. Africa is among the three least democratic world regions, with 42% of African countries cur- rently designated as not free. Measuring the decline or rise of democracy only by the perfor- mance of institutional politics does not provide a complete picture of the issue. Institutional politics does not account for the resil- ience and thriving new spaces where democratic vibrancy and civic engagement prevail. Examples from African countries demonstrate that democracy indices based on institutional politics alone do not account for alternative democratic spaces and practices. This paper is the edited version of the keynote speech delivered by the author at the 6th Pécs African Studies Conference under the theme “African Realities: Conflict and Cooperation”, September 23-24, 2021 – University of Pécs, Hungary.


Author(s):  
Juliana M. Streva

Moving beyond the legal and historical hegemonic definitions of the quilombo, this paper investigates continuities in gendered racial violence in Brazil by evoking the political and poetic of the quilombo. Inspired by the works of the historian and poet Beatriz Nascimento, the multifaceted notion of quilombo is conceptualized as an ongoing praxis of fugitivity and coalition that draws on the interconnectedness of anti-colonial, feminist, and anti-racist struggles. In exploring geopolitical breaks and epistemological ruptures, this paper fosters a necessary conversation between theory and practice by engaging with the living archives of three Afro-Brazilian writers and activists: (i) Beatriz Nascimento’s fundamental contributions on the political, material and symbolic dimensions of quilombo; (ii) the legacy and vision of Marielle Franco focusing on the necessity to ocupar the institutional politics like a growing seed; (iii) the work of Erica Malunguinho and Mandata Quilombo through the praxis of aquilombar the constitutional democracy, based on the alternation in representative power and repossession.


2021 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Cristina Rosillo-López

The first chapter focuses on outlining the study of politics in Rome beyond institutions. It reviews who participated in politics, going beyond the classic model of the adult male citizen with full political and legal rights, and including many other groups that were active in politics through their participation in the network of meetings and conversations, especially women and freedmen. The chapter argues that political participation also happened outside institutions, so the number of people who took part in politics becomes much larger. Both extra-institutional and institutional politics, both of which were used by the elite and the people in their own ways, constituted the body of Roman politics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 179-203
Author(s):  
Cristina Rosillo-López

Chapter 7 posits an important hypothesis for this book: senators could not reach everybody for many reasons, so they were surrounded by a wide spectrum of people, non-senatorial actors who intervened in conversations with several degrees of agency and thus played an important role in the transmission of information and, therefore, in politics. The chapter focuses mainly on two groups: freedmen and elite women; finally, it questions the role of courtesans within this system. Elite women did not intervene in politics exclusively in their own realm; instead, their role in conversations attests to their inclusion within the broader network of conversations and the circulation of information that sustained Roman politics. Trusted liberti also played a relevant role. Even those actors with a lower degree of agency were not mere mouthpieces who parroted words that they had been taught. These actors played a limited role in institutional politics. However, they were a sine quibus non within the sphere of extra-institutional politics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 204-234
Author(s):  
Cristina Rosillo-López

Chapter 8 studies how conversations and meetings impacted political deliberation and deal-making in the Senate, thus fusing extra-institutional and institutional politics. How did senators look for support and probe each other regarding specific issues? How did preparatory conversations work? It is a fact of life, in ancient Rome as nowadays, that the written text of a decision does not fully reflect the previous groundwork, negotiations, and discussions that led to it. The study of Atticus allows us to consider the role and influence of non-senatorial actors. The aim of this chapter is not to claim that a certain measure was enacted because A and B had a conversation during a dinner or because someone secured the support of C and D during a quick chat in the Forum or in a corner of the Senate house (although such actions are described). Going beyond the micro-scale and specific instances, the interest of this study is to analyse how these actions illuminate our understanding of how the Roman political system worked in practice. This chapterargues that the role of conversations and meetings did not mean that all was decided beforehand; a senator could gather support for a draft of a law or a policy through previous conversations, but he still had to defend it and fight for it in public institutions (the Senate, contiones, and assemblies), without always being able to guarantee success beforehand.


2021 ◽  
pp. 117-127
Author(s):  
A. R. Agababov ◽  
R. A. Lyovochkin

The article examines the main forms and socio-cultural features of the participation of Muslim youth in Scotland in non-institutional politics. As their research goal, the authors chose to identify the mechanisms through which political processes specific to the Scottish context (different from the general British or, for example, the English context) generate various forms of political participation of young adherents of Islam. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was a significant layer of empirical data (mainly Scottish), comprehended through an interpretive paradigm, which allowed the authors to analyze the non-institutionalized political experience of young Muslims, finding patterns in how Muslim youth perceive and construct the social world around them. The result of the study was an understanding that the strengthening of the “Islamic factor” in the social and political life of Scotland is explained not only by the growth of the Muslim population, but also by the obvious support that the Scottish authorities provide to adherents of Islam. According to the authors, the issue of national and state independence, the specificity of Scottish nationalism, the attractiveness of the political platform of the Scottish National Party for ethno-confessional minorities became the most important primary factors that predetermined the active entry of Scottish Muslim youth into politics. The main conclusion in this article was the idea that the specific socio-political and sociocultural contexts of Scotland create appropriate forms of political participation of young Muslims. Despite the prevailing opinion that Scottish Muslim youth are interested mainly in international events, the authors show a clearly traceable institutional and non-institutional involvement of young Muslims in national and local political issues in Scotland. According to the authors, the non-institutional political participation of young Scottish followers of Islam is manifested in such forms as social movements, activism and charity, and volunteer work.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
ROSSELLA CICCIA ◽  
CÉSAR GUZMÁN-CONCHA

Abstract The expansion of social pensions in Latin America was part of a larger process aimed at extending protections to informal workers and other individuals not covered by social insurance. These reforms were enacted by governments of different colours, and varied considerably with regard to the scope of the new programmes. While previous comparative studies have privileged economic factors and electoral dynamics to explain these differences, this article extends these frameworks to incorporate the interplay between contentious and institutional politics. It uses a two-step qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the long-term effect of protests on reforms extending the coverage of social pensions under different constellations of political, economic and institutional conditions in 18 Latin American countries (2000-2011). The results show that protest was present in almost all configurations of expansion, but that its effect was contingent on the ideology of governments, the levels of political competition and the strength of unions.


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