An Overview of the Civil Procedure and Court System of Netherlands

When it comes to Dutch law, the initiation of civil litigation, there are just a few cases in the Netherlands. This is due to the harmonized Dutch culture. Therefore, compared to other European countries, the number of lawyers and judges per capita in the Netherlands is small. In this scientific paper, we will make an overview of the civil judicial organization, the types of civil proceedings, the obligation to represent the civil cases in the court through a lawyer, legal aid and also in more detail we will focus on the main stages of the civil trial as well as the conditions that must be met before initiating civil proceedings. We will analyze in detail the fact that in the Dutch Law, the defendant may deny the right to judicial reconciliation with the plaintiff, before initiating the proceedings and that it is also preferable in Dutch Law, that the opposing party is summoned to fulfill its obligations within a certain period. If without respecting this method, the court procedure is initiated, the court costs may be attributed to the initiator of the procedure, i.e the plaintiff. Except for proceedings before judges from subordinate regions in Dutch law, the general rule is that the proceedings must be presided over by the plaintiff's attorney (procurator litis) and by a lawyer selected from the list of attorneys registered with the Association. In this scientific paper, we will also pay special attention to the temporary legal protection and special procedures and we will also focus on the judgments and legal remedies in Dutch law.

Do constituents know (or care) about the lawmaking effectiveness of their representatives?

Substantial evidence exists that members of the US Congress vary in their lawmaking effectiveness. Less known, however, is whether constituents are sufficiently informed and inclined to hold their representatives accountable, based on their effectiveness. We conduct two separate survey experiments, informing some constituents about lawmakers' effectiveness and comparing their responses to those with the baseline level of information. We find that voters demonstrate little knowledge of their elected officials' lawmaking effectiveness. When presented with objective and credible information about lawmaking effectiveness, however, respondents express greater approval of more effective lawmakers. Effects are strongest among ideological moderates, but are even pronounced among partisans, who approve of effective representatives of the opposing party, and disapprove of ineffective representatives from their own party.

Negative partisanship is not more prevalent than positive partisanship

The dominant narrative among scholars and political pundits characterizes American partisanship as overwhelmingly negative --- portraying citizens as more repelled by the opposing party than attached to their own party. To assess the valence of partisan identity, we use novel measures, several new and existing nationally representative surveys, and behavioral outcomes obtained from two experiments. Our findings consistently depart from the negative partisanship narrative. For the majority of Americans, partisanship is either equally positive and negative or more positive than negative. Only partisan leaners stand out as negative partisans. We pair these observational findings with experimental data that differentiate between positive group behavior and negative group behavior in the partisan context. We find that the behavioral manifestations of party identity similarly include both positive and negative biases in balance, reinforcing our conclusion that descriptions of partisanship as primarily negative are exaggerated.

Necessary Questions of Chö: Uses and Abuses of Religion in Dondrup Gyel’s “Tulku”

“Why do you ask questions of roots and branches instead of the necessary questions of chö (Tib. chos)?” asks a character in Tibetan author Dondrup Gyel’s (don rgrub rgyal) controversial 1980 short story, “Tulku” (sprul sku). The Tibetan term chö can be translated in many ways, including to mean ‘the Buddhist teachings,’ ‘religion’ more generally, or even ‘the nature of reality.’ In “Tulku,” however, what chö means is not at all clear, and the various characters claim authority to determine what is legitimate chö. In the story, a Tibetan village is visited by a mysterious stranger claiming to be a tulku—a reincarnated religious leader— but who is actually a fraud. Most scholars have interpreted “Tulku” as a critique of traditional Tibetan religious devotion, and as a call by Gyel for Tibetans to modernize. This paper, however, proposes a new reading of “Tulku.” It suggests that Gyel pairs overt criticism of the corrupt tulku with a subtler critique of the Chinese government’s policy towards Tibetan Buddhism. It argues for such a reading by tracking how the word chö is used in “Tulku.” It shows that Gyel places the word not in the mouths of the Tibetan villagers, but rather in the mouths of the fraudulent tulku and the representatives of the Communist Party. Both thus use chö in order to appeal to the Tibetan villagers, claim power for themselves, and exclude the opposing party. “Tulku” thereby creates parallels between the ways in which the Tulku and the Party use chö to appeal to and manipulate the Tibetan villagers. On this reading, “Tulku” highlights the way chö can be weaponized by both traditional religious authorities and Communist party ideology, and suggests that in this modern period, any claimant to chö must be treated with caution and skepticism.

Creating and Disrupting Othering During Policymaking in a Polarized Context

As the United States has become increasingly polarized, policymakers have had difficulty gaining bipartisan support for policy proposals. Political polarization can lead to the othering of individuals, a process characterized by the tendency to construct members of an opposing party in negative ways. In this article, we examine the creation and disruption of othering through the lens of language convergence/meaning divergence (LC/MD) and pragmatic ambiguity. LC/MD and pragmatic ambiguity framed our case study of the successful bipartisan passage of the Global Food Security Act (GFSA) in 2016. We found that othering was produced through a maestro Discourse of Polarization that structured interactions between other Discourses, including the Discourse of National Security and the Global Good Discourse. Discordant framings of the three Discourses created the ambiguity necessary to disrupt othering and achieve collective action. The findings provide new theoretical insights into othering processes while pragmatic ambiguity broadens LC/MD in important ways.

When Evaluative Adjectives Prevent Contradiction in a Debate

This paper argues that some words are so highly charged with meaning by a community that they may prevent a discussion during which each participant is on an equal footing. These words are indeed either unanimously accepted or rejected. The presence of these adjectival groups pushes the antagonist to find rhetorical strategies to circumvent them. The main idea we want to develop is that some propositions are not easily debatable in context because of some specific value-bearing words (VBWs), and one of the goals of this paper is to build a methodological tool for finding and classifying these VBWs (with a focus on evaluative adjectives). Our study echoes the importance of “cultural keywords” (as reported by Wierzbicka, Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, 1997) in argument (as reported by Rigotti & Rocci, Argumentation in practice, 2005), but is rather based on a German approach developed by (as reported by Dieckmann, Sprache in der Politik: Einführung in die Pragmatik und Semantik der politischen, 1975), (as reported by Strauss and Zifonun, Der politische Wortschatz, 1986), and (as reported by Girnth, Sprache und Sprachverwendung in der Politik: Eine Einführung in die linguistische Analyse öffentlich-politischer Kommunikation, 2015) about “Miranda” and “Anti-Miranda” words that is expanded and refined here. In particular, our study tries to understand why some statements, fueled by appreciative (Tseronis, 2014) or evaluative adjectives, have such rhetorical effects on a pragmatic level in the particular context of a vote on the Swiss popular initiative called “for more affordable housing”. This context is fruitful since two parties offer reasons for two opposing policy claims: namely, to accept or to reject an initiative. When one party uses arguments containing such universally unassailable adjectival groups to defend a “yes” vote (in our example, pleading for more affordable housing rents), the opposing party cannot use a symmetrical antonym while pleading for the “no” vote. The methodological tool that is proposed here could shed light on the use of certain rhetorical and referential strategies in conflicting policy proposition contexts.

It’s Only You and Me and We Just Disagree: The Ideological Foundations of Affective Polarization

Using the extensive battery of issue questions included in the 2020 ANES survey, I find that a single underlying liberal-conservative dimension largely explains the policy preferences of ordinary Americans across a wide range of issues including the size and scope of the welfare state, abortion, gay and transgender rights, race relations, immigration, gun control and climate change. I find that the distribution of preferences on this liberal-conservative issue scale is highly polarized with Democratic identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the left, Republican identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the right and little overlap between the two distributions. Finally, I show that ideological preferences strongly predict feelings toward the parties and presidential candidates. These findings indicate that polarization in the American public has a rational foundation. Hostility toward the opposing party reflects strong disagreement with the policies of the opposing party. As long as the parties remain on the opposite sides of almost all major issues, feelings of mistrust and animosity are unlikely to diminish regardless of Donald Trump’s future role in the Republican Party.

The politicization of face masks in the American public sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic

This research shows how face masks became politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. While differences in mask wearing behaviors between liberals and conservatives declined over the course of the pandemic, masks remained controversial in the American public sphere. We argue that political divisions over masks cannot be understood by looking to partisan differences in mask wearing behaviors alone. Instead, we show how the mask became a political symbol enrolled into larger patterns of affective polarization, defined by animosity toward the opposing party. This study relies primarily on a combination of qualitative coding and computational text analysis of a large corpus of opinion articles published during the first 10 months of 2020 (n = 7,970). It also relies on supplemental analyses of social media data (from Twitter), the transcripts of major news networks, and longitudinal survey data. We show that backlash against mask refusal—rather than mask refusal itself—was the primary way that masks took on political significance in the American public sphere. Anti-mask discourse consistently occupied a marginal role in the public sphere, while backlash against mask refusal came to prominence and did not decline even as mask wearing behaviors normalized and partly depolarized. We argue that the mask refusal backlash discourse appealed primarily to liberals and show that it was particularly resonant with national political discourses. Beyond the case, this research demonstrates how to use media data to understand how a new set of issues and objects becomes integrated into broader patterns of political polarization.

Biased and Inaccurate Meta-Perceptions about Out-Partisans’ Support for Democratic Principles May Erode Democratic Norms

Two studies (one preregistered) of Americans (N = 2,200) drawn from a nationally representative panel show that both Democrats and Republicans personally value core democratic characteristics but severely underestimate opposing party members’ support for those same characteristics. In turn, the tendency to believe that political ingroup members value democratic characteristics more than political outgroup members is associated with support for anti-democratic practices. Results suggest biased and inaccurate intergroup “meta-perceptions”—beliefs about what others believe—may contribute to democratic erosion in the United States.