Search results for " Public Administration"
showing 10 items of 979 documents
The triumph of partisanship: political scientists in the public debate about Catalonia's independence crisis (2010-2018)
2021
Participation in the public debate constitutes one of the most evident avenues for political scientists to demonstrate the social relevance of the discipline. This article focuses on two questions: the types of roles political scientists adopt in their public interventions and the potential tensions between their public engagement and the epistemic norms regulating academic and research activities. We investigate these questions in the context of very salient political debates, involving a high degree of political confrontation, where basic political beliefs, values, identities, and interests are at stake. Focusing on the case of the public debate surrounding the Catalan inde pendence crisi…
How representative are referendums? Evidence from 20 years of Swiss referendums
2017
Direct democracy allows citizens to reverse decisions made by legislatures and even initiate new laws which parliaments are unwilling to pass, thereby, as its proponents argue, leading to more representative policies than would have obtained under a purely representative democracy. Yet, turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. Consequently, critics of direct democracy argue that referendum outcomes may not be representative of the preferences of the population at large. We test this assertion using a compilation of post-referendum surveys encompassing 148 national referendums held in Switze…
Claims secured by a registered pledge in sanation proceedings
2019
This study concerns the legal situation of a receivable secured by a registered pledge in a debtor’s sanation (restructuring) proceedings. The registered pledgee has a special position in the course of such proceedings. The study discusses the rules of subjecting the receivable secured by the arrangement, the rules of preparing and contesting the list of receivables, and finally the rules of satisfying the pledgee.
Evolution of the suicides’ right to funeral and burial in Canon Law and Polish Law
2020
For centuries, funeral law was not too favourable to suicides. Admittedly, at the dawn of Christianity this group of the deceased was not refused religious funeral celebrations or a burial, yet, the situation changed along with the Catholic religion gaining significance. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, suicides were deprived of the right to a religious funeral. Furthermore, in the 11th century the ecclesiastical legislator forbade burial for suicides in “holy places.” Until modern times, therefore, suicides were buried at a distance from grave- yards. This in practice often indicated a burial insulting human dignity. The monopoly on religious funeral regulations only ended in Europe at…
Casual, Colloquial, Commonsensical: A News Values Stylistic Analysis of a Populist Newsfeed
2021
This study explores a mediated variety of right-wing populist discourse in the digital context, given the populists’ inclination to bypass legacy media to connect directly to the citizens to garner political support. It analyzes a sample of the Tea Party’s newsfeed headlines posted in the spring of 2019. A corpus of 308 headlines collected according to a “constructed week” formula has been coded first according to selected news values parameters (Bednarek and Caple 2017), and then with respect to stylistic devices operationalized in terms of “casual,” “colloquial” and “commonsensical” expressions. Methodologically, the study aims to combine the perspectives of newsworthiness and stylistics …
La politique éolienne et ses effets sur le développement local. Une analyse basée sur le système des acteurs (Loja, Equateur)
2020
La política energética ecuatoriana pretende que las centrales eléctricas contribuyan al desarrollo local en las áreas en las que se implantan. A partir del caso de estudio del Parque Eólico Villonaco (PEV), la pregunta de investigación que se plantea es si el Plan de Desarrollo Territorial Comunitario (PDTC) que se está implementando en la zona de influencia del Parque, está teniendo efectos socio-territoriales positivos. Se utiliza una metodología cualitativa, a partir de entrevistas semiestructuradas a actores clave. Los resultados obtenidos indican que la central eólica ha empezado a tener efectos positivos en el ámbito de los equipamientos educativos, la infraestructura vial, o en el al…
The effect of early career social capital on long-term income development in Finland
2020
PurposeIn this study, the authors examine whether social capital embedded in individuals' social networks is connected to employees' long-term income development in Finland.Design/methodology/approachAnalyses are based on 25–35-year-old employees from the Finnish Living Conditions Survey of 1994 combined with register data on earned incomes from 1995 to 2016. The authors used questions addressing the frequency of meeting parents or siblings, spending free time with co-workers and participation in associational, civic or other societal activities as measures of the extent of network capital. Ordered logistic model was used to examine whether the size and composition of social networks differ…
Turning experience into expertise : technologies of the self in Finnish participatory social policy
2017
This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects’ emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants’ way of ‘knowing themselves’. They require the service users to reframe thei…
Constructing social Europe through European cultural heritage
2021
The political and economic crises of the recent decades as well as the new changes brought on by globalization and digitalization have contributed to exacerbate social inequalities and injustice and revealed different social realities in Europe. The EU increasingly deals with social issues in its cultural and heritage policy. In this article, we explore the construction of this social dimension and advance the concept of 'social Europe' by exploring its cultural aspect based on our analysis of a recent EU heritage action, the European Heritage Label. In this action, the narrations of the European past and the attempts to foster common cultural heritage in Europe function as building blocks …
‘The will to not be empowered (according to your rules)’: Resistance in Finnish participatory social policy
2018
Participation has increasingly become a means and an end for successful and ‘empowering’ social policy. Building on previous governmentality critiques of participatory initiatives, this article investigates practices of resistance in the context of Finnish participatory social policy. I adopt a Foucauldian counter-conducts approach as my lens to study critical speech as a form of resistance in initiatives that invite marginalised people as ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organisations. I illustrate how practices of governing and resistance are intertwined and mutually dependent in a much subtler and more practical manner than allows the often-used analytical dichotomy between domi…