Search results for "POLITICS"

The Changing Role and Contribution of Social Science to Nuclear Waste Management in Finland

2008

This article explores both the social and political usage of social science research and its effectiveness, as perceived by experts, in the process of planning and decision-making in the context of Finnish nuclear waste management. The argument is that public participation in the process is important, but to reach some kind of public acceptability the actors in charge of “solving” the nuclear waste problem have to govern the societal process and respond to the claims and the needs of the public. This requires the integration of social science research into the process responsible for developing the nuclear waste management model. In trying to understand the uniquely positive nuclear waste …

Unravelling environment and politics in the Spanish press. From Franco’s dictatorship to democracy

2017

The 1970s and 1980s were key years for the consolidation of environmentalism and environmental communication. In Spain, the special political situation during General Franco’s military dictatorship conditioned the coverage of environmental issues, as did the transition to democracy. The Albufera Natural Park (Valencia, Spain) was a particularly significant case in this context, since it was involved in one of the first environmental protests to protect a natural area covered by Spanish media. In this paper, we study opinion articles published in the Valencian newspapers Las Provincias and Levante, in order to analyze the evolution of the environmental discourse in Spanish society from the d…

Is diversity of leisure-time sport activities associated with low back and neck–shoulder region pain? A Finnish twin cohort study

2019

This study investigates cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between the diversity of leisure-time sport activities and the frequencies of low back pain (LBP) and neck-shoulder region pain (NSP) in twins, including a cross-sectional within-pair design to adjust for potential familial confounding. Finnish twins born in 1975–79 (FinnTwin16 study) reported participation in leisure-time sport activities at the mean ages of 17 (1992–96) (n = 5096, 54% females) and 34 years (2010−12) (n = 3731, 57% females). Diversity assessed as the number of sport activities was categorized as 1, 2, 3, 4, and ≥ 5, excluding inactive individuals. The frequencies of LBP (n = 3201) and NSP (n = 3207), rep…

Testing for a Political Bias in Freedom House Democracy Scores: Are U.S. Friendly States Judged To Be More Democratic?

2012

Several scholars have criticized the Freedom House democracy ratings as being politically biased; do countries indeed incorrectly receive better ratings that have stronger political ties with the United States? Starting from the assumption that other indices of democracy can be used as benchmark data, different estimation strategies are employed to gauge whether differences between a number of alternative indices of democracy and the FH ratings can be explained in a systematic manner by variables that record relationships between the U.S. and the countries under investigation. Differentiating between the period before 1989 and after 1988, I obtain consistent evidence of a substantial bias i…

Corruption, political discretion and entrepreneurship

2018

Purpose While common sense suggests that corruption will likely have a negative impact on the economy as it raises the cost of doing business, research on the topic showed inconsistent results (positive, negative and neutral). This paper aims to verify whether corruption has a “grease” or “sand” effect on the wheels of entrepreneurial rates and under which conditions corruption will have stronger or weaker effects. Design/methodology/approach Using institutional theory as the basis for the hypotheses, generalized least squares estimation is conducted to empirically examine the role of corruption and political discretion in entrepreneurship in a sample of 93 countries. Findings Countries wi…

Politics of Mobility and Stability in Authorizing European Heritage : Estonia’s Great Guild Hall

2019

AbstractKaasik-Krogerus scrutinizes the European Heritage Label (EHL) as an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) in the making. She analyses how the discourse is formed in a politics of mobility and stability between the local, national, and European scales resulting from the interplay of europeanization (of the national and local) and domestication (of the European). The chapter asks how this politics of mobility and stability is conducted to manage the scalar dissonance in one of the sites, the Great Guild Hall in Tallinn, Estonia. Kaasik-Krogerus argues that the politics conducted in the exhibitions works in two controversial ways: legitimizing mobility and stability as natural and simult…

Media for the minorities: Russian language media in Estonia 1990–2012

2013

This article aims to explore the ways in which Estonian public broadcasting tackles one specific media service sphere; how television programmes for language minorities are created in a small country, how economics and European Union media policy have influenced this processes. The article highlights major tensions, namely between Estonian and Russian media outlets, Estonian and Russian speakers within Estonia and the EU and Estonia concerning the role of public service broadcasting (PSB). For research McQuail’s (2010) theoretical framework of media institutions’ influencers – politics, technology and economics – is used. For analyses media regulatory acts and audience surveys are accomplis…

A Century with the Same Problem - Similar but still Different Solutions? : Four perspectives on the security policies of Finland and Estonia during t…

2020

Conflictual Rebordering: The Russia Policies of Finland and Estonia

2023

This article seeks to analyse the process of conflictual rebordering in the EU’s relations with Russia. The authors single out three major crises that triggered and shaped the process of toughening the border regime and the related transformations of political meaning of the EU-Russia border: the COVID-19 pandemic, the drastic deterioration of Moscow-Brussels relations in the beginning of 2021 and the war in Ukraine that started on 24 February 2022. Correspondingly, the EU’s reactions to each of these critical junctures might be described through the academic concepts of governmentality, normativity and geopolitics. Our aim is to look at the three ensuing models – governmental, normative an…

Tavoitteena vahva ja yhtenäinen kansa : historia ja kieli kansallisen identiteetin rakentamisen välineinä Pätsin aikakauden Virossa 1934-1940

2018

In this dissertation, I study national campaigns aimed at constructing Estonian national identity in 1934–1940. The campaigns were organized through the cooperation of Konstantin Päts’ authoritarian government and civil society. I focus on the folk art campaign and on the name changing campaign. The name changing campaign was the largest national project in Estonia, aiming at the Estonification of names. Initially, the campaign focused on changing individuals’ surnames and first names, but later also on changing the names of places, streets and properties. The name changing campaign had history political and language political dimensions. Through the folk art campaign, the state tried to af…