Search results for "Political Science"

Citizenship, Civil Society, and Development: Interconnections in a Global World

2012

1. Citizenship, Civil Society, and Development: Interconnections in a Global World 2. Citizenship Quality: A New Agenda for Development? 3. Water Privatization and Social Citizenship: The Case of Urban Water Sector in Ghana 4. CSO Law in Ethiopia: Considering its Constraints and Consequences 5. Cooperation for the Enhancement of Environmental Citizenship in the Context of Securitization: The Case of an OSCE Project in Serbia 6. The Arab Spring Meets the Occupy Wall Street Movement: Examples of Changing Definitions of Citizenship in a Global World

Justifying Civic Activism in Russia and Finland

2013

ABSTRACTIn this article, we present a novel way of researching civil society in a comparative perspective and illustrate it through a detailed analysis of public disputes concerning urban building construction projects in St. Petersburg and Helsinki in 2008–2009. In our illustration, we use justification theory, a line of thought developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot in the early 1990s, but until now little used in comparative civil society research. Moreover, we use a variant of Public Justification Analysis, a new method for analysing media data. Our focus is on moral justifications, that is, on arguments which are presented against or in favour of the proposed projects and whic…

Civil Society Participation in Advocating Interests on EU Legislation

2015

The article analyzes the activity of non-governmental actors in Latvia in advocating their interests on national and European Union legislative proposals. The findings draw on primary data gained from 122 responses from interest organizations in Latvia in an online survey. Despite the large number of societal actors (thirteen thousand registered organizations), the interest group population in Latvia consists of small and financially underequipped NGOs. Their lobbying activities are characterized by predominantly influencing domestic authorities, that is, national route strategies, although there is some variation across the types of interest groups.

Global trends in a fragile context : public–nonpublic collaboration, service delivery and social innovation

2020

PurposeThis study aims to enhance the understanding of the nature of collaboration between public and nonpublic actors in delivering social services and achieving social innovation in a fragile context, with an emphasis on the role of civil society organisations (CSOs). The paper focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Southeastern European country which has faced a turbulent post-conflict transition and experienced challenges in its social welfare policy and practice.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses institutional theory, particularly new institutionalism and institutional networking, as a lens through which to understand public and nonpublic collaboration and social innovation withi…

Associational Activeness and Attitudes towards Political Citizenship in Finland from a Comparative Perspective

2009

This article first focuses on the development of the system of associations and association memberships in Finland as well as additional forms of political participation from a comparative perspective and, second, expands the examination by analysing ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimensions of participation, i.e., the development of the number of Finnish association memberships and people's ideas of, and attitudes towards political citizenship. The typology of polity regimes adopted in this article (Schofer & Fourcade-Gourinchas) functions as a structuring scheme for understanding the differentia specifica of Finnish political participation. Two structural characteristics of the civil societ…

Is there a Nordic Approach to Questions of Democracy in Studies of Network Governance?

2009

Abstract The notion of democratic network governance has attracted growing interest among students of local and regional governance in all the Nordic countries since the 1990s. This article examines whether research in this area reflects a particular Nordic account of democracy. The Nordic countries have strong traditions of local autonomy, local networks and the inclusion of civil society associations. The authors find reason to expect that the Nordic traditions of local and regional governance may have stimulated a common approach to democracy questions with the features of an integrative perspective. At the same time, the differences in the history of democratisation are likely to have u…

Organised Crime and the Economy: a Framework for Policy Prescriptions

2014

In this paper we discuss policies to combat organised crime from the perspective of economic analysis. We introduce concepts such as supply and demand for Mafia and the implied notion of equilibrium to build a framework to classify the contexts in which organised crime interferes with the economy. We then use this framework to discuss policy interventions, distinguishing between policies implemented by the State and mobilisation of civil society. We show that using the economic approach helps understand the aspect of persistence of criminal organisations and identify vicious circles of different nature. The broad spectrum of State policies identified includes norms on competition, on the ef…

Sport Clubs in Finland

2015

This chapter introduces the current state of the Finnish sport clubs. The article aims to highlight firstly, how sport and physical culture in Finland are historically based on the civil society and volunteer activities; secondly what are the characteristics of sport clubs in Finland; and finally what kind of challenges sport clubs are facing at the moment and in the future.

2017

Centralization and decentralization are key concepts in debates that focus on the (anti)democratic character of digital societies. Centralization is understood as the control over communication and data flows, and decentralization as giving it (back) to users. Communication and media research focuses on centralization put forward by dominant digital media platforms, such as Facebook and Google, and governments. Decentralization is investigated regarding its potential in civil society, i.e., hacktivism, (encryption) technologies, and grass-root technology movements. As content-based media companies increasingly engage with technology, they move into the focus of critical media studies. Moreo…

Antibiotics and food in the American press

2021

AbstractThe emergence of antimicrobial resistant infections from food is well documented in the scientific literature but, in this kind of matter, the public opinion is an important policy driver and is vastly forged by traditional media. Here, we propose a text mining study through about 500 articles from two reference daily U.S. newspapers to assess the media coverage of this issue. Our results indicate that, since the middle of the 80s, the two journals considered here adopted a very different narrative around the issue, echoing civil society concerns in one case and the official discourse in the other.