Search results for "Politics"
showing 10 items of 2266 documents
The conversion of the atom : nuclear science and ideology in Francoist Spain
2016
At the beginning of the atomic age, Francoist Spain launched an expensive project to develop, research and use nuclear energy. Scientists, the military and high-ranking officials in the administration mobilised to materialise a technoscientific dream with an international scope. The modernity of nuclear science contrasts with the reactionary ideology of the regime, but the paradox is only apparent because until now there has not necessarily been any historical relationship between science and democracy. The drive towards nuclear technoscience reveals the mutual construction of science and politics during the Cold War era and the different ways to appropriate and exploit the atom during the …
Governing the Metropolitan Dimension: A Critical Perspective on Institutional Reshaping and Planning Innovation in Italy
2019
As in other European countries, over recent decades the question of metropolitan government has captured political and academic attention in Italy too. The debate has been recently fuelled by a national reform introduced to create 14 metropolitan authorities to provide for new government solutions in the territories of the larger urban areas. Based on literature and empirical observation, this paper presents a critical view of that process by examining the following questions: How do metropolitan areas relate to broader Italian urban policy? How does the reform contribute to a reshaping of multi-level governance through national and local initiatives? And how does institutional reorganisati…
Reviving the EU project: from values to new territorial development models
2020
Le but de cet article est d’analyser les relations entre l'aménagement du territoire, la cohésion territoriale (comme but à atteindre et comme politique) et les valeurs qui sous-tendent le projet de l'Union européenne (UE). Les territoires, les cultures et l’histoire des pays de l'UE peuvent jouer un rôle afin de redéfinir l'UE comme modèle social et politique de référence à l'échelle mondiale. Dans la « nouvelle grande transition » (écologique, économique, sociale, urbaine, féministe, démocratique…), la dimension territoriale et les politiques publiques jouent un rôle clé dans la définition des futurs possibles : nouveau modèle de développement économique, nouveaux modèles spatiaux et nouv…
Discourses on governing diversity in Europe: Critical analysis of the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue
2015
International audience; The White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue, published in 2008 by the Council of Europe, is one of the first European level attempts to provide a common guideline for diversity politics in Europe. It introduces the idea of ‘intercultural dialogue’ as a new focus and a method of governing diversity. Our paper aims to investigate the explicit and implicit meanings included in the idea of ‘intercultural dialogue’ and how the idea is rhetorically operationalized as a policy in the White Paper. The investigation is conducted with a lexical and semantic analysis of the text in the White Paper and a discourse analysis of its rhetoric, in order to explore how the ‘intercultura…
Within and Beyond Postmodernism: Oppositional Remediating Strategies in Jeanette Winterson’s The Power Book
2016
Informed by interconnected theoretical approaches, the paper aims to illustrate the ways in which Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000), while drawing on specific postmodern ideological elaborations and writing techniques – among which remediation, in the sense of multiple transcodifications, plays a major role –, simultaneously distances itself from the apolitical dilution of meanings which underlies postmodern conceptualizations and identity models. As far as sexual politics is concerned, the essay demonstrates that the sense of plurality and multiplicity in the novel suggests new creative ways of identity re-invention through conscious self-fashioning.
Introduction: Security, Criminal Justice and Human Rights in Countering Terrorism in the Post 9/11 Era
2012
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, many commentators claimed that the world had changed ‘forever’ with international terrorism constituting one of the defining global security challenges of the twenty-first century. The renewed focus on counter-terrorism law and policy also called into question whether the lessons drawn from previous terrorism emergencies are pertinent to the post-9/11 environment. Indeed, to what extent, if at all, are the principles identified for the liberal democratic response to traditional forms of terrorism applicable to a response to contemporary international terrorism? The historical, political and security implications of 9/11 notwit…
The logic of pressure groups and federalism
1985
Constructing a complete model of the relations between politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, and voters is not an easy task. Consequently most economic models of government have to do away with some of these relations. One way to simplify matters is the so-called group theory of politics (or "pluralism”) which assumes that the influence of interest groups dominates policy-making. In political sciencel, where this line of thinking has been important for a long time, the theory is not very striking, since it isnot always clear that an interest group is anything more than a number of individuals, or firms, who share a common concern, Lg. an interest category. Thus, the theory can be made …
Intra-Party Heterogeneity in Policy Preferences and Its Effect on Issue Salience: Evidence from the Comparative Candidates Survey
2016
Quantitative research on the positions of political parties and party competition regularly invokes the assumption that parties are unitary actors with homogenous policy preferences. Drawing on Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) data from 28 elections in 21 developed democracies, we show that candidates often hold quite heterogeneous issue positions and that the extent of this heterogeneity varies significantly across parties and, most interestingly, even within parties across different issue dimensions. In an effort to explore the implications of such intra-party heterogeneity for party strategy and competition, we argue that intra-party heterogeneity and issue salience go together, becau…
Explaining Contagion: Tactical, Ideological, or Geographical Impulses?
2021
Elections are a zero-sum game, and the gain of one party equals the loss of another party. Likewise, the vote gains of some groups of parties have parallel losses among other party groups or party families. Political Parties do not operate in isolation. When Eurosceptic parties are successful, pro-European parties tend to lose votes as a consequence. Would a political party decide to adjust its position every time a Eurosceptic Party gains votes? The assumption here is that if a political party gains votes from one election to another (or at least does not lose votes), the information that the election result is communicating to it is that it is doing something right. A party might take not…
Recensione di Paolo Giaccaria, Claudio Minca (Eds), Hitler’s Geographies. The Spatialities of the Third Reich
2017
Hitler’s Geographies, il volume curato da Paolo Giaccaria e Claudio Minca per The University of Chicago Press (2016), prende le mosse da quel vuoto teorico e bibliografico in cui è stata confinata la riflessione sulle geografie del Terzo Reich e a partire da qui tenta di riaprire uno spazio di dibattito che troppo a lungo è stato inibito o negato. Gettare le basi per una storia culturale degli spazi reali e immaginati che hanno attraverso il progetto nazista è l’intenzione dei due curatori, nella convinzione che un’attenta ricognizione della sua natura eminentemente geografica potrà non soltanto arricchire gli itinerari di ricerca esistenti, ma anche aprirne di inediti. La conquista del Leb…