Search results for "democracy"

Tolerance, Empathy, and Inclusion

2021

AbstractIn this chapter, the authors analyze the artifacts in which the students explore the key attitudes of cultural literacy within the CLLP: Tolerance, empathy, and inclusion. The chapter introduces each attitude with critical discussion of its meanings, connections, and relations to other key concepts of cultural literacy, such as diversity, equality, and democracy. The authors explore how the program addresses these attitudes and the cultural texts it includes. The analysis of the artifacts reveals the variety of ways in which children give meanings to tolerance, empathy, and inclusion, such as helping others. In this meaning-making process, the students draw from their own experience…

On Simon Nelson Patten’s Progressivism: A note

2020

This article is an attempt to offer an assessment of the main coordinates of Simon Nelson Patten’s views on democracy and biological determinism. This will allow us to better delineate the differences—as well as the affinities—between Patten and the core of progressives discussed by Thomas C. Leonard in a series of path-breaking contributions, culminating in his Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. It is our contention that even within the persisting intricacies, ambiguities, and contradictions of Patten’s expository style, it is possible to trace a shift in some aspects of his ideas—a gradual evolution that makes his peculiar brand of progress…

Lobbying, the public interest, and democracy: Communication perspectives

2020

The participation paradox: demand for and fear of immigrant participation

2019

In this paper, we address the ambivalence in European immigrant integration discourses toward the political participation of immigrants. We show how this ambivalence manifests in what we call a ‘participation paradox’, which is constituted by two apparently conflicting, but potentially mutually reinforcing characteristics of the discourse. The first emphasizes the need for immigrants to be active in order to attain a well-integrated society and well-functioning democratic polity; the second is a call for the protection of liberal democratic institutions from the alleged ‘illiberal threats’ that migrants pose to society. Immigrant participation is thus both demanded and feared. Using illustr…

Balancing seclusion and inclusion: EU trilogues and democratic accountability

2020

This article assesses how trilogues affect the possibilities to hold the European Parliament to account from the perspectives of democracy as political equality and democracy as epistemic quality. ...

Co-Production in the Context of Finnish Social Services and Health Care: A Challenge and a Possibility for a New Kind of Democracy

2016

Alongside the ongoing renewal process of the Finnish welfare state, the role of the citizens is also revisited. So far the attention has mainly focused on how the responsibility for service provision is shared between the public sector and the service users, while the role of public services as a part of the democratic system has been more or less ignored. Based on the results from a 3-year participatory action research project called KAMPA, this article will discuss if the development of co-production in the context of public welfare services shows the way forward toward a new kind of society where democracy is an inseparable part of the structures and procedures of the service provision. …

Stakeholder Thinking and a Pedagogical Approach in Public Relations Processes: Experience From Transition Societies

2007

Public relations (PR) and communication management (CM) processes have mostly been studies in stable democratic societies. This article, focusing on the republics of the former Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe, takes a stakeholder analytical approach to the processes of PR and CM in such transition societies and the emergence of Western-style PR and CM concepts during the change from totalitarianism to democracy. Selected state institutions and businesses operating before, during, and after the transition period were examined; personal and questionnaire interviews were conducted, and policy documents and media texts were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative analysis and the…

Conceptualizing and Measuring the Quality of Democracy: The Citizens' Perspective

2018

In recent years, several measurements of the quality of democracy have been developed (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy Project). These objective measurements focus on institutional and procedural characteristics of democracy. This article starts from the premise that in order to fully understand the quality of democracy such objective measurements have to be complemented by subjective measurements based on the perspective of citizens. The aim of the article is to conceptualize and measure the subjective quality of democracy. First, a conceptualization of the subjective quality of democracy is developed consisting of citizens’ support for three normative models of democracy …

Strange bedfellows: the Bundestag’s free vote on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) reveals how Germany’s restrictive bioethics legislation is …

2015

Germany’s bioethical legislation presents a puzzle: given structural factors, the country should be at the forefront of reproductive medicine, but its embryology regime remains one of the strictest in Western Europe. Past research has linked this fact to an unusual coalition of Christian and New Left groups, which both draw a connection from modern embryology to eugenics under the Nazis. In this article, the workings of this alleged alliance are demonstrated at the micro-level for the first time. The behaviour of individual MPs in a crucial free vote on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is modelled using data on their political, sectoral and religious affiliations. Identifying as a …

Conflict, consent, dissensus: The unfinished as challenge to politics and planning

2021

Public participation in planning politics is a legal right in many countries. Planners often see themselves as the defenders of public interests, whereas planning studies may see public planning as the institutionalization of politics, the politicized management or government of disputes on planning issues. Public participation is ultimately a political decision, and this article focuses on how phrases like planning is ‘a work in progress’ and agonistic consensus is a ‘solution for now’ in fact add a critical issue to planning politics: such statements indicate that planning should be seen as an unfinished process, and decisions as temporary. A ‘solution for now’ literally means a ‘planning…