Search results for "international relations"

Adult Education in Art Galleries

2016

Since I began researching adult education in art galleries 20 years ago in Europe, I have noticed two conflicting trends. Contemporary art has become more extraverted and socially engaged, whilst lifelong learning, the discourse of neoliberalism that informs most policy, has become increasingly focused on providing learners with predefined competencies and pushed for ‘measurable’ results (e.g. Pedersen, 2014; Illeris, 2015).

Personality Traits and Foreign Policy Attitudes in German Public Opinion

2007

This article examines the effects of personality traits on attitudes toward foreign policy issues among the German public. Building on previous research, it argues that personality characteristics shape an individual's motivation, goals, and values, thereby providing criteria to evaluate external stimuli and affecting foreign policy opinions. An analysis of survey data from a random sample of Germans eligible to vote confirms that the personality traits play a role in attitudes toward foreign policy issues. By and large, personality affects foreign policy opinions roughly as strongly as traditional factors such as partisanship, ideology, and social background. Among the traits studied, agr…

Personality Traits, Partisan Attitudes, and Voting Behavior. Evidence from Germany

2007

Political psychology has paid rather little attention to personality traits when explaining political attitudes and political behavior in mass publics. The present paper argues that personality traits contribute to our understanding of political attitude formation and decision making of ordinary citizens. Based on the Five Factor Model of Personality, we state hypotheses regarding the effects of personality traits on partisan attitudes and vote choice in Germany. We test the hypotheses using survey data obtained from a random sample of the Germans eligible to vote. The evidence confirms that personality traits indirectly affect partisan attitudes and voting behavior in Germany in predictabl…

Selling a vote

2005

Abstract A voting function is a rule that determines the outcome of an election: taking the voters' votes as input, a voting function selects the winning candidate from the set of candidates receiving some vote. A voting function is immune to vote selling when, given that neither voter i nor voter j votes for the winning candidate, a change ceteris paribus in i's vote cannot make the candidate for which j votes the winner. It is shown that voting functions immune to vote selling have either a dictator (a voter who always determines the winning candidate) or a dictated candidate (a candidate who becomes the winner by just receiving some vote).

Celebrating independence jubilees and the millennium: national days in Africa

2013

The Southern African Development Community (SADC): An Analytical Overview of Its History, Policies and Institutional Framework

2017

This chapter gives fundamental background information about the history and development of regionalism in Southern Africa and about the current state of the SADC as a modern regional integration organisation. In terms of an analytical overview, Muntschick reflects briefly on the formation, character and objectives of the region’s old regionalisms such as the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), the Frontline States (FLS) and particularly the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC) as predecessors of the SADC. Also, this chapter turns to the new regionalism and provides detailed information on the SADC as an organisation, its member states, key agenda and central poli…

La construcción de los límites a la libertad de expresión en las redes sociales

2016

La generalización de las comunicaciones electrónicas, junto a otras muchas transformaciones, ha facilitado enormemente tanto la comunicación interpersonal como la participación en el debate público a cualquier ciudadano. Como resultado, el pluralismo se ha visto indudablemente enriquecido, así como las posibilidades de recibir información y ser miembro activo de la comunidad política. Otras consecuencias de esta transformación, sin embargo, presentan algunas aristas. Así, esta ampliación del espacio público ha limitado también los espacios de estricta privacidad, incluyendo aquellos ámbitos donde históricamente la expresión de todo tipo de ideas y opiniones quedaban en la intimidad, que cad…

The European Courts and the Security Council: Between "Dédoublement Fonctionnel" and Balancing of Values

2009

The recent case law of various international tribunals facing questions related to UN Security Council resolutions shows the clear tendency to grant primacy to the UN legal order. This trend, far from being well founded on formal arguments, appears to be a tribute to a legal order perceived as superior, and, at the same time, is revealing of the ‘value oriented’ approach followed by the courts. Such an approach can be categorized from a theoretical perspective in the light of Scelle's theory of relations between legal orders, whereby the courts implement in their respective legal orders values stemming from the UN legal order. Various critical remarks can be advanced in relation to this att…

The Dignity in Free Speech: Civility Norms in Post-Terror Societies

2016

ABSTRACTIt is difficult to strike a balance between protecting freedom of speech and ensuring public safety. The attacks on 22 July 2011 in Norway, and the fear of terrorist acts inspired by public utterances on the Internet, have caused many to question whether and how we should regulate hate speech. In this article, we analyse the main arguments from the debate on freedom of speech in post-terror Norway, termed the ‘liberal’ and ‘harm’ (or ‘balance of harms’) arguments respectively. We propose a set of civility norms that may serve to uphold the wide freedom of speech advocated by the liberal argument, while being attentive to the real ethical challenges emphasised by the harm argument.

The World Bank’s Early Reflections on Development: A Development Institution or a Bank?

2009

Until the late 1960s, the World Bank presented itself as an institution devoted to making sound and directly productive project loans. Yet, during its very early years, some discussions developed inside the Bank regarding the possibility of issuing different types of loans, namely (i) loans aimed at tackling social issues ("social loans"), and (ii) loans aimed at providing foreigncurrency to address disequilibria in the balance of payments ("impact loans"). This paper brings together historical analysis and theories of organization development to study the housing issue as a case in point. The analysis reveals that the Bank was unwilling to lend for housing programs not because these were n…