Search results for "political economy"
showing 10 items of 637 documents
2018
With a mounting communist threat from Eastern Europe after the Second World War, in Western Europe an attempt was made to create permanent structures not only to help in facilitating cooperation in...
The Five-star Movement inside the institutions in Sicily: from ‘swimming the Strait’ to institutionalisation in local politics
2019
This article considers the institutionalisation of the Five-star Movement (M5s) in regional and local councils. It discusses the process of the Movement’s institutionalisation, analysing the development of its internal organisation; its local platforms and political performance; its institutional repertoire of action, and the several internal and external conflicts between its own rules and the ‘others’. In particular, the article investigates the changes affecting the M5s after its engagement with the Sicilian regional assembly and Sicilian municipal councils, and the ways in which the specific institutionalisation process it underwent was influenced by the complexities of the political an…
After the Referendum
2015
During the years 2011–2014, Latvia experienced a significant increase in the adoption and use of militant democracy measures—constitutional amendments, refusals of party registration, restrictions on referendums and popular initiatives. These events, triggered by a widely attended referendum on the introduction of Russian as the second state language, highlighted the problematic relations between democracy and nation-building in Latvia. Despite earlier expectations that the original militancy of Latvian democracy would decrease with the gradual integration of the Russophone minority, recent developments show that the defence of a particular type of nation-building has become an integral pa…
2018
Ever since the beginning of international climate conservation politics there has been variation across nations in political traditions in debating the climate issue. Political decision-makers have interpreted the scientific findings on global warming with different emphases, thereby giving rise to variation in views on preferred national or international solutions. These tensions first became evident before and during the Earth Summit of the United Nations in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, when the United Nations Climate Change Convention was prepared and eventually signed. This article discusses the historical background of international climate conservation politics and illustrates the tensions…
The micro-politics of parliamentary powers : European parliament strategies for expanding its influence in the EU institutional system
2018
The European Parliament (EP) has gained considerable new powers since it was first established in 1952. Why has this happened, and how should the powers the EP possesses be assessed? This article suggests a novel approach that focuses on inter-institutional micropolitics and the processes in which the EP obtained its powers rather than treaty changes at IGCs. Interinstitutional micropolitics are carried out by institutions and their members who act politically and shape the EU’s system from within. The EP’s successes in interinstitutional micropolitics are shaped by (1) its existing powers that need to be assessed in their differentiation; (2) the interparliamentary setting and the power co…
Legislative agenda-setting in parliamentary democracies
2009
Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real-life politics? To answer this question, this article discusses different arguments that link institutional and policy-related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co-sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, it relates policy-, office- and vote-related incentives, as well as ins…
Academic Political Science in Latvia: The First Steps
1994
Radical Experiences of Portuguese Social Workers in the Vanguard of the 1974 Revolution
2019
ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the contribution of social workers to the Portuguese democratic transition in the 1970s. Their involvement in urban social mobilizations and in the cooperative movem...
An Absolute Majority for the SPD as an Unintended Consequence? The Land Election in Rhineland-Palatinate 2006
2007
The state election of 2006 in Rheinland-Pfalz resulted in a (bare) majority of seats for the SPD, which allows the party to govern alone for the first time in the history of the state. The CDU, on the other hand, received slightly less than one-third of the vote, an all-time low in its former stronghold. This result was by and large determined by factors at the state level. Yet it had a considerable impact at the federal level: it signalled the end of a string of devastating losses for the SPD, enhanced the standing of minister president Kurt Beck (now the SPD's chairman), and brought to an end the last coalition between the SPD and the FDP. These repercussions notwithstanding, there is no …
The Sports Club as a Social Organization in Finland
1989
The voluntary sports movement began in Finland in the late 1800s concomitantly with the industrialization of the country. Due to the political, ethnic and emancipatory interests the sports movement has particular configurations still valid at present and embodied in the separate national organizations for workers, Finnish-Swedish people and women. The national survey on sports clubs as social organizations was carried out in 1987. The data were collected by mail from the sample of clubs (n 835). The survey was focused on the prime components of the internal system of sports clubs — ideology, membership, program, resources and administration — but also on the interaction between this interna…