Search results for "political economy"

From fringe to fringe: the shift from the clericalist League of Polish Families to the anticlericalist Palikot Movement 2001–2015

2017

The period between 2001 and 2015 brought two events in Poland that deserve to be called phenomena. In 2001 the rightist, clericalist League of Polish Families entered the Sejm. Ten years later, the leftist, anticlericalist Palikot Movement achieved spectacular success in the 2011 elections. These events give a picture of a radical shift in the Polish political scene: a rightist clericalist party disappeared from the right flank of the political scene, while a new, leftist-anticlericalist formation appeared. The article makes reference to a set of five explanations on both the causes and consequences (and permanence) of the observed changes. I argue that only a concurrence of a number of com…

Promoting neoliberal ideology in Finnish rural community development : the creation of new moral actors

2019

Today’s political ambitions are based on the neoliberal aspiration to diminish the state’s role and responsibilities, and to transfer those responsibilities to local communities and individuals in ways that idealise those communities, promising to ‘give power to the people’. Instead of highlighting individualism, neoliberalism now celebrates communities and participation. This article deals with the effects of this ideology with regard to Finnish rural policy objectives. Drawing on Finnish village action programmes as data, we argue that these ideological views aim to transform individuals and create new moral actors. Our research indicates that Finland’s rural policy objectives invoke acto…

Measuring populism across nations: testing for measurement invariance of an inventory of populist attitudes

2019

Abstract The rising voter support for populist parties in Western Democracies in recent years has incited academic interest in populist voters and attitudes connected to the voting propensity of populist actors. In line of this research, numerous scales to measure populist attitudes among voters have been proposed. In most cases, however, the measurement of populist attitudes was tailored to specific countries and its applicability to cross-national research on populism was not assessed. This article uses a cross-national survey to assess the measurement invariance, reliability, and validity of a deductively developed inventory for populist attitudes. The findings suggest that there is a co…

Young adults and the tuning of the entrepreneurial mindset in neoliberal capitalism

2018

Enhancing the entrepreneurial spirit of young people is a means by which their employability and future potential as well as economic growth, the core goal of national policies, are incubated. Cons...

Through the Looking Glass: The Attitudes of Polish Political Parties towards the EU before and after Accession

2009

Abstract The objective of this paper is a comparison of the attitudes of parliamentary parties towards the European Union in terms of Poland's accession to the European Union. Therefore the parliamentary parties' attitudes after the elections in 2001 and 2005 have been analyzed and compared. Another significant aim of this paper is the identification of factors conditioning these attitudes as well as changes in them. The change from a candidate to a member of the EU forced the political parties to redefine their attitudes towards Europe since the character of the European issue itself also changed. This especially applies to those parties which strongly opposed Poland's accession to the EU.…

2018

A vigorous anti-nuclear movement emerged in Germany in the mid 1990s, when spent nuclear fuel elements began to be transported to the interim storage facility in Gorleben, Lower Saxony. Resistance ...

Local interest groups and the perception of power in Spanish cities

2018

Studies on local interest groups have generated a considerable number of theories on urban power that have eventually become the basis of far-reaching approaches on democracy and collective action. Such literature has been especially concerned with discovering who governs the city, paving the way for discussions on elitism, pluralism and urban regimes. Some approaches consider that the business elite dominates local politics, while other theories assert that interests other than business (neighbors, environmentalists, faith-based organizations, civic groups) have been gaining relevance and access to local government. The POLLEADER survey (2006) provided data on the influence of certain soci…

National identity and Europeanization in post-communist Romania. The meaning of citizenship in Sibiu: European Capital of Culture 2007

2008

The structure of the requirements for citizenship in a Romanian city differs by and large from the structure of the same requirements in other European cities. The peculiarity lies in the lack of distinctiveness between the origin, the ethnic aspect and the civic aspect of citizenship and also in the emphasis on the language requirements for citizenship. The explanations could be traced back to the previous century and to the cultural and political project of state and nation-building. But the importance assigned to the national identity and national sovereignty issues in Romania may affect the European integration by hindering the feelings of European belonging and solidarity.

European comission's identity during brexit : a communication strategy change on twitter

2021

The European Union (EU) was founded to promote peace, prosperity and other values between an increasing number of member states (European Commission, 2001). However, Brexit has activated a reputation crisis that reinforces Euroscepticism (Borzel; Risse, 2018). The objective of the study is to identify the differences in the semantic construction and thematic framing of the European Commission during a two-year period, previous to Brexit and after Brexit, on a sample of 4827 tweets posted by the European Commission. Findings show that in the period before Brexit, the EU is presented as an abstract political body, highly informative on major crisis, and reactively framing messages with values…

The local appropriation of democracy: an analysis of the municipal elections in Parakou, Republic of Benin, 2002–03

2006

Ever since the ‘democratic renewal’ of 1989–90, Benin has been regarded as a model democracy in the African context. The holding of local elections in 2002–03 can be seen as the culmination of this turn to democracy. Donors attach high expectations to decentralisation and local democracy. Based on an empirical analysis of municipal elections in Parakou, the country's third-largest city, the paper tries to gauge whether these expectations have been realised. The paper argues that while multi-party democracy has been instituted under considerable pressure from the outside, the particular form it has taken derives instead from rationales of national and local politics which go back to the late…