Search results for "representative democracy"
showing 6 items of 26 documents
Regional leadership: a systemic view
2012
Published version of an article in the journal: Systemic Practice and Action Research. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11213-012-9268-2 New innovation and industrial policies contribute to the development of an informal economy and have increased collaborative processes across sectors and social spheres within regions. This paper addresses the role of regional leadership in the informal economy. By themselves, network processes increase complexity and create a series of uncertainties that differ from processes that are steered through the hierarchical procedures of public bureaucracy or regulated through the judicial and competitive mechanisms of the market.…
The Temptation of Populism in David Cameron’s Leadership Style
2015
DOI: 10.1057/9781137439246\₁0; International audience; It may seem unusual to associate the widely-used concept of populism with the leadership of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. Populism is, however, open to various interpretations and definitions and so easy to manipulate that it could apply to almost anything. Moreover, populism has so often been used to describe movements and groups critical of representative democracy, generating a ‘malaise’ (Mény and Surel, 2002: 21) or a ‘threat’ to democracy (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012), that it is has become difficult to conceive it as a new political practice in the hands of democratic governments. To accept what would appear to be a co…
How representative are referendums? Evidence from 20 years of Swiss referendums
2017
Direct democracy allows citizens to reverse decisions made by legislatures and even initiate new laws which parliaments are unwilling to pass, thereby, as its proponents argue, leading to more representative policies than would have obtained under a purely representative democracy. Yet, turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. Consequently, critics of direct democracy argue that referendum outcomes may not be representative of the preferences of the population at large. We test this assertion using a compilation of post-referendum surveys encompassing 148 national referendums held in Switze…
The 18th-century traditions of representation in a new age of revolution : History politics in the Swedish and Finnish parliaments, 1917−1919
2014
What happened to shared historical experiences in the discursive processes of constitutional reform in Sweden and Finland? This article examines the use of 18th-century history in early 20th-century politics. Building on a long-term survey of Swedish and Finnish estate and parliamentary debates, it analyses the political implications of differing national historiographies in the two successor states of the 18th-century Swedish realm, focusing on how the ancient past and collective (and often selective) memories of the Age of Absolutism, the Age of Liberty and the Gustavian Age were used by parliamentarians in constitutional debates. The analysis demonstrates how the Finnish polity continued…
Más allá de la retórica. ¿Qué queda en pie del bonum commune?
2021
En el artículo se propone un recorrido a través de algunos clásicos de la filosofía política que dedicaron una especial atención al tema tradicional del bonum commune –desde los clásicos griegos hasta Schumpeter–, con el fin de dilucidar qué sentido podría tener hoy el «bien común» (en singular). Antes de ello, a la vista del debate sobre el tema relativamente reciente de los «bienes comunes» (en plural), el artículo propone distinguir, e intenta buscar terrenos de compatibilidad posible, entre bien común y bienes comunes, no sin antes hacer alguna observación crítica sobre estos últimos. En conclusión, es necesario admitir que la destrucción schumpeteriana de la misma idea de bien común re…
Building and Testing a Comparative Interface on Northwest European Historical Parliamentary Debates : Relative Term Frequency Analysis of British Rep…
2022
Tensions between the people and parliament over representation are a normal feature of representative democracies. In this paper, we demonstrate how digital humanities analysis tools help in answering questions about the timing of debates on popular representation, tensions over its realization, and representatives’ changing perceptions on their parliamentary role. Our long-term approach to the conceptual history of political representation is based on the analysis of digitized parliamentary debates as nexuses of multi-sited political discourse. We combine computer-assisted distant and context-sensitive close reading to consider diachronic trends and synchronic political struggles surroundi…