scholarly journals Nonelectoral Participation in Deeply Divided Societies: Transforming Consociations from the Ground Up?

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Timofey Agarin
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Institutional Politics ◽  
Context Shapes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Decision Making

Abstract Premised on elite accommodation, consociations provide little consideration for citizens’ input on institutional change. Likewise, valuable analyses of cross-community political participation in divided societies have emerged in recent years, yet whether the relationship between the grassroot and formal political process has broader consequences remains to be fully explored. The article examines the conditions in which nonelectoral participation takes place and the ways in which actors involved therein negotiate constraints for continuous cross-community mobilization. The structure of political systems and the nature of deep divisions in Northern Ireland and Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina invite a comparison of the consequences of nonelectoral political participation in these two illustrative case studies. The article concludes that while the formal political context shapes the likelihood of engagement on a cross-community basis, whether nonelectoral participation changes the structure of political decision-making depends on the willingness and ability of those involved to cooperate with formal institutional politics.

scholarly journals The issue of basic models of democracy: institute of political parties under competent democratic procedures

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 774-782
Author(s):  
A.E. Klychkov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Political Interaction ◽  
Democratic Practices ◽  
Political Decision Making ◽  
Models Of Democracy

The article analyzes the main classical and modern models of democracy. Within the framework of the models under consideration, the author investigates the interaction of political parties in a competitive political process. The paper analyzes the protective model of democracy, participatory democracy, pluralistic model of democracy, consociative democracy, marxist model of democracy and others. The author connects the orientation and nature of political parties transactions, their influence on the process of political decision-making with the understanding of the nature and specificity of democratic practices and procedures. The article emphasizes that political parties as an institution enable citizens to realize themselves in the socio-political sphere. Within the framework of this democratic process, the format of political participation of representatives of various social groups of the population is being implemented. The results of the study can be used to analyze democratic practices and party-political interaction within the political systems of states both at the national and subnational levels.

Ideals and Actions: Do Citizens’ Patterns of Political Participation Correspond to their Conceptions of Democracy?

2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Åsa Bengtsson ◽  
Henrik Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
National Election Study ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Political Decision Making

The interest in procedures for political decision-making has grown tremendously during recent decades. Given the intense scholarly debate and the implementation of greater opportunities for citizen participation in many democracies, there has been surprisingly little interest in citizens’ conceptions of democracy understood as their preferences concerning the processes by which the political system works. Some recent attempts do, however, suggest that it is important to expand the study of public opinion from policy output to decision-making processes, and that there are coherent patterns in citizens’ expectations of the way in which political decisions come about. What is not clear, though, is whether citizens’ different conceptions of democracy have repercussions for how they engage in politics. Using the Finnish National Election Study of 2011 (Borg and Grönlund 2011), this article explores the relationship between citizens’ conceptions of democracy and patterns of political participation. Results demonstrate a distinct association between citizens’ ideals and the actions they take.

The Internet, Political Participation and Election Turnout: A Case Study of Germany's www.abgeordnetenwatch.de

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 156-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hartwig Pautz
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Political Decision Making

Germany's parliamentary democracy appears to be in crisis. The major parties' membership is in decline and barely existing in East Germany, election turnout is decreasing at all levels, and the reputation of politicians has never been worse. At the same time, however, Germans are more interested in politics than in the 1990s, overwhelmingly support democracy, and are keen on participating particularly in local political decision making. Out of this situation emerged www.abgeordnetenwatch.de— a website that aims to re-establish the link between electors and elected by allowing voters and representatives to communicate via a publicly accessible question-andanswer structure. This article addresses the questions of whether such an instrument can revitalize representative democracy and whether it has done so in the context of the 2009 federal elections.

How Literacy Empowers Us

2016 ◽  
pp. 338-347
Author(s):  
Maureen Fitzgerald-Riker
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Social Empowerment ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Decision Making

This chapter examines the relationship between literacy and social empowerment. The author contends that literacy evolves at an early age through language acquisition. Literacy extends beyond learning to read - it is the basis of critical thinking, shared reflection, and participation in community and political decision-making. Historically, not everyone has had access to the global literacy essential for civic engagement. Implications for the classroom are included in this article to encourage the development of educational systems that advocate for change while promoting social empowerment and civic engagement.

Black Consciousness and Political Participation: The Missing Link

1981 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Shingles
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Efficacy ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Politically Active

Recent research has demonstrated that black Americans are far more politically active than whites of similar socioeconomic status. The difference has been related to black consciousness. Yet the reasons for this relationship have not been adequately explained. Starting with the work of Gurin and Gamson, this article theorizes that black consciousness contributes to political mistrust and a sense of internal political efficacy which in turn encourages policy-related participation. The relationship between the two attitudes and policy-related behavior is demonstrated to be conditional. The conditions favor blacks more than whites. What I shall call the Gamson-Gurin thesis is supported by data from Verba's and Nie's 1967 survey of the American public. The thesis, and its derivations, prove useful in clarifying the scope and nature of black participation in the American political process as well as helping us to understand how individuals in general select one mode of participation over another and how the choice varies by race and social class.

Agent-Based Modeling in Political Decision Making

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin Qiu ◽  
Riyang Phang
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Boundary Conditions ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Agent Based Modeling ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Decision Making

Political systems involve citizens, voters, politicians, parties, legislatures, and governments. These political actors interact with each other and dynamically alter their strategies according to the results of their interactions. A major challenge in political science is to understand the dynamic interactions between political actors and extrapolate from the process of individual political decision making to collective outcomes. Agent-based modeling (ABM) offers a means to comprehend and theorize the nonlinear, recursive, and interactive political process. It views political systems as complex, self-organizing, self-reproducing, and adaptive systems consisting of large numbers of heterogeneous agents that follow a set of rules governing their interactions. It allows the specification of agent properties and rules governing agent interactions in a simulation to observe how micro-level processes generate macro-level phenomena. It forces researchers to make assumptions surrounding a theory explicit, facilitates the discovery of extensions and boundary conditions of the modeled theory through what-if computational experiments, and helps researchers understand dynamic processes in the real-world. ABM models have been built to address critical questions in political decision making, including why voter turnouts remain high, how party coalitions form, how voters’ knowledge and emotion affect election outcomes, and how political attitudes change through a campaign. These models illustrate the use of ABM in explicating assumptions and rules of theoretical frameworks, simulating repeated execution of these rules, and revealing emergent patterns and their boundary conditions. While ABM has limitations in external validity and robustness, it provides political scientists a bottom-up approach to study a complex system by clearly defining the behavior of various actors and generate theoretical insights on political phenomena.

Het strijdpunt als besluitvormingstype in de Belgische politiek

Res Publica ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-550
Author(s):  
Wilfried Dewachter
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Electoral Campaigns ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
Direct Election ◽  
Political Decision Making

Within the Belgian political system political issues are hard to deal with. The institutions do not provide a problem-solving mechanism : no ref erendum, no direct election of a one-party cabinet. Moreover, electoral campaigns usually involve a lot of heterogeneous issues and almost never focus upon a single one. Active political participation of citizens is, by definition, selective and, compared with electoral participation, limited, although, the number of people taking part in a political demonstration is sometimes considerable. An investigation of the Belgian political elite shows that active political participation, sparked off by a single issue, can be considered as one of the most polyarchie types of political decision-making in Belgium. This involves an increase of tension and conflict, a slowing down of the process of decision-making and a selective accessibility to this type of participation. Belgian politicians try to avoid these difficulties by either opting for non-decision or consociational politics.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 209-216
Author(s):  
Todd Butler
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Decision Making

Concerns over equivocation, captured letters, and religious division continued to attend the relationship between thought, expression, and political obedience throughout the Restoration. The concern in early Stuart England for political intellection was thus not simply a product of its immediate moment but the catalyst for a more fundamental recognition of deliberation and other forms of individual and institutional thought as being arenas for political action. In looking backward, then, we might recognize the early Stuart era’s continual attention to the means by which monarchs and subjects alike thought through their political dilemmas to be something of a precursor to a more modern interest in political decision-making, and the extent to which processes of the mind remain integral to the operation—proper or otherwise—of contemporary democracies.

scholarly journals VOX POPULI, VOX DEORUM? ATHENIAN DOCUMENT RELIEFS AND THE THEOLOGIES OF PUBLIC INSCRIPTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 365-398
Author(s):  
William Mack
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
The Other ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Symbolic Representations ◽  
Divine Agency ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Decision Making

This article argues that, by concentrating on a reading of the depictions of deities on the Athenian document reliefs as symbolic representations of states rather than as divinities, previous scholarly approaches to them have failed to explore the role they ascribe to the gods in collective decision-making and the exercise of public authority. This article resituates the interpretation of these monuments in the context of other monuments depicting the gods and recent approaches to them, and the other ways in which public inscriptions, both at Athens and elsewhere, make reference to divine actors, through their erection in sacred spaces and the use of thetheoiheading. It then examines the range of possible readings of the relationship between divine agency and political decision-making which these monuments privilege and argues that they reflect a conventional understanding that, in general, Athenian decision-making was underpinned by the gods.

The Dynamics of Coercion in the Malaysian Political Process

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Barraclough
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Direct Bearing ◽  
Control And Management

The study of coercion and how it is applied within a political system is useful for a number of reasons. As a strategy of control and management it is in itself worthy of investigation. Moreover, an examination of how coercion is applied can tell us much about the nature of a particular polity. Indeed, as Weber emphasized, the state itself is distinguished from other political systems to the extent that it successfully upholds the claim to the legitimate application of force. The willingness of a regime to use coercion against opponents or dissidents, or to regulate the political participation of the ordinary citizenry, has a direct bearing upon such questions as human rights, democratic values, authoritarianism, and the degree of consensus within a given polity.

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