A Place for Civics in a Liberal Democratic Polity? The Fate of Local Institutions of Resistance after Apartheid

2000 ◽  
pp. 175-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonny Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Local Institutions ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity

From Relative Autonomy to Consensual Development: The Case of South Korea

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 630-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tat Yan Kong
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
Relative Autonomy ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
Societal Actors ◽  
Rapid Industrialization ◽  
Autonomous State ◽  
Economic Leadership

The success of the autonomous state in promoting rapid industrialization in South Korea from 1961 to 1987 is usually seen in terms of the state's capacity to coerce reluctant societal actors into productive economic pursuits. The economic sluggishness associated with some autonomous states suggests that any explanation of Korean economic success also needs to mention the factors that constrained bureaucratic abuse and the methods by which societal motivation behind the industrialization effort was maintained over three decades. Democratization has accentuated the capacity of societal actors to challenge the state's economic leadership but has not resulted in the emergence of an economic free for all. While similarities exist, Korea will experience greater difficulty in realizing the synthesis between developmental state and liberal-democratic polity (consensual development) that characterized postwar Japanese development.

ELISABETH ÖZDALGA, The Veiling Issue, Official Secularism and Popular Islam in Modern Turkey, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Report Series, No. 33 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1998). Pp. 125. $45.00 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-307
Author(s):  
SYLVIA WING ÖNDER
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Women's Clothing ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
Modern Turkey

Elisabeth Özdalga's book is an important introduction to one of the issues that has been front-page news in Turkey since the 1980s. The most visible and controversial sign of the increasing participation in public discourse of Islamic revivalists has been the marked increase in numbers of women in urban spaces and institutions who wear the particular form of dress called tessetür, a public symbol of a personal commitment to a certain form of Islamic values. Özdalga's focus is timely and of interest to both a Turkish audience and a Western one, although it speaks mainly to the latter. The banning of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) from Turkish politics since the publication of the book, as well as the internationally noted furor surrounding the election to, and subsequent dismissal of, a headscarf-wearing woman in Parliament, show that what the author calls Turkey's “large-scale attempt to integrate Islam within the institutions of a modern, liberal democratic polity” (p. viii) continues to be a vitally important and controversial subject. Her book attends both to the symbolic power and legal status of women's clothing in public debate and to women's actual participation in the re-formations of public and private definitions of citizenship.

Research in the Political Process

1951 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Garceau
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
Individual Capacity ◽  
Democratic Faith

A discipline, like an individual, may in some measure be known by the dilemmas it keeps, or more properly by the manner in which it keeps them.A central conceptual controversy, probably inescapable for political scientists because of their disciplinary heritage, is that involved in perceiving uniformities in behavior, describing recurring patterns, identifying the determinants and yet reconciling this effort and its underlying premises about the roots of behavior with the liberal, democratic faith in man's individual capacity to determine his own ends, to think rationally and to reach individual and creative decisions. On this faith rests the political structure of rights, the machinery of the democratic electorate, the party system and the values of the constitutional democratic state whose political process we are concerned to describe and analyze. Cultural anthropologists, social psychologists of many disciplinary schools, hard-boiled “realists” in political science, have recently drawn back from determinist or whole-heartedly relativist positions. Some are concerned that political science, in a fresh enthusiasm for empirical research, may become so engrossed with uniformities and determinants that it will obscure or abandon the normative commitments of a democratic polity.

Sideways at the entrance of the cave: A pluralist footnote to Plato

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-402
Author(s):  
Alessandro Ferrara
Keyword(s):  
Political Liberalism ◽  
The Core ◽  
Special Version ◽  
Reasonable Pluralism ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity

The idea of a ‘true’ account of pluralism is ultimately contradictory. Liberal political philosophers often fell prey to a special version of this fallacy by presupposing that there might be only one correct argument for justifying the acceptance of pluralism as the core of a liberal democratic polity. Avoiding this trap, Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ has offered a more sophisticated view of reasonable pluralism as linked with the ‘burdens of judgement’. His philosophical agenda, however, left some questions underexplored: What is the relation of pluralism to relativism? How can a conception of pluralism (epistemic, moral and political) avoid being either one view among others with no special claim to truth, or a foundationalist claim? If pluralism is a fact, in what sense can it bind us? These questions – crucial for grasping the distinctiveness of ‘political’ liberalism – are addressed by revisiting Plato’s simile of the cave, in order to make it accommodate the groundbreaking Rawlsian notion of the ‘reasonable’.

scholarly journals Social Inequality and Social Mobility: Is there an Inverse Relation?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erzsebet Bukodi ◽  
John H Goldthorpe
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Family System ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Inverse Relation ◽  
Relative Mobility ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
The Great Gatsby

While accepting that an inverse relation of some kind exists between inequality and mobility, we begin by reviewing criticisms of recent attempts by economists to express this relation in terms of income inequality and mobility – the ‘Great Gatsby Curve’. This appears to be neither empirically secure nor theoretically well-grounded. Using a newly constructed European dataset, we then aim to show that if mobility is treated in terms of social class, rather than income, an inverse relation with social inequality can be suggested that is more complex but that has a stronger empirical and a more coherent theoretical basis. Our results indicate that European countries are best seen not as displaying entirely continuous variation in their relative rates of class mobility, but rather as falling into a number of comparatively high and low fluidity groups. We offer an interpretation of these results that starts out from the proposition that within societies with a capitalist market economy, a nuclear family system and a liberal democratic polity, some limit exists to the extent to which relative mobility rates can be brought towards equality. Variation in such rates can then be understood in terms of how close nations are to this limit, and whether they are moving towards or receding from it, but with different forms of inequality impacting on their fluidity trajectories in differing ways.

The Machinery of Government

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Heath
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
State Employees ◽  
Rule Making

Political theorists are aware that the old-fashioned model of state power, according to which elected officials make policy decisions, which are then faithfully enacted by a loyal cadre of public servants, is hopelessly outdated. The complexity of the modern state, not to mention the difficulty of the economic and social problems it confronts, is such that a great deal of rule-making power is delegated to public servants. Yet if public servants are not merely in the business of administration, but are also deciding questions of policy, how are they making these decisions, and what normative principles inform their judgments? The Machinery of Government attempts to answer this question. The central challenge involves reconciling the tension between the traditional commitment to political neutrality on the part of the civil service with the fact that administrative discretion inevitably involves making normative judgments. State employees are in many cases unable to do their jobs effectively without some conception of where the public interest lies. It seems inevitable that this will conflict with the commitment to political neutrality, since this conception of the public interest may be tension with that of elected officials. The solution to the dilemma lies in an understanding of the constraints that liberalism imposes on popular sovereignty in a liberal-democratic polity. Not only do courts play an important role in checking the power of democratic publics, the executive branch is also the custodian of certain fundamental liberal principles.

scholarly journals How Culture Matters: Culture and Social Change in the Federal Republic of Germany

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Brady ◽  
Sarah Elise Wiliarty
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
European Studies ◽  
Relative Contribution ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
The University

In December 1995, the Center for German and European Studies atthe University of California at Berkeley hosted the conference, “ThePostwar Transformation of Germany: Prosperity, Democracy, andNationhood.” During the proceedings and in the edited volume thatresulted, conference contributors explored the reasons for Germany’ssuccess in making the transition to a liberal democratic politysupported by a rationalized national identity and a modern, dynamiccapitalist economy. In charting postwar Germany’s success, the contributorsweighed the relative contribution institutional, cultural, andinternational variables made to the country’s transformation.

Habermas, Religion, and Citizenship

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Neal
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
The Public ◽  
Jurgen Habermas ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Liberal Position

AbstractWhat is the appropriate place for religious argument in the public realm of a liberal-democratic polity? The primary competing positions have been a “liberal” account and a “revisionist” response arguing for a greater role for religious argument in liberal democracy than the liberal position is ordinarily understood to allow. Liberals and their revisionist critics disagree about whether restraints on religious arguments and justifications are justified and desirable. Jürgen Habermas has intervened in this debate with a provocative account of the place of religion in the public sphere. Habermas presents his account as an alternative to both the liberal and the revisionist perspectives, and purports to do justice to the legitimate claims of each without falling prey to the failings of either. This article critically analyzes Habermas's interesting proposal and argues that it does not succeed.

Community as Communication: Jean-Luc Nancy and ‘Being-in-Common’

2007 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 459-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Schwarzmantel
Keyword(s):  
Political Community ◽  
Civic Identity ◽  
Open Form ◽  
Active Citizenship ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
Strong Concept ◽  
Identity Groups

This article seeks to propose and defend the necessity of political community as a prerequisite for an effective democratic polity. It defends a republican model of political community, involving ideas of active citizenship and interaction across the particular identity groups which proliferate in contemporary liberal-democratic societies. It is argued that ideas of community as communication, derived from the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and his distinction between ‘being-in-common’ and ‘common being’, can be applied in a more political sense than in his original usage to justify a revised notion of republican solidarity. This more open form of community is used as the basis for expounding a strong concept of civic identity, which is defended against three rival conceptions. The article takes issue with some liberal theorists who assert that political community is neither desirable nor possible under contemporary conditions. It offers reasons to be sceptical of both a ‘civic nationalist’ perspective as well as of ‘post-nationalist’ arguments. The significance of the issue of community is illustrated by examples drawn from the recent riots in France and some analyses of the significance of those events.

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