La sociedad civil de adentro hacia afuera Comunidad,organización y desafío de la influencia política

Having developed conceptually and analytically civil society as a sociological category (based on a conceptual reflection stemming from a theoretical-epistemological dialogue between the collectivist and liberal perspectives), this article accounts for the implications that allow us to understand the potential of civil society in contributing to democratization. Throughout this work the dynamics that characterize the ambiguous relationship between civil society and community –ambiguous in as much communities with exceptionally strong ties between its members can provide both elements for the strengthening of civil society as well as obstacles to its growth– are analyzed. It is argued that the role of communities in relation to civil society in the social construction and civil strengthening of citizenship will depend on several factors, particularly the mechanisms available to build consensus within the community. The threat stemming from neopluralism as a novel discourse of interest intermediation, both for the community and civil society, is explored. In the final section, the implications of this discourse for democracy are discussed.     

Enfrentando las políticas de integración y de ciudadanía: migrantes latinoamericanos en la ciudad europea

Over the last two decades, and with the so-called failure of multiculturalism, an important debate has emerged around integration policy making for immigrants in Europe. While these policies should aim to strengthen the participation of immigrant groups in all spheres of society and encourage intercultural processes, in practise, immigrants are made to shoulder the whole responsibility of their integration. Given the international economic and political context, Europe has underscored its rejection of non-western immigration and its policies tend to enforce control measures as well as the establishment of strict selection criteria. As shown in the Latin-American case, the efficiency of these policies is limited and migrants are participating in host societies through the use of informal social and civic networks and transnational activities developed by migrants themselves, instead of through formal policies designed to integrate them. Immigrants are opening alternative channels of participation in response to the weakness in the government's policies. The resurgence of the concepts of citizenship and national identity as a strategy for integration and social cohesion, and the urgency that characterises these integration policies despite the fact that they are processes that require long-term views and goals, are leading to the inefficiency –if not the failure– of these legislative efforts.     

Calidad democrática en América Latina: ¿proyecto o utopía?

While recognizing the heuristic limits of the concept “democratic quality” this article argues that measuring democracy over time is the most adequate way to identify, discuss and analyze its presence in every country. “Democratic quality” sheds new light on both concept elaboration and empirical studies because it synthetizes two political processes that have developed in the region in the last twenty five years: democratic transition and democratic consolidation. This category allows us to define the current state of Latin American countries in terms of their institutional and societal development of democratic life. We can thus, at least in theory, observe and propose an integrated improvement of existing political regimes in a context in which modern representative democracies are reorganized in terms of their new attributes and rights. Based on these premises, this article proposes two interrelated paths of analysis: a) considering the model of “democratic quality” to analyze Latin American democracies and characterize their present problems; and b) examining the relevance of this model’s heuristic power. The main thesis holds that not even the most visible long or short-term transformations undergone by our democratic political legal codes, since its inception, are sufficient in and of themselves to bring us closer to the democratic quality model, or in other words, to the basis of a democratic State of law.     

La resistencia al programa fuerte en la sociología del conocimiento: la asepsia científica y la amenaza del relativismo

In this article we defend the plausibility of adopting a Strong Program in the Sociology of Knowledge. We critically analyze various objections against it; in particular, we show that the auto-refutation charge is not decisive. We offer a Mertonian hypothesis to explain the reason why the Strong Program continues to be the target of very passionate attacks and mockery, despite its prima facie attractiveness and its affinity with contemporary epistemology. Such hypothesis suggests that at least some of the passionate arguments against the Strong Program are motivated by outrage occurring as a result of the violation of a central value of scientific endeavor.     

Participación política de los migrantes. Reflexiones sobre la extensión de la ciudadanía en Argentina

Political participation for both, foreigners living in Argentina as well as nationals living abroad, is the topic of this paper. Through legislation, both groups have limited, in whole or in part, voting rights. An empirical study is carried out in order to identify that discrimination. The study of the legal framework allows us to verify whether or not migrants are considered political actors, empowered to participate actively in public life, and become part of the common will. This review reveals that there is a heterogeneous landscape of the legislative framework that enables the vote in national, provincial and local elections. It is argued that restricting citizenship to nationality or residence is a simple and unrealistic approach to contemporary human mobility. An open, inclusive and flexible citizenship is more consistent with a true democratic order.     

Los modos de decir en la política. Una intervención al análisis del discurso

The aim of this article is to discuss essential notions of political discourse analysis in the light of Jacques Rancière's theoretical proposals. To achieve this purpose, we will review definitions and categories with which different authors contributed to the development of that discipline. We suggest that this approach of political enunciation analysis would improve the episte-mological organization of the discipline and, at the same time, would allow for reconsideration of problematic issues of contemporary politics (collective building). With this approach, we can also reflect on the work of the analyst as part of an emancipation project.     

Paisaje antes de la batalla. Notas sobre el contexto de la guerra contra las drogas en México

Mexico’s security crisis and Felipe Calderón’s (2006-2012) security strategy had its roots in drug trafficking, the prohibition of drugs, contraband and the border shared with the United States. Standard accounts of the violence experienced in the country, which reduce it to confrontations between drug cartels, are of little use. This article presents part of the context in which the security crisis developed, putting it in a historical perspective, and attempting to take a step towards a more nuanced interpretation. It holds that drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States is a complex, many-sided reality which admits dense symbolic elaboration. Apart from the very concrete shipping of drugs, drug trafficking is part of Mexico’s relation with the United States, a register that imbues the asymmetry between both countries with meaning, a space of political negotiation and a resource of American global diplomacy which is crystallized in a clandestine foreign policy system. Furthermore, through the demystification of the imagery that envelopes organized crime, corruption and contraband are examined, conceiving these two as phenomena that are integrated organically into borderland society.     

Lost in Santa Martha. Limitaciones para una etnografía en una cárcel de mujeres

En este artículo propongo un examen de algunos de los obstáculos establecidos por las autoridades penitenciarias para llevar a cabo un proyecto etnográfico en una cárcel de mujeres de la Ciudad de México. Mi intención es plantear la importancia de formas de investigación-acción en contextos que, como el mexicano, se ven afectados por una profunda crisis de los aparatos del Estado –en particular presto atención a los sistemas educativo, penal y de justicia- que impacta con mayor severidad a grupos vulnerables como es el caso de las mujeres en reclusión que están en el centro de este estudio de caso.     

Entre la autonomía y la heteronomía. Socialización universitaria y prácticas profesionales de los sociólogos en la Argentina

This article studies the relation between university socialization and professional practices of sociologists in Argentina since democracy’s restoration in the mid-eighties. On the one hand, it examines orientations and ways of understanding the discipline transmitted by the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) curriculum contents and, on the other, it reconstructs the main labor market changes. Through the examination of the notion of autonomy (and its opposite, heteronomy), it aims to show that the professional practices of sociologists are strongly conditioned by the set of perception and classificatory schemes incorporated during university socialization. Those schemes, operating through a group of oppositions, contribute to the production of a set of “crafts” or modes of practicing sociology clearly differentiated according to the area or sphere of insertion.     

Teoría del campo literario y subalternidad. Perspectivas metodológicas para el estudio de la poesía en el espacio literario ibérico

Abstract

La teoría del campo literario ha constituido una referencia importante para el estudio de literaturas definidas por su carácter subalterno o dependiente, y ha conocido interesantes desarrollos teóricos y aplicados en campos académicos como el gallego, el belga o el quebequés. Los modelos resultantes tienen varios elementos comunes, resultado de la crítica y de los ajustes metodológicos realizados sobre el marco teórico de partida. Entre estos últimos, destacan la consideración de una lógica nacionalista; la expansión de la idea de autonomía, entendida ahora en los sentidos estético, discursivo, e histórico-nacional; la identificación de especificidades en la estructura y el funcionamiento de este tipo de campos, así como la complementariedad con otras teorías del entorno empírico-sistémico. Los objetivos del artículo son el repaso de estos modelos y de las aplicaciones correlativas, la proyección de su rentabilidad en el espacio literario ibérico y, especialmente, el avance de pautas metodológicas para el estudio de la poesía. En relación con este último aspecto son estudiados determinados asuntos vertebrales: la identificación de habitus y principios de distinción; la inestabilidad de las relaciones entre canonización, subcampo de producción restringida, consagración, y vanguardia; o el papel asumido por la poesía en el reparto de funciones y capitales.     

Políticas de la memoria. A propósito de su vigésimo aniversario en la ciudad de La Plata (Argentina): la configuración de un campo y sus prácticas

This article aims to outline and explain the development of twenty years of politics of memory in a city in Argentina. The configuration of institutions and social actors, the scope and limitations of their practices are described in order to understand the current timing of the trials of repressors of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). In turn, the processes around the demand for justice and its impact on the city of La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires, are analyzed, from the perspective of the so-called time of “outbreak of memory”, launched since the mid-1990s.     

Aspectos políticos de la dependencia financiera en los municipios mexicanos1

Specialized literature has analyzed the impact of changes to fiscal institutions such as The National System of Fiscal Coordination (1980) and the constitutional reforms of article 115 (1983 and 1999) on the degree of financial dependence of local (municipal) governments and the governmental functioning. Political environment as well, affects to an important extent such functioning. Indeed, previous studies in the field of political economy point to the effects of political environment and fiscal institutions -such as public spending and debt- on national and sub-national governments. Based on four variables -political affiliation of the mayor, political affiliation of the governor, composition of local congresses and celebration of local elections-, the authors build indicators of “political confluence” at the municipal level. They study the effect that the degree of political unification at the municipal level has on the financial dependence with respect to the State government, and also to the local Congress. In their analysis, the authors also consider the political affiliation of the mayor and the local electoral cycle. Through its analytical focus and main empirical findings, this article contributes to broadening the scope of empirical studies of municipal financial dependence. Simultaneously, it adds to existing literature in the field of political economy that accounts for public finances at the sub-national level     

Clase política y medios: explorando el fenómeno de la publicidad política encubierta en México

This work presents the results of a qualitative research that explores the phenomenon of political publicity on noncommercial television content, which has been growing since the electoral reform of 2007–2008. Since then, the acquisition of airtime for electoral advertising purposes, as well as the appearance of public officials on government advertising has been prohibited. The information was gathered through ‘in depth’ interviews, and analyzed through Strauss and Corbin grounded theory model, which allowed confirmation of the existence of covert political publicity, as well as to provide a definition of this concept and determine its causes, characteristics, and consequences. It was concluded that, despite the legal modification aiming to guarantee a more equitable political communication model and the eradication of airtime commercialization for electoral campaigning, this was not achieved due to structural conditions of the political system in Mexico and the relation between media and government, which impacts political communication, and extends beyond the electoral issue and its regulatory framework.     

Las élites neoliberales en México: ¿cómo se construye un campo de poder que transforma las prácticas sociales de las élites políticas?

The recomposition of Mexican political elites during the 1980s overlaps with the transformation of a development model that shifted from a basically protectionist and nationalistic model to a neo-liberal and open-oriented one. Such a switch has implied far-reaching changes in the social practices of political elites. Based on a record that contains each high-rank official during the 1988–2014 period, the mechanisms having established a transnational power network crossing from one presidential term to the next are reviewed, as well as those factors that favored the organization of a power field increasingly focused on the border between the national, regional and global spaces. Some of those mechanisms include the international historical context; the creation of working teams with a basically neo-liberal worldview; the trajectories of the high-rank officers; the reforms that have been driven; the fluent transit among public and private positions, and the highly varied relationships established between this group of officials and transnational actors and organizations. It is concluded that the elites’ new social practices do not only hamper and challenge the creation of public goods and autonomous structures with the capacity of planning according to the general interest, but they also encourage institutional depredation.     

Más allá de la representación y del clientelismo: hacia un lenguaje de la intermediación política

This paper proposes rethinking conceptual scopes of the term “political mediation”, in order to illustrate the analytical scope of indirect politics, whose range of possibilities has usually been thought of as if contained between the extremes of political representation and patronage. An analytical exercise is offered as one possible and tentative path to specify not only a vocabulary which is more sensitive to the demands of the present but to –in the words of Bunge– allow the initial reinterpretation of old symbols of our political vocabulary. To this end, in addition to a linguistic and conceptual journey of the term “intermediation”, three analytical dimensions of indirect policy are developed; thus facilitating dialogue with theories of representation, and leading to an analytical model that we call “cube of indirect politics”. We conclude with a brief case classification exercise intended to show the displacements produced by this model in understanding certain indirect political experiences.     

Participación política y violencia de género en México

This work studies the relationship of women and politics within the framework of the Mexican law on quotas, stressing gender political violence as an explanatory variable of women political underrepresentation. Besides basic information resulting from in-depth interviews and discussion groups, data from the last federal election (2012) are analyzed, and studies on women and political parties in Mexico are reviewed from a critical angle. Research outcomes reveal that the existing dynamics within the political parties –understood as organizations that reproduce traditional gender patterns—represent a crucial variable to explaining the peculiarities of the process through which women can have access to candidatures, and explain their experiences of discrimination, harassment, and violence related to campaigns and parliamentary performance. Also, it is claimed that the implementation of regulatory frameworks aimed at promoting women participation in parliaments depends on the prevailing political party culture in Mexico.