Politik als Markt

In this article, I argue that instead of speculating about voter preference, political actors observe each other in a social role structure in the public sphere. Historically developed social cleavages define the positions in this role structure. The public sphere serves as a stage on which political actors define their roles in relation to each other. I find empirical evidence for this market model by investigating the debate surrounding a reference to God in the European Constitution, a debate that does not fit into the cleavage lines. If the market model for political behavior holds true, political actors won’t be able to articulate positions in the absence of cleavages defining political behavior. In this case, the debate will show symptoms of narrative uncertainty. Consequently political actors will produce narrative chaos and relinquish their role in public communication. As a consequence, they will remain in silence.     

Discourse rights and the Drumcree marches: a reply to O'Neill

In a recent BJPIR article Shane O'Neill uses Habermas' discourse theory of rights to argue that the conflicts over marches in Drumcree can be resolved rationally in the nationalist residents' favour. I question this conclusion via a critique of Habermas' theory. Habermas' apparently unexceptionable requirement that political outcomes win universal acceptability is bought at the cost of vagueness: it fails to specify how acceptability is secured, or how the requirement itself is derived. So it cannot justify the exceptions to equal civil rights which O'Neill wants, such as exceptions to rights of freedom of expression or movement. Unionists can claim that their position respects Habermas' universal acceptability requirement. This exposes the limitations of attempts to impose abstract principles such as Habermas' on real political conflicts. A possible alternative to this is a form of Schmittian decisionism, in which rules either prove indeterminate, or are confronted with exceptional cases that call for executive intervention outside the framework of rules. Sensitivity to political context requires not derogations from rights, but respect for the autonomy of political processes.     

The Use of Twitter during the 2009 German National Election

During the 2009 election campaign, Twitter not only served as a source of news for the media but also became a public stage for active political users. In particular, hopes were raised about a pluralistic grass-roots sphere of public communication in which political information can be shared in a non-ideological, decentralised and egalitarian manner. To test whether Twitter led to new patterns of political interaction and to determine the beneficiaries, we present findings from a large-scale network analysis investigating about four million tweets by more than 33,000 users including citizens, journalists and politicians in the 2009 National Election. Our analysis identifies the most popular users, contents and topics in this political sphere, revealing the Pirate Party movement as the most influential group during the campaign. A network analysis of the participating actors confirms the strong position of established online activists and bloggers in contrast to traditional mass media, politicians and parties.     

La confection de diplômes à croix suisse. Standardisation des certifications et construction du national dans l'espace helvétique de la fin du 19e siècle

Which actors initiate or prevent the unification of diploma and what is at stake? How does the state intervene in the reglementation of curricula? This article studies under a socio‐historical angle the nationalisation of certification procedures within the framework of a political sociology approach. It analyses processes of nationalisation as well as nationally differenciated forms of public intervention. Taking as a focal point the nationalisation of lawyer's diploma and vocational training certificates, the article compares the professionalisation of legal and vocational training in Switzerland. It shows that the constitution of a national public sphere materialises through a process of professional interests unification. This implies divisions among professionals as well as among public authorities. The constitution of a national public sphere is not considered as a matter of simple political oppositions but as a conflicting process which challenges the professionalisation of several professionlsectors and the modalities of public action.     

From newspapers to social media? Changing dynamics in Swiss direct democratic campaigns

Switzerland is a laggard in terms of digital campaigning. Direct democratic votes, more particularly, are centered around issues and little personalized. Combined with the specificities of voters’ information behaviour in direct democratic campaigns, these features are likely to disincentivize political actors from extensively campaigning online. Instead, we expect political actors to continue relying on traditional media. These propositions are tested on a large data base of social media posts and newspaper advertisements published before direct democratic votes held in Switzerland from 1981 to 2020 and 2010 to 2020, respectively. Counterintuitively, this research note finds a strong discontinuity in campaign communication practices. Over the past decades, and between 2010 and 2020 in particular, newspaper ads have become less central to direct democratic campaign communication. At the same time, political actors are increasingly shifting their communication to the digital sphere.     

The nature of political advising to prime ministers in Australia,Canada, New Zealand and the UK

Political advisors to heads of government occupy such a privileged sphere of influence that their role is a source of consternation among democratic idealists. Interviews with advisors to prime ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK inform a small body of comparative literature about political advising in the Commonwealth. The authors find that first ministers consider input from many advisors and therefore the counsel of any one advisor is of limited impact. Further research is needed to understand the extent to which these agents project the power of the executive office and make decisions on the principal's behalf.     

Emile Durkheim zwischen Republikanismus und deliberativer Demokratie

Emile Durkheim has written only a few sociological texts on democracy, but they seem to remain important both for neo-republican theories and for the idea of deliberative democracy. The paper tries to explain this paradox through a reconstruction of Durkheim’s conception of political democracy, which implies three channels of communication: within the state, between the state and civil society and within civil society. The first one is the only one which rests upon deliberation, in the two meanings of this word in French (collective discussion and decision). The paternalist dimension of Durkheim’s conception clearly appears in the way he understands the typical pathologies of democracy. This paternalist dimension is also to be found in neo-republican theories. Conversely, the absence of the notion of public sphere distances Durkheim from the concept of deliberative democracy, even though he develops a non-substantialist notion of democracy and gives an important role to reflection in political communication. However, discussing Durkheim makes it possible to underline some of the problems and challenges which a conception of deliberative democracy has to face.     

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.     

Sms,Communication, And Citizenship In China's Information Society

ABSTRACT

China has entered a new information age that calls for a reconsideration of some key presuppositions about the relationship between Chinese media, communication, society, and culture. These include stereotypes that dominate representations and understandings of China such as the appealing, though too simple, model of propaganda versus free speech and political repression versus democracy or those anticipating the emergence of a more or less Habermasian “public sphere.” Taking the example of mobile phone short messaging services (SMS), this article investigates the transforming relationships between Chinese media, power, political subjectivity, and citizenship. SMS now constitutes an important new set of communication practices in China. It is more widely used than the Internet and by a more diverse section of the population. In early 2005 per person, fifteen times more SMS messages than emails were being sent in China. Putting forward the idea of “orderly” and “disorderly” media it is suggested that while the Party voices its own rhetorics from the past, many people, particularly in the large metropolitan centres, are driving their own alternative visions of the future and forcing the authorities to engage with entirely new kinds of media practices that pose quite different challenges to those of the past.     

Seeking the Soul of Democracy: A Review of Recent Research into Citizens' Political Talk Culture

This article provides a review of extant empirical research on ordinary citizens' everyday political communication, its phenomenology, determinants, consequences, and relevance for democratic politics. It highlights the recent upsurge in interest in the study of political conversations against the background of both classic and more recent developments in democratic theory and empirical research that served as intellectual inspirations. The article discusses conceptual and methodological issues of research into interpersonal political communication and presents key findings with regard to the background and consequences of political talk, tapping into fundamental aspects of democratic citizenship such as political preferences, participation, cognitive involvement with politics as well as orientations towards fellow citizens and towards the democratic political system. It concludes with an assessment of the state of the art in this field of study, highlighting desirable avenues for future empirical research.     

The Debate on the Crucifix in Public Spaces in Twenty-First Century Italy

Although the presence of the crucifix in public classrooms and other public offices is an ancient Italian tradition, it was never a political issue until recent times. In the early 2000s, some court cases and other events (first at the national and later also at the European level) turned the public display of the crucifix into a major issue in the national political debate. This article analyses the frames used by social and political actors in the different phases of this debate, in order to understand its evolution and its connection to the broader discussion on values in the public sphere developed in Italy in recent times.     

Oakeshott, Freedom and Republicanism

It is contended that Michael Oakeshott resists classification in terms of conventional labels of conservative, liberal, right or left, and that it is difficult to incorporate him in discussions of modern liberal theory because his concerns are not with human rights, distributive justice or multiculturalism. It is with reference to the classical republicanism of Rome that Oakeshott's distinctive contribution to political philosophy is illuminated because of his emphasis upon authority, the rule of law and freedom as non-domination. These are the very features that Oakeshott highlights in his lectures on the 'Political Experience' and 'Political Thought' of the Romans. Oakeshott values the distinction that the Romans, but not the Greeks, made between public and private, but unlike later republicans he does not associate the public sphere exclusively with political participation and civic virtues. One may contribute just as significantly to the public concern by being a music-hall entertainer. Oakeshott is clearly differentiated from modern instrumental republicans who in his view would be rationalists obsessed with institutional design and with viewing the civil condition as an enterprise association.     

Understanding Turkish secularism in the 21th century: a contextual roadmap

ABSTRACT

This paper asserts that Turkish secularism and Islamism represent two faces of one coin – contemporary Turkish politics – when one considers their goals and strategies. The two ideological movements have shaped one another and each now seeks to impose itself as superior. This article unpacks these differences and similarities in the following steps: (a) it defines the socio-historic modes of Turkish secularism and (b) examines its social and political origins; (c) it then explores Islam’s return to the public domain as an oppositional Turkish identity; (d) and thereafter considers the diverse understandings of secularism resulting from neoliberal policies that relaxed state control over Islam, which then prompted socially-acceptable reinterpretations of Islam; and finally (e) describes how the AKP’s has re-imagined secularism while (mis)using Islam as a political instrument. The comparison highlights such commonalties as a collectivist character, a desire for state control as a vehicle to realize an ideology, intolerance of diversity and criminalization of other perspectives, and the differentiation of religion as morality in the private sphere versus its cultural role in the public sphere. It concludes that, under the AKP government, Islam is used as a tool to consolidate the power of Erdo?an’s kleptocratic regime.     

Letters to the President: participation beyond the public sphere in Argentina, 1989–1999

President Carlos Menem received thousands of letters from citizens during his two consecutive administrations (1989–1999). Most often Peronist and working class, they wrote to him to seek financial or material aid, praise, criticize, advise, communicate political opinions and invite correspondence. They injected their letters with intimate details of everyday life, their understandings of democracy, and their sense of the successes and failures of the state at meeting those criteria and forging a democratic identity for the Republic. This article provides contextualized readings of a sample of those letters in an effort to elucidate why their writers looked beyond the public sphere to express themselves, and chose the letter to the president as method. It argues that discursive participation in the public sphere remained elite-dominated, and mass mobilization did not provide the individualized results or political bonds that the letter writers sought. Furthermore, as an activity that Juan Perón had actively encouraged, writing to the president appeared an object lesson in good Peronist citizenship. The “mythical basis of the legitimacy” of Perón and his version of Justicialism had been his “direct contact with the people” (Plotkin). The letters reveal how citizens in the 1990s sought to reconstitute this imagined proximity with a Peronist president in a newly democratic context.     

Bringing Policy Communities Back In: The Case of Fire Service Cover

It is argued that the concept of a policy community has an enduring value in the analysis of public policy, especially if an emphasis is placed on the way in which ideas are excluded from debates. Historical analysis based on the National Archives using a political science conceptual framework can offer fresh perspectives. The concept is developed through a specification of the conditions that encourage policy community formation and survival. Policy inertia led to a policy that produced a higher rate of deaths from fire in the UK than in other developed countries, especially among the socially excluded. The policy community concept can be of value in the policy analysis tool-kit, especially if policy frames that have become embedded to the exclusion of alternatives are identified.     

Populist Communication and Publicity: An Empirical Study of Contextual Differences in Switzerland

Abstract: This study analyzes the context‐dependency of populist communication and asks whether there are variations in populist communication for representatives of different kinds of parties. In contrast to previous research on European populism, which mostly considers only the right‐wing, this study includes the entire scope of political parties; thus allowing for the possibility of the diffusion of populism in contemporary politics. The empirical contribution is a multilevel analysis of speeches in non‐public and public forums (closed parliamentary committees, open parliamentary floors, and the talk show ‘Arena’) on immigration and asylum amendments in Switzerland. A so‐called populist party, the Swiss People’s Party, played a significant role in drafting the legislation. Analysis reveals that a) different public settings influence populist communication differently; b) a non‐populist party, the Christian‐democrats, employs more populist communication on average than any other party and its populism is employed more consistently across contexts than that of the Swiss People’s Party; c) but when speaking in media forms, the Swiss People’s Party employs substantially more populist communication than any other party. Thus, the type of public forum does not uniformly contribute to higher levels of populist communication, but rather the effect of forum type varies substantially by party.     

Online-Öffentlichkeiten als Gegenstand empirischer Forschung

So far, research of online public spheres has mainly been carried out as an online version of offline public spheres. The possibilities of the new medium to create new and Internet-specific forms of a public sphere have been ignored both on the theoretical and empirical level. In this article, I propose an approach that allows for the conceptualization of new forms of online public spheres. It takes the Internet user, the providers of web sites and the structural specificities of the Internet into account. The main thrust of the article is the question as to where the Internet provides public spheres that fulfill functions similar to their offline siblings yet are characterized by an Internet-specific quality. Taking the case of online public spheres that are created by search engines, it can be illustrated how these Internet-specific forms of the public sphere may be analyzed empirically. In order to be able to judge their potential, online public spheres are compared with printed mass media. In a final reflection, I propose a theoretical framework that could be fruitful for the explanatory interpretation of the patterns found in the empirical analysis.     

From Contestation to Autonomy: The Staging and Framing of Anti-Hanson Contention

The rise of Hansonism provoked a campaign of demonstrations, rallies, marches and walkouts. This movement was frequently received within the media as violent, disruptive, and illiberal. However, I argue that anti-Hanson contention represented a noteworthy form of active citizenship. It contested the presence of the One Nation Party, undermined the ideological claim that Hanson represented 'ordinary' Australians, and garnered substantial publicity. The anti-Hanson campaign was concerned not only with the staging of dissent in public space, but with how that dissent was framed within the public sphere. Reflecting these public dynamics, the anti-Hanson movement moved over time from a reliance on contestational gatherings, that directly opposed the One Nation Party in physical space to autonomous gatherings, that attempted to create separate spaces of anti-racist politics. Ultimately, therefore, the campaign can be understood as a flexible, democratic and self-reflexive form of political mobilisation.     

Friends in High Places: Congressional Influence on the Bureaucracy in Chile

Chile presents a paradox for legislative studies. In most comparative research on the political power of presidents and assemblies in Latin America, the Chilean presidency is considered one of the most powerful in the region. The country's congress is seen, accordingly, as weak and lacking influence over public policy. Such evaluations, however, tend to be based on constitutional and legal faculties (that is, formal powers), and they overlook the substantial influence exerted by the Chilean Congress through informal political channels. This article analyzes literature on informal politics that shows the substantial influence of Chile's Congress on public policy; and, for comparison, presents an empirical study that adds several details to current accounts of congressional influence on the bureaucracy in Chile and describes two mechanisms of congressional influence not contemplated by recent research.     

Die Konstruktion der soziologischen Realität durch Forschungsrating

The article subjects the research rating of sociology, published in 2008 and carried out by an evaluation group on behalf of the German Science Council, to a secondary analysis. It is shown that the research rating constructs a reality of sociology which does justice neither to the variety of sociological knowledge production nor to its own claim of multidimensionality. Unwillingly, the peer reviewed article has imposed itself as the dominant criterion for assessing the research quality of research units against other types of publication and other activities such as externally funded research, knowledge transfer for practical problem-solving and knowledge diffusion in the public sphere. This preference also affected the assessment of entire research institutions with regard to their impact and efficiency as well as the devaluation of knowledge transfer and diffusion. In this way, sociology is limited to the type of professional sociology, while critical, public and policy-oriented sociology are displaced.