Insolvency in Private International Law: National and International Approaches

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Sāṃkhya and Yoga: Towards an Integrative Approach

Sā?khya and yoga are normally discussed either as topics in philosophy or as subjects of historical and philological inquiry. In this paper, I will attempt to demonstrate that, before separate developments appeared in the areas of both sā?khya and yoga (or perhaps at the same time as these separate developments appeared), at least some brahmins seemed to have espoused the idea that any physical exertion (tapas) or harnessing to a specific task (yoga) had to be preceded by an intellectual approach to reality and possibly by a thorough enumeration of its principles (sa?khyā). I come at this question from three different angles. I first analyze Kapila’s actions in the Sagara episode. The double presence of a yogācārya and a sā?khyācārya in certain cosmogonies provides a second approach to the question. The third angle will be a study of the significance of a coordinated emphasis on kratu and dak?a in the Vedic context. These apparently disconnected themes actually point in a single direction, and they contribute to an understanding of sā?khya and yoga as linked together as a binary pair of complementary attitudes (which, of course, does not preclude their separate development in other contexts).     

Does Belgium (still) exist? Differences in political culture between Flemings and Walloons

The emergence of two separate political systems in Belgium is the logical consequence of a gradual cultural and social divergence between Flanders and Wallonia. It is particularly in Flanders that Belgian nationhood is being put under pressure by a subnational identity. At the same time, there are still widespread emotional ties to Belgium, albeit stronger in Wallonia than in Flanders, that act as an important counterbalance to both the social and institutional centrifugal forces. Church involvement was traditionally higher in Flanders, but the stronger decline in the latter region has levelled off this difference. In both regions, the impact of pillarisation on voting behaviour is diminishing. As concerns the attitude towards foreigners, Flemings are more concerned about maintaining their own culture, while the Walloons are more concerned about the alleged economic and social threat. Other differences with regard to values exist, but are relatively small from a comparative perspective.     

Conformity and Individuals’ Response to Information About Aggregate Turnout

Political Behavior - How do voters react to information about aggregate turnout? Do high turnout levels mobilize or discourage citizens to vote? We argue that it depends on individuals’...     

Too much choice,too little impact: a multilevel analysis of the contextual determinants of preference voting

Abstract

Despite the rich and growing body of research addressing how turnout and party choice depend on the institutional context, far less is known about the impact of the political environment on voters’ propensity to vote for candidates – not parties. Recent single-country studies have focused almost exclusively on individual-level resource- and identity-based differences in preference voting. Combining data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies (PARTIREP) election studies in six countries, this article provides the first comprehensive, cross-national test of the impact of macro-contextual factors on a voter’s decision to indicate a candidate preference, instead of simply casting a party list vote. It demonstrates that both the failure of preference votes to affect the allocation of seats and choice overload dissuade voters from marking a candidate name on the ballot. These contextual factors affect informed and uninformed voters differently, moreover. The findings have important implications for electoral scholars and political practitioners when designing electoral systems.     

The Quality of Representation and Satisfaction with Democracy: The Consequences of Citizen-Elite Policy and Process Congruence

Citizen-elite congruence has long been considered an important yardstick for the quality of democracy. The literature on citizen satisfaction with democracy, however, has reduced congruence almost exclusively to one of its components, policy congruence. Just as citizens are considered to have positions on policy issues, there is growing scholarly interest in the preferences they have about the process of representation. Yet studies inquiring into the impact of the divergent preferences that citizens and elites have regarding the representational process thus far have been few and their results inconclusive. Combining new, unique data from the 2014 Belgian Election and Candidate Studies, we seek to address this lacuna. Our findings indicate that we cannot understand citizen satisfaction without also taking process into account—even as the policy gap has the greater effect. They should be of interest to scholars of democracy, those concerned about citizen disengagement from politics, and political practitioners.     

Putting Food Sovereignty to Work: Civil Society Governmentalities and Canada’s People’s Food Policy Project (2008–2011)

The People’s Food Policy Project (PFPP) used ‘food sovereignty’ to unite civil society organizations and build a national food policy agenda in Canada from 2008 to 2011. Agri-food scholarship largely highlights the resistance and empowerment dynamic of food sovereignty in the context of neoliberal capital relations. We propose that the story of what food sovereignty discourse does, or could do, in the work of civil society organizations (CSOs), is more complicated. This article contributes to agri-food literature and CSOs studies by examining the governmentalities of the PFPP. We find that the PFPP’s food sovereignty produced at least two discourses: food sovereignty as ethic, or a governmentality of resistance and agrarian empowerment; and food sovereignty as tactic, which we see as a governmentality of administration by CSOs. While PFPP activists increasingly share a spoken commitment to food sovereignty, the analytic of governmentality allows us to show these important differences in the movement, rooted in how CSO actors understand their day-to-day work, and the tensions these differences bring to their seemingly united agenda.     

Introduction: Authority Building in International Administered Territories

This introduction to the special section on “Authority Building in International Administered Territories” begins by summarizing the relevant literature on international administrations. To conceptualize authority building as an ongoing process in which international and local actors confirm – or refuse – authority claims, secondly, two types of authority are differentiated: ‘interpretative authority’ and ‘performing authority’. This sociological conceptualization of authority building allows, thirdly, a discussion on the restrictions and challenges that international administrations face in their attempts to establish authority on the ground. Finally, an overview of the section’s articles is provided.     

Party competition in the Middle East: spatial competition in the post-Arab Spring era

This paper charts the nature of political cleavage between major parties in post-Arab Spring elections in five Mediterranean region countries, with data from online opt-in surveys. We compare the Moroccan elections, held under a consolidated authoritarian regime, with the transitional cases of Tunisia and Egypt as well as the more mature democracies of Turkey and Israel. Voter opinions are obtained on 30 salient issues, and parties and voters are aligned along two dimensions. We trace country-specific cleavage patterns and reflections of party system maturity in these five countries. The cases of Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco reveal that in less settled cleavage structures there is little congruence between vote propensities for parties and agreement levels with policy positions compared to the more institutionalized democracies of Israel and Turkey where voters exhibit a higher likelihood to vote for a party as the distance between the voter and the party in the policy space gets smaller.     

Elites' and Voters' Attitudes towards Austerity Policies and their Consequences in Greece and Portugal

This article analyses the attitudes of the political elite and voters in Greece and Portugal vis-à-vis the Troika bailouts, austerity policies and the attribution of responsibilities for the crisis. Using both elite and mass surveys with similar questions, the article explores to what extent the elites and voters share similar attitudes, what might explain possible differences between these two groups and between the two countries and what this information can tell us about the quality of political representation in Greece and Portugal. The differences between the countries are explained mainly by the severity of the crisis and austerity policies in each country, but also by the diversity of political conditions.