A political economy for social movements and revolution: popular media access,power and cultural hegemony

Abstract

One key marker of mass social movements transitioning to participatory democratic governance is popular media access. This essay argues that democratic media access by public constituencies becomes a site for constructing social revolution and simultaneously a manifest empirical measure of the extent of democratic participation in the production, distribution, and use of communication with new cultural possibilities. The participatory production practices (with citizens producing and hosting their own programs) and the democratic content (of oral histories, local issues, critiques of government and business, and everyday vernacular) reflect the hegemony of emerging ‘Bolivarian’ twenty-first century socialism expressed as popular participation in media production. Bolstered by constitutional changes and public funding, popular social movements of civil society, indigenous, women, and working class organizations have gained revolutionary ground by securing in practice the right of media production. Findings indicate that public and community media (that move beyond alternative sites of local expression and concerns) provide a startling revolutionary contrast to the commercial media operations in every nation. Popular media constructions suggest a new radically democratic cultural hegemony based on human solidarity with collective, participatory decision-making and cooperation offering real possibilities and experiences for increased equality and social justice.     

‘That splendid body of women’: nursing,professional registration,and suffragette militancy

ABSTRACT

In the decades before World War One, a group of women fought for their right to control their own futures, claiming that their governance was in the hands of men whose interests lay in keeping women subservient. Initially articulated by an educated, middle-class few, the women's demands were embraced by widening numbers of both women and men. They saw their hopes dashed on several occasions by political manoeuvring, and only after WWI did their demands begin to be met. This is not an account of the women’s suffrage movement, but rather of the fight for the registration of trained nurses. Both movements claimed the right of women to be actors in their public lives and both faced public condemnation for transgressing social boundaries. The two movements interacted, with nurses connecting their struggle to the wider call for women's rights, and with the suffrage movement foregrounding nurses as disenfranchised women professionals.     

Party brand hate in political market: antecedents and consequences

ABSTRACT

Brand hate is defined as a severe dislike for a product or service by the consumer. Although brand hate has been recognized as a critical element, in the political market, there is a lack of understanding of the impact of brand hate on voters. This study is an attempt to examine the antecedents and consequences of brand hate in the political market. The study reveals that unmet expectations, symbolic incongruity, and ideological incompatibility of electorates have a significant positive impact on brand hate intensity. The result shows that political product involvement significantly mediates the relationship between unmet expectations, symbolic incongruity, and ideological incompatibility and brand hate intensity. The study further reveals that as an outcome of political brand hate, electorates put emphasis on either brand avoidance and/or brand extremism. The outcome of this study may help political parties gain knowledge about the impact of political brand hate.     

Beveridge at Eighty: Learning the Right Lessons

The eightieth anniversary of the Beveridge inquiry is a timely moment to consider how the landmark report is used within contemporary UK politics. Calls for a ‘new Beveridge’ reflect a desire for a rupture with the past and the creation of a radical new welfare consensus. But this reflects a misunderstanding: Beveridge's approach was organic in nature, building on decades of experimentation, politically contested rather than consensual, and intellectually pluralist rather than moored to a single ideological worldview. The real insight Beveridge offers us today flows not from his substantive agenda—which was rooted in a particular set of historic circumstances—but as an approach to securing social reform. Successful welfare advances over the last generation have drawn on these ‘Beveridgean instincts’. Rather than calling for a new twenty-first century blueprint to be handed down from above, reformers should build on experimentation and successful incremental change, from within the UK and abroad.     

法律认知和法律原则：情感、效率与公平

情感、效率、公平是人们认知活动中惯常的三个进程。对应这三个进程,人们对法律的认知有一些基本的原则。这些认知互动既可能形成社会自发秩序,也可能为法学提供一个基于认知背景的分析框架,有助于法学应对实践问题。“公平主导”的一个简单回答是,面对不同场合,情感、效率、公平三种进程被激活的程度不同。大体上,家庭场合激活情感,工程场合激活效率,市场和法律则更激活公平。在实践中,公平主导的法律原则由于比较接近主流社会认知,所以法律规范在社会中往往可能“自执行”,无需全靠外界监督或者激励。公平原则也有其自身的局限。虽然规范和原则很重要,是社会秩序的母体。但是,公平原则并不能解决所有问题。缺乏制度上的法治,光靠情理法是不足的。所以现代社会形成了规则化解决纠纷的机制,这就是二阶意义上的法律。     

美国等西方国家对华“分化”策略的新变化及对策思考

基于政治制度和意识形态的冲突、地缘政治的竞争和战略的不信任,以美国为首的西方国家对华实施"西化""分化"的战略图谋一刻也没有松懈。近年来,中国的快速发展迫使美国调整了对华实施"分化"战略的策略;同时,由于中国正处于社会转型、改革深化的关键时期,社会矛盾的增多、社会冲突的加剧为美西方的"分化"活动提供了诸多契机和借口。面对美国等西方国家的"分化"活动出现的新形式与新特点,为了维护国家的政治安全,中国不仅要在策略方面进行应对,还需要在战略层面提出适应国家整体发展的"顶层设计",更为重要的是在"软实力"上构建一套让全世界都信服且能与西方相抗衡的价值体系。     

The Alexander memorandum

ABSTRACT

British officials knew a good deal about the upsurge in malignity following the terrible euphoria of the Anschluss in March 1938. Word even reached a British consul working under Sir Frederick Leith-Ross in China. Alexander made his way from the Far East to Germany, the place where he had spent contented days as a student, in order to negotiate the release of a Jewish friend from Dachau. Negotiations were progressing nicely until they were interrupted by the outburst of destructive fury against Germany’s Jews in November 1938. As talks faltered in a febrile atmosphere of Jew-hatred, Alexander used his connections to gain access to a member of the Nazi aristocracy. The British diplomat got more than he bargained for. The senior Nazi made a shocking proposal. He outlined an incredible scheme that, he claimed, would lead to permanent peace between Germany and Britain. His plan uncannily presaged details of the Final Solution three years before its implementation. This information quickly made its way back to London and indeed to the British Foreign Secretary himself, Lord Halifax. So, how would the Foreign Office react? Wallis’s article tells the story of a forgotten memorandum, one that challenges whether theories concerning the limits of the British imagination are sufficient to explain British inaction in the face of massive anti-Jewish persecution and violence.     

Evaluating the cross-national comparability of survey measures of political interest using anchoring vignettes

Making cross-groups comparisons by using survey instruments has raised substantial scholarly concerns due to the potential risk of incomparability resulting from differential item functioning (DIF). However, not every survey item necessarily suffers from DIF. In this paper, we argue that, unlike many other survey items (e.g., political efficacy), the usual question used to measure political interest is likely to be largely immune to DIF. Our theoretical argument centers on the relative specificity of the item and a corresponding cultural homogeneity (at least in advanced democracies) in what it means to be politically interested or not. Utilizing the anchoring vignettes technique (King et al., 2004; King and Wand, 2007) in our original surveys in the UK, France, and the Netherlands, we demonstrate the size of DIF is small for the standard political interest question.     

Inter-parliamentary relations in the United Kingdom: devolution’s undiscovered country?

Since 1997, the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution has undergone an immense process of change and has resulted in the establishment of separate legislatures and governments for the peoples of Scotland, Wales and, when Stormont is operational, Northern Ireland. These changes have spawned a whole series of relationships between the institutions of the devolved UK, at executive, legislature and civil service levels. However, while intergovernmental relations has been the subject of repeated debate, there has been little attempt to document and examine the way in which the UK’s four legislatures interact with one another, post-devolution. To the extent that these interactions, otherwise known as inter-parliamentary relations (IPR), have been the subject of scrutiny, it has been largely to bemoan their modest state and/or to suggest that stronger, albeit occasionally rather unelaborated, mechanisms be established. This article seeks to correct this deficit and provide a first step towards a clearer understanding of IPR in the UK, post-devolution. The article breaks the different levels of IPR down into three main strands: (1) parliament-parliament, (2) committee-committee and (3) official-official, and suggests that the main interactions that take place at each of these levels. Following this audit, the article concludes by highlighting the role that shared policy competence (a field that is set to grow with the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union) has played in driving IPR in the UK, post-devolution, and suggests some steps that may be taken to enhance IPR in the future.     

政治统一、支持监督与协商治理:中国新型政党制度的优势

中国新型政党制度是保持国家政治统一、实现权力有效监督制约和实践协商民主政治的重要制度载体.中国新型政党制度的优势主要体现在通过聚合性的政党制度结构,保持了超大规模国家的政治统一;通过非竞争支持型的政党监督模式,初步实现了政党之间的权力监督;通过多党合作和政治协商,实现了包容互惠发展导向的协商民主治理.新时代坚持和完善中国新型政党制度,需要通过制度改进和完善,进一步发挥中国新型政党制度的优势,促进国家治理现代化的实现.