The Dynamics of Stereotyping: Is a New Image of the Terrorist Evolving in American Popular Culture?

This article considers popular ways of representing terror activists, and the metamorphoses that approaches to representation in the American media have undergone. A part of the article deals with terrorism in the media over time, common stereotypes, and how they affect the representation of Arabs and Muslims. The article then discusses Sleeper Cell (2005), a mini-series which focuses on a Jihad terror group. The article addresses questions including: How are Arabs and non-Arab Muslims portrayed in the series? Can a real change be observed over time in the method of portraying them? Twentieth-century historical considerations precede the pointed topical discussion.     

Participatory Initiatives and Political Representation: The Case of Local Councillors in Sweden

The health of political parties and the institutions of representative democracy have been extensively questioned during the last decade due to evidence of a widespread decline in voting turnout, political trust, and party membership as well as identification. An often-proposed, but also often-questioned, strategy to strengthen representative democracy is for political institutions to offer alternative forms of political participation through so-called participatory initiatives. The literature suggests that participatory initiatives will have little impact on representative democracy if no adaptation among political representatives is apparent. This paper explores the consistency between participatory initiatives in Swedish municipalities and the attitudes, practices and role-taking of local councillors, comparing pioneer municipalities where extensive numbers of participatory initatives have been executed vis-à-vis hesitator municipalities where few initiatives have been implemented. The study indicates that local participatory initiatives may stimulate political representation by creating new channels for citizen input and communication between citizens and representatives that are supported by local councillors in the pioneer municipalities. However, the core roles of parties and councillors in representative democracy appear not to be challenged by these initiatives, being similar in both groups of municipalities. The article is concluded by a discussion of the implications of these results for the function of participatory initiatives in local democracy.     

Revisiting the crisis of representation thesis: the Indian context

This article addresses the ‘crisis of representation’ thesis by examining some of the findings of a survey conducted in Delhi in 2003. On the basis of the data collected during the course of the survey, it revisits two rather significant questions that have been thrown up by the thesis. First, how valid is the assumption that people have lost confidence in the capacity of political parties to represent them in forums of policymaking? Second, have people really come to believe that civil society groups, such as non-governmental organizations, can better help them resolve the oft intractable problems of everyday life? The answers to these questions could help to throw light on two vital political and theoretical issues: the relationship between citizens and the world of representative politics in particular, and the adequacy of representative democracy in general. The findings of the research project tell us that the crisis of representation runs deep and that people seem to have lost confidence in the ability or indeed the political will of all organizations, whether they belong to the political or the civil domain, to address their basic problems.     

Democracy and the European Union: Matching means to standards

In justifying recent European Union Treaty changes, member-state governments have claimed that publics are doubly represented in the EU: through their elected governments and through the European Parliament. This review evaluates ‘dual representation’ as a means of delivering democratic standards. It concludes that present institutional arrangements contain some means of aligning policy outcomes with citizen preferences but they do not match up so well to ‘input’ or procedural conditions for public control with political equality. One troubling aspect of this is that there are good normative grounds for holding ‘input’ standards to be prior to ‘output’ ones. Another is that difficulties of public control are, on Union matters, more acute in relationships between representatives and voters than in those between representatives and other power holders.     

Representation,agendas and institutions

Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between public priorities and the policy activities of government, undertaking time‐series analyses using data for the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1951 to 2003, relating to executive speeches, laws and budgets in combination with data on public opinion about the ‘most important problem’. The results show that the responsiveness of policy agendas to public priorities is greater when institutions are subject to less friction (i.e., executive speeches subject to few formal rules and involving a limited number of actors) and declines as friction against policy change increases (i.e., laws and budgets subject to a greater number of veto points and political interests/coalitions).     

Farm to Non-Farm Employment Linkages and Pattern： An Analysis of Village Level Survey in Bangladesh

The widening of rural-urban continuum has accelerated the transformation of Bangladesh agriculture from subsistence toward commercialization. This has accompanied significant employment linkages and patterns in farm and non-farm sector. Modern rice production contributed to employment generation through backward and forward linkages. The field study of three villages measures farm to non-farm employment linkages for two major rice crops. The estimated backward, forward, and total linkages were 0.18, 0.43, and 0.61 for Boro rice and 0.14, 0.39, and 0.53 for Aman rice. For two crops as a whole, farm to non-farm total employment linkage coefficient was 0.58, which meant that total 100 man days of farm employment per hectare in farm production activities generated 58 man days of non-farm employment in various support services, processing, and marketing activities. Employment pattern in different months was more flexible for the farm workers than for non-farm workers. The availability of farm employment in a month varied from five to 25 days for farm workers, and from 22 to 27 days for non-farm workers. The findings imply that more investrnent in rice-based production system significantly increases non-farm employment opportunities. From national policy perspective, more research and development efforts should go into accelerating potential rural growth and non-farm sector development.     

论劳动者的团结权与工会体制改革

由于历史和现实的原因,造成了我国工会组织的行政化、工作内容的娱乐化、工会立场的中间性、代表权利来源和责任机制的虚无化等一系列问题,导致工会的维权作用受到很大削弱。我国工会的发展道路,应是在坚持党的政治领导和社会主义方向的前提下朝着社会化的方向发展。要通过深化改革强化工会的代表性和相对独立性,通过完善法律将维护会员的合法权益作为工会的首要职能,从而加强工会的责任意识。只有这样,才能适应我国当前经济转型、体制转轨时期劳动纠纷多发、群体性事件增多,必须创新社会管理、建立稳定和谐的劳动关系的迫切需要。     

One for me and one for you? The spillover effect of heads of lists on the presence and success of candidates of immigrant origin

As gatekeepers to elected office, party selectors are often held responsible for the political under-representation of social groups, including immigrant-origin citizens. This article investigates how the socio-demographic characteristics (immigrant background and gender) of heads of list affect the presence and success of immigrant-origin candidates. Heads of lists constitute a unique group, as they simultaneously act as selectors and role models for aspirants and voters. We rely on an original dataset based on the 2018 local elections in Flanders (Belgium) (N = 31,173 candidates on 1309 lists). To our knowledge, it is the first time such a big endeavour is undertaken. The results show that whereas having an immigrant-origin head of list has a positive effect on both the presence and success of other immigrant-origin candidates, having a female head of list does not. We find a spillover effect within one under-represented group, but not between under-represented groups.