Professor Christopher Lord 《Democratization》2013,20(4):668-684

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.  相似文献   

    

Richard Rose 《Democratization》2013,20(2):251-271

To be admitted to the European Union (EU), an applicant country is expected to meet five conditions for democratic governance set out in the EU's Copenhagen criteria. The first section compares the EU's criteria with alternative criteria of democracy and of governance. Secondly, the article uses New Europe Barometer sample surveys to demonstrate how the bottom-up evaluation of governance by a country's citizens can complement top-down evaluations by external institutions. Evaluations by citizens of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Ukraine are compared with those of citizens in eight post-communist countries admitted to the EU in 2004. Factor analysis demonstrates that, unlike democracy indexes, democratic governance is a multi-dimensional concept. Citizens characterize their system of democratic governance as acceptable on some criteria but not on others. Taken singly, each Copenhagen criterion can be a tool for diagnosing an area of weakness in democratic governance. However, political pressures lead policymakers to lower demands for improving governance as a deadline approach for deciding whether or not to admit an applicant country to the European Union.  相似文献   

    

Gilbert Motsaathebe 《Communicatio》2013,39(4):444-458

ABSTRACT

The rise of film production and the ubiquitous presence of the ‘new wave’ of South African films on the international scene in recent years have raised expectations amongst local film stars hoping to get their biggest break by taking leading roles in major South African productions. However, most of these films – particularly co-productions – have continuously used foreign stars in leading roles. As a result, local stars have constantly voiced concerns about the proliferation of foreign artists in leading roles in South African productions. Many explanations have been offered in trying to understand why filmmakers tend to cast a foreign star when a local one could probably do a better job (in, for example, portraying a local icon like Nelson Mandela) and still command a lesser fee. However, this article puts forward that most of these arguments are based on intuition rather than on the real dynamics and externalities governing this practice. The article attempts to make sense of this issue by arguing that the rationale for this practice stems from a film being a high-risk investment that it is driven by the broader financial imperatives of film production. The article offers empirical evidence to suggest that stars do not add economic value to the film, but to themselves (see Elberse 2005), since the bulk of the money goes towards their appearance fees. It is concluded that the traditional model guiding film finance and the logic behind it need to be looked at afresh, given the fact that several films have failed at the box office, both locally and internationally, despite featuring major foreign stars, compared to the massive success of some local films (e.g., Jerusalema, Tsotsi and Yesterday) with local stars in the leading roles.  相似文献   

    

Eyo Mensah  Idom Inyabri  Eyamba Mensah 《Communicatio》2013,39(3):56-73

Abstract

Among female youth in Nigeria, especially those living in Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and its environs, skin design or tattooing has become a trendy social ritual in reinventing the notion of the “self” or perceived personhood, according to some subjective relevance. The body, or the skin in particular, has become a site for cultural (re)production and interpretation of meaning and a symbolic resource for embodied social capital and individual agency. This article interrogates the practice of tattooing among these youth: its motivations, semiotic interpretations, and perception. It illuminates how female tattoos have helped to create a conceptual dialogue between the biological (objective) body and the social (subjective) body. The study is conceptually rooted in African feminist thoughts and postmodern perspectives about the (female) body which view it as a text that can be written, rewritten and interpreted in powerful ways through a cultural lens. The results indicate that female tattoos are symbolic investments that represent fashion, self-expression, individuality, social change and sexual agency. Fundamentally, the aesthetic and artistic female body is deployed to reconstruct postmodern female identity while protesting the mainstream stereotyped representation of women especially in a male-dominated conservative society like Nigeria.  相似文献   

    

Hartmut Behr 《Terrorism and Political Violence》2013,25(4):539-557

The Arab “hegemonic debate” on the causes of Islamist terrorism nurtures (pan-) Arab, anti-Western sentiments and delegitimizes criticism of the political status quo. The European Union's emphasis on multilateral means of conflict resolution and trade promotion leads to official pronouncements that barely address the Arab world's domestic problems, instead referring to international tensions such as the Arab-Israeli conflict as a particular cause of Islamist terrorism and the need for cooperation with Arab governments. By failing to challenge the official narratives of authoritarian Arab regimes the EU obstructs interests in the democratization of the region and the delegitimization of Islamist violence.  相似文献   

    

Theodor Tudoroiu 《Democratization》2013,20(1):236-264

This article examines the state of and perspectives on democracy in the Republic of Moldova. The fall of its communist authoritarian regime in 2009 – sometimes compared to a colour revolution – went against the trend toward heavy authoritarianism now visible in the Commonwealth of Independent States. However, the regime change in Moldova does not necessarily imply a process of genuine democratic consolidation. This article argues that the future course of the Moldovan polity will be decided by structural domestic and geopolitical factors different from those that produced the regime change. Most of these structural factors do not favour democratization. Moldova's only chance to secure a genuinely democratic trajectory may therefore be dependent on its relationship with the European Union (EU). The article argues that nothing short of a process of accession to the EU can modify factors that are likely to prevent democratic consolidation. In its absence, the article contends that Moldova will either develop a Ukrainian-style hybrid regime or return to its authoritarian past.  相似文献   

    

Robert Lempert 《The international spectator : a quarterly journal of the Istituto affari internazionali》2013,48(2):77-89

The political and strategic landscape of the Middle East and North African region has changed dramatically since late 2010 and the events now loosely defined as the ‘Arab Spring’. The dust has yet to settle in many Arab capitals and 2013 is set to be another defining year for the greater Middle East as regional actors, particularly new Islamist-led governments, take on more direct roles in influencing political, military and social developments in the Arab world. Israel and the Palestinian factions of Hamas and Fatah are not immune to these developments and while progress towards peace has been all but non-existent, change in the region must not necessarily lead to more tensions and conflict. The EU and US should work to establish greater Arab ownership of the diplomatic process, convince Israel that its security is best served by assuming a proactive approach to its changing neighbourhood and strive to harness the new realities in the region to modify the incentive calculus of the major domestic players in the conflict.  相似文献   

    

Jakob Cornides 《The Journal of World Intellectual Property》2007,10(1):70-77

On 17 May 2006, the European Union adopted new legislation implementing the World Trade Organization (WTO) General Council Decision of 30 August 2003: Council Regulation 816/2006. This regulation aims to reflect faithfully the compromise negotiated at the WTO without creating an unnecessary burden for importing countries. Not all expectations articulated by the non‐governmental organization community could be met. Yet, criticism against the regulation seems premature: the value of compulsory licensing rules does not depend on the number of compulsory licences granted, but on the pressure such provisions exert on patentees to make their product available at a reasonable price.  相似文献   

    

Mike Todd 《Journal of Public Affairs (14723891)》2002,2(3):177-185

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Léa Lemaire 《Journal of immigrant & refugee studies》2014,12(2):143-160

Although security has become a common framework for analyzing dispositifs that aim to control irregular migration, island spaces themselves are seldom considered as security dispositifs. The case of Malta, where detention is mandatory upon arrival, epitomizes what could be conceptualized as a “sentinel island” within the European Union. This article demonstrates how the interaction between political discourse, administrative practices, and migrants’ experiences contributes to turning the island into a form of total-institution setting. The empirical data is based on qualitative fieldwork that combines ethnographic observation, migrants’ individual narratives and semi-structured interviews conducted with European and national policy makers.  相似文献