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Information on research project titled "Policy Responses Overcoming Factors in Intergenerational Transmission on Inequalities" [POFIT]
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Information on research project titled "Policy Responses Overcoming Factors in Intergenerational Transmission on Inequalities" [POFIT]
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The paper deals with the interpretation of the concept of the conflict of interest by politicians and state officials in Poland. It proposes a definition of the term "conflict of interest" and describes the history of related Polish legislation. Then it presents the famous 2002 case of a politically connected film producer trying to secure a bribe from a leading Warsaw daily in return for a favourable clauses in the then pending electronic media legislation. The analytical part of the paper reconstructs, on the basis of testimonies presented before a Parliamentary Investigating Commission, the "unorthodox" interpretations of conflict of interests. It shows that some politicians and officials do not understand this idea while others interpret it depending on their particular interests. Many think that, due to the economic and social needs and due to the deficiencies of the political system, the cases of violating ethical norms should be treated with tolerance. Those failures to notice the issue of the conflict of interestshow that they ignore the basis of the legislation of the liberal democratic state.
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Is political culture approach fruitful in understanding democratization in East Asia? Certainly in cases of East Asian democratization there are complex interactions between institutional, economic, and cultural dynamics. Sometimes political culture can be seen as an expression of differences in historical, political, and economic development. Sometimes political culture must be seen as an independent variable. Often political cultural analysis points in the same direction as institutional or economic analyses and can be seen as one aspect of phenomenon with many dimensions. Political culture should never be reified. Political culture is dynamic. It evolves over time in response to changes in people’s lives. In this paper would like to lay great stress on the importance of Confucianism in understanding the political cultures of East Asia. But what Confucianism is, how it is understood, and what it means for human behavior is radically different today than two thousand years ago, or even 50 years ago, just as the effect of Christianity on western political culture has changed over historical time.
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This article presents the finding of research on sexuality of Polish men and women. It tries to reconstruct the prevalent patterns of sexual behaviour and the evaluations and expectations which accompany them. The author also tries to identify the determinants of those patterns, i.e., the factors relating to earlier sexual experiences, demographic characteristics and socio-cultural variables.
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This article is about national identification. The author proposes conceptual framework for an account of nationality which respects the multidimensional nature of the nation and hence the contextual andmulti-levelnatureofnationalidentification.Hethinksthattheterm“identification”referstoindividual nationality more adequately than the term “identity” which is associated with undesirable methodological subjectivism and individualism and often draws upon unrealistic, excessively intellectual conceptions of the individual. Use of the latter term is also often associated with researchers’ tendency to confuse individual and group phenomena. To illustrate his claims, the author quotes Jaroslav Hasˇek’s The Good Soldier Sˇvejk. In his analysis of the national identification of the novel’s heroes, he points out that it is actually multi-level and changes depending on the situation and the obligating institutional framework. This analysis shows that more appropriate way to approach identification would be to give an account of the configuration of social roles and surrounding institutions which lead to the development of identifications rather than to describe an individual’s national identity per se.
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Parliamentary Elections 1998 in Slovak Republic -the Challenge That Came intoEffect. The paper attempts to analyse main causes and relationships of the radical change that the parliamentary elections have brought in the political life of the Slovak Republic. First, the author points to the persistence of the public opinion and explains its obliqueness and a challenge for politicians - how to project a critical opinion majority in the political stands and electoral decisions. It was achieved only after the former opposition parties made organisation changes and in the course of the election campaign. Further, the author reveals the chief motives of the electoral behaviour in view of the results of the election analysis and shows the impact of social issues. He explains the motivation of the voters for Mečiar’s HZDS as being conditioned by clientele relationships and/or by the traditional populist political opinion of the so-called residual group. Further factors of the election shift were embedded in the practical politics of the former government coalition. It was its attempt to facilitate delegatory democracy that failed face to face with the reviving civil society and political plurality supported by the free media. As a decentralised ”trench opponent,” the media represented an insurmountable obstacle for the regime of the concentrated power. In the last part of the paper, the author analyses a group background for electoral decisions; he states that the influence of social structure (it has not been crystallised so far) was not recorded in spite of the intensive privatisation. In the end, he points to potential instability of the political scene. The new governmental coalition not only faces the task how to deal effectively with accumulated problems in the economic sphere and public life, but also the task to give a clear image to political forces and their social background.
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