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The final debate represents the most broadcasted event of the electoral campaign for the presidential title. Considered risky by the candidates, awaited by the citizens, the final debate succeeds to inform and entertain in the same time. With both their assets and clumsiness, the candidates are faced with each other in order to introduce themselves to the electors and to ask for their votes. In this article I have introduced a short presentation of the presidential debates from the post-Decembrist Romania, followed by an analysis of the 2014 debate, where I have included the first round of the debate hosted by Realitatea TV, and the second one, broadcasted by B1 TV. I have used as a basis the framing theory, and as research method, the content analysis. From la Semetko & Valkenburg (2000) I have taken the classical grid of analysis of the five frames (the attribution of responsibility, the human interest, the conflict, the morality, and the economical ones), and I have watched the prevailing framings within the presidential debate broadcasted by the two televisions. I have also made an analysis on which are the most prominent themes approached by the two rival political actors during the debate. According to the previous research in this field, for both candidates the dominant frame was the conflictual one, followed by the moral-legal one, and by the attribution of responsibility. Surprising is only the economical-consequences frame representation, which lacked consistence. The themes which carried the highest weight in the presidential debate were those related to the weak organization of the elections for the Romanian citizens who voted abroad, the suspension of the amnesty and pardon law, the enforcement of the anti-corruption fight and the support of the authorised institutions, the institutional collaboration between the president and the prime-minister, Romania’s relationships with the foreign partners, and future strategies for the economical-development of the country.
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Interview with Dan Sorin MIHALACHE
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The concept of life as a theatre, as a stage for people to act, has its origins in the ancient world. You can already find it in Plato, and in the work of many later philosophers, writers and social researchers. It is also found in sociology. Political theatre has become a dominating force in the world of politics, where it has found fertile ground for growth, providing the metaphor of the theatre with yet another grotesque and often comical dimension. One of the finest and most distinctive actors in the “theatre politics” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Europe has been Silvio Berlusconi, who for many years has efficiently manipulated public opinion and maintained a strong influence on political life in Italy. For years, he has also managed to escape justice – often using a “one-man theatre” technique.
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Presented article is aimed at examining the emotional attitudes to candidates for the president of Poland among pro-systemic and anti-systemic voters in 2015 presidential election and showing the influence of campaign TV ads on these groups of Polish electorate. The research conducted by author reveals that anti-systemic electorate is less interested in politics and more likely to be influenced by electoral TV spots. The study also confirms the relation between emotional attitudes to political actors and political preferences. According to the results of experiment anti-systemic voters expressed more positive feelings towards candidates from out of the political mainstream, and the other way round, the pro-systemic electorate rather liked the candidates presented by parliamentary parties.
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After PSD has lost the presidential elections in 2014, we are in a new context in which we need to discuss the possible decisive erosion of PSD electorate. We will analyze sociological data to see to what extent this possible erosion is based on something real or is just wishful thinking of PSD opponents
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Politics is a particular field of social activity where accusing an opponent of mental incapacitation occurs as a frequent element of the conducted narrative. Moreover, public opinion discrediting a profession of a politician is very eager to question the mental health of political actors. Vocabulary used in the public is a vital testimony of societies attitude towards people with mental disorders. However, we refer paranoia to personality traits of individuals while political paranoia refers to reaction to events, facts or to the way it is seen by individuals or groups. The authors do not have any ambition to carry out a psychological analysis of politicians. What is intriguing is the issue of using political paranoia (searching for enemies, tracking plots, fighting in defence of ideals, irrational justification of failures) in the group spectrum for elections. What is also intriguing is the answer to the question whether politicians are paranoid, or it is a well-planned election strategy which aims to identify an opponent to consolidate a group of voters around the leader.
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Scientific discussion on political leadership increasingly takes on the form of interdisciplinary argumentation, in which different research perspectives, models and explanatory conceptual grids overlap. This state of affairs is on the one hand dictated by the contemporary trends in scientific research, especially in the broadly defined social sciences, where the cognitive, explanatory or descriptive relevance is achieved only by taking into account a broader, inter-disciplinary nature of scientific knowledge. In this sense, a thorough, reliable research practice consists primarily in crossing the formal borders of scientific disciplines, where researchers renounce the “complex” of detailed and firm definitions of their own subject of study to turn instead towards integration of knowledge from various, often very different, areas. The above is mainly due to the dispersion of objective scientific knowledge, which is conditioned, among others by: scientific and technical progress, the phenomenon of intertextuality (modern researchers in humanities concentrate their research eff ort on the texts and practices associated with this phenomenon, which means that their primary method in analyses of political phenomena is to fortify the text – specifically, to prepare the scientific text in such a way as to meet the standards of scientific writing and withstand criticism in the absence of the writer); as well as conceptual-theoretical pluralism present in social sciences. On the other hand, it is the result of scientific analysis of the given forms and practices of leadership, where nowadays greater attention is paid to the multi-dimensionality of leadership processes in politics, related to: the multi-level nature of concepts and research (meso, micro and macro-theoretical level analyses) and the need to take into account a large number of variables in the study of leadership (personality and environmental, situational, institutional factors, economic, political or religious variables). The consequence of this state of affairs is the multi-paradigm character of leadership, which in this case means that very often highly different ways of defining and explaining the complex relationship between a particular political leader and followers co-exist within the discipline. In addition, the multiplicity of paradigms of political leadership is a feature demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge generated by political science, where various claims, theses, observations or conclusions complement each other, for example those originating in disciplines such as sociology, law, psychology, management sciences and cultural studies.
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The article treats the impact of psychological researches upon the humanistic ethic came out from Lumières, and subsequently on the liberal thought influenced by that. Hence it first presents the crisis which psychoanalysis induced to the traditional image of human being as rational an capable of free will. It also shows the way that humanistic view was transformed and so recovered in a more democratic sense by the analytical psychology and mainly the cultural psychoanalysis.
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The notion and meanings of trust. Trust as a cultural precondition of democratic order belongs to the man’s second nature. The significance of universal values for the foundation of trust. The relation of reliability, risk, expectance and trust. Disappointment in trust. Trust as moral obligation. Two kinds of human obligations: obligations stemming out of body movement and impersonal obligations. Trust between citizens and authorities and trust between citizens themselves, coming out of their differences. Mistrust in political and societal life. Prejudice and stereotypes toward others and different ones and trust. Trust in pre-modern and modern societies. The significance of trust for political culture. I-functions of importance for trust: empathy, dialogue, tolerance and distance. National homogeneity as an articulation of mistrust to minorities. The significance of autonomy for maintaining minority identities.
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The dominant approach in genocide studies focuses on the intentions and motives of mass murderers. However, in many cases, natural phenomena, pathogens and machines determine the nature and course of genocidal mobilization. The aim of this article is to present the advantages of the actor-network theory (ANT) in explaining genocidal mobilization, taking into account environmental factors. “Natural objects” have been selected from a rich catalogue of non-human actors. The author divides these objects into three classes, showing that pathogens (associated with “the asymmetry of resistance” of victims and perpetrators) and deserts are of key importance in the history of collective violence. Referring to specific cases (in particular, the conquest and colonization of the Americas and Australia, the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, the Armenian genocide, Shoah), the author identifies that adopting the assumptions and methods of ANT reveals new aspects of the genocidal process. This indicates the need for considering the politics of non-human actors, delegating morality and law, tracking consecutive translations, rejecting the division into qualitatively different micro- and macro-actors, and tracking the emergence of new actants and forms of knowledge during genocide.
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Reflections on political systems are necessarily based on some sort of model of political man – an individual who thinks, decides, discusses, and participates in politics. This paper offers a review of modern conceptions of political man structured in five models. The personality model highlights the importance of childhood experiences for political behavior and belief in adulthood; the sociological model highlights the importance of primary and interest groups; the sociopsychological model highlights the importance of party identification; the rational economic model highlights the efficiency of thought and self-interest;while the cognitive model highlights the citizens’ mental capabilities.The main assumptions, methodology, and findings for each model are presented in the paper. Also, implications for democratic processes for each model are explained. The conclusion offers a critical survey of the current state of research on political man, as well as recommendations for further research.
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The article presents the voting behaviour in the municipality of Szadek in the elections of 2015. The investigation of the electoral behaviour comprises the turnout and voting results in each of the electoral districts, and a synthetic city-countryside comparison. The article is an attempt to explain the variation in voter turnout and transfers within the electorate.
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Victimhood nationalism has gained considerable attention in the past decade within nationalism studies. This theoretical article shows how recent research in the fields of international relations and victimology can help improve our understanding of Czech (Czechoslovak) nationalism. To do so, this study is using a selection of newspaper articles and unpublished archival materials from the period of the First World War, covering propaganda activities of Czechs (Masaryk, Beneš) and their allies or acquaintances in France, as well as those of Czech-Americans in the United States of America. By drawing on the definitions of victimhood nationalism within the context of the 20th century by Adam B. Lerner, and of Early Modern religious martyrdom by Brad S. Gregory, as well as on recent research conducted by Andrea Orzoff regarding the national identity of interwar Czechoslovakia, I highlight the importance and the singular aspect of the use of victimisation as a diplomatic and political strategy in the Czech case during the First World War.
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This article discusses the significance of social capital in Bourdieu-inspired analyses of contemporary South-East European societies. We first recapitulate Bourdieu’s theorization of social capital, emphasizing that it allows different operationalizations expressly because of its rather abstract theoretical character. Following that, we explain what is meant by “South-East European societies” and that their inequality-generating mechanisms are largely based on social closure. In the central part of the article, we comment on some attempts at operationalization of social capital in the SEE region. While we also discuss two cases of eclectically mixing Lin’s operationalization with Bourdieusian concepts, at the center of our attention is the elaboration of Bourdieu’s theorization of social capital put forward by the Serbian sociologist Predrag Cvetičanin. The relevance of his concepts of “social capital of solidarity” and “social capital of informal connections” for the study of class relations in post-socialist societies in South-East Europe highlights the advantages of a consistent application of the Bourdieusian framework in a contemporary (post-Bourdieusian) context.
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A puzzling aspect of Hungarian politics is the centerwise migration urge of the oppositional party Jobbik, dominating the right side of the political spectrum for long. Until the end of 2020, however, no remarkable change has taken place, in terms of political coordinate changes, between the stances of the left-liberal and rightist (Jobbik) oppositional blocks, meanwhile the government-opposition relationship has been substantially transformed. I apply the political space approach of Downs for studying this elongated getting-not-getting-closer period during the 2010s. I demonstrate that it was the relative political distance between the oppositional blocks, i. e., their distance compared to their remoteness to government positions, that has diminished, in parallel with a new political space dimension’s becoming dominant. The relative distance change did not require modifying the, oftentimes diametrical, political views of the oppositional blocks. By the end of the decade, their relative closing has been complemented with absolute distance decrease, as well as with aligning political space positions.
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This study analyses the names of political formations (politonyms) in Spain from the start of the country’s transition to democracy in 1976 to the present day. Based on a corpus of more than 5,000 names, the evolution of the creative systems is examined according to a series of parameters: the hallmarks of territoriality, the use of collective names, and ideologically defined terms, as well as the global nature of the name and language used. The quantitative data confirm constant elements in the structuring of politonyms on the one hand, and changes in trends associated with historical events and the evolution of the political course itself, on the other.
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The paper dwells on the language of a political dialogue between two members of the UK Parliament in the House of Commons during the weekly event called Prime Minister’s Questions, which took place on the 29th March 2023. At the time, standing in for the Prime Minister was the Conservative Deputy Prime Minster, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Dominic Raab; the other MP is Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office, Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner. The present analysis highlights textual and linguistic features of the discourse from several points of view: that of register, pragmatic and semantic, lexico-grammatical, rhetorical and stylistic. The verbal exchange is heated, with an intensely dramatic effect, with all the elements converging towards the conative function of communication, as the public is meant to be drawn to one side or the other of the political agenda.
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