Clientelism is an exchange relationship that includes sources of patrons and services of clients. In the political dimension, this relationship?s basic characteristic involves political support from citizens and the redistribution of resources, mostly public resources, by party elites. Hypothetically, control of public resources is subject to state regulation within an institutional framework. In some countries, like T?rkiye, the state and government, state elites, and party elites are intertwined. This structure has its own roots in the peculiarities of Turkish political history. These peculiarities make clientelistic relations embedded in daily life. These conditions and peculiarities make brokers, who bridge state elites and resources with citizens, significant actors in Turkish political history. In this study, I analyze the effect of brokers in politics at a local scale by examining their agency during the 2014 and 2019 local elections in Artvin, a province of T?rkiye. The question posed is whether the efficiency of brokers influences local election outcomes.

In Douglas Adams? The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1984), a galactic civilization built a super computer to answer the meaning of life. The answer, when given, is famously ?forty-two?, a once both nonsense answer and one that has taken on great cache as a marker of insider nerd knowledge. Ask a computer to define the civil sphere, it would likely be able to define the binaries of hermeneutic code but it would be unable to explain why these things are meaningful to different groups. The context would escape it. This paper argues that the meaning making that results from the binary codes of the civil sphere are not compatible with a society compressed into numbers and in fact, the binaries of computer code distort meaning making into its opposite. The global nature of the public sphere through connected communications and smart devices inverts the civil sphere into making it (i.e. repressive) by enabling surveillance by anyone anywhere in the globe and therefore removing it from local context bound together by shared beliefs. To accommodate the impact of commercial surveillance enabled data collection on the civil sphere, the theory of the civil sphere must expand to consider the consequences of data collection and ordinalization through commercial surveillance - how are the binaries of the civil sphere transformed by the binaries of life reduced to data?

We explore the use of the term ?Carpathian Basin? in the Hungarian Parliament 1998-2020. The ?Carpathian Basin? is a term of Hungarian geography, historically used to justify Hungary?s territorial claims during the interwar period. While it was absent from official discourse for decades, it has recently gained traction among Hungary?s politicians. By processing 1525 speeches, we examine changes in the discourse of three major political blocs (right-wing nationalist, liberal/left, and Fidesz) to capture the linguistic representation of the dynamics of political polarization, and to identify changes in politically driven identity patterns and framing differences. Our paper has both methodological and substantive relevance. The methodological novelty is that we apply methods that allow automated processing of large text corpora without reading them, in a field where previously mainly qualitative approaches were used. We show that it is possible to detect changes in framing in an automated way without human coding. From a substantive point of view, our study focuses on the linguistic features of an important concept that differ from one political ideology to another. We employ both supervised and unsupervised modeling approaches. The supervised classification was used to examine changes in the polarization of discourse, while the unsupervised tool (Structural Topic Model) supported a more nuanced, qualitative interpretation of the results. According to our results, the political ideology of the speakers of the speeches can be predicted more effectively, i.e. a kind of polarization-growth can be detected, while at the same time the deeper analysis shows that parallels can be detected in the changing discourse of different ideological sides. One such common feature is a more concentrated focus on the Hungarian nation, as opposed to neighboring peoples and the European Union. We also found discourse traits of both the left?s rapprochement with the right (as an imprint of the left?s opening to Hungarians beyond the borders after 2010) and the moderation of the far right.

This article explores how primordial, tribally rooted bonds become sacralized within the Civil Sphere (CS), challenging prevailing assumptions about the sphere?s inertial universal horizon. Through a structuralist-hermeneutic analysis of communicative and regulatory institutions surrounding the Trump Administration?s Muslim Ban (2017-2021), the study reveals how exclusionary, anti-civil policies become legitimized within ostensibly civil frameworks. Central to this dynamic is a paradox within the CS, wherein the discourse of liberty inherently justifies repression when targeted groups are represented as threats to democratic universality. This analysis demonstrates the persistence of a ?tribal solidaristic horizon,? rooted in primordial ties to blood, land, and religion, strategically mobilized through civil motives, relations, and institutions to narrow solidarity. The Muslim Ban initially faced fierce opposition, characterized by widespread protests and judicial scrutiny framed by civil binaries profaning the ban as un-American, anti-democratic, and unconstitutional. Subsequent iterations adapted strategically to these cultural binaries, gaining legitimacy through orderly, procedural implementation. This strategic civil rebranding exemplifies how primordial ties-grounded in race, place, and religious identity-continue to shape and constrain the civil sphere, facilitating democratic backsliding through the relativization and manipulation of civil motives, relations, and institutions. Ultimately, the study extends Civil Sphere Theory by underscoring vulnerabilities to relativization of core cultural binaries, highlighting that resilience in democratic societies requires critical recognition of how civil discourses themselves can be co-opted to legitimize exclusion. The Muslim Ban case thus reveals significant deficits in universalistic CS resilience, signaling vulnerability to sustained exclusion despite apparent civil repair.

This paper examines the complex relationship between heritage, public history and democracy, arguing that heritage is not a neutral transmission of the past but a contested, constructed and politically charged process. Drawing on critical heritage studies and public history scholarship, the text evaluates how dynamic memory practices can both empower communities and reinforce existing power structures. Special attention is paid to the concept of dissonant heritage, which challenges singular narratives by exposing the omissions, silences and exclusions inherent in heritage-making processes. In contexts where democratic institutions are fragile or delegitimised, the paper identifies grassroots, bottom-up heritage initiatives as spaces for civic interventions and resistance. This work advocates participatory and reflective heritage practices, positioning heritage and public history as essential tools for democratic engagement and future-oriented cultural governance.

Most current studies on the democratic or de-democratic changes in Europe have concentrated so far on the national level, while they are also important at the local and regional levels. The article is aimed at investigating: 1) changes going in either democratic or autocratic direction within the subnational structures in a state as well as 2) their relationship with similar processes at the central level - focusing on the impact of the national tier on lower territorial levels. The case of Poland will be studied, focusing on the years 2015-2023 (the period of Law and Justice ruling in the country) but also taking into consideration previous years to identify a possible change concerning the investigated issues taking place since 2015. The article presents a part of the research within the pilot project. It takes mainly a qualitative approach and is based on the following data sources: local media materials, data from mini survey, in-depth semi-structured interviews of sub-national politicians and national experts as well as data from focus group interviews - local journalists and NGOs members.

In the final phase of the Cold War, Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard popularized the end of modernity and the dawn of a new era, ?postmodernity?. But postmodernism is already over again. In the resurgence of the great empires and civilizations that perished in European colonization and European-American hegemony, the rise of the ?others?, a new epoch of history is emerging that will define the entire 21st century. Lyotard?s position is characterized by three different approaches that seem to flow into each other but need to be separated: A critique of Hegel with the core assertion that Auschwitz, as a symbol of infinite suffering, abrogated his philosophy of history, and the extension of this critique to the great narratives of modernity. This is followed by a meta-discourse on the great narratives of history on the basis of linguistic-philosophical considerations (in fact a meta-meta-narrative) and, finally, the construction of an alternative great narrative, that of the individual, particular, other, of postmodernity. This latter is only ostensibly not an alternative construction because it is intimately connected to the critique of grand narratives. In all three subfields, Lyotard has made groundbreaking considerations ? but their immediate connection has reversed these advances. Lyotard exchanged a totalizing discourse of the absolute through a similar totalizing discourse of the particular. We not only need a radical reversal of the concepts of Western modernity, but also of those of post-modernity and re-invent a kind of different dialectics. It must be granted to Lyotard that an abridged interpretation of Hegel could support his critique. However, it is completely disputed whether Hegel?s approach is based on a closed or an open system. The thesis presented here is that Hegel?s approach is both open and closed at the same time. A simple and illustrative example is a sine curve on a slightly rising x-axis. This wave model is closed on the y-axis, but completely open and even infinite on the x-axis. Critics and proponents of Hegel?s philosophy of history misunderstood his approach as a closed system and derived from it an ?end of history? (Marx as well as Fukuyama). With Hegel, however, it can be argued that we are at the violent end of postmodernity. I wanted my text not only to attempt a critique of Lyotard and a reconstruction of the Hegelian method, but also to lay out the consequent substantive perspectives, even if they are necessarily not yet fully elaborated. In addition, I see Lyotard as an outstanding representative of post-structuralism, with whom he shares comparable problems, so that I make cross-references to similarities in this position, even if I do not treat them separately here.

Economic crises create specific social conditions that affect voter preferences and behaviors. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 reached Serbia a year later, causing a major shock to the fragile Serbian economy, already burdened by the legacies of wars and international isolation during the 1990s, compounded by inequalities and uncertainties stemming from the delayed transition. Subsequent elections brought the collapse of the post-2000 political consensus, with many liberal and social democratic parties never recovering. This led to the domination of the populist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in the party system from there on. The main hypothesis of this article posits that the 2008 crisis solidified the pool of transitional losers composed of low skilled workers, the unemployed, low educated, rural populations, and elderly, providing continuous support for SNS ever since. The authors investigate whether the socioeconomic status of these groups still correlates with SNS votes, even though the party has been in power for 12 years. If the correlation stands, it implies that past economic traumas continue to influence voter preferences to this day. The study utilizes original data from two nationwide public opinion surveys.

This article tries to offer a contribution with regard to the understanding of the periods of modernism and postmodernism in the arts through a Hegelian point of view. Based on Hegel?s thesis about the end of art, the article tries to show how modernism can be seen, at the same time, as both the realization and the negation of this end, for modernist art embodies the reflective character demanded by the modern spirit and at the same time it tries to resist the loss of relevance of art in the modern world. This type of art, thus, tries to be more than just an aesthetic experience by seeking to influence life and society and to reclaim for itself the primary role of expressing the truth. Postmodernism, in turn, as the negation of modernism, fully carries out Hegel?s reading on the art of his own time, accepting this loss of relevance and turning to representations that no longer have the goal of being spirit?s highest mode of self-apprehension. Postmodernism has, however, two possible readings: it can either be seen negatively, as an art that has become sterile and that demands to be accepted by institutions and the market, or positively, as an extension of the freedom achieved by modernist experimentations to every artistic production without being limited by a programmatic view. Both these readings show the intrinsic contradictions of artistic postmodernism and the role of philosophy in apprehending it.

The co-authored book Making Policy Move (Clarke, Bainton, Lendvai and Stubbs 2015) was an attempt to apply insights from theories of translation and assemblage to the field of policy studies. The mantra ?when policy moves it is always translated? was based, as much if not more, on postcolonial and decolonial theories as it was on the ?interpretive turn? in policy studies and on the idiosyncrasies of Actor Network Theory and the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In this paper, revisiting the book, we suggest that the conceptual, empirical, moral-ethical and political implications of taking colonialism and racism seriously were underdeveloped and we outline, in broad brush stroke terms, some of the ways this could be remedied in future work. We emphasize, in particular, the importance of a politics of translation for understanding coalescing crises, the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, and the collapse of democracy and the associated rise of techno-politics. We seek to situate reconstituted racialised hierarchies, patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies, and forms of class oppression within policy assemblages co-constituted through colonialism and neo-colonialism.