Political Class Research Articles

Политическая экономия как научная платформа изучения тенденций развития: взгляд через призму теории ноономики

Humankind is currently facing many issues that need to be dealt with. Therefore, the necessity for their theoretical reasoning arises. The modern paradigm of economic knowledge based on the liberal concept does not provide suitable answers to existing challenges. In this regard, the appeal to the methodology of political economy becomes relevant, using which adequate results were obtained. It is not so much about classical political economic tools, but the application of new theories developed using this methodology, in particular, the theory of noonomy. The paper reveals the prospects of its application to explain the changes that are currently taking place and, apparently, still will be taking place in the socioeconomic system.

Encountering Innovation, Countering Innovation

What could be gained by putting science and technology studies (STS) in conversation with innovation studies (IS)? These distinct fields have shared people over decades, as they build concepts, careers, institutions, and even nations. I review how this collection offers accounts of how STS and IS have been practiced in different times and locations: resisting underdevelopment, Western and middle-class assumptions about progress, or technology-centric policy. I argue, however, that it is critical to clarify the difference between innovation as an analytic and as an emic and ideological category. Neither STS nor IS should take for granted the ways political economy, class relations, racialization and gendering, and even national(ist) ideologies shape what counts as desirable forms of newness, what newness ought to be contained or criminalized, and the hierarchies of socio-technical transformation that emerge out of that. I offer three examples: San Diego’s “smart streetlights” program where “innovation” as an ideology devalues or erases the creativity and knowledge already manifest among residents; Amazon® Mechanical Turk worker advocacy and the limits of doing scholarship with policy relevance when workers do not have organized power; and mid-twentieth-century Iran, where I show what IBM® throwing computers into the ocean can tell us about innovation as a form of enclosure, repression, empire, and waste of collective resources and knowledge.

THE ORIGIN AND MEANING OF OLD TURKIC WORDS

Language has been the primary means of communication since the creation of mankind. Gesture communication of the first people and then language evolved along with civilization, forming languages through divisions such as geographical environment and political class. Language is a living organism being born anew, developing, and then dying, disappearing from the surface of the earth. As an argument, the Latin language can be mentioned, which plays a key historical role. Although it is a dead language, the languages separated from the Latin branch are a reflection of European languages today. The article examines the specific lexical meaning and etymology of some incorrectly translated words or words with different meaning used in Old Turkic runic written monuments. In addition, when considering the research material of the Old Turkic language, they were compared based on the materials of the Middle Turkic and modern Turkic languages. It is mainly compared with the lexical fund and grammar of the Kazakh language and is considered as the main connecting language. Key words: Orkhon-Yenisei, Turkic, runes, etymology, Kazakh language, translation, written monuments.

The Split in the Political Elite of the Empire as an Obstacle to the Activities of Mikhail Muravyov: Lessons for Nowadays

In 1863, the Russian Empire faced a formidable challenge – an armed rebellion of the Polish nobility, supported by Western Europe aspiring to divide Russia into regions dependent on it. The Tsar persuaded the brilliant oppositional politician and 1812 Patriotic War hero M.N. Muravyov, possessing experience in fi ghting the Poles during their last rebellion in 1831, to lead the suppression of the new riot as Governor-General of the Western Region. However, our conservative hero, relying on the Russian spirit and the collectivism of the Russian people, was opposed not only by obvious enemies – rebel Polish gentry, but also by ministers who were adherents of Westernized cosmopolitanism and became the main force restraining the conservative reformer. On the contrary, the spiritual and cultural Russian elite, led by the Metropolitan of Moscow Filaret and poet and thinker F.I. Tyutchev warmly supported Muravyov’s patriotic course. However due to the tsar’s mental dependence on the high-ranking “Рarty of cosmopolitans” and the lesser infl uence on him of the “Russian party”, Muravyov was not allowed to complete the reform program. The author comes to the conclusion that in our time of growing threats to Russia’s security due to the new onslaught of the West on Russia, our political elite should take into account the experience of Muravyov’s struggle “on two fronts” with the inadmissibility, in fact, of internal betrayal. In other words, our political class must avoid splitting while striving for unity on a nationally oriented basis with appropriate personnel recruitment.

Challenges of Administering COVID-19 Vaccine in Some Selected States of Northeast Nigeria

The COVID-19 pandemic has successfully registered itself among the league of global epidemics that the world is currently battling. The virus, which emerged in December 2019 in China, quickly spread worldwide, paralysing socioeconomic, political, and cultural activities around the globe. Nigeria is one of the African countries that is most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially socioeconomically and politically. Although the pattern of spread in the country indicates a higher incidence in the South than in Northern Nigeria, some factors made the case in Northern Nigeria an interesting study. The study is an examination of the challenges that influenced the process of administering the COVID-19 vaccine in Northeast Nigeria. The study used a quantitative phenomenological study as a methodology. Data were collected from selected informants with relevant and valuable information on the subject matter in the area of study. The data obtained were analysed and interpreted using content analysis. Culture, religion, and perception, in addition to the attitude of the political class, all contributed to the negative perception of COVID-19 as a pandemic and its vaccine as a preventive measure. Most of the inhabitants of Northeast Nigeria are found to have harboured negative thoughts against the Virus and its vaccination because of some reported cases of side effects and the way the politicians turned the pandemic into a racket of money-making. The study recommends, among others, that royal fathers, religious clerics, and opinion moulders should be rigorously engaged in a massive campaign to disabuse all negative perceptions and to convince the populace on safety and prevention.

Inequalities in Online Representation: Who Follows Their Own Member of Congress on Twitter?

Members of Congress increasingly rely on social media to communicate with their constituents and other members of the public in real time. However, despite their increased use, little is known about the composition of members' audiences in these online spaces. We address these questions using a panel of Twitter users linked to their congressional district of residence through administrative data. We provide evidence that Twitter users who followed their own representative in the 115th, 116th, and 117th Congresses were generally older and more partisan, and live in wealthier areas of those districts, compared to those who did not. We further find that shared partisanship and shared membership in historically marginalized groups are associated with an increased probability of a constituent following their congressional representative. These results suggest that the efficiency of communication offered by social media reproduces, rather than alters, patterns of political polarization and class inequalities in representation observed offline.

Squeezing Blood from a Turnip? The Resilience of Social Democratic Governmental Power in Western Europe (1871–2022)

ABSTRACT In recent years, a growing body of literature has revived its interest in social democratic parties, emphasising their allegedly irreversible crisis in Western Europe. However, all such accounts focus solely on electoral results, thus neglecting governmental power, the decisive factor to realise social democratic parties’ policy goals. To address this gap, the article tests whether the decline of social democracy is confirmed in terms of governmental power, for which an index that remedies the limitations of existing measures is employed. Through comparative longitudinal analysis on 20 Western European countries and more than 600 legislatures between 1871 and 2022, the article finds that the governmental power of social democracy has remained fundamentally the same as in the golden age of class politics. In particular, in contexts of high party system fragmentation and strong radical left competition, social democratic parties have still managed to secure relevant government positions despite their declining electoral performance.

Digital Platforms and Media Use: An Exploratory Research on Trust, Gender Stereotypes and Bias in Turkey

Media use and news consumption occur throughout digital platforms as a rising trend worldwide. These digital infrastructures serve as channels through which users access content and as gatekeepers that curate the content figured by algorithmic selection. Thus, this research is designed to step inside the digital media use and aims to understand what kind of stereotypes and biases users face in digital platforms. To that end, a group of international university students from Turkey were interviewed about their experiences from several digital platforms. Accordingly, the participants were asked about the preferred source of the news, whether they trust the content they encounter on platforms, the stereotypes they face in their social media use, the most disturbing content in terms of bias and discrimination, if they feel free on their social media accounts, the awareness about the concepts “stereotypes”, “representation”, “algorithmic selection”, “algorithmic bias”. The research has shown that gender is the most common category of stereotype, followed by political, religious, nationality, and social class. In parallel with the concept of intersectionality, it has been observed that other forms of social discrimination are also encountered along with gender on digital platforms.

Toward Provocations for Playing with Games as Technologies

Abstract What does it mean to engage play as a method of inquiry into games? More importantly, how might we, as arts educators, invite others, particularly our students, to engage play as a method of inquiry into the politics of games as technologies? In this article, I work toward building a few short provocations to engage play as a method of inquiry into the politics of games as technologies. By reflecting upon my past pedagogical experiences alongside scholarship in critical game studies and science and technology studies, I start from the premise that all technologies are political, to argue that to approach games as technologies is to foreground the politics of games, whereby questions about their materialized arrangements of order that manifest gender, race, disability, and class politics are centered. With that understanding, I argue that to engage play as a method of inquiry into games is to disrupt what we know and can know about games, especially through the power relations that games mediate. Under this context, I end by offering a few short provocations for fellow arts educators to invite students to make sense out of nonsense and to make nonsense out of the commonsensical with regard to games.

Development studies meet Pierre Bourdieu: the case of Chinese Private FDI in Zambia

ABSTRACTInspired by Bourdieu's field theory and utilising the case of Zambia, this article aims to enhance the understanding of the intricate relationship between Chinese private investors and sub-Saharan state institutions. The study proposes an epistemological framework that integrates sociological, anthropological and neo-institutional approaches to development studies. Through extensive fieldwork and over 75 interviews with both Chinese and Zambian stakeholders, we explore various contexts in which group-actors related to foreign capital in Zambia operate. We argue that three separate habiti – inhabited by the Zambian political class, Chinese investors and ‘ordinary’ Zambians – are crucial for comprehending private foreign capital operations in this sub-Saharan state. The ordinary Zambians and Zambian political class fields converge primarily during elections, while interactions between ordinary Zambians and Chinese investors have remained very limited (predominantly employee–employer relations), creating an ideational structure of hostility. In contrast, the Zambian political class and Chinese private investor fields crosscut and are mutually constitutive.

Music in Africa During Pandemics/Epidemics: Studying the Interaction Between Ịjọ Owigiri Music and COVID-19

Abstract: This article focuses on "musical performances" of COVID-19 in owigiri, the Ịjọ variant of West African highlife. As with musicians on the African continent in times of epidemics or pandemics generally, artists among the Ịjọ of Nigeria's Niger Delta region have used this music to create awareness about the pandemic. To educate audiences about covid, artists use the same songs to reflect on the interface between adversity and creativity and religion and health, negotiate their Ịjọ identity, and critique the Nigerian political class.

Women Exclusion in Nigerian Politics: A Historical Re-Evaluation

The systemic exclusion of women and minority groups in Nigeria’s politics have contributed to the underdevelopment crisis in the country. Starting from the 1954 elections, the women remained underrepresented in both elective and appointive positions. At independence in 1960, the trend continued as the nationalists struggled to undo the damages of colonialism. It is regrettable to note, that, while the women played significant roles in the decolonization and nation-building process, however, their rights for equal representation were systemically undermined in a supposedly secular country where equality should be a fundamental principle shaping the society. Numerous studies in this field agree that women are potential asset in nation-building and as such must be given the opportunity to contribute to that process. This accounts for why women rank highest among the unemployed persons in the country, they are the least considered when distributing power or during allocation of political positions, and for more than fifty years in Nigeria, women have remained the most vulnerable in the country, often ranking highest in the poverty index annually. Based on the foregoing, the paper sought to critically re-evaluate the historical trajectories of women exclusion in Nigeria’s politics to reposition the women and minority groups as principal actors in the political development of the country. It argued that, the system of exclusive governance was not an indigenous idea, but a colonial legacy which took practical expression in the Indirect Rule policy of the British. Data used for this study were collected through the qualitative method, which allowed for the use of secondary and primary sources. Secondary data used include books and journal articles. While primary materials were gathered using newspapers, official memos, recorded interviews and videos. The combination of primary and secondary data provided a balanced analysis of the phenomenon being studied. A theory of exclusion informed the theoretical argument of the paper, which holds that when individuals or groups in a society are denied their rights, it results to resistance, protests or conflicts that could potentially destabilize the nation. Consequently, the paper found that Nigeria’s political development has continued to suffer unprecedented setback due largely for the failures of successive regimes to adopt inclusive governance, which supports equal participation in politics. It concluded that, the racial discrimination of the British colonial officials rubbed-off on Nigerian political class who could not revert to the morals that govern the traditional African society in the pre-colonial time; built on communal living and inclusiveness.

Feminism against Progress

Feminism against Progress

Elite Capture Syndrome and Anti-Corruption Control in Nigeria: The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and The Independent Corrupt Practices Commission in Perspective

Like many African states, Nigeria has hitherto been caught in the web of pervasive acts of grand and petty corruption. The pervasive nature of political and bureaucratic corruption in Nigeria has undeniably impoverished her economy and, as such, warranted the establishment of the EFCC and ICPC. However, anti-corruption agencies have not been able to control corruption to a minimum, as Nigeria remains poorly ranked in the global corruption index. This research takes on a critical and comparative lens to understand the nature of class politics in the fight against corruption, to examine the level of high-profile prosecutions, to identify irregularities in the institutions of law enforcement, and to consider the level of transparency and accountability for recovered loot and confiscated properties. The study finds, among other things, that powerful elites have high-jacked anti-corruption fights of the EFCC and ICPC, with low-profile convictions in Nigeria, and public accountability and transparency regarding recovered loot is almost nonexistent. The Elite Capture paradigm is employed as a theoretical guide in its narrative.

The Crisis of Legitimacy

ABSTRACT In recent years, the West has increasingly experienced a sense that the political aspects of its social life have undergone a profound alteration. There is a sense of blockage, of non-responsiveness, a feeling that the political class no longer represents the interests of the broader society. Underlying all of this is a loss of legitimacy. What exactly is legitimacy? How does it function? How is it lost? These are the questions that I address in this article. While I refer to Max Weber’s remarks on legitimacy, my thesis is my own. My claim is that legitimacy involves temporal identity. It depends upon the ability of both individuals and peoples to identify themselves as the same over time. Legitimacy’s breakdown is the breakdown of this identity.

«Islamic Socialism» in Pakistan: Evolution, Implementation and Legacy in Domestic and Foreign Policy

The article examines the phenomenon of "Islamic socialism" in Pakistan and its impact on the nation's current domestic and foreign policies. Employing critical theory, the author delves into an analysis of the political class's objectives and how the environmental context influenced the political process, offering insights into the perceptions held by higher echelons. The application of elite theory allows for a deconstruction of the Pakistani statehood, unveiling the specific social groups shaping developmental trajectories. By leveraging historical sociology in international relations, the article investigates the influence of historical underpinnings on the decision-making of social groups, shedding light on their endeavors to construct the past for political purposes.The study meticulously traces the origins of "Islamic socialism," exploring the discourse's evolution in the initial decades following the country's independence. It identifies the driving forces that led the state leadership to adopt the model of "Islamic socialism." Focused on the tenure of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1971-1977), the article examines the implementation of the "Islamic socialism" policy and the subsequent reasons for its failure, culminating in a military coup. The author contends that the principles of "Islamic socialism" introduced in Pakistan's domestic and foreign policy retained relevance even after its rejection.Conclusively, the article posits that the "Islamic socialism" constructed by Pakistani elites, often viewed through an orientalist lens, emerged not only as a response to the crisis in Pakistani statehood but paradoxically, became a crucial driver in shaping Islamabad's foreign policy determinants. Notably, this development forged integral relationships with China and the Islamic world, evolving into pivotal imperatives in Pakistan's grand strategy.This study highlights the interplay between "Islamic socialism," the crisis in Pakistani statehood, and its unforeseen impact on foreign policy, ultimately forming the bedrock for Islamabad's strategic engagements with China and the Islamic world.

Human Interest: Usury from Luther to Bentham

This article revisits a set of classic political, theological and economic scenes in the (early) modern debate on usury from Luther to Bentham. To summarize, I argue that this theory of usury – which polemically mobilizes counter-Aristotelian tropes of the breeding, reproduction and husbandry of money – might also be read as a theory of what Foucault famously calls pastoral power. If this debate nominally concerns the ‘repeal’ of the ancient prohibition against money-lending at interest, I argue that what is really at stake here is the pastoral production of a new theory of the subject as ‘human interest’: a self whose allegedly intrinsic self-interest expresses itself paradigmatically through financial interest. In conclusion, I situate this genealogy of human interest within the larger history of the self-interested, capitalist and indebted subject from Hirschman, through Foucault, to Lazzarato.

Breakdown by disengagement: Tunisia’s transition from representative democracy

ABSTRACT On 25 July 2021, Tunisian president Kais Saied suspended parliament, lifted the immunity of its members, and dismissed the prime minister and the government. Tunisia’s post-revolutionary democracy had thus succumbed to a populist president within two years from his electoral victory in the context of widespread popular disillusionment with the entire political class. This article draws on the work of Peter Mair, in particular his analysis in Ruling the Void (2013), to understand democratic breakdown in Tunisia. I argue that political dynamics in Tunisia diverge significantly from the standard model of democratic backsliding. Instead, I conceptualize the Tunisian case as breakdown by disengagement. The relative success of Tunisian democratization after the 2014 elite compromise paradoxically fuelled a crisis of representation: The main political camps lost popular support, populist challengers were strengthened, and citizens disengaged from conventional politics in ever greater numbers. Popular disengagement and elite withdrawal into a sphere of competition protected by the elite pact gave rise to a void at the heart of Tunisian democracy. While Kais Saied’s anti-party project proposed to fill this void with an alternative political system built from the bottom up, there is growing evidence of authoritarian retrenchment instead of democratic renewal.

Development of ideological and political education course field dimensions based on multi-data chain network

Abstract This paper firstly classifies the ideological and political education course field dimensions, studies the specific composition of the learning field in three dimensions: information, technology and emotion, and discusses the necessity of learning field optimization in secondary school Civics class. Secondly, on the multivariate data chain network, the MIFS model is proposed to extract the ideological and political teaching feature values, followed by the LSTM neural network to train the information related to students’ Civics classroom contents and the average function of adaptive excitation function is used to replace the excitation function in the LSTM neural network to achieve the effect of improving the output accuracy. Then, the characteristics of learners and learning resources are parametrically represented, followed by an experimental analysis of ideological and political education based on multivariate data chain networks using evaluation indexes based on the data set. The results show that there is no difference between the MAE values of CNN and LSTM except for sample one, but the MSE values of LSTM are both lower than CNN, and LSTM is more stable than CNN, indicating that it is reasonable to choose LSTM when ideological and political education based on multivariate data chain network. This study provides a reference and reference for future field optimization in ideology and political science classes.

Stormy Times: How did Social Movements Conquer the Political Class for the Overthrow of the Dictatorship in Brazil?

Book Review: PITTS, Bryan. Until the Storm Passes. Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.