Current Political Practices Research Articles

О соотношении государственного (политического) режима с иными элементами формы государства

The article is devoted to doctrinal issues of the relationship between the state (political) regime and other elements of the form of the state: the form of government and the form of government. The author comes to the conclusion that, despite the mutual influence of all elements of the form of the state, the determining factor for the characteristics of a particular state is still the state (political) regime. It is the methods of power, the current political practice that determine the specific objective and subjective varieties of the corresponding forms of government and government structure, determined by various reasons. It can be stated that the state regime makes it possible to implement the legal characteristics of the form of government in different ways, taking into account the real situation of government bodies of different branches of government in a particular period, as well as the implementation of the actual form of government in the corresponding state.

Nowelizacja Kodeksu wyborczego w styczniu 2023 r. Przyczynek do dyskusji o frekwencji wyborczej w Polsce

On 26 January 2023, a law amending the Electoral Code was adopted. The article aims to analyse the accepted solutions in the context of current political practice and voters’ decisions. The publication is enriched with considerations on research on voter turnout and absenteeism, as well as a description of the main changes introduced by the 2011 amendment to the Electoral Code.

Legacy and Rupture: The Political Learning of Young Left-wing Basque Nationalists in the Post-ETA Period

The article examines ways in which the left-wing nationalist movement in the Basque Country has offered a framework of opportunity for the construction of activist youth agency. It also identifies transformations in youth activist practices over the last decade, following the cessation of ETA´s armed activity. Based on in-depth interviews, we set out to reconstruct the evolution of the political learning and trajectories of youth from the Basque Nationalist left during this period. The analysis of these young peoples’ narratives allows us to understand some of the meanings that they attach to their current political practices. With respect to inherited political traditions, continuity was manifest in the existence of enduring dispositions favourable to counter-hegemonic activism. Changes were manifest in the adaptation of these dispositions to new political conditions through progressively more individualized forms of political action, connected to emerging contemporary agendas.

Sociotechnical reality of the digital space of contemporary politics: structure and features

The main purpose of the article was the analysis of experts' ideas about the digital space of modern politics. The authors put forward a hypothesis about the formation of an independent ontological space of modern digital politics, which has its own principles of functioning. The intensive introduction of digital technologies into the modern practice of socio-political management, the active development of the global digital infrastructure lead today to the formation of a new type of sociotechnical reality and an independent phygital space of politics within which virtualized constructs, values, meanings are formed and communication interaction is transformed. In the digital space of politics, there is an algorithmization of power, with the help of which political institutions actively borrow corporate techniques of predictive analytics, ranking, filtering information to study target audiences, manage the political agenda and correct public sentiment; new hybrid actors with serious power potential and the ability to form the design of modern politics for their own purposes and interests appear in current political practice. To confirm the working hypothesis, the authors conducted an international expert survey, which allowed to study the views of experts on the features of the digitalization of modern politics and the characteristics of the emerging sociotechnical reality. The results of the study confirm the hypothesis, however, experts assess the speed and trends of the formation of this new type of policy in different ways. Based on the results of theoretical and empirical research, the authors highlight the key trends in the formation of the modern socio-technical space of politics.

La 'Marea Humana' según Ai Weiwei: conflictos transnacionales y discrepancias fronterizas entre la ética, la estética y la política en la representación de ciudadanos refugiados

Revisando el documental HumanFlow (Marea Humana) del artista chino Ai Weiwei, y algunos de sus polémicos planteamientos visuales sobre la crisis de los refugiados, trataremos de observar la necesidad de vinculación de paradigmas éticos y estéticos en las representaciones de carácter político actuales. Para ello revisaremos algunos de los discursos que en las últimas décadas se han realizado en este sentido, contrastándolos con las estrategias narrativas que Weiwei realiza en su producción, intentando localizar dónde puede producirse la fractura entre discurso ético y estético, y las consecuencias que esto tiene para la posibilidad de realizar un arte político.

Shvatanje demokratije Božidara S. Markovića

Overcoming the obvious democracy crisis is possible to be done by taking an insight into our democratic thought. This paper reminds, directs, actualises, values and reminds scientifically-democratic thought of Bozidar S. Markovic, in a real context of strenuous processes of intoducing and consolidating democracy in Serbia. Understanding democracy of Bozidar S. Markovic is a theoretical framework which satisfies criteria of scientific generalisation, for it includes characteristic and essential landmarks of democracy and criteria of methodological contextuality for different and specific experiences of certain countries and their people. In this paper the frameworks of democracy are being thematized, with its characteristics, good and bad sides in the circumstances of our current political practice.

Neutrality without pluralism

Friends and foes of liberal neutrality assume that neutrality presupposes pluralism. On this view, the state should be neutral among the many permissible conceptions of the individual good that citizens affirm. I argue that neutrality need not be construed as a response to pluralism. I focus on the case of specifically religious neutrality and argue that it can be an appropriate political response to what I call “the fact of religious hegemony,” which is a social scenario in which a particular religion is unanimously recognized as dominant. Religious neutrality, in this kind of context, requires the state to avoid all religious words and symbols that can be taken as an expression of endorsement or criticism of religion. I take this conception of religious neutrality from both political history and current political practice and discourse. Neutrality was originally conceived of as a proper political response in contexts of religious hegemony both in France and in Mexico. Today, and despite the growth of religious pluralism, this conception continues to be a live political posture in the places where it first originated. I call it “neutrality as independence from religion” and argue that it differs from liberal neutrality in crucial respects.

Двухпартийность как возможный сценарий эволюции российской политической системы

The article examines the possibility of transfer to bipartisan system in Russia. The authors assess the benefits of the two-party system that include first of all the ensuring of actual political competition and authority alternativeness with simultaneous separation of minute non-system forces that may contribute to the country destabilization. The authors analyze the accompanying risks and show that the concept of the two-party system as the catalyst of elite schism is mostly exaggerated. The authors pay separate attention to the experience of bipartisan system implementation in other countries, including the United States. They offer detailed analysis of the generated concept of the bipartisanship crisis and show that this point of view doesn’t quite agree with the current political practice. The authors also examine the foreign experience of the single-party system. They show that the success of the said system is mostly insubstantial, besides many of such systems have altered into more complex structures, while commentators very often use not the actual information but the established myths about this or that country. The authors also offer practical advice regarding the potential technologies of transition to the bipartisan system in Russia.

¿Cómo analizar discursos de 140 caracteres? Propuesta metodológica para el estudio del discurso político de campaña en Twitter a partir del análisis estratégico del discurso con una perspectiva multimodal y crítica

This article presents a methodology for the collection and analysis of corpus of political discourses published on Twitter. It has been drawn up in an ongoing doctoral research that seeks to report the persuasive discursive strategies used in the official accounts of the Argentine presidential candidates during the 2015 electoral campaign. This methodology is based on the strategic analysis of the discourse (Menendez 2000, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012) with a multimodal perspective (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001). This expects, in the first place, the description of the corpus from a grammatical analysis with a functional systemic base (Halliday 1970, 1985, Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001, Kress & Van Leuween 2006 [1996]) and pragmatic discursive studies (Lavandera 1992, Martin & White 2005, Sperber & Wilson 1994[1986]). And, secondly, the relation between the results obtained by these analysis in order to look for recurrences that allow to rebuild the produced discursive strategies. Finally, it seeks to achieve a critical analysis (Fairclough 2003) of these strategies, which allows to understand the campaign political discourse on Twitter in terms of discursive practices and analyze its influence on current political practices.

The Asylum and its Discontents: Reflections on Michal Heiman

Michal Heiman's project, Return: asylum (the Dress, 1855-2018), consists of photographs of women and men clothed in a dress similar to one worn by women inmates at the former Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the 1850s. Traversing time, space, gender, race and institutional practices of asylum, the artist takes the viewers on a ride in a time machine that is not a technological devise but a discourse on memory and on owning the future: s/he who wears the dress has the potential to return as witness, reader, artist, prosecutor, gate-keeper or rebel, thereby transforming her exceptional story into ours. Return: Asylum is an act of resistance: it engages human imagination in re-presenting the regenerative power of human solidarity as an alternative to current political practices that sacrifice the right of asylum—the only right that since the dawn of political life, as noted by Arendt, "has ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man"—at the altar of a security theology.

Stuart Hall e feminismo: revisitando relações

This article firstly addresses Stuart Hall’s account of the contributions of feminism to the formation of cultural studies. Secondly, it deals with the development of feminist criticism in the context of cultural studies, especially in England. Following this line, it retrieves Hall’s ideas on the problematic of identity(ies). This dimension of his work is the third approach to be explored, a subject also relevant in feminist theoretical production. The paper additionally points out matches and mismatches of such developments in the Brazilian context. Finally, it concludes that the theme deserves in-depth analysis, especially as the topic of identity plays a central role in current political practice and feminist theory.

Przyczynek do poszukiwań performatyki we współczesnych praktykach politycznych

Contribution on the study performance of contemporary political practices. Analysis of selected examples According to Jon McKenzi almost every aspect of human life today is driven by a pressure to perform. It is, therefore, understandable, why both past and current political practices are analysed using the tools offered by performativity. Performativity, however, has never been considered a homogeneous field. This is why I will present the reasons I decided to choose the current of it that exposes the theatrical genealogy of contemporary cultural and organisational performances theatrimogeneous field. This is why I will present the reasons I decided to choose the current of it that cality of politics was discussed by Bertolt Brecht. I truly believe that research tools offered by this current will create an optimal opportunity to describe strategies presently used in both politics and the political which is Chantal Moufee’s conception. It is my intention to apply the initial theoretical concepts to particular examples of political practices in Poland.

Use of the discourse analysis method to study current political practice (by the example of representation of the political leader image)

The potentialities in the application of the discourse analysis method to study a political discourse as a current political practice are shown. The authors, using the Foucault methodology, offer a sociological definition for the political discourse. It is the authors’ opinion that the approach mentioned allows investigating a political discourse as a practice for the formation of a certain reality, specific agents, institutions and organizations. A political discourse is a simulative dynamic model of political area where various subdiscourses interact, thus creating their own ideas of policy, symbols and images. Subdiscourses of political leaders become dominating. Inasmuch as a political discourse in a current political system is carried out with the aid of mass media, it could be considered as a media discourse of policy. The authors consider the representation as a basic mechanism for the formation of a political discourse, by the example of the representation of the image of V.V. Putin, the President of the Russian Federation. The representation of a political leader image in a political discourse has a number of peculiarities. It is carried out on the basis of certain principles with the aid of the system of political codes. Empiric investigations allowed making a conclusion that the main symbolic image for the Russian President is an image of a super-hero. It is the authors’ opinion, the image of V.V. Putin as a leader super-hero is determined by the specificity of the Russian political culture within the limits of which a leader is a center of power establishing an authoritarian style of ruling. The authors show the process of the political legitimacy displacement from the institutional level to the personal one by means of mass media. A political leader gains a status of a subject establishing moral, social and value reference points for the whole of the society.

Patrimonialism. What is behind the term: ideal type, category, concept or just a buzzword?

The terms patrimonialism and neo-patrimonialism designate significantly different conceptual instruments. They are used to identify and interpret a range of phenomena. Using as a point of departure Weberian types of partimonial rule the author reconstructs the prototype of patrimonial order. Its key element is an inherent insight of mutual patrimony or patrimonium. It is both instrumental and essential common good that helps to keep together not only the rulers and the ruled but the entire patrimonial order. This and other morphological pattern of order are nothing but ‘blueprints’ for making conflicting desires of order come actual and real. Historical achievements and current practices provide a range of patrimonial hybrids and admixtures to political setups of all kinds. All those arrangements can be interpreted as metamorphoses of the prototype patrimonial order. The author particularly highlights the tripled knot of patrimonialism, bureaucracy and modernity in the current political practices. Conceptually coherent analysis of both functions and dysfunctions of patrimonialism helps to see the potential of patrimonial patterns of order in the ongoing political process. Insufficient and blurred conceptualization of patrimonialism let its dysfunctions loose and deprive us of abilities to overcome them.

Risk analysis – A field within security studies?

The academic environments of risk analysis and security studies had hardly ‘spoken’ to one another until recently. The two fields of study were defined within different academic disciplines: security studies a matter for International Relations (IR), and risk studies a matter for sociology, economics and the natural sciences. Increased focus on catastrophic events (terrorism, climate change, etc.) seems to have given the fields of security studies and risk analysis a common empirical theme and highlighted the need for a common research agenda. This article explores the intersection between these two fields of study, as it investigates how the ‘old’ disciplinary debates on risk have been translated ‘into’ security studies — to predict, criticize or evaluate the current political practice of security. Such analysis provides a much-needed overview of the risk debates within security studies and brings out the limits of this debate in light of the broader and much more historically settled risk debates within sociology, economics and anthropology.

The English People and the English Revolution Revisited

��� Revolutions accelerate historical time. In so doing, they raise important questions about how far the political forms and ideas informing them are created by the experience of revolution and how far the dislocations of power disclose ideas and forms predating the experience of revolution. This paper examines these issues through the prism of popular politics in the English revolution. It argues that previous attempts to carve out a role for popular politics, both those based on Marxist readings and those against which these were directed, were secured by privileging only a section of the people as politically conscious and by importing a restrictive definition of ‘the political’, now challenged in both social theory and current political practice. It analyses the preceding tradition of protest in early modern England to demonstrate that this provides evidence of a popular political culture, before going on to sketch how revolutionary events interacted with that culture. Knowledge of the inherently political nature of prerevolutionary popular agency and its engagement with the politics of the state helps to raise in a more acute form the problematic of the transformatory role of revolution. 1

Challenging Imperial Feminism

Our task here is to begin to identify the ways in which a particular tradition, white Eurocentric and Western, has sought to establish itself as the only legitimate feminism in current political practice. We seek to address ourselves in very broad terms, to the theoretical and consequently political limitations of Euro-American feminism and the ways such analyses inform and distort white women's political practice. In challenging such feminist writings we not only look at the ways in which analyses of racism have been significantly lacking from that work but equally importantly we look at the ways in which we as Black women have been made 'visible' in such writings and the terms in which our experiences have been explained. The growth of the Black feminist movement in Britain in the last decade has forced the question of the centrality of Black women's oppression and exploitation onto the political and theoretical agendas. The political energy of Black women who have organized at the grassroots within our communities against the myriad of issues engendered by the racism of the British state has inspired and pointed to the urgent need to challenge many of the theoretical conceptualizations and descriptions of Black and Third World women existing within white feminist literature. Bell Hook's argument (1982) that racism in the women's movement in the USA has acted to exclude the participation of Black women is equally applicable to the British situation:

The Georgian Political Print and Democratic Institutions

At the beginning of the long reign of George III, a new mass media outlet for political expression surfaced in England: the colored political and social print. These prints were first carried as a sideline at stationers and bookstores, but from the middle 1770s on their popularity was great enough to justify setting up special print shops.The Georgian print after 1760 was different in more than color from those that had preceded it, though the use of color was indicative of the change. Artistically they were less representational, more free in line, and made heavier use of caricature in both face and body action. In content their appeal was more populist and urban than aristocratic and rural. They were also more journalistic; they focused their comment increasingly on current and often trivial political and social events and were published soon after the event occurred. In an earlier period, comment was in response to events. After George III, the commentators became established professionals seeking out events which they could make the theme of their weekly or so caricature comment. The prints also continued to be unrestrained in ridicule, attacking not only political leaders, but royalty itself. If possible, they became more unfair and calumnious than the prints of the period of the first two Georges. The prints were a part of what was evolving, I will argue, as a new democratizing force in the politics of England: a stream of mass media criticism of current political practices.

The Significance of the Verb Love in the David-Jonathan Narratives in 1 Samuel

contexts have drawn attention to the political overtones that sometimes attach to this word or to its semantic equivalent in a wide range of ancient Near Eastern texts 1). Thus in 1 Kings v 15 2) Hiram King of Tyre is described as having always loved David, kz 'oheb haydh hzirdm leddwid kol hayydmim. It is clear from the total context in verses 15 to 26 that Hiram and David were involved in some kind of diplomatic and commercial arrangement as rulers of two neighbouring independent states. Further evidence of such a treaty comes from 2 Samuel v 11 which refers to the dispatch of messengers, cedar trees, carpenters and masons by Hiram to David for the building of a houzse. That Hiram should greet Solomon, David's son, after the death of David was entirely in keeping with current political practice according to which, on the death of one treaty partner and on the enthronement of his successor, the other party to the treaty would send an embassy 3). The root '-h-b occurs a number of times in the David-Jonathan narratives. It is not difficult to discern in the whole movement of the drama as it has been recorded by the narrator, a series of steps on David's way to the throne of Israel. The whole story is a complex texture of agreements between various parties as David made his progress towards the throne. The covenant or agreement (berit) between David and Jonathan was only one of many covenants of one kind and another which were made over the years till David was finally securely established on the throne 4). It is possible therefore

Quevedo and the Court of Philip III: Neglected Satirical Letters and New Biographical Data

In 1613 Quevedo left Spain to join his friend, Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna and at that time Viceroy of Sicily. Two years later Quevedo was chosen by the Sicilian Parliament to present in person the triennial contribution of 300,000 ducats to the King of Spain. During the eight months he spent in Madrid, the satirist gained a wealth of experience in intrigue and practical politics. The purpose of this article is to edit with brief comment letters recently uncovered in Spain which bear on this sojourn in Madrid. These documents clarify the nature of Quevedo's relationship with the Duke of Osuna, facilitate the analysis of his experiences at the Court and reactions to current political practices, and make possible the rectification of various misconceptions. No attempt will be made below to restate what is already known about these years of Quevedo's life.