Dimensions Of Contestation Research Articles

Cosmopolis: public spaces, cosmopolitanism, and democracy.

What is the role of public spaces in contemporary cities? Despite the growing interest in the theme of public spaces in the last decades, a significant number of authors appeal, directly or indirectly, to ideas of the “regression”, “decay”, and “crisis” of public life, public sphere, and public spaces. Without disregarding this hegemonic point of view, in the present article we would like to consider other perspectives, which recognize the importance of public spaces, public sociability, and cosmopolitanism for the democratic societies in the context of the contemporary city, the cosmopolis. We therefore propose a bibliographic review that deals with the political nature of public spaces, the dimension of contestation within public sociability, the advent of virtual public spaces, and the geography of cosmopolitan encounters. The article concludes that urban public spaces remain essential for the existence and functioning of democratic societies and institutions.

What is new and what is nationalist about Europe's new nationalism? Explaining the rise of the far right in Europe

AbstractFar‐right parties are on the rise across Europe. Their shared populist rhetoric, emphasis on sovereignty and policies that promote a ‘national preference’ has facilitated the term ‘the new nationalism’. According to an emerging consensus, this new nationalism is primarily a demand‐side phenomenon triggered by cultural grievances, i.e. a cultural backlash, driven by those on the wrong end of a new transnational cleavage. This explanation we argue tends to overlook important variations across countries and across time. As such, in this article, we contest the view that the ‘new nationalism’ is a linear and coherent phenomenon best understood as a cultural backlash. Specifically, our argument is threefold: (1) it is important to conceptually distinguish between populism, nationalism and the far right in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the extent to which this phenomenon is linear, coherent and comparable across cases; (2) voters' economic concerns remain pivotal within the context of the transnational cleavage, entailing that voting behaviour is structured by two dimensions of contestation; (3) the explanatory power of nationalism is in the supply, i.e. the ways in which parties use nationalism strategically in an attempt to broaden their appeal.

The impact of the Eastern enlargement on the decision-making capacity of the European Union

ABSTRACTThis contribution investigates the impact of the Eastern enlargement on the decision-making capacity of the European Union. On the basis of new data on the number and types of legal acts produced by the EU (1994–2014) and on the time between the proposal and adoption of legislative acts (1994–2012), the contribution argues that enlargement has had a rather limited impact on legislative production and duration and that it is extremely hard to disentangle this impact from other contemporaneous institutional and socioeconomic developments. On the basis of analyses of expert-based policy positions of member states in EU negotiations and on voting data from the Council of Ministers of the EU, it is argued that enlargement has possibly added a new dimension of contestation in EU legislative decision-making, but one that concerns a relatively small share of all negotiations in few policy fields like environment. All in all, there is no evidence that the Eastern enlargement has led to the institutional gridlock and loss of decision-making capacity that the public, many politicians and some academics as well have feared.

Transcending apartheid in higher education: transforming an institutional culture

Twenty years after Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, deeply entrenched inequalities and injustices are still at the core of the country’s social fabric. South Africa’s public and private sectors continue to battle with the situation and higher education institutions are no exception. The South African Ministry of Education has identified systemic problems within the institutional cultures of universities as one of the key obstacles to change. This article focuses on a racist incident that occurred at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa in 2007. The incident shook the university’s institutional culture to the core and became a catalyst for change for universities across the country. We portray the institutional culture of the UFS on the basis of a series of interviews with management and student leaders who personally played key roles in handling the incident in 2008. The interviews reveal some of the ‘story stock’ within the institutional culture and highlight four interrelated dimensions of contestation. The stories also show that the interviewees frequently situate and justify their beliefs and actions in an intergenerational chain. Finally we consider some of the implications of our findings for the ongoing reconstruction of post-apartheid institutional cultures in higher education.

How salient is Europe? An analysis of European election manifestos, 1979–2004

What determines how ‘European’ a party’s manifesto is? This article examines the salience of European issues in national parties’ Euromanifestos during the 1979–2004 period. I argue that domestic politics, including voter, party, and party system factors, influence the European content of a party’s Euromanifesto. Using data from the Euromanifestos Project for 14 member states, I find that the differential emphasis on European issues in the national party system, intra-party dissent on European integration, voter ambivalence on membership of the European Union, and party type all influence the salience of European issues in a party’s manifesto. These findings have important implications for understanding both how parties use manifestos to manipulate the political agenda and the dimensions of contestation in elections to the European Parliament.

Data and Analyses of Voting in the UN General Assembly

Roll-call voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has long attracted the attention of scholars; first to study the formation of voting blocs in the UNGA and more recently to create indicators for the common interests of states. This chapter discusses the data and the various choices scholars have to make when using these data for both these purposes. The chapter points out various common errors, such as confusing abstentions and absentee votes, and discusses appropriate methodologies for estimating state preferences from observed vote choices. I argue that studies that use UN voting data to measure common interests pay insufficient attention to the content of UN votes and show how ignoring (changes in) the UN’s agenda and dimensions of contestation can lead to serious biases. The chapter reviews characteristics of available data and gives a bird’s eye view of the history of UN voting.

Envisioning Identity: Deity, Person, and Practice in the Kathmandu Valley

Through an analysis of diverse accounts offered by those who perform "god's work" for a large religious festival in the Kathmandu Valley, I argue that the oppositional frameworks typically used to understand divergent perspectives are inadequate to understand the multifocal polyphony that these accounts (as well as most other ethnographic settings) present. The terms of argument upon which conflicting accounts agree suggest that esoteric concepts of visualization (sadhana) resonate with popular modes of constructing identities of gods and selves and that this shared understanding helps account for the reproduction and transformation of the many dimensions of contestation that have characterized this festival for centuries.[Nepal, Newar, hermeneutic contestation, multifocal polyphony, identity, religion, ritual, tantra]