Political Debate Research Articles

The Immunity of the Deputy in the 1998 Constitution of the Republic of Albania

Immunities are generally configured as an exception to the application of the common law provided for the benefit of some subjects due to the function they perform. It should be emphasized that immunity, in general, is a very significant instrument for the protection of the autonomy and independence of constitutional institutions. In this paper, the author will deal only with the immunity of the deputy, postponing to a second moment the treatment of immunity for other constitutional institutions provided by the Constitution of the Republic of Albania. The issue of the MP's immunity has been and continues to be at the center of the political debate at the moment we are writing this. It will continue to be in the center of attention from our politicians until it is not considered as a personal privilege but as an instrument to protect the exercise of functions in the Parliament. First, the author will deal with the notion and origin of immunity in general, then to stop at the immunity of the deputy according to the 1998 constitution and the evolution that has occurred during these years.
 
 Received: 19 February 2024 / Accepted: 15 March 2024 / Published: 23 March 2024

The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Risk of Corruption

AbstractThis paper estimates the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on risk of corruption in Mexico. To calculate the pandemic’s impact on risk of corruption, this study uses monthly administrative data of 378,000 public acquisitions through 64 institutions from the Mexican Federal Government during the 2018–2020 period. These institutions account for approximately 75% of all allocations of public acquisitions made by the Mexican Federal Government. The risk of corruption is measured through the Discrete-Contracts-Value-to-Budget (DCVB) ratio, which represents the ratio of the value of contracts assigned through discretionary non-competitive mechanisms to the total value of contracts per institution. The empirical strategy consists of a difference-in-differences methodology and an event-study design. The analysis is conducted over all institutions as well as by healthcare and non-healthcare institutions. The results show the following: (1) the pandemic increased the DCVB ratio by 17%; (2) the DCVB ratio increased during six months and then it returned to pre-pandemic levels (inverted U-shape form); and (3) surprisingly, the rise in the risk of corruption is mainly driven by non-healthcare institutions. From a policy perspective, Mexico’s Government Accountability Office, although counterintuitive, should focus on non-healthcare institutions when conducting audits targeting public acquisitions made during the pandemic, even though much of the political debate remains centered around the risk of corruption in healthcare institutions.

Key point generation as an instrument for generating core statements of a political debate on Twitter.

Identifying key statements in large volumes of short, user-generated texts is essential for decision-makers to quickly grasp their key content. To address this need, this research introduces a novel abstractive key point generation (KPG) approach applicable to unlabeled text corpora, using an unsupervised approach, a feature not yet seen in existing abstractive KPG methods. The proposed method uniquely combines topic modeling for unsupervised data space segmentation with abstractive summarization techniques to efficiently generate semantically representative key points from text collections. This is further enhanced by hyperparameter tuning to optimize both the topic modeling and abstractive summarization processes. The hyperparameter tuning of the topic modeling aims at making the cluster assignment more deterministic as the probabilistic nature of the process would otherwise lead to high variability in the output. The abstractive summarization process is optimized using a Davies-Bouldin Index specifically adapted to this use case, so that the generated key points more accurately reflect the characteristic properties of this cluster. In addition, our research recommends an automated evaluation that provides a quantitative complement to the traditional qualitative analysis of KPG. This method regards KPG as a specialized form of Multidocument summarization (MDS) and employs both word-based and word-embedding-based metrics for evaluation. These criteria allow for a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the KPG output. Demonstrated through application to a political debate on Twitter, the versatility of this approach extends to various domains, such as product review analysis and survey evaluation. This research not only paves the way for innovative development in abstractive KPG methods but also sets a benchmark for their evaluation.

Difference and diversity: Combining multiculturalist and interculturalist approaches to integration

Multiculturalism (MC) and interculturalism (IC) as approaches to governing ethnic diversity have developed an often antagonistic relationship, borne out through scholarly as well as political debates. Yet, increasingly, scholars have begun to note that while IC-consistent policies have gained some prominence, they have done so alongside MC policies. This suggests the possibility of complementarity between the two, and prominent scholars on both sides have also begun to stress complementarity. What this might look like, however, has not yet been well researched or developed. Focusing on the UK context, an important site in which debates between MC and IC have played out, this article aims to address this point of complementarity. It does so through an analysis of documents and interviews from civil society organisations who work in areas of integration, diversity and anti-discrimination at national and local levels. The article identifies four models of complementarity and shows the divergent and contested ways in which theoretical aspects of competing normative positions are combined empirically. In this way, it develops an argument for the continued centrality of MC for policy in these areas.

Balancing Gains and Losses—A Research Note on Tradeoffs in the Case of Non-Alcoholic Wines in Germany

Non-alcoholic alternatives are gaining growing significance within the German beverage sector. In this context, the German wine industry is increasingly focusing on non-alcoholic wines, whose market has developed dynamically in recent years. While the technologies used, the sensory characteristics and the marketing of the products are frequently addressed in the literature, the consideration of sustainability impacts has so far been largely neglected. This applies in particular to the view of all three dimensions of sustainability. These are examined more closely in this review with regard to tradeoffs, which indicate that positive aspects in one dimension go hand in hand with a loss in the other. It can be shown that tradeoffs in the production and marketing of non-alcoholic wines arise both within and between the three sustainability dimensions. Exemplary of this is the increased use of resources in the course of alcohol removal. At the same time, an emerging market segment holds positive aspects from an economic perspective. Ultimately, the consideration of social sustainability is marked by the health science and political debate around the reduction in alcohol consumption and the simultaneous increase in the consumption of non-alcoholic alternatives.

Slow Dissent and Worldmaking beyond Imperial Relations in “Kamer-amère” (Bitter Cameroon)

Abstract Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists experienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally supported,” and misappropriations of the anti-imperial mantel by government representatives. Over the preceding several decades, the state fostered a political environment antagonistic toward Cameroonians of the diaspora, and this was instrumentalized in the widespread dismissal of activists as foreign, foreign-backed, or foreign-influenced. Activists were hesitant but sometimes strategically prepared to call upon transnational groups for attention and political action against repression and violence in Cameroon. In the context of the state’s appropriation of an anti-imperialist ideology, I argue that transnational solidarities must be attuned to and integrated with local politics in Cameroon. Making sense of popular debates regarding (anti)imperialism, (anti)intervention, and transnational solidarity in conditions of authoritarianism matters for political debates across the African continent.

Implications for the institution of mixed agreements in European Union law arising from the evolving nature of in foro externo competence

Due to the growing political debate on the necessity to revise primary law in the European Union (hereinafter: Union, EU), whereby the division of competences between the Union and its Member States is to be altered, there is a growing urgency to take a closer look at the potential consequences of these changes in regard to the ability to establish international relations – both by the EU and by Member States. In practice, this ability is evident in particular in the specific legal institution of “mixed” agreements, the signatories of which (as a rule) are not only the EU and third states, but also Member States of the Union. This institution will continue to exist for as long as the issues of the division of competences, at the core of the consideration of the nature of mixed agreements in EU law, remain relevant. The capacity to shape international relations and pursue the objectives of the Union and the Member States is of considerable importance in the context of the current global challenges they face. Being able to act jointly in this field reduces potential tensions and conflicts of interest in the relationship between the EU and the Member States, thus strengthening the Union’s own subjectivity. This article seeks to find an answer as to whether, and if so to what extent, the changes in competences leading to the establishment of new EU exclusive competences might have the effect of limiting the institution of mixed agreements. It is also important to try to determine whether a possible restriction of the said legal institution could strengthen the EU’s position in international relations.

INCLUSION OF IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE STUDENTS WITH DISABILITY IN EDUCATION: A QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

In the modern globalised environment, the extended immigrant and refugee crisis is at the centre of the scientific, social, and political debate. Meanwhile, the field of Intercultural Education is of paramount importance for social cohesion as the education system is affected by the aforementioned crisis. Against this complicated backdrop, the double challenge of the promotion of educational inclusion of students with diverse cultural backgrounds and disability should be the focus of attention for teachers and policymakers. The present study examines the issue of inclusion of immigrant and refugee students with disability. It employs the qualitative method of thematic analysis, collecting data through semi-structured interviews with teachers who work in Reception Classes and Typical Classes of Intercultural schools in the Prefecture of Epirus, Greece. The data analysis revealed that the participants highlighted the need for restructuring the Greek education system on two levels: the macro level and the micro level. This study underlines the need for systemic change and cooperation to create an environment without exclusion.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0758/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

How ‘European sovereignty’ became mainstream: the geopoliticisation of the EU’s ’sovereign turn’ by pro-EU executive actors

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of research on the leading role of radical and populist parties to situate ‘sovereignty’ as an increasingly central element of political discourse. However, there is much less said about the response of pro-EU actors, and how they can accommodate, modify, or reject the notion of ‘sovereignty’. The article begins with the following research question: what role does ‘European sovereignty’ play in the legitimation strategies among pro-EU executive actors? Through a framing analysis of Spanish, French, German, and EU executive actors, we uncover the way in which they articulate (European) sovereignty in their speeches. We argue that the resignification of the concept of sovereignty as ‘European’ plays a relevant role in the rearticulation of European politics, mostly led by French President Emmanuel Macron. The mainstreaming of ‘European sovereignty’ has implications for power relations, as it orients European political debates towards a geopolitical perspective.

Citizens’ and Politicians’ Definitions of Corruption, Corruption Survey Quality, and Political Will for Anti-Corruption Reform: The Portuguese Case Put to the Test

Corruption is recurrent in conversations and political debates, but it can have different meanings. This study aimed to assess how the words that 1,020 citizens and 120 politicians in Portugal associated with corruption interacted and varied. Data came from two surveys that collected responses to “What words do you associate with corruption?” from October 2020 to April 2021: the EPOCA-FCT survey conducted with citizens and the ETHICS-FFMS survey conducted with MPs and local elected officials in office. We used network analysis to find that the mass-elite incongruence when defining corruption can be used (a) to enhance corruption surveys and (b) as a tool to foster political will for anti-corruption reform in areas/sectors that are linked to corruption. In Portugal, corruption came down to “theft of money by politicians” (citizens) and “dishonesty and illegality in a crony relationship” (politicians), and the promotion of integrity in the Banking sector emerged as central to any anti-corruption reform. This was the first attempt to show that knowing what citizens and politicians have in mind can be a valid tool to enhance both the quality of future corruption surveys and the implementation of anti-corruption policies when no short-term political will for a change exists.

What Explains Interest Group Prominence in Parliamentary Speech? Policy Agenda, Partisanship, or Conflict Expansion

Gaining the attention of legislators in a crowded advocacy landscape is a key dilemma for organized interests. Yet, there has not been a great deal of direct analysis of whether groups are indeed recognized as important by politicians in the context of them advancing political arguments. In this article, we examine under what conditions interest groups achieve prominence among political elites. Drawing on a supervised machine learning approach to code prominence from legislative speech, we exploit variations in levels of prominence for the entire Australian interest groups system. We find that prominence is highly concentrated and that it covaries with the need to align with prevailing policy agendas and the logic of conflict expansion. Conversely, we do not find evidence of a strong partisan or ideological dimension of prominence. This contributes to our understanding of the responsiveness and representativeness of democratic political systems in which the interest group sector is expected to funnel public preferences into policymaking.

The political life of post-industrial objects: aesthetic re-signification in the Russophone Estonia

ABSTRACT The article discusses how material legacies of the past are conceptualized as cultural and artistic objects, and in this capacity inscribed into the contemporary Estonian political debates on security, identity, and borders. One section focuses on the city of Narva where the compound of the Kreenholm factory is located. Another part looks at industrial objects in smaller towns where the Soviet material heritage is intermingled with the EU-promoted environmental agenda, including the Green Deal project and the idea of just transition. research based on the methodology of visual analysis includes two specific groups of visual artefacts that are illustrative of linkages between locations, cultural meanings and their political reverberations.

Americans misperceive the frequency and format of political debate

Disagreement over divergent viewpoints seems like an ever-present feature of American life—but how common is debate and with whom do debates most often occur? In the present research, we theorize that the landscape of debate is distorted by social media and the salience of negativity present in high-profile spats. To understand the true landscape of debate, we conducted three studies (N = 2985) across online and lab samples. In contrast to the high-profile nature of negative debates with strangers, we found that people most commonly debate close contacts, namely family members and good friends. In addition, they often report feeling positive after engaging in debate. We then directly measured misperceptions regarding debate in a representative sample of Americans (N = 1991). We found that Americans systematically overestimated how often others engage in debate. This overestimation extended across debate partners (family members, good friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and strangers) and contexts (in-person and online; p’s < 0.001, d’s > 0.98), most strongly overestimating how often Americans debate strangers online. This misprediction may be psychologically costly: overestimating how often Americans debate strangers online significantly predicted greater hopelessness in the future of America. Together, our findings suggest that Americans may experience a false reality about the landscape of debate which can unnecessarily undermine their hope about the future.

French political symbolism and identity construction

The present study examines how the language of political symbolism operates within the framework of identity construction. It focusses on the themes of sovereignty during the 2022 French presidency of the European Union and the national presidential election campaign. On the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, it suggests that, apart from purely linguistic features, extra-linguistic factors are also essential in order to convey a global view of symbolic rhetoric. The analysis is conducted according to an overall 6-tier model of figurative origins involving the parameters of personal background, political context, cultural history, reference, conceptual metaphor and linguistic metaphor. By applying the parameters of the model, it is proposed that the core of political argumentation in the corpus analysis is based on national symbols and the conceptual mapping they embody. The basic hypothesis of the model assumes that a politician attempts to portray the symbolisation of unity in accordance with his or her political background and personal biography. A political narrative is thereby created within the current political context using predominant symbols in cultural history. An over-riding factor is the role of referential points which may determine divergence in conceptual mapping. These features then lead to the construction of conceptual metaphors which can take on a particularly hyperbolic structure in the ensuing linguistic metaphors. The implications of the study highlight the important role of symbolism in political debate, its interaction with conceptual metaphor, the relevance of extra-linguistic factors portrayed by the 6-tier model, the link between cultural history and hyperbolic linguistic structures and political divergence in similar symbols.

The Formation of American Historiography of the New Deal (1930s – early 1960s)

The article analyzes the formation of American historiography of the New Deal based on a comprehensive study of scientific and journalistic literature. The initial assessments of the New Deal date back to the presidential campaign of 1932 when it was still a preliminary theoretical reform program. During the political debates of the 1930s, opponents of F. Roosevelt criticized the New Deal because, in their opinion, it did not align with American traditions, operated with un-American approaches to public administration, etc. These assessments were significantly influenced by the international situation related to the crisis of capitalism and democratic governance in Europe. Political opponents, referring to experience overseas, unjustly regarded the New Deal as a manifestation of one of the European radical “isms”. The author of the article found that such assessments did not find a wide response in society, and the scientific works of researchers who defended similar theses were on the margins of historical debates around the New Deal.&#x0D; The publication of their memoirs by most members of F. Roosevelt’s cabinet and his advisers, as well as the opening of access to the President’s library in Hyde Park, contributed to the formation of the first scientific assessments of the New Deal in the late 1940s. The historiography of the New Course had its “founding fathers”, to whom the author of this article includes – Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., B. Rauch, R. Hofstadter, F. Freidel, J. Burns, and W. Leuchtenburg. These researchers established a scientific basis that remains valid to this day, despite various attempts to revise it. They established certain historiographical trends and approaches to research and interpretation of this period in the 1950s. The author determined that the 1950s were marked by a debate between two schools of historical thought – Progressive and Consensus, regarding what the New Deal was – a continuation of the reform movement of previous decades, a turning point, or a revolution in American life and politics. In the research, the author considered and analyzed the main arguments and counterarguments of each of the schools.

Is civilizational primordialism any better than nationalist primordialism?

The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war seems to have prompted a return to anthropology's origins: the armchair. Claiming authority based on status and knowledge accumulated elsewhere and extrapolated to Ukraine, public scholars have proffered takes, op-eds, and geopolitical phantasies. Slow research in the full ethnographic mode, studying actors and subjectivities in fast shifting contexts, would have been preferable. In a context of war, complex and dynamic political phenomena easily become tokens in political debates that do not go much beyond statements of political identity.

Antecedent Ideological Profiles and Negative Socio-political Outcomes of LGBTQ+ Conspiracy Beliefs

IntroductionConspiracy theories and beliefs (CTBs) about LGBTQ+ people are often used as arguments in political debate in Italy and across Europe to hinder the passing of protective laws and negatively affect popular consensus regarding the promotion of anti-discrimination policies and the advancement of civil rights.MethodWe conducted two correlational studies in Italy starting the data collection at the end of 2022. In Study 1 (N = 589), we investigated which ideological profile was more associated with LGBTQ+ CTBs, between the two profiles identified by Duckitt et al.’s model (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(1), 75–93, 2002): path A) high vision of the world as a competitive jungle and consequent high social dominance orientation; path B) high vision of the world as dangerous and consequent high right-wing authoritarianism. In Study 2 (N = 1581), we have also included three potential outcomes associated with LGBTQ+ CTBs in the model.ResultsThrough a mediational path model, we found that path B was the strongest associated with LGBTQ+ CTBs. We found that LGBTQ+ CTBs mediated the relationships between the two ideological dispositions and (a) lower support to LGBTQ+ civil rights; (b) lower LGBTQ+ collective action intentions; and (c) higher adherence to economic myths about LGBTQ+ people.ConclusionsSocio-psychological research on LGBTQ+ CTBs may inform social policies that work to lessen the harm these beliefs do and advance a more welcoming and inclusive society.Policy ImplicationsSuch results offer several insights to change and improve the actual debate in political, scientific, and cultural domains, contributing to producing new policies which might increase the self-determination of all LGBTQ+ people.

Legalism and the European Union’s rule of law crisis

AbstractThe past decade has seen the rise of the semi-authoritarian regimes within the European Union. EU law scholars are rightfully concerned that, in the absence of a meaningful response, this leads to an existential crisis for the Union, as these regimes threaten respect for the Union’s foundational values. The Union did respond to what it has framed as a rule of law crisis by means of a constitutional transformation, asserting Union power to protect judicial independence within the Member States even in areas previously thought beyond the reach of Union law. This paper contends that the Union’s response to the authoritarian threat is flawed for its legalist faith in law and courts. In institutional terms, it was the Court of Justice of the European Union, rather than the Union’s political branches, that took the lead in this transformation. In substantive terms, the Union has transformed its constitutional framework to protect the organisational infrastructure of the judiciary, but it failed to do the same in response to various other strategies in the authoritarian playbook. By framing the authoritarian threat as, above all else, a threat to the judiciary, the Union’s response contributes to the reification of political debate at Union level and risks the alienation of the European polity.

Not only Väterliteratur: The engagement of several media in talking about the Nazi past in Wolfgang Glück’s Die kleine Figur meines Vaters (1980)

This article explores the adaptation of Peter Henisch’s novel Die kleine Figur meines Vaters made by Wolfgang Glück. The film produced by three (Austrian, West German and Hungarian) television companies focuses on conversations between father and son that relate to the Nazi past of the latter. What initially was planned as a biographical novel, in the end, became an intermedial work drawing on literature, a magnetic tape containing a recorded oral testimony, photography and film. In this article, I examine the film’s narration and reception to demonstrate that it was one of the first Austrian movies to deal directly with the ambiguous role ordinary Austrians played in National Socialism, which in fact preceded the political debate on Austria’s past generated by the election of Kurt Waldheim to the president’s office in 1986. The analysis of the film was possible thanks to the research conducted in the Austrian National Library in Vienna and the Archives of the Bavarian Television (BR) in Munich.

Finally Got the News , on Another Continent

Abstract: For many of its initial viewers, Finally Got the News gave food for thought to those who had paid little or no attention to the tens of millions of unwaged and waged workers of non-European origins who have toiled for capitalism in the modern era worldwide. The distinctive feature of Finally Got the News is that it shows Black Detroit, in the aftermath of the 1967 Rebellion, taking freedom of speech seriously and speaking for itself without any deference to condescending powers. The film made a particular impact on young working class and student activists who gathered for two days of political debate on an isolated farm near Florence in August 1970, a meeting organized by the Italian extra-parliamentary group, Potere Operaio (PO). One of the leaders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, John Watson, introduced the film with his history of the self-activity of African American laborers in the United States. In the end, many found the translation of Watson's ideas on screen more compelling than Watson's own in-person presentation. The Florence screening of Finally Got the News ended with big applause. I recount the events herein and put the film in dialogue with revolutionary currents throughout postwar Europe.