Political Program Research Articles

Cultivating Civic Engagement

In contemporary society, the concept of civic engagement appears as an essential condition for the functioning of democracy and social well-being. Civic engagement transcends simple participation in the electoral process and encompasses a wider spectrum of activities: civic and community participation, activism, and public dialogue. Thus, cultivating civic engagement is a mission, duty, and responsibility for universities, particularly for social science programs. They derive from the need to form and shape not only professionals but also responsible and involved people from a civic and social point of view. However, the mechanisms by which higher education institutions can effectively cultivate such engagement among students remain a subject of debate and investigation. This study seeks to bridge this gap by exploring the strategies used by universities to promote civic awareness among students. Methodologically, this article proposes a study on one of the most important universities in the field of social, political, and administrative sciences in Romania. By analyzing the perceptions and experiences of students, the research provides new empirical data on how educational practices influencing civic and political engagement are evolving, or, conversely, reveals institutional shortcomings in fulfilling the mission of promoting civic engagement among students. In this sense, a standardized questionnaire was distributed to the students from the political science bachelor's degree program to analyze their perceptions and experiences regarding how the study programs and the teachers' activity incorporate the component of civic and political involvement. Data analysis highlights how and if higher education programs cultivate and shape student engagement through academic programs, extracurricular activities, or community partnerships.

Technocultural worldings: dialectical dynamics in contemporary media landscapes

ABSTRACT In this piece, which frames the special issue “Technocultural worldings,” we build on previous editions of commentary and criticism in this journal. We propose a theoretically anchored way to systematically approach the dynamic, multidimensional, and heterogeneous technocultural communities that have created their own worldings and are engaged in complex dialectical dynamics within the contemporary media landscape. The technocultural communities that are part of these dialectical dynamics are constituted, on the one hand, by the complex collective sense-making of the emancipatory political programs of feminist and LGBTI+ initiatives and, on the other, by the retrogressive mobilizations of far-right and anti-gender movements. Hence, we argue that these worldings come into being due to the ability conferred by digital spaces to incorporate both material and virtual components in performances of gender and sexuality, in all their complex diversity. These issues are explored in more detail in eight articles, grouped into two discretely separate sections, one exploring emancipatory technocultural worldings, while the other describes retrogressive technocultural worldings.

Eva Piirimäe on Herder’s political thought

ABSTRACT Eva Piirimäe's Herder and Enlightenment Politics deserves recognition as a landmark study in the scholarship of Johann Gottfried Herder, and of eighteenth-century political thought more broadly. Piirimäe shows us that Herder should be taken very seriously as a political thinker of the eighteenth century. Herder engaged in the central debates of his time and possessed a political programme concerned with the possibility for – and reformist potential of – a distinctive kind of patriotism. The review welcomes Piirimäe's contextualist, historicist approach to Herder's political thought, allowing us to understand Herder “in his own terms”. Piirimäe thereby reveals that the coherence, scope and urgency of Herder's political programme, addressing the particular challenges of his European modernity, has hitherto been underappreciated. Piirimäe suggests that Herder's political objectives provided an important and underappreciated impetus to his cultural thought. Piirimäe also emphasises the significance of Herder's experiences in the distinctive commercial environment of Riga and draws attention to his engagement with the genre of Imperial Reichsgeschichte. These highlight a more modern outlook on history and politics than is often appreciated, particularly in Kantian scholarship, and which must be borne in mind as a qualification to his famous critiques in Another Philosophy of History (1774).

‘AN APT OR AN INAPT INTERVENTION?’: THE POLITICAL EDUCATION PROGRAM OF THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS (ANC) IN SOUTH AFRICA

Based on the theoretical insights of desk research and critical analysis, respectively, this article interrogates and critically evaluates the political education program which the currently governing African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa launched and began implementing in 2019 through the OR Tambo School of Leadership. It raises questions and casts doubts about the program’s pertinence, its potency for wider public buy in, and its chances of success within the presently volatile and adverse South African social, economic, and political climate. As well as teasing out the issue of whether the program represents what the country really needs at the present juncture of its democracy, it is also contended that there are many factors / hurdles that are both intrinsic and extrinsic which are highly likely to obviate the program’s wider public buy in and the success thereof. It is further contended that the adoption and implementation of the said program has not only been an inapt, untimely, and a knee-jerk intervention but also that it is to all intents and purposes an exercise in red herring and clutching at straws, and therefore peripheral to the more pressing political and policy issues that lie at the heart of the problems which beset both the ANC as the governing party and the country at large. The article concludes by predicting the foundering of the said program and posits the notion of a broad-based, nationalistic-oriented, and inclusive civic education program, as opposed to a political party-driven one such as that of the ANC, as a viable alternative for the country going forward.

Student Assistance through Training on Javanese Language and Culture at Walailak University Thailand

The community service activity at the political science study program, Walailak University Thailand has the aim of introducing Javanese language and culture to improve Indonesian insight. The target of this activity is political science students, walailak university who need initial and advanced guidance to improve Indonesian insights. This activity is very helpful for students in providing initial provision before taking a lecture program in Indonesia. This service activity provides theoretical knowledge and cultural practices in the classroom which include the introduction of Javanese language and traditional games. The activity method is carried out with discussions, presentations and cultural practices. The results of the activity showed the enthusiasm of students in learning Javanese language, Javanese culture and Indonesian in general a total of 61% of students stated that they could know Javanese vocabulary, 22% of students knew Javanese culture. 9% of students got preliminary knowledge if they visit Indonesia, while 8% of students got important information related to Javanese culture.

Empowering Beginner Voters: Yogyakarta KPUD's Role, Criticisms, and Recommendations in 2024 Election

The participation of beginner voters in the 2024 General Election is crucial for the preservation of democracy. The General Election Commission of Yogyakarta City is concerned that a lack of understanding of democracy and political education among these voters could reduce overall voter turnout. To address this, the Commission promotes voter engagement through targeted socialization and political education programs in schools and higher education institutions. This qualitative research examines the efforts of the Yogyakarta City General Election Commission to educate and engage beginner voters for the 2024 Election. The study highlights the critical role of political education in raising awareness and ensuring active participation among young voters. It explores the Commission's initiatives to foster a well-informed electorate, emphasizing the significance of early political education. The findings suggest that through these educational efforts, beginner voters are more likely to participate actively in the democratic process, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness and inclusivity of the 2024 General Election. This research underscores the importance of continuous political education to sustain and strengthen democratic engagement.

Not playing the game: Political talk, hybridity and performance

This article looks at two prominent news interviews by non-political actors; one an accountability interview and the other part of a panel discussion. It shows how the exchanges contest the conventions of the journalistic interview, deploying a range of unorthodox verbal and non-verbal tactics. The accountability interview, broadcast on Sky News and posted on X (Twitter), includes a heightened performative component, using a variety of techniques to foreground verbal and embodied incredulity. This attracted widespread public and journalistic comment, and produces a manner of engagement that evades conventional language analysis. Performance is a still more prominent factor in the second example, which analyses an appearance by a professional comedian on a BBC political discussion programme. This sustains a comedic persona based upon an enactment of mock-sincerity, contesting the conventional forms of mediated political talk and commentary. Together, these performances are assessed in the context of increasing hybridity in broadcast news, and the article suggests their significance extends beyond their status as sharable media spectacle, such that they show how popular forms of performance can challenge the institutional norms of neutralism.

Mediatyzacja parlamentarnej kampanii wyborczej. Przypadek narodowej demokracji w 1922 roku

National Democracy actively participated in the mediatization of the electoral campaign in 1922. The effects of the media mediation process in learning about the world, influencing the world view of individuals and social groups, and creating an image of social reality were measurable because they brought political success in the form of obtaining parliamentary and senatorial seats in the parliament of the first term. To characterise the components of the mediatization of political activities, a case study article was proposed, considering knowledge about National Democracy, its members participating in the process of disseminating knowledge about politics through the media, and about the techniques used to influence recipients. Attention was paid to the variety of directions of propaganda work, to the involvement of brochure and periodical publishers, to the variety of election forms that were intended to promote the national political program, and, above all, to the ways of obtaining votes from the electorate from particular social groups limited by age, gender or profession. The conclusions include the use of communication competences of National Democracy leaders and members. The leadership of the national formation used three types of narrative: factual, sensational, and humorous, stimulating the effect.

Unveiling Public Perception and Interpretation of China’s National Self-Image: Analyzing Chinese Online Commentary Data

This research study aims to address the oversight in previous studies that focused on constructing China’s image through the media without investigating how audiences perceive and interpret that depiction. This study aims to investigate how Chinese internet users perceive China’s self-image to understand Chinese citizens’ attitudes and reactions to political propaganda circulated by Chinese authorities online more effectively. To achieve this, we have chosen “This is China,” an online political program that presents China’s self-image. A total of 60,648 comments were collected and analyzed. For the analysis, T-LDA, Sentiment Analysis, and Semantic Network Analysis were employed. The study reveals six significant factors: Real-Life Stress, Patriotic Sentiment, Rational Emotion, Program Style, Presenter’s Public Persona, and Ironic Remarks, all of which shape the public’s perception of China’s image. Specifically, the study finds that Patriotism and Program Style have a positive influence on the audience’s perception, while the other factors hinder a favorable interpretation of the nation’s image.

Pandemic Persona and Digital Culture: The Role of Celebrity Politicians on Social Networks

The paper discusses a specific intersection of the politics, celebrity, and digital culture. In the last few decades, more and more people from the entertainment realm entered the world of institutional politics trying to leverage their popularity. Thanks to the media, they manage to transfer their celebrity capital, namely accumulated media visibility and recognisability (Driesens 2013) into the political sphere. In the beginning, they improve their visibility with the help of mass media that place their personas and private lives in the focus of public attention. However, with the digitalization of the media, the popular-political landscape has changed (Marshall 2020), so today they have dispositional new bases for practising personalized politics, i.e. imposing their personality instead of political party programmes. In this paper, attention is directed to former American president Donald Trump, president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Miroslav Škoro, who was a candidate in the presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in Croatia. Although there were obvious differences between these three celebrities mentioned before entering the political arena, their later use of social networks vividly shows how they built their political/pandemic persona in the evolving mediatization of politics.

Internationalization of the training and production of Brazilian Graduate Programs of Political Science

This article analyzes the internationalization strategies of the teaching careers of Brazilian political scientists. Internationalization will be measured in two dimensions: 1) publications and 2) academic training of the teachers. Are the central countries the main destinations of Brazilian political scientists? In the field of Brazilian political science, do the central programs monopolize internationalization or is it also accessible to more recent programs? The hypothesis tested is that internationalization would be linked to the central countries and that core programs would be largely over-represented. The study analyzed 360 researchers linked to political science programs. The hypothesis was only partially confirmed. It was concluded that the peripheral programs also have space in the internationalization of the academic training and in the publication of papers abroad. The main difference found between internationalization dynamics concerns the country of destination for academic training and for paper publication. Academic training is basically concentrated in central countries (US, England and France). Although it is absent in academic training Latin America has an important presence as a focus of the international publication of the researchers examined.

New municipalism and feminist leadership after the Indignados: The political aesthetics of truth in Ada Colau for Mayor (Faus 2016)

In this article, I reflect on the intersection between feminism and documentary art as truth-telling by focusing on Alcaldessa ( Ada Colau for Mayor), the most relevant documentary of the long-term collaboration between the film-maker Pau Faus and Ada Colau, the first female mayor of Barcelona (2015–2023). My argument is critical of a reductionist interpretation which portrays Alcaldessa as a personalist postfeminist documentary overly fixated on ‘biography rather than policy’. In contrast, I posit that Faus’ documentary, delving into Colau’s initial electoral campaign (2014–2015), offers valuable insights into pivotal aspects of an underexamined political vision that merges the principles of new municipalism with a focus on the ‘common people’ ( gent comú) and feminism. Furthermore, the documentary sheds light on unreconciled dilemmas inherent in the lived new politics and feminist leadership, issues that often remain concealed within the ideological trappings of political manifestos and programmes.

Unveiling the role of political education for political participation in China

It is a well-known fact that political education plays a pivotal role in shaping informed, engaged, and responsible citizens in a country. The empirical literature lacks the exploration of the impact of political education on political participation in addition to political efficacy and social media usage. This study investigates the interconnected relationship between political education, social media usage, political efficacy, and political participation in China. Drawing upon a sample of 843 participants across various regions, this research explores the extent to which these factors influence political participation within the Chinese context by applying the structural equation modelling for empirical results and establishing a positive association between political education and political participation. Furthermore, the mediating role of social media and political efficacy is uncovered in relationship of political education and political participation in China. It is suggested to emphasize and invest in comprehensive political education programs through colleges, universities and social media that promote critical thinking, information literacy, and political responsibility for the well-being of the Chinese society.

Railroad Luxemburg: Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Infrastructure and its Consequences for a Public Service Internet

Infrastructures of circulation, transportation, and communication play a central role in Luxemburg’s work in political economy as well as revolutionary strategy. This paper seeks to reconstruct and develop a theory of capitalist infrastructural expansion drawing from a variety of Luxemburg’s writings. In Accumulation of Capital, infrastructural expansion – namely of railroads – plays a central role at all stages of capitalist accumulation. Railroads act as a site of military and state investment for introducing the commodity economy to non-capitalist sectors and eventually for the “capitalist emancipation of the hinterland.” At the same time Luxemburg rejects the progressive character of these infrastructural endeavours, and she argues that they will not be a genuine “stamp of progress in an historical sense” until capitalism has been destroyed. It is no coincidence then that her political writings prominently feature figures such as railway and postal workers, who are strategically positioned to strike at the infrastructures of imperialism. A Luxemburgist theory of infrastructure has important relevance for contemporary debates around the expansion and ownership of Internet infrastructures. The past decade has been marked by various calls for new models of Internet ownership. These include The Public Service Internet Manifesto, the Democratic Socialists of America’s Internet for All Campaign, Tarnoff’s Internet for the People, Téwodros Workneh’s “Case for Telecommunications Commons in Ethiopia,” and netCommons Project’s vision for community networks. Such calls for a publicly owned and funded Internet risk reproducing some of the dynamics Luxemburg describes in her account of the history of railroads, canals, telegraphs etc. Namely, such calls parallel the state subsidising of an infrastructure that seeks out new sites of accumulation and extraction. This is not to say that such endeavours should be wholly abandoned, but must fit into a broader anti-capitalist political program, otherwise such infrastructural expansion can be seen as continuing the expansion of capitalist accumulation. Luxemburg deters us from looking for a technical fix. For this reason, Luxemburg’s political writings and her critique of the non-progressive nature of capitalism are also useful as she indicates how the destruction of capitalism can alter and redeem such large infrastructural projects.

Representation of british social and political life in audiovisual content

Representation of british social and political life in audiovisual content

Gendered framing and representation of women in Irish political television programming during the 2020 formation of the government of Ireland

ABSTRACT The ways in which women are incorporated into Irish political programming is vital in understanding the visibility of women in mainstream media, but also the gendered nature of politics, which tend to be dominated by men. This research investigates how three Irish current affairs television programmes frame and represent women, questioning whether Irish political programmes are gendered. This research employed a quantitative and qualitative content analysis case study of one month of broadcasts from Virgin Media’s The Tonight Show and RTÉ ‘s The Week in Politics and Prime Time. The findings indicate the representation of women was constituted through three dominant themes. Firstly, women are marginalised by being numerically underrepresented. Secondly, women receive significantly less airtime than men, even in relation to their numerical representation and thirdly, female participants are represented in a restrictive and limited manner. Women are more likely to be consulted for their personal experience or opinion, with questions aimed at them centring around “soft” topics. Female participants are also considerably less likely to be portrayed as expert sources. This research outlines the critical need for further and continuous monitoring of political media in Ireland, particularly regarding gender bias and female participation in political programming on television.

Pietistic atheism and the modern breakthrough: on the narrative culture of secularity

ABSTRACT Secularity was first substantiated as a cultural practice constitutive of modernity in late-nineteenth-century fiction. The so-called Modern Breakthrough in Danish literature, taking place between 1871 and into the 1880s, is a prime case of a cultural radical movement that translated the modern criticism of religion into a literary and political program. Today, the Danish writer J. P. Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880) remains a classic of the atheistic literature of the period. Its portrayal of the psychological struggles involved in the transition from a tradition of faith to a modern secular society suggest it to be a core document of atheistic identity formation. To contemporaries, however, the psychology of the protagonist Niels Lyhne seemed fundamentally implausible, and his atheism overtly dramatic. By contextualising the literary work in its wider and highly contested narrative culture, this article discusses how narrative scripts first substantiated the modern religious vs secular distinction. In documenting the changing plausibility structures by which Jacobsen’s novel could become prescriptive of the emotional norms of a secular mind, the article explores how literary works shape cultural and emotional realities.

Real-time multilingual speech recognition and speaker diarization system based on Whisper segmentation.

This research presents the development of a cutting-edge real-time multilingual speech recognition and speaker diarization system that leverages OpenAI's Whisper model. The system specifically addresses the challenges of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization (SD) in dynamic, multispeaker environments, with a focus on accurately processing Mandarin speech with Taiwanese accents and managing frequent speaker switches. Traditional speech recognition systems often fall short in such complex multilingual and multispeaker contexts, particularly in SD. This study, therefore, integrates advanced speech recognition with speaker diarization techniques optimized for real-time applications. These optimizations include handling model outputs efficiently and incorporating speaker embedding technology. The system was evaluated using data from Taiwanese talk shows and political commentary programs, featuring 46 diverse speakers. The results showed a promising word diarization error rate (WDER) of 2.68% in two-speaker scenarios and 11.65% in three-speaker scenarios, with an overall WDER of 6.96%. This performance is comparable to that of non-real-time baseline models, highlighting the system's ability to adapt to various complex conversational dynamics, a significant advancement in the field of real-time multilingual speech processing.

Analyzing the Impact of Macroeconomic Variables on Financial Stability: Evidence from South Asian Economies

This research examines whether macroeconomic variables disturb the financial stability of SAARC countries in 1996-2022 using panel ARDL approach. We shape the financial stability as the dependent variable, and we have developed a PCA index of financial stability (principal component analysis). This study contains of macroeconomic models with a wide choice of possibly related variables for financial stability, using financial flows, financial openness, macroeconomic stability, exchange rate and economic growth on a sample of five countries between 1996 and 2022. Our experimental suggestion proposes that most of the macroeconomic variables have a positive impact on financial stability. Therefore, our outcomes support the view that the development of macro-economic policies and political programs should be part of financial improvement. All these variables may enhance the financial stability of the countries which are under consideration.

Study on the Integration of the Spirit of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China into the Classroom Teaching of the Outline of Modern and Contemporary Chinese History

What kind of people to cultivate, how to cultivate people and for whom to cultivate people are the fundamental problems of education. The twenty-second congress of the Party is the political declaration and action program of the new era. The spirit of the twenty-second congress of the Party provides a new value guidance for the ideological and political course in the new era. As a front-line teacher who has been struggling for a long time in teaching and learning, the author tries to integrate the spirit of the Party's 20 Great Congress organically into the teaching process of the introduction and chapters of the Outline of Chinese Modern and Modern History from three aspects: necessity, possibility and feasible path.