Role Of Democracy Research Articles

Political and Democratic Role of The National Party in Restoring Peace and Democracy in Balochistan During the Insurgency

Balochistan is a troubled province in the country since the inception of Pakistan in 1947. The political turmoil is deeply embedded in the process of princely states joining the newly established Pakistan. Political parties including the National Party tried to curb the situation and pave the way for a peaceful reconciliation between the marginalized people of Balochistan and the state of Pakistan. The National Party (NP) is one of the bigger mass political parties in the province. It is a social-democratic and center-to-the-left party whose legacy party is linked back to the Kalat State’s National Party. In 2003, the merger of two political parties, the Balochistan National Democratic Party (BNDP) of Mir Hasil Khan Bizenjo, and the Balochistan National Movement (BNM) of Abdul Hayee Baloch led to the foundation of this popular mass political party. The Baloch people have been denied their political, economic, and cultural rights. They also ignored their right to self-governance and the management of their region's natural resources, ever since Pakistan was founded. Balochistan was not represented at the state level and had little influence over how the government was run. The focus of this paper is to know about the role of the National Party in restoring peace after the insurgency and how the leadership of the National Party did an effort to bring back democracy in the province to keep the federation of Pakistan. The research is a qualitative study based on primary and secondary data collected by researchers. Primary data was collected from the key informants of political parties. The secondary data includes an analysis of the written literature of the parties. It is concluded that the role of such parties in the establishment of peace and reconciliation between the state and the people of the province is important for the prosperity of the people of Balochistan in particular, and Pakistan in general.

Local Government Policies in Formulating Harmonious and Democratic Regional Regulations

Regional Regulation is one of the legal products in the region that greatly affects the welfare of the people, therefore the formation of regional regulations by the Regional Government should be participatory. The purpose of this research is to see how democratic laws and regulations are used to make local regulations. Components of the legal framework, especially the local government and DPRD, do not provide space for the community to express their aspirations, resulting in local regulations that are only ceremonial in nature. Similarly, the principle of democracy outlined in the Law on the Formation of Legislation is still a formality due to the fact that the publication of local regulations to the public is not an obligation and the legal culture of the community and the role of democratization of formation have not been implemented. The problems in this research are 1) How is the implementation of democratic legislation in accordance with the needs of society? 2) Has the formation of local regulations involved public participation? The results of this research show that relevant institutions need to oversee how bureaucrats' participation works, in line with the mandate of Law Number 12/2011 on the Formation of Legislation, the formation of local regulations that are not participatory has resulted in several local regulations that are not in accordance with the demands of the community so that revisions need to be made. To ensure that local regulations are participatory and meet the needs of the community, the government must involve the community, accommodate aspirations, and capture as much community input as possible.

Freelance Photojournalists Redefine Their Work: Perspectives on a Precarious Field

ABSTRACT With the digitization of news, media organizations are downsizing or removing their photo departments completely, and freelance work has become the norm for photojournalists. This increasingly precarious profession, where photojournalists go from assignment to assignment, is facing a repositioning. As scholars, it is important to understand how those working in this space conceptualize their work and its role in media and society. Doing so will help scholars better understand the evolving nature of visual communication labor. This study utilizes in-depth interviews with 14 freelance photojournalists to better understand how they view their job and its role in democracy. Analysis shows that photojournalists are reconceptualizing the field they work in, including the ethical codes that have historically guided it. These findings show the ethical consequences of the freelance-reliant business model in the field of photojournalism.

“Make a reasonable effort”: Translation policy for Texas state websites

AbstractLanguage plays a key role in democracy. In fact, the role of language in democratic societies is so crucial that scholars have addressed it thoroughly through different lenses, ranging from law to language policy. This article, in turn, seeks to add to the scholarship on democracy and language rights by considering the role of translation policy in the development of linguistically inclusive public web pages. To that end, the study considers the State of Texas's translation policy as it relates to its online presence. Specifically, it approaches translation policy by looking at translation management, translation practice, and translation beliefs as observed in the efforts that state government agencies in Texas make when localizing their websites for the inclusion or integration of linguistic minorities. In so doing, it explores the relationship between written rules and the belief in providing language access in government agencies and how this affects the practice of translation in websites.

Values Do Matter: Lessons for Non-Governmental Organizations During the Crises of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT Anti-democratic governments are wary of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) owing to the latter’s important role in ensuring that the government acts according to public interest. Unfortunately, some governments are trying to hinder the functions of NGOs, creating an unfavorable image for them and causing a lack of trust. Despite their poor financial condition and strong dependence on state aid, Polish NGOs play their democratic role by supporting society in various areas. This study finds that the NGO values of openness, tolerance and selflessness prevent NGOs from having an unfavorable and untrustworthy image in the eyes of the public and the media.

European news media in the decade of digitalisation: Persisting democratic performance with uneven developments

This article discusses how the performance of leading European news media evolved between 2010 and 2020 regarding normative expectations of liberal democracies, focusing on the role of digital journalism. The rise of platforms, news media crisis and consolidation of digital journalism in the 2010 decade challenge established discourses on the normative roles of news media. It is unclear to what extent media performance may have changed, especially outside the United States. This article draws on 2010 and 2020 data from the Media for Democracy Monitor (MDM) to compare the performance of news media in Austria, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. It argues that leading news media in these countries have had an overall similar contribution to democratic roles as before the 2010 decade. However, there are uneven developments, as digital journalism has strengthened the watchdog dimension while failing to attract younger audiences for the news industry. Additionally, countries with stronger public media ownership performed fairly better, indicating that technology alone is not the main factor to fulfil democratic expectations.

Foreign experience in researching social and political activity online

Over the past decades, depending on the development of information and communication technologies, the understanding of social and political online activity, its meaning, and research methods have been constantly changing. Therefore, the article analyzes new theoretical and methodological approaches and the results of foreign research on public and political online activity. It is worth noting that today the research interest is sharpened by the involvement of more and more citizens and the continuous expansion of online political participation methods in democratic countries. After all, to the huge list of forms of political participation, it is worth adding those that have become available with the development of information and communication technologies, in particular social media — the distribution of political content and the use of social networks to mobilize other people to solve certain political goals. Many research questions have already been raised in the foreign scientific discourse: conceptualization of socio-political online activity, its determinants, predictors, and socio-demographic presentation. In my research, online social and political activism is conceptualized as a form of political participation, meaning citizen activism whose goal or outcome is to influence political and governmental outcomes. The study examines the activity itself because so far this type of activity cannot be called a practice, its normalization and habituation in everyday life have not yet been proven. At the same time, the question of the future of the digital public sphere and its role in democracy is extremely relevant, because it can develop according to at least two opposite scenarios, which directly affects online activism, especially in transition countries. That is why it is so important to study and apply foreign experience in the study of Ukrainian social and political online activism. In general, the article demonstrates that a large gap in Ukrainian research on political participation on the Internet has yet to be filled.

Can synthetic data accurately mimic oncology clinical trials?

1554 Background: There is strong interest by researchers, the pharmaceutical industry, medical journal editors, funders of research, and regulators in sharing clinical trial data. Reusing data extracts the most utility possible from patient contributions. The majority of patients do want to share their data for secondary research purposes. However, data access for secondary analysis remains a challenge. A key reason why individual-level data is not made directly available to data users by authors and data custodians is concern over breaches of patient privacy. Synthetic data generation (SDG) is an effective way to address privacy concerns that can enable the broader sharing of clinical trial datasets. However, a key question is whether the reproducibility of the generated data is adequate to draw reliable conclusions. Methods: We synthesized datasets from five pragmatic breast cancer clinical trials performed by the REaCT group (https://react.ohri.ca/). A sequential synthesis method, a type of machine learning was performed. The published analysis of each trial was repeated on each synthetic dataset to evaluate reproducibility. We evaluated reproducibility on three criteria: (a) decision agreement: the direction and statistical significance of the primary endpoint effect estimates are the same as the real data, (b) estimate agreement: the parameter estimates from the synthetic data are within the 95% confidence interval of the real data, and (c) the confidence interval overlap between real and synthetic parameters is above 50%. In addition, we evaluated privacy using a membership disclosure metric. This evaluates the ability of an adversary to determine that a target individual was in the original dataset using the synthetic data, computed as an F1 classification accuracy score. Results: Our results show that decision and estimate agreements held true across all five trials, and the confidence interval overlap was high. The risks of membership disclosure are all below the established 0.2 threshold. Conclusions: In this study, we were able to successfully generate synthetic datasets that accurately replicated original data from 5 oncology trials and yielded the same results as in the original published studies, with a very low risk of membership disclosure. With proper modeling techniques, synthetic datasets can play a key role in data democratization and the reuse of oncology clinical trials.[Table: see text]

Changing Face of Indian Political Cartoons from 2010–2020

Political cartoons are a reflection of the politics in the country and democracy as a whole. As time changed, media and politics changed, too. Therefore, it is important to understand how political cartoons are changing, especially when they are known to play a critical role in democracy. Comparison and analysis of political cartoons over time could bring about reasonable findings. The present research focused on mending this gap in the existing literature and analyzed the changing face of Indian political cartoons over the past decade. The present study was conducted on Editors of different editorials (English and Hindi) based in the Delhi-NCR region, India. Primary data were used in the study, wherein the interview method was adopted to collect the data in the form of interview transcripts. Herein, qualitative analysis was conducted wherein the interview method was adopted. The study’s findings threw light on how the face of political cartoons has changed over the past decade. The research findings could be used by practicing political cartoonists to update themselves. Further, the newspaper could also use this study to analyze how to keep the dying art of political cartooning alive. The research conducted on political cartooning is very limited, and the focus on changes in political cartooning is almost zero. Thus, the present research is one of its kind.

Gender and corruption: examining the nexus in MENA countries using PMG-ARDL approach

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between gender and corruption in thirteen Middle East and North African (MENA) countries during 2006–2020. We find a poor performance in terms of both corruption and the lack of involvement of women in public life, with a correlation between these two phenomena in the region. Due to the presence of cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity in the panel, we employed second-generation econometric panel unit root and cointegration tests. Using the ARDL-PMG approach, which is categorised as an error-corrected model, we demonstrate that greater involvement of women in the economic and political sphere is associated with lower levels of corruption. The results also indicate that the link between corruption and gender is dependent on the context and institutional factors. The role of democracy and political stability in explaining this interaction is particularly important, especially when women are well-represented in decision-making positions. Finally, we provide evidence that improved gender equality can strengthen the connection between greater involvement of women in public life, and more success in tackling corruption. Greater gender egalitarianism can break down the male-dominated network of corruption that is widespread in MENA countries.

Two Journalisms? Linear and Curvilinear Relationships Between Journalists’ Role Ideals and Degree of Democracy

ABSTRACT If there are authoritarian, transitional, and democratic political and media systems, are there associated authoritarian, transitional, and democratic role profiles for journalists? The relation between countries’ degree of democracy and the importance of journalistic role conceptions among journalists in a country is analyzed based on the World Journalism Study (Wave 2). I find that journalists in democratic political systems generally subscribe to fewer role conceptions than journalists in authoritarian political systems; Journalism-for-Democracy is more defined by what it is not (i.e., journalists reject the typical role conceptions of Journalism-for-Authoritarianism and Journalism-in-Transition) than by what it is. Journalism in transitional political systems (i.e., hybrid regimes and deficient democracies) is characterized by a specific set of role conceptions that are linked to political activism, which journalists in full democracies tend to reject. The study reassesses which role conceptions might be typical for which kind of political systems leading to revised hypotheses regarding the link between democracy and journalistic role conceptions.

Role conflicts of preschool teachers: From children's perspectives in a changing cultural setting in Taiwan

AbstractThis study investigated children's perspectives on preschool teachers' roles in Taiwan's changing cultural setting. This study attempted to examine how aspects of culture and time are interwoven in children's lives. Data were collected through children's drawings, the photographs they captured and drawing‐photo elicitation interviews. The data were analysed to identify the eight types of teachers' roles and the time points at which the children observed the roles. The children noted that their teachers were ‘regulators’; however, they also discovered teachers' interactive and democratic roles in less structured settings during the time of learning areas and while outdoors.

Social Policy Expansion and Retrenchment in Latin America: Causal Paths to Successful Reform

Abstract The literature on social policy expansion and retrenchment in Latin America is vast, but scholars differ in how they explain outcomes, arriving at different conclusions about the role of democracy, left parties, favorable economic conditions, and social movements. What can welfare state developments since the end of the commodity boom teach us about the theoretical power of these arguments? This paper engages this question, seeking to explain recent incidents of successful social policy reform in 10 presidential administrations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Using a combination of crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) and case studies, we identify multiple paths toward successful social policy expansion and retrenchment. The QCA results highlight two key findings. First, social policy expansion was generally carried out by programmatic parties (often, though not always, from the left). Second, retrenchment is most likely when nonprogrammatic right parties face fiscal constraints. The case studies affirm these findings and show that differences in electoral competition, social movement pressure, and policy legacies shape the contexts in which expansion and retrenchment is feasible. The results provide new insight into social policy reform, underscoring the relevance of complex forms of causality.

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Populism and Critical Incidents in Journalism: Has Bolsonaro Disrupted the Mainstream Press in Brazil?

Despite the increasing number of studies examining the conflicts between the media and populist leaders, understanding how such clashes prompt shifts in journalism norms and practices remains to be thoroughly explored. Based on a literature review and the discussion of an extensive array of examples characterizing the Brazilian media setting, this article provides a qualitative assessment of how Jair Bolsonaro's rhetoric and actions have triggered a “critical incident” in our mainstream journalism. We consider four dimensions currently experiencing transformations: the media's (1) institutional responses and campaigns, (2) production of the news, (3) production of editorials, and (4) how media professionals have reacted to populist attacks. There is evidence that journalism has increasingly become a central topic in news texts. We have also cataloged changes in news production routines (e.g., the editors’ hesitancy to send reporters to cover some political events), the use of editorials to reinforce metajournalistic discourses, and shifts in how professionals make sense of their work. Our findings contribute to the broader literature by investigating how traditional borders and values of journalism are renegotiated during institutional crises. In addition, our analytical framework can be applied to other media settings experiencing similar tensions and help underpin the construction of empirical variables to understand meaningful changes in the field. Lastly, this study considers the possible effects that change in norms, routines, and practices can have on the democratic roles of journalism.

Scientific conferences, socialization, and the Covid-19 pandemic: A conceptual and empirical enquiry.

Since the 1970s social analysts have seen communication between scientists not solely as information exchange (the algorithmical model), but as a process of socialization into overlapping and mutually embedded scientific domains (the enculturational model). Under the algorithmical model, the impact of the Covid-19 shutdown on travel would be easily remedied by replacing face-to-face communication with online platforms. Conferences and similar gatherings are costly, elitist, and environmentally damaging, but under the enculturational model abandoning them could be disastrous for science, which depends on the development of cross-national trust and mutual agreements through face-to-face interaction and, in turn, disastrous for science's role in democracy. We explore the problem theoretically and empirically, arguing against recent proposals from some scientists for the wholesale and permanent replacement of conferences with remote communication.

Communicative labor resistance practices: organizing digital news media unions and precarious work

Abstract Unionization among newsworkers has increased in the U.S. since 2015. This article develops a relational theoretical framework to examine communicative labor resistance practices. It is grounded in critical organizational communication, social movement studies, sociology of work, and labor studies, responding to how newsworkers’ union resistance has been undertheorized in extant journalism and media studies research. It argues that communicative labor resistance practices should be based on three propositions: a dialectical process and continual cycle of organizing unions’ resistance and exploitative precarious work; the relationship among heterogenous alternative digital communication labor resistance practices; and a relational approach to digitally-mediated communicative material conditions and discursive forms of resistance rhetoric in social movement genres of organizational communication that mutually co-produce and constitute unions’ resistance practices and organizational self-structuring. This framework has implications for understanding precarious work, class, professional identity, and journalism’s democratic role in society, and for doing labor resistance-oriented communication research.

“Defenders of perversion”: Professing Same-Sex Marriage Rights in the Local Press

This case study provides an important socio-historical snapshot of the same-sex marriage debate in a small city in central Alberta between December 2004 and August 2005. We explore the relationship between professors and small-town newspapers in fostering democratic dialogues on key social issues through an analysis of faculty columns and the responding Letters to the Editor in a local paper. In so doing, this research focuses on two social groups located in a particular social environment, each representing a particular frame: the professors working in the local university who maintained an op-ed column in the local paper and supported a equality frame; and the general public living in Camrose and the surrounding rural area who supported a morality frame. This article contributes to our understanding of scholarly engagement in the town-gown context, the democratic role of the press, and how a particularly contentious social and political issue—same-sex marriage—was experienced and framed by concerned citizens in a small conservative rural city that is also the home to a liberal arts and sciences university campus.

Born out of civil wars: Are former rebel parties an organizationally distinct type of party?

In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of work on the transformation of formerly rebel groups into political parties. However, there is little work that examines the organizational types of parties that formerly armed groups become. Are these parties more likely to exhibit certain organizational characteristics when compared to other parties? This is an important question especially as scholars consider the role these former rebel parties play in the development of peace and democracy in post-civil war politics. Using data from Daly (2020) and Tuncel and Manning (2022) , as well as recently released data from V-Dem on political parties (Coppedge et al 2020) we find that former rebel parties are more clientelistic and personalistic than other parties, even compared to parties in countries where they compete. We suggest that these parties are unlikely to play a constructive role in post-conflict democratization.

The role of Sá Carneiro in the building of the Portuguese democracy: Memory(ies) of the agents of change through the press

This article aims to analyse how the press has depicted Francisco Sá Carneiro, founder of the Social Democratic Party, regarding his role in the construction of Portuguese democracy. Debates on the Portuguese transition to democracy focus almost invariably on its revolutionary phase and on the relative importance of its actors and agents of change. Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to the role of civilian leaders during or after the 74-75 Revolution. In addition, the impact of the media on the historical memory of the Portuguese transition remains an underexplored research topic. Considering the importance of the media in shaping public opinion and in the process of building the historical memory, we will undertake a qualitative analysis of piece of news published on Sá Carneiro and his role in Portuguese democratization. Our research will focus on Portuguese and Spanish largest newspapers in order to perceive if Sá Carneiro’s memory also changed abroad. This article argues that the press hasn’t paid much attention to Sá Carneiro’s role in the democratisation process, echoing mythologized visions of the centrist leader.