Role In Political Affairs Research Articles

Separating Politics from Institutional Religion

Nowadays, more than three centuries after John Locke’s affirmation of the separation between state and church, confessional systems of government are still widespread and, even in secular liberal democracies, politics and religion often intermingle. As a result, some ecclesiastical institutions play a significant role in political affairs, while minority groups and individuals having alternative worldviews, values, and lifestyles are frequently discriminated against. Locke’s theory of religious toleration undeniably has some shortcomings, such as the exclusion of Roman Catholics and atheists from toleration and an emphasis on organized religion in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). However, Locke’s theory of toleration, which presents a Christian’s defense of the civil rights of those who have different religious opinions, still provides powerful arguments for the oft-neglected separation of politics from institutional religion, thereby urging us to leave theological dogmas and ecclesiastical authorities out of political life.

Factors Affecting the Political Empowerment of Women: A Case Study of Pakistan

The research paper examines factors affecting women’s political empowerment in Pakistan. Globally, the importance of women’s political empowerment; their representation in legislative assemblies, and their role in the democratic system are much realized. Almost half of the population of the country is consist of female, but still not empowered to play role in the development of the country. Women in Pakistan have less access to education, finance, and politics. This research paper will focus on impediments affecting women’s role in political affairs in Pakistan. The paper will highlight literacy challenges, social and cultural barriers, economic obstacles, and patriarchy as a system affecting overall gender equality and women empowerment in Pakistani society. Smooth running and positive outcomes of any form of a democratic system are not possible without the representation of women. In Pakistan, the general perception is that political affairs are dominated by males and politics is something unfamiliar to women. Women need to argue for their political rights to contribute to the decision-making process. The constitution of Pakistan guarantees women’s political rights. But the social, patriarchal, cultural, and structural barriers are obstacles in their way to political empowerment, and their role in political affairs, at the local, provincial, and national level remains limited. The study aims to explore barriers hindering the growth of political empowerment of women in Pakistan.

Communication and Collective Mentality: Pathways of Mobilisation in Colonial America

The political upheaval that comprised the American Revolutionary era instigated a new social, political, and intellectual consciousness which ultimately shaped an inclusive national identity for colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia. In order to comprehend the depth of such a transformative historical event, it is critical to examine the extensive process that emboldened the colonists, leading them from reluctant opposition to legitimised resistance and finally to the establishment of an organized network which aired American grievances and advertised protests, boycotts, and public denouncements of those deemed unpatriotic. By evaluating the radical developments of the Imperial Crisis via the lens of contemporary scholarship on radicalisation and mobilisation, historians can gain an improved perspective on exactly how eighteenth-century Americans were able to transform mass congregation into a means of political influence. As the study of extremism has been brought to the forefront in recent years, scholars have come to consider radicalisation as a process comprised of discrete developmental phases in which an individual acquires and demonstrates beliefs, feelings, and actions in support of any given group or cause in conflict. With regard to Colonial America, friendships, networks, and committees of correspondence not only moulded a collective mentality, but additionally enabled individuals who previously had no significant role in political affairs to actively participate in local decision-making processes. The Patriot movement burgeoned as a direct result of the fact that they were able to provide discontented and disadvantaged citizens with hope for the future and a definite degree of insurance against misfortune for the present.

On the Antebellum Fringe: Lumbee Indians, Slavery, and Removal

On the Antebellum FringeLumbee Indians, Slavery, and Removal Malinda Maynor Lowery (bio) In 1801 authorities in Robeson County, North Carolina arrested a Lumbee man named Aaron Cumbo for stealing sixpence worth of property from a white man named William Townsend. A few nights after a jury found Cumbo guilty someone shot and killed Townsend's horse, an animal that was undoubtedly worth more than sixpence. Townsend blamed Aaron's brother Elisha Cumbo, declaring they were both "infamous character[s]" and "notorious villains." He admitted that he possessed "no positive proof" that Elisha had killed the horse, but he nevertheless judged Aaron's brother guilty because they had "for a long time carried on an illicit trade." Their illegal network had two headquarters, Townsend avowed. One was in Robeson County; the other was in "a remote part of South Carolina, [which] enables them to do a great deal of mischief with little prospect of detection." The fact that the Cumbos allegedly participated in illegal activity, Townsend proclaimed, was evidence enough to prove that Elisha had gunned down the horse.1 Townsend and seven men retaliated by violently apprehending Elisha, who in turn responded by suing his attackers. The white men, who later described themselves as "industrious, honest, and submissive to the law," defended their actions as permissible albeit outside of the normal "process of law." At the same time, they dismissed Cumbo's right to bring suit as a "defiance of the law." The court disagreed and fined the men fifteen pounds for rioting. When they appealed, a committee of state legislators upheld the court's decision. In essence, a group of landowning whites were informed that they, not a Lumbee Indian man, had acted outside the law in Robeson County. What had started as a sixpence [End Page 40] theft ultimately cost Townsend more than one hundred pounds in fines.2 The 1801 conflict between William Townsend and Elisha Cumbo reveals a long forgotten South—one where citizenship and civic responsibilities did not necessarily adhere to a binary racial divide.3 Arbitrary racial structures may have divided free white citizens from enslaved and non-white residents in later decades, but it was not always the norm. The North Carolina court and legislature of 1801 treated whites and people of color/Indians equally. They did not unilaterally support the extra-legal behavior of white men who punished people of color for perceived transgressions. Whites in Robeson County may have perceived that Indian families were prospering unjustly, but local courts nevertheless were willing to uphold the latter's rights to personal safety and property. The outcome of the Cumbo case stemmed from the fact that in 1801 "citizenship" was deemed a Tenth Amendment issue: one left to the states because nothing in the US Constitution specifically conferred upon the central government the power to define citizenship.4 Each state had a different constellation of laws indicating who could participate in the political process. In North Carolina, the 1778 Constitution allowed Indians and other free men of color to vote as long as they maintained additional markers of legitimacy: they had fought against the British Empire, paid taxes, and owned sufficient property. They made Elisha Cumbo as much a citizen of the state as William Townsend. Throughout North Carolina, free people of color consistently exercised their right to vote. One Robeson County resident even remembered that Indians possessed more political rights than white Loyalists after the Revolution.5 By the eve of the Civil War, however, North Carolina had stripped the Lumbee of their citizenship. Whereas in 1801 the Cumbos could both play a role in political affairs and participate in illegal activities, fifty years later the white community rested easier knowing that the state had turned Lumbees into degenerate lawbreakers outside the body politic. In essence, the assumptions about Indians that had shaped William Townsend's assault on Cumbo became the dominant narrative in North Carolina. Their presumed widespread participation in criminal activity—particularly making and selling liquor, trading with slaves, carrying weapons, and larceny—became a kind of venal litany that justified disfranchisement and marginalization from southern society.6 And yet physically the Lumbee remained, deeply rooted within their [End...

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Arien Mack in 2014, social research entered its eightieth year of continuous publication, and this year I entered my forty-fifth year of editing the journal. One anniversary is public, the other is personal. Both seem remarkable. Since its founding as the journal of the University in Exile, which in 1934 was accredited as the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, Social Research has been concerned with the relationship between theory and practice and, more simply, with the intersection between political and social issues and the academic enterprise. While the papers in each issue are largely written by people within the academy, the subjects explored have been chosen because of their relevance to our political and social lives—not because of their relevance to the arcane subjects that are often the focus of heated academic debate. Looking through the early issues of the journal, it is clear that while they were not thematic, as almost all issues have been since around 1975, their focus was on the economic and political questions that arose during the Second World War and the post-war period. Those early issues were mainly authored by the predominantly European founding members of the University in Exile and the early Graduate Faculty, many of whom had played some role in political affairs in Europe prior to the war and in the United States after coming here, such as Hans Speier, whose brief biography (like those of all the authors whose work is republished here) appears at the end of this issue. This explains, at least in part, why the journal was so deeply engaged with concerns outside the academy. [End Page xxv] That focus began to shift in the 1950s. Fewer and fewer Social Research authors were members of the Graduate Faculty of the New School, and the center of gravity of the articles that appeared veered away from political problems of the moment and toward more sociological questions. Not surprisingly, that shift largely coincided with the retirement and death of the journal’s founders. As an inexperienced editor, I was faced in 1970 with whether to keep up the profile Social Research had developed by then, as more or less a journal of sociology, or try a different path that might nevertheless maintain a connection with the journal’s roots. I chose the latter path, and within a few years had moved from issues that were primarily miscellanies of essays to ones that were entirely thematic and for which all the papers were invited. The themes varied widely, from The Religious-Secular Divide, Courage, Boredom, and Is Peace Possible? to Happiness, Shame, Hope and Despair, Punishment, International Justice, and the Limits of Knowledge. In 1988 we initiated an ongoing series that addressed transitions to democracy around the world, beginning with several issues on East and Central Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and continuing with issues on South Africa, China, Iran, India, and Egypt, to name just a few. This is another way in which Social Research has kept faith with its roots. We continue to seek out authors not only from Europe but other parts of the world as well in an effort to prevent too provincial a focus and to try to maintain the international strengths of the early issues. Also in 1988, the first Social Research conference took place. Entitled “In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Diseases,” it inaugurated in what became the Social Research Conference Series at the New School. By the time this issue is published, we will have held the thirty-second conference in the series, “Fear of Art.” The papers from each conference are published as special issues of the journal. These public conferences have immensely increased the journal’s outreach because they usually attract large audiences, both in person and online, and have considerably [End Page xxvi] amplified our mission to bring scholarship to bear on the urgent political and social issues of our time. Even in these days in which small magazines and journals are suffering from the many changes in technology and the enormous proliferation of online...

Gauging Arab Support for Democracy

The Arab world stands out as a region for its limited progress toward democracy. At the same time, eight national surveys in six Arab countries between 2000 and 2004 show that 90 percent or more of those interviewed would like to see a democratic political system in their country. This does not necessarily imply support for secular democracy, however. Roughly half of the respondents who support democracy also believe that Islam should play an important role in political affairs. It remains to be seen whether popular support for democracy, coupled with recent, albeit limited political openings in some Arab countries, will lead to sustained democratic transitions.

Opinion polls, Political Elites and Party Competition in Post-Communist Bulgaria

Opinion polls have taken a high-profile role in political affairs in East European countries over the course of the past decade. Policy-makers, politicians and political parties made much use of polls in the early years of democratic transition, although for various reasons they were received with significant scepticism by each of these users and by citizens alike. In the post-communist era, as revealed in recent studies and interviews conducted among the Bulgarian elite, significant use of opinion polls has been made by political parties anxious to bolster their own position and undermine that of their rivals. Sometimes there has been real collusion between parties, pollsters and journalists, implying that the public is correct to be sceptical. Polls therefore perform the role of enhancing the position of politicians, as identified by Schumpeter, rather than contributing to the empowerment of the population, as envisaged by Gallup.

Power and Society; a Framework for Political Inquiry.

In Power and Society, Harold D. Lasswell collaborates with a brilliant young philosopher, Abraham Kaplan, to formulate basic theoretical concepts and hypotheses of political science, providing a framework for further inquiry into the political process. This is a classic book of political theory written by two of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century.The authors find their subject matter in interpersonal relations, not abstract institutions or organizations, and their analysis of is related to human values. They argue that revolution is a part of the political process, and ideology has a role in political affairs. The importance of class, both as social fact and social symbol, is reflected in their detailed analysis, and emphasis on merit rather than rank, skill rather than status, as keystones of democratic rule.The authors note that is only one of the values and instruments manifested in interpersonal relations; it cannot be understood in abstraction from other values. Lasswell and Kaplan call for the replacement of power politics, both in theory and in practice, by a conception in which attention is focused on the human consequences of as the major concern of both political thought and political action. The basic discussions of core concepts in political science make Power and Society of continuing importance to scholars, government officials, and politicians.