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Civil democracy: How partition led into this crisis and what we need to fix it
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The first decades of the 21st century see a world in crisis not less than the early 20th century did. Sociology describes a ’second modernity’ emerging, and a loss of institutional performance and legitimacy, globalizations, social inequalities, economic crises, political violence and terrorism in times of hugely shifting global resource distributions are much the same in both century starts. Behind this similarity, this paper sees one common cause: The Europe of Western Christianity had a specific ‘groups under roofs’ structure that partitioned individuals but linked them as groups in open instutional structures. This model was especially successful and spread its heritage in the form of partitioning forms of democracy across the globe. But partitioning democracy is successful only in ‘groups under roofs’ societies, and hence it did not properly work outside the West, and does neither work on the global level nor in contemporary individualized Western societies. An adequate problem solution capacity can only be (re-)gained with Civil democracy that stores and uses trust not in the form of one-every-four-years ballot mark, but in a (not necessarily but adequately IT-based) system that allows for the flexible storage of trust relations to diverse kind of civil society actors and the support of direct democratic decision making as the norm. As systemic solution, Civil democracy demands a social movement for its realization.
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The institutionalization of party politics is supposed to contribute to the consolidation of democracies. Analysis of Hungary’s democratic backsliding shows, however, that this is not necessarily the case. This article demonstrates that the combination of populist party strategies, polarized party relations, and the inertia of the party system constitutes a significant challenge (here labeled “populist polarization”) to the consolidation of liberal democracy. After considering the applicability of structuralist and transitologist frameworks to the political dynamics in Hungary, the article differentiates the notion of populist polarization from similar concepts and argues that populist polarization in the region poses a more acute danger to high-quality democracy than the much-feared under-institutionalized and fragmented configurations of party politics.
Research on the environmental dimensions of human migration has made important strides in recent years. However, findings have been spread across multiple disciplines with wide-ranging methodologies and limited theoretical development. This article reviews key findings of the field and identifies future directions for sociological research. We contend that the field has moved beyond linear environmental "push" theories toward a greater integration of context, includingmicro-level,meso-level, and macro-level interactions. We highlight findings that migration is often a household strategy to diversify risk (new economics of labor migration theory), interacting with household composition; individual characteristics; social networks; and historical, political, and economic contexts. We highlight promising developments in the field, including the recognition that migration is a long-standing form of environmental adaptation and yet only one among many forms of adaptation. Finally, we argue that sociologists could contribute significantly to migration-environment inquiry through attention to issues of inequality, perceptions, and agency vis-'a-vis structure.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
This four-part work describes and analyses democracy and despotism in tribes, city-states, and nation states. The theoretical framework used in this work combines Weberian, Aristotelian, evolutionary anthropological, and feminist theories in a comparative-historical context. The dual nature of humans, as both an animal and a consciously aware being, underpins the analysis presented.
Part One covers tribes. It uses anthropological literature to describe the “campfire democracy” of the African Bushmen, the Pygmies, and other band societies. Its main focus is on the tribal democracy of the Cheyenne, Iroquois, Huron, and other tribes, and it pays special attention to the role of women in tribal democracies. Part Two describes the city-states of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Canaan-Phoenicia, and includes a section on the theocracy of the Jews. This part focuses on the transition from tribal democracy to city-state democracy in the ancient Middle East – from the Sumerian city-states to the Phoenician. Part Three focuses on the origins of democracy and covers Greece—Mycenaean, Dorian, and the Golden Age. It presents a detailed description of the tribal democracy of Archaic Greece – emphasizing the causal effect of the hoplite-phalanx military formation in egalitarianizing Greek tribal society. Next, it analyses the transition from tribal to city-state democracy—with the new commercial classes engendering the oligarchic and democratic conflicts described by Plato and Aristotle. Part Four describes the Norse tribes as they contacted Rome, the rise of kingships, the renaissance of the city-states, and the parliamentary monarchies of the emerging nation-states. It provides details of the rise of commercial city states in Renaissance Italy, Hanseatic Germany and the Netherlands.
This article investigates women’s economic, political, and social rights in both home and destination countries as potential push and pull factors of female migration. Using a bilateral framework including 104 origin countries and 28 destination countries for the years 1990 and 2000, we document that for female migrants with various levels of education, when women’s economic and social rights at home improve, they are less likely to leave, but women’s political rights are a push factor. Women’s economic rights in destination countries attract female migrants of all education levels but more so those with a tertiary education. Also, women’s political rights in destination countries are a pull factor, but women’s social rights are not.
Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts—and to a lesser extent its economic impacts—on the nation as a whole. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it holds for the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when, and why they matter for attitude formation.
This paper empirically investigates why, between 800 and 1800, the urban center of gravity moved from the Islamic world to Europe. Using a large new city-specific data set covering Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, we unravel the role of geography and institutions in determining long-run city development in the two regions. We find that the main reasons for the Islamic world's stagnation and Europe's longterm success are specific to each region: any significant positive interaction between cities in the two regions hampered by their different main religious orientation. Together, the long-term consequences of a different choice of main transport mode (camel versus ship) and the development of forms of local participative government in Europe that made cities less dependent on the state explain why Europe's urban development eventually outpaced that in the Islamic world.
Individualization theory has been understood as a way of challenging the common paradigms within the studies of social inequality. This shift also addresses how the transnationalization of social inequalities challenges and alters the given framework of institutional settings - nation state (parties), trade unions, welfare state systems and the national sociologies of social inequalities. In this essay I will test the ′cosmopolitan perspective′ and how it relates to social inequality focusing on three cases: (1) the inequality of global risk; (2) the European dynamics of inequality; and (3) transnational inequalities, which emerge from the capacities and resources to transcend borders. Before that I will tackle the questions: What exactly constitutes individualization and to what extent is it displacing class structures?