The Ideological Convergence of Civil Society Organizations and Newspapers in Turkey

This study investigates the extent to which newspapers are polarized in representing civil society organizations in Turkey. In examining the news in 15 printed newspapers and 2 online newspapers in 2017, we found that (1) 1499 associations and 499 foundations were mentioned but not equally distributed across the newspapers, (2) Turkish newspapers’ coverage of associations/foundations was affected by the type of association/foundation (religious/conservative vs. secular) and newspaper (pro-government vs. anti-government), (3) when news about an association/foundation appeared in pro-government newspapers, it did not appear in anti-government newspapers, and vice versa, and (4) secular associations/foundations were covered more often by anti-government newspapers than by pro-government newspapers. We therefore argue that in countries such as Turkey, where civil society organizations have historically been closely allied with state or political ideologies, newspapers’ political stances affect the media coverage of civil society organizations.

     

INFORMATIZATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A POLITICAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

In recent years, both academic and policy making circles in the UK have shown a growing interest in the potential uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the delivery of government services. Much of the academic literature has been centred around the concept of 'informatization', and it has been suggested that the new technologies are transforming public services. Key theorists in the field of Public Administration have argued that informatization is one of a number of major trends likely to shape public services in the twenty-first century. However, the dominant theoretical approaches within public administration- those rooted in political sciencesuggest that inertia and stability are the norm in the public sector; clearly there is something of a contradiction between these two broad approaches. This paper outlines three political science perspectives that might be used in analysing informatization: the policy networks approach, rational choice and the new institutionalism. Evidence is then drawn from the social security, health care and social care sectors of the British public sector and related to the political science frameworks in order to examine their utility. Not only do these frameworks rightly highlight the incremental nature of change, but they also help to explain important variations in ICT use across the three policy sectors. It is concluded that combining the study of informatization and political science offers a fruitful avenue for future research.     

The Social Backgrounds of Nazi Leaders: A Statistical Analysis of Political Elites in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933

This article compares the social backgrounds of Nazi leaders and representatives of democratic parties in the Weimar Republic. It does not advance any overarching new narrative on Nazism’s social origins, but rather aims to present a nuanced statistical picture of Weimar’s political elites. The results of this analysis are derived from an index of German members of parliament and from a new dataset, which has recently been collected from the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Germany’s largest biographical encyclopaedia. Together, these two samples cover more than 2000 German politicians, industrialists, diplomats, political writers, academics, high state officials, and important journalists. This article reveals sociological differences between the politicians who led the Nazi party in parliament and those elites that promoted Nazism in the media, in academia, or within the German civil service. While Nazi politicians in the Reichstag were recruited from a variety of social classes, ranging from industrial workers to members of the aristocracy, National Socialist elites outside the parliament typically belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum and sociologically resembled the highly educated members of democratic and liberal parties. Overall, the picture of a generation of Nazi leaders emerges that was sociologically far more heterogeneous than is often recognized by historians.     

Focusing on Focusing Events: Event Selection,Media Coverage,and the Dynamics of Contentious Meaning‐Making

Despite the prevalent assumption among scholars of social movements and contentious politics that transformative contentious events are also the focus of public attention and discussion, there has been little attempt to substantiate this. After making a case for why to focus on focusing events and suggesting that these events should be thought of as products of a dialogical contentious meaning‐making process, we develop a coverage attribute‐based method for identifying focusing events. For illustrative purposes, we apply our method to the coverage of contentious events during the “first” intifada by Israeli‐Jewish, Jewish settler, and Palestinian newspapers. Findings from analyses of 11,868 news items reveal that newspapers are likely to strategically quiet contentious events that are strategically amplified by newspapers affiliated with opposing or targeted parties, and vice versa, depending on their interpretation of these events as political opportunities or threats. Analyses of variations across and within contending parties reveal the role of structure and agency in the dialogical seesaw‐like dynamics of contentious meaning‐making.     

The public sphere and debates about europe in Britain

This article undertakes an analysis of British public debates on European integration by recourse to an original data set on political claims-making. The public sphere is conceptualized as a space where citizens interact through their acts of public communication. Such public communications are an important source of the Europe-building process, because they potentially provide public inputs to the elite-led processes of European political institutional integration. Our empirical findings show that British public debates are internalized within the nation-state rather than creating links to supra- or transnational European polities. In addition, we find relatively low levels of civil society engagement compared to that of political elites, and a high level of political competition between the two major political parties, Labour and Conservative. Overall, we argue that elite ambivalence to Britain's position within the European Union has created this climate of uncertainty and political competition over Europe.     

Placing democratization within the global frame: sociological approaches to universalism, and democratic contestation in contemporary Turkey

The process of democratization in Turkey is enhanced by both proximity to the European Union's enlargement process and universalistic discourses of personhood rights, and, at the same time, compromised by a nationalistic rejection of global human rights and democratic norms and state‐led resistance to political pluralism. One key feature of the democratization process is the way in which contending parties—the Kemalist elite, religious and ethnic minorities, the European Union—attempt to legitimise their claims by appeals to universal principles. The paper examines three sociological/social theory approaches to universalism (Beck, Laclau, Robertson) and demonstrates their usefulness for an understanding of political contestation in contemporary Turkey. It is argued that the work of these theorists allows us to move beyond a simplistic polarisation of the universal and the particular, where the state represents the universal and minorities the particular. The conceptualisation of universalism advanced by Beck, Laclau and Robertson points to the need to understand the processes of democratization within a sociologically informed globalization framework.     

Politics in Spain: A Case of Monitory Democracy

Analysing the current political context in Spain is a major challenge to political theory. Spain is experiencing the accumulation of trends that in recent years have focused the attention of most theorists and political scientists: discrediting of the major parties, falling numbers of party members, disaffection, etc. In parallel, this trend has been accompanied by citizen mobilisations that, since 15 May 2011, are manifest in numerous channels and strategies. The aim of this paper was to analyse the complex Spanish context from the monitory democracy proposal. The results show how in recent years processes of public scrutiny have been consolidated through a range of citizen initiatives. The study offers an in-depth analysis of the main characteristics of the most notable cases and monitoring initiatives, and also reflects on their democratising potential.     

Who Wants a Deliberative Public Sphere?1

Democratic theorists and social scientists suggest that a deliberative public sphere would be good for democracy by maximizing emancipatory possibilities and providing broad legitimacy to political decision making. But do ordinary Americans actually want a deliberative public sphere? I examine this question in the context of four contentious “religion and science” debates. Through a multidimensional evaluation exercise with 62 ordinary respondents, I find that evaluation of public representatives in these debates tends to favor open‐mindedness and ongoing debate. Further, respondents explicitly discount elected representatives who participate in public debate precisely because they are seen as violating deliberative norms through their affiliation with electoral politics. Respondents want a deliberative public sphere. However, this desire reflects an understanding of the public sphere and institutional politics as disconnected arenas with incompatible rules and objectives, raising multiple questions for democratic theory and for political sociology.     

FROM MEDIA POLITICS TO E-PROTEST

New forms of political expression are often taken as further evidence of the 'cultural turn' within contemporary societies. Taking two recent cases - the use of popular culture in the election campaigns of British political parties (and particularly the Labour Party) and the so-called 'Carnival Against Capital' of June 18th 1999 - this article argues for caution in assuming that such cultural modi vivendi necessarily require culturalist forms of explanation and analysis. Weargue that both established political parties and extra-parliamentary social movements have found new opportunities for political communication and mobilization through media and information technology (particularly the Internet). However, the resource and organizational problems they confront remain the same, as does the familiar instrumental rationality of their actions. Rather than leading us to abandon established analytical tools such as political intermediation, political opportunity structures or resource mobilization, shifting opportunities and conditions require the adaptation and extension of such concepts. In this spirit, we attempt to offer an analysis of the cultural mode adopted by parties and movements without losing sight of their broader goals and motivations.     

Twenty‐Five Years After the Fall of Communism: The Cultural Peculiarities of Fighting Corruption and Building Civil Society in Romania

Even when the domestic political system has undergone reform, it sometimes seems unlikely that any outside force can introduce enough of a “carrot and stick” approach to persuade a country to maintain momentum. This article is concerned with understanding the cultural peculiarities of fighting corruption and building civil society in Romania, where despite the tough EU monitoring and domestic anti‐sleaze efforts, corruption, and low trust remain significant problems. Many of the theorists in the post‐communist literature argue that socioeconomic factors and the communist legacy have weakened post‐communist civil society in the region. This article explores the question whether corruption has replaced the legacy of communism as a factor undermining trust in others and government in Romania and presents an examination of the association between corruption and post‐communist civil society. The article argues that future research needs to switch focus from discussing Romanian social, political, and cultural behaviors from a longue durée perspective to evaluating the impact of political corruption on trust and, hence, civil society in Romania.     

Exploring the Concepts of Recognition and Shame for Social Work

Recognition and shame are both concepts that potentially offer social workers a structure to build practice on; two states experienced by both social workers and service users. ‘Recognition’, within social, political and economic thought, has been established as a field in which inequality and exclusion can be analysed. Social work theorists have also made inroads into exploring its reach. ‘Shame’ in twentieth century and contemporary sociological and psychoanalytical accounts, is understood as a force in limiting human agency, well-being and capacity This paper briefly outlines some of the defining ideas in circulation in relation to recognition and shame, and then briefly considers how psychoanalytical and contemporary social structural analysis builds on this, making links to contemporary social work thinking throughout. The paper also specifically considers some of the uses of recognition and shame for thinking about social worker and service user ‘well-being’, and the connections, through both the relational and the socio-political, which inflect social work practice.     

“The ANC brand is bulletproof”: accountability and the logic of the brand in South African politics

In this paper, I draw on analyses of the brand in the commercial world to explore the implications of branding when applied to political parties and politicians. Specifically, I examine the ramifications of the logic of the brand for accountability within a multi-party democracy. I argue that in branding discourse, the brand serves as a risk-management strategy by creating relations of loyalty with consumers, designed to secure forgiveness for possible transgressions on the part of the brand and thus protect brand equity. Through an analysis of how branding discourse is applied to South African politics by journalists, political parties and participants in social media, I show how in this arena, branding logic works to defer accountability for political parties and politicians who fail to deliver on election promises. Culpability becomes assessed in terms of damage to brand.     

Current supply and demand for neopopulism in Latin America

The emergence of neopopulism in several countries in Latin America has been described by political science literature as the success of a political strategy in which a leader, generally bearing a strong personality and charismatic appeal, seeks popular support in an almost direct form, and overshadows political parties, the external mechanisms of control which define a democratic regime (Roberts 1996, 2003, 2006, Weyland 1999a, 1999b, Knight 1998, Connif 1999). This article adopts this definition of the concept and argues that the success of this strategy can be analyzed as a relation between supply and demand for populism. The supply refers to the political process which allows leaders to make use of features such as charisma and anti-political and polarizing speech to obtain the support of the public based on their non-programmatic and personal qualities. The demand is defined as the presence of certain preferences within the public, which increase the chance of success of the neopopulist strategy adopted by the leaders. Amidst that relationship, we can place fragile intermediate institutions, mainly the political parties, which would limit themselves to working as vehicles centered on the figure of the leader in order to allow his success among voters. Before going any deeper into the arguments regarding the relationship between supply and demand for neopopulism, the next item will discuss the concept of populism in its more contemporary form.     

Democratizing the Refugee Regime Complex

This article considers how civil society organizations (CSOs) may be understood in relation to the global refugee regime complex. It describes how several leading scholars have conceptualized refugee/internally displaced person (IDP) governance and explores how the neoliberal cognitive frame is impeding the possibility of democratic agency among IDPs/refugees. It argues that CSOs can play essential roles in encouraging democratization of the refugee regime complex by working to reshape their prevailing frame or orientation. Civil society organizations can also work to foster critical reflexivity among the parties that govern refugees and within that population as well. As an example of one such effort, the article employs Fraser’s (Scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010) democratization framework in a brief case analysis of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Deshodaya initiative in Sri Lanka that has sought to enable IDPs in that nation to embrace critical reflexivity to reimagine themselves as governing agents who can redefine state and international organization-based definitions of refugee protection. Overall, the analysis suggests that civil society organizations can act successfully and intentionally to open democratic spaces in which refugees/IDPs may find possibilities to exercise their innate agential possibility.     

Antipolitics and Counterpolitics in Nepal’s Civil Society: The Case of Nepal’s Citizens’ Movement

This article considers the relationship of civil society to the domain of the political from the actors’ perspectives. It explores the attempt by a citizens’ movement (CMDP) in Nepal to construct new political realities in the context of the autocratic regime of king Gyanendra and then during the democratic transition. This was, paradoxically, to be achieved through the construction of an apolitical space. Theoretically, this production of apoliticality by civil society actors shows that civil society is not only implicated in the expansion of what is understood as ‘political’ but also in setting its boundaries. The broader aims of the article are to contribute to the ethnography of civil society and to add to current understandings of the relationship of actually existing civil societies to the political domain. Practically, it argues that debates over whether civil society is or is not political in the Nepal case and normative positions within development circles that it should not be political are misconceived since civil society is a site for the production of both politicality and apoliticality.     

Approaches to civil society in authoritarian states: The case of China

Both civil society in China and research on Chinese civil society have developed profoundly over the last three decades. Research on Chinese civil society can be classified into two categories: a structure‐oriented approach and an agency‐oriented approach. Both approaches acknowledge the state's dominant position in restricting the political space for civil society engagement, but they differ in their understanding of state–civil society relations. A key concern within the structure‐oriented approach is to analyze how the autonomy of civil society organizations is shaped by their structural position vis‐à‐vis the state. Agency‐oriented scholars, on the other hand, reject the analytical focus on structural autonomy. Instead, they build on a more nuanced understanding of the authoritarian yet nonmonolithic context in China and analyze how civil society organizations develop specific strategies to be able to operate within their restricted political space. In particular, agency‐oriented scholars have analyzed two ways in which organizations exercise agency: by strategically developing formal or informal ties with state actors and by bringing their engagement into the public sphere to raise awareness and express their voice. What could be further developed in the agency‐oriented approach is, however, a deeper understanding of the political dimensions of civil society agency.     

Modernity and the development of PR in Norway: Influences and interactions

This article examines the relationship between Norwegian PR history and the development of modernity. The theoretical starting point is based on historical sociology and especially theories of modernity as formulated by Anthony Giddens and Jürgen Habermas. The study concerns the period from 1800 to 1913, where Norway may be defined as a modern capitalist society. The study shows that there is a mutual interaction between PR history and the development of modernity in Norway: in the same way that PR is a product of modernity, PR activities are also important for the development of modernity. Basic concepts in this development are rationalism (science and technology), nationalism, parliament, law/justice, democratisation, freedom of speech, public spheres, individualism, elitism, discipline/control, civil society, capitalism, industrialism, political parties, and mass participation in politics.     

Citizenship,Pluralism, and Modern Public Space

The article begins with the realist assumption in political science that posits that political violence and chaos occurs in the absence of the state, and that the international system is congenitally anarchic. Using the Y2K problem and the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York as two instances of violent political phenomena within global modernity, this article examines notions of citizenship, pluralism, and their relationships with modern public space through the lens of 'public disaster' scenarios in which the breakdown of centralized systems of power tends to lead to chaos. However, public disasters also appear to create the opposite effect of bonding communities together in the face of adversity that leads to greater social cohesion rather than the breakdown of social institutions. The article tries to resolve this apparent enigma through several theories of public space, democracy, and civil society.     

Organizing Sexualities,Organized Inequalities: Lesbians and Gay Men in Public Service Occupations

This article examines the experiences of lesbians and gay men who are employed in a variety of public service occupations in the UK, drawing upon interview material gathered during a broader research project on lesbian and gay self-organization within the public sector trade union UNISON. It forges pathways through hitherto unexplored territories by concentrating upon career trajectories beyond the closet, arguing that those who dare to come out and proud in public sector workplaces will tread a precarious tightrope between being out and pursued for their specialist knowledges and out and persecuted for their presumed perversities. Although many public sector employers have endorsed equal opportunities policies which include lesbians and gay men, and although these have been vital in alleviating some forms of discrimination, it is argued that such measures have been incapable of resolving the more profound double-binds etched into our organizations, whereby sexualities are reproduced as inequalities, while sexuality itself is eclipsed from the organization's self-consciousness. It is claimed that in virtue of their unique positions and perspectives, lesbian and gay employees have become the carriers of the sexual consciousness of their organizations. However, it is also acknowledged that the political agenda on lesbian and gay rights will not remedy deeper ignorances and broader injustices, unless the heterosexual majority and other non-heterosexual minorities are also parties to these debates.