Intergenerationale Fertilitätstransmission in Ost- und Westdeutschland

This study addresses intergenerational fertility transmission: How similar is the fertility behavior of parents and their children? I first discuss the implications of intergenerational fertility transmission for population development and review prominent theoretical mechanisms of fertility transmission. Using data from the German National Education Panel (NEPS), fertility transmission in East and West Germany is compared with fertility correlations and quantile regression models for count data. For the analysis cohorts (1944–66) we find relatively strong fertility transmission in West Germany but no effect in East Germany. In West Germany the impact of parents’ fertility is particularly strong in small and in large families. In line with previous research, the results support that intergenerational fertility transmission is stronger in liberal democratic societies compared with regulative restrictive regimes, such as the communist East. The article concludes that the intergenerational continuity in fertility that is usually found in developed societies was disrupted by the regulative communist regime in East Germany. Fertility in one generation therefore is generated at the intersection of family internal dynamics and macro-structural contexts.     

Decency and the Liberal International (Dis)Order: Moral Limits and the Possibilities of a Global Pluralist Politics

This article analyzes the tension between the liberal ideals of freedom and equality and cultural difference. It argues that decency has become intertwined with the fragility of the liberal international order by providing a problematic threshold of international justice. The idea is that as global pressures mount for protecting the human dignity of persons/peoples, they also congeal or harden decency’s political and social constraints (impartiality, neutrality, and basic rights enforcement) on engaging others. Decency as a moral threshold of international justice, the article claims, has become static or a self-reinforcing limitation. This contradictory decency/dignity dynamic of the liberal international order not only explains how states have aggressively asserted their interests by absorbing these constraints, but also how politics can limit the pragmatic potential to bridge the various social gaps in values and belief systems. This article seeks to conceptualize a pluralist ethos that shows how such constraints can be reimagined as, or turned into, the conditions of possibility/freedom that transition us to a global pluralist politics. It concludes with a discussion of the refugee crisis and Islamism, showing how both cases resonate the felt stigmatization and alienation within the liberal international order.     

The media and the formation of the public sphere in the new Independent States

This paper analyses the development of the media in the successor states of the USSR from a public sphere perspective. This approach allows the post‐communist media to be placed within the context of the process of democratization that these societies are currently experiencing by postulating that the role of the media in this process should be to provide a symbolic space where the economic and political dimensions of the process of transition offer themselves to the comprehension of citizens, and where those who hold representative opinions on this process are able to express themselves. This article argues that two main obstacles exist to the development of East European media as a public sphere institution. These are the various means of control East European governments employ to check the freedom of the press, and some of the profit‐oriented journalistic practices market‐driven media entrepreneurs are introducing in the East European media field. In its conclusion, this article argues that media policies in the New Independent States should specifically aim at developing the media as a public sphere institution rather than simply an industry.     

Middle class identities in a neoliberal age: tensions between contested authenticities

This paper explores in‐depth interviews on aspects of middle class identity in a neoliberal age, taking the case of Chile's rapid and stark transition to a neoliberal economic model which was imposed by a dictatorship but later reproduced during democracy. ¹ The paper reveals that there are no challenges to middle class identities (eg from the working class, or peasants). In this respect, these are neo‐liberal middle class identities in that their way of thinking is preconditioned by market dominance. Informed by Bourdieu's views on class identities, this article emphasises the horizontal, non‐hierarchical nature of contemporary class taste, and contributes to debates on stratification and culture, settling accounts with older class theory which perceives contests between the popular and middle classes. Notwithstanding this, however, I argue that processes of horizontal differentiation do involve tensions between cultural and moral boundaries. This article therefore also offers an alternative approach for exploring how middle class identities experience processes of individualization. It is argued that individualization processes should be placed in social and ethical registers as they could be in tension with various ways of understanding authenticity: being true to oneself or to one's origins.     

Unpolitical solutionism: Wealth elite sentiments against democracy and politics

The last few decades have been marked by discourses that challenge many basic presumptions supporting liberal democracy. Populist parties in particular have raised criticism against democratic systems, and authoritarian programmes have made electoral gains. This article offers the elite's perspective on this phenomenon, which is often discussed in the context of lower income groups. Drawing from qualitative interviews with 90 Finnish top earners, the article shows how wealth elites sustain strong discontent towards liberal democracy and see it as an ineffective and sometimes fundamentally flawed system. They are concerned with its alleged (in)efficiency and disagreements typical of democratic processes and are correspondingly fascinated by solutions that are presented as self-evident but that no one has the courage to execute. In this article, we refer to this type of reasoning by introducing and developing the term unpolitical solutionism, which refers to a preoccupation with quick solutions to complex problems that are political in nature. The concept of unpolitical solutionism builds on discussions of unpolitical democracy (Urbinati) and technosolutionism (Morozov) and brings them to our dialog. By analysing wealth elites' views in a Nordic democracy and by developing the concept of unpolitical solutionism, this article contributes to recent discussions on different forms of unpolitical argumentation in the context of (liberal) economic thinking.     

Muslim Political Activism or Political Activism by Muslims? Secular and Religious Identities Amongst Muslim Arab Activists in the United States and United Kingdom

Scholarship on Muslim political mobilisation in the West has developed as an important counterpoint to public discourse, which has tended to cast Muslims as a threat to social cohesion, liberal democracy, and national security. But even as scholarly literature has shed light on civic participation among Muslims, it has sidelined the diversity of political identities and values that motivate them. Most, if not all, Muslims in the West find their identities politicised in some way, but the question of whether this leads to a consensus amongst Muslims about the role of religion in public life often remains unexamined. In this article we draw on interviews with seventy-eight activists in Britain and the United States who are both Muslim and Arab to complicate ideas about the political mobilisation of Muslims in the West. Respondents, we show, are far from unified in their views on religion as a basis for political action and mobilisation. Some are keen to place Islam squarely in mainstream political spaces; most, however, are insistent that Islam should remain a private faith and identity and that political mobilisation should take place under the aegis of Arabness or other ‘secular’ identities. Using theoretical perspectives on the public sphere, we explain the complexity of our respondents' political identities and activism. Our overall aim is to broaden perspectives on the ways in which people from Muslim backgrounds participate in public, political life in Western contexts.     

The Fate of Former East German Police in Reunified Germany, 1990–1996: The Dialectics of Inclusion and Exclusion

This article analyzes the vetting of former East German police in Berlin and Brandenburg in the context of the former East Germany's transition to democracy and German unification. Police are one of the most critical and sensitive sectors of the civil service and typically, along with teachers, among the first groups to be vetted in the context of democratic transitions. The German case illustrates the often unpredictable and inconsistent approaches to vetting that led to very different outcomes throughout the East. It identifies several factors that influenced vetting and employment prospects for former East German police officers. These included political geography, who did the vetting, how a candidate's past was interpreted (whether aggravating or mitigating circumstances were weighed), the institutional arrangements for vetting, state‐mandated guidelines or criteria for determining suitability, and timing.     

The Child of the Common: Governing Children in the Freetown Christiania,Denmark

Children in the intentional community of Christiania, Denmark, are seen as belonging to a flock. They experience a relatively high degree of freedom and autonomy as well as collective supervision/control. Departing from Foucault's conceptualisation of pastoral power and interviews conducted in Christiania, this article explores what the idea of the child as belonging to the common/collective may imply for the governance of children. A unique combination of freedom and supervision, individualism and collectivism, results in a form of responsibilisation that aims to strengthen the community, unlike neo‐liberal responsibilisation, which leaves the individual alone with the freedom to take care of herself.     

The arrival of critical citizens: decline of political trust and shifting public priorities in China

Political trust has been in decline in China. In this article, we capture this decline as reflecting the modernization of Chinese political culture. While the government managed to deliver a sustained period of rapid economic growth, the public's trust in it is diminishing through two mechanisms. On the one hand, Chinese citizens are acquiring stronger liberal democratic values, which make citizens more critical toward government institutions. On the other hand, changing political culture is also shown in the citizens’ shifting of their priorities toward the expansion of freedom and empowerment of citizens. Decades of socioeconomic modernization, therefore, meant that the era of critical citizens has arrived in China.     

Urban Political Theory and the Symmetrical Model of Community Power in Singapore

Modernity's concern within metropolitan regimes includes the revival of community power through 'growth machines' and 'urban regime' theory. This paper introduces the symmetrical model of community power for the creation of civil society in urban centres like Singapore which, apodictically, represents a 'First World' city-state in a 'Third World' region. Singapore's urban growth engines falls within a variety of state-sanction and quasi-private metropolitan urban regimes that have contributed to innovative uses of human and material resource allocation. But can the people creatively empower themselves? The model is premised on liberal democratic ideals of community empowerment, and represents a plausible alternative to paternalism in preparation for the uncertainties of modernity in the twenty-first century.     

From communist control to glasnost and back?: Media freedom and control in the former Soviet Union

The last decade has seen dramatic changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: the end of the Cold War with the West; the loosening of the Soviet Union's hold on part of Germany; movements for independence by regions in the USSR; and the public rejection of Communism by Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, as well as by key leaders within the Soviet Union. Radical changes in political philosophy have been accompanied by transformations in mass media communication.These changes are inextricably linked to how public relations is practiced in these nations, many of which are attempting, to varying degrees, to adopt a democratic system of government. This article frames the role of public relations in a self-governing society; discusses three environmental factors that affect the practice of socially responsible public relations, reviews the historical media philosophy of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; and examines examples of media practice that have occurred during the region's transformation and their implications for media freedom and independence, and for the practice of public relations.     

Surveying the European Public Space - A Political and Research Agenda

This paper examines the reasons why it is justified to talk about a European 'democratic deficit'. The creation and consolidation of a European public space necessitates conceptual clarification at the normative theoretical level - as liberal democracy is historically closely bound to the nation-state - and action at the policy and political levels. A Union of European Citizens is a step towards, but not equivalent to, a democratic Union based on European citizenship. Formal announcements, normative convictions, or even institutional reforms are not enough to guarantee openness or support contestation. European democracy is de facto a process to be observed but it is also a project to be defined. The article outlines an agenda for European democracy both with regard to political deliberation and empirical research.     

Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

Mujeres '94

ABSTRACT

Periods of democratic transition may provide space for increased political participation by women. Often, however, women's participation inexplicably falls off after the transition period to former low levels. This article argues that the form women's participation takes in transitions is crucial to both the shape of the resulting new democracy, and the subsequent impact of the new democratic institutions on building or sustaining a women's movement. A case study of the 1992-1994 transition period in El Salvador suggests that women must be present and contribute to the transition; form autonomous organizations but remain engaged with the state; and transform their political behavior from opposition to interaction with the new state.     

‘Coming Down to the Shop’: Trajectories of Hadhrami Women into Indonesian Public Realms

This article is concerned with the trajectories of Indonesian women of Hadhrami-Arab descent into public realms. It enquires how their agency has developed out of a particular diasporic tradition that has brought a gender order to colonial Indonesia characterised by a rigid division of public and domestic domains. In Indonesia, Hadhrami concepts of the public and domestic encountered local and governmental gender regimes and experienced considerable transformations in recent decades. The article shows how Hadhrami women coped with this dynamic and manifold field of gender relations and examines the expansion of their agency into Indonesian public realms paying particular attention to their economic activities, their public roles as skilled employees and professionals, and their engagement in the women's wings of Hadhrami-Islamic organisations. The article concludes that their deployment of particular Islamic discourses stressing piousness through the construction of a gendered hierarchy in the domestic but not in the public sphere underpins their agency in today's Indonesia which witnesses a general trend towards the appearance of self-consciously pious Muslim women.     

The genealogical imagination: the inheritance of interracial identities

The aim of this article is to examine ethnographically how ideas of descent, biology and culture mediate ideas about the inheritance of racial identities. To do this, the article draws upon interviews with the members of interracial families from Leicester, a city situated in the East Midlands region of England. The article focuses upon the genealogical narratives of the female members of interracial families who live in an ethnically diverse inner‐city area of Leicester. Attention is paid to the ways in which the women mobilise and intersect ideas about kinship, ancestry, descent, belonging, place, biology and culture when they think about the inheritance of their own and/or their children's interracial identities. The article's emphasis upon the constitution of interracial identities contributes to the sociological study of race and genealogy by exploring the racialised fragmentation of ideas of inheritance and descent across racial categories and generations.     

The Goals of History Teaching

Abstract

The following article is an excerpt of a speech given by Larry Diamond to those participating in the 1996 Civitas Panamericano Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his speech, Dr. Diamond included a comprehensive survey of the state of stable, liberal democratic government in the Americas. He outlined the multiple levels of development required to achieve stable, liberal democratic institutions, but he focused the major portion of his address on that one level “indispensable for a stable, liberal, and effective democracy”—the individual citizen. At that level, civic education, both formal and informal, is required. The editors of The Social Studies offer readers Dr. Diamond's concept of educating for democracy, hoping that the excerpts will result in our readers' critical reflection on the revival of civic education in the United States and in other parts of the Americas.     

Women's self‐presentation and the transition from classroom to workplace

Organizations place context‐specific appearance demands on women — demands that often echo wider inequalities, require adaptation of self‐presentation and impact on women's careers. Despite this, the effect of life and career stage transition on women's self‐presentation and embodied identities remains largely unexplored. Drawing on a qualitative study of young British women's body modification, this article examines what impact transitioning from education into the world of work has on women's self‐presentation and body modification regimes and their embodied identities. Body modification here refers to all methods women use to alter their physical body and appearance (e.g., invasive or non‐invasive; self‐administered or other‐administered; permanent or temporary), provided the intention of their use is primarily to alter the user's physical appearance. Expectations of transition, the impact of entering the workplace and of career establishment are considered as well as the significance of career stage and vulnerability for resistance and negotiation of organizational expectations. Transition of life stage is found to be a catalyst for self‐presentation change. The transition from education to work is identified as having a significant impact on body modification practices across workplaces.     

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt,Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face‐to‐face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexander's performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexander's concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.     

The impact of privatization and change of social security systems upon living conditions of east German households

After the collapse of the communist regime East Germany became the prime example of a ‘Big Bang’ strategy of transformation. Rapid marketization and privatization brought about a disastrous economic downturn. But immense transfer payments from West Germany and the import of a well‐developed system of social security institutions accompanied the transformation, minimizing social costs. This article summarizes the main developments and analyzes their impact on the living conditions of East German households. The indicators presented cover labour force participation, business activities and economic inactivity in the household context; relative income position, poverty, income inequality and the self‐assessment of income changes; consumption and livelihood. The article reveals both the different experiences of gains and losses within East German society and the (in some respects) advantageous position of East German households compared with households in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech and Slovak Republics.