Global narratives of fatherhood. Fathering and masculinity on the Internet

There is currently an increasing amount of research on online fatherhood. In this article, we have used international blogs as our empirical data, in order to investigate and create an in-depth picture of fatherhood as it is expressed in various men’s stories about their everyday lives. Three distinct conceptions of fatherhood and masculinity emerge. The first of these positions could be described as a nostalgic position in relation to hegemonic masculinity. The second position is referred to here as complicity. This position indicates a changing landscape of fatherhood and family politics, moving towards gender-equal conditions. Thirdly, we have an inclusive position that reflects a gender-neutral position, and are understood less in terms of masculinity, heteronormativity and gender-divided responsibilities.     

The Holodomor law and national trauma construction in Ukraine

This article proposes to conceptualize the remembrance of the 1932–33 famine, known as the Holodomor, as cultural trauma construction in Ukraine. This entails the study of how the memory of this devastating historical event became the national collective symbol of suffering with which Ukrainians identify today. Based on Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of cultural trauma, the analysis focuses on the role of political elites and their claim-making regarding the meaning of the famine. Focusing specifically on the 2006 Holodomor law as the main claim of the Ukrainian policy-makers, the article investigates their definition of the historical event, their naming of victims and perpetrators, and their social mediation of famine representations. The article reveals how, through their definition of the Holodomor as genocide, the political elites promoted the understanding that Ukrainians experienced the years of 1932–33 differently from other Soviet nations. The Holodomor law should therefore be seen in the context of Ukrainian nation-building policy, which aims to forge a distinct Ukrainian collective identity.     

Social security privatisation: the lessons from the Chilean experience for other Latin American countries and the USA

The purpose of this article is to analyse the economic and social implications of the privatisation of social security in Chile and to draw some lessons from the Chilean experience. The focus of the analysis is on the costs and benefits of the privatised system and its impact on social equity. Thus, the main section of the article is devoted to the analysis of the 20-year-old Chilean experience. This section is followed by a discussion of privatisation in other Latin American countries and the impact that World Bank's policies have had on the region. The last section looks at the lessons for the United States and argues against the establishment of a partially private plan in the USA.     

抗争、民主与治理:全球治理下的抗争政治研究

随着20世纪60年代西方社会运动的兴起,西方国家的国内政治由此发展出有别于常规制度、正式政治的独特政治形态——抗争政治。诸多的理论认为,这一政治形态对其国内政治的民主和治理都具有积极的促进作用。本文通过对抗争政治历程的研究,指出:一方面,全球化及反全球化运动、全球风险社会都使得全球政治和治理发生大转型,由此引发全球社会运动,抗争从国内走向国际;而另一方面,抗争功能也具有局限性。同时认为,国内和国际层面上的抗争政治,关注全球抗争与民主、治理的关系,呈现出与常规政治不同的性质、特点和功能,具有重大的理论和实践价值。     

法治概念属性释义

当前对法治的理解仍然比较混乱,有必要澄清。法治是个政治概念而不是个法律概念,它不同于执法和司法。法治其实就是依法治国;法治是与人治相对立的政治概念;法治不等同于法制;法治以民主为前提,并保障民主,民主是法治的灵魂。     

中国农村基层民主建设的思考

民主政治体制改革是社会主义市场经济发展的必然要求。本文就农村基层民主建设的实际对村民自治的意义法制化、规范化作了比较深入的探讨     

Anti-austerity between militant materialism and real democracy: exploring pragmatic prefigurativism

ABSTRACT

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the ‘age of austerity’ that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as ‘pragmatic prefigurativism’. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a ‘left convergence’ of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive institutions of democracy in prompting the move towards pragmatic prefigurativism, the adoption of techniques of direct democracy and direct action as the means through which to express a voice and to refuse austerity, and the pragmatic nature of the subsequent (re)turn to political institutions when this became a possibility.     

Explaining Italian “exceptionalism” and its end: Minimum income from neglect to hyper-politicization

Traditionally at the margins of the political debate, minimum income protection has recently become a key issue in Italian politics. After decades of social and political “neglect” letting Italy the only European country (with Greece) still lacking an anti-poverty minimum income safety net in the 2010s, finally a national programme called Inclusion Income was introduced in 2018, then replaced by a more robustly financed scheme, the Citizenship Income in 2019. The introduction of these new programmes was the object of an intense political debate, which raises two main puzzles. Why a policy field characterized by the low political resources of would be beneficiaries and low incidence on the overall welfare budget has become so important in the political debate? How did it occur in Italy, where minimum income protection had been absent in political discourses for at least five decades after World War II? To answer these questions, this article first elaborates a novel theoretical framework which combines the main properties of socio-political demand and political supply in order to explain the scope and direction of minimum income reforms. Second, it provides an analytically oriented reconstruction of MIS policy trajectory in Italy in the three different phases: the phase of MIS “neglect” (1948–1992) characterized by inertia; the period of political “contentiousness” (1993–2012), marked by attempts of path departure followed by policy reversals; the more recent phase leading to the introduction and institutionalization of a MIS. Third, the article provides a theoretically framed interpretation of the overall MIS trajectory in Italy.     

Radical alternative conceptualizations of the classical welfare state? Contrasting the United Kingdom and the Netherlands with Norway

In many countries, new, broad, and normative “conceptions of society” gained prominence that represent fundamentally different discursive alternatives to the classical welfare state. We present two political projects that contain radical alternative conceptualizations of the classical welfare state, the “Big Society” in Britain and the “Participation Society” in the Netherlands, and contrast these with Norwegian developments, where no such a radical alternative conceptualization of the welfare state can be found. We show that the British and Dutch political projects were attempts to replace the welfare state, whereas there is no comparable big idea about a radical overhaul of the welfare state in Norway. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of a fundamental shift in welfare state reform, namely a radical reconsidering of the ideational and normative foundation that defines and underpins what the welfare state is or should be.     

民主政治建设的共和维度

共和民主制是人类社会的一种政体，是中国近代杰出政治家的共识与选择。共和强调政府的公共性、公平性与中立性，主张在民主基础上公权制衡。共和的核心理念是“天下为公”。市场经济主体是多元的，从计划经济转向市场经济的过程应是政府自觉地培育多元主体的过程，多元之间不是敌对关系，解决的方式是由多元均衡达到社会和谐。公共权力体系应向代表性的阶层、群体或集团全方位敞开，从而达到多元共赢的目的。