Dialogue and transparency: A content analysis of how the 2012 presidential candidates used twitter

This study conducted a content analysis of the Twitter pages of the 2012 presidential candidates to determine how they were using Twitter, if they were engaging in meaningful dialogue with their followers, and if they were being transparent. Tweets from February 1, 2012 through February 29, 2012 were coded. Overall, the candidates tweeted most about the economy, events, and specific primaries but failed to created meaningful dialogue with their followers. Some candidates were more transparent than others in regards to who was responsible for tweeting.     

Elder Participation and Senior Power in Australian Electoral Politics

This article seeks to assess the “goodness of fit” between the social science literature on the impact of older voters on electoral outcomes and the Australian experience of the politics of aging. While the literature suggests that the notion of senior power is a flawed one, Australia's 2004 federal election campaign indicated that this is not quite so. This article offers a possible explanation for the difference between the literature and the Australian experience in terms of the calculus that underpinned the election campaign, namely, capturing the votes of swing voters in marginal seats including “silver” swing voters in seats with a disproportionate number of older voters. The preliminary findings of a small exploratory study of campaign strategists suggest that there may be a real basis to this explanation. Thus, there does appear to be some basis for asserting that “gray power” does play a role in Australian national electoral politics.     

NATIONAL TIMES AND OTHER TIMES: RE-THINKING CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship is a temporal as well as spatial phenomenon. While it conceptually located in a legal, territorial entity, within which it is associated with the privileges of sovereignty and the rights of individuals, it is also understood is terms of the historical process by which peoples develop shared characteristics. However, the attempt to code citizenship interms of shared cultural backgrounds belies the ways in which citizen-subjects are temporally disjunctive. Beginning with attention to the way some writing practices challenge the state system's monopoly over the meaning of citizen presence in time and space, this essay turns to a reading of an Israeli woman's novelistic treatment of a geographically and culturally diverse Jewish family, whose characteristics challenge the State of Israel's myth of national homogeneity. Ronit Matalon's, The One Facing Us, which juxtaposes a version of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘women's time’ with the historical time of the state, restores the diverse forms of co-presence that are denied in the discourses of nation-state legitimation. Her novel, along with the other genres treated in this analysis, encourages an understanding of politics that resists the identity-fixing effect of a state-oriented model of political space and the homogenizing of the temporal presence of citizen-subjects. More generally, the writing performances treated in this essay cast political interaction as a continuous negotiation of co-presence among those with diverse ways of being-in-time.     

TEXTURES OF THE MODERN: VIENNESE CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL HISTORY AND URBAN STUDIES

The following essay recapitulates the findings of a research project on Viennese modernity, which since 1995 has involved a group of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and sociologists examining the different phases in the history of the city in the twentieth century from a transdisciplinary perspective. The point of departure for the project was its participants' dissatisfaction with a myopic image of twentieth-century Vienna increasingly constricted to literary and aesthetic practices, which has focused on the ‘golden age’ of high culture in the Habsburg capital of the fin-de-siècle while omitting crucial periods of the city's history, in particular the political and cultural crisis between 1918 and 1938, and the phase of material and cultural reconstruction after the ‘collapse of civilization’ that was Nazism.     

ALIEN-NATION: IMMIGRATION,NATIONAL IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONALISM

This article examines recent anti-immigration initiatives, like California's Proposition 187, in light of the contemporary processes of economic and political reorganization that seem to have undermined the viability of the nation state (i.e. the globalization of the market economy and the end of the cold war). It argues that anti-immigration discourse works on a symbolic level to recuperate a coherent sense of national identity in response to the social and psychic ‘alien-nation’ caused by the global penetration of capitalism. The study compares two similar yet distinctly different moments of mass immigration- Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century and ‘illegal’ immigration in the late twentieth- to determine (1) why these mass migrations have elicited legal regulation when others have not, and (2) what might be done to disrupt the re-emergence of a paradigm of legislated exclusion in the current case. It concludes by examining the conditions of possibility for collective political action within a mass-mediated public sphere. Specifically, I ask how resistance to the historical paradigm of legislated exclusion might best be mobilized from within a public sphere dominated by visual media that not only personalize the political, but also exacerbate the inequalities of access to public life endemic to liberal democratic political theory.     

Charles Tilly and the Practice of Contentious Politics

Charles Tilly developed the concept of the repertoire of contention over a long and distinguished career. It wasn't easy and it wasn't quick. In addition to being easily distracted, Tilly also needed to develop the analytical tools with which to study repertoires and performances and complete his transformation from what he called "an old structuralist" to what he came to call a "relational realist." This long development came to final fruition in the book he completed shortly before his death, Contentious Performances, which the author of this tribute regards as his masterpiece.     

职业院校学生对思想政治教育教学的需求调研

目前,思想政治课教学在满足职业技术院校学生多方面的需求状况如何,我们通过问卷调查得知：大多数学生对现阶段的思想政治教学较为满意,同时认为当前提高思想政治学科育人功能最主要的障碍是思想政治教育教学内容较空洞、形式较单一、校内外教育脱节;影响和阻碍学生充分全面发展的主要因素是制度体制缺陷和社会诚信缺失。因此,深化思想政治教育教学改革是一项艰巨的任务。     

政治与经济的有机互动:经济全球化背景下的理论探索

在和平与发展的时代主题下,世界经济的全球化和民族国家对经济生活干预力度的强化,深深地影响到政治与经济之间相互依存、相互作用、相互转换的有机互动,使政治与经济的互动规律呈现出"强经济—强政治"的关联模式,国际经济关系政治化、国际政治关系经济化的特征在70年代以来愈益鲜明。     

政治社会学视野下的社会稳定问题新探--从政经异构、阶级谱系、社会差异理论出发

立足于社会稳定这一焦点问题 ,分别从政治与经济的异构、阶级谱系的非常化、社会差异的极大化三个不同崭新的理论视野予以透视。通过理论的分析 ,不难得出这样一个结论 :当前社会稳定问题无不与此息息相关。在此基础上 ,提出了相应的对策 :关注异构规律 ,认识阶级谱系 ,缩小社会差距。