Decisiveness and Fear of Disorder examines how democratic representatives make decisions in crisis situations. By analyzing parliamentary asylum debates from Germany’s Asylum Compromise in 1992-1993 ...and the 2015-2016 refugee crisis, Julius Rogenhofer identifies representatives’ ability to project decisiveness as a crucial determinant for whether the rights and demands of irregular migrants were adequately considered in democratic decision-making. Both crisis situations showcase an emotive dimension to the parliamentary meaning-making process. As politicians confront fears of social and political disorder, they focus on appearing decisive in the eyes of the public and fellow representatives, even at the expense of human rights considerations and inclusive deliberation processes. Rogenhofer shows how his theoretical approach allows us to reinterpret a range of crisis situations beyond the irregular migration context, including democracies’ initial responses to Covid-19, the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, and United States climate politics. These additional case studies help position concerns with decisiveness amid the challenges that populism and technocracy increasingly pose to representative democracies.
By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, populists have taken charge in Turkey, India and Israel, all previously heralded as exceptional democracies in difficult regions. This ...moment offers a unique opportunity to explore populism in power outside Europe and the Americas, in three states shaped by deep social, ethnic and religious divisions. This article locates Turkey, India and Israel within a global wave of electorally successful populist movements. It explores how populism can jeopardize democratic choice in deeply divided societies and whether Erdoğan's capture of democracy in Turkey offers a blueprint for the political strategies employed by Modi and Netanyahu. In unravelling parallels between the three administrations, our analysis uncovers a common populist playbook of neoliberal economic policies, the leveraging of ethnoreligious tensions as well as attempts to denigrate independent news media, by portraying it as the "enemy of the people". Although their position on the spectrum between democracy and authoritarianism differs, our analysis reveals striking continuities in the erosion of democracy in Turkey, India and Israel as a result of these policies, thus highlighting the vulnerability of political systems, particularly those of deeply divided societies, to democratic decay.
Decisiveness as a logic of political action Rogenhofer, Julius Maximilian
Constellations (Oxford, England),
June 2023, 2023-06-00, 20230601, Letnik:
30, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Populist attitudes are frequently tied to a specific social position, namely the constituent’s status as a “loser of globalization.” Adding nuance to this explanatory framework, we investigate ...whether and how resentment mediates between social positions and populist attitudes. We distinguish three constitutive components of resentment—status insecurity, relative deprivation, and powerlessness—and analyze to what extent these sentiments explain the prevalence of two key populist attitudes: anti-elitism and demands for popular sovereignty. Using survey data from the Belgian National Election Study 2014, we show that although both populist attitudes are more likely among individuals of low socioeconomic status, this effect is mediated by a sense of group relative deprivation (anti-elitism and popular sovereignty) and feelings of powerlessness (anti-elitism). The effect of individual-level status insecurities on populist attitudes is, however, not significant. These results suggest that people do not simply adhere to antagonistic and people-centric views about politics because they experience economic precariousness; they embrace populist attitudes if their vulnerability is perceived in terms of a threatened sense of group position and understood as the outcome of an unjust society, wherein they feel powerless to alter their circumstances.
This article untangles competing conceptualisations of nostalgia and identifies a specific form of collective‐restorative nostalgia as politically significant. We argue that the link between ...resentment and this type of nostalgia emerges from their joint critique of the socio‐political realities of the present. Nostalgia provides spatial and temporal orientations for a group's experiences of resentment through highly selective recollections of the heartland and an idealised golden age. We hypothesize that nostalgia leverages the heartland and the golden age to formulate claims for recognition and restored status on behalf of those who feel left behind by late modernity. Next, the article uses structural equation modelling and the 2019 Belgian National Election Study to reveal how resentment (consisting of ontological insecurity, group relative deprivation, and powerlessness) mediates between structural characteristics and nostalgia. Our findings suggest that each component of resentment individually contributes to explaining the nostalgia of less educated and economically deprived individuals.
Why did Hong Kong protestors choose a symbol of former oppression – the old colonial flag – as a banner for their fight for democracy, rights and autonomy in 2019? We propose to answer this puzzle by ...studying the colonial-era flag as a displacement device. The waving of the colonial-era flag is shown to induce non-linear temporal and extraterritorial displacements, as well as contradictory interpretations of Hong Kong’s core values, national sovereignty and cultural identity. The flag’s displacements are amplified against the contested colonial history of the former British enclave. Conceptually, this pragmatic definition of the flag moves beyond approaches that study flags as representations of a structure of symbolic meaning. The flag is neither an unimportant prop nor is it a free-floating signifier; its materiality elicits significant political effects. Methodologically, this translates into an exploration of the flag’s second-order agency. The old colonial-era Hong Kong flag, in combination with discourse and institutional arrangements, is shown to be integral to contentious politics. The flag and its displacements shed new light on a city uneasy with its past, dissatisfied with its present and uncertain about its future.
This article investigates the determinants of populist attitudes among ethnic minorities. It breaks with conventional studies of the so-called losers of globalization, which focus almost exclusively ...on the majority population. Minorities were not spared by the economic and cultural displacements of late modernity and often suffer structural disadvantages vis-à-vis the majority population. Displacement and discrimination threaten the social position of established ethnic minorities - many of which arrived in Europe as guestworkers in the 1960s. Threatened, at once, by persistent skepticism form the majority population and new arrivals into the political community, it is plausible that such established minority groups share in the populist resentment currently sweeping continental Europe. Using the 2014 Belgian Ethnic Minority Election Study, we investigate how resentment might trigger the populist attitudes of anti-elitism and a preference for unmediated popular sovereignty, not only among the most vulnerable, but among those who occupy intermediate social positions.
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