En la última década, después de casi medio siglo de abandono, los mercados públicos entran nuevamente en la agenda pública y en los estudios urbanos. Basado en un acercamiento etnográfico, este texto ...propone dos aportes principales a estas nuevas investigaciones: 1) dar cuenta del perfil y heterogeneidad de experiencias de los comerciantes que trabajan en tres mercados públicos de la Ciudad de México; 2) a partir de lo anterior, sugerir algunas líneas de reflexión sobre las desigualdades de las condiciones sociolaborales que se reproducen en el interior de los mercados públicos. Con base en ello, proponemos que, si se tiene un mejor conocimiento de las condiciones laborales y de vida de los comerciantes en los mercados públicos, se puede contribuir al desarrollo de políticas públicas más inclusivas, eficientes y democráticas.
How will the rise of China and other illiberal regimes affect the behaviour-shaping power of global liberal norms? The paper uses updated dyadic data on ambassadorial appointments to address this ...question. It focuses on the fate of a global liberal norm on gender-balanced representation. It argues that when powerful international partners discount the importance of gender balance, governments become less likely to prioritise gender balance themselves. The pattern of nodding toward partners' norms is particularly pronounced for governments of structurally dependent, poorer countries. We find that the gender-balanced representation norm has eroded in the last five years. In this period, countries like Sweden and Germany have increased their support for global liberal norms, but China has become an increasingly vocal opponent. We also find that countries' international power positions-not their broad cultural value systems (e.g. 'Asian values')-affect partner countries' approaches. We suggest that the pressure for states to prioritise women's political representation will weaken further unless rising powers dramatically reorient their current behaviours.
Traversing cultural studies and political theory, this paper asks how any representative is to represent a diverse constituency, given that any constituency is necessarily co-instituted—that is, made ...up of—multiple and conflicting bodies and interests. Arguing that the term has suffered from a deficit of enquiry within the theoretical and critical humanities, this article thus aims to re-figure the concept of constituency. The specific understanding of constituency formation within the context of British political system, something especially visible in the wake of the EU referendum and its aftermath, highlights that constituencies are understood within this context through an atomic logic—that is, that each constituency is made up of individual constituents. Thinking with the notion of constituent power allows for a better understanding of the co-instituted nature of constituencies: how and by whom they are co-created. This, in turn, undermines any understanding of political representation as a merely bi-directional practice between representative and constituency. Finally, a close reading of Ghislaine Leung’s CONSTITUTION helps probe further both a bi-directional account of constituency formation and the notion that constituencies are themselves atomically structured, upsetting set theory in the process and allowing us to better apprehend the co-constitutive relationship between constituency and constituent.
Our aim is to provide an account of constitutive rules in terms of (1) the acceptance of regulative norms, and (2) a cognitive process we call “symbolization” (in an altogether different sense from ...what J. R. Searle means by this word). We claim, first, that institutional facts à la Searle boil down to facts concerning the collective acceptance of regulative norms in a given community. This, however, does not exhaust what institutional facts are. There is a residue, symbolization. Symbolization, as we understand it, involves a transfer of cognitive models from one domain to another. We introduce this notion by exploring different sorts of games, taking our cue from games of pretend play. In the context of this exploration, we introduce the idea of the significance—a matter of degree—of symbolization for a given institutional concept. In particular, we claim, symbolization may play, vis‐à‐vis a given institutional concept, a properly constitutive or a merely auxiliary role. We further argue that, in most legal concepts as conceived in our legal culture, symbolization plays a merely auxiliary role. A possible exception is the concept of political representation, at least on some understandings of it.
Political representation theory postulates that technocracy and populism mount a twofold challenge to party democracy, while also standing at odds with each other in the vision of representation they ...advocate. Can these relationships be observed empirically at the level of citizen preferences, and what does this mean for alternative forms of representation? The article investigates technocratic attitudes among citizens following three dimensions—expertise, elitism, and anti‐politics—and, using latent class analysis, identifies citizen groups that follow a technocratic, populist, and party‐democratic profile in nine European democracies. Results show that technocratic attitudes are pervasive and can be meaningfully distinguished from populist attitudes, though important overlaps remain. We investigate differences in demographics and political attitudes among citizen profiles that are relevant to political behavior and conclude by highlighting the role that citizens’ increasing demands for expertise play in driving preferences for alternative types of governance
Research on party competition and political representation relies on valid cross-national measures of party positions. This research note reports on the 1999–2019 Chapel Hill expert survey (CHES), ...which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology, and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for six waves of the survey, from 1999 to 2019. The trend file provides party position measures for all 28 EU countries and 1196 party-year observations. In this article, we analyze the evolving party positions on European integration from 1999 to 2019, with a particular focus on how EU positions are related to economic left-right and the Green/Alternative/Libertarian-Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist dimension (GAL-TAN). The dataset is publicly available on the CHES website.
Western neo-liberal Democracies are often and shortly characterized by having a representa-tive procedure of participation in the public sphere of life, determining a self-ruled form of ...politicalregime, affirming the sovereignty of the people in a specific territory; an economic welfare system; po-litical institutions that administrate and organize public life based on their citizen ́s confidence; publicsecurity and order. Yet, the lack of political representation of local communities, or at least their senseof ineffectiveness of the representative system to respond to their needs, promotes their alienation fromnational political systems and weakens it. It is a vicious circle, i.e., the political system does not ade-quately represent the political communities, and these, if not represented, weakens the political systemand its ability to respond to the needs of local communities. Our intent is to show that breaking this vi-cious circle means strengthening democracy with new mechanisms of political representation.
The historiography on the Italian Communes has investigated the motives behind the new city governments. Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur and Chris Wickham have stressed different rationales in the actions ...of the communal elites. However, we should avoid underestimating the cultural power of a model still very much present in the Middle Ages: imperial Rome. In the crisis linked to the struggle for investiture, city elites were inspired by the Roman institutional model, albeit following different ‚models‘ (classical, Byzantine, Carolingian and Saxon). The communal world interpreted this legacy with the contribution of the Roman Church. In this context, the use of
as an instrument of legitimization, stressed by Arnold Esch, should be re-evaluated. The interpretation in a Roman key of institutions, laws, political and artistic languages presupposed a sound cultural education on the part of the people of the commune, based on the classical tradition and, politically, on Roman law and institutions. These concepts were visually expressed in the new artistic style – later called the ‚Romanesque‘ due to the obvious desire to reinterpret classical models. Finally, the equestrian group of Oldrado da Tresseno (1233) on the facade of the Palazzo della Ragione in Milan, the only known example of this type of municipal political representation in the first half of the 13th century, allows us to assess the power of the Roman model in legitimising municipal policies.
Informal political representation can be a political lifeline, particularly for oppressed and marginalized groups. Such representation can give these groups some say, however mediate, partial, and ...imperfect, in how things go for them. Coeval with the political goods such representation offers these groups are its particular dangers to them. Mindful of these dangers, skeptics challenge the practice for being, inter alia, unaccountable, unauthorized, inegalitarian, and oppressive. These challenges provide strong pro tanto reasons to think the practice morally impermissible. This paper considers the question: On what conditions is the informal political representation of oppressed and marginalized groups permissible? By responding to skeptics’ challenges, I develop a systematic account of moral constraints that, if adopted, would make such representation permissible. The account that emerges shows that informal political representatives (IPRs) must aim to fulfill two sets of sometimes conflicting duties to the represented: democracy within duties, which concern how the representative treats and relates to the represented, and justice without duties, which concern how the representative's actions advance the aims of the representation.
This article provides a survey of the emerging debate on the political representation of nonhuman animals. In Section 1, I identify some of the reasons why the interests of animals are often ...disregarded in policy-making, and present two arguments why these interests should be considered. In Section 2, I introduce four institutional proposals that have been discussed in the relevant literature. Section 3 attempts to make explicit the underlying logic of each proposal (i.e. which specific problems it wants to tackle). Section 4 discusses some of the main normative pros and cons of each proposal.
PDF
