Bøger i SpringerBriefs in Political Science serien

This Open Access book explains the philosophy, design principles, and community organization of Decidim and provides essential insights into how the platform works. Decidim is the world leading digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, built entirely and collaboratively as free software, and used by more than 500 institutions with over three million users worldwide.The platform allows any organization (government, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood, or cooperative) to support multitudinous processes of participatory democracy. In a context dominated by corporate-owned digital platforms, in the era of increasing social structuring via Artificial Intelligence, Decidim stands as a public or community owned platform for collective human intelligence. Yet, the project is much more than its technological features. Decidim is in itself a crossroad of the various dimensions of the networked society, a detailed practical map of its complexities and conflicts. Theauthors distinguish three general dimensions of the project: (1) the political - shedding light on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations, (2) the technopolitical - explaining how this technology is democratically designed and managed to produce and protect certain political effects, and (3) the technical - presenting the conditions of production, operation, and success of the project.This book systematically covers those three levels in an academically sound, technologically consistent, and politically innovative manner. Serving as a useful resource and handbook for the use of Decidim, it will not only appeal to students and scholars interested in participatory and digital democracy but also to professionals, policy-makers, and a wider audience interested in learning more about the Decidim platform.This is an open access book.

This book compares anti-immigrant attitudes across 8 countries on 5 continents. It develops a general framework that explores grievances, personal interactions, and entrenched beliefs that explain anti-immigrant attitudes. Using original survey research with 1,000 respondents per country, the authors test the salience of their theoretical expectations across eight very diverse cases: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Africa, the USA, and Turkey. The empirical study allows to decipher the degree to which the drivers of anti-immigrant attitudes are universal or context-specific. One the one hand, they find that positive interactions between natives reduce critical attitudes toward immigrants in all 8 countries. On the other hand, there are some country specific differences in the influence of various grievances and the three proxy variables measuring entrenched beliefs populist attitudes, nationalism and social conservativism. This book appeals to scholars and students of political sociology, comparative politics, public opinion research and related fields.

This book is the first to analyse the practice of governance to resolve conflict in the case of Aceh in Indonesia. Combining theoretical discourse on conflict, democracy, and governance, it draws from original field research on the separatist conflict, utilizing a social constructivist approach in collating observations and interviews with political elites from both the Government of Indonesia and the Aceh Independent Movement (GAM). The conflict was an intractable one in which thousand civilians were killed between 1976 and 2006. The author zooms into the 2003 and 2007 period, against the broader context of the political landscape of Indonesia under the Suharto regime. In doing so, the book tackles the challenges presented by intrastate conflicts relating to ethno-religiosity, land use, and separatism. It unpacks the Indonesian political system¿s shift from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one, and demarcates the prevalence of state violence in managing conflicts, as exemplified in the Aceh separatism conflict. Relevent to political scientists and scholars in peace, conflict and development studies, this co-published book presents novel sociological insights into Indonesiäs historical, and contemporary, political landscape.

This Brief introduces a novel research approach to investigate freedom of the press in Hong Kong. The authors pair computational analyses from the field of natural language processing with qualitative content analysis of patterns of journalistic practice in volatile political settings. Together, these shed light on the evolution of press freedom in Hong Kong since its return to Chinese sovereignty. Providing an interdisciplinary perspective, the Brief will appeal to a wide range of readers with interests in computational social science, public policy, political sciences as well as policy-makers, think tanks, and practitioners who focus on the China-Hong Kong nexus.

This open access book explores the field of human rights dissemination in Central Asia. Offering a comparative perspective on five post-Soviet Central Asian states¿Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, it examines compliance with international human rights standards in these countries. The contributions capture various aspects of human rights dissemination through educational programs, seminars, training, and empowerment programs at Central Asian universities, together with Central Asian NGOs/CSOs and international organizations. The book shows that a change of behavior among state and non-state actors in the region can only happen when both local and international actors, usually international donors, jointly take action to report, train, and empower people in human rights. This book is an invitation to anyone interested in the (troubled) nexus between international human rights norms and standards and their implementation on the local level, as well as in the effective empowerment of citizen in the region.

This open access book presents an international comparison of religiously motivated extremism in the Arab world and around the globe. Based on data from the Arab Barometer and the World Values Survey, it applies advanced statistical techniques to analyze how religiously motivated political extremism affects political and social outcomes as well as political violence. The study clearly shows that identification with a political Islam that also influences elections, promotes religious and gender discrimination, and advocates an Islamist interpretation of Islam, are the main interrelated syndromes of political Islam that together explain more than 50% of the total variance of the 24 model variables used.¿A carefully and methodically flawlessly researched work, which is highly recommended for all those who deal seriously with this topic. Professor Arno Tausch is clear-headed and possesses a remarkable ability to make the broad picture of Political Islam accessible.¿Hon. Prof. Gunther Hauser, Head of the Department Strategy and Security Policy, National Defense Academy, Vienna, Austria¿Methodological rigorous, scientifically sound, empirically rich and combining the best of qualitative and quantitative approaches, Prof Arno Tausch has produced a tour de force on Political Islam. This study reflects the best scholarship on the subject and will be of use to both policy makers and academics.¿Prof Hussein Solomon, Academic Head of the Department of Political Studies and Governance, University of the Free State, South Africa

This concise book examines the decline and erosion of UMNO as a dominant political party of Malaysia through the perspective of Ibn Khaldun's theory of asabiyyah and umran. It uses the qualitative method of data collection from Ibn Khaldun's original works. After discussing Ibn Khaldun's theory of asabiyyah and umran, UMNOs umranic contributions and erosion of Malay asabiyyah are discussed in detail. The research outlines how asabiyyah led to UMNOs rise to prominence, gain of political power, bringing of progress and development of Malaysia to an umranic stage before it started to decline and erode in concordance with the five stages of Ibn Khaldun's theory of rise and fall of civilizations. This book highlights that early leaders of UMNO played significant role in fostering group feeling and solidarity of the Malays (asabiyyah). Asabiyyah was the engine that propelled UMNO to transform the Malays and Malaysia to an umranic society. In conclusion, the later leaders of UMNO contributedto weakening of the Malay asabiyyah and the fall of UMNO from power in the 14th General Elections in 2018. The process of UMNOs decline and erosion of political power is primarily caused by the leaders¿ failures and shortcomings. The author, a Malaysian lawyer and long-standing Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, Minister of Justice, Minister of Defence, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Home Affairs in the Barisan Nasional in Malaysia, concludes with the recommendation that for UMNO to be relevant again in the current political landscape, it must initiate new and serious approaches and initiatives to change itself and must focus on good governance and rule of law in a multi-ethnic Malaysian society. Relevant to scholars and practitioners in political science, sociology, and Islamic studies, this book is a landmark commentary on contemporary Malaysian politics, drawing from the author's own experience as a member of parliament in his various ministerial positions over three decades.

This open access book develops a conceptual framework for glocal governance as a multi-stakeholder local governance approach based on global human rights norms and democratic principles. It discusses glocal governance as part of an ongoing global transformation process that began in the 1990s, when democracy and individualizing responsibilities for governance became the dominant political system worldwide, and continues through today¿s dawn of a New Cold War between those countries which have democratized and those which haven¿t. This book will intrigue practitioners and scholars alike who are interested in the concepts of glocality and glocalism, local-global connectivity, and the implementation and dissemination of global norms and concepts such as human rights and democracy, at the local and community level as well as among civil society and private enterprises. The author argues that global norms have now become universal benchmarks which private, political,and civil actors use to assess day-to-day situations and market developments, and to make their decisions accordingly. This book will appeal to students, practitioners, and scholars of the social sciences and humanities who are interested in governance, human rights, public diplomacy and international relations; and in conceptualizing mechanisms for governing and enforcing political decisions locally, on the basis of global universal principles, international norms, and laws.

This book discusses the role of millennials in political leadership and governance in Africa going forward.

This book is the first attempt to introduce the current status of archival practices in Japan as well as the basic views of the populace on making records accessible to English readers.

This collection offers insights of the international humanitarian system, considering what constitutes humanitarianism in Asia-Pacific, and how it shapes policy and practice in the region and globally.

This book presents an overview of political economic change in Vietnam during a period of significant social and economic change and an era of international turbulence.

This book presents a number of specific proposals that, if translated into political reality, could contribute to nurturing a Europeanisation of national public spheres.

This book explores how a society accepts and utilizes a system of archives to improve the quality of people's lives at each level of community, organization, and government.

By comparing the many voting procedures used in democratic decision-making, it explains why win-or-lose binary voting can be inaccurate and divisive, while the more inclusive preferential points system of voting can be so much more accurate and, therefore, more democratic;

This Brief provides a comprehensive introduction to current research on armed groups and proposes a unitary political theory for their future analysis.

Although autocrats can efficiently guide the first steps out of poverty, once a certain level of prosperity has been achieved, people begin to demand a sense of well-being - freedom and codetermination.

The book draws on gendered candidate and election data, on the party statutes of federal and state-level party organizations, and on interviews with party officials and party women's organizations.

This book discusses Brexit's implications for the two most important security institutions in Europe, the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

This book adopts a long-term perspective to consider political self-determination, peacekeeping and the creation of political meaning.

This book makes a significant interdisciplinary contribution to existing scholarship on ethnicity, conflict, nation-making, colonial history and religious minorities in the Philippines, which has been confronted with innumerable issues relating to their ethnic and religious minority populations.

This book highlights fundamental, but often neglected, issues important for a better understanding of present-day Iran. It underlines the idea that the most effective means for a nation to meet challenges and practices of the modern era lies with the fundamental values and norms that resonate with its inhabitants.This book is meant to be a companion to the author's published book Iran Revisited: Exploring the Historical Roots of Culture, Economics, and Society that expands upon that book's ideas, without repeating its theoretical reasoning. Its goal is to offer a better understanding of the current and evolving situations in Iran. In this regard, the author tried to clarify his position through a host of suggestions, most notably, the need to consider social rights as the bare minimum but extremely imperative criteria in our contemporary discourse for the betterment of our society. These rights, he argues, are the most fundamental tenets of any community that strives to succeed and flourish. In this context, the underlying discussion rests on the following claim: the most persisting problems in Iran are the outcomes of the gradual regression of the people' mindset that persistently overlooked their heritage and value system in favor of imitating ideas that were/are neither compatible with their culture and history, nor applicable to the country's socioeconomic conditions. The author, therefore, presumed that these predicaments are self-inflicted: they were neither caused by a specific state, nor belong to a historical period, or individual(s); they cannot be characterized by political or economic terminologies, but are firmly rooted in people inability to recognize that the most vital principle in developing and propelling a nation forward is the existence of a unified people.

This book will expand the body of literature on capacity-building in science and improve public understanding of the issues regarding geographical concentration of federal research funding.

Accordingly, it offers a valuable asset for researchers and students interested in political theory, Middle Eastern studies, international relations, conflict resolution studies, political science, negotiation theory, and contemporary Arab studies and Israeli studies.

This extended essay investigates the meaning of imperialism in Syria, providing a valuable addition to the ongoing debate on the Syrian crisis through the lens of imperialism, modern warfare, and geopolitics.

How, where and when can a universal basic income be put into political practice? This book discusses these questions by analyzing the political logic of a basic income and its controversial political and scientific implications. The author studies the institutions, rules, and decision-making processes of conventional democracies to reveal an institutional framework in which a universal basic income for all citizens could eventually become politically viable. The work addresses a broad range of topics, such as nationwide experiments with a basic income, voters' support for the idea, and the effects of a basic income on business cycles and demographic policies. As such, it will appeal to anyone interested in the preconditions and implications of introducing a universal basic income.

This book offers a cross-national comparison of open data policies in Estonia and Kazakhstan. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars, policymakers, e-government practitioners and open data entrepreneurs interested in implementing and evaluating open data-driven public sector projects.

This book investigates the professional needs and training requirements of an ever-changing public service workforce in Australia and the United Kingdom. It explores the nature of future roles, the types of skills and competencies that will be required and how organisations might recruit, train and develop public servants for these roles.Leading international research - practitioners make recommendations for how local organisations can equip future public servants with the skills and professional capacities for these shifting professional demands, and the skillsets they will require.Drawing on ideas that have been developed in the Australian and UK context, the book delves into the major themes involved in re-imagining the public service workforce and the various forms of capacities and capabilities that this entails. It then explores delivery of this future vision, and its implications in terms of development, recruitment and strategy.

This book argues that inequality of basic freedoms-economic, political, sociocultural-is a central cause of fragility and challenge to job creation in fragile geopolitical situations.