Health as a Public Good

The purpose of the article is to present different conceptualizations of health as a public good. Author considers whether analytical tools and conceptual framework developed in the studies on the issue of public goods might be useful in order to analyze health. It was noted that health belongs to the special group of exceptional goods, since it carries the characteristics of both private and public good. It was emphasized that the distribution of public goods is a complex issue that requires an appropriate system of incentives as well as instruments in charge of its proper functioning. In the article it is argued that the widespread social anxiety and growing fear of further integration and globalization to a large extend results from the wrong management and unequal provision of global public goods.

El juego de las políticas públicas: Reglas y decisiones sociales

El Juego de las políticas públicas -- Reglas y decisiones sociales es un libro que se deja leer con facilidad y sus propuestas conceptuales son un buen punto de partida para generar discusiones y cerrar otras, para articular discursos, para proponer metodologías de análisis, de ahí su valía teórica -- Constituye un paso en la dirección correcta para enriquecer el análisis de políticas públicas, en un país como Colombia donde se habla del tema con extrema flexibilidad, y donde los conceptos construidos en otras latitudes no se adaptan a nuestras realidades institucionales y culturales -- Ese esfuerzo de adaptación es un valor agregado de la obra

Derechos humanos y construcción de ciudadanía en la escuela. Una propuesta para construir democracia participando en la actividad sociocultural

ResumenEste trabajo pretende ser un instrumento de reflexión sobre el rol histórico de la autoridad en el aula. El supuesto es que los períodos autoritarios han dejado huellas en las cosmologías docentes y por ello el autoritarismo se resiste a partir. Esto último impide enfatizar en actitudes y acciones didácticas de tipo cooperativo; invisibilizando derechos fundamentales, principalmente aquellos referidos en la infancia y adolescencia. Se hace hincapié en la participación democrática de docentes y estudiantes, enfatizando en la exaltación de un tipo de socialización enmarcada en la participación democrática desde la escuela, que pueda aportar hábitos trasladables a otros ámbitos sociales, contribuyendo a formar actitudes deliberativas, necesarias para participar activamente. El marco utilizado es, en el caso de las teorías del aprendizaje y como soporte metodológico, el principio de Zona de Desarrollo Próximo (Vigotsky) y el supuesto de aprendizaje práctico/participativo (Rogoff), además de brindar algunas concepciones sobre filosofía política en educación (Gutman).Respecto al marco normativo, se presta atención al cuerpo jurídico internacional sobre derechos humanos poniendo énfasis en la esfera de la educación, las recientes leyes argentinas de educación (2006) y de protección de la infancia y la adolescencia (2006). Palabras clave: autoridad democrática, diálogo horizontal, ciudadanía activa, talleres pedagógicos. AbstractThis work aims to be an instrument of reflection on the historical role of authority in the classroom. The assumption is that authoritarian periods have left footprints in the cosmologies of teacher, hence authori­tarianisms resists to leave. This prevents the emphasis on didactic cooperative attitudes and actions, thus subduing fundamental rights, mainly those referred to infancy and adolescence. The teachers´ and students´ democratic participation is emphasized, remarking the exaltation of a kind of socialization framed by the democratic participation from the school, which can bring habits transferable to other social areas, facilitating the development of the deliberative attitudes needed to participate actively. The theoretical framework is, in the case of learning theories and as a methodological support, the principle of Near Area Development (Vigotsky) and as the second argument, we use the assumption of learning by doing/participatory (Rogoff). In the first case, a task that is done with help today will be autonomously tomorrow. For the latter, it means participatory activities in order to achieve habits that may relocate to other social environments. In the case of Guttmann, it is looking for framing issues of political theory of education, mainly those related to the new skills a twenty-first century citizenship must acquire. Regarding the regulatory framework, attention is paid to international norms on human rights with empha­sis on education, recent Argentinean education laws (2006) and new laws on childhood and adolescence protection (2006). Keywords: democratic authority, horizontal dialogue, active citizenship, pedagogical workshops.         

Les machines du pouvoir. Technique et politique entre l'Iran sassanide et le califat abbasside

Dans l’Antiquité, la recherche sur la technique permet les premières réalisations de dispositifs ingénieux, tels que des appareils qui accomplissent une série d’actions par le biais de stimulus externes et de mécanismes cachés. Les organismes politiques et religieux saisissent rapidement la puissance communicative de ces machines, en devenant les promoteurs et patrons privilégiés de leur production. L’Empire sassanide (224-650) ne constitue pas une exception. En effet, les souverains perses consacrent, au moins à l’époque tardive, une grande attention à la conception et au déploiement de dispositifs savants. De même, un siècle plus tard, dans le milieu du califat islamique, les Abbassides (750-1258) semblent s’entourer de tels dispositifs. La continuité entre les deux empires dans plusieurs domaines, de la théorie politique à l’administration, est bien connue. Cependant, la question de la réutilisation du patrimoine technique et scientifique ancien, et notamment sassanide, par la cour abbasside, demeure encore largement inexplorée. L’étude d’un corpus de sources, aussi vaste qu’hétérogène, rassemblant des ouvrages historiographiques, géographiques, poétiques et d’adab, ainsi que des traités scientifiques et techniques en plusieurs langues, permet d’analyser différents aspects de la production et de l’usage politique des machines. Au sein de la cour sassanide, comme de la cour abbasside, la machine s’avère constituer un véhicule préférentiel de représentation et de diffusion de l’idéologie politique. À travers sa mise en scène publique, elle contribue de manière substantielle à la définition de l’espace du pouvoir, en participant à la création d’une image de la cour comme un microcosme au cœur duquel le Roi des rois, et plus tard le calife, occupaient le rôle cardinal de maître incontesté du monde. La continuité entre les empires sassanide et abbasside dans le domaine technique ne se limite donc pas à une récupération de savoirs, mais s’opère aussi sous la forme d’une véritable réactivation d’un patrimoine symbolique

Populism as a battlefield Populist actors and their representation on social and legacy media during the european parliament elections 2019 in Finland, Italy and the Netherlands

The objective of the present research is to describe and explain populist actors and populism as a concept and their representation on social and legacy media during the 2019 EU elections in Finland, Italy and The Netherlands. This research tackles the topic of European populism in the context of political communication and its relation to both the legacy and digital media within the hybrid media system. Departing from the consideration that populism and populist rhetoric are challenging concepts to define, I suggest that they should be addressed and analyzed through the usage of a combination of methods and theoretical perspectives, namely Communication Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Political theory, Rhetoric and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. This thesis considers data of different provenance. On the one hand, for the Legacy media part, newspapers articles were collected in the three countries under study from the 1st until the 31st of May 2019. Each country’s legacy system is represented by three different quality papers and the articles were collected according to a selection of keywords (European Union Elections and Populism in each of the three languages). On the other hand, the Digital media data takes into consideration Twitter tweets collected during the same timeframe based on particular country-specific hashtags and tweets by identified populist actors. In order to meet the objective of this study, three research questions are posed and the analysis leading to the results are exhaustively presented and further discussed. The results of this research provide valuable and novel insights on how populism as a theme and a concept is being portrayed in the context of the European elections both in legacy and digital media and political communication in general.

Organizing resistance movements: contribution of the political discourse theory

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of articulating Political Discourse Theory (PDT) together with Organizational Studies (OS), while using the opportunity to introduce PDT to those OS scholars who have not yet come across it. The bulk of this paper introduces the main concepts of PDT, discussing how they have been applied to concrete, empirical studies of resistance movements. In recent years, PDT has been increasingly appropriated by OS scholars to problematize and analyze resistances and other forms of social antagonisms within organizational settings, taking the relational and contingent aspects of struggles into consideration. While the paper supports the idea of a joint articulation of PDT and OS, it raises a number of critical questions of how PDT concepts have been empirically used to explain the organization of resistance movements. The paper sets out a research agenda for how both PDT and OS can together contribute to our understanding of new, emerging organizational forms of resistance movements.

Political autonomy and independence: theory and experimental evidence

We study the process by which subordinated regions of a country can obtain a more favourable political status. In our theoretical model a dominant and a dominated region first interact through a voting process that can lead to different degrees of autonomy. If this process fails then both regions engage in a costly political conflict which can only lead to the maintenance of the initial subordination of the region in question or to its complete independence. In the subgame-perfect equilibrium the voting process always leads to an intermediate arrangement acceptable for both parts. Hence, the costly political struggle never occurs. In contrast, in our experiments we observe a large amount of fighting involving high material losses, even in a case in which the possibilities for an arrangement without conflict are very salient. In our experimental environment intermediate solutions are feasible and stable, but purely emotional elements prevent them from being reached.

Social security in theory and practice (I): Facts and political theories

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forcescreate and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply, pay-as-you-go features, intergenerational redistribution, benefits which areincreasing functions of lifetime earnings and not means-tested. We partition theories of Social Security into three groups: "political", "efficiency" and "narrative" theories. We explore three political theories in this paper: the majority rational voting model (with its two versions: "the elderly as the leaders of a winning coalition with the poor" and the "once and for all election" model), the "time-intensive model of political competition" and the "taxpayer protection model". Each of the explanations is compared with the international and historical facts. A companion paper explores the "efficiency" and "narrative" theories, and derives implicationsof all the theories for replacing the typical pay-as-you-go system with a forced savings plan.

Liberalism, Marxism and Democratic Theory Revisited: Proposal of a Joint Index of Political and Economic Democracy

Liberalism and Marxism are two schools of thought which have left deep imprints in sociological, political and economic theory. They are usually perceived as opposite, rival approaches. In the field of democracy there is a seemingly insurmountable rift around the question of political versus economic democracy. Liberals emphasize the former, Marxists the latter. Liberals say that economic democracy is too abstract and fuzzy a concept, therefore one should concentrate on the workings of an objective political democracy. Marxists insist that political democracy without economic democracy is insufficient. The article argues that both propositions are valid and not mutually exclusive. It proposes the creation of an operational, quantifiable index of economic democracy that can be used alongside the already existing indexes of political democracy. By using these two indexes jointly, political and economic democracy can be objectively evaluated. Thus, the requirements of both camps are met and maybe a more dialogical approach to democracy can be reached in the debate between liberals and Marxists. The joint index is used to evaluate the levels of economic and political democracy in the transition countries of Eastern Europe.

The Theory of Interhybridity: Socio-political Dimensions and Migration Experiences of Post-communist Western Balkan States

The Western Balkans integration within the EU has started a legal process which is the rejection of former communist legal/political approaches and the transformation of former communist institutions. Indeed, the EU agenda has brought vertical/horizontal integration and Europeanization of national institutions (i.e. shifting power to the EU institutions and international authorities). At this point, it is very crucial to emphasize the fact that the Western Balkans as a whole region has currently an image that includes characteristics of both the Soviet socialism and the European democracy. The EU foreign policies and enlargement strategy for Western Balkans have significant effects on four core factors (i.e. Schengen visa regulations, remittances, asylum and migration as an aggregate process). The convergence/divergence of EU member states’ priorities for migration policies regulate and even shape directly the migration dynamics in migrant sender countries. From this standpoint, the research explores how main migration factors are influenced by political and judicial factors such as; rule of law and democracy score, the economic liberation score, political and human rights, civil society score and citizenship rights in Western Balkan countries. The proposal of interhybridity explores how the hybridization of state and non-state actors within home and host countries can solve labor migration-related problems. The economical and sociopolitical labor-migration model of Basu (2009) is overlapping with the multidimensional empirical framework of interhybridity. Indisputably, hybrid model (i.e. collaboration state and non-state actors) has a catalyst role in terms of balancing social problems and civil society needs. Paradigmatically, it is better to perceive the hybrid model as a combination of communicative and strategic action that means the reciprocal recognition within the model is precondition for significant functionality. This will shape social and industrial relations with moral meanings of communication.