Kelsen und seine Demokratieschrift im Exil

Kelsen and his Book “Essence and Value of Democracy” in Exile. Two recently found letters and an unpublished small introduction into a planned translation of his book on democracy shed some light on Kelsen’s conception of cultural and political foundations of democracy. His description of the democratic citizen as antagonistic to absolute values rises philosophical as well as political doubts. The status of values under philosophical, moral and legal perspectives calls for a thorough discussion.

Peer Production Practices: Design Strategies in Online Citizen Science Platforms

Citizen science is an umbrella term covering a broad range of practices, all related to engaging individuals actively in scientific research. There is a tension about the nature and scope of participation in citizen science, with the majority of projects being scientific authority-driven crowdsourcing approaches, allowing individuals to perform only narrowly defined microtasks. On the other side of the spectrum, there is peer production: A decentralized way of production that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals, known for example from open source software or Wikipedia.In this article, we inspect three online citizen science platforms - iNaturalist, Public Lab and Zooniverse - from a peer production perspective. We introduce a working model of peer production ecosystems that we apply to perform qualitative analyses of the projects’ online platforms. Our results show that peer production is partly already practiced in citizen science today and we provide concrete examples of features. The amount of peer production elements vary strongly between the case studies, relative to orientation of the projects as a support for professional researchers or for community activism. We argue for the potential of peer production approaches for more inclusive and democratic citizen science and aim to orient readers on why and how they might put peer production elements into practice in their own citizen science projects.

Democratic Practices at School. Theoretical and Research Ascertainments

The modern democratic society must ensure the realization of the ideal democracy through the education of the youth with knowledge-skills and critical thinking and finally through the education of democratic citizens. A democratic citizen is defined as a citizen who is personally responsible, participatory, and oriented towards social justice and has the will to work for the realization of democratic ideals. The key issues the study focuses on are: What school practices contribute to the preparation of democratic citizens? What is meant by the open / positive climate of the classroom and how is it related to the strengthening of citizenship according to research data? The main purpose of the study is to reflect and raise awareness about the democratic conditions we must ensure in schools, to avoid the erosion of institutions and the rejection or loose commitment to the rules of democracy.

The Virtues of Vulnerability

There are many locations, relationships, and experiences through which we learn what it means to be a citizen. Contemporary healthcare—or “the clinic”—is one of those sites. Being drawn into the complex “medical-legal-policy-insurance nexus” as a patient entails all sorts of learning, including, it is argued here, political learning. When we are subjected as a patient, frequently through a discourse of “choice and control,” or “patient autonomy,” what do we learn? What happens when the promise of a certain kind of autonomy is accompanied by demands for a certain kind of humility? What do we learn about agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge, dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute vulnerability? This book explores these questions on a journey through medicalized encounters with giving birth, navigating death and dying, and seeking treatment for life-altering mental illness (here post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans). While the body has always posed a problem for Western thought, and has been treated as an obstacle to freedom and independence and something our rational capacity must master and control, this book aims to counter that intellectual-historical and political tendency by asking how we might reimagine the political potential of embodiment, or make space for considering “the virtues of vulnerability.” In particular, the book offers a novel conception of democratic citizen-subjectivity, grounded in an ethical disposition of humility-informed-relational-autonomy.

CITIZENSHIP AND CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION: A DETERMINANT OF GOOD GOVERNANCE

Citizenship is the status of being a legal member of a state, having been recognized by the law and custom of such state, whereby citizens owe allegiance to the state (coun-try) and in turn been protected by the state. Nevertheless, for citizens to owe allegiance to their states implies that such citizens is patriotic and also ready to take up their constitutional rolls or duties to the betterment of the state, and in return enjoys the fundamental human rights, citizen’s liberty and protection from their states (country). However, for citizens to know their rights, duties and obligations, and for them to be able to participate actively in their countries political decision making (supporting and criticizing government policies) that will leads to a robust public and foreign policy of their country, then, such citizens need to be politically educated through citizenship education, because Citizenship education breeds active democratic citizen-ry. This article titled citizenship and citizenship education: A determinant of good governance examined the importance of citizenship education and how it can breed active democratic citizenry that can enhance good governance in the state. This article employs the interview as a tool for data collection, and also applied the secondary source of Data collections by retrieving valuable information’s from ready-made works of scholars to buttress the argument of this work. The paper finds out that there is a positive correlation between citizenship education and active democratic citizen-ry. This article finally recommends that extensive citizenship education will serve as a veritable tool for good governance and National development. However, the paper recommends that citizenship education is a must and a child of necessity, a policy to be adopted by all government.

17. Political Culture

This chapter examines the role that the concept of political culture plays in comparative politics. In particular, it considers how the political culture field increases our understanding of the social roots of democracy and how these roots are transforming through cultural change. In analysing the inspirational forces of democracy, key propositions of the political culture approach are compared with those of the political economy approach. The chapter first provides an overview of cultural differences around the world, before tracing the historical roots of the political culture concept. It then tackles the question of citizens’ democratic maturity and describes the allegiance model of the democratic citizen. It also explores party–voter dealignment, the assertive model of the democratic citizen, and political culture in non-democracies. It concludes with an assessment of how trust, confidence, and social capital increase a society’s capacity for collective action.