Are knowledgeable voters better voters?

It is widely believed that democracies require knowledgeable citizens to function well. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals tend to be the most partisan and the strength of partisan identity tends to corrupt political thinking. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, an informed citizenry is allegedly necessary for a democracy to flourish. On the other hand, the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways. What to do? This paper examines this tension and draws out several lessons. First, it is not obvious that more knowledgeable voters will make better political decisions. Second, attempts to remedy voter ignorance are problematic because partisans tend to become more polarized when they acquire more information. Third, solutions to citizen incompetence must focus on the intellectual virtue of objectivity. Fourth, some forms of epistocracy are troubling, in part, because they would increase the political power of the most dogmatic and biased individuals. Fifth, a highly restrictive form of epistocracy may escape the problem of political dogmatism, but epistocrats may face a steeper tradeoff between inclusivity and epistemic virtue than they would like.

The Hambach Forest in the German Debate on Climate Protection: Is There a Symbolic Value beyond the Environmental Value?

In the late summer of 2018, the Hambach Forest (North Rhine Westphalia/ Germany) appeared prevalently in the media due to massive protests against its clearance for lignite mining with for the power generation. Because coal power as a form of energy supply is extremely climate intensive, the Hambach Forest rapidly became a symbol of the fight against climate change and the ongoing destruction of nature and its resources for economic reasons. Due to the extra-ordinarily prominent role of the Hambach Forest in the public opinion across Germany, this research addresses values of the forest to the population in monetary terms as well as the underlying factors that determine those values. For the analysis, a contingent valuation survey was conducted in December 2019 in Germany. The proposed amounts for the preservation of the Hambach Forest are mostly in accordance with previous evaluation studies of woods and forests, although this time almost only passive-use values are decisive. Further, a conversion of the WTP values to the area of the Hambach Forest results in an extra-ordinarily high per-hectare value of about 3.6 million. Thus, the symbolic value of the forest is remarkable and should be considered in future political decisions.

Fungsi Pengawasan Partisipatif Dalam Mewujudkan Pemilu Demokratis

The involvement of the community in the political process is very necessary to be considered as the existence of political apathy in the general election. The political process can be said to be democratic when the community is the main actor in making political decisions, so that democracy guarantees the participation of the community itself. Participatory election supervision is a joint way of how the community can participate in supervising both campaigns, calm periods and election day by transforming moral strength into strength. with the consequence of having knowledge and skills about electoral and monitoring techniques. The main problem in this research is how to implement participatory supervision in realizing democratic elections?. The results show that participatory supervision plays a strategic role in the formation of responsive and impartial electoral law, implementation of election law by supervisors at the field level and the formation of a community legal culture/culture that can support the creation of participatory supervision for the realization of democratic elections in 2024.

Self-Presenting Virtually for Remote Social Influence

On the Social Web, social influencers have outsized effects on their peer followers and can influence worldviews, political decisions, aspirations, lifestyles, and buying-and-selling behaviors for varying periods of time. Social influencers attain their influence based on various factors (or combinations): the sharing of insider knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) or information; entertainment; charisma, personality, appearance, communications; engaging storytelling; social identity building for the followers; and parasocial relationship building. This work explores how social influencers self-present to attract and maintain a mass-scale remote audience in a competitive virtual popularity game. This explores “peer lessons” about social influence by masters, based on observed strategic and tactical communications from social video, in a particular target domain, namely survival in the more remote reaches of Alaska.

The Development of Initiatives and Municipal Referendums in Germany

Direct democracy offers possibilities for citizens to influence political decisions especially at the local level. In Germany, the local political systems have been affected by the introduction of direct democratic tools such as citizen initiatives and local referendums since the Reunification. The state legislations defined new conditions for citizen initiatives and municipal referendums with a minimum number of valid signatures for initiatives and a minimum approval rate for referendums. The chapter evaluates the practice of local initiatives and municipal referendums in Germany and examines the routinization of these tools in local politics.

Czy partnerstwo Polski i Rosji jest platformą do kontaktów i współpracy gospodarczej?

Partnership creates a basis for relations and connections (including between states, cross-border and interregional), enabling the development of contacts and comprehensive economic and non-economic cooperation. This role is performed in its various forms and on a different basis. The article presents the partnership (including the economic one) that is being implemented between Poland and Russia, its scope, stages of development and the existing tariff, non- and par-tariff barriers in trade. The analysis shows that currently the Polish-Russian partnership is selective in nature and is subject to a high degree of uncertainty as a result of political decisions.

New Strategic Foresight in EU

The article deals with the consideration of the concept and practice of the new strategic foresight being developed in the European Union. It summarizes the EU's experience in clarifying the conceptual framework, in the conceptual apparatus, methodology and expected practice of using strategic foresight for the development and implementation of policies to achieve the declared goals of long-term development. The main attention is paid to the analysis of four interrelated factors assessed by the European Commission as determining its target setting for sustainable development: socio-economic, geopolitical, green and digital, as well as issues of political decisions monitoring. Based on the results of the work, conclusions were made that are of fundamental importance for the formation of the prognostic component of domestic policy, with a focus on the general socio-economic and political conditions necessary to create a strategic forecasting system that is not yet available in Russia, adequate to the requirements of modern development.

Europejski Zielony Ład i odbudowa polskiej gospodarki – szanse i wyzwania

Man-made climate change has become the greatest political and economic challenge today. The dictate of GDP as the main measure of prosperity and economic success has led to the wasteful use of natural resources and a drastic increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The consequences are more and more felt: water, food and air pollution, the spread of infectious diseases such as Covid19, or extreme weather phenomena caused by global warming. Limiting these phenomena requires strong and consistent political decisions as well as real actions. The ambitious goals of decarbonisation and climate neutrality adopted by the European Union meet with the strongest resistance and criticism in the former Eastern Bloc countries, whose economies are highly dependent on coal. European policymakers are trying to reconcile the interests of European economies, highly diversified both in terms of the economic structure and the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix. The main tool is to be the unprecedented scale of the European budget earmarked for pro-climate actions, which is to help achieve climate neutrality while maintaining economic growth.

Borderland Anxieties: Brexit, Upper Silesia and Irish Partitions in Recent Novels by Glenn Patterson and Szczepan Twardoch

Northern Ireland owes its existence to a partition of Ireland that took place a century ago. The knottiest problems involved in the UK’s recent divorce with the European Union can be traced back not only to the Belfast Agreement of 1998 but also to the establishment of a new border, and a new borderland, in the island of Ireland in 1922. The same year (1922) saw the coming into effect of a partition of Upper Silesia, which was triggered by the events and political decisions taken in 1921. The primary focus of this essay is on literary representations of crises and anxieties connected with the transformations of the geopolitical statuses of the two provinces (i.e. Northern Ireland and Upper Silesia) and selected historical, political and cultural parallels between them. Those anxieties are exemplified and illustrated by the leading characters of Glenn Patterson’s Where Are We Now? (2020) and Szczepan Twardoch’s Pokora (2020). Both novels yield to provincial readings that explore basic aporias of uprootedness, displacement, deterritorialization and identity crises, collectively identified here as borderland anxieties. In consequence, transnational and postnational perspectives that emerge from Patterson’s and Twardoch’s works count as proactive responses, encoded in literary texts, to current geopolitical crises in Europe.

Delegitimizing Strategies and Tactics in a Discourse of Political Scientists (on an Example of Publications of Cyril Rogov)

Offered article is devoted to a problem of studying of communicative repertoir of political scientists. The given problem is actual in connection with distinction of objectives which are pursued by politicians and political scientists, and as consequence, distinction of their communicative strategy and tactics used in professional work. A leading position a discourse of political scientists strategy and borrow tactics which have been directed on confirming of legality and illegality of political processes. The article describes the features of the implementation of delegitimizing strategies and tactics in the publications of one of the most authoritative Russian political scientists – Kirill Rogov. Delegitimization as macrostrategy is carried out through a number of private communicative strategy and tactics realizing them, in particular, T. van Leuven has allocated four basic ways of giving of illegality to actions of authority: it is 1) the link on authority; 2) an ethical assessment; 3) rationalization; 4) mythopoetics. All the listed strategy (though and with a different degree of rate) are used in Cyril Rogov’s publications. Results of research specify, that key, possessing the person attractiveness, as communicative tactics of delegitimization tactics of a moral assessment and tactics of analogy act tactics of the appeal to “impersonal” authority. As one of the main features of the argument of own positions Cyril Rogov actively uses the reference to realities of the Soviet epoch, spending thus analogy between events of the present and Stalin reprisals, and in such a way specifies on illegitimacy many political decisions and political events. In addition, all the delegitimizing strategies and tactics used by Kirill Rogov are distinguished by the variety of lexical and syntactic means used, as well as by their pronounced evaluativeness and metaphoricity.