The Dynamics of Religious Legitimation

This chapter examines legitimation theory and the ways in which religion has justified inequality throughout most of history. The rise of economic and political inequality generated social attitudes and beliefs that justified it, making it seem proper, natural, and consonant with the mandates of celestial powers. Elites’ ideology presented this inequality as necessary and fair. Because religion also meets psychological and social needs, until modern times, religion played the major ideological role in legitimating inequality, social institutions, and behavior. Inequality and class or other group-based hierarchy can be maintained by either physical force or ideological persuasion. Physical force can be expressed as threat of imprisonment, torture, or death. But physical force generates resentment and expensive policing. Less costly, ideological control is generally expressed through the manipulation of social discourse. Thus, it is most effective for elites to embrace self-serving ideological systems that are convincing to themselves and to those below them.

Political inequality, political participation, and support for populist parties

We theoretically investigate how political abstention among certain social groups encourages populist parties to enter the political stage, trying to absorb inactive voters. We design a two-stage game with two established parties and n voters who jointly determine a taxation policy. The electorate is divided into two groups, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Voters’ decisions on whether to participate depend on a party’s tax rate proposal and on general party ideology. Effective political participation requires a certain amount of financial, social and intellectual resources to, for example, evaluate party programs or to engage in political discussion. As the disadvantaged are endowed with fewer resources, they lack political efficacy, resulting in less political participation. Consequently, the established parties propose a tax rate which is biased towards the preferences of the advantaged. The unused voter potential among the disadvantaged draws the interest of a populist challenger. To win support from the disadvantaged, the challenger party optimally proposes a respectively biased tax rate, which then works to polarize the political spectrum.Please confirm if the author names are presented accurately and in the correct sequence (given name, middle name/initial, family name). Author 1 Given name: [Kim Leonie] Last name [ Kellermann]. Also, kindly confirm the details in the metadata are correct.All correct.

Income Inequality, Social Mobility, and Electoral Participation in the US Counties: Revisiting the Inequality-Participation Nexus

Previous research has provided contested hypotheses about the impact of income inequality on electoral participation. This study reexamines the debate between conflict and relative power theories by focusing on a largely ignored factor: social mobility. We argue that social mobility conditions the inequality-participation nexus by alleviating the frustration, class conflict, and efficacy gaps between the rich and the poor that the prevailing theories assume income inequality to create. By utilizing the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, we test this argument focusing on US counties. Our analysis confirms that the effects of income inequality on citizens’ likelihood of voting vary depending on mobility, suggesting that social mobility provides a crucial context in which income inequality can play out in substantially different ways. This article implies that more scholarly endeavors should be made to clarify the multifaceted structure of inequality for improving our understanding of the relationship between economic and political inequality.

Staatsburgerschap en Nederlanderschap in Nederlands-Indië in de negentiende eeuw

The development of political citizenship in the Dutch East-Indies in the nineteenth century This article aims to analyze the political inequality between Dutch subjects in the Dutch East-Indies and the Netherlands based on developments in nineteenth century national citizenship debates and legislation. It argues that the juridization of the idea of political citizenship by J.R. Thorbecke in the 1840s and 1850s, led to the exclusion of the indigenous colonial population on the basis of descent (ius sanguinis). A close inspection of this principle shows how it was legitimized and implemented for the colonial territories on the basis of a ‘Dutch and European civilization criterion’ under which a series of other criteria – such as religion, skin color, education – could be used for political, cultural and economic exclusion. The ‘colonial differences’ that were gradually enshrined in legislation surrounding political citizenship in the nineteenth century would create a new layer of colonial hierarchy in the Dutch East-Indies.

Algorithms, Manipulation, and Democracy

Algorithmic communications pose several challenges to democracy. The three phenomena of filtering, hypernudging, and microtargeting can have the effect of polarizing an electorate and thus undermine the deliberative potential of a democratic society. Algorithms can spread fake news throughout the society, undermining the epistemic potential that broad participation in democracy is meant to offer. They can pose a threat to political equality in that some people may have the means to make use of algorithmic communications and the sophistication to be immune from attempts at manipulation, while other people are vulnerable to manipulation by those who use these means. My concern here is with the danger that algorithmic communications can pose to political equality, which arises because most citizens must make decisions about what and who to support in democratic politics with only a sparse budget of time, money, and energy. Algorithmic communications such as hypernudging and microtargeting can be a threat to democratic participation when persons are operating in environments that do not conduce to political sophistication. This constitutes a deepening of political inequality. The political sophistication necessary to counter this vulnerability is rooted for many in economic life and it can and ought to be enhanced by changing the terms of economic life.

Economic and political inequality in the management of socio-environmental problems

We designed and conducted an experiment of common-pool resource management involving economic and political inequality. Participants are assigned to different types differing in their endowments-Poor, Middle and Rich-and play an appropriation dilemma, with and without a voting procedure to select a quota limiting maximum extraction. Political inequality is introduced by allocating a higher likelihood to select the voted quota of a given player type: in the Ptochocracy treatment, the "Poor" type has a higher chance of setting her choice as quota; whereas in the Demarchy and Plutocracy treatments, this is true for the "Middle" and "Rich" types, respectively. These are contrasted with Democracy, where the votes of all three types are equally likely to be selected. Theoretically, each player type selfishly prefers the quota closer (i.e., one unit below) their endowment, although the lower quota would be socially desirable.We find that participants voted for the selfishly preferred quota between half and two-thirds of the time, and the introduction of these quotas decreased the absolute extraction in about 17.5%, even though participants were more likely to choose extraction levels closer to their maximum capacity (now set by the quota). Nonetheless, we do not find systematic differences in extraction patterns between treatments.

Gender inequalities in political participation and political engagement among young people in Europe: Are young women less politically engaged than young men?

This paper contributes to the literature by examining gender inequalities in political participation and political engagement among young people from a comparative perspective. By analyzing data on young people from nine European countries collected in 2018, we examine gender inequalities in participation in various modes of conventional and unconventional activism as well as related attitudes, broader political engagement and key determinants, cross-nationally, in order to provide a detailed picture of the current state of gender inequalities in political activism among young people in Europe. Our results allow us to speak to extant theorizing about gender inequalities by showing that the extent of political inequality between young men and women is less marked than one might expect. While the gender gaps in political participation for activities such as confrontational types of protest are small or absent, we find that young women are actually more active in petitioning, buycotting, and volunteering in the community. Young men instead are more active than young women in a majority of the nine countries analysed with respect to more institutional forms of participation linked to organizations and parties, various types of online political participation, and broader political engagement measures, such as internal political efficacy and consumption of political news through various channels. However, young men also appear to be more sceptical at least of certain aspects of democratic practice relative to young women.

The dynamics of cooperation, power, and inequality in a group-structured society

Most human societies are characterized by the presence of different identity groups which cooperate but also compete for resources and power. To deepen our understanding of the underlying social dynamics, we model a society subdivided into groups with constant sizes and dynamically changing powers. Both individuals within groups and groups themselves participate in collective actions. The groups are also engaged in political contests over power which determines how jointly produced resources are divided. Using analytical approximations and agent-based simulations, we show that the model exhibits rich behavior characterized by multiple stable equilibria and, under some conditions, non-equilibrium dynamics. We demonstrate that societies in which individuals act independently are more stable than those in which actions of individuals are completely synchronized. We show that mechanisms preventing politically powerful groups from bending the rules of competition in their favor play a key role in promoting between-group cooperation and reducing inequality between groups. We also show that small groups can be more successful in competition than large groups if the jointly-produced goods are rivalrous and the potential benefit of cooperation is relatively small. Otherwise large groups dominate. Overall our model contributes towards a better understanding of the causes of variation between societies in terms of the economic and political inequality within them.

De-Russification of Government as a Factor in the Disintegration of the USSR

In the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1990, the political inequality of the nationalities’ representation in institutions of governance was overcome, non-Russians’ participation in the power structures increased, and Russians’ role in administration correspondingly decreased. The increased non-Russian percentage in governance was mainly due to the introduction of the democratic principle in government formation, according to which ethnicities should participate in proportion to their number. By 1990 in the USSR overall, Russians had a slight majority in all power structures, corresponding roughly to their higher share in the country’s population. In the union republics, however, the situation was different. Only in the RSFSR did all peoples, Russian and non-Russian, participate in government administration in proportion to their numbers, following the democratic norm. Elsewhere, Russians were underrepresented and therefore discriminated against in all organs of power, including the legislative branch. Representatives of non-Russian titular nationalities, who on average filled two-thirds of all administrative positions, predominated in disproportion to their numbers. Given these representatives’ skill majority in legislative bodies, republican constitutions permitted them to adopt any laws and resolutions they desired, including laws on secession from the USSR; and the executive and judicial authorities, together with law enforcement, would undoubtedly support them. Thus, the structural prerequisites for disintegration were established. Thereafter, the fate of the Soviet Union depended on republican elites and the geopolitical environment, because of the Center’s purposeful national policy, aimed toward increasing non-Russian representation among administrative cadres and the accelerated modernization and developmental equalization of the republics.

Unemployment and Youth Restiveness in Africa: Implications for Counselling

Restiveness among youths has become one of the nagging global challenges. Consequently, its prevalence in Africa has become more worrisome now than ever before. This paper therefore examined unemployment and the incidences of youth restiveness in Africa: Implication for counseling. The paper adopted a qualitative approach relying mainly on secondary materials from documented evidences. Available data indicates persistent rise in the level of unemployment across different African countries. By the same token there have also been high incidences of restiveness among the youths in Africa within the same period. However, the paper brought to the fore specific instances of restiveness in select African countries namely; militancy and insurgency in Nigeria Niger Delta, xenophobic attacks in South Africa, socio-political crises in southern Cameroun, ethnic and religiously motivated restiveness in Mali and rising piracy and terrorism in Somalia as case studies. The paper identified poverty, unemployment, socio-economic and political inequality and marginalization as factors of youth restiveness. These factors no doubt are in high prevalence in Africa. Given the scenario, the implication for counseling is of great consequence as the concern revolves around how counselling services can be leveraged in the context so that the youths can be properly engaged to embrace genuine efforts towards self-development, skills acquisition, self-reliance and nation building. It is argued that the solution to unemployment and youth restiveness problems lie in part on counsellors constructive engagement with youths, on awareness creation through the media, education of the youth towards self-realization and on their pivotal roles in nation building.