Parliamentary Scrutiny of the European Semester: The Case of Poland

The European Semester became an essential part of the revised governance architecture of the Europe 2020 reform strategy for the Single European Market under the conditions of the global financial crisis and the emerging eurozone crisis a decade ago. The article examines to what extent the European Semester offers channels to establish throughput legitimacy by granting national parliaments the ability to effectively scrutinise executive decision-making in the annual policy cycle. Poland is chosen as the case study for parliamentary scrutiny of the EU’s system of multi-level governance in the East-Central European region. The analysis adopts a liberal intergovernmentalist two-level approach. On the domestic level it concentrates on the involvement of the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, on the drafting of the Polish National Reform Plans for the annual Semester policy cycle between 2015 and 2020. The basis for the analysis are official transcripts from the plenary debates in the relevant committees, the European Affairs Committee and the Public Finance and the Economic Committee. The Polish case study illustrates that the European Semester represents a predominantly elite-driven process of policy coordination, which is strongly geared towards EU-level executive bargaining processes between national governments and the European Commission at the expense of domestic parliamentary scrutiny

Editor’s Introduction: The Promise and Peril of Ranked Choice Voting

Dissatisfaction with two-party politics is at an all-time high in the US. As extreme polarization and minority rule persist, a possibility of an electoral reform becomes increasingly more likely. This editor’s introduction discusses the ranked choice voting (RCV) as an alternative to the current single-member geographic districts with winner-take-all plurality elections in the US. The articles for this thematic issue critically evaluate whether RCV lives up to its promise in improving democracy in the US. Like any rule or institutional change, it has benefits and drawbacks. The empirical and historical research presented here focuses on the implementation and use of RCV in the US compared to other countries. This thematic issue offers new insights into the promise and perils of RCV as a way to aggregate votes in elections that ensure that the winning candidate receives a majority of the votes cast

Ranked Choice Voting and Youth Voter Turnout: The Roles of Campaign Civility and Candidate Contact

Ranked choice voting (RCV) has become increasing popular in the United States as more cities and states begin allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference. This change in election system has been linked to increased campaign civility and mobilization, but with little evidence suggesting these benefits lead to increased voter turnout in the general population. This study argues that RCV elections may not increase overall voting but will increase youth voting. Considering young Americans, who have become increasingly pessimistic towards politics and are also heavily reliant on mobilization for participation, this study argues that increased campaign civility and mobilization may work to offset the negative feelings and lack of political engagement that plague young Americans. Using a matched study of individual level voter turnout for seven RCV and fourteen non-RCV local elections from 2013 and 2014, we find that there is no statistical difference in voting rates between RCV and plurality cities for the general public. Yet, in line with our hypotheses, younger voters are more likely to vote in RCV cities. Further, we find that increased contact in RCV elections accounts for a larger portion of the increased voter turnout compared to perceptions of campaign civility. Findings suggest RCV acts as a positive mobilizing force for youth voting through increasing campaign contact

The Need and Desire for Inclusive Universities: A Perspective from Development Studies

In recent times there has been sustained momentum to address inequalities within university faculties and improve the diversity of students. Also, in response to historical and current social injustices, universities have sought to decolonize curricula. These progressive movements have had particular significance for departments focused on development studies and related subjects because the need to be inclusive is not only the right thing to do from a moral position, but also because to be exclusive is fundamentally challenging to the conceptualization and philosophy of the discipline. Development is a contested term but addressing inequality and working towards social justice are common themes found across most definitions. This commentary provides a critical insight into the importance of inclusive universities as gatekeepers to equitable knowledge production and the development of future professionals. To play their part in addressing the challenges posed by a globalized world, universities need to be proactive in ensuring that they become fully and meaningfully inclusive. While all university departments would benefit from becoming more inclusive, departments focused on development must be the pioneers leading the way, as inclusivity is relevant to the delivery of development studies, as well as emerging as an important discourse within the discipline that continues to evolve. This commentary will explore how and why in an increasingly interconnected global society, the need for universities to leave no one behind, and challenge hegemonic and unequal structures has never been greater

Disability Narratives in Sports Communication: Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games’ Best Practices and Implications

The Paralympic Games have become a relevant social and communication tool for the enhancement of global awareness and understanding of disability. The increasing visibility of this kind of global sports event, as well as the efforts of public authorities to make their host cities more accessible, evidence a relevant shift to new urban barrier-free experiences and discourses concerning disability. This research is guided by an exploratory case study approach to assess the disability representation and narratives within the context of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games. The examination of some innovative communication strategies fostering the visibility of disability reveals a series of effective practices implemented in Japan. The focus on the personification of para-athletes, the celebration of public events to experience first-hand para-sports disciplines, as well as the engagement of school-children and young people in para-sports initiatives are predominant in the communication efforts of Tokyo 2020 in the pre-games period

Straddling the Fence: Land Use Patterns in and around Ports as Hidden Designers

Ports are clearly demarcated structures on land and water. They are fenced in, easily recognizable on satellite and orthophoto images, and they have specific functions. This apparent clarity of ports, their function and outline, in relation to nearby urban and rural areas, becomes more complex when explored through the lens of land use, that is the existing and planned future functional dimension or socio-economic purpose of the land. In contrast to urban and rural areas, where land use has been mapped and defined for centuries, the use and function of land and water in port areas has long been multifunctional and not defined on land use maps. This raises questions about the role and understanding of port territory in relation to neighboring spaces, past, and present. This article first defines land use and describes its historical development. Scholars from various disciplines, including geographers, planners, and economists, have addressed the issue of land use in port areas. Land use patterns have emerged over time and are based on earlier demarcations of port areas and distinctions between port and city. As shown by the historical port city borders in Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Koper, these delimitations can change over time, by location and by function. The land use register has only recently been harmonized at the European level. European and national registers distinguish existing and planned land use in port areas differently. Mixed uses prevail in new port interventions, creating a new kind of permeability or porosity; that is, areas where port, urban and rural functions merge. New land use porosity is a particular state of land use (on both sides of the boundaries of port areas) that goes beyond the physical boundaries marked by fences. Land use porosity effectively creates land use continuity, a functional porosity that serves as a hidden blueprint for future planning. Understanding land use porosity can provide a foundation for novel approaches to the development of transition strategies that are needed to address contemporary challenges, including climate change and sea level rise, digitization, and new work and life practices in port city regions. In conclusion, we note that due to the porosity of land use patterns, the separation between the present port and the city is beginning to crumble. However, this process has yet to be made fully visible and used as a basis for design

Spinning at the Border: Employee Activism in ‘Big PR’

This article extends Coombs and Holladay’s (2018) social issues management model to provide new perspectives on activism and public relations. It also fills a gap in the literature on internal activism by analyzing the case of The Ogilvy Group and their employees, many of whom pushed for the agency to resign its work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Through a textual analysis of a leaked transcript documenting a meeting between Ogilvy management and internal activist employees, the communicative tasks of definition, legitimation, and awareness (Coombs & Holladay, 2018) are explored in a way that complicates identity and power. As public relations practitioners are increasingly called upon to either advocate for or against social issues, this study provides an interesting contrast, showing one interpretation of what happens when there is dissension in the ranks

Ressentiment: A Complex Emotion or an Emotional Mechanism of Psychic Defences?

Ressentiment is central for understanding the psychological foundations of reactionary politics, right-wing populism, Islamic fundamentalism, and radicalism. In this article we theorise ressentiment as an emotional mechanism which, reinforcing a morally superior sense of victimhood, expedites two parallel transvaluation processes: What was once desired or valued, yet unattainable, is reassessed as something undesirable and rotten, and one’s own self from being inferior, a loser, is reassessed as being noble and superior. We establish negative emotions of envy, shame, and inefficacious anger as the main triggers of ressentiment, with their associated feelings of inferiority and impotence, which target the vulnerable self. We identify the outcomes of ressentiment as other-directed negative emotions of resentment, indignation, and hatred, reinforced and validated by social sharing. We map the psychological structure of ressentiment in four stages, each employing idiosyncratic defences that depend on the ego-strength of the individual to deliver the transvaluation of the self and its values, and finally detail how social sharing consolidates the outcome emotions, values, and identities in ressentiment through shallow twinship bonds with like-minded peers. Our interdisciplinary theoretical account integrates classic philosophical scholarship of ressentiment and its contemporary proponents in philosophy and sociology, which highlight envy as the prime driver of ressentiment; it also considers the sociological approaches that focus on the repression and transmutation of shame and its social consequences, as well as the psychoanalytic scholarship on psychic defences and political psychology models on the emotionality of decision-making. We conclude the article by elaborating the political implications of ressentiment as the emotional mechanism of grievance politics

Diversity is not the Enemy: Promoting Encounters between University Students and Newcomers

In today’s globalized world with dynamic processes of political, social, and societal change (Mergner et al., 2019) the university should be a place of encounter between people with different (cultural) backgrounds. The learning arrangement presented here therefore initiates intercultural exchange and aims to help students see diversity as an asset rather than a challenge (Roos, 2019). To this end, an intercultural project was initiated at TU Dortmund in Germany in 2017. In the context of different learning environments future teachers were invited to have encounters with young newcomers through a nearly completely self‐managed learning arrangement. The students were prepared for the encounters in focused courses dealing with theoretical backgrounds and didactic concepts. They would then prepare the lessons with the newcomers. In the context of this learning arrangement the following questions were important: What did the university students expect with regard to the encounter with newcomer students from schools? How did they prepare the lessons? What did students and newcomers think about the encounters later? What have they learned? And what do these reflections mean for inclusive and intercultural teacher education at universities? In the project we could observe that the didactic approach supports the students’ level of sensitivity towards differences and encourages future teachers to train the education of newcomers in a non‐judgmental framework (Bartz & Bartz, 2018). Based on a selection of qualitative empirical findings (ethnographic approach during six lessons in a period of two years and 147 interviews including the students’ and newcomers’ points of view about their learning encounters at TU Dortmund), this article discusses opportunities to create more innovative spaces for inclusive practices and cultures under the restricted terms of a mass university

Mass University and Social Inclusion: The Paradoxical Effect of Public Policies

The objective of this article is to revisit the role of public policies in the social production and reproduction of university access inequalities that have been made evident more than ever in the current intensified mass higher education context. Although the situation is complex and varies from one societal context to another, a systematic review of the existing literature highlights the undeniable responsibility of public policies in this reproduction through three main channels: guidance systems and educational pathways, institutions’ stratification and hierarchization of fields of study and, finally, the financing of studies and tuition fees