A functional perspective on post-communist civil society: contentious activities and internet activism in Latvia

Post-communist civil society is generally depicted to be rather weak. However, the existing academic literature is outdated and reveals conceptual issues. The incorporation of normative assumptions, focus on formal activities and establishment of universally applicable indicators has resulted in rigid operational concepts of civil society that do not sufficiently account for contentious activities and internet activism. Yet, these forms of public participation are becoming increasingly important. By adopting a functional perspective, this dissertation develops a revised operational concept of civil society that allows for assessing alternative forms of public participation in terms of their quantity and quality structure. The framework is applied to the case of Latvia, where quantitative aspects of contentious activities and internet activism as well as the quality structure of the online CSOs ManaBalss.lv and Politika.lv are investigated. The analysis yields remarkable results. Latvian civil society is not weak. The extent of both contentious activities and internet activism militate for a rather strong civil society in the country. However, the organizational infrastructure of ManaBalss.lv and Politika.lv shows that financial strains serve to illustrate huge constraints on the working capacities of the organizations and, thus, need to be addressed if civil society is to be maintained and further strengthened.http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b2681626~S1*es

E-expression in a comparative perspective: contextual drivers and constraints of online political expression

As the opportunities for online political expression grow exponentially, aggregate levels of e-expression vary strongly across countries worldwide. The paper explores contextual factors enabling or restraining e-expression, particularly media dependence, democratic experience and civil society robustness and combines them with micro-level demographics, capacities, and motivations. Based on multilevel logistic modelling of 2014 ISSP 'Citizenship II' data [ISSP Research Group. 2016. "International Social Survey Programme: Citizenship II - ISSP 2014 (Version 2.0.0) [Data file]." GESIS Data Archive.], it shows that e-expression is not dependent on a robust civil society, but on the years spent under democratic rule and the level of media dependence. The latter mediates the predictive effect of political trust, which is negative but ceases in countries with dependent and unfree media. The findings challenge assumptions on the mobilizing potential of digital tools in less free countries, particularly for critical citizens who wish to express grievances outside the circuit of official but closed or monitored channels. In contrast, a reinforcement effect is not only found on the individual-level but also in terms of a democratic digital divide between free and consolidated as well as dependent and young/no democratic regimes. Thereby, the paper contributes to our theoretical understanding of the institutional factors shaping e-expression

Numerical Analysis of a Time-Simultaneous Multigrid Solver for Stabilized Convection-Dominated Transport Problems in 1D

The work to be presented focuses on the convection-diffusion equation, especially in the regime of small diffusion coefficients, which is solved using a time-simultaneous multigrid algorithm closely related to multigrid waveform relaxation. For spatial discretization we use linear finite elements, while the time integrator is given by e.g. the Crank-Nicolson scheme. Blocking all time steps into a global linear system of equations and rearranging the degrees of freedom leads to a space-only problem with vector-valued unknowns for each spatial node. Then, common iterative solution techniques, such as the GMRES method with block Jacobi preconditioning, can be used for the numerical solution of the (spatial) problem and allow a higher degree of parallelization in space. We consider a time-simultaneous multigrid algorithm, which exploits space-only coarsening and the solution techniques mentioned above for smoothing purposes. By treating more time steps simultaneously, the dimension of the system of equations increases significantly and, hence, results in a larger number of degrees of freedom per spatial unknown. This can be used to employ parallel processes more efficiently. In numerical studies, the iterative multigrid solution of a problem with up to thousands of blocked time steps is analyzed in 1D. For the special case of the heat equation, it is well known that the number of iterations is bounded above independently of the number of blocked time steps, the time step size, and the spatial resolution. Unfortunately, convergence issues arise for the multigrid solver in convection-dominated regimes. In the context of the standard Galerkin method if the diffusion coefficient is small compared to the grid size and the magnitude of the velocity field, stabilization techniques are typically used to remove artificial oscillations in the solution. However, in our setting, special higher-order variational multiscale-type stabilization methods are discussed, which simultaneously improve the convergence behavior of the iterative solver as well as the smoothness of the numerical solution without significantly perturbing the accuracy

Improving Convergence of Time-Simultaneous Multigrid Methods for Convection-Dominated Problems using VMS Stabilization Techniques

We present the application of a time-simultaneous multigrid algorithm closely related to multigrid waveform relaxation for stabilized convection-diffusion equations in the regime of small diffusion coefficients. We use Galerkin finite elements and the Crank-Nicolson scheme for discretization in space and time. The multigrid method blocks all time steps for each spatial unknown, enhancing parallelization in space. While the number of iterations of the solver is bounded above for the 1D heat equation, convergence issues arise in convection-dominated cases. In singularly perturbed advection-diffusion scenarios, Galerkin FE discretizations are known to show instabilities in the numerical solution.We explore a higher-order variational multiscale stabilization, aiming to enhance solution smoothness and improve convergence without compromising accuracy

A class for itself? On the worldviews of the new tech elite.

The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises questions about the economic reach, political influence, and social importance of this group. How do these inordinately influential people think about the world and about our common future? In this paper, we test a) whether members of the tech elite share a common, meritocratic view of the world, b) whether they have a "mission" for the future, and c) how they view democracy as a political system. Our data set consists of information about the 100 richest people in the tech world, according to Forbes, and rests on their published pronouncements on Twitter, as well as on their statements on the websites of their philanthropic endeavors. Automated "bag-of-words" text and sentiment analyses reveal that the tech elite has a more meritocratic view of the world than the general US Twitter-using population. The tech elite also frequently promise to "make the world a better place," but they do not differ from other extremely wealthy people in this respect. However, their relationship to democracy is contradictory. Based on these results, we conclude that the tech elite may be thought of as a "class for itself" in Marx's sense-a social group that shares particular views of the world, which in this case means meritocratic, missionary, and inconsistent democratic ideology