The Role of Government in Collective Bargaining: Scandinavia and the Low Countries

This article compares the role of government in collective bargaining in five small West European countries. For the period until the second half of the 1970s, a distinction is made between countries in which government often interfered in wage bargaining, e. g. Denmark and The Netherlands, and countries in which government refrained from intervention, like Sweden. Belgium and, to a lesser degree, Norway. In all countries the tradition of (non)-intervention had already started before the Second World War. The article reviews some explanatory variables: in Scandinavia centralization of labour relations is crucial, in the Low Countries the nature of political verzuiling. Recent developments show that government intervention has become a characteristic of labour relations in all but one country.\ud \u

До питання про етапи розвитку конкретної поезії від античності до XX століття

The article «The question of continuation stages of concrete poetry from antiquity to the 20th century» deals with the main problems and forms of experimental non-conventional poetry. The article focuses on the beginning of experiments in poetry starting with the concrete poetry in the Hellenistic age and proceeds with studying its development up to nowadays. The author makes an attempt to systematize the transformation of non-traditional poetry

Public Deliberation or Popular Votes? Measuring the Performance of Different Types of Participatory Democracy

There is a growing body of empirical research on democracies with strong or weak deliberative and/or direct democratic features. But how do these features affect the performance of a country? How do participatory types of democracies differ considering system performance, democratic performance, and social performance? Which type is more successful? Although these questions are most crucial and pressing in democracy research, they remain mostly unexplored. Our explorative study is a start to fill this gap. It analyzes which participatory types of democracies perform better: countries with less or more deliberation, countries with less or more direct democratic elements, countries that score high or low on both features. Based on several datasets and applying different statistical tools, we show that the associations between these types of democracy and performance are multifaceted. The most important finding, however, is clear-cut. Democracies with strong deliberative as well as strong direct democratic features perform better than other democracies. Combining deliberation with direct democracy seems to be the optimal formula to guarantee high social, system, and democratic performance. However, many questions remain open and we discuss the need for future research

Theories and core principles of Dutch democracy

Democracies in Europe differ in what they see as being at the core of the democratic system. In some countries, citizen participation constitutes the fundamental tenet of democracy; in others, democracy is closely linked to pluralism and the protection of minorities. This paper tries to identify certain core principles of the Dutch democratic system that are reflected in the institutions and political culture that have to come to define the democratic system and are derived from the intellectual context in which the system emerged. It does so by asking two questions. The first is: what are the core principles of Dutch democracy that are reflected in the democratic system? Five core principles are distinguished, each of which has been institutionalised in various ways. The second question is: which ideas on democracy of key political thinkers of the 19th and early 20th century are relevant to understanding the core principles of Dutch democracy? This paper explores the normative theories on democracy of a number of political thinkers in the Netherlands. Traces of different theories appear to be present in the core principles of the Dutch democratic system.democracy; ideas; political science