The populist re-politicization : some lessons from South America and Southern Europe

This article proposes an alternative categorization of the populist phenomena, by elaborating the distinction between electoral-delegative and participative-mobilising populisms. All the populist phenomena share some common traits, such as a polarising and antagonist discourse dividing the society into a "People" and some "elites" or privileged sectors, their reliance on a strong leadership, a pretension to be majoritarian and to achieve the power at the national level in order to restore the sovereignty of the People. Nonetheless, the strategies for achieving these goals vary according to the specific diagnoses that would correct the perceived deficiencies of the representative democracies in terms of accountability of the representatives. The populisms closer to the electoral-delegative pole stress the symbolic dimension of the concept of representation, thus relying on a strong leader able to "truly interpret" the general will of the People. Those closer to the participative-mobilising pole call for an active involvement of the People in the decision-making process in order to effectively control the public institutions, stressing the descriptive dimension of the concept of representation and sometimes questioning the theoretical bases sustaining the representative democracy. I provide a brief discussion on four participative-mobilising populist experiences, i.e. the MAS-IPSP, the Kirchnerism, the M5S and Podemos, focusing on their internal organizations and relying on an extensive fieldwork (consisting in one hundred in-depth interviews with country experts and party's representatives at regional and national levels) that I conducted for a broader research project

Scaling relations of supersonic turbulence in star-forming molecular clouds

We present a direct numerical and analytical study of driven supersonic MHD turbulence that is believed to govern the dynamics of star-forming molecular clouds. We describe statistical properties of the turbulence by measuring the velocity difference structure functions up to the fifth order. In particular, the velocity power spectrum in the inertial range is found to be close to E(k) \~ k^{-1.74}, and the velocity difference scales as ~ L^{0.42}. The results agree well with the Kolmogorov--Burgers analytical model suggested for supersonic turbulence in [astro-ph/0108300]. We then generalize the model to more realistic, fractal structure of molecular clouds, and show that depending on the fractal dimension of a given molecular cloud, the theoretical value for the velocity spectrum spans the interval [-1.74 ... -1.89], while the corresponding window for the velocity difference scaling exponent is [0.42 ... 0.78].Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures include

The political instrument of self-employed workers. Inter-organizational conflicts within the bolivian process of change

The article analyses the relationship between the MAS-IPSP's party organization, the main Bolivian social movements, the economic model and the State-society relations during the masista-era. The research relies on over thirty interviews to social and political actors, and on secondary literature. The research recuperates classic analytical tools to explore the different levels of influence reached by the main social organizations surrounding (or composing) the MAS-IPSP and to highlight the role of two relevant conflictual dimensions within the former masista-coalition (salaried versus self-employed workers, indigenism versus developmentalism, among others) which in the middle term jeopardised the hegemony of the MAS-IPSP in Bolivia.El art\uedculo analiza las relaciones entre la organizaci\uf3n partidaria del MAS-IPSP, los principales movimientos y organizaciones sociales del pa\ueds y el modelo econ\uf3mico y de relaciones Estado-sociedad que se han desarrollado en Bolivia durante los gobiernos de Evo Morales. El an\ue1lisis se basa en m\ue1s de treinta entrevistas en profundidad a actores pol\uedticos y sociales, y en una revisi\uf3n de la literatura relevante. La investigaci\uf3n utiliza cl\ue1sicas herra- mientas conceptuales para desvelar el distinto nivel de influencia de las principales organizaciones sociales que formaron parte de la galaxia oficialista durante los gobiernos de Morales, identificando algunas irresueltas l\uedneas de conflictos (asalariados versus cuentapropistas, indi- genismo versus desarrollismo, entre otros) que en el mediano plazo debilitaron la hegemon\ueda del MAS-IPSP

A Super-Alfvenic Model of Dark Clouds

Supersonic random motions are observed in dark clouds and are traditionally interpreted as Alfven waves, but the possibility that these motions are super-Alfvenic has not been ruled out. In this work we report the results of numerical experiments in two opposite regimes; M_a ~ 1 and M_a >> 1, where M_a is the initial Alfvenic Mach number --the ratio of the rms velocity to the Alfven speed. Our results show that models with M_a >> 1 are consistent with the observed properties of molecular clouds that we have tested --statistics of extinction measurements, Zeeman splitting measurements of magnetic field strength, line width versus integrated antenna temperature of molecular emission line spectra, statistical B-n relation, and scatter in that relation-- while models with M_a ~ 1 have properties that are in conflict with the observations. We find that both the density and the magnetic field in molecular clouds may be very intermittent. The statistical distributions of magnetic field and gas density are related by a power law, with an index that decreases with time in experiments with decaying turbulence. After about one dynamical time it stabilizes at B ~ n^{0.4}. Magnetically dominated cores form early in the evolution, while later on the intermittency in the density field wins out, and also cores with weak field can be generated, by mass accretion along magnetic field lines.Comment: 10 figures, 2 tables include

The Statistics of Supersonic Isothermal Turbulence

We present results of large-scale three-dimensional simulations of supersonic Euler turbulence with the piecewise parabolic method and multiple grid resolutions up to 2048^3 points. Our numerical experiments describe non-magnetized driven turbulent flows with an isothermal equation of state and an rms Mach number of 6. We discuss numerical resolution issues and demonstrate convergence, in a statistical sense, of the inertial range dynamics in simulations on grids larger than 512^3 points. The simulations allowed us to measure the absolute velocity scaling exponents for the first time. The inertial range velocity scaling in this strongly compressible regime deviates substantially from the incompressible Kolmogorov laws. The slope of the velocity power spectrum, for instance, is -1.95 compared to -5/3 in the incompressible case. The exponent of the third-order velocity structure function is 1.28, while in incompressible turbulence it is known to be unity. We propose a natural extension of Kolmogorov's phenomenology that takes into account compressibility by mixing the velocity and density statistics and preserves the Kolmogorov scaling of the power spectrum and structure functions of the density-weighted velocity v=\rho^{1/3}u. The low-order statistics of v appear to be invariant with respect to changes in the Mach number. For instance, at Mach 6 the slope of the power spectrum of v is -1.69, and the exponent of the third-order structure function of v is unity. We also directly measure the mass dimension of the "fractal" density distribution in the inertial subrange, D_m = 2.4, which is similar to the observed fractal dimension of molecular clouds and agrees well with the cascade phenomenology.Comment: 15 pages, 19 figures, ApJ v665, n2, 200