Empowerment through religion: religion’s survival strategies in democratic politics

Utraciwszy status dominującej formuły legitymizacyjnej w świecie zachodnim, religia została też instytucjonalnie oddzielona od państwa i, w myśl ideologii liberalnej, zepchnięta na margines życia publicznego. Pomimo tych niesprzyjających okoliczności, religia – zarówno jako system idei i norm, jak i w wymiarze instytucjonalnym – zdołała obronić się przed marginalizacją, zapewniając sobie szczególny status wśród innych ideologii. W nauce objawia się to swego rodzaju metodologicznym agnostycyzmem, nakazującym traktować twierdzenia religijne jako niewspółmierne z naukowymi, a zatem niepodlegające krytyce. W polityce, organizacje religijne uzyskały w wielu państwach zachodnich szczególną pozycję, a wolność religijna została ukonstytuowana jako szczególny przypadek swobody wypowiedzi. W swej działalności politycznej organizacje religijne stosują zarówno metody identyczne z innymi aktorami politycznymi (lobbying, masowa mobilizacja itp.) – co nadaje im legitymację w ramach demokratycznych systemów politycznych – jak i specyficzne strategie religijne. Działania te są w artykule analizowane głównie na przykładach polskich i amerykańskich. Uzbrojone w takie narzędzia, religijne podmioty polityczne mogą wywierać znaczący wpływ na demokratyczne systemy polityczne.In contemporary Western world religion has long lost its status of a default legitimating formula and has been relegated, in liberal political philosophy, to the private sphere. Institutionally, religious organizations have been largely separated from government institutions. Despite these adverse circumstances, religion – both as a system of ideas, values and norms and in its institutional expression – has adopted effective survival strategies guarding it from social and political marginalization. Religion has been accorded special status among other ideologies. In science, it results in a sort of methodological agnosticism, which treats religious and scientific statements as belonging to two incommensurable spheres. In politics, religious organizations are often granted special legal status among other political actors and religious freedom has been constitutionalized as a special case of general freedom of expression. As judicature and political practice show, religious arguments can often trump non-religious claims when fundamental value conflicts arise. In their political activity, religious organizations have used strategies characteristic for other political actors (lobbying, mass mobilization etc.), thereby gaining democratic legitimacy, as well as unique, religion-specific strategies. Armed with these and other empowering tools, religion can continue to influence democratic political systems in significant ways

A contemporary religious political movement: LDS Church’s nation-wide political campaigns

Drawing empirically on the examples of the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ (Mormon) participation in anti-ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) ratification campaign and its latest attempts to influence other political issues of moral consequences (such as same-sex marriage) in the United States, the paper attempts to analyse the dynamics of a contemporary religiously motivated political movement.Despite being, on any of these issues, a part of a wider coalition of political actors, the Mormon church displayed a specifically religious motivation, justification and modus operandi. Owing to strong religious legitimacy of their power – based on the doctrine of continuous revelation and enhanced by a sort of “personality cult” of the Church President-Prophet developing in late 20th century – the leadership of the church has been capable of effective grassroots mobilization, achieved through a disciplined universal priesthood structure.While, from the theoretical point of view, this Mormon political movement is of a traditional, “old” variation (ideological and social cohesion of members, well-defined, stable membership, hierarchical leadership etc.) it has nevertheless been relatively successful in modern political environment. The Mormon engagement, at least in the anti-ERA campaign, had made a difference certainly in Utah, and probably elsewhere as well

Speed-up credit exposure calculations for pricing and risk management

We introduce a new method to calculate the credit exposure of European and path-dependent options. The proposed method is able to calculate accurate expected exposure and potential future exposure profiles under the risk-neutral and the real-world measure. Key advantage of is that it delivers an accuracy comparable to a full re-evaluation and at the same time it is faster than a regression-based method. Core of the approach is solving a dynamic programming problem by function approximation. This yields a closed form approximation along the paths together with the option's delta and gamma. The simple structure allows for highly efficient evaluation of the exposures, even for a large number of simulated paths. The approach is flexible in the model choice, payoff profiles and asset classes. We validate the accuracy of the method numerically for three different equity products and a Bermudan interest rate swaption. Benchmarking against the popular least-squares Monte Carlo approach shows that our method is able to deliver a higher accuracy in a faster runtime.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1905.0023

Function approximation for option pricing and risk management Methods, theory and applications.

PhD Thesis.This thesis investigates the application of function approximation techniques for computationally demanding problems in nance. We focus on the use of Chebyshev interpolation and its multivariate extensions. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a new pricing method for path-dependent options. In each step of the dynamic programming time-stepping we approximate the value function with Chebyshev polynomials. A key advantage of this approach is that it allows us to shift all modeldependent computations into a pre-computation step. For each time step the method delivers a closed form approximation of the price function along with the options' delta and gamma. We provide a theoretical error analysis and nd conditions that imply explicit error bounds. Numerical experiments con rm the fast convergence of prices and sensitivities. We use the new method to calculate credit exposures of European and path-dependent options for pricing and risk management. The simple structure of the Chebyshev interpolation allows for a highly e cient evaluation of the exposures. We validate the accuracy of the computed exposure pro les numerically for di erent equity products and a Bermudan swaption. Benchmarking against the least-squares Monte Carlo approach shows that our method delivers a higher accuracy in a faster runtime. We extend the method to e ciently price early-exercise options depending on several risk-factors. As an example, we consider the pricing of callable bonds in a hybrid twofactor model. We develop an e cient and stable calibration routine for the model based on our new pricing method. Moreover, we consider the pricing of early-exercise basket options in a multivariate Black-Scholes model. We propose a numerical smoothing in the dynamic programming time-stepping using the smoothing property of a Gaussian kernel. An extensive numerical convergence analysis con rms the e ciency

Eine qualitative Studie zum Zusammenhang von Facebook - Nutzung und Partizipation bei 16 - bis 18 - Jährigen

Obwohl sowohl Soziale Online-Netzwerke als auch Partizipation wesentliche Teile der Lebenswelt Jugendlicher in Deutschland sind, wurde der Zusammenhang bisher kaum untersucht. Unter den Prämissen, dass Jugendliche Soziale Online-Netzwerke zur Identitätsarbeit nutzen und dass Engagement identitätsstiftend ist, wird analysiert, inwiefern soziale und politische Partizipation in die Selbstdarstellung bei Facebook eingebunden werden. Normativer Ausgangspunkt ist dabei ein partizipatives Demokratieverständnis. Zur Beantwortung der Frage werden neun qualitative Online-Interviews geführt, deren Auswertung eine enge Verzahnung von Partizipation und Facebook-Nutzung offenbart. Das Soziale Netzwerk wird zur Information, Koordination und Kommunikation genutzt. Zudem erweitern sich durch die Online-Nutzung die Handlungsmöglichkeiten der Jugendlichen und sie können sich raumunabhängig Themen von persönlichem Interesse widmen. Für die Identitätsarbeit zeigt sich, dass Jugendlichen stolz auf ihr Engagement sind und es gerne online präsentieren. Gerade im politischen Bereich werden Bezüge aber nur dann sichtbar gemacht, wenn sie sich ihrer Sache sicher sind. Ein Experimentieren mit verschiedenen Identitäten konnte nicht festgestellt werden. KJM : Forschungspapiere Kinder- und Jugendmedien : Forschungspapiere des Masterstudiengangs Kinder- und Jugendmedien der Universität Erfurt Übersicht: http://www.uni-erfurt.de/target/kjm

Urbane Regime: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Ansatzes

Der Ansatz der urbanen Regime ist ein prominentes Forschungsparadigma der lokalen Politikforschung, insbesondere in der angloamerikanischen Tradition. Unter dem Oberbegriff der Governance geht es um die Beziehungen zwischen öffentlichen und privaten Akteuren in den Städten, somit um die Konsensfindung über die gemeinsam zu erreichenden Ziele bzw. Agenden. Die deutsche lokale Politikforschung konzentrierte sich bislang stark auf die öffentliche Verwaltung als Untersuchungsfeld. Diese Schwerpunktsetzung steht im Zusammenhang mit der vergleichsweise hohen Autonomie der öffentlichen Verwaltung in Deutschland. Demgegenüber stehen Allianzen zwischen verschiedenen Gruppen öffentlicher und privater Akteure im Zentrum des Ansatzes der urbanen Regime. Die institutionelle Einbettung der Akteure auf lokaler und supralokaler Ebene und deren dadurch strukturierte Handlungsräume werden allerdings in diesem Ansatz bislang nur unzureichend thematisiert. Gerade bei international vergleichenden Analysen kann dies durch die Kombination mit neo-institutionalistischen Ansätzen gewährleistet werden. -- In local policy studies, the urban regime approach is one of the prominent paradigms, especially in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The focus on the governance structures stresses the importance of blending public and private resources in the cities to realize consensus on a common agenda. The German local policy research traditionally centred around the logics of public administration in achieving public goals and strategies. This priority is due to the relatively high autonomy of public administration in Germany. In contrast, the approach of urban regimes concentrates on the alliances between different groups of public and private actors. Yet, the institutional embeddedness of the actors at the local and supralocal level for establishing and maintaining urban regimes has, on the whole, been a not adequately integrated topic. But precisely in regard to international comparisons, it is essential to make sure that this factor is acknowledged. This can be done by combining the urban regime approach with neo-institutional theories.