1,720,978 research outputs found
The European Synarchy New Discourses on Sovereignty
No full textPreface Half a century since its inception as a community of western European democracies, limited in scope and competences, the European Union (EU) is taken to denote a composite polity that combines unity and multiplicity while having the capacity to produce publicly binding decisions and allocate values in European society. It is thus possible to capture the endemic systemic complexity of the regional process through the lens of new theoretical perspectives with a view to developing a series of novel understandings of EU governance in the early twenty-first century. p. far, the EU polity refers to a system of institutionalized shared rule among multiple state and non-state actors, characterized by the dispersal of political authority among various levels and the transcendence of hierarchical forms of power distribution. Thus different notions of democracy, legitimacy and representation produce novel accounts of post-national politics. Accordingly, a new democratic concept for the EU project should entail a balanced mix of social and political forces that share in the emerging sovereignty of the larger unit. Within the latter, public authority should not reside within a single decision-making centre, but rather should be diffused among different governance levels and forms of social, political and cultural contention that can combine territorial and substantive public issues. At the same time, recent changes in the workings of the EU polity have not affected its nature as an essentially statecentric project, preserving a balance between state sovereignty and a relatively moderate yet discernible deepening of integration by means of producing a system of political co-determination; in other words, a new form of synarchy between states and demoi – an ensemble sui generis of highly interdependent systems – is created, its structural and functional interaction resulting in a multilogical system of entwined sovereignties.1 Yet, the EU polity still remains a treaty-constituted body politic and not the unilateral act of a single and undifferentiated demos. Moreover, it does not derive its political authority from its citizens directly and has not – as yet – resulted in a complete fusion among different levels of public authority. Also, its constituent parts, in the form of historically constituted nation-states, are free to dissociate themselves from the larger unit. Finally, its emerging yet nebulous and even controversial constitutional identity rests heavily on the domestic orders of states, although the EU already projects a profound intertwining of democracies regarding the joint exercise of fundamental powers. Arguably, all of the above is crucial to understanding the changing conventions regarding state sovereignty that may now be interpreted as the right to be involved in the joint exercise of competences with other states. Linked to the question of sovereignty is that of democracy, which currently points to a negative side-effect of European integration: the growing dissonance between the requisites of democratic rule and the actual conditions on which the political management of EU affairs is largely based. The crucial distinction here concerns an institutional and a sociopsychological perspective. Whereas the former focuses on power-sharing and on institutional reform as a solution to the actual or perceived problems of democracy in the EU, the latter is concerned with questions of European identity and the formation of a composite European demos that is nonetheless distinct as a collectivity. As the current debate raises fundamental questions about the future form of the EU as a polity of highly interrelated states and demoi – a synarchy of entwined sovereignties – recent reforms, including the Lisbon Treaty2, whose ratification is still pending, failed to enhance the democratic properties of the general system, leaving the EU to resemble a system of democracies more than a democratic system in its own right. In a period when transnational pressures are challenging both intrastate and interstate relations, it may no longer be enough to confine democracy within state boundaries to deal effectively with the implications of new forms of polity. This raises new questions such as how to hold transnational decision-makers to account to citizens who belong to different national political systems. Such questions reflect substantive concerns that have grown as the regional process has evolved from an interstate diplomatic forum to a fully-fledged polity. This development, otherwise known as a “normative turn” in EU studies, has led to scholarly interest in the idea that the EU might one day transform itself into a democratic political system. While there is some measure of agreement that the EU is not democratic, there is no consensus on how it might become so. Indeed, there are two different understandings of what the EU’s democratic deficit comprises. The first focuses on institutional properties, arguing that the problem of democracy in the EU is tied to the flawed interinstitutional interactions that characterize the functioning of a non-state polity like the EU. In this context, proposals for further reform speak of the EU’s ”institutional imbalance” and of the need to enhance the public accountability as well as the representative nature of EU policy-makers and decision-takers. The second focuses on sociopsychological factors and makes the case for a new sense of European “demos-hood”. It argues that the EU’s present democratic pathology occurs because of the absence of a European demos. As a consequence, this second perspective is more interested in collective civic identity and the extent to which there is “a feeling of community” amongst Europeans. Acknowledging that the absence of a European demos – assuming that a legal or economic demos already exists – is a barrier to a democratic Europe, proposals for further reform tend to suggest paths to transnational demos-formation based on a common European civicness3. These notions of plural citizenship give rise to the idea of a “Republic of Europeans”, to which we now turn
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
"The Democratic Theory of European Integration: Elite Domination vs. Demos Control"
Full text linkThis essay aims to develop, and at the same time defend, a general view of democracy which goes beyond what has been labelled by Forsyth as 'normal interstate relations', 1 reflecting upon the current political physiognomy of the European Union (EU) as a Confederal Consociation: a compound polity whose distinct politically organised units are bound together in some form of 'Union' for specific purposes without losing their national identity or resigning their sovereignty to a single common government. In doing so, it is expected to shed some additional light on the relationship between democracy in the member nation-states and democracy within the larger polity. Hence, not only international relations theory or comparative politics proper, but also democratic theory, as a coherent 'network' of concepts and ideas concerning 'the art of good government', comprise the field of exploration. Although a number of normative assessments and value judgements are likely to develop during its elaboration, it should be stressed that there is no place of dogmatism in this undertaking. As Cohen once put it: There may be dogmatic democrats; there can be no democratic dogma.'.
The European Synarchy: New Discourses on Sovereignty
No full textHalf a century since its inception as a community of western European democracies, limited in scope and competences, the European Union (EU) is taken to denote a composite polity that combines unity and multiplicity while having the capacity to produce publicly binding decisions and allocate values in European society. It is thus possible to capture the endemic systemic complexity of the regional process through the lens of new theoretical perspectives with a view to developing a series of novel understandings of EU governance in the early twenty-first century. So far, the EU polity refers to a system of institutionalized shared rule among multiple state and non-state actors, characterized by the dispersal of political authority among various levels and the transcendence of hierarchical forms of power distribution. Thus different notions of democracy, legitimacy and representation produce novel accounts of post-national politics. Accordingly, a new democratic concept for the EU project should entail a balanced mix of social and political forces that share in the emerging sovereignty of the larger unit. Within the latter, public authority should not reside within a single decision-making centre, but rather should be diffused among different governance levels and forms of social, political and cultural contention that can combine territorial and substantive public issues.
At the same time, recent changes in the workings of the EU polity have not affected its nature as an essentially statecentric project, preserving a balance between state sovereignty and a relatively moderate yet discernible deepening of integration by means of producing a system of political co-determination; in other words, a new form of synarchy between states and demoi – an ensemble sui generis of highly interdependent systems – is created, its structural and functional interaction resulting in a multilogical system of entwined sovereignties.[1] Yet, the EU polity still remains a treaty-constituted body politic and not the unilateral act of a single and undifferentiated demos. Moreover, it does not derive its political authority from its citizens directly and has not – as yet – resulted in a complete fusion among different levels of public authority. Also, its constituent parts, in the form of historically constituted nation-states, are free to dissociate themselves from the larger unit. Finally, its emerging yet nebulous and even controversial constitutional identity rests heavily on the domestic orders of states, although the EU already projects a profound intertwining of democracies regarding the joint exercise of fundamental powers. Arguably, all of the above is crucial to understanding the changing conventions regarding state sovereignty that may now be interpreted as the right to be involved in the joint exercise of competences with other states.
Linked to the question of sovereignty is that of democracy, which currently points to a negative side-effect of European integration: the growing dissonance between the requisites of democratic rule and the actual conditions on which the political management of EU affairs is largely based. The crucial distinction here concerns an institutional and a socio-psychological perspective. Whereas the former focuses on power-sharing and on institutional reform as a solution to the actual or perceived problems of democracy in the EU, the latter is concerned with questions of European identity and the formation of a composite European demos that is nonetheless distinct as a collectivity. As the current debate raises fundamental questions about the future form of the EU as a polity of highly interrelated states and demoi – a synarchy of entwined sovereignties – recent reforms, including the Lisbon Treaty[2], whose ratification is still pending, failed to enhance the democratic properties of the general system, leaving the EU to resemble a system of democracies more than a democratic system in its own right.
In a period when transnational pressures are challenging both intrastate and interstate relations, it may no longer be enough to confine democracy within state boundaries to deal effectively with the implications of new forms of polity. This raises new questions such as how to hold transnational decision-makers to account to citizens who belong to different national political systems. Such questions reflect substantive concerns that have grown as the regional process has evolved from an interstate diplomatic forum to a fully-fledged polity. This development, otherwise known as a "normative turn" in EU studies, has led to scholarly interest in the idea that the EU might one day transform itself into a democratic political system. While there is some measure of agreement that the EU is not democratic, there is no consensus on how it might become so. Indeed, there are two different understandings of what the EU’s democratic deficit comprises. The first focuses on institutional properties, arguing that the problem of democracy in the EU is tied to the flawed interinstitutional interactions that characterize the functioning of a non-state polity like the EU. In this context, proposals for further reform speak of the EU’s ”institutional imbalance” and of the need to enhance the public accountability as well as the representative nature of EU policy-makers and decision-takers. The second focuses on sociopsychological factors and makes the case for a new sense of European "demos-hood". It argues that the EU’s present democratic pathology occurs because of the absence of a European demos. As a consequence, this second perspective is more interested in collective civic identity and the extent to which there is “a feeling of community” amongst Europeans. Acknowledging that the absence of a European demos – assuming that a legal or economic demos already exists – is a barrier to a democratic Europe, proposals for further reform tend to suggest paths to transnational demos-formation based on a common European civicness[3]. These notions of plural citizenship give rise to the idea of a “Republic of Europeans”, to which we now turn.
[1] Dimitris N. Chryssochoou, Theorizing European Integration, 2nd ed. (2009).
[2] Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community, 13 December 2007, OJ 2007/C 306/01.
[3] Dimitris N. Chryssochoou, Democracy in the European Union (1998)
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