Inhalt

PCS – Politics, Culture and Socialization
2023-2024: Special Issues

Vol. 14, 2023: Special Issue: Political Identities Challenged: Democracy, Culture, and Socialization
Articles
Henk Dekker: Democracy, Democracy Support and Democracy Socialization
Bob Hanke: Trump’s New Face of Power in America

Work in Progress
Daniel B. German: The State of America IV: A Nation Divided, But Still Strong

Book review
Daniel B. German: Brothers at Each Other’s Throats: Regularity of the Violent Ethnic Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Space. By Isaenko, Anatoly (2021)

Vol. 15, 2024: Special Issue: Political Identities Challenged: Exploring the Consequences of Communicative Changes
Articles
Peter Bull: The analysis of political equivocation by British political leaders
Oleksii Polegkyi / Christ’l De Landtsheer: Knocking at the House with Closed Doors: Metaphorical representation of European integration in Ukrainian media discourse before 2014
Onur Sultan / Ismail Aslan: Mere Duplication or Original? ISIS Ability to Adapt Propaganda to Different Target Audiences
Richard D. Anderson, Jr.: Voicing Politics: Linguistics and the Debility of Political Science

Book Reviews
Daniel B. German: Alone Together: Why We Expect MORE From Technology and LESS From Each Other. By Sherry Turkle (2017) and Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Perils of the Digital Age. By Brad Smith and Carol Browne (2019)

Download of single articles (Open Access/fee-based): pcs.budrich-journals.com
You can register here for the PCS alert.

Einzelbeitrag-Download (Open Access/Gebühr): pcs.budrich-journals.com
Sie können sich hier für den PCS-Alert anmelden.

Zusätzliche Information

Zusatzmaterial

Table of Contents / Inhaltsverzeichnis
Extracts / Leseproben

Autor*innen

Henk Dekker

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Bob Hanke

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Daniel B. German

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Peter Bull

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Oleksii Polegkyi

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Christ'l De Landtsheer

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Onur Sultan

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Ismail Aslan

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Richard D. Anderson Jr.

alle Publikationen anzeigen

Schlagwörter

assemblage, Daesh, deeply divided, democracy, democracy socialization, democracy support, discourse, equivocation, equivocation typology, Estonian and Russian languages, Europe, european integration, face-work, faciality, flawed democracy, impeachment, ISIL, landscape, magazine, Mai 2025, Media, metaphors, micro-fascism, micropolitics, non-replies, political linguistics, Prime Minister’s Questions, Propaganda, questions, reply-rate, similarity check, still strong, survey language context, survey questionnaires, translation, Trumpism, Ukraine, United States, Voicing Politics

Abstracts

Democracy, Democracy Support and Democracy Socialization (Henk Dekker)
What is the current democratic situation in the world? How can we explain the presence or absence of democracy in countries? How much popular support is there for democracy? How can we explain variance in this support for democracy? These are the key questions to answer in this article. Only a small fraction of the world’s countries are democracies, and only a small fraction of the world’s population lives in a democracy. Moreover, many existing democracies suffer from a gradual erosion. Favourable conditions for democracy include a positive economic development, a good functioning of the actual democracy, democratic leaders without autocratic temptations, and a strong and robust support for democracy among the population. Support for democracy among citizens in the world is however weak: only a minority said that a representative democracy is a very good way of governing the country and even less support a representative democracy without also supporting a non-democratic rule by experts, a strong leader or the military. Support for democracy on the individual level is the effect of various other orientations such as knowledge of democracy and autocracy, satisfaction with democracy, political trust, subjective well-being, and emancipatory values. People acquire these orientations through experience and socialization. Committed democrats are concerned with the decline of democracy and the intensifying wave of autocratization in the world over the past decade and ask for new initiatives to establish and defend democracy. Keywords: democracy socialization, democracy support, democracy
» Buy Single Contribution (Budrich Journals) / Einzelbeitrag kaufen (Budrich Journals)

Trump’s New Face of Power in America (Bob Hanke)
This article proposes that the advent of Trumpism was an historical moment of danger that compelsus to analyze the micropolitics of the present. In the first part, I describe the constellation that gave rise to Trumpism. In the second part, I recall Goffman’s concept of face-work and discuss how it remains relevant for describing Trump’s aggressive face-work. In the third part, I take Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality as a point of departure for understanding micro-fascism. As an abstract machine, Trump’s faciality engendered and diffused fascisizing micropolitics around a messenger/disruptor in chief. It worked in connection with a landscape and relative to a collective assemblage of enunciation that extracted a territory of perception and affect. In the micropolitics of the present, the defining feature of Trumpism was how the corrupt abuse of power and the counterforces limiting his potency collided on an ominous, convulsive political reality TV show that threatened US democracy. Keywords: Trumpism, micropolitics, face-work, faciality, assemblage, landscape, impeachment, micro-fascism
» Buy Single Contribution (Budrich Journals) / Einzelbeitrag kaufen (Budrich Journals)

The State of America IV: A Nation Divided, But Still Strong (Daniel B. German)
America continues to be the world’s number one (1st) economy as it is the leading innovator in digital applications. Meanwhile, it has fallen somewhat on “democracy” measures. Three of the world’s leading democracy monitoring organizations. Freedom House, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) have, among many issues, particularly noted a dangerous political polarization and a rejection of the electoral rules of the game in America. EIU cites America as having become a “flawed democracy” especially on the rejection of the political culture variable of acceptance of electoral defeat by Donald Trump and allies. Keywords: United States, deeply divided, flawed democracy, still strong
» Buy Single Contribution (Budrich Journals) / Einzelbeitrag kaufen (Budrich Journals)

The analysis of political equivocation by British political leaders (Peter Bull)
Equivocation, sometimes referred to as “the intentional use of precise language”, is the focus of this article. Data are reported concerning the extent to which politicians equivocate in televised interviews and Prime Minister’s Questions (so-called reply-rate). In addition, methodological techniques devised by Peter Bull and colleagues for the analysis of equivocation are discussed. These involve the identification of different types of questions, whereby it is possible to establish whether a politician has provided an answer. An equivocation typology is presented, whereby 43 techniques of not replying to a question are identified. Examples of equivocation by recent British political leaders are discussed: Conservative Prime Ministers: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson; Labour Leaders of the Opposition: Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn; Liberal Democrats leaders: Paddy Ashdown, Nick Clegg, Tim Farron; UKIP leaders (United Kingdom Independence Party): Nigel Farage, Paul Nuttall. Keywords: equivocation; equivocation typology; reply-rate; questions; non-replies; Prime Minister’s Questions
» Buy Single Contribution (Budrich Journals) / Einzelbeitrag kaufen (Budrich Journals)

Knocking at the House with Closed Doors: Metaphorical representation of European integration in Ukrainian media discourse before 2014 (Oleksii Polegkyi and Christ’l De Landtsheer)
The idea of European integration played an important role in Ukrainian political discourse, but was attributed different meaning in the course of its political development. This idea was crucial for a definition of Ukrainian foreign policy preferences and for the construction of Ukrainian national identity. In the Ukrainian context, this idea was found to be primarily constructed in regard to the question of the historical and geopolitical place of Ukraine. Public opinion in general largely reflects the instability in Ukraine-EU relations, as well as the inconsistent European integration policy of the Ukrainian government and the lack of a coherent policy from the side of the European Union. This article focuses on a study of how the European integration was conceptualized and metaphorically presented in the Ukrainian press in the period of 2005 – 2010. By examining the metaphors used to describe this process in the Ukrainian media between 2005 and 2010, we gain valuable insights into the historical and discursive nuances that have shaped contemporary perceptions of European integration in Ukraine. Based on the Critical Metaphor Analysis and Conceptual Metaphors approach, we investigate the main frames and metaphorical representations of Europe and the European integration in the Ukrainian media. It can be noticed that the European integration was described in Ukraine before 2014 with a tension between the two discourses – the discourses of closeness and of openness. The European Neighborhood Policy was created for an opening of the door for Ukraine to Europe and as a ‘road map’ for the Ukrainian way towards the EU. Despite that, for the majority of Ukrainians the EU before 2014 was still an unrealistic ‘dream’ where doors were ‘rather closed’ then opened. Keywords: European integration, Europe, Ukraine, discourse, media, metaphors
» Buy Single Contribution (Budrich Journals) / Einzelbeitrag kaufen (Budrich Journals)

Mere Duplication or Original? ISIS Ability to Adapt Propaganda to Different Target Audiences (Onur Sultan and Ismail Aslan)
ISIS’s ability to recruit new members and spread its message has been widely attributed to its prolific production of propaganda items and its ability to adapt its message based on target audience. We tested these two hypotheses by analysing magazines published by ISIS central media in three languages (English [Dabiq] , Turkish [Konstantiniyye] and French [Dar al-Islam]) in two one-month periods in 2015 and 2016. To see how far the terrorist organization could generate original content in different languages instead of translations, we conceived a pre-trained deep learning model that measured similarity between articles in magazines, leveraging a sentence-based approach. In order to test ISIS ability to adjust message based on target audience, we further conducted qualitative content analysis. Our deep learning model test results showed, except for re-publication of one article in the second period, ISIS was in fact able to publish discrete propaganda items. The results of the qualitative content analysis showed ISIS was successful in differentiating thematic coverage of its propaganda content for English-, French-, and Turkish-speaking audience. Keywords: Daesh, ISIL, magazine, translation, propaganda, similarity check
» Buy Single Contribution (Budrich Journals) / Einzelbeitrag kaufen (Budrich Journals)

Voicing Politics: Linguistics and the Debility of Political Science (Richard D. Anderson, Jr.)
Voicing Politics claims that political attitudes vary with the language that people speak. Experiments with random assignment of bilinguals to answer survey questionnaires presented in either Estonian or Russian show that their answers do change when the language of the questionnaire is switched. First, relative to gendered Russian, genderless Estonian elicits more support for women’s rights. Second, relative to futured Russian, futureless Estonian elicits more willingness to invest now for future gain. Third, relative to dominant Estonian, minority Russian elicits more awareness of the “most nationalist” party in Estonian politics. But the first claim is inconsistent with the authors’ own evidence. The second claim is inconsistent with both Estonian and Russian’s joint use of linguistic aspect to express futurity. The third claim is invalidated by Russian’s lack of any translation for English “nationalist” that does not signal “anti-Russian,” to which Russian speakers will be more sensitive regardless of dominant or minority status. The experimental asymmetries reported by the authors are attributable, not to differences between the Estonian and Russian languages, but to unspoken context, on which the use of any language for communication must rely but which varies from one language to the next and for which survey research cannot control. Since no practicable survey questionnaire can control what context respondents choose to activate in interpreting a question and deciding how to respond, rather than identifying “beliefs” or “attitudes,” any survey research reveals unspecifiable variation in context. Since much of what purports to be known about politics has been inferred from inherently unreliable surveys, this implication of the errors in Voicing Politics is debilitating enough. But since the institutions that political science attempts to explain are uniformly consequences of language use, the uncritical endorsement of Voicing Politics by the discipline’s most prestigious American academic press, its board, editor and referees, prominent endorsers and multiple reviewers is evidence that the debility revealed by this study’s errors afflicts a broad sweep of the discipline extending far beyond survey research alone. Keywords: Voicing Politics, survey questionnaires, Estonian and Russian languages, survey language context, political linguistics
» Buy Single Contribution (Budrich Journals) / Einzelbeitrag kaufen (Budrich Journals)