Politische Vierteljahresschrift最新文献

Stymied by preoccupation with short-term interests of individualist consumers, democratic institutions seem unable to generate sustained political commitment for tackling climate change. The citizens' assembly (CA) is promoted as an important tool in combatting this "democratic myopia." The aim of a CA is to bring together a representative group of citizens and experts from diverse backgrounds to exchange their different insights and perspectives on a complex issue. By providing the opportunity for inclusive democratic deliberation, the CA is expected to educate citizens, stimulate awareness of complex issues, and produce enlightened and legitimate policy recommendations. However, critical voices warn about the simplified and celebratory commentary surrounding the CA. Informed by agonistic and radical democratic theory, this paper elaborates on a particular concern, which is the orientation toward consensus in the CA. The paper points to the importance of disagreement in the form of both agony (from inside) and rupture (from outside) that, it is argued, is crucial for a democratic, engaging, passionate, creative, and representative sustainability politics.

Very few countries have managed to decouple economic growth from resource use and greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms and at rates to meet the climate targets of the Paris Agreement. To achieve this, technological solutions would need to be combined with sufficiency-oriented policies in a postgrowth context. This paper develops policy ideas for a sustainable welfare-work nexus via citizen engagement and examines the level of democratic support for such ideas. Theoretically, it employs "sustainable welfare" to understand welfare and wellbeing within planetary and social limits. The paper first sketches the welfare-work nexus as developed in the postwar circumstances in Western Europe, highlighting that this model was at no point in time ecologically generalizable to the rest of the world, and then briefly reviews the existing debate on sustainable welfare. The empirical analyses start with qualitative data from 11 deliberative forums on sustainable needs satisfaction, with emphasis on policies targeted at respecting the upper and lower boundaries of a "safe and just operating space" for economic and social development. The qualitative data are then triangulated with quantitative data from a representative survey, which was constructed based on the policy suggestions from the forums, hence allowing for an exploration of their popularity in the Swedish population as a whole. We find a considerable gap between the far-reaching policy measures that forum participants consider necessary and the measures that the general public in Sweden are prepared to support, especially when it comes to policies targeting maximum levels of needs satisfaction.

Inter- and transdisciplinarity (ITD) has been part of political science for quite some time now, but although political science regularly deals with its self-understanding, the consequences for research and researchers of ITD have not yet been systematically considered. To stimulate this debate, we conceptualize ITD as a spectrum of knowledge integration, application, and participation. We use International Relations norm research as a theoretical framework to describe, analyze, and reflect on ITD as a normative dynamic. Autoethnographically and through participatory observation, we examine ITD as a normative dynamic, with insights from three research projects in the field of sustainability. Specifically, we ask what implications ITD has for researchers and research in political science. As a result, we find that ITD offers both opportunities and challenges. In the context of knowledge integration, we discuss the importance of the participation of political science in major societal issues in contrast to ITD's preferences for a particular understanding of knowledge and research. We reflect on ITD's application bias in terms of problem-solving opportunities and output orientation. In addition, we consider the participation postulate of ITD and weigh potential democratizing effects against the conditions under which these might be realized. Finally, we address where further research seems useful to continue reflection on ITD.

The French and the German national parliaments are dominated by highly educated, older, and mostly male politicians. There are growing calls for a more balanced political representation of different social groups. This paper seeks to inform this debate by conceptualizing and measuring representation gaps for women, people of immigrant origin, the working class, and younger age groups in France and Germany and by assessing the potential of deliberative participatory fora to ameliorate underrepresentation. Based on theories of deliberative and participatory democracy, it suggests three criteria these fora must fulfill to potentially balance underrepresentation (descriptive representation in composition, deliberative quality, and coupling to politics) and explores them empirically in four recent cases of deliberative participatory fora: the Grand Débat National and the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat in France and the Bürgerrat Deutschlands Rolle in der Welt and the Bürgerrat Klima in Germany. We show that significant representation gaps exist for all groups studied. They have been narrowing for women and people of immigrant origin and remain most pronounced for class. Regarding institutional features, our cases fare relatively well in terms of balanced composition and deliberative quality, but the potential to balance representation gaps is seriously limited by a lack of coupling to the political system.