Download or read book The Legal Limits of Direct Democracy written by Moeckli, Daniel and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-31 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the rise of direct-democratic instruments, the relationship between popular sovereignty and the rule of law is set to become one of the defining political issues of our time. This important and timely book provides an in-depth analysis of the limits imposed on referendums and citizens’ initiatives, as well as of systems of reviewing compliance with these limits, in 11 European states.
Download or read book Models of Religious Freedom written by Marcel Stüssi and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, the US, Swiss, and Syrian models of religious freedom are illustrated in legal settings. The Analytical Representation comprises more than statements of positive law or mechanical comparison. Each chapter is introduced by thought-forms predominant in the respective legal culture. The objective of the Methodological Representation is to investigate the logic and legitimate pattern by which the US and Swiss judiciary come to the conclusion that an alleged interference is covered under the right to religious freedom. The last dimension, which is the Eclectic Representation, pursues a dual aim. Firstly, the idea is to develop an actual guideline of religious freedom rules, and secondly, to evaluate how much religious freedom is internalized in the US, Swiss, and Syrian legal systems. Dissertation. (Series: ReligionsRecht im Dialog - Vol. 12)
Download or read book Mehrsprachigkeit Interkulturalit t und Fremdsprachendidaktik in einem zweisprachigen Kontext written by Aline Gohard-Radenkovic and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cet ouvrage examine les enjeux des politiques linguistiques suisses et européennes et leurs implications pour la conception du «plurilinguisme», en étudiant les situations d'apprentissage et comportements des apprenants en contexte bilingue. Il analyse les relations entre plurilinguisme et interculturalité, en explorant les représentations, attitudes, pratiques linguistiques et stratégies identitaires de l'étudiant. Ces réflexions engagent le spécialiste des langues et cultures étrangères à penser une nouvelle didactique du plurilinguisme et de l'interculturalité pour répondre aux défis que représente la formation des jeunes générations en situation de mobilité sociale, culturelle, professionnelle et intellectuelle
Download or read book Swiss Public Administration written by Andreas Ladner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swiss citizens approve of their government and the way democracy is practiced; they trust the authorities and are satisfied with the range of services Swiss governments provide. This is quite unusual when compared to other countries. This open access book provides insight into the organization and the functioning of the Swiss state. It claims that, beyond politics, institutions and public administration, there are other factors which make a country successful. The authors argue that Switzerland is an interesting case, from a theoretical, scientific and a more practice-oriented perspective. While confronted with the same challenges as other countries, Switzerland offers different solutions, some of which work astonishingly well.
Download or read book Swiss Democracy written by Wolf Linder and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated third edition of this authoriative analysis of Swiss democracy, the institutions of federalism, and consensus democracy through political power sharing. Linder analyses the scope and limits of citizen's participation in direct democracy, which distinguishes Switzerland from most parliamentary systems.
Download or read book The Education Systems of Europe written by Wolfgang Hörner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-05-03 with total page 879 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique handbook offers an analytical review of the education systems of all European countries, following common analytical guidelines, and highlighting the paradox that education simultaneously pursues a universal value as well as a national character. Coverage includes international student performance studies, and a comparison of education dynamics in Eastern "new Europe" with "older" western EU members. The book provides a differentiated analytical data base, and offers suggestions for further research.
Download or read book Fiscal Federalism in Switzerland written by Bernard Dafflon and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Its highly fragmented structure of local governments and serious horizontal fiscal imbalances make Switzerland a surprisingly powerful model for Eastern European countries that are currently facing the challenge of fiscal decentralization. In spite of the substantial differences in the tradition and current practice of intergovernmental fiscal relations, transition economies may learn valuable lessons from the Swiss case in the fields of direct democracy, horizontal cooperation, expenditure and revenue assignment, and fiscal discipline. Among other conclusions, the authors suggest that subnational authorities can effectively fend off recentralization attempts of the central government if they engage in spontaneous cooperation to enhance the efficiency of public service provision. Together with an adequate fiscal equalization scheme, interjurisdictional cooperation also permits the reconciliation of the objective of an increasing devolution of powers with the existing regional disparities. The authors also show that the principle of subsidiarity can best be safeguarded by anchoring the expenditure and revenue powers of subnational governments in the constitution or in a similarly strong law. With regard to fiscal discipline, the combination of a "golden rule" with direct democratic instruments of budget control is proven to be successful in enhancing the accountability of local politicians toward their constituencies.
Download or read book Heritage Regimes and the State written by Bendix, Regina and published by Universitätsverlag Göttingen. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when UNESCO heritage conventions are ratified by a state? How do UNESCO’s global efforts interact with preexisting local, regional and state efforts to conserve or promote culture? What new institutions emerge to address the mandate? The contributors to this volume focus on the work of translation and interpretation that ensues once heritage conventions are ratified and implemented. With seventeen case studies from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and China, the volume provides comparative evidence for the divergent heritage regimes generated in states that differ in history and political organization. The cases illustrate how UNESCO’s aspiration to honor and celebrate cultural diversity diversifies itself. The very effort to adopt a global heritage regime forces myriad adaptations to particular state and interstate modalities of building and managing heritage.
Download or read book Courts in Federal Countries written by Nicholas Theodore Aroney and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courts are key players in the dynamics of federal countries since their rulings have a direct impact on the ability of governments to centralize and decentralize power. Courts in Federal Countries examines the role high courts play in thirteen countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Nigeria, Spain, and the United States. The volume’s contributors analyse the centralizing or decentralizing forces at play following a court’s ruling on issues such as individual rights, economic affairs, social issues, and other matters. The thirteen substantive chapters have been written to facilitate comparability between the countries. Each chapter outlines a country’s federal system, explains the constitutional and institutional status of the court system, and discusses the high court’s jurisprudence in light of these features. Courts in Federal Countries offers insightful explanations of judicial behaviour in the world’s leading federations.
Download or read book Between Imagined Communities and Communities of Practice written by Nicolas Adell and published by Göttingen University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community and participation have become central concepts in the nomination processes surrounding heritage, intersecting time and again with questions of territory. In this volume, anthropologists and legal scholars from France, Germany, Italy and the USA take up questions arising from these intertwined concerns from diverse perspectives: How and by whom were these concepts interpreted and re-interpreted, and what effects did they bring forth in their implementation? What impact was wielded by these terms, and what kinds of discursive formations did they bring forth? How do actors from local to national levels interpret these new components of the heritage regime, and how do actors within heritage-granting national and international bodies work it into their cultural and political agency? What is the role of experts and expertise, and when is scholarly knowledge expertise and when is it partisan? How do bureaucratic institutions translate the imperative of participation into concrete practices? Case studies from within and without the UNESCO matrix combine with essays probing larger concerns generated by the valuation and valorization of culture.
Download or read book Societies Social Inequalities and Marginalization written by Raghubir Chand and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of marginality or marginalization, as a concept, characterizing a situation of impediments – social, political, economic, physical, and environmental – that impact the abilities of many people and societies to improve their human condition. It examines a wide range of examples and viewpoints of societies struggling with poverty, social inequality and marginalization. Though the book will be especially interesting for those looking for insights into the situation and position of ethnic groups living in harsh mountainous conditions in the Himalayan region, examples from other parts of the world such as Kyrgyzstan, Israel, Switzerland and Finland provide an opportunity for comparison of marginality and marginalization from around the world. Also addressed are issues such as livelihood, outmigration and environmental threats, taking into account the conditions, scale and perspective of observation. Throughout the text, particular attention is given to the context and concept of ‘marginalization’, which sadly remains a persistent reality of human life. It is in this context that this book seeks to advance our global understanding of what marginalization is, how it is manifested and what causes it, while also proposing remedial strategies.
Download or read book Constructions of Cultural Identities in Newsreel Cinema and Television after 1945 written by Kornelia Imesch and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2016-12-31 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newsreel cinema and television not only served as an important tool in the shaping of political spheres and the construction of national and cultural identities up to the 1960s. Today's potent televisual forms were furthermore developed in and strongly influenced by newsreels, and much of the archived newsreel footage is repeatedly used to both illustrate and re-stage past events and their significance. This book addresses newsreel cinema and television as a medium serving the formation of cultural identities in a variety of national contexts after 1945, its role in forming audiovisual narratives of a »biopic of the nation«, and the technical, aesthetical, and political challenges of archiving and restaging cinematic and televisual newsreel.
Download or read book The Pacific Rural Press written by and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Republican Alternative written by André Holenstein and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republican Alternative seeks to move beyond the mere notion of scholarly inquiry into the republic—the subject of recent rediscovery by political historians interested in Europe’s intellectual heritage—by investigating the practical similarities and differences between two early modern republics, as well as their self-images and interactions during the turbulent seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among the world’s most economically successful societies, Switzerland and the Netherlands laid much of the foundation for their prosperity during the early modern period discussed here. This volume attempts to clarify the special character of these two countries as they developed, including issues of religious plurality, the republican form of government, and an increasingly commercially-driven agrarian society.
Download or read book Modern Europe 1794 1871 written by Thomas Henry Dyer and published by . This book was released on 1877 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Governance and Performance of Education Systems written by Nils C. Soguel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educational systems are now more than ever faced with the challenge of improving their performance and proving that suitable measures are being taken to guarantee greater efficiency regarding equity. Bringing together a wide range of disciplines and experience in several countries, this book details possible models of governance and describes ways to measure their effects in terms of efficiency and equity.
Download or read book University Governance written by Catherine Paradeise and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-02-07 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Higher education reforms have been on the agenda of Western European countries for 25 years, trying to deal with self governed professional bureaucracies politically weakened by massification when an emerging common understanding enhanced their role as major actors in knowledge based economies. While university systems are deeply embedded in national settings, the ex post rationale of still on-going reforms is surprisingly uniform and “de-nationalized”. They promote (1) the “organizational turn” of universities, to varying extent substituting collegial loosely coupled entities by “integrated, goal-oriented entities deliberately choosing their own actions (and therefore open to differentiation), that can thus be held responsible for what they do” (2) the diversification of stakeholders, supposedly offering solutions to problems as various as the democratisation of universities, the shrinking of State budget resources and the diversification of university missions offering answers to changes in the making and in the use of science. When it comes to accounting for these reforms, two grand narratives of public management share the floor. NPM implies a strengthening of the capacity of the core State to direct public services organizations through management by objectives and results or contractualization, assessment, evaluation and. “Governance” focuses on “network-based” governance systems, where coordinating power and control are collectively shared between the major ‘social actors or partners’ at all levels of the decision-making system. Our results suggest that all higher education systems under study were more or less transformed according to both these narratives. It is therefore needed to understand how they combine or create contradictions. This leads us to test a third neo-weberian model. This model reaffirms the role of the State, of representative democracy, (central, regional and local), of public law (suitably modernized), preserves the idea of a public service with a distinctive status, culture and terms and conditions. It shifts from an internal orientation to bureaucratic rules towards an external orientation in meeting citizens’ needs and wishes by means of standardization of work processes and their products, based on a distinctive public service and a particular legal order survived as the foundations beneath the various packages of modernizing reforms. This book traces the national dynamics of public policies, organizational design and steering tools in seven European higher education and research systems, using these narratives to interpret and test the actual changes and the degree of national specificities and European convergence. This book is not a sum of national chapters like other presumably comparative. It does not intend to tell once again the story of the transformation of the relationships between the state and universities. It tries to use Higher education system to discuss issues on state intervention and steering and more generally the NPM, governance and neo-weberian models in a specific field. Furthermore, this book intends breaking the walls between specialists in higher education and specialist in public management and research policy. This well rooted division of labour is less that ever justified as the university mission in research (fundamental, applied, strategic) is underscored by commentors and reformers themselves. For that reason, we have chosen to observe the consequences of the dynamics of public policies, organizational design and steering tools on two specific issues related to the development of research training and organizing within universities: the transformation of research funding on the one hand and the expansion of graduate studies and doctoral schools on the other.
