New book published: Talking Politics and Society Again: Reengaging with Fellow Citizens.

Talking Politics and Society Again: Reengaging with Fellow Citizens is the title of the new book of Hans Blokland. It will be published by Transcript Verlag in Bielefeld and will be available from March 27...

Populism in Algeria: Negation of Politics

If one term can describe Algeria’s political system from its inception to today, it is populism. For social, cultural, and historical reasons, populism served as the ideological foundation for the national liberation movement and, later...

Populism in France: An overview of its history, narratives, and relationship with the media

 The last elections (legislative and European) in France have highlighted more than ever the success of populist parties and strategies in French politics, on the left as well as on the right. The aim of...

Populism in the Netherlands: tradition or trend?

This article examines the history of populism in the Netherlands and how this led to the recent success of the populist right-wing PVV. This party is mostly known for its radical ideas about migration and...

Does Federalism Work for Afghanistan?

In countries like Afghanistan, where there are important ethnic, cultural and linguistic divergencies, a unitary system of government is always a great source of hostility and bitterness on the part of minority groups. Consequently, if...

Resisting democratic decline: deliberation and some lessons from Germany and beyond

Democracies around the world seem to lose appeal for growing numbers of citizens. Partly explaining this trend, citizens seem less and less able to steer, on the basis of substantial rational considerations, the course their...

Politics is no Match for Business: Charles Lindblom, Elon Musk and the Privileged Position of Business

The interplay between Elon Musk and the social democratic government in Brandenburg, where Tesla recently opened a Giga factory, illustrates what Charles Lindblom termed in 1977 the privileged position of business. To make sense of...

Contemptuous Encounters: How Internalised Beliefs about Work and Self-Esteem Create a System of Mutual Resentment

Bringing people together can be a risky business. You invite people from different parts of the society. They might distrust you. They might also distrust the people they expect to meet. Part of that distrust...

Charles Lindblom on the Market, Elites, Inequality and our Inability to Think Clear

Charles Lindblom (1917 – 2017), one of the most important political scientists of the twentieth century, published in 2000 The Market System : What it is, how it works, and what to make of it...

Planning a future together: Could Eisenhüttenstadt use some deliberative democracy?

Political communities occasionally come to crossroads where fundamental, far-reaching decisions must be made. At such times, it can enhance the democratic and substantive quality of decision-making if significant numbers of citizens are invited to participate...

Loneliness, unhappiness, consumerism and its political consequences: observations and predictions of Robert E. Lane

Twenty years ago, the American political psychologist Robert E. Lane (1917 – 2017) published The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000). In it, he showed that Westerners (and Americans in particular) were increasingly unhappy...

Emotions and Political Deliberation

Reading the title of this article might evoke pictures of people violently shouting at each other or bursting out into tears while pleading their cause in front of an audience. Whereas the first case will...

Countering Radicalization: What the Research on Deliberation and Radicalization Teaches us

Could radicalization be prevented or reversed by bringing together those that have seemingly entered this path, with other not (yet) radicalized citizens, to discuss fundamental issues like: democracy, pluralism, freedom, autonomy, respect and gender? The...

Robert A. Dahl on Pluralism, Democracy and Deliberation

Robert Dahl (1915 – 2014) is one of the most influential political scholars of the last century. His ideas on political scholarship, pluralism, democracy and deliberation also influenced Social Science Works. On Dahl, Hans Blokland...

Challenging extreme claims for truth: How to deliberate the open, pluralist society with monist thinkers

Imagine we are dealing with a person with a rather monistic mindset, thus believing, assuming or hoping that all questions can only have one right answer, that all these answers can be neatly, harmoniously ordered...

Charles Edward Lindblom, In Memoriam

On January 30, 2018, Charles Lindblom died at the age of 100. His ideas on, among others, policy making processes, democracy, the limits and possibilities of social and political science, impairment, and usable knowledge play...

How to deliberate fundamental values? Notes from Brandenburg on our approach.

People hardly ever change their mind. The more they feel forced to justify themselves, the more they feel questioned, criticized, disrespected, and the smaller the chance that they will open their mind to other positions...

How Postmodernism Advanced Populism: An Inside Story From The Netherlands

There are many factors that explain the upheaval of populism. Postmodernism is one of them. In the Netherlands, certainly the columnist represented and helped to shape the postmodernist mood, a mood characterized by skepticism, subjectivism...

Taking people seriously: a new approach for countering populism and furthering integration

In our deliberative democracy and integration projects we treat our participants – natives as well as migrants – as citizens, able and willing to discuss in a rational way the big themes like democracy, freedom...

How To Debate Values In A Diverse Europe

We need to talk. We need to talk about fundamental concepts like democracy, ethical and political pluralism, tolerance, equality and freedom, concepts that many consider as constitutive for the European identity. We need to talk...