New book published: Talking Politics and Society Again: Reengaging with Fellow Citizens.
Hans BloklandMarch 17, 2025
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
Akram YahiaouiMarch 5, 2025
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
Noelle WendlingDecember 29, 2024
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?
Eline SapDecember 9, 2024
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?
Farhad SultaniSeptember 30, 2023
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
Hans BloklandMay 11, 2023
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
Hans BloklandApril 13, 2022
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
Phillip ReissenweberMarch 11, 2022
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
Hans BloklandJune 22, 2021
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?
Hans BloklandJune 1, 2021
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
Hans BloklandApril 3, 2021
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
Phillip ReissenweberApril 8, 2019
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
Hans BloklandOctober 7, 2018
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
Hans BloklandJuly 19, 2018
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
Hans BloklandJune 4, 2018
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
Hans BloklandApril 24, 2018
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.
Hans BloklandFebruary 20, 2018
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
Hans BloklandDecember 21, 2017
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
Hans BloklandMay 11, 2017
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
Hans BloklandApril 1, 2016
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...
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