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...

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...

 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 (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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...