SEMINAR ON POLITICAL EQUALITY AND PARTICIPATION

In coordination with Uppsala University

Monday, 19^th June 2017, h. 9.00

Sala Atti “F. Cacciaguerra”

H. 9.00 Resisting Women’s Political Inclusion: An Analysis of the Uruguayan Gender Quota

Cecilia Josefsson, PhD Candidate

Resistance against women’s political inclusion continues to thrive even after the adoption of quota laws, limiting the reforms’ effects and potential to re-gender the political arena. Cecilia Josefsson examines the one-off implementation of gender quotas in the Uruguayan Parliamentary election in October 2014.

Uruguay’s quota law proved to have a limited effect. Contrary to previous accounts of quota implementation that mainly have focused on policy design and institutional factors in explaining quota effectiveness, Cecilia Josefsson adopts a more actor-centered approach and focuses on the male political elites’ motives and strategies in the processes of adopting and implementing the law.

H 9.45 Migrants’ enfranchisement: rules and principles on voting rights for resident non-citizens

Jonas Hultin Rosenberg, PhD

Democracy means ‘rule by the people’ – but who is this people? Until quite recently, the people was thought of as the group that is at the same time citizens in the democratic state. However, in many states international migration and extraterritorial impact of national decisions have decreased the overlap between the groups of persons that are citizens, residents and those affected by the decisions of the state. This has pushed for rethinking how to define the people of the democracy.

Migration thus make it necessary to reconsider the democratic practices of enfranchisement. Jonas Hultin’s presentation contributes to this reconsideration by makes an overview of basic principles of democratic inclusion.

H. 11.00 Political consumption as a means for political equality: Evidence from a survey experiment

Johan Wejryd, PhD Candidate

To deliberately choose or avoid specific products or brands for political, ethical or environmental reasons has become increasingly common over the last decades. From a democratic perspective, however, this “political consumption” suffers from being dependent on money, which is a far less equally distributed than votes or time as resources for political influence. Thus, political consumption will not in itself increase political equality. Nevertheless political consumption can benefit democracy because it increases or decreases conventional political participation. By means of a survey experiment Johan Wejryd tests political consumption’s effects and explore several of the suggested ways in which political consumption is assumed to affect conventional participation. 

The seminar is held in English and it is coordinated by prof. G. Ieraci, DiSPeS