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Over the past few decades, a variety of groups have begun to argue that the US and European patent systems do not adequately represent the public interest in their decision making and that they need to undergo fundamental changes to their structure and orientation. These challengers have adopted similar strategies-in terms of the venues chosen and the arguments, evidence, and rhetoric used-in each context. However, they have experienced more success in Europe than in the United States. This paper begins to explain this difference by arguing that the US and European patent policy domains have different 'expertise barriers'-formal and informal rules that make it difficult for those without the knowledge that is recognized as relevant and legitimate in that domain to engage as equals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the fall of state-socialism, efforts were made to build democracy by creating civil society organizations (CSOs) and forming independent nonprofit sectors across Central and Eastern Europe. However, most of these efforts ignored the mass organizations, state-sponsored interest groups, and quasi-independent associations in existence for many years. To understand how the transition affected existing associations and the forms of volunteerism they promoted, this paper investigates changes in the Czech Union for Nature Protection (ČSOP), an organization that has endured since 1979. Here, it is found that rather than retaining its emphasis on classical modes of voluntary action and participant interaction, ČSOP favors professionally managed activities designed to attract financial support. The case suggests that some of the participatory practices and collectivist norms advanced by associations in socialist times are being weakened as these groups attempt to secure the resources necessary to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the central features of our societies is an increasing polarisation between communitarian and cosmopolitan positions. The theoretically sound and differentiated concepts are increasingly being escalated and misused in political practice by authoritarian populists and polarising pushers who try to pull the undecided to their side and tear society apart. Two essential agreements of the post-war period are increasingly being called into question: The European consensus, which considers European unification as an essential achievement and goal of political actors, and the democratic consensus, which states that representative democracy is the undisputed best form of government. In this article, after an introductory definition of polarisation, two future scenarios are developed. In the scenario "Polarised Europe", polarisation is extrapolated into the future and discussed with its serious consequences for the democratic and European consensus. The second scenario "Democratised Europe" shows how the concept of a relative cosmopolitanism can mitigate polarisation and what steps could possibly be taken to constructively turn it into a more democratic direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of rising political distrust in the USA and parts of Europe attracted political scientists’ attention in the 1990s, and urged them to look at possible consequences of this phenomenon for the functioning of democracies and social life. Approximately during the same period, from a sociological viewpoint, social capital theorists started studying the effects of declining social capital on political and economic life. In this article, we looked at the relationship between political distrust and social capital from an interdisciplinary perspective. We studied the relationship in six European countries from three regions (North-West, South and East), and the USA, and we were interested in the question of whether this relationship varies over the regions, or whether it is approximately the same everywhere. We used ISPP data from the 2004 wave, which included a range of social capital indicators and political distrust items. Social capital was subdivided into four dimensions, namely, networks (membership of organizations), interpersonal or social trust, social norms (citizenship norms), and linking social capital (political activities). First we studied the effect of political distrust on these four dimensions of social capital, while controlling for other variables such as political efficacy, political interest and a set of socio-structural background variables. One of our main findings was that the only significant effect of political distrust we found throughout all countries was a negative effect on one dimension of social capital, namely, interpersonal trust: the more people distrust politicians and people in government, the less they trust other people in general, even when controlled for all other variables. The reverse relationship led us to the same conclusion: the more people tend to trust people in general, the less they distrust politics, a result we found in all countries. This finding refutes the claim that there is no or either only a very weak relationship between political and social trust, as some have strongly argued before. Other important political attitudes connected to social capital were political interest and political efficacy, and for political distrust it was external efficacy. Significant socio-economic factors were religiousness and educational level for membership of voluntary organizations, educational level for interpersonal trust, religiousness for citizenship norms, and educational level and age for political activities. The reciprocal relationship was strongest in the USA and North-Western Europe, as were the explained variances of our (more extensive) regression models. In Southern and Eastern Europe other factors appear to be at work which influence both social capital and political distrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have drawn a straightforward lesson from European history: taxation promotes representation. Drawing on this history, scholars have developed general theories that connect taxation to modern democracy. In this article I argue that these theories have overlooked the most important element in the relationship between taxation and representation in European history. Premodern assemblies, or their members, typically had a deep involvement in the mechanics of tax collection, and it was primarily through this that taxation promoted the emergence, strength, and longevity of representative institutions. But modern parliaments do not collect taxes. As a consequence, taxation has only a modest role in the promotion of democracy in the modern world. My argument challenges existing theories of the link between taxation and representation, including those made in the literature on rentier states. It also advances our understanding of the process by which premodern European representative assemblies were transformed into the basic institutions of modern democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy may well be the primary virtue of political systems. Yet European politics is marked by a democracy deficit that will not disappear spontaneously. While legal and political theory on this issue is dominated by supporters of civic institutionalism and constitutional republicanism, liberal nationalists seem to be split. They justify the civic nationhood of member states, but they shrink away from the idea of a European people. This essay claims that a quasi-national conception of European identity can be conducive to the rise of a democratic political union of Europe. It discusses the mechanisms and rules for Europeanization of the sense of equal dignity and solidarity. This approach to supranational identity is explicitly instrumental and orientated towards the long run. However, the main liberal objections against it can be countered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decade after the fall of Communism in Europe, the Czech Republic's membership in the European Union is still a matter of a relatively short waiting period of 4 years. Not so the imagination of this membership and the creation of a political concept created to promote this goal: the specific Central European policy initiated by Thomas G. Masaryk and revitalized by Václav Havel. Despite the deep differences in the political thought and philosophical orientations of both Presidents, not to mention the historic rupture of 41 years of Totalitarianism, their perceptions of Europe as an Imagined Community are identical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]