On behalf of Nick Aylott please contact Nick or Kadri for further information.
NOPSA CONFERENCE 2011
August 19th-21st 2001, Vaasa, Finland
www.nopsa2011.abo.fi
Call for papers: deadline January 15th 2011
Models of Democracy: What Are They and Do They Travel?
Workshop leaders
Dr Nicholas Aylott
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University, Sweden
sh.se/nicholasaylott, nicholas.aylott@sh.se
Dr Kadri Simm
Institute for Semiotics and Philosophy, University of Tartu, Estonia
This workshop would have two main objectives.
First, it would seek to develop our knowledge and understanding of different forms of democracy. These could be procedural forms - liberal, illiberal, direct, representative, party-centred, candidate-centred, deliberative and the like. Equally, they could be regionally or culturally specific, such as the European or Nordic "models" of democracy. What, if anything, is really distinctive about such models? What is to be gained analytically by constructing them? How closely do real-world cases conform to their precepts?
The second objective concerns the possible transmission of these precepts from one place to another. Policy diffusion is a well-established sub-field within political science. Somewhat less studied, however, though certainly not entirely neglected, has been the notion of institutional diffusion: the idea that political institutions can spread from one place to another, perhaps inducing a break with local practice. Under what conditions might this happen? Clearly, modern institutional theory is likely to be central to many of the workshops' contributions, though that leaves wide scope for various ways of defining and understanding political institutions. Post-communist democratisation in Europe is one area in which the application of an institutional-diffusion framework might be especially helpful.
The core of the panel would comprise participants in an ongoing international research project, the Nordic Model of Democracy (nmd-project.net), which investigates the relationships between democracy in the Nordic and Baltic states. The panel chairs are both members of the project team. However, we welcome papers that contribute to either or both of the two main objectives outlined above. A variety of methodological approaches is also encouraged.
In order to make our workshop as inclusive as possible, and especially with an eye to participation by scholars from the Baltic states, we would like its working language to be English, and we would expect most papers to be written in English. However, we are conscious of NOPSA's tradition of providing a forum in which Nordic scholars can present and discuss their work in their own Scandinavian languages, so our workshop would remain open to papers that are written in Danish, Norwegian or Swedish.
