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The notions of "concepts of the political" and that of "political concepts" refer to different but intertwined phenomena. As I will argue in this article, the concepts of the political refer to the self-institution of societies, while political concepts are those that emerge in the realm of politics, a field some societies institute as precisely the site in which the reversibility of the political takes place. This article will argue that the concepts of the political and the political concepts coming out of South America in its contemporary history spring from the main events and processes—the political and social history—that dominated the period. The events and concepts first discussed will be those related to the conquest and its legacy, only to later move fully to the past fifty years of dictatorships, transitions to democracy, and the emergence of the neopopulist political form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Espacio, Tiempo y Forma: Serie V, Historia Contemporánea is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After 1983, with the end of the military dictatorship and the return to democracy, nudity and sex became ubiquitous in Argentina. As society was eroticised and sexuality politicised, a debate about limits, excesses, correctness, and standards arose, in which pornography was central. In addition to the increasing production, access to, and circulation of sexually explicit materials and the debates and tensions around it, the pornographic pervaded culture in more unexpected but no less conspicuous ways during the transition to democracy. Pornography, as a disruptive genre and transgressive cultural construct, provided a flexible and dramatic allegory to address difficult and pressing subjects that were unrelated to sex. This essay examines the concepts of "pornographic journalism", "pornocracia", and "pornographic democracy" and explores the use of "obscene" in descriptions of the dictatorship, state repression, and the Catholic Church. The analysis shows how commentators at opposite sides of the ideological spectrum conjured the conventions, tropes, leitmotifs, and expectations of pornography to make an elaborate interpretation of those institutions and voice harsh criticism against them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores the ability of historical materialism to articulate a history of democracy that focuses on social conflict as the main engine for the emergence and consolidation of representati- ve democratic institutions. The article begins by reflecting on the withdrawal and rise of Marxism in the academic world. It continues to define democracy as an object of study and investigates the capacity of political Marxism as a tool for the construction of this historical interpretation. Historiographical background in this field continues to be exposed to end with an exposition of the hypotheses of our targeted research plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the article was to analyze, from a gender perspective, the main issues and social actors projected by the ABC newspaper in the representation of patients and their healthcare during the 1980s. The historical analysis of the discourse revealed the prioritization of the medical discourses, and the selection of sexuality, cancer, obesity and mental health issues as the main health debates. The results showed the resistance to the process of modernization and democratization of sexuality in our country, the construction and legitimization of bodies and social identities loaded with gender meanings, and the increased responsibility of women regarding health-illness-health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arenal.Revista de Historia de las Mujeres is the property of Arenal. Revista de Historia de las Mujeres and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Modernization theorists believe that there is a direct relationship between economic and social development and the process of transition to democracy. According to modernization theories, economic development and industrialization lead to the transition to democracy. China has achieved economic development since 1978 and has had economic growth of more than 10% for consecutive years. However, according to the theory of modernization, this country has not gone through the transition to democracy and has become an exception. The aim of this article is to examine and explain the lack of transition to democracy in China according to modernization theories. The research question is: What factors have prevented China from entering the process of transition to democracy between 1978 and 2021? The hypothesis of this research trying to be proved with the analytical and explanatory methodology, is: Several factors have contributed to the lack of transition to democracy in China. But the most important of them are the coordination and cohesion between the ruling class (Chinese Communist Party, government and army), the weakness of civil society, the fragmentation and dependence of the middle class, the basis and values of Chinese society and the fear of disarray. Social and political stability in the most populous country in the world with most groups, different classes of society and some countries. The combination of these factors has led to the support of the authoritarian system and their unwillingness to enter the process of transition to democracy between 1978 and 2021.

The article explains the state of political transition in Ethiopia since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 based on the concept of political settlement in the context of divided societies. It is qualitative research based on in-depth interviews with fifteen key political party leaders and key experts. Relevant literature on democratization in Ethiopia has been reviewed and has rarely explored the issue of democratization in the context of divided societies. Ethiopia is a deeply divided society that hosts countless politically mobilized ethnonational liberation movements seeking more political autonomy and a fair share in central decision-making institutions. While Ethiopians and the international community hoped for Ethiopia's transition to democracy under Abiy, the findings show that the transition is stalled, and the process is hijacked by centralizing and increasingly authoritarian elite that has marginalized key political actors. Centralization and marginalization are currently two major challenges. Both are inimical to deeply divided Ethiopia that hosts a variety of territorially based cleavages. Cycles of marginalization have entrenched fragility in Ethiopia, as the fight continues between those who are in power and those who are excluded. Transition to democracy implies an inclusive political system, popular and elite support [End Page 257] for democracy and democratic rules are accepted as norms, anti-system parties are weak or nonexistent, and, most importantly, authoritarianism is rejected wholeheartedly. This is a fundamental question for Ethiopia and is called the genetic question of democracy because it determines the gateway and the answer to the question: How does democracy come into being in the first place? One cannot have democracy when a country has a significant number of armed rebel groups in or outside the country who still think that power comes through the barrel of a gun. Nor is the transition to democracy possible when the elite in power adopts violence and the use of force as a means to stay in power. Transition to democracy can succeed only through an inclusive dialogue that produces political settlement addressing the deep cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The book reviewed is a proof of the complexities of the actual political context. The result of its cross-sectoral analyses are in line with the Eastern European rhetoric, lacking a democratic system. The book swirls through its five chapters around most of the essential elements of a country in transition. It provides an analysis following a horizontal time axis, a vertical developmental axis, and occasionally deplores the future. The first, introductory chapter anchors the books from a theoretical and factual point of view of a transitory process, while the second analyses the installation of democracy in Romania. The third and the fourth chapter deepen the optic, zooming firstly into the regionalization process, and then in the minority regimes in Romania. The last chapter bounce up, offering the image of limited space of maneuver of Romania in what regards its Foreign Policy, caught up in the almost natural, rationally explainable, conditionality of a small country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of a constitutional control is the essential cornerstone in any democratic system. Without a constitutional justice it is impossible to maintain a pluralist democracy with a real rule of law. The Tunisian constitutional history is emblematic of the relevance of the constitutional review. This article outlines the difficult and hampered life of the Tunisian constitutional justice that crossed two authoritarian regimes: a "revolution"; and the transition to democracy. It is in the latter phase that the creation of the constitutional court proved to be the paramount element in the passage from a procedural democracy to a substantive democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Studia Historica. Historia Contemporánea is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The so-called Spanish transition to democracy has largely been a process of collective forgetting undertaken for the sake of progress and measured by the country's perceived success at democratization, for example, by adopting a new constitution and joining the European Union after forty years of a repressive fascist dictatorship. As the 15-M movement took off in 2011, the effectiveness of the Transition started to be openly questioned. In the 2017 film El bar, directed and co-written by Álex de la Iglesia, the characters find themselves in a situation that appears to be a random terrorist killing as one of the characters walks out of a bar in Madrid. Implying that we live in a society where "pedir un café puede costarte la vida", the film employs a rather predictable narrative trope of trapping a handful of characters from different walks of life in an enclosed space and shows the audience how they organize themselves into a community whose goal is to leave the trap as a community, thus questioning its functionality. This article examines the plethora of fears that circulate in democratic Spain including terrorism, disease and Balkanization through a cinematic lens that seeks to reevaluate the Transition process and the very notion of crisis that shapes the public sphere and is, in turn, shaped by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses parliamentary debates on the «law on the protection of constitutional order and democratic life» (Law 23077), adopted on 9 August 1984 during the government of Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989). The aim is to investigate the senses and representations that served as a justification framework, as well as in the legal rhetoric used to turn democracy into a protected legal good. In this way, the article seeks to offer a glimpse into the changes in legal discourse during the transition to democracy. On the basis of what we have called as a 'legislator's phenomenology', it is particularly relevant how the relationship between the proposed law and historical experience is established in parliamentary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early 1960s in Spain saw the beginnings of a cycle of protest against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco that would end by rendering its continuity unviable after the dictator's death in 1975. The process of building democracy was undertaken bidirectionally, both from 'above' and from 'below', and it involved multiple actors. This article pays special attention to those 'democratizing agents' in civil society who acted in the cultural and educational spheres, as teachers, students, protest singers or members of the cultural centres and neighbourhood associations that emerged at that time, especially in rural Andalusia. It argues that through day-to-day micro-conflicts and micro-mobilizations, those actors acquired and transmitted civic–democratic guidelines and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo se propone examinar los posibles motivos que llevaron a Televisión Española a censurar el guion del telefilm basado en La Celestina que Julio Diamante presentó en el concurso organizado por el Ministerio de Cultura en 1979. Para ello, se analiza el tratamiento que el director español dio a su proyecto para ofrecer por primera vez una visión tanto crítica como personal de la obra clásica en el contexto de la transición hacia la democracia (1975–82). Sin embargo, la televisión española no estaba preparada para la representación explícita de temáticas que seguían siendo tabú en el país en lo tocante al erotismo, la religión y la política. Especial atención se presta al segundo intento de Diamante de adaptar su guion al cine y cómo este nunca llegó a concretarse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Brocar: Cuadernos de Investigación Histórica is the property of Universidad de la Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The transformations in Spain from the 1960s onwards in relation to communication resulted in a new legislation that allowed a certain liberalization to try to legitimize the Franco regime. Despite the information repression, some media outlets (especially magazines) became channels for the dissemination of democratic ideas and spaces for debate. In addition, the lack of consolidation in the socialization of the values of the '18 of July' in the first stages of the dictatorship led to a more successful technocratic socialization to favour the depoliticization and demobilization of Spanish society. The interpretations on how this communication pseudo-space was decisive, during the last years of the Franco regime, for the formation of public opinion in democratic Spain have not taken into account a significant factor that allows overcoming the opposition between the emergence of civil society and the persistence of some values from Francoism. This factor is the enormous disparity in culture and media consumption, with its reflection in education and, more generally, in economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodistico is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Any country embarking upon a political transition to democracy faces a complex period of change. While many factors influence successful democratization, political leadership remains a relatively unexplored phenomenon. This research presents a theoretical framework that is corroborated with data gathered from 65 semi-structured interviews with people involved in the transition processes of Spain and Lithuania along with the main political leaders themselves: King Juan Carlos I, Adolfo Suárez, Algirdas Brazauskas and Vytautas Landsbergis. The four leaders presented a similar political leadership style – based on their vision, decision-making, negotiation and power – which positively influenced the success of each transition to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of the press coverage given to the first formal and organised mobilisation of women in Spain during the first years of the political transition to a democratic context after decades of dictatorship (1975–1979). This feminism was influenced by the American and European trends of the 1960s and 1970s, while at the same time representing a singular movement. Following recent related analysis and using a descriptive content approach, the study thus aims to contribute new insights on the media coverage of feminism in its most significant phases over the course of the twentieth century and in different social and political contexts. The research reveals an ambiguous coverage that contributed to making the second-wave Spanish feminism visible while, at the same time, keeping its main revolutionary claims hidden, and furthermore depicting it as a whiny and problematic. Thus, in this pre-democratic context, the movement was represented as essential for political and social pressure but as necessarily short-term and only ground-breaking within certain limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the conceptual approaches to the analysis of the particular problems, structural and dynamic aspects of the transition to democracy in Slovakia. The complexity and nonlinearity of democratic transit in Slovakia underline the advisability of applying an integrative scheme for studying socio-political transformations. The theoretical and methodological potential of the transitological prism and alternative approaches to the study of sociopolitical transformations in Slovakia are analyzed. In the Slovak political context, theoretical models of Z. Brzezinski, K. von Beyme, W. Merkel, S. Levitsky, L. Wey, J. Linz, A. Stepan, G. Pridham, A. Croissant are adapted. In the context of the current tendencies of socio-political development of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the importance of clarifying the degree of realization of the «potential of consolidated democracy» is emphasized, which actualizes the further elaboration of adequate explanatory schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the filmic representations of delinquency in the cinema of the Chilean transition to democracy, paying attention to the relationship between film discourse and sociopolitical context. To do this we conceptualise, from a foucaulteana perspective, the notion of governmentality, later we examine the way in which the transition established the expansion of consumption as a way of governance and, finally, we investigate the social imaginary and ideologies associated with the filmic representation of the offender, seeking to determine how the governmentality and modes of neoliberal subjectivation are registered in four films of the chilean cinema of the transition. For this, we will analyze the films Caluga o menta (Gonzalo Justiniano, 1990), Johnny cien pesos (Gustavo Graef Marino, 1993); Taxi para tres (Orlando Lübbert, 2001) y Mala leche (León Errazuriz, 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representative Spanish model -the electoral provisions for the Congress and the Senate included in the Constitution of 1978- was developed in three stages. Here I analyze the second one, from November 1976 to March 1977. I describe the so-called «negotiations» between the Government of Adolfo Suárez and the democratic opposition and the different strategies of the different groups. I focus on the influence that official polls -managed only by the government- had in the decision of creating the Democratic Center Union (UCD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Thirty years after the beginning of transition to democracy in Bulgaria, the time has come to assess the successes and failures. The article tries to give this assessment by answering several questions: what were the specifics of the Bulgarian crisis of socialism, why it differed from the processes in Central Europe, how the new political parties are formed and operated, what were difficulties of European integration and how modern Bulgarians appreciate the results of the transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Investigaciones Historicas is the property of Universidad de Valladolid, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodistico is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper I want to analyze the process of transition to democracy, particularly in relation to two points: the lack of solution to the problem of autonomous government and the lack of lustration in the judicial system, leaving extremely conservative judges who are now at the top of the Spanish judiciary and who seem to be pushing for a hard response to any attack against the unity of Spain, using an old category of criminal offence, that seemed to have been left out from European criminal justice systems: that of political crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper explores the relation between the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric in post-war Austrian parliamentary debate and the development of the consensusoriented, corporatist model of Austrian democracy, the "consociational model," between 1945 and 1955. Specifically, this paper examines the anti-Semitic stereotypes found in parliament, an arena where "the sayable" of official politics is defined, and whether such anti-Semitic stereotyping serves political-strategic purposes. The predominant pattern of exclusion proves to be the attribution of ambivalence, drawing on the repertoire of nationalist anti-Semitic stereotypes, depicting "emigrants" as "cowards," incapable of love for and defense of their countries. The analysis shows this pattern of exclusion is rooted in an ethnicized, homogeneous, and masculinist understanding of the people - recurrent in contemporary right-wing movements and parties. It follows the lines of Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, in which the distinction of "friend" and "enemy," and hence, the eradication of pluralism and ambivalence, is pivotal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding institutional change remains a major theme on the agenda of social sciences. Thus, this working paper analyzes, through a comparative perspective, the different institutional transformations of the Portuguese and Spanish intelligence systems after the transifition to democracy and after 9/11. We applied an institutional change model centered on the relationship between ideas and interests, and used process tracing as a technique in order to identify the key drivers and inhibitors that explain the different institutional paths observed in the intelligence systems of both countries after two critical junctures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores the role of photography in the recent Spanish crime thrillerLa isla mínima(2014). It argues that the indexicality of the photographic object is the key to the allegorical message of the film, in which the criminal investigation also serves an historical investigation into the compromises that were made in the name of Spain’s transition to democracy. The photographic object in turn both reveals and conceals the extent to which violence was integral to the ‘pacto del olvido’ of the transition, and presents itself as an uncomfortable truth that Spain has not yet reconciled itself with. The article also discusses the influence of photography on the cinematography of the film, as well as the important role thatEl Casoand photojournalism played during these years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The advent of democracy in most European countries was preceded by a long constitutional tradition that dates back to the early 19th century. In Spain, the process, that had begun in 1812, was interrupted in 1923 by a military coup. The democracy started eight years later with the advent of the Republic, but with a very unstable political regime in place that eventually led the country into a civil war and four decades of totalitarianism. For many historians though, the constitutional monarchy in Spain, in place since 1876, avoided modernization and democratization. Many critics insure that the mechanisms of political representation; the elections, the political parties, and the election procedure, prevented the constitutional liberalism in Spain to evolve into a full democracy. Along these lines, they claim that every election was the result of the electoral fraud. However, the analysis of the aforementioned factors refutes these assertions and dispels most of the misconceptions that have been accepted until now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marchi examines how the French Nouvelle Droite (ND) was introduced into Portugal at the end of the Salazarist regime and during the transition to democracy. The relevance of the Portuguese case lies in the fact that the early diffusion of the ND in Europe coincided with the profound crisis of the radical right in Portugal as it faced the liberalization of the authoritarian regime and repression during the revolutionary transition. For that reason the far right in Portugal, in comparative terms, can be seen to have been subject to historical constraints quite different from those in Spain and other Western European democracies. Marchi describes the groups on the Portuguese radical right, and certain figures who were inspired by the ND and disseminated its ideas in Portugal. His analysis of their main publications, their statements and the media campaign to promote the ND from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s highlights the different reasons for and ways in which Portuguese radicals engaged and dealt with the ND. Marchi also looks at the reactions of the national right-wing milieu to the spread of ND ideas. As part of his paper's contribution to comparative studies on the transnational radical right, it also provides new evidence, derived from the Portuguese case, of the way in which one of the most important schools of right-wing thought at the end of the twentieth century has influenced extreme-right milieux all over Europe. In light of Tamir Bar-On's analysis of the ND's cultural and pan-European impact, the findings presented here confirm its transnational character while drawing on this and other cases from southern Europe to question the French movement's long-term effectiveness in reorienting the culture of the right-wing milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Historia Contemporanea is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2010, ten years after Mexico’s so-called ‘transition to democracy,’ the country commemorated two hundred years of independence and one hundred years of revolution. To celebrate, the state spent nearly 230 million dollars on diverse sites of memory, mass spectacles, and works of art. These commemorative projects, including the controversial, gigantic statue dubbed theColoso, triggered extensive debates that addressed the country’s myriad contemporary political issues. These discussions revealed a growing disappointment with electoral democracy and an increasing anxiety about the war on the drug trade launched by president Felipe Calderón. The state’s manifestation of power during the celebrations was paradoxically seen as a reminder of its inability to curb the growing violence, and the commemorations were widely regarded as a failure. This paper examines this failure by analyzing how the Coloso generated political discourses that fostered new forms of resistance and critique. Soon after its display, the statue was abandoned and inadvertently became an ephemeral monument. This paper argues that the literal rise and fall of theColosois symptomatic of the state’s increasing inability to control the nation’s symbolic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]