RESEARCH LETTER OF POLITICAL SCIENSE
Year:2007 | Volume:2 | Issue:4 (8)|Papers Count:8

Political culture includes a set of outlooks and values that shape political process and life. The type and extent of socialization and political participation vary depending on the subjective and passive or civic nature of political culture. Considering this basis and significant influence of political culture in the performance and efficiency of political parties and attitudes towards party system, this paper studies the type of interaction between these two variables, particularly adverse impact of certain parameters of Iranian political culture on the question of party system. The author seeks to explain one of the main causes of the inefficiency of Iranian political parties from the perspective of political culture.

Our time is an age of politics referring to everyday life (micro-politics) on the one hand and different and distinct politics on the other. Our time also represents an era of proliferated life-worlds or social world of the people. In other words, the life-worlds of today's humans are increasingly fragmented or proliferated. Such conditions have provided the ground for the birth of expressionist self and mosaic identities. The life-world of this world is a life-world without borders, replete with multiplied truths and affected by diverse lingual and discursive games. The world of this self is a world accompanied by perplexing, fluid, penetrable and unclear changes, full of ambiguity, likelihood, accidence, contradiction, complication, innovation and apostasy. Hence, today's human being has faced unique variables in sociopolitical realms; variables that have exposed the order of his archaic social and political relations to a deconstructive current, demanding a different outlook to politics, theory and methodology. This paper seeks to portray these deconstructive currents and their impact on political sphere.

Following the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, the lawmakers paid attention to local associations and councils as the best way to develop democracy. This paper studies the developments in lawmaking in this respect during the past century. For this reason, it draws on the laws adopted by the Majles (the Parliament) concerning councils and associations since the Constitutional Revolution up to now, then it analyzes the data in a comparison between the pre- and post-revolutionary periods. A comparison of the texts and laws relating to local institutions and associations in the pre- and post-revolutionary eras demonstrates that despite the presence of common concepts and themes, there are numerous formal-structural and functional-essential differences which were affected by the circumstances of the time and the power of the establishment. In fact, the findings of the research shows that there was a conflict going on between centralism (on the part of the central government) and decentralization (on the part of the associations and councils) that for some reasons resulted in the victory of centralism over decentralization.

Sharing a destiny for story and history is not anything complex, because some speculation on the concept of history can be useful. History means researching those events that have been accounted for, observed or attended by a researcher or a number of researchers working to build a construction of narratives concerning those events. Identity is a criteria based on which the historized event can be studied. Identity as an accumulative and condensed thing entails two simultaneously growing traits: on the one hand, it leads to the recognition of beings and re-understanding of the becoming. When we speak of identity as a process, we indeed talk about the continuity of historized phenomena that an individual, group, community or nation seeks to reply when answering the questions raised respecting its past. These questions can include who it was? Where has it been? What has it been? What is it now? Such questions imply the recognition of actually existing characterizations and reinventing the historically existing distinctions. It is founded upon a huge number of concepts and conducts that form themselves vis-à-vis the other. Re-reading six Qajar era's historical works, the author seeks to identify the Western element of identity in the historical reports of the Qajar era.

This paper deals with McPherson’s critical approach to theory of liberal democracy, his reconstruction of the theory and its critique. While arguing in confirmation of basing this theory upon two maximal claims (claim of maximizing individual interest, and claim of maximizing individual power) or indeed upon two concepts of human nature (the concept of human nature as consumer in possession of unknown boundary, and the concept of human nature as developer and user of his/her human potentials), McPherson emphasizes the contradiction (illogical nature) of these two claims or two concepts of human nature. He believes that the liberal democracy theory cannot meet its second claim, which is the basis of any theory on democracy. Hence, the paper first describes McPherson’s argument in this respect and then explains the characteristics of his reconstruction, which is founded upon the rejection of market concept of human nature. Critiquing McPherson’s critical approach, the paper at last points to the most important factor that reduces his critique power of the concept of monopolistic individualism.

More than three decades, new populist radical right parties have been shaped in more European consolidated democracies. New economic cleavages between native workers and foreigners and cultural- identical cleavages between natives and immigrants, (because of socio-economical globalization) have been led to the emergence of these parties. From the viewpoint of these parties, globalization and increased immigration have been led to the public and job insecurity, multi-culturalism and threatening national and cultural identity in certain countries. In the participatory and electional process, these parties opposed to the immigration and global & regional integration. In this study, first, the researcher explains the main theoretical & sociological explanations about the emergence and electional successfulness of these parties and then, for clarifying the importance of each explanation, the results of some main quantitative researches have been explained.

Thought currents and sociopolitical grounds in the recent decades at the world level led to rethinking in political theories and executive policymaking concerning the state as manifested by the rise of a conceptual framework and new method of policy-making called multiculturalism that focuses on the recognition of differences in public sphere. This emerging school of thought appeared as social philosophy depending on cultural and social backgrounds of different societies within the approaches of cultural nationalism policymaking and multiculturalism. Cultural nationalism approach refers to the demands of various minorities, indicating that public sphere particularly cultural realm should be a place for recognition of diversity and difference. Policymaking approach means a kind of practical mechanism for decision-making, governance, policymaking and inevitable confrontation of certain Western societies with the demographic requirements, issues and realities and emerging human diverse composition. The third approach is founded upon critique of excessive individualism of classical liberalism and rethinking in liberal social philosophy outlook towards the importance of individual and instead emphasis upon groups and cultures. In studying and analyzing the factors influencing the formation of each of these approaches, such parameters as the extensive wave of immigration following Second World War, impact of globalization, new communications and information technologies, raising awareness of minority cultural groups, and the rise and importance of such schools as communitarianism are considered as influential.