Communities as Political Culture Spaces

During this year and the past few years, communities all over the world have witnessed shocking events, weird political developments, and have faced a terrible public health threat. Almost all are unknown experiences to the mid-, and young generation: climate change and massive migration waves arriving to Europe that is weakened by economic crisis and divided by Euroscepticism; Brexit; the removal of historical statues and the “Black Lives Matter” movement as a hard reaction to the systemic racism; COVID-19 global pandemics. More than ever before, the collective perceptions of threat were amplified by the overwhelming global dimensions of such shocking contexts and evolutions. Moreover, societies all over the world were seriously shaken by the complex changes arising after COVID-19: unemployment and teleworking, and the surprisingly powerful return to the state as the major actor able or expected to be able to tackle such challenges. As a matter of fact, communities all over the world have been put under the pressure of change, where “change’ has often became something vague enough as to make the communities themselves look for solutions to their own security. Their (high or low) resilience against threat has been once again the main issue both for governments and for research. Small or large, ancient or contemporary, traditional or highly industrialized, poor or rich, the communities have always provided for the most dynamic forms of political organization which are able to transfer cultural patterns into normative patterns, political statehood patterns, political identities and political power structures. The community’s political culture which emerges from the individuals’ dynamic involvement in political participation processes are marked by the community’s patterns of political organization and governance and by the political power structure embedded in such patterns. The complex outcomes of political culture processes have often fed back on the political organization patterns which have reinforced them enhancing the rise of social and political complexity. It is this complexity spiral of becoming and changing which capture the community dynamics providing for its further self-reconfiguration and development or, on the contrary, for its decline. The world is more often than before comprehended and perceived in terms of communities of all types. As our world changes, the communities adapt themselves or die taking with them patterns of political interaction and participation and eventually make them change into new patterns. The sources of community change are covering more and more processes and mechanisms both endogenous and exogenous to their very structure, environment, and dynamics. In spite of their low or high changing rates, in spite of them being deeply isolated or, on the contrary, highly integrated in networks of interactions of all types, communities are able to adapt to both internal and external pressure to change. Be it common resources management, climate change, COVID-19 or similar types of threats to the public health, such a source of change would always have an impact onto the political culture phenomenology. Overtly or hiddenly, the community change does occur and sometimes people could hardly face this kind of challenge. The questions which most often arises are those concerning the types of change pressure a community is exposed to, and the potential or actual outcomes of a major change as it usual impacts the capacity of individuals, groups or entire societies to accept and undergo themselves such change. COVID-19 has appeared suddenly for most of us. However, the deep roots of such threats are more and more emphasized by those studying how communities evolve and change. Political culture targets the capacity of people in any community to participate in the community’s governance processes. When facing a community change challenge people react to those public policies which aim at controlling that change. What political culture does is to address the capacity of people to get aware and/or anticipate the change, to reinforce the governance openness so as to provide feedback to policy-making processes, and to evaluate the capacity of the political leadership and elite to cope with the change challenge so as to target and achieve expected welfare conditions in the society at large. In order to do so, political culture addresses nowadays extended areas of research starting from the Weberian concept of force and state power or from Parsons’ theory of the role values and norms play in the state organization to the ideas of polycentric governance and common resource management, migration desecuritization and anticipatory powers. This section aims at revealing the relationship between political culture and research areas which, in spite of appearing as rather distant, they nevertheless contribute nowadays to enhance our understanding of how people participate in the cultural, social and political life of their own communities. Keywords: Political Cultures, Political Methodology, Political Participation, Political Ideology, Political Leadership, Governance, Identity, Immigration Panel 060: Community and the Sense of Territory: Human geography and political culture Panel Abstract: The spatial distribution of political processes mirrors the political interactions and political participation phenomena in ways which enhance the description and analysis of political culture in communities. Rural or urban, the communities base their development on the collective perceptions of localness, territory, and political geography aspects of their internal political life and their interactions with other communities. One question which often arises is whether political culture of a community relates to its geographic space, and geographic location, and how does this make sense in the interactions between real and virtual communities. Panel 319: Political identity dynamics and political cultures of web communities Panel Abstract: The intensive development of internet services and the increasing access rates to web platforms and socializing networks have induced the development of a special type of political culture in which the major aspect is that of political identity in relation to set of values as both the basis of identity construction and a meaningful framework of interacting with the others. People accessing and interacting with web communities have often the dilemma of constructing dual identities and eventually make them (partially or fully) overlap. The political identity construction is often the subject of cognitive dissonance processes, and people interacting on web platforms, socializing networks or forums experience differences between their political identities, responsibilities, and capacities to communicate. Political identity dynamics in such virtual environments offer the context for studying the emergence of political sub-cultures as the web semantics provides for the construction of meaning and narratives which address other’s identities and require ways of communication with them. Panel 059: Communities and polycentric governance Panel Abstract: Communities are sometimes viewed as (partially) overlapping and communicating networks which reveal complex power structures and interaction patterns. Such views are actually providing support to governance processes not only in the classic terms of law, international relations and political science, but more appealing in terms of the institutional networking backgrounds which support multiple independent decision-making processes operating at different levels of imbrication in the community organization. Multiple independent centers of governance might require a paradigmatic shift in the political culture research as they provide conceptual and pragmatic support to the idea that an individual agent is simultaneously the target and the actor in multiple processes of policy making. Mainstream political culture theory is based on two fundamental concepts: attitude, and open polity. In the polycentric governance framework, the individual agent as well as the state, the government and the decision-making require fundamental conceptual adaptation in order to provide support to the idea that political participation meets the requirements of multiple independent (synchronous or asynchronous) policy making processes. Panel 058: Communities and people empowerment Panel Abstract: Communities are the political participation spaces in which the processes of empowerment could be adequately measured and analyzed. As revealed by the famous works of Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel on this issue, political culture theory and human empowerment theory have basically assumed that the measurement and analysis of such change could be assessed in the classic governance framework using the attitude measurement in various social and political organization contexts. The polycentric governance might nevertheless offer a different perspective over the value-based human empowerment ideas. This might further develop into a new theory of political culture concerning communities which are organized on principles of polycentric governance. Panel 061: Community power structure Panel Abstract: Political elites have always played a major role in shaping the political culture of communities. A community undergoing substantial changes on its social and economic dimensions often reveals major shifts in its power structure and in the exercise of power as conveyed by the social and political influence processes. Political culture is often the outcome of influential dynamic processes, and an enduring political culture is often associated with an enduring community power structure. The instability phenomena affecting the internal balance of the power structure is followed by essential shifts in the political culture stability and efficiency, resulting in contentious political phenomena and changes at the value system of a certain community. Political culture instability phenomena on such dimensions like contentious politics or collective action processes have often been approached in social and political movements research. Collective perceptions which underlie the political culture instability represent an understudied issue. It nevertheless might emphasize complex phenomena which provide for the re-configuration (self-configuration) of a community. Panel 057: Communities and Migration. Studying Securitization under the prism of Political Culture Theory: Multi-Dimensional Approaches International research pertaining to the nexus of security and migration suggests that migration and the refugee crisis in Europe are securitized (Lazaridis & Wadia, 2015; Gattinata & Morales, 2017). Nevertheless, the securitization of migration in Europe is not a new phenomenon. Rather, a reading of the security – migration scientific literature points out that securitization patterns prevailed in the EU ever since the 1970’s (Huysmans, 2000). More specifically, European governments have used economic, national and societal security assertions as a pretext to implement emergency measures for the management of migration (Dimari, 2020). This continuity and reaffirmation of securitization of migration patterns leads to the question of whether these practices draw from the political culture of each of the EU member states that resort to security policies. In other words, is there a relation between the political culture of a country and securitization practices? In addition, how does political culture shape political security patterns in a state? Do national myths and identity narratives exert influence in securitizing moves in the EU states and if this is the case, in what ways? – In this context, the aim of this panel would be to bring together scholars and research that could contribute in the understanding of the interrelation of political culture and securitization of migration. This is an interdisciplinary approach that could combine theoretical, methodological, and experimental research that would yield useful scientific data aimed to preamble new research pertaining to innovative and specific desecuritization of migration strategies. Panel 086: Smart Communities and the Anticipatory Dimension of Political Culture Panel Abstract: In a very similar way to the terms of “Smart City” and ”Smart Society”, the term “Smart Community” is meant to define a type of community organization based on the advanced technologies of the artificial (AI, Alife, ABS, CAS, etc.) and of the anticipatory systems. Communities could thus enhance the quality of their governance, their capacities of management of common resources, their security strategies and their resilience against threats. Communities achieve the properties of “smart” social and political entities as they employ the anticipatory attributes of political cultures in order to identify frameworks of social and political participation of their members, to examine potential tendencies and political scenarios of political preferences and ways to involve the individual and institutional agents in the public deliberation and policy making processes. Panel 312: Cultural challenges in the 21st century international community-building, its impact on international relations and the role of strategic communication. Panel Abstract: Karl Deutsch (1912-1992) was a Czech-American-German political scientist, who significantly contributed to the discipline of International Relations with two key concepts. Security community according to Deutsch focuses on peaceful change towards an integrated community which relies on shared (expectedly liberal democratic) values. The experience of the 21st century has demonstrated that building Hobbesian and Lockean ideological communities may become a reliable tool in challenging the Kantian international system and it would become an attractive task for sophisticated status seeking actors, change-oriented in cultural patterns of the system. Identity politics has become the ideological keyword of the 21st century, and the international society is deeply divided between supporters of conservatism and liberalism, nationalism and globalism, protectionism, and supporters of free trade, among others. Change-oriented culturally diverse ideological communities started to challenge the post- Cold War international system, which initially followed the Kantian cultural patterns. Another important contribution of Deutsch refers to the term of deutocracy – the control over means of mass communication and, and the use of information in political activities. Modern ideological communities practice active strategic communication which relies on successful dissemination of their strategic narratives. Besides papers studying the impact of culturally diverse status-seekers on political/security community-building, this panel also welcomes papers which analyze the impact of strategic communication and strategic narratives on cultural/ideological community building.