Hi all!
I’ve chosen East Asia for my regional democracy report.
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‘Penny-less’
Today, new federal guidelines for phasing out the penny came into effect; pennies are no longer going to be in circulation, with retailers being encouraged to round all prices to the nearest nickel for the time being. Strauss, Jang, and Taber at The Globe and Mail say that this newly implemented system gives incentives to consumers to use cash when the price is rounded down and use debit/credit to avoid the price being rounded up. They anticipate a number of strategic responses, for example, making a small purchase a number of times as opposed to being multiple units of that item in a single transaction to maximize savings. Personally, I don’t know if I would be particularly compelled to consciously change my spending patterns in order to save a couple cents.
Whether or not I choose to use cash or plastic to pay for a purchase depends on a matter of convenience and the price of the item, and it appears that the strategies being employed that are differentiating between the two on the basis of ‘penny’ pinching do not have particularly viable effect on the overall population regardless. According to a report published by the Senate finance committee, rounding to the nearest denomination tends to even out any potential wins and losses incurred by the elimination of single-unit coins (i.e. in Australia, New Zealand, etc.). Will you be ‘seeking savings in a penny-less age’?
The China Diaries
Globe and Mail staff photojournalist John Lehmann and China correspondent Mark MacKinnon are traveling through China along the trails of Mao Zedong’s Long March documenting China’s progress into a new age of modernity. The China Diaries takes an insightful, cross-sectional look at the current state of the vastly-progressing nation as it continues along its prominent paths of economic development. A number of posts particularly stood out to me in this micro-documentary of their travels, especially those with a more sociocultural focus. I highly recommend giving The China Diaries a read, or at least a glance through.
The written work aside though, the aspect of The China Diaries that I was most excited to share was photojournalist John Lehmann’s Tumblr, on which you can find a chronological photo-documentary of his and MacKinnon’s travels through China. The images he’s captured range from quirky and personable portraits to absolutely breathtaking snapshots of major landmarks and panoramic landscapes. And here’s an added bonus that might pique your interest: it’s all done in a very hipster, iPhone, Instagram-like style; quite a deviation from the newspaper photojournalistic norm.
Restaurant Ratings
Ever since I started living on my own, my main sources of sustenance have been largely consistent of restaurant fare, whether it be in dine-in or take-out form. This habitual change has made me very dependent on online restaurant reviews, almost embarrassingly so, especially when I am looking to try something new. Thus, for this mini assignment, I decided to look at the two different measures of restaurant ‘goodness’ I most frequently use: Dine Here and Urbanspoon.
The websites are similar in that they both address all the basics you need to know before making a reservation, i.e. restaurant location, contact information, website and online menu if available. Informationally, the main differences between the two are the scope and the panel. While Dine Here is restricted to Canadian restaurants, Urbanspoon covers almost all major North American cities.
Dine Here offers more of a vernacular review as the critiques come from ordinary diners with ‘untrained’ palettes. Restaurant ratings are based on an ascending five star scale, which is aggregated from the rating submissions based on three criteria: food, service value and ambience. In order to avoid evolving into an online platform facilitating restaurant sabotage, users are asked if they have any affiliation with the restaurant reviewed, although this measure is easily by-passable with a simple lie. Users must discuss the reasons for their rating, which are, in turn, rated based on usefulness. This keeps the reviews relatively reliable, as one is able to see and judge individual reviews by how much consensus or the ‘usefulness’ rating it receives.
Urbanspoon covers a larger geographical scope and categorizes its reviews into multiple categories such as price, type of cuisine and city. The panel of judges in effect ‘work/contribute’ to the interactive corporation. While they have fifteen million of these employed ‘foodies’, they also include ratings from newspapers, bloggers and other social media sites. The scope and information categories can be time-consuming and a little overwhelming if you’re just browsing. However, if you’re not scrambling over last minute reservations then this would be a better source in terms of both validity (although this is dependent on how much you value a professional’s taste buds over the everyday diner’s). The website does not have standard review criteria so what you gain in validity you might have to sacrifice in reliability. The ratings tend to fluctuate with no general trend due to such a wide range of reviewers with completely different palettes and preferences.
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I think utilizing Dine Here would provide you and your date with a more reliable rating, and less information to sift through. If you are an ‘appeal to authority’ type, Urbanspoon will allow you insight into a range of ‘professional’ opinions, but the inconsistencies that arise mean that you will often have to take a chance with the review you choose to lend the most credit to.
Too Little Too Late?
Today, RIM unveiled its new Blackberry 10 operating system and a pair of corresponding handsets – one entirely touchscreen, and one with the beloved physical keyboard that Blackberry users swear by. While the RIM stock has risen in value in anticipation of this fateful day, the success of Blackberry 10 is far from certain. Many consider Blackberry 10 to be RIM’s last chance at rescuing its once-innovative devices from becoming completely obsolete, but to do so, Blackberry 10 has not only persuade its few remaining fans to upgrade to something radically new and presumably different, but also distinguish itself enough from competing smartphones to attract new fans.
Heather Kelly at CNN evaluates the innovations of Blackberry 10, but concludes that, despite its relative thoroughness at addressing the concerns that have been raised with against earlier Blackberry operating systems, “there’s no guarantee it will work.”
Call me biased (yes, I am an avid iPhone supporter), but judging from the sheer competitiveness of the smartphone market and the substantial disintegration of RIM, not only in terms of Blackberry technology itself, but, perhaps even more disparagingly so, in its reputation, I think that the Blackberry 10 operating system and its corresponding devices are too little too late to espouse the comeback RIM is hoping to make. Does anyone have a differing opinion?
Democracy in Egypt: on the brink or on the distant horizon?
It’s been two years since the revolution that removed Egypt’s longtime dictator, Hosni Mubarak, from power, and the aura of hope for a democratic peace has slowly eroded into a restless uncertainty among the frustrated Egyptian public.
Violent civil unrest continues to ensue throughout the nation, with the most recent upsurge occurring on the two-year anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. This violence stems appears to stem from two sources: 1. the ruling a judge gave for 21 people to receive the capital punishment for their roles in the “massacre at Port Said” riot that occurred after a football game on February 1, 2012 and 2. the general dissatisfaction Egyptians now feel towards their first democratically elected leader, Morsy, viewing him as ‘power-hoarding’ and ‘slow’ at achieving any substantial progress towards a stable and functional democracy.
What happens now? Ahmed and Yan at CNN ask. The answer is unclear, Morsy is holding a meeting today with representatives from 11 different political parties to discuss and address some of the issues currently facing Egypt . The pessimist and the optimist in me are vying to give very different answers to the question being posed. To take the safer route, I will give my answer from a realist’s perspective: while I believe that Egypt will eventually be a peaceful democratic state, with properly functioning democratic institutions, I think that the path towards such an end is going to be a long and arduous one.
Fire on the Dance Floor
Earlier this morning, news broke about a fatal nightclub fire in Santa Maria, Brazil, a major university town, in which at least 231 people were killed and many more were injured. The fire itself was initiated during a performance by a band, Gurizada Fandangueir, known for high energy shows that incorporate pyrotechnics. After doing their routine “sputnik” pyrotechnics, in which sparkler columns were set off into the air, following the fifth song in their set, the ceiling caught on fire. In club KISS that night, there were around 2000 people, 1000 past the maximum capacity. Compare this to the size of clubs in Vancouver, where our largest clubs have capacities around maximum capacities around 500 people…KISS was playing host to a huge party Saturday night. The depictions of the ramifications of the fateful concert are devastating; with some describing the horrifying remains of club KISS as being reminiscent of a war zone. Piles of bodies were discovered following the fire, with causes of death ranging from smoke inhalation to trampling panic.
It is a tragedy that, I think, can speak to all of us. Santa Maria was a major university town in Brazil; of the 231 dead, 101 were university students at the Federal University of Santa Maria. These club-goers were all generally in our age range, and probably left their homes on Saturday night, flanked by their friends, hoping to create a ‘fire on the dance floor’ in a completely different way. The extent of the casualties at club KISS is very disconcerting, to the point where I would probably feel a tinge of anxiety before the next time I step into a club. Fire safety measures are the last thing on any of our minds when we are getting ready to go out with our friends, but, in light of these grievous circumstances, I know that the next time I party, I will be a little more aware of things like evacuation procedures and the locations of emergency fire doors.
What Democracy Is… and Is Not
I enjoyed Schmitter and Karl’s article; it serves as a fitting introduction for the content of this course. The definition of democracy proposed by Schmitter and Karl is as follows: “Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.”
While it is not an inaccurate per se, Karl and Schmitter’s definition does not suffice for me. It seems that this definition is more consequence-oriented, implying that the ability to hold leaders accountable, via the entitlement to vote, is sufficient for determining what is and what is not a democracy. Accountability of elected officials is certainly one of the most basic tenets of democracy, and is, for me, a necessary component, but it is by no means sufficient for my conceptualization of democracy. The concept of accountability emphasis a cyclical version of democracy, regular, regulated elections to reward or punish incumbents for their actions by either re-election or electing a new person into office. However, by capitalizing so much on this single cyclical process, Schmitter and Karl are reducing the citizen’s duty to the simple act of voting, which, for me, can guarantee only a bare minimum standard of democracy (to go beyond this bare minimum, citizen participation in various aspects of civil society is essential).
With this minimalist definition of what democracy is, what do they have to say about what it is not? Among many mistaken assumptions they address, Schmitter and Karl present a key criticism: “Democracies are not necessarily more efficient economically than other forms of government. Their rates of aggregate growth, savings, and investment may be no better than those of non democracies”. This touches on the nature of the relationship, or lack thereof, between capitalism and democracy, one that I am quite interested in observing. While the two seem to be intrinsically linked throughout history, must they occur hand-in-hand? I personally believe that there is a system of one-way dependency; a country can be capitalist but not democratic, but a country cannot be democratic if it is not capitalist. Democracy, for me, requires limitations on the role of the state in the marketplace; a centralized economy places an exorbitant amount of control in the hands of government, and strongly detracts away from the underlying liberal tendencies prevalent in most successful democracies today.
Measurement Validity
I found Adcock and Collier’s piece “Measurement Validity: A shared standard for qualitative and quantitative research to be the most worthy of note this week. Their task, in and of itself, is quite unique. Rarely are political science articles so loose in focus; the topic of measurement validity is such a vast and diverse one. Often, papers will be considered with simply critiquing the critique of one other paper’s particular operationalizing of a concept, and its validity, not the entire issue of validity en masse. Adcock and Collier confront this daunting task by taking a thematic approach. First, they seek to “establish a shared framework that allows qualitative and quantitative scholars to assess more effectively, and communicate about issues, of valid measurement. This deals directly with the aforementioned instances of one author critiquing another author’s work based on its validity. Adcock and Collier’s piece seeks to establish some kind of common ground that will circumvent the fruitless back and forth that often occurs.
Secondly, Adcock and Collier bring to the forefront of the discussion the need to draw a clear distinction between measurement issues and disputes about concepts. Again, this speaks to the perpetual back-and-forth between political scientists, by suggesting that, in some cases, there may exist an intrinsic disagreement between authors regarding the conceptualization of any given concept, as opposed to the measurement of it. Thirdly, the authors capitalize on the conceptual specificity of measurement claims, and suggest that claims can be more generalized without losing their validity oif greater attention is paid to matters of context. Finally, Adcock and Collier address alternative measurement validation procedures and give three examples of types of measurement validation, namely, (1) content validation), (2) convergent/ discriminant validation, and (3) nomological/ construct validation.
They assess each as serving different purposes, and emphasize the usefulness in differentiating between these three types of validation. Adcock and Collier sought to present an “understanding of measurement validation that can plausibly be applied in both quantitative and qualitative research.” They achieved this purpose by reframing each type of validation so as to create basic questions that can be utilized in both quantitative and qualitative analysis. In this way, they are hoping that qualitative and quantitative researchers can resolve their differences and learn from one another.
Democracy with Adjectives
In their article, Collier and Levitsky focus on a “procedural minimum” definition of democracy for their examination of the various adjectives that have arisen in front of the term ‘democracy’ in academia. In dealing with the conceptualizing of a newfound diversity of post-authoritarian regimes, scholars have exhibited two contradictory goals. The first, analytic differentiation, refers to the attempt to capture the diversity in the forms of democracy that have emerged. The second, conceptual validity, is concerned with avoiding the conceptual stretching that occurs when the concept of democracy is made applicable to cases which, by scholarly standards, it is not applicable. This latter goal results in subtypes of democracy, and espouses the title of Collier and Levitsky’s piece, “Democracy with Adjectives.”
Example 1:
A day to celebrate American democracy
In the example above, the phrase “American democracy” is moving down Santori’s ladder of generality, aiming at increasing differentiation, not conceptual stretching. It is “precising” the definition of democracy by adding a defining attribute that does not contradict the definition of democracy itself (be it procedural minimum or expanded procedural minimum). Thus, it is a classical (as per Collier and Levitsky) or traditional (as per lecture notes) subtype of democracy. In other words, if you were to remove the adjective “American” from the phrase “American democracy,” we would still be referring to a democracy in this context.
Here is another example of the usage of the phrase “American democracy:”
Presidential inaugurations: American democracy in its glory and shabbiness
Example 2:
Nigeria: Country As an Emerging Democracy: The Dilemma and the Promise
While the phrase “emerging democracy” is also moving down Santori’s ladder of generality, the subtype that it represents is a diminished subtype. I classify it as such because, firstly, this subtype is not a full instance of the root definition (type) of democracy, and secondly, it represents an incomplete form of democracy. In other words, if you were to remove the term “emerging” from the phrase “emerging democracy,” the use of the term democracy would become incorrect in this context.