In the present article, key conceptual and regulative requirements for quality public democratic talk to be maintained are identified and the linguistic economy of civic conversation about common affairs in the Swedish public sphere gauged; the relationship between public talk, power, and identity is charted; and exposure and response horizons for further quality slippage with Swedens’s institutional frameworks visited. A distinction between width and amp difference is introduced to separate democratically acceptable from unviable modes of conversational engagement and provide a new platform for analysing this space. Democratic history and theory is also visited, showing how cognitive moral conversation is a precondition for democratic governance. It is ultimately shown that if democratic politics wishes to remain within its remit, key ideals need safeguarding. It is concluded that the well-known challenges brought out by Levitsky & Ziblatt have not yet affected Swedish politics as they have American politics, but that risks for graver deterioration of struggling conversational and normative formats are visible.

Denna introduktion till det vetenskapliga studiet av politik vill ge en grund till att förstå vad politik är och hur stats­veten­skaplig kunskapsbildning går till. Med utgångspunkt i fem tematiska kategorier – institutioner och organisationer, regimer och system, idéer och ideologier, normer och beteenden och slutligen begrepp och diskurser – beskrivs villkoren för stats­vetenskap­lig kunskapsbildning på ett utförligt sätt.

I boken diskuteras också politikens olika former i nära sam­­band med en principiell diskussion om vetenskaplig kun­skaps­bildning i stort: i kunskapsförnekelsens, des­­infor­mationens och de ogrundade påståendenas tidevarv ger den nödvändiga verktyg för den som vill förstå politiska för­hållanden.

Politikens former är avsedd för såväl studenter i stats­veten­skap som för andra intresserade som vill bringa reda i hur statsvetenskaplig kunskaps­bild­ning om politik skiljer sig från allmänt tyckande och ideologiskt motiv­erade påståenden.

Recension av: Hren, Joshua, 2018. Middle-Earth and the Return of the Common Good. J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy. Eugene: Cascade Books.

This contribution aims to unpack the ontological nexus of cyborg identity and culture. It highlights a set of core assumptions driving its operations that merit critical attention as cyborgic and AI discourses continue to unfold and penetrate societies deeper, ultimately questioning the normative and conceptual logic and social distribution of these core assumptions.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate salient approaches to citizenship and civic-normative educationin liberal democratic life. The chapter argues that core technocratic assumptions about clarity,linearity, and predictability feeding into civic-educational deployment and change warrant critical attention.The chapter aims to shed new light on states’ instinct to regard themselves and their value setsas seamless conceptual wholes. A range of ramifications of this typical approach are interrogated, inprinciple as well as in relation to Swedish civic-educational matrices. The chapter refines a heuristicmodel for unpacking citizenship and civic-normative education thinking in liberal democracy originallypresented in an earlier work by the author. It is concluded that even as the enormous policy efforts thatgo into organizing and revamping public civic-normative education in response to new societal challengeshave little chance of meeting governments’ intentions; they may still be important since they areexerted in highly visible public spaces and domains.

Begrepp är centrala i allt politiskt tänkande och handlande: begrepp formar politiska program och dagordningar, men också maktförhållanden och världsbilder. Det går inte att förstå en politisk idéströmning om man inte tar hänsyn till de uttolkningar av begrepp som individ, gemenskap, autonomi eller kultur som strömningen omfattar – men uttolkningarna skiftar från en ideologisk tradition till en annan.

I denna bok utvecklas en modell för att förstå politisk-normativ begrepps­­bildning och här analyseras nio av de mest framträdande politiska begreppen. I anslutning till analysen diskuteras också villkoren för god kunskapsbildning i en tid som präglas av post-sanning, val­manipulation, sociala mediebubblor, elitförakt och politisk kunskaps­resistens. I ett utförligt appendix presenteras slutligen ett antal centrala västerländska ideologiska traditioner på ett överskådligt vis.

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary, multidimensional research on civic and religious education in northern Europe, this article explores disciplinary epistemological economies in an era of mounting discontent with the narrowness of mono-disciplinary analyses of complex social and educational issues. It is argued in the article that under conditions of sufficient world complexity, interdisciplinarity provides for a more cogent scholarly approach to educational structures and phenomena than either of the logics of mono-, multi- and transdisciplinarity—the main extant alternatives. It is shown in both conceptual and empirical terms that these alternatives cannot accommodate social and educational diversity, complexity and sprawl other than thinly, hence should mainly be endorsed by universities and research funders for other than epistemological reasons or when there is agreement that the object subjected to analysis is correspondingly thin and isolated. As education in and of itself is a remarkably complex social phenomenon and field of study, it is concluded that interdisciplinary environments may typically be expected to provide a stronger potential for assessing and understanding it.

This article investigates civic-political and cognitive participation as they play out in democratic theory. Its core purpose is to develop a conceptual-normative critique of the presupposition in liberal democratic theory that these logics are mutually reinforcing and complementary. This misunderstanding of a theoretical ambivalence contributes to inhibiting constructive assessment of epistocratic*technocratic frameworks of democratic interpretation and theory. I demonstrate that these logics circulate contrasting views of democratic power and legitimacy and should be disentangled to make sense of liberal democratic theoretical and political spaces. This critique is then fed into a political-epistemological interrogation of post-truth and alt-facts rhetorical registers in contemporary liberal democratic life, concluding that neither logic of participation can harbor this unanticipated and fundamentally nonaligned way of doing liberal democratic democracy.