SocietàMutamentoPolitica, Rivista Italiana di Sociologia (ISSN 2038-3150)
CALL FOR PAPERS – SMP ISSUE NO. 15 (1/2017) ‘TOWARD A POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF OUR TIME’
Edited by Lorenzo Viviani – University of Pisa
Sociology has been interested in political phenomena, from the earliest sociologists onward, as an integral and fundamental part of its own scientific progression, in a comparison that has developed over the course of time with other disciplines, from political philosophy to political sciences, from political psychology to anthropology, from history to law. It is a continuous exchange in which sociology has maintained its own theoretical and methodological specificity, one which this issue of Smp proposes to reexamine, opening itself to the contribution of Italian and foreign authors and turning to new generations of scholars able to enrich the debate on a “political sociology of our time”. Looking at political phenomena through a sociological lens means assuming that there exists a constant interaction between society and politics, that in contemporary society it plays out on a global scale, including economic recessions, power conflicts, religious phenomena, migration flows, and more generally all those processes that change the social bases of democracy and the attribution of power within different societies.
The objective of the call for papers is therefore to collect theoretical and empirical contributions that develop themes and research methods capable of encompassing the complexity of current political changes in a comparative key. As for the topics of this issue, the focus is principally on representative democracy as a result of the force of identity of traditional ideologies, and more generally with the redefining of society, corresponding to processes of advanced modernisation. A change that involves the individual and the very structure of social and political ties, and which underpins the crisis of the expressive and organisational methods of politics developed during the century of party democracy. In this sense, the radicalisation of the process of individualisation and pluralisation of identity construction processes is accompanied by the disintermediation of politics and by the changing of actors and contents of representation, with the the stability crisis between identity and procedural activity present in traditional political organization. Further, such a radical transformation of the forms of politics in advanced democracies makes the study of the processes of the personalisation of politics and leadership particularly relevant nowadays. In particular, the sociological perspective allows the theme of leadership to be confronted in its nature of social relationship between leaders, citizens/voters and the contexts inside which it develops, and at the same time explore more deeply the relation between leadership and democracy in the political era of post-mass integration.
The crisis of confidence and delegitimization (with regard to traditional parties and to the political class), the emergence of movements and parties opposed to the traditional, political and institutional system, and the rise of populism are phenomena that political sociology has to face by analysing in how and to what extent representative democracy may be experiencing a period of fragility. They also affect the forms that continuing phase of surpassing party democracy has taken on, in the different perspectives of output democracy, of post-democracy, of populist democracy, of participative and deliberative democracy, and of leader democracy.
Lastly, a political sociology of – and for – our time cannot ignore the supranational dimension of political conflict, just as it cannot be uninterested in the phenomena that characterise societies outside of Europe, no less the relationship between religion and politics in Middle Eastern countries. This issue thus intends to throw itself into the middle of the debate on new challenges of research at the national and international level, that once again give the political sociologist a central role in unravelling the intricate narrative of contemporary, social and political change. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: crisis of representative democracy in advanced societies; personalization of politics, personalization of power, and leader democracy; populism and political parties; new cleavages politics; new perspectives on political sociology research in European and non-European countries.
Peer Review Policy
Every article submitted to Smp will be evaluated by the Director and the Curator to verify that the contents are relevant to this issue. In the event the article is accepted, it will be subjected to a double- blind peer review.
Submission procedure
This issue of Smp will accept articles primarily written in English and Italian. The articles should be no longer than 10,000 words, notes and bibliography included, and should be drafted according to the editorial guidelines of Smp, which may be consulted on the journal’s website. Every article should be accompanied by a brief note on the author (max. 150 words) and an abstract (max. 200 words).
Deadline
Article submission: 15 September 2016?
Peer review feedback: 15 November 2016?
Article submission with edits: 31 December 2016
Issue publication: 15 April 2017
Articles and abstract should be submitted to the following email address: lorenzo.viviani@unipi.it
The editorial guidelines are available at: http://www.fupress.net/public/journals/33/smp_norme_eng.pdf
Previous volumes are available at: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/smp