Democracy

In a bilingual or multilingual society, certain sectors may be regarded as disloyal should they speak the language of state enemies or be associated in one way or another with neighboring hostile countries. Within this framework, the present article analyzes how two deeply divided democracies, India and Israel, determined and implemented language and educational policies with respect to two major minority languages, Urdu and Arabic. A comparison is conducted between the policies of secular democratic India, regarding Urdu, a language of its Muslims minority, and of Israel, an ethnic democracy, regarding Arabic, the language of its Arab-Palestinian minority. The findings indicate that both states have consigned the minority language to a marginal position on the public stage. Moreover, albeit that a certain level of autonomy in the educational sphere is given to the minority, the educational status of the minority is markedly low in comparison to the majority.En una sociedad bilingüe o multilingüe, ciertos sectores pueden ser considerados como desleales si hablan el idioma de estados enemigos o fueran asociados de una u otra forma con países vecinos hostiles. Dentro de este marco, el presente artículo analiza como dos democracias sumamente divididas, India e Israel, determinaron e implementaron las políticas lingüisticas y educacionales de los dos más importantes idiomas minoritarios, el Urdu y el Árabe, respectivamente. Se lleva a cabo una comparación entre las políticas de la democracia secular de India, en lo que respecta al Urdu, un idioma de su minoría Musulmana, y de la democracia étnica Israelí, con respecto al Árabe, el idioma de su minoría Árabe-Palestina. Las conclusiones indican que ambos estados han consignado el idioma minoritario a una posición marginal en el escenario de la vida pública. Además, el status educativo de la minoría es considerablemente bajo en comparación con el de la mayoría, aunque un cierto nivel de autonomía en la esfera educacional es dado al idioma.

This article focuses on the ambivalent effect of religious autonomy in India and the outcome for democracy in the country. The Indian constitution guarantees autonomy to its religious minorities, and promises the minorities the freedom independently to manage their religious affairs in addition to a proportional share of the budget. At the same time, the constitution emphasizes the aspiration to legislate ‘uniform personal laws’ for all the citizens of India in accordance with the principles of secularism, equality and with India's self-definition as a civic nation. This recommendation has however remained a ‘dead letter’ until today. In this domain, the state has constituted a civic law for Hindus, which adjusts Hinduism to democratic principles....

"""This article examines the interests of "majorities" and "minorities" in the context of political conflict in deeply divided democracies and analyzes democratic solutions to mitigate tensions between communities in these societies. Two case studies Macedonia and Israel – are examined through the prism of recent theories on democracy in divided societies.
Whereas Israel is engaged in an internal struggle for a suitable solution, but at the same time insists on preserving its Jewish national character, twelve years ago Macedonia redefined
itself and preferred to preserve the state‘s territorial unity at the expense of some of its national character. Important lessons to be learned from the recent political experiences of both cases are discussed. """

In this paper, we develop the nucleus of a quantitative tool for the comparative assessment of democracies with respect to the electoral inclusion of immigrants. We take into account the standards of concept formation and at the same time we stick firmly to our evaluative goal. Therefore, we start by justifying why and when democracies ought to electorally include long-term residents with a migrant background on the basis of liberal and republican reasoning as (still) dominant normative theories of democracy. The next part contains the necessary steps of concept formation. First, we define the concept on the basic level by situating the main terms in the semantic field, by specifying its boundaries and by pointing to divergent discourses to which we can link the findings by using specific terminology. Second, we introduce two meanings of electoral inclusiveness as the constitutive dimensions of our concept: the de jure meaning which refers to the norms that regulate the inclusion of immigrant residents and the de facto meaning which points to the actual functioning of the inclusion of immigrants in their country of residence. Third, we point to the two means for regulating which are at the same time the pathways for reaching electoral inclusion: access to citizenship and alien enfranchisement. These means/pathways represent the components of our index on the third level of our concept. Next, we explain the indicators that we apply for measuring the components and dimensions of our concept. Finally, we present the conceptual architecture of our concept and justify the rules of aggregation. In the third part of the paper we present the results of the first application of the IMIX to 22 European democracies. These results make clear that the electoral inclusiveness with respect to immigrants is in most countries far away from what it should be according to normative theories of democracy; and this is true independent of whether we look at the laws and regulations of these democracies or whether we evaluate how well they actually function in including immigrants. We conclude by indicating how our evaluative concept could potentially be expanded or modified.