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During the 1970s, the Parliament-Funkadelic collective, or P-Funk, performed a unique type of funk music that impacted the lives and culture of generations of fans. Their music has been a vital force in the developments of popular music, redefining the limits of concept albums and performances, and opened the doors to funk rock, hip hop, and neo-soul. I address the ways in which P-Funk has been received, interpreted, and reconstructed by the diverse constituents of American popular culture from the 1960s to the present. Each chapter explores a discrete interpretive community that has granted meaning to the collective from perspectives of history, music, iconography, consumer culture, and popular entertainment media. The resulting study unifies these threads through their engagement with history and the evolution of P-Funk through time. Ultimately, this thesis seek to shed light on a group that has lacked thorough scholarly attention.

<p>The problem of world poverty is appalling in human terms. Almost half of all the humankind lives below the poverty line of $2 per day, whereas affluent parts of the world continue to enjoy enormous technological and economical progress. In the light of such discrepancy, the debate in political philosophy regarding “global justice” has renewed significance. The current debate between those who agree global justice is important, is those who think that positive duties towards poor is enough, and those who think that morality requires a re-designation of the ground rules operating at the global level.</p><p>The Cosmopolitan view grounds its theoretical framework in this second view. This study aims to analyse if, and how, the normative debate in the European Parliament reflects the assumptions, arguments and considerations of the Cosmopolitan approach. This study identifies central concepts of the Cosmopolitan approach, and then analyses how these concepts are discussed in the European Parliamentary debates. In addition, I identify who discusses what in the parliamentary debates. The analysis reveals how Cosmopolitan ideas are reflected in the discourse within the debates, and the second dimension identifies which party groups discuss and hold which key concepts of Cosmopolitanism.</p>

Thesis (doctoral)--Universiẗat Bonn, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-167).

A qualitative document analysis is used to answer the aim of this thesis that is to find out if the relation between the European Union and Belarus has changed from confrontational to reparational in between the two parliamentary elections that was held in the country in the years of 2004 and 2008. The study focuses on debates from the European parliament in association to the elections in Belarus to see if the rhetoric used in the debates have changed. It is found that the rhetoric used in the European parliament after the 2004 election in Belarus are extremely confrontational and the members of the debate expresses their thoughts of Belarus in a rather harsh way. It has also been found that the rhetoric used in the European parliament after the 2008 election in Belarus are more diplomatic and have the tendencies of a warmer relation to Belarus although there are still some confrontational views among the members.

II Lietuvos Seimas 1923 – 1926 m. Santrauka. Lietuva, 1918 m. paskelbusi nepriklausomybę, pasuko demokratijos keliu. Lietuvos piliečiai galėjo tiesiogiai rinkti atstovus į Seimą, kurie atstovavo jų interesus. Istorikai daugiau tyrė Steigiamojo Seimo veiklą, nes šis Seimas padėjo pamatus tolesniam teisinės valstybės gyvavimui, nemažai tirtas III Seimas dėl savo darbų ir prezidento A. Smetonos įvykdyto valstybės perversmo. II Seimas mažai susilaukė dėmesio, todėl istorikams lieka aktualu užpildyti parlamentarizmo tyrimuose spragas. Šio darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti II Seimo veiklą, nuveiktus darbus. Tikslui pasiekti keliami uždaviniai: 1. pateikti politinės situacijos II Seimo išvakarėse apžvalgą, 2. išanalizuoti II Seimo rinkimų eigą ir rezultatus, 3. pristatyti Seimo kiekybinius ir kokybinius rodiklius, bei 4. aptarti atliktus Seimo darbus vidaus (politinėje, kultūrinėje, ekonominėje ir tautinėje sferoje) ir užsienio politikoje. Pirmajame Seime (1922 – 1923 m.) iš 78 Seimo narių – 38 buvo krikščionys demokratai (pozicija), o kita dalis opozicinės frakcijos. Toks skaičius lėmė, kad opozicija ir pozicija negal���jo tinkamai dirbti. Opozicija ginčijo Respublikos prezidento, vyriausybės išrinkimo teisėtumą (legitimumą), nesutardavo svarbiais klausimais. Todėl prezidentas A. Stulginskis 1923 kovo 13 d. paleido I Seimą. 1923m. gegužės 12-13 d. įvyko rinkimai į Antrąjį Seimą, kurie parodė, kad šį kartą rinkėjai buvo aktyvesni. Antrajame Seime daugiausia vietų iškovojo krikščionių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The second Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania 1923 - 1926 Raimundas Trinkūnas Summary Lithuania, declared its independency in 1918, turned to the democracy way. Lithuanians were able to elect representatives directly to Seimas, who represented their interests. Historians started studying more about Constituve Seimas work, because this Seimas put the base for the further life of the juridical state existence, the III Seimas was researched quite in an intensive way as well because of its works and the revolution carried out by the president A. Smetona. The II Seimas got quite little attention. Due to that, it is of present interest to historians to fill the gaps in the researches of parliamentarism. The aims of this work – to analyze the movement and achieved works of the II Seimas. These tasks are raised in order to reach the aim: 1) to produce the review of the II Seimas Eve political situation; 2) to analyze the II Seimas election course and results; 3) to present the quantitive and qualitive indexes of Seimas, and: 4) to discuss about Seimas achieved works in inner (political, cultural, economical and national sphere) and foreign policy. From the 78 Seimas members in the First Seimas (1922-1923) – 38 members were Christian Democrats (position), and the others were opposition fractions. Because of such a number, position and opposition couldn’t work in a proper way. The opposition argued about Republic president, state election legitimacy, and disagreed about important... [to full text]

This research focuses on contributions – oral and written – on the topic of linguistic diversity made by Members of the European Parliament during the plenary sessions from 2000 to 2003 inclusive and analyses the attitudes expressed by Members towards the concept of linguistic diversity, particularly as it applies to the national languages and the regional autochthonous languages of Member States. The analysis is set within a framework consisting of contemporary academic work and the classic work by Johann Gottfried von Herder and the German Philosophen. The European Year of Languages 2001 was widely supported by the European Commission; but an important question seemed to be what significance, if any, did maintaining linguistic diversity have for Members of the European Parliament in the years immediately following 2001. This research set out to discover to what extent issues related to linguistic diversity were given expression to in the plenary debates from 2000 to 2003, the years corresponding essentially to the fifth parliamentary term. Was only lip service paid to linguistic diversity in the years 2000 – 2003? Or did the European Year of Languages focus the attention of parliamentarians from all political groups in an ongoing way on issues of language use and preservation in the European Union, especially since the Union was to be significantly enlarged by the addition of ten Member States on January 1, 2004? Did the MEPs recognise that there were social and economic benefits accruing from pursuing policies of linguistic diversity? How important was linguistic diversity to the essence of the European Union in the eyes of its Members of Parliament? To what extent did MEPs espouse the use of just one language as a preferred method of communication in and around the Parliament? How much respect was there for the regional and minority indigenous languages of the European Union? Did MEPs regard linguistic diversity as an important consideration in determining the suitability of other countries seeking accession? The research reviews the response from the Commission in subsequent years to the views articulated by the MEPs. Finally, are there lessons in any of this for New Zealand?

This thesis addresses the relationship between formal and informal institutions in the European Parliament from a new institutionalist perspective. This is done in order to fulfill the aims of the thesis, which are: (1) to broaden our understanding of informal institutions and institutional change in the EP as well as (2) develop our understanding of the new institutionalist approaches: rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism and historical institutionalism. The method of analysis is qualitative and the main material consists of 14 interviews with Swedish members and former members of the 4th to the 7th EP. The empirical investigation shows that the EP should be interpreted as institutionalized, but some informal institutional changes have, however, occurred due to changes in formal institutions. The enlargements and treaty changes have changed not only how the parliamentarians work in informal network, but also the internal selection procedures of the rapporteur and the internal view on the EP versus the European Commission and the Council of Ministers. The two central claims of this thesis are: (1) that new institutionalist approaches go well together and should be used parallel in order to get a comprehensive understanding of political phenomena and, (2) that the EP is characterized both by institutionalization and informal institutional changes and that these interplay with each other.

Much recent scholarship celebrates the early modern period for its development of broader public political engagement through printed media and coffeehouse culture. It is the argument of this study that the formation in England under Charles II of a public sphere may be shown to have followed a reassessment of political discourse that began at Westminster during the troubled reign of that king’s father, Charles I. The narrative of parliament’s growth in this era from an “event to an institution,” as one historian describes it, tells of more than opposition to the King on the battlefields of the English Civil War. Parliament-work in the early years of England’s revolutionary decade also set new expectations for rhetorical deliberation as a means of directing policy in the House of Commons. The ideals of discursive politics that were voiced in the Short Parliament (May 1640), and more fully put into practice in the opening session of the Long Parliament (November 1640), were soon also accepted by politically-minded authors and readers outside Westminster. Prose controversy published in print and political poetry that circulated in manuscript both demonstrate that the burgeoning culture of debate outside parliament could still issue “in a parliamentary way.” Such promotion of productive textual engagements eventually constituted a wider, notional assembly, whose participants – citizen readers – were as much a product of deliberate education and fashioning as they were of the “conjuring,” “interpellation,” or “summoning” that recent scholarly vocabulary suggests. Following the spirit of reform in the English parliament, and subsequently developing through the years of partisan political writing that followed, public opinion, like the Commons, established itself in this era as an institution in its own right. These public and private assemblies disseminated the unprecedented amount of parliamentary writing and record-keeping that distinguishes the period under review, and this rich archive provides the literary and historical context for this study.

ABSTRACT This thesis aims to (re)examine the breakdown of consensus that led to the outbreak of the English Revolution. It aims to do so from the particular perspective of a group of moderate godly laymen, commonly known as the 'Junto', who played a prominent role in the religious and political machinations of the Long Parliament before the outbreak of hostilities in 1642. Of particular concern is an exploration of the ideological background of these men in order to delineate possible contours of continuity of thought and action extending from the 1620s to the Long Parliament; an objective which has been facilitated via the deployment of a kind of micro-prosopographical methodology which focuses more on qualitative rather than quantitative 'ties of association'. With a view towards charting such contours of continuity, the 1630s provide the crux of the thesis. To this purpose, a number of ties of association have been interrogated including the involvement of these men in colonisation schemes (in particular the Providence Island Company); their resistive action to prerogative taxation; the efficacy of godly communitarian and social ties; and their association with the irenic schemes of John Dury and Samuel Hartlib. Deeply contextualised analysis of such ties of association has the potential to reveal and reframe previously obscured contours of continuity. Furthermore, this focus not only sheds light on this important yet relatively neglected decade but also contributes to a growing body of post-revisionist research by reappraising the revisionist emphasis on short-term and non-ideological causes of the English Revolution. This thesis demonstrates that, for these men at least, there can be discerned a continuity of dissident ideological thought and action stemming from the mid-1620s and receiving its fullest expression in the Grand Remonstrance of November 1641. Moreover, although this dissident ideological framework had political/constitutional implications, it was fundamentally religious in origin and nature, stemming as it did from a reaction to the Arminianism of the Caroline ecclesiastical establishment in the 1620s and its subsequent Laudian efflorescence in the 1630s. Thus this thesis demonstrates that for these men the causes of the English Revolution were essentially religious in nature.