Masyarakat, Kebudayaan dan Politik

Elderly and their barriers to accepting and learning to use technology: A scoping review

Najmi Najiha Mohd Zaid — 2023-02-13

As the rate of technology development is concurrently increasing with the number of elderly people, it is necessary for people to be digitally literate and be able to use technology to its full capacity. However, research has found that the digital divide is still happening within the community, as not everyone has fully accepted technology in their daily life routines. With the aim of identifying barriers and challenges of elderly learning technology, and mitigating efforts used by past researchers to cater to the barriers, a scoping review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guideline was conducted, and 19 eligible articles have identified having low self-confidence, lack of knowledge, cognitive and physical limitations, as well as psychological and socioeconomic challenges as the common barriers associated with elderly learning. Recognizing what the elders can and cannot do, alongside having intervention programs that promote digital inclusion, could be taken as measures to mitigate the barriers faced by the elders in learning to use technology.

Rethinking Nigeria’s soft power capability as a regional leader in Africa

Imo Akanimo Eshiett — 2023-02-13

Nigeria has always been seen as a significant regional player in Africa, and the country has not hidden its aspiration to be its leader. However, recent events, particularly in the fourth republic between 1999 and to date, have seen this ambition decline significantly. The study interrogates Nigeria’s soft power leadership capability as contemporary power diffusion theory and its ambition to be a regional leader in Africa. It examines various ways Nigeria can rethink its soft power strategies to achieve its age-long regional aspiration. The qualitative research method was adopted for the study, while primary and secondary sources were used in collecting data for the research. Findings reveal that Nigeria’s neglect and underutilisation of its strategic soft power tools in gaining regional influence continue to inhibit its African leadership ambitions. The study recommends a dynamic policy of developing and deploying significant soft power resources to boost Nigeria’s leadership in Africa.

Afrocentric beauty: The proliferation of ‘Texturist’ and ‘Colorist’ beliefs among young women in Kenya

Karen Mwende Kinuthia — 2023-02-13

The beauty ideals of a Eurocentric nature have been promulgated among African communities for decades dating back to the colonial era. The beauty ideal posits lighter or brown skin tone as prettier and straight hair as attractive. The study aimed to identify ways in which families and peers have perpetuated this common beauty ideal within the home and school settings and how these have influenced how young women view themselves. There were 20 young women of different skin tones ranging from light, medium (brown) to dark participated in two focus group discussions. Thematic analysis was used whereby three main themes (familial influence, peer socialization and self-perceptions) and four sub-themes were identified (general opinion, teasing, family disassociation and preferential vs. unfair treatment). Findings revealed that family member and peers knowingly and unknowingly augmented ‘colorist’ and ‘texturist’ beliefs by ridiculing both dark-skinned and light-skinned women. Most of them treated dark skinned people unfairly. The research findings suggested that future research should investigate how body features represent attractiveness within the African communities.

Epistocracy vs constitutional democracy: A Hayekian response to Jason Brannan

Buğra Kalkan — 2023-02-13

Jason Brennan, who proposes assessing democratic decisions based on non-procedural expert knowledge from a pure utilitarian standpoint, holds a prominent position among libertarian critiques of democracy. Brennan contends that epistocratic regimes can outperform democracies since democracies perform badly due to the phenomena of rational ignorance and deliberative democratic methods cannot solve this problem. Brennan, who compares epistocratic institutions to constitutional institutions, wants to tame democracies using negative externality arguments. In this study, we demonstrate that constitutional democracies cannot be assessed by the Brennanian metrics and that epistocracy will erode the libertarian political successes of constitutional democracy. Two important arguments back up this conclusion. First, transforming libertarian ideals beyond constitutional rules into the standard for daily politics allows experts tremendous discretion. Even with good intentions, the unchecked discretion of experts would most likely undermine the general, abstract, and egalitarian rules required by a complex society. Second, taking the concept of rational choice out of its original context will make the distinction between constitutional and unconstitutional governments unclear. Therefore, the libertarian ideal of the limited government established by the separation of powers and the procedures of checks and balances would lose its significance, giving place to the unchecked discretion of expert rule.

Modeling and innovation using artificial intelligence in accelerating handling the COVID-19 pandemic: A bibliometric study

Anwar Sadat — 2023-02-13

This study aims to analyze previous publications with the theme of modeling and innovation using artificial intelligence in accelerating the handling of COVID-19. The data of this study come from the Scopus database. This study uses VOSviewer to evaluate keywords from 575 publications in the Scopus database with research topics. Next, analysis of Scopus database search results visualizes features and trends of related journals, authors, and themes. This study found that articles on modeling and innovation using artificial intelligence in accelerating the handling of COVID-19 have been published in 267 journals, with the most popular journals being Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals. The results of bibliometric analysis show that there are ten popular journals, with The Lancet Infectious Diseases receiving the most citations. Likewise, in this study there are authors who have the most article documents, namely J.S. Suri with 4 (four) documents, and X. Xu is the most popular author with the most citations. The results of this study show that an AI approach can help in the dissemination of important information around the world while reducing the spread of misinformation about COVID-19. This study suggests that focused, effective, and efficient collaboration, coordination, and harmonization are needed between the central government, local governments, and commercial entities.

The role of community-based democracy volunteers in increasing the voter participation in general elections

Mohammad Nur Huda — 2023-02-24

Voter participation in general elections is one of the challenges for general election organizers. Various attempts were made to increase voter participation in every general election. This study aims to identify the role of community-based democracy volunteers in increasing the voter participation, analyzing the increase in voter participation, and analyzing the obstacles that affect the implementation of communitybased democracy volunteer activities in 2019 in Pekalongan City. This research is a descriptive study with a qualitative approach case study toward The General Elections Commission of Pekalongan City. The results suggested that the role of community-based democracy volunteers in increasing voter participation was manifested through the socialization of elections to the community, considering the large number of communities in Pekalongan and the members who were also voters in the 2019 election. The socialization carried out by community-based democracy volunteers in Pekalongan greatly influenced the increase in voter turnout in the 2019 elections which reached 84%. The obstacles occurred during socialization by community-based democracy volunteers could be properly resolved. Community-based democracy volunteers have a very important role in increasing voter participation in elections through socialization activities carried out.

Interest as a mode of reality: Answering the crisis of digital society

Novri Susan — 2023-02-24

Currently, society is entering a new crisis in the historical phase of society namely post-truth reality. The crisis arises when the mixing of real and fake information is reproduced through social media by the digital actors. It has put new problems of social analysis particularly to understand the meaning and direction of social actions. This article aims at answering the crisis of the digital society with the elaboration of theoretical discourse of interest. Social scientists from various schools have placed interest as the basic concept to analyze social life. However, the sociological elaboration of the theory of interest stops among the great edifices of all schools of social theory. Therefore, this article is a proposal for developing a theory of interest to track the mode of reality, particularly in the digital society. The research method of this study is an eclectic literature review of interest theories and participative observation in Indonesia’s digital society during 2019-2021. This study finds that digital actors produce and reproduce symbolic language on social media by confounding true and false information or post-truth in the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic policy. The symbolic language of digital actors does not only mean violating the rules in a digital society, but also expresses certain social interests including certain needs or aspirations.

The management of rural tourism in Barru Regency from a supply and demand perspective

Ilham Junaid — 2023-02-24

There is limited literature on the study of rural tourism, particularly related to supply and demand. This study aims to (1) identify the supply and demand aspects of rural tourism, (2) describe the concept of rural tourism based on supply and demand data. This research employs a qualitative approach in examining rural tourism in Paccekke Village, Barru Regency, for six months in the period from April to September 2021. The authors collected information through interviews with the local community and authority of Paccekke Tourism Village and direct observation. The study reveals that local communities and village officials have the opportunity to manage and develop villages through the concept of rural tourism. There are three types of supply: existing potential supply, supply of tour packages, and alternative tourism supply. This paper divides the demand for rural tourism into two parts, including products that can meet the tourists’ needs and prepared and managed rural tourism products. This study concludes that rural tourism can be realised by combining the concepts of supply and demand. This study contributes to the management and development of the village through the concept of rural tourism. This research strengthens the theory/concept of supply and demand in examining the reality of rural tourism development.

Genopolitics: A New Approach in Political Behavior

Ali Sahab — 2023-02-24

This study is about the influence of genes on political attitudes and behavior in the subfield of biopolitics. Genopolitics arose as a critique of the political science approach which was deemed insufficient to explain political attitudes and behavior both theoretically and methodologically. To find the origins of political attitudes and behavior, interdisciplinary studies are needed. It is genes that can explain the origin of individual preferences on which all rational choices are based. The method used in this study was a literature review to see the development of genopolitics, debates, and criticisms related to political attitudes and behavior from the point of view of political science and genopolitics. The literature used was derived from books, journals, magazines, and news on the internet. Regarding voter turnout, 32 different social factors can only be explained by 31% by differences in political behavior, while the remaining 69% of differences can be explained by genetic differences. This study concludes that genopolitics as a new approach used to see political attitudes and behavior can be applied in Indonesia to answer and complete the survey-based study of political behavior.

Women in local politics: Insights from Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, Indonesia

Alex Alex — 2023-02-24

Aceh is a region that is still strongly implementing Islamic law and a patriarchal political culture. The purpose of this study is to examine the dynamics of women’s participation in local Acehnese politics. This study uses a qualitative-exploratory method with a literature study on the dynamics of women’s participation in local Acehnese politics. The results of this study indicate that post tsunami 2004 and the 2005 Helsinki MoU agreement had an impact on openness for Acehnese women in the process of becoming members of the legislature, which is currently experiencing obstacles due to structural, socio-cultural, religious issues, ideology, and the dominance of local Aceh political party elites by men. This has greatly affected the representation of women in Aceh’s politics governance, even though during the 2009 to 2019 election year the representation of women in Aceh’s politicsgovernance has experienced a fairly good trend of increasing. However, what is being pursued is not the number that increases every year, but the process of fulfilling women’s political rights in Aceh. The conclusion of this study is the importance of holding a commitment to fight for women’s rights so that they are accommodated in public policies that are sensitive to women’s interests, not only as a complement to the quota for women’s representation in politics-government.

Transformation of the political struggle model at the village level due to the fight for village fund resources: A case study of village head elections before and after the enactment of UU Desa Number 6 of 2014

Jafar Ahmad — 2023-02-24

This study captures how the Village Law (UU) Number 6 of 2014 has radically changed political behavior at the village level. The political dynamics involved several former DPRD members, former KPU members, and local businessmen in the succession arena for the Village Head Election (Pilkades), in which conditions were rarely encountered in previous times. This study analyzed how changes occurred as they were triggered by the struggle for resources due to the allocation of village funds (DD). This study uses qualitative research methods. Data were collected through interviews with actors who contested in village elections, documentation, and literature studies. The results of this study show how changes in political behavior at the village level only occur after the Village Law is enacted. This study concludes that the Village Law number 6 of 2014 has shifted the political behavior of rural communities as evidenced by the massive circulation of money politics which has led to tense political battles. This study also concludes that the Village Law entices political actors and local businessmen to participate in the contest to seize the power of the village head.