Un of Ph. D. Proposals
escrito por Dini Harmita
BACKGROUND
Democracy has been challenged through many angles, especially polarization. Given its impact
directly and indirectly to people mainly following several developments such as the rise of populism and
authoritarianism in several places, marked by at least Coup d'etat in Myanmar and Russian aggression
to Ukraine, the role of two poles of power becomes inevitably acknowledged and felt more. In this case recently titles have been owned by the US and China.
Characterized by the efforts to bring less or zero harms to anyone and leaving no one behind,
democracy needs to deal with polarization in many faces that tend to be dangerous. By definition of
development world called as sector or by Bourdieu (1983) called as capital, the polarization is either
influenced by or influencing the sectors in its own way.
Economically, the ownerships of oligarchs are undoubtedly unquestionable in leading a development
into modernization, dependency, and or neoliberalism impact; which means it can bring a country with its
population in the path of being modern, independent, liberal, and or vice versa.
Sociologically, the interaction and exchange of knowledge and acquisition between social units be it for
example political party system or government in certain contexts influences the level of inequalities of
the units. When it reaches certain stage of human's capability in bearing it effects the relationships
between them, more dehumanization leads to discrimination.
Environmentally, when the human and nature relationships are endangered, it tends to also threaten
economically and sociologically. When economic development is characterized by skyscrapers and
social development is characterized by ivory trafficking, it also impacts environmentally.
Culturally, when it's defined as education (Bourdieu, 1983) then a development must have contribution
in shaping people's knowledge. As development itself, when the education tends to always be topping
down then it creates a dictatorship. When it's always bottomed up be it organic or boosted (Mansuri and
Rao, 2013) then it tends to create people with too much free will. When it's balanced then a room to
facilitate even doubts can be useful as critical thinking that leads to theory development and
collaborative practices that brings to sustainable development. When both are combined it becomes a
harmonized development.
Political science has been and should actually be acting as the foundation and umbrella if it's defined as
a way of thinking (Harmita, 2022). Especially when the policies produced by the disciplines solely or in
collaborative manners depend on the sciences. Efforts to bridge theories and practices have been made
by many scholars and practitioners from the above mentioned sciences, including political science. One
of the main gaps is the comprehensive approach to see the interaction between those sciences,
theories, and practices; therefore this study is aimed at building another version of theory of everything,
not only to bridge the sections and subsections of social sciences but also to relate it with other related
sciences.
LITERATURE REVIEW
DEMOCRACY, POPULISM, AND AUTHORITARIANISM
Democracy has been learned traditionally without political parties especially since the Greek era when
history comes to surface. When people learned to write they have more power to deliver their messages:
not necessarily with a mouth. Then political parties emerged as the form of brain development called as
organization. People want to be more organized to be more civilized. As one of the consequences there
are social units which are less organized and less civilized. When the gaps between them are
unbearable, polarization occurred both in scientific ways and as practices.
Mair (2006, 2007, 2008, 2013) that is further revisited by Enyedi and Casal Bértoa (2022) put populism
at first actually to differ between left or right, north or south, and democracy or authoritarianism.
Nevertheless, since humans are very dynamic; especially with the current development of thinking that
allows everyone to explore deeper and practice as free as they want as responses to mainly inequalities
or any kinds of threats to their status quo or comfortable seats-zone, the definition of populism becomes
vague and vary.
Many scholars from literally all continents have been trying to conceptualize the characters of each
context such as Lee and Casal Bértoa (2021) for Asia, Sibiri (2021) for Africa, Yilmaz and Morieson
(2021) for North America, Wehner and Thies (2020) for South America, Yermakova (2021) for
Antarctica, Sengul (2022) for Australia, Casal Bértoa and Mair (2012) for Europe. Other political
participations including at least as voters, politicians, journalists, and activists is explained more in
following polarization part.
POLARIZATION
The choice to put other political participations here is based on the fact that the scholars of social
sciences are researching humans who are defined by some scholars of having capitals and or are the
part of the capitals. While Bourdieu (1983) was trying to understand a human as a social unit with
capitals, as most of scholars and practitioners especially those who are experienced in development
from community to international development, Martins-Neto et. al. (2021) explained human capital as a
wholesome capital in job polarization. They summarized literatures and best practices including the
essential measures can be undertaken through the policy enactments upon. Learning from this brief
example, we may want to elaborate and facilitate both by seeing the job polarization in the point of view
as human capital or human with capitals.
Psychologically, a human consists of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor sections in their brain. That
differs us from animals and plants. They can talk and think but only limited to survive, not as complex as
our brain. Romeo (2021) studied about collaborative learning to develop those dimensions as the part to
see the difference between male and female. Harmita (2006) analyzed two villages as communities
consist of households including male and female as individuals with focus on Sundanese women with
less than a half hectare land or known as peasant in several contexts. She tried to comprehensively
understand the systems that act as umbrella to each related social unit by also comprehending their
psychology mainly because systems are made of humans and vice versa.
When polarization is understood only in macro ways, a gap that is often missed is what we call as
minorities. Stewart, Plotkin, McCarty (2021), Carlos (2021), and Polacko et. al. (2021) studied about
polarization including political polarization and inequalities in developed countries such as Australia and
US. If we follow the logic of more developed a country's economic means less inequalities then
developed countries should have less inequalities by now. While China, Japan, and South Korea as not
only countries of East Asia but the tink tank of Asian economy also struggle in their own ways. Enyedi
and Casal Bértoa (2022) mentioned each country in Europe has its own characters in understanding
bipolarization. Shaping the framework of critical thinking into electoral practices, Mair may have given us
all clue that winning is not something or everything, but it's the only thing; that's why every social unit
tries so hard to win. Nonetheless, this phenomenon would have never been explained with political
science alone. Therefore, its interactions with other sciences and practices are crucial
PURPOSE
Proposing to comprehensively understanding the relationships and interactions
between sciences and practices, this study is aimed to build a theory of everything in
bridging sciences and practices as an attempt to prevent the escalation of the harms
that have been brought by polarization and countermeasures to solve the current ones.
With that in mind, the research questions are developed as mentioned below.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1) What are the proportions of each science's role in shaping a harmonized
development?
2) Regardless how the relationship resulted with RQ1, if they need to be equalized, what's the tendency of the proportion?
3) How to equalize the proportions so the development can be sustainably
harmonized?
METHODOLOGY and HYPOTHESIS
RQ 1 is expected to be developed and answered quantitatively using and resulting a
formula with basics as follows.
HD = S1+P1+S2+P2+... +Sn+Pn
HD = Harmonized Development
S= Science
P = Practice
n= order
Once RQ1 is answered then I will test it to answer RQ 2 and RQ 3 with qualitative and
comparative methods; using samples from each continent.
As reflected from the very beginning, this study is considered to be original because
the formula and theory that are going to be built is novel. Many scholars and
practitioners may have tried to compile them but not as comprehensive as the study I want to conduct, in the hope that my PhD is going to be useful not only for myself.
REFERENCES
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Carlos JPM (2021) Essays on Inequality, Economic Growth and Political Polarization. Bamberg,
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Enyedi E, Casal Bértoa F (2022) The future is not what it used to be: the failure of bipolarisation, Irish
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