El cine: producciones recientes en prime time

Manning, Tikhonova, and George 2004; Rechitsky 2010), leaving ample space for further research and empirical analysis on other post-Soviet states.¹⁵

2.3 Economic, Social, and Political Dimensions of Social Exclusion

The discussion of social exclusion is often emphasized in terms of processes and dynamics rather than as a condition. According to UK Department for International

Development (DFID) Social Exclusion Review, social exclusion can be a condition or an outcome on one hand, and a dynamic process on the other (DFID, 2005:8). In the case of social exclusion as a condition, groups of society are excluded from participation in their society, mainly due to their social identity (race, gender, nationality, religion, sexual

orientation, etc.) or social location (remote or rural areas, poor with resources, suffering from war or conflict). As a dynamic process, social exclusion refers to certain relations and

barriers that block equal opportunities and citizenship. In this case of exclusion, we deal with social and political relations that hinder access to organizational and institutional sites of power. DFID, thus, provides a good definition of social exclusio n in the following way:

“Social exclusion is a process and a state that prevents individuals or groups from

participation in social, economic and political life and from asserting their rights. It derives from exclusionary relationships based on power”. (DFID, 2005:9)

Figure 2.1 presents the three processes that comprise social exclusion. While the three circles of exclusion are important, the central quadrangle that deals with social relations and powers, organizations and institutions is the most interesting part to research. There are theories that examine these relations. Weber’s theory of “social closure” (1958) and Tilly’ s theory of “opportunity hoarding” (1998) examine the interaction of groups from the point of view of acquiring resources and power.¹⁶ In both these cases, certain groups of people, most typically powerful elites, exploit and monopolize resources excluding others from sharing with them.

15To the best of my knowledge, Nazim Habibov's " Self-perceived social stratification in low-income

transitional countries: Examining the multi-country survey in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia " is one of the first studies concerned with social polarization in the South Caucasus region . The social implications and empirical findings of Habibov's work will be briefly described in Chapter 4, Public Perceptions of Social Exclusion.

16 For a thorough discussion of Weber’s “social closure” theory, see also Collins 1974; Collins 1979; Parkin 1979, Bourdieu 1984; and Murphy 1988.

24 Figure 2.1: Social, Economic and Political Dimensions of Social Exclusion

Source: DFID “Social Exclusion Review”, London, 2005, page 9.

Tilly’s exploitation or “opportunity hoarding” is defined as a situation where members of a network “acquire access to a resource … supportive of network activities”

(Tilly 1998:10). To Weber, the idea of closure is related to exploitation based on both property advantages and forms of prestige or status. Not only power and status, but also ethnicity and kinship, as in the case of hoarders, may become sources of exploitation and exclusion. Social closure is a process of subordination, where a group closes opportunities for others, who are accepted as more inferior and ineligible (Murphy, 1988:8).

Similar to DFID, Weber and Tilly, Bhala and Laperye conclude that social exclusion is a multidimensional concept, and that its analysis should be studied as a result of dynamic causal factors (as presented in Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2). This process embraces economic marginalization, social disintegration and political polarization. Economic exclusion mainly concerns the lack of employment and worsening of income distribution over time. Long periods of unemployment deprive people of not only income, but also social legitimacy, social status, prestige and participation in decision-making. These two dimensions strongly affect the political dimension of exclusion that according to the UNDP (1992:29) includes

25 personal security, rule of law, freedom of expression, political participation, and equality of opportunity. Exclusion in each dimension increases the risk of exclusion in the other two.

However, a person who is economically excluded is not necessarily excluded in one or two of the other two dimensions, and vice versa.

Figure 2.2:Economic marginalization, social disintegration and political polarization

Source: Bhala and Laperye, “Poverty and Exclusion in a Global World”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Exclusion from economic life is expressed by unequal assets, incomes and

employment opportunities. People are economically excluded when they have limited or no access to material resources due to external forces. They are marginalized in the distribut ion of economic resources. Once this dimension of exclusion marginalizes certain groups of a society, they are likely to be further excluded from the other two dimensions as well. While many major reports on poverty, such as World Bank or UN reports indicate sharp inequalities of incomes between, for example rural and urban areas in developing countries, access to social services and political participation is often not taken into account.

Exclusion from social services is expressed by unequal access to various public services. People are socially excluded if they face limited or no access to social services, such as education, health care and medicine, social protection, basic infrastructure and

transport, water and energy. Here exclusion refers to not only the availability and quality, but Economic Marginalization

(insecure and low-paid jobs; long-term and recurrentunemployment)

Social Marginalization (loss of networking and

opportunities for social participation)

Political Marginalization (loss of participation andinfluence)

Political Polarization (loss of social cohesion)

26 also to accessibility and affordability of those services. For example, population groups residing in villages or mountainous areas might have worse access to water than those living in urban areas. Another example of social exclusion for the same group may be rare access to internet technologies.

Exclusion from political life is expressedbyinequalities in political, cultural and civic opportunities, liberty and justice, as well as unfair exercise of power. Political exclusion occurs not only through formal institutions but also may happen due to lack of access to informal structures and opportunities.

There isa popular assertion within the social exclusion literature to attach more weight to the distributional issues when dealing with the economic dimension of exclusion.

In the case of social and political dimensions, greater attention is paid to relational issues.

One should not forget, though, that these two are closely correlated. Unemployment not only excludes the individual from having income; it is related to the concept of entitlement, which extends beyond the pure economic dimension. Very simply, if an individual does not have income, he/she is likely to be excluded of appropriate social status and social legitimacy. If lack of employment continues for a long period of time, the individual finds himself/herself within a vicious cycle of denial: denial of revenue and output, denial of other economic rights and opportunities, access to various social services and networks, and finally, this process fails to recognize the person’s productive role as a human being in a society. All of these significantly affect human ability, desire and inclusion in political engagement. Thus, another social dimension concerns participation of social groups in decision-making. Other indicators of the social aspect of exclusion are increasing violence and crime, and increasing number of prisoners. The most popular indicators of social well-being are related to the quality of health and educational services and whether one can access those services at all.

Bhalla and Lapeyre (1999/2004) conclude three most important aspects of the social aspect of exclusion as follows:

a) Access to social services, such as health and education;

b) Access to the labor market; and

27 c) Level of social participation reflected in a weakening of social fabric, as measured by

greater crime, juvenile delinquency and homelessness, etc.

This summary yet again shows the link between the economic and social dimensions of exclusion; both dimensions are heavily dependent on access to the labor market, health and education.

Bhalla and Laperye (2004) suggest that the distributional problems (the economic dimension) are more predominant in developing countries and relational problems (the social dimension) are more predominant in the industrialized ones. According to them, in

developing countries the lack of the welfare state is substituted and ameliorated by social and family ties and kinship networks, and thus serves as risk insurance for the unemployed. The authors argue that the decline of social institutions, such as family and marriage and social support networks, as well as long-term unemployment results from the wealth and

appropriate welfare system in the industrialized countries, while in developing countries, despite the newly-emerging industrialization trend, social networks continue to prevail. Here, people fight against exclusion through informal institutional mechanisms to substitute for the formal ones (Bhalla and Laperye, 2004:90-91).

As a theoretical concept, social exclusion does not focus on bounded groups, but stresses social relations and processes through which people are deprived. In social exclusion, as a multi-dimensional concept, people can be excluded from employment, earnings, property, education, health services, personal contacts or respect, freedom of speech, political participation or activism, etc. All of these create a cycle of socio-economic and political disadvantages. A second aspect of the concept, which is less discussed but quite relevant for the theoretical contribution of the concept, considers relations and processes.

There is a clear link between economic and social indicators and weak socio-political participation. Long-term unemployment, for example, has a significant effect on not only material deprivation but also on social marginalization and political polarization, or in other words, on both distributionaland relational aspects in societies where employment and workplace is core to not only having income but also social recognition and status. The workplace also provides opportunities for social networks. Employment loss, thus, results in

28 loss of solidarity networks and a sense of social inferiority, isolation and alienation. This, in its turn, affects the ability and extent of socially isolated and alienated people to political participation. The accumulation of disadvantages on each level aggravates social exclusion, and if this state lasts for a long time, social exclusion becomes durable.

Defining and understanding social exclusion is much easier than measuring it. There have been a few efforts to measure social exclusion or roots of deprivation. Haan (1999:11-12) mentions some sources and methods, such as UNDP’s Human Development Index and poverty assessments’ ‘correlates of poverty’, London Research Center’s index of deprivation areas that focus on the polarization within British cities, and other 30-40 quantitative

measures created by the EU, the French Action Plan for Employment and Britain’s New Labor’s ‘poverty charter’. Paugam (1995) also uses a quantitative analysis of correlations between elements of deprivation in order to examine ‘spirals of precariousness’ of French deprived neighborhoods.

Employing quantitative analysis is useful in measuring social exclusion, but again it does not sufficiently cover relations. It demonstrates that, for example, an individual or a number of individuals in a society are excluded from, for instance, employment, but it does not lay out the scenarios why the same people are excluded also from politics and policy making.

In this study, social exclusion as an outcome or condition is analyzed through measuring the following phenomena, which are key elements of social exclusion and which include all three dimensions of social exclusion:

 Gini coefficient rates,

 Lack of employment or exclusion from the labor market,

 Lack of access to education to acquire skills,

 Lack of access to health services, and therefore inequalities in health,

 Increasing homelessness;

 Increasing crime rates.

 Increased feeling of insecurity;

29

 Self-perception of lower-status social identity;¹⁷

 Decreased freedom of speech;

 Administrative difficulties to run for parliamentary or presidential elections and

extremely unequal chances to win in elections by secondary political party members or independent candidates.

 More cases of political arrests and uncovered cases of politicians’ and/or politically active citizens’ assassination.

 Human rights abuses in general.