Words and images of the Republic: Italian political propaganda (1946–1948) – The article intends to highlight how the transition from monarchy to republic represents a significant boundary in Italian history not only from the institutional point of view but also from that of national political propaganda, in which words and images – the expression of a harsh ideological confrontation – contributed to the building of a national collective memory of which there are still evident and rooted traces in current political confrontation.

This article analyses the capacity of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance to counteract the democratic governance shortfall. It argues that the tangible impact of the treaty on the states’ practice has been limited by various endogenous and exogenous factors. The former are identified as directly linked to content of the document and refer to the accuracy of the drafting. The latter are rooted outside the text and beyond the character of the Charter and include issues relating to the states’ reluctance to ratify the document, certain constitutional constraints undermining implementation on the national level, and the weak international guarantees of enforcement.

The aim of the study was to examine how the manipulation of information about hypothetical presidential candidates infl uenced youth’ attitudes towards them. The experiment was conducted on 929 subjects (454 women and 475 men), who were either pupils in their fi nal year of secondary school or university students, aged 18–25. The amount of information about politicians was manipulated (politicians’ gender, political affi liation, moral and competence traits (positive or negative), political programme characteristics). The results showed that (1) the own-group favoritism effect was observed only among female participants, (2) female presidential candidate was evaluated better than male presidential candidate in conditions of positive information, yet, when negative information about candidates was provided, female presidential candidate was evaluated worse than male presidential candidate.

To accept science as a tool of cognition of this what is unknown, and teaching which serves popularization of knowledge in society, the scientific committees of PAS should integrate scientists within the Country and on the background of world science progress. However, scientific associations should propagate their field knowledge and join and consolidate researchers and people within the area of their interest. To realize this, the scientific committees must represent all scientific centers in our Country and all research directions and so called schools of research. Because of this, the procedure of election of the committees’ representatives has to be changed.

Contemporary Polish historiography tends to focus predominantly on the main actors of the political transformation of 1989 and there are communist and opposition elites considered as such. In that perspective, Polish society remains a community on which the views of the elites are projected, and the myth about the birth of ci-vil society on the ruins of communism as early as 1989 may serve as a perfect example of such process. In reality, however, the Polish society was overwhelmingly apolitical, uninterested in political par-ticipation and to a large extent socially inactive. There are many reasons which caused this situation: starting from the martial law, which in December 1981 broke the backbone of the mass social movement that was the legal ‘Solidarity’, as well as the very 45 years of communism themselves, during which a social initiative was na-tionalized, and citizens were in fact deprived of it. As a result, the interpretations of the events of 1989 should be demythologized, al-so in order to understand the popularity of the slogans about “end-ing the 1989 revolution”, which still tend to appear in the public discourse in Poland.

On the changes that have taken place in the Polish Academy of Sciences over the decades and its goals and tasks in science and beyond.

The article underlines the importance of the substantive debate for a stable and sustainable social development and presents key Polish problems which require such a debate.