Abstract
74.1 AASKOVEN, Lasse —
The “democratic advantage” in access to credit markets has been vigorously researched. Recent research has found that this “autocratic disadvantage” can be partly countered by other factors. However, this research agenda has largely ignored an increasingly important type of institution of direct importance for national fiscal policy, fiscal rules. This article argues that fiscal rules alleviate the “autocratic disadvantage” in sovereign bond market access. This argument is tested on a dataset on fiscal rules and sovereign bond issuing data covering 121 countries from 1990 to 2015. The results provide substantial evidence in favor of the argument, autocracies with fiscal rules face no disadvantage in bond market access and might even be more likely to issue new government bonds than democracies. [R]
74.2 AERNE, Annatina ; BONOLI, Giuliano —
Shared beliefs are seen as a basis for policy coordination in the literature. Actors sharing beliefs coordinate their activities in order to translate their beliefs into policies. However, the literature shows that actors also coordinate for policy change across such belief coalitions for diverse reasons. Drawing on the literature on incentives in collective action organisations, we systematise these motives. We argue that rational motivations, such as access to material resources, as well as relational motivations, including power and reputation gains, may convince actors to coordinate. Based on 25 semi-structured expert interviews, we illustrate our propositions with a case study on the motivations that led actors to coordinate and support a vocational education and training (VET) programme for refugees in Switzerland. Coordination between a coalition of VET actors and a coalition of migration actors succeeded despite divergent policy beliefs, mainly due to rational motivations. [R]
74.3 AHLSTROM-VIJ, Kristoffer —
Have we entered a ‘post-truth’ era? This article is an attempt to answer this question by (1) offering an explication of the notion of ‘post-truth’ from recent discussions, (2) deriving a testable implication from that explication, to the effect that we should expect to see decreasing information effects — that is, differences between actual preferences and estimated, fully informed preferences — on central political issues over time and then (3) putting the relevant narrative to the test by way of counterfactual modelling, using election year data for the period of 2004-2016 from the American National Election Studies’ Times Series Study. The implication in question turns out to be consistent with the data: at least in a US context, we do see evidence of a decrease in information effects on key, political issues — immigration, same-sex adoption and gun laws, in particular — in the period 2004-2016. This offers some novel, empirical evidence for the ‘post-truth’ narrative. [R]
74.4 AITCHISON, Guy —
Aside from the case of refugees under international law, are non-citizen outsiders morally justified in unlawfully entering another state? Recent answers to this question, based on a purported right of necessity or civil disobedience, exclude many cases of justified border-crossing and fail to account for its distinctive political character. I argue that in certain nonhumanitarian cases, unlawful border-crossing involves the exercise of a remedial moral right to resist the illegitimate exercise of coercive power. The case accepts, for the sake of argument, two conventional assumptions among defenders of immigration restrictions: that states have a ‘right to exclude’ and that migrants have a prima facie duty to respect borders. Nonetheless, where immigration law is racist or otherwise discriminatory, it violates the egalitarian standards at the core of any authority it can plausibly claim over outsiders. In such cases, it may be resisted even where the law is facially non-discriminatory. [R]
74.5 ALBANNA, Razan —
Does the adoption of constitutional provisions governing the administration of justice in exceptional courts have impact on states’ repressive behavior? Drawing on Draft Principles Governing the Administration of Justice through the Military Tribunals, I gather and code data on exceptional courts from the national constitutions of 140 countries between the years of 1990 and 2005. I show that provisions related to exceptional courts prohibiting the trial of human rights violations in exceptional courts, protecting the right to appeal exceptional courts’ decisions, prohibiting fair trial derogations during emergency are more likely to increase the cost of repression. These are the provisions that when activated, hold statesmen accountable for their violations of human rights in judicial venues that are less amenable to their control. [R, abr.]
74.6 ALBERTSON, Bethany ; JESSEE, Stephen —
Researchers face difficult decisions about whether to ask potential moderators before or after a survey experiment. Competing concerns exist about priming respondents before the experiment and about introducing post-treatment bias. We replicate the classic “welfare” versus “assistance to the poor” survey experiment, randomly assigning respondents to be asked a battery of racial resentment questions either before or after the question wording experiment. We find little evidence that the question wording effect is different between those who are asked about racial resentment before versus after the experiment. Furthermore, we find little evidence that measured racial resentment is affected by this ordering or by the question wording treatment itself. [R]
74.7 ALDAMA, Abraham, et al. —
Cognitive appraisal theory predicts that emotions affect participation decisions around risky collective action. However, little existing research has attempted to parse out the mechanisms by which this process occurs. We build a global game of regime change and discuss the effects that fear may have on participation through pessimism about the state of the world, other players’ willingness to participate, and risk aversion. We test the behavioral effects of fear in this game by conducting 32 sessions of an experiment in two labs where participants are randomly assigned to an emotion induction procedure. In some rounds of the game, potential mechanisms are shut down to identify their contribution to the overall effect of fear. Our results show that in this context, fear does not affect willingness to participate. This finding highlights the importance of context, including integral versus incidental emotions and the size of the stakes, in shaping effect of emotions on behavior. [R]
74.8 ALEXANDER-SHAW, Kate —
This article considers the argument by Tim Vlandas, in this issue, that an ageing electorate may undermine democracies’ ability to make the right economic choices. Vlandas suggests that the emergence of gerontocratic politics may give rise to ‘gerontonomia’: an economy run for the old, at the expense of younger generations and of future prosperity. However, evidence from the UK suggests a more mixed picture. Age-based voting patterns have been consequential around single issues, not least the 2016 Brexit referendum. However, voters’ interests in broad economic policy models are not easily reducible to age dynamics, and intergenerational politics are filtered through a set of normative and affective considerations beyond straightforward self-interest. Moreover, since the rational interests of different age groups do not speak for themselves, cueing by political elites is potentially significant and may be contributing to older voters’ relative tolerance of a poor economic record. [R]
74.9 ALLARD-TREMBLAY, Yann ; COBURN, Elaine —
This essay relies on the insight that settler colonialism is an ongoing structure geared toward the elimination of Indigenous presence to argue that ideologies that legitimate and naturalize settler occupation are equally ongoing. More specifically, the ideologies that justify settler colonialism in major states like Australia, Canada, and the United States, are like Flying Heads that shape-shift and recur over time. We explore how two notorious ideological tropes — terra nullius and the myth of the Vanishing Race — recur in the work of contrasting contemporary theorists. Ultimately, Flying Head ideologies of settler colonialism cannot be defeated by reasoned argument alone, but by structural transformations beyond the settler-colonial relations that necessitate and sustain them. Following diverse Indigenous theorists and activists, we briefly explore prefigurative resurgent practices and how Indigenous political imaginaries, like the Dish with One Spoon, offer alternatives to transcend the settler colonial present. [R]
74.10 ALRABABA’H, Ala’, et al. —
A critical barrier to generating cumulative knowledge in political science and related disciplines is the inability of researchers to observe the results from the full set of research designs that scholars have conceptualized, implemented, and analyzed. For a variety of reasons, studies that produce null findings are especially likely to be unobserved, creating biases in publicly accessible research. While several approaches have been suggested to overcome this problem, none have yet proven adequate. We call for the establishment of a new discipline-wide norm in which scholars post short “null results reports” online that summarize their research designs, findings, and interpretations. To address the inevitable incentive problems that earlier proposals for reform were unable to overcome, we argue that decentralized research communities can spur the broader disciplinary norm change that would bring advantage to scientific advance. [R, abr.]
74.11 ALYUKOV, Maxim —
To evaluate the credibility of political information, citizens rely on simple logical rules-of-thumb or heuristics based on various resources, such as personal experience and popular wisdom. It is often assumed that contrary to dependence on the media, personal experience and popular wisdom help citizens to build alternative understandings of political events. However, little is known about how citizens use heuristics in authoritarian settings. Relying on focus groups, this study uses Russian citizens’ reception of the regime propaganda regarding Ukraine in 2016–17 as a case study to investigate the credibility heuristics of citizens living in an autocratic state during war. Deploying both qualitative and quantitative analysis of citizens’ discourse, I identify the main heuristics used to evaluate the credibility of propaganda. I show that citizens perceive regime propaganda with distrust and often rely on popular wisdom and personal experience to identify bias. However, this does not necessarily guarantee a critical attitude toward regime propaganda. [R, abr.]
74.12 AMS, Shama —
military uses of AI and data will be explored. In an increasingly multi-polar world, a fierce global contest has emerged between NATO, China, and Russia concerning the ethics, governance and regulation of data, artificial intelligence, autonomous decision systems (ADS), and autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The use of AI and data systems like AWS in the military has been widely criticized for use cases like an algorithm determining targets for drone strikes. These systems carry the risk of algorithmic bias due to flaws in underlying training data and its interpretation, difficulty in maintaining meaningful human control, the potential for more conflict due to fewer barriers to military engagement, and uncertainty in accountability for machine error. This represents one of the principal challenges of “remote warfare” conducted through AWS. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.1266]
74.13 ANDERSSON, Jenny —
This essay examines the Swedish Freedom Front, created in 1989 by libertarians from the editorial committee of the Nyliberalen magazine. It argues that in its emphasis on cultural, sexual, religious and political freedoms, libertarianism contained a different ideological repertoire from neoliberalism. It compares the construction of a canon of translated neoconservative and neoliberal texts with a popular and vernacular register in youth culture, consumption, and media technologies. Finally, it argues that the ascendance of neoliberalism in the early 1990s fractured libertarian arguments. [R] [See Abstr. 74.1315]
74.14 ANDINA-DÍAZ, Ascensión ; GARCÍA-MARTÍNEZ, José A. —
Quite often an expert takes position on an issue where certain actions can be perceived as biased. If the expert has an informational concern and she does not want the listener to perceive her as biased, she has an incentive to avoid the biased action, even if she thinks this is the correct action. This paper shows that when an expert has multiple types and two concerns, an informational concern and a bias concern, the incentive to contradict private relevant information and avoid the biased action can even increase when the listener observes the quality of the expert’s advice. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for this perverse effect of transparency on consequences to emerge and discuss variations of the model. [R]
74.15 ANHEIER, Helmut K. —
Civil society has re-entered the standard social sciences vocabulary, and important contributions have been made in recent years to advance the historical understanding and conceptual development of this sphere analytically located between the state and the market. Such contributions have been mostly within a political science perspective that examines civil society in the context of a particular country or region or in reference to the emerging field of non-profit studies. What has been missing is a broader perspective within a comparative institutional framework that places the capacity of civil society for self-organisation and self-correction relative to the capacity of the state to control and regulate. Frequently, these two capacities are in conflict with each other, and exploring their relationship may suggest new answers to the question of what makes civil society develop and be sustainable in the long run. [R] [See Abstr. 74.149]
74.16 ANSON, Ian G. ; KANE, John V. —
In democracies, policy ambitions hinge upon governments’ ability to collect tax revenue from their citizens. Ongoing funding cuts at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) undermine the US government’s ability to fulfill this function. Yet, despite its central importance, funding for IRS enforcement activities has received scant scholarly attention, limiting our understanding of the factors that underlie public attitudes on this issue. In this article, we report the results of preregistered experiments that test whether citizens’ attitudes regarding the IRS can be shaped by framing efforts. Specifically, we test both information-based and value-consistent frames that invoke partisans’ core ideological concerns. Results show that these frames significantly increase public support for the IRS, as well as citizens’ willingness to learn more and become politically active. [R, abr.]
74.17 ARGYLE, Lisa P., et al. —
We propose and explore the possibility that language models can be studied as effective proxies for specific human subpopulations in social science research. Practical and research applications of artificial intelligence tools have sometimes been limited by problematic biases (such as racism or sexism), which are often treated as uniform properties of the models. We show that the “algorithmic bias” within one such tool — the GPT-3 language model — is instead both fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups. We term this property algorithmic fidelity and explore its extent in GPT-3. We create “silicon samples” by conditioning the model on thousands of sociodemographic backstories from real human participants in multiple large surveys conducted in the United States. We then compare the silicon and human samples to demonstrate that the information contained in GPT-3 goes far beyond surface similarity. [R, abr.]
74.18 ASPIDE, Alessia, et al. —
Many scholars and policymakers see rising debt burdens in the industrialised world as the product of ageing populations. Prominent theoretical models of government debt accumulation — used to justify fiscal rules and austerity measures — explicitly assume that support for debt reduction decreases with age. While such models have been influential, the fundamental relationship between age and preferences for debt has not been tested empirically. We test this argument but further theorise that the relationship between age and debt preferences is non-linear. While the elderly have a clear preference for ignoring debt burdens, we add that the young should also prefer to delay reckoning with high national debts given their low income and expectations of higher future earnings. Using survey data (N = 112,689), we find that age does have a small to modest non-linear impact on concern for national deficits and debt burdens. Middle-aged respondents are most concerned about debt reduction, while the young and old view reducing government debt as less of a policy priority. Notably, the relationship is strongest in countries with more generous old-age benefits. [R]
74.19 BACHLEITNER, Kathrin —
This article explores the link between collective memory and state behaviour in international relations. In that regard, it develops a new concept entitled ‘temporal security’. Building on the existing ontological security literature, it extends a temporal understanding to its underlying identity concept. Countries are now assumed to be temporal-security seekers visa-vis a ‘significant historical other’ from their past. Decision makers thus enter into a self-reflective conversation with their country’s ‘collective memory’ when choosing courses of action. Contrasted with existing physical-security and ontological security explanations for state behaviour, the explanatory potential of the temporal-security approach is in a second step illustrated by the empirical case of West Germany and Austria, two former Nazi perpetrator states, and their respective assignments of support during conflict in the Middle East. Through a comparative, qualitative discourse analysis of historical documents during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War and oil crisis of 1973, the empirical study finds that West Germany and Austria adopted different courses of action in their international politics, because they looked to Nazi Germany as their significant historical other. [R]
74.20 BADERIN, Alice —
Parents employ a wide range of anticipatory strategies to prepare their children for, and protect them against, risks of racism. This article argues that, while black children need to be equipped with the skills and understanding to navigate racist societies, these practices are also the site of a significant injustice for minority families. Specifically, the imperative to take strategic steps to protect children against threats of racism creates unfair barriers to the enjoyment of some valuable relationship-based goods. In advancing this argument, the article brings recent philosophical work on the family into dialogue with a rapidly developing body of empirical research on racial and ethnic socialization. I show that Brighouse and Swift’s ‘familial relationship goods’ framework generates a valuable new perspective on some contested empirical terrain. But I also highlight, and seek to begin to redress, a problematic silence on race within contemporary philosophy of the family. [R]
74.21 BAELE, Stephane J. ; ROUSSEAU, Elise —
This paper offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the ways and extent to which the US president and UK prime minister have securitized the Covid-19 pandemic in their public speeches. This assessment rests on, and illustrates the merits of, both an overdue theoretical consolidation of Securitization Theory’s (ST) conceptualization of securitizing language, and a new methodological blueprint for the study of ‘securitizing semantic repertoire’. Comparing and contrasting the two leaders’ respective securitizing semantic repertoires adopted in the early months of the coronavirus outbreak shows that securitizing language, while very limited, has been more intense in the UK, whose repertoire was structured by a biopolitical imperative to ‘save lives’ in contrast to the US repertoire centred on the ‘war’ metaphor. [R]
74.22 BALDWIN, Kate —
This article examines church activism for liberal democracy in sub-Saharan Africa in recent decades. The article seeks to explain churches’ high levels of activism compared to (1) other civil society organizations, specifically trade unions, and (2) churches’ varied commitments to democratic activism. The argument emphasizes the protections liberal-democratic institutions offer churches to spread their ideas without being curtailed by an all-powerful ruler. The extent to which churches need these protections depends on the degree to which their activities are vulnerable to appropriation by the state, with churches that have historically invested in schools as a method of evangelization being those most likely to advocate for liberal democracy. [R]
74.23 BANKERT, Alexa ; POWERS, Ryan ; SHEAGLEY, Geoffrey —
As international trade flourishes, Americans can choose from an increasing number of foreign products even at their local grocery stores, allowing consumers to directly experience the consequences of globalized trade in a simple and intuitive way that does not require much political expertise. Yet, most prior scholarship on political consumerism assumes that consumers are aware of the political and economic implications of their choices at the checkout lane. [R, abr.]
74.24 BASAURE, Mauro ; JOIGNANT, Alfredo ; THEODORE, Rachel —
In this article, we present a conceptual model for the study of intellectual trajectories. The notion of trajectory combines the figure of the intellectuals, as actors, and the stages on which they act. With the help of this model, we seek particularly to study the figure of the global digital public intellectual and the global digital stage on which this figure operates. By studying the case of Project Syndicate (the most important global platform or stage for the circulation of ideas through opinion columns), we show empirically that this stage has particularities that make it a circuit for such circulation. The notion of circuit seems to us more appropriate than field to describe this type of global stage at a transnational scale, still characterized by a lower level of institutionalization. [R]
74.25 BELL, Stephanie A. ; KORINEK, Anton —
As artificial-intelligence (AI) systems become more capable, their potential labor-market effects may aggravate inequality and by extension undermine democratic governance. Moreover, the interrelationship between democracy and inequality may trigger a feedback loop, whereby increases in inequality undermine democracy, which in turn lead to policies that further increase inequality, giving rise to multiplier effects. In the short term, policies to mitigate AI-induced inequality include steering the direction of advances in AI to enhance human-AI collaboration, strengthening worker power and agency, and adjusting tax codes to not incentivize automating human labor. In the longer term, these policies include distributing the surplus generated by AI and taking measures against the adverse effects of market concentration in the AI industry. Moreover, policies that protect and strengthen democratic processes may lead to virtuous multiplier effects by reducing inequality. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.26]
74.26 BENGIO, Yoshua —
Since OpenAI’s release of the very large language models Chat-GPT and GPT-4, the potential dangers of AI have garnered widespread public attention. In this essay, the author reviews the threats to democracy posed by the possibility of “rogue AIs,” dangerous and powerful AIs that would execute harmful goals, irrespective of whether the outcomes are intended by humans. To mitigate against the risk that rogue AIs present to democracy and geopolitical stability, the author argues that research into safe and defensive AIs should be conducted by a multilateral, international network of research laboratories. [R] [First article of a symposium on "Artificial intelligence and democracy". See also Abstr. 74.25, 61, 126, 182, 198]
74.27 BERGER, Tobias —
While recent scholarship has turned to the increasing fragmentation of global human rights discourses, the often competing ideological projects in which different understandings of human rights are embedded have received comparatively scant attention. Although treated as isolated, human rights norms are frequently simultaneously understood against the implicit backdrop of liberal assumptions about political order and human agency, thereby obscuring alternative human rights conceptions. This research note seeks to move our understanding of human rights beyond the liberal script. Drawing on advances in the fields of intellectual history and political theory, it develops a morphological approach that treats norms not only as individual standards of appropriate behavior but as complex units of meanings. These meanings only emerge in larger ideational formations in which varying notions of human rights are temporarily fixed through their positioning toward other concepts. [R, abr.]
74.28 BEVIR, Mark ; HALL, Ian —
This article responds to Charlotta Friedner Parrat’s critique of our argument that the English School of international relations should embrace a more thoroughgoing interpretivism. We address four of Friedner Parrat’s objections to our argument: that our distinction between structuralism and interpretivism is too stark; that our understanding of the relationship between agency and structure is problematic; that our approach would confine the English School to the study of intellectual history; and that the English School should eschew explanation. We argue that if the School is to use structuralism, it must be clearer about how it understands structures and their relationships to agents. We argue too that interpretivism not only offers a better account of situated agency, but also that it provides the English School with one way to move beyond the description and classification of institutions in international society towards better explanations of international relations. [R]
74.29 BLAJER DE LA GARZA, Yuna —
Citizens often describe their membership in the political community in terms of how much they belong. This article probes belonging as a category of analysis, aiming to contribute to our understanding of contemporary democratic citizenship and its challenges by using our everyday manners of speech as the object(s) of philosophical inquiry. A focus on belonging disentangles how esteem, identity, and the gaze of others shape experiences of membership. Belonging carves space to apprehend the egalitarian potential of an ordinariness that need not imply homogeneity. The article then discusses the ways in which formal citizenship simultaneously disappoints in its inability to guarantee belonging and empowers those construed as “citizens who do not belong” to reassert their belonging. [R, abr.]
74.30 BLANTON, Robert G. ; PEKSEN, Dursun —
The ‘resource curse’ associated with natural resource abundance has long been a subject of study across multiple disciplines. Though much research has focused on possible effects of resource wealth on the formal economy, little is known about how such wealth affects the informal sector, a substantial portion of global economic activity. We posit that resource windfalls directly contribute to growth in the informal economy, as investment and spending patterns associated with such revenues limit opportunities within the formal sector and thus channel more labor and businesses into the informal sector. We test these claims across a panel of over 120 countries for the period 1985 to 2012. Across multiple model specifications, we find that resource wealth growth is associated with increased informal economic activity. [R]
74.31 BLAXILL, Luke —
This article argues that historians have failed to grasp the profound opportunities afforded by computational analysis. Despite the abundance of machine-readable data liberated by digitisation — alongside tools and exemplar studies — there has been no widespread embrace of text mining or revival of cliometrics. This ambivalence has arisen mainly through apathy and side-lining of computational analysis to a specialist methodological niche. The absence of justification is damaging to the intellectual vitality of the discipline and its capacity to face the dawning age of data science. The article calls for an urgent debate about the historian and the computer. More than anything else, this requires sceptics to come forward to meet the advocates to discuss how we face the future. British political history has a proud tradition of methodological innovation and there is no better subfield in which to begin a debate that has fundamental implications for the whole discipline. [R] [See Abstr. 74.1400]
74.32 BLOCK, Ray, Jr. ; GOLDER, Matt ; GOLDER, Sona N. —
Over the last 40 years, scholars have adopted many different approaches to studying intersectionality. A common refrain in the literature is that one cannot evaluate the implications of an intersectional theory with an interaction model. We demonstrate that a large class of claims regarding intersectionality, whether quantitative or qualitative in nature, can only be evaluated within an interactive framework. There is some uncertainty among those who adopt quantitative methods in their intersectional research about how interaction models work. In addition to outlining the necessary evidence to support claims of intersectionality, we provide useful advice on how to appropriately specify and interpret interaction models to better evaluate these types of claims. We believe that considerable progress can be made in our empirical and theoretical understanding of intersectionality if scholars follow the advice provided in this article. [R]
74.33 BOLTON, Derek —
While ontological security (OS) studies have gone through a recent evolution, shifting toward psychoanalytic and existential accounts of anxiety, this article argues there remains a deficient engagement with the affective environments within which actors operate. Specifically, focusing on shared emotions/affect allows for a thicker account of the mechanisms of OS — including the constitutive forces underpinning society/societal trust, the role/power of signifiers and narratives, and the basis upon which actors promote social change. Accordingly, it suggests Durkheim’s social theory, his broader concept of ‘religion’ as an affective community constituted by faith in a moral order entwined with the sacred, offers a viable pathway to develop these insights and develop a new basis for the mechanisms of OS. [R, abr.]
74.34 BOOTH CHAPMAN, Emilee —
Realism can mean many things in political theory. This article focuses on “common-sense realism,” an approach to decision-making under uncertainty characterized by its posture toward risk. Common-sense realist arguments have become popular in recent democratic theory. One prominent example is found in debates over the responsible party institutional model (RPIM). RPIM’s main features are two-party competition for full control of government and party organizations that empower officeholders, not activists. Proponents of RPIM defend it in realist terms. They claim that efforts to pursue more ambitious democratic ideals jeopardize goods that RPIM can readily secure. I articulate a realist approach to institutional evaluation that assesses proposals on three dimensions: robustness, feasibility, and stability. Using this approach, I demonstrate that the realist argument for RPIM is weaker than it initially appears. [R, abr.]
74.35 BORN, Vivienne ; BROCK, Clare —
Graduate student writing is an under-attended to challenge for many incoming graduate students, whose skill levels often do not match the expectations of their graduate programs. Utilizing socialization theory as a foundation, we propose a Writing Bridge Program model to quickly, affordably, and clearly, develop graduate student writing, improve retention, and demystify the hidden curriculum. This article lays out the need for explicit graduate writing instruction and offers a model for meeting this need, particularly in low-resource environments. In order to evaluate the success of the program, we look at qualitative student comments regarding their experience in the Writing Bridge Program. We offer evidence for how dedicated writing programs can impact student attitudes toward the writing process through improved confidence and familiarity, and by decreasing feelings of impostor syndrome and isolation. [R]
74.36 BOUCHER, François ; GUÉRARD DE LATOUR, Sophie ; BAYCAN-HERZOG, Esma —
Foundations, Practices and Methodologies.” The contributions presented in this special issue were discussed during the conference “Multicultural Citizenship 25 Years Later”, held in Paris in November 2021. Their aim is to take stock of the legacy of Kymlicka’s contribution and to highlight new developments in theories of liberal multiculturalism and minority rights. The contributions do not purport to challenge the legitimacy of theories of multiculturalism and minority rights, they rather aim at deepening our understanding of the foundations of liberal multiculturalism and of its practical implementation, sensitive to social scientific dynamics of diverse societies. Without abandoning the general idea that cultural minorities should be granted special minority rights, the essays presented raise new questions about three dimensions central to liberal multiculturalism: its normative foundations, its practical categories of minorities or groups, and its fact-sensitive methodology. Taken together they shed light on the renewed variety of theories of liberal multiculturalism highlighting their complexity and internal disagreements. [R, abr.]
74.37 BRANDIMARTE, Italo —
Following a widespread fascination with drones, the materiality of aerial warfare – its bodies, embodied experiences, technologies — has received increasing attention in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This article pushes for a deeper, political theorisation of air in the study of war in its material and embodied dimensions through a critical reading of the Abyssinian War (1935-1936) — a central yet largely neglected conflict in the colonial history of world politics. Exploring the joint deployment of aeroplanes and mustard gas in Ethiopia via a mosaic of sources — literature, strategic thought, cartoons and memoirs — I argue that aerial relations expose the production of a racialised global order underpinned by more-than-human war experiences. Bringing together geographer Derek McCormack’s concept of ‘envelopment’ and Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe’s idea of ‘the weather’, I show how Italy’s imperial desires — and their international perceptions – cannot be theorised in separation from aerial experiences that are conceived as excessive of human bodies, sensing and imagination. This analysis thus makes two central contributions to the critical study of war in IR. First, an aerial reading of the Abyssinian War highlights the political importance of war experience beyond the human. Second, it challenges studies of drone warfare that reduce discussions of air to either the strategic, technical and ontological plane or to the intimate, embodied and phenomenological one. Instead, the more-than-human aerial experiences of the Abyssinian War call for a theorisation of air as both material and affective, technical and embodied, and grand strategic and intimate. [R]
74.38 BRANDO, Nico ; MORALES-GÁLVEZ, Sergi —
Language conditions our socio-political world in fundamental ways. How public institutions deal with linguistic diversity, and how they distribute linguistic benefits, has an important impact on an individuals’ life. This article studies the value of language in multilingual environments by evaluating the debate on linguistic justice through the capabilities approach. It studies the value of language to assess what principles of justice are required to secure individual freedom. First, we explore the value of language within the framework proposed by the capabilities approach. Second, we assess the role of language in enabling the development of certain capabilities. As a first attempt to comprehensively address the relationship between linguistic justice and the capabilities approach, it evaluates how linguistic justice theories fare in fostering four capabilities from Martha Nussbaum’s list. We provide a conceptually sound normative assessment of the role played by language within the capabilities framework, and how it translates into policy. [R]
74.39 BROMAN, Benjamin —
What is the impact of popular discontent on the transition from indirect to direct rule? The current literature suggests contrasting theories, variously arguing that rulers are more likely to govern directly when facing either a particularly high or particularly low probability of mass resistance. I reconcile these views by arguing that the decision to rule indirectly is subject to competing dilemmas. In a formal model, I show that these twin tensions influence the choice to centralize power in opposing manners. Accordingly, there are two distinct political logics driving direct rule: one resulting from a high likelihood of revolt and the other from a low likelihood, with contrasting comparative statics. The model therefore reconciles contrasting views in the literature. I illustrate the model’s logic with reference to key cases and provide heuristics for predicting comparative statics in new empirical settings. [R]
74.40 BROWNING, Christopher S. ; BRASSETT, James —
Humour is usually overlooked in analyses of international politics, this despite its growing prevalence and circulation in an increasingly mediatised world, with this neglect also evident in the growing literature on ontological security and anxiety in IR. Humour, though, needs to be taken seriously, crossing as it does the high-low politics divide and performing a variety of functions. In the context of the Covid pandemic we argue that the link between humour and anxiety has been evident in three notable respects: (1) functioning as a (sometimes problematic) form of stress relief at the level of everyday practices of anxiety management, (2) working to reaffirm biographical narratives of (national) community and status and (3) most significantly for IR, as a form of anxiety geopolitics. [R] [See Abstr. 74.200]
74.41 BUEGER, Christian ; MALLIN, Felix —
The oceans have received extraordinary international attention in global policy and research. New insecurities and uncertainties, ranging from intensifying interstate disputes to persistent piracy and overfishing as well as to pollution, deoxygenation and climate change imply that the oceans are increasingly seen as being in crisis. This revolution in thinking about and addressing the oceans is driven by new ideas of why the oceans need political attention and care. In this article we demonstrate how four key new ‘blue paradigms’ — maritime security, blue economy, ocean health and blue justice — have evolved and turned the oceans into a new area of priority. Each of these paradigms drives global ocean politics in different directions, which implies risks of fragmentation and conflicts. We work out the key differences between paradigms, investigating their underlying problematization, priorities and communities of practices involved. This provides a new map for navigating the complexity of global ocean politics useful for policy-makers and scholars. [R, abr.]
74.42 BUENO DE MESQUITA, Bruce ; BUENO DE MESQUITA, Ethan —
The endogenous consequences of competition between the Roman Catholic Church and lay political rulers set into motion by the Investiture Controversy contribute new insights into European economic, political, and religious development. The resolution of the Investiture Controversy in the concordats of London (1107), Paris (1107), and Worms (1122) resulted in an increase in the bargaining power of lay rulers over the selection of bishops in wealthier dioceses relative to poorer dioceses. Empirical evidence exploiting the timing of the adoption of the concordats interacted with a variety of time-invariant measures of diocesan wealth yields results consistent with this account — adoption of the concordats led bishops to become more aligned with lay political authorities in wealthier dioceses relative to poorer dioceses. [R, abr.]
74.43 BURT, Lindsay ; KLOTZ, Audie —
Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) who run independent sections for larger lecture courses typically receive insufficient feedback. Course evaluations, already flawed by numerous biases, offer an amalgam of student reactions to lecture and section, even when comments specifically laud or criticize section instructors. Course designs also vary greatly: Some professors meet regularly with their team of GTAs; others delegate to a lead GTA; and many simply let their GTAs do anything that gets students talking. Instead, we advocate a team-orientation approach: Lesson Study. Modifying the use of Lesson Study in science education, in turn adapted from a Japanese approach gaining popularity among K–12 educators, we concentrate on mentoring that emphasizes collaborative learning, rather than likeability surveys. Sections use a common assignment, which facilitates GTA participation in design and evaluation. The team meets in advance to confirm common pedagogical goals and again after sections to debrief. Insights may lead to immediate adaptations in subsequent assignments in the same term or revisions to the original assignment in subsequent semesters. [R, abr.]
74.44 CAIRNEY, Paul —
How can policy process research help to address policy and policymaking problems? This special section seeks to address that question by examining the theory and practice of policy analysis. The call for papers sought state of the art articles that conceptualise the politics of policy analysis, and empirical studies that use theoretical insights to analyse and address real world problems. Contributions could draw on mainstream policy theories to explain how policymaking works, and/or critical approaches that identify and challenge inequalities of power. This introduction shows why such perspectives matter, and how they contribute to a full examination of policy analysis. [R] [First of a series of articles, edited by the author. See also Abstr. 74.147, 153, 175, 188, 689]
74.45 CALLIARI, Elisa ; RYDER, Ben —
By analyzing the way climate change loss and damage (L&D) is framed in nationally determined contributions (NDCs), this article investigates how parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change make sense of the concept. Building on an original database of 313 active and archived NDCs, we employ frame analysis to identify the countries that mention L&D in these documents; map how they frame it, both in terms of the types of impacts that are relevant for the national context and the responses that are planned or adopted; and explore how this has changed over time. We find that L&D is not perceived as a “small islands issue” anymore and that a growing number of middle- and highincome countries are referring to the concept in their NDCs. We also observe increasing levels of specificity about the types of economic and noneconomic L&D incurred or projected and about national responses, including those focused on knowledge generation, institutional arrangements, and sectoral adaptation measures. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.237]
74.46 CAPPELEN, Cornelius Wright ; SICAKKAN, Hakan G. ; VAN WOLLEGHEM, Pierre Georges —
The concentration of the world’s refugees in developing countries calls for international collaboration on the matter. In the face of concerns voiced not only amongst politicians but also the public, we investigate how people trade-off the two most prominent responsibility-sharing mechanism. We conduct a survey experiment in 26 countries asking whether people would rather: (1) admit more asylum seekers and (2) provide financial assistance to the host countries. We find that most respondents prefer admitting asylum seekers over paying. We also establish significant individual-level heterogeneity that sheds new light on people’s attitudes towards asylum seekers. Importantly, we report on the effect of welfare chauvinism and nativism on the willingness to admit rather than to pay. [R]
74.47 CARSTENS, Jens —
Political trust is routinely invoked by social scientists and pundits, usually in a crisis narrative that sees a danger to democracy in declining or low levels of political trust. However, the concept remains fuzzy and elusive. Although non-exhaustive, this review traces strands of consensus and disputes on the conceptualisations, determinants, and consequences of political trust. It highlights the recent (re-)discovery of a distinction between related yet distinct family members of political trust: sceptical mistrust and cynic distrust. The deeply rooted concern with political trust lies not in increasing political trust but in preventing healthy mistrust from turning into cynic distrust. [R]
74.48 CATTAPAN, Alana —
In the Winter of 2020, my introductory Canadian politics class started to develop its own online, collaboratively-built, open-access, introductory “textbook” on Canadian politics. Drawing on the principles of critical pedagogy, the assignment engages students in group work to generate plainlanguage primers that can connect with an audience beyond our classroom while contributing to knowledge-building in the field. Once submitted, students’ work is compiled, edited and uploaded to the project website. Students have multiple opportunities to provide feedback about their experience and the project as a whole. Since the project was piloted in 2020, it has been used twice more in two Canadian politics classrooms, with plans for further expansion. This article chronicles the process of developing, revising, and expanding the project. It identifies the principles behind the assignment, and the challenges the project has faced so far. [R, abr.]
74.49 CHALMERS, Jocelyn, et al. —
Libertarianism enshrines individual autonomy as its central political principle, but it has been criticized for applying this principle selectively. Reproductive decisions can stress the concept of individual autonomy by placing into conflict the claimed rights of each biological parent to choose. Two studies (N1 = 296; N2 = 580) show that among US participants, libertarianism is associated with opposition to women’s reproductive autonomy and support for men’s. Libertarianism was associated with opposition to abortion rights and support for men’s right both to prevent women from having abortions (male veto) and to withdraw financial support for a child when women refuse to terminate the pregnancy (financial abortion). Adjusting for the association between libertarianism and conservatism, only the relationship with opposition to abortion rights was rendered nonsignificant. Mediation analyses suggest that hostile sexism may account for libertarians’ selective support for men’s and not women’s reproductive autonomy. [R]
74.50 CHENG, Eric —
I argue for a value-pluralistic orientation to liberal democratic politics that accommodates not just the good of conflict (championed by ‘democratic agonists’), but also the good of unity. This approach, I show, accommodates various forms of contestation, but also recognizes the need to purposefully cultivate unity, and thus can be said to balance a ‘tragic ethos’ with a ‘progressive patriotic ethos’: the former encourages citizens to become more vigilant in the struggle against oppression, and the latter, to share in a sense of unity and to honour liberal democracy’s vital role in preventing tyranny. Such an approach would surely not be free of tension. However, I argue that it can help liberal democrats indeed consolidate and practice ‘fugitive antagonism’ against the enemies of liberal democracy when necessary. [R, abr.]
74.51 CHUNG, Eunbin ; GOVINDAN, Pavitra ; PECHENKINA, Anna O. —
How does political ideology affect the processing of information incongruent with one’s worldview? The disagreement in prior research about this question lies in how one’s ideology interacts with cognitive ability to shape motivated numeracy or the tendency to misinterpret data to confirm one’s prior beliefs. Our study conceptually replicates and extends previous research on motivated numeracy by testing whether monetary incentives for accuracy lessen motivated reasoning when high- and low-numeracy partisans interpret data about mask mandates and COVID-19 cases. This research leverages the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, as Americans are polarized along party lines regarding an appropriate government response to the pandemic. [R]
74.52 COLE, Kathleen —
Even though the need is great, there are too few resources available to political science faculty who seek to integrate antiracist pedagogy into their courses and curriculum. To date, there are no publications that focus on the special considerations that must be taken into account when teaching political science courses in an antiracist way due to the relationship between our discipline and the political actors and institutions we study. In this article, I discuss some of the foundational principles in antiracist pedagogy and consider how they can be implemented in political science courses that involve direct advocacy. Following hooks, Kandaswamy, and Kishimoto, I argue that that antiracist teaching requires instructors to engage in critical reflection on their own positionality — both as individuals in a society structured by racial capitalism, and as faculty members in particular departments, within an academic discipline. [R, abr.]
74.53 CORMIER, Ben ; NAQVI, Natalya —
Outside of the rich world, international financial markets are thought to discipline borrowing governments by monitoring political and economic characteristics. But increasingly, asset managers do not assess individual country risk/return profiles. They replicate benchmark indexes, delegating investment decisions to index providers. This has two effects. First, it relocates market discipline into the hands of index providers. Second, it alters the constraints sovereigns face when accessing bond markets, conditioning the relationship between a sovereign’s political-economic features and its ability to raise capital. Using a novel data-set of index inclusion and weights, we show that country-specific factors traditionally associated with bond market access do not have the expected constraining effects on countries included in a major index but do continue to affect excluded countries. [R, abr.]
74.54 COULTER, Steve ; MEGGITT-SMITH, Benjamin —
Governments have rediscovered industrial strategy as a central tool of economic policy in order to deal with a range of challenges, including ending the stagnation in productivity, transforming economies to meet net zero targets and coping with disruptive new technologies. An important emerging feature of this is a shift in emphasis from ‘supply-side’ policies, focussing on tackling market failures, to ‘demand-side’ policies, which aim to help entrepreneurs overcome uncertainty by providing a final market for their products. For UK policy makers, this shift represents opportunities to support nascent technology industries, but it also holds dangers of waste, overreach and political capture. The article assesses several possible approaches available to the UK and concludes that a viable strategy for the UK is not to try to compete with big spending schemes, like the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act, but to work with entrepreneurs in de-risking new product development. [R]
74.55 CRAWLEY, Sam —
Scholars have debated why people on the right of politics are consistently found to be less likely to support environmental action than those on the left. Some authors argue that this relationship is primarily driven by conservative economic attitudes, while several studies have demonstrated a negative link between conservative social attitudes and environmental attitudes. However, as few studies include both conservative economic and social attitudes, it remains unclear whether both sets of attitudes relate to environmental attitudes independently, or whether one confounds the other. This study uses Bayesian regression analyses of data from the 2017 New Zealand election study, finding that both conservative economic attitudes (free market support, opposition to welfare) and conservative social attitudes (exclusionary attitudes, right-wing authoritarianism) have independent negative relationships with environmental attitudes. [R, abr.]
74.56 CRISMAN-COX, Casey ; GASPARYAN, Olga ; SIGNORINO, Curtis S. —
Separation or “perfect prediction” is a common problem in discrete choice models that, in practice, leads to inflated point estimates and standard errors. Standard statistical packages do not provide clear advice on how to correct these problems. Furthermore, separation can go completely undiagnosed in fitting advanced models that optimize a user-supplied loglikelihood rather than relying on pre-programmed estimation procedures. In this paper, we both describe the problems that separation can cause and address the issue of detecting it in empirical models of strategic interaction. We then consider several solutions based on penalized maximum likelihood estimation. Using Monte Carlo experiments and a replication study, we demonstrate that when separation is detected in the data, the penalized methods we consider are superior to ordinary maximum likelihood estimators. [R]
74.57 CROSS, Ben —
In this article, I aim to bring apocalypticism and radical realism into conversation, with a view to their mutual interest in prefigurative politics. On one hand, radical realists may worry that an apocalyptic approach to prefigurative politics may be marred by wishful thinking. On the other hand, radical realists can (and sometimes do) acknowledge that wishful thinking is sometimes desirable. I argue that an apocalyptic approach to prefigurative politics suggests one way of guarding against the dangers of wishful thinking, while allowing space for its potential benefits; prefigurativists have reason to pay at least some attention to what Bernard Williams calls ‘The First Political Question’. I will argue for this claim with reference to the case of Omar Aziz, a Syrian activist who played a pivotal role in the construction of local councils in the aftermath of the 2011 protests. [R]
74.58 DÁVID-BARRETT, Elizabeth —
This article argues that the concept of state capture helps to structure our understanding of patterns of grand corruption seen around the world in varied contexts, and increasingly even in countries once regarded as secure democracies. This article situates the concept within a wider literature on corruption and describes how it relates to other similar terms, including regulatory capture and kleptocracy. Second, it elaborates on three pillars of activity that are subject to capture, and a variety of mechanisms through which state capture occurs. Third, it considers the impact of state capture on economic and social development, by outlining the ways in which it skews the distribution of power and potential long-term consequences for the allocation of rights and resources. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue on "Transnational kleptocracy and the international political economy of authoritarianism", edited and introduced by John HEATHERSHAW, M. Anne PITCHER and Ricardo SOARES DE OLIVEIRA. See also Abstr. 74.1103, 1195, 1287, 1338, 1381, 1457, 1496]
74.59 DAVIDSON, Charles G. ; JUDAH, Ben —
The expansion and sheer enormity of the financial-secrecy system is undermining democracy to an alarming extent. This system has distorted capitalism and its elites’ relationship to taxation and the public realm to such an extent that powerful vested interests are now attached to a financial system that (1) conceals kleptocracy, crime, and foreign interference, and (2) exacerbates inequality to a degree unrecognized precisely because of the system’s secrecy. The state of the public realm shows that capitalism with a secrecy system has become increasingly hard for a democratic polity to hold accountable. Understanding the architecture of the financial-secrecy system, one can identify how to conduct its deconstruction. [R]
74.60 DAVIDSON, Joe P. L. —
There is nothing new about predictions that climate change will cause serious social problems in the twenty-first century. However, in recent years, some tendencies in the environmental movement have made an even stronger assertion: the climate-induced collapse of industrial society is highly likely and may have positive consequences. This claim, which I term the collapse thesis, is associated with the deep adaptation movement in Britain and the collapsology movement in France. In this article, I analyse the work of key theorists associated with these movements to outline the core tenets of the societal collapse thesis. Responding to the criticisms directed against the idea of societal collapse, I partially defend the thesis by reading it as a form of science fiction. Following Darko Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement, it is argued that collapse encourages us to pinpoint the unstable ecological preconditions of everyday life and posit a new utopian world. [R]
74.61 DAVIDSON, Tom —
We must reduce harms from current AI systems while also looking ahead to harms that may occur soon. Experts worry that runaway AI could cause extreme harm in the next five to twenty years. The risk is that we develop superhuman AI systems that surpass humans in domains like persuasion, strategy, hacking, and research and development; that we design these systems to pursue goals autonomously; that we accidentally give them unintended goals; and that humans lose control of these superhuman systems. Without regulation, the actions of a small number of elite AI developers could pose massive risks to the rest of society. The risk is not specific to any particular deployment context, but is inherent to the technology itself. So, in addition to regulating specific AI products, we should also regulate the development of frontier AI systems. We should develop safety standards and empower a regulatory authority to enforce them. These regulations would apply only to a small number of frontier AI developers. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.26]
74.62 DeFORD, Daryl, et al. —
Katz, King, and Rosenblatt recently wrote a broad survey developing and extending the theory of partisan symmetry. Our paper reviewed the implementability of the theory, focusing on simplified scores of symmetry — seemingly compatible with their formulation — that are in wide use. We analyzed these simplified scores and concluded that they are not suited for redistricting reform. By our reading of their response, Katz, King, and Rosenblatt agree. [R] [See Abstr. 74.582, 715]
74.63 DOMINGUES, José Maurício —
Climate change is an overwhelming issue today, but sociology has yet to fully engage with its hermeneutical and political aspects. The article tackles this limitation and thus the lexicon of climate change, proposing an integrated framework that brings its principal concepts and notions together. In particular, it singles out hazard, risk and threat, vulnerability and resilience, adaptation, mitigation and precaution, Anthropocene and Capitalocene, nature and society. Although some authors have stressed the political aspects underlying these concepts and notions, and the IPCC itself has incipiently recognised this issue, the parameters of the debate remain conspicuously narrow. The article therefore proposes to engage it in direct and strong political terms, countering the partly successful operation of depoliticisation that such concepts and notions undergo. The article eventually points to the role of agents and power within the UN system concerning the articulation of this lexicon. [R]
74.64 DORREN, Lars ; WOLF, Eva E. A. —
A popular explanation for governments’ persistent enthusiasm for evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) is its expected capacity to solve policy conflict. However, research is divided on whether or not EBPM actually has a positive impact on conflict. On the one hand, EBPM is said to introduce a set of principles that helps overcome political differences. Simultaneously, EBPM has been criticised for narrowing the space for democratic debate, fuelling the very conflict it is trying to prevent. This article explores how EBPM structures policy conflict by studying the example of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) in policy processes through reconstructive interviews and ethnographic observations. It argues that, although EBPM channels conflict in a way that prompts engagement from stakeholders, it also escalates conflict by misrepresenting the nature of policy processes. As such, the findings suggest that managing process participants’ expectations about what evidence is and can do is key in fostering productive policy conflict. [R]
74.65 DOTTI, Valerio ; JANEBA, Eckhard —
We study the optimal design of a deficit rule in a model in which the government is present-biased, shocks to tax revenues make rule compliance stochastic, and a rule violation reduces the payoff from holding office. We show that: (1) the benchmark policy of the social planner can be always implemented via an optimal nonlinear deficit rule and under certain conditions even under a linear rule; (2) the optimal rule prescribes a zero structural deficit but only partially accounts for shocks; and (3) a government with a stronger ex-ante deficit bias should be granted a higher degree of flexibility. [R]
74.66 DRAPER, Jamie —
This article develops a normative theory of the status of ‘internally displaced persons’. Political theorists working on forced migration have paid little attention to internally displaced persons, but internally displaced persons bear a distinctive normative status that implies a set of rights that its bearer can claim and correlate duties that others owe. This article develops a practice-based account of justice in internal displacement, which aims to answer the questions of who counts as an internally displaced person and what is owed to internally displaced persons (and by whom). The first section addresses the question of who counts as an internally displaced person by offering an interpretation of the conditions of nonalienage and involuntariness. The second section articulates an account of what is owed to internally displaced persons that draws on and refines the idea of ‘occupancy rights’. The third section sets out an account of the role of the international community in supplementing the protection of internally displaced persons by their own states. [R]
74.67 DRMOLA, Jakub ; KRAUS, Josef —
The primary goal of this investigation is to systematically explore the relationship among the students’ performance, grades, gender, previous experience, and impressions while using Diplomacy, a strategy game, as an educational tool. The rationale for this research is the existing and commonly expressed concern that such games unfairly disadvantage female students due to their lesser exposure to similar games. If such teaching methods are to be successfully employed, we must ensure that they are well suited, appropriate and, most importantly, fair to all our students. To explore this issue, the data collected over 6 years through a university course on strategic thinking and from anonymous student questionnaires were analyzed and tested for statistically significant correlations. The results show that, while male students are more experienced in playing similar games, had an easier time understanding the rules, and showed stronger engagement, this did not translate into considerably better performance or grades and even led to higher levels of disappointment with their own performance. [R]
74.68 EGAMI, Naoki ; HARTMAN, Erin —
The external validity of causal findings is a focus of long-standing debates in the social sciences. Although the issue has been extensively studied at the conceptual level, in practice few empirical studies include an explicit analysis that is directed toward externally valid inferences. We make three contributions to improve empirical approaches for external validity. First, we propose a formal framework that encompasses four dimensions of external validity: X, T, Y, and C-validity (populations, treatments, outcomes, and contexts). The proposed framework synthesizes diverse external validity concerns. We then distinguish two goals of generalization. To conduct effect-generalization — generalizing the magnitude of causal effects — we introduce three estimators of the target population causal effects. For sign-generalization — generalizing the direction of causal effects — we propose a novel multiple-testing procedure under weaker assumptions. [R, abr.]
74.69 EGELAND, Kjølv —
Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the question of how nuclear weapons are legitimized in the first place. And while there is widespread agreement that struggles for legitimacy make up a pervasive feature of political life generally and nuclear politics specifically, available typologies of legitimation invariably comprise only a subset of the varied ways in which actors struggle to build or retain a social license to operate. Drawing on scholarship on propaganda, marketing, and legitimacy-seeking, this article offers an investigation of the full range of actions nucleararmed governments and defence contractors undertake to sustain acceptance for the continued development and deployment of nuclear arms. Four broad categories of legitimation are identified: discursive legitimation, institutional legitimation, behavioural legitimation, and legitimation through information control. [R, abr.]
74.70 EHRHARDT, Andrew —
The term ‘world order’ is perhaps the most enticing, consequential and vague concept in the diplomatic lexicon. There are countless scholars, analysts and policy-makers wrestling over its theoretical and practical dimensions. But often taken for granted in these examinations is the philosophical aspect — in other words, those fundamental reflections on the very purpose and nature of order across regional and international systems. Using a historical precedent as an example of this mode of thinking, this article makes the case for why questions related to political philosophy and political theory are essential to abstract and practical considerations of future world order. [R]
74.71 ENGLER, Sarah —
Scholars have paid increasing attention to how questions of multi-level governance have become politicized in the domestic political arena. Issues surrounding democratic government itself have received surprisingly little attention in this debate. In this article, we ask how political parties politicize the principles of liberal democracy within advanced democracies. We expect that challenger parties are most likely to question existing principles. The targets of their criticism, however, should vary according to their ideological origins. Conducting automated quantitative text analysis of Swiss, German and Austrian party press releases between 2006 and 2018 using a multidimensional dictionary of liberal democracy, we confirm that left-libertarian and populist radical right parties are the main challengers of the democratic status quo. The foundation of criticism, however, differs fundamentally. While left-libertarians focus on principles that strengthen individual autonomy in politics, populist radical right parties demand more forms of participation and fewer constraints by liberal elements of democracy. [R]
74.72 FABIAN, Mark, et al. —
We compare and evaluate two competing paradigms in the ‘wellbeing public policy’ (WPP) space with the intention of promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. We argue that most WPP proposals adopt the same ‘social planner perspective’ (SPP) that undergirds conventional economic policy analysis. The SPP is broadly technocratic, emphasising scientific standards for what constitutes good policy and empowering ‘dispassionate’ experts. We argue that WPP could lend itself to a more transformative agenda, one that embraces the value-laden nature of ‘wellbeing’ as a concept. We call this the ‘citizen’s perspective’ (CP). It would see WPP relinquish the SPP’s stance of detached analysis by technical experts and instead give a greater role to participatory and deliberative modes of policymaking to define, analyse, and measure wellbeing and ultimately make policy decisions. We present a preliminary framework for analysing when the SPP or CP is more suitable to a particular area of WPP. [R]
74.73 FARAG, Mahmoud, et al. —
The power-sharing literature lacks a review that synthesizes its findings, despite spanning over 50 years since Arend Lijphart published his seminal 1969 article ‘Consociational Democracy’. This review article contributes to the literature by introducing and analysing an original dataset, the Power Sharing Articles Dataset, which extracts data on 23 variables from 373 academic articles published between 1969 and 2018. The powersharing literature, our analysis shows, has witnessed a boom in publications in the last two decades, more than the average publication rate in the social sciences. This review offers a synthesis of how power sharing is theorized, operationalized and studied. We demonstrate that power sharing has generally positive effects, regardless of institutional set-up, post-conflict transitional character and world region. Furthermore, we highlight structural factors that are mostly associated with the success of power sharing. Finally, the review develops a research agenda to guide future scholarly work on power sharing. [R]
74.74 FERNANDES, Reynaldo —
The article presents two models of public policy evaluation: one named idealistic and the other named pragmatic. In the former, social progress occurs when changes in the form of how society is organised bring us closer to social institutions and public authority conduct considered ideal. In the latter, social progress occurs if the prevailing social state (postchanges) is taken to be better than the previous social state (prechanges), according to certain pre-established judgement criteria. It is argued that the adoption of different models is one of the main obstacles to clarity in the public debate on the implementation of public policies, namely, that of making the points of disagreement explicit. The article presents a defence of the pragmatic model, which is considered more compatible with the use of scientific criteria in order to assess the effectiveness of policies. [R]
74.75 FESTENSTEIN, Matthew —
This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of arguments about the character of democracy — although the character of those arguments is open to debate and reimagination — and how pragmatist arguments have been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches. This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion. [R]
74.76 FETSCHER, Verena —
Why do high-income earners support higher levels of income redistribution in some countries than in others? I argue that differences in the social insurance design have consequences for fairness considerations and that this matters for preference formation. Flat-rate systems provide social benefits in equal amounts to everyone in need, while earnings-related systems provide benefits in relation to previous earnings. In the case of income loss, earnings-related systems maintain unfair income differences, while flat-rate systems equalize unfair income differences between the rich and the poor. Cross-national patterns reveal that support for redistribution among the rich is higher in income-maintaining welfare states. For a strict test of my fairness argument, I conduct a laboratory experiment and show that participants reduce inequality more if given endowment differences are maintained in the case of loss. [R]
74.77 FITZGERALD, Maggie —
Postfoundational political thought is characterized by a distinction between “politics” (a socio-symbolic order that delineates what is knowable and thinkable) and “the political” (the instantiation of a socio-symbolic order). This article critically engages with the postfoundational thought of Jacques Rancière to rethink “the political” in the context of the pluriverse, a matrix of multiple distinct yet interconnected worlds. In so doing, this article challenges the idea that “care” is not properly political. Specifically, I argue that in the context of the pluriverse, socio-symbolic orders, or worlds, are not instantiated as such; rather, they must be established and, importantly, reestablished in the face of one another. From this vantage point, caring for and maintaining worlds — especially worlds marginalized by relations of power in the global political economy — is of political and ethical significance. This article thus offers a decolonial and feminist approach to thinking about the political as it (1) destabilizes the Westerncentric assumption that there is one-world, and takes different worlds as worlds seriously; and (2) centers issues of care and reproduction, demonstrates how they are politically and ethically salient, and thereby contributes to the project of foregrounding the political import of care. [R]
74.78 FOGED, Søren Kjaer ; HOULBERG, Kurt —
Voucher markets where governments subsidise the consumers of public services to give them a free choice of service provider are implemented by public authorities as a means to reap the supposed benefits of competition and choice. Such voucher markets imply economic costs for the public authority in the form of transaction costs, e.g., for preparation of quality standards and information material as well as approval, coordination and supervision of providers. However, voucher markets may also affect the public authority’s production costs through a competitive pressure for increased efficiency and/or by affecting the potential economies of scale for public service delivery. This article shows that in a voucher market without price competition voucher markets increase the public production costs of delivering home help services. Specifically, the larger the share of elderly persons who choose a private provider, the higher the public costs of delivering practical home help. [R]
74.79 FOSTER, Jack ; EL-OJEILI, Chamsy —
This article explores utopian dimensions and reality problems in the intellectual production of leading Anglophone public intellectuals and policymaking institutions of Western capitalism. We argue that from the close of the 1990s, but especially in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, elite discourse has splintered into three core strands or moments: first, a post-hegemonic, punitive neoliberalism of austerity, which retreats from leadership and seeks to preserve extant power relations; second, a pragmatic neo-Keynesian turn, which frequently combines the language of enterprise and competition with advocacy of selective political and economic re-regulation towards a more socially justified capitalism; and third, the advance of a ‘liberalism of fear’, which evokes a number of threatening dystopian figures in populism, protectionism, the 1930s, extremism and totalitarianism. [R, abr.]
74.80 FRACCAROLI, Nicolò ; REGAN, Aidan ; BLYTH, Mark —
This paper contributes to the Growth Model (GM) research program in comparative and international political economy by analyzing the impact of Brexit on London and other financial centers within the EU. Our key contribution is to demonstrate that for many countries, national growth models are really city-level growth models, and that this is directly observable in the relationship between GMs and their international financial centers. Such city-level GMs are possible precisely because they do not depend on, nor are they deeply integrated into, the rest of their national economy. To explain these observations, we draw upon insights from economic sociology and argue that ‘place-specific social capital’ and professional ‘linked ecologies’ make such internationally oriented city-level GMs highly robust to external shocks — even one as big as Brexit. Empirically, we develop this argument using financial firm-level data to observe the post-Brexit movement of assets, loans, and jobs in London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfurt. [R, abr.]
74.81 FRIEDMAN, Jeffrey —
The polarization and charges of “post-truth” that mark contemporary politics may have its source, ultimately, in a crisis of epistemology, which is characterized by a tension between different forms of naïve realism — the view that reality appears to us directly, unmediated by interpretation. Perhaps too schematically, those on the right tend to be first-person naïve realists in treating economic and social realities as accessible to the ordinary political participant by simple common sense, while those on the left tend to be third-person naïve realists in treating credentialed experts as forming a consensus — a new common sense. In treating reality as transparent enough to be legible either to oneself or to a group of experts, both sides tend to treat disagreement as a motivational problem — a problem of bad faith, motivated reasoning, perversity, and refusal to see the truth — rather than as an epistemic problem caused by the possibility that each side may hold a different set of interpretive frameworks that determines how and what it sees of reality. In obviating the possibility of genuine disagreement, the epistemological crisis is quite naturally transformed into a political crisis. [R]
74.82 FRIEDNER PARRAT, Charlotta —
This article is a reply to Bevir and Hall, who recently argued in this journal that the English School needs to reflect more on its philosophy. They are right. Yet, their preferred distinction between a structural and an interpretivist strand of the School is not a constructive way forward. This is because their distinction between a structural and an interpretivist strand of the school is too stark, their chosen dimensions for sorting through the School are arguably not the most fruitful, and the inclusion of the English School’s normative agenda must remain independent of whether one is inclined to start from structure or from agency. After elaborating these points, the article moves on to suggesting a number of other philosophical issues which would be more relevant for the English School to work through. It ends with an empirical illustration of what an integrated English School approach, inspired by structuration, could look like. [R]
74.83 GALIK, Christopher S. ; BA, Yuhao ; BOBBITT, Christopher —
Efforts to better understand what prevents institutions from changing to meet contemporary demands — or what facilitates the evolution of existing constructs to address new challenges — are of particular import and relevance to environmental governance. While the existing literature provides valuable conceptualisation and empirical evaluation of institutional stability and change, the lack of a consistent and holistic typology complicates the evaluation of institutions over time. In this article, we use a combined stability-change typology to assess the dominant modes of institutional change and stability over a multi-decadal timespan across three environmental governance systems — air quality governance in the US and China, and climate governance in the European Union. Across cases, we find that these modes are not mutually exclusive but can occur simultaneously, in concert or in conflict. We also find that observed patterns of change and stability are reflective of the social and political context in which systems operate, as well as the focus of the system itself (for example, localised air quality versus global climate change). [R, abr.]
74.84 GALLOW, J. Dmitri —
A norm of local expert deference says that your credence in an arbitrary proposition A, given that the expert’s probability for A is n, should be n. A norm of global expert deference says that your credence in A, given that the expert’s entire probability function is E, should be E(A). Gaifman taught us that these two norms are not equivalent. Stalnaker conjectures that Gaifman’s example is “a loophole”. Here, I substantiate Stalnaker’s suspicions by providing characterisation theorems which tell us precisely when the two norms come apart. They tell us that, in a good sense, Gaifman’s example is the only case where the two norms differ. I suggest that the lesson of the theorems is that Bayesian epistemologists need not concern themselves with the differences between these two kinds of norms. While they are not strictly speaking equivalent, they are equivalent for all philosophical purposes. [R]
74.85 GANJI, Sarath K. —
Autocrats are investing vast sums in the global sports sector — a practice critics call sportswashing. The term, though relatively new, rests on a millennia-old conviction that sports offer opportunistic actors a vehicle for reputation-laundering. But recent developments in the football industry reveal a shift in how autocrats are approaching the practice. This paper explores the investment empires of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to show how autocratic actors are scaling their activities to segments of the sector’s value chain once thought beyond the reach of states. These activities make use of sophisticated forms of information manipulation, weaving Gulf interests into the fabric of open societies. Only by understanding the mechanics of sportswashing can democratic actors recognize, prioritize, and counter this emerging and disruptive form of autocratic influence. [R]
74.86 GARB, Yaakov ; DAVIS, John-Michael —
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) principles have emerged as the template for e-waste policies, centered on establishing regulated collection and recycling channels. Originating in the Global North, these policies are increasingly adopted in the global South where e-waste is primarily ‘managed’ by the informal sector, centered in spatially defined hubs. These formal systems fail to achieve collection quotas, while further marginalizing informal recyclers by delegitimizing their access to e-waste. We suggest an alternative hub-centered approach to e-waste reform based on eight years of research and advocacy within the Israel-West Bank ewaste system. We offer several converging rationales for centralizing hubs in e-waste policies and a case study demonstrating an integrated hub-driven package of business, enforcement, and cleanup measures. While the unique complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian case offer an exceptional window into the dynamics of a hub-driven approach, similar packages might shape e-waste policy reform throughout the global South. [R]
74.87 GIANNI, Matteo —
Multicultural citizenship has provided a terrific liberal philosophical framework to justify respect for cultural minorities and their fair accommodation in contexts marked by cultural disadvantages. However, the importance it provides to societal culture in order to fulfil individual’s autonomy entails a metaphysical aspect (i.e societal culture as an instrumental condition for autonomy) which calls into question the full inclusion of all individuals in multicultural societies. This paper maintains that the conception of citizenship in Multicultural citizenship should be independent of metaphysical assumptions and strengthen in its political underpinnings. Kymlicka’s view on citizenship is based on liberal rights and the constitutional recognition of minorities. It does not address the process of citizenship, and how a conception of performative citizenship can be conceived to address claims for recognition in ways that produce legitimate, inclusive and intersubjectively shared outcomes, especially with regard to an inclusive national identity. Multicultural citizenship provides principled legal modalities to accommodate multicultural societies, but does not clearly address the political modalities supporting such accommodations. It thus entails a danger of a de-politicization of citizenship; and a de-politicized citizenship, is not citizenship anymore. [R, abr.]
74.88 GIERSCH, Jason ; LIEBERTZ, Scott —
Many instructors of political science wrestle with the question of whether to reveal their political ideology to their students and recent polarization in the United States intensifies those concerns. Prior research suggests that liberal and moderate students are wary of taking a course with a conservative professor, but do students react to economically conservative professors the same as they do socially conservative professors? We conducted an online survey experiment of current students at two public universities in the southern United States to test whether a reputation for expressing conservative opinions on either economic or social issues affected a professor’s appeal to students. Participants split along ideological lines on both professor profiles, but greater skepticism was directed at the socially conservative professor. Preference for a socially conservative professor was greatest among more religious students. [R]
74.89 GINSBURG, Tom ; VERSTEEG, Mila —
Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting, and elections. The trend is apparent in both democracies and nondemocracies, although democracies tend to constitutionalize slightly more matters. Constitutionalization can help democracy by tying the hands of politicians. Looking at cross-national data, we find that constitutionalizing democracy is correlated with higher levels of democracy. However, some rules have the potential to undermine democracy, particularly in contexts where the military plays a major role in politics. The essay illustrates these dynamics with the case studies of Kenya and Thailand. [R]
74.90 GOERGER, Samantha ; MUMMOLO, Jonathan ; WESTWOOD, Sean J. —
Political elites increasingly express interest in evidence-based policymaking, but transparent research collaborations necessary to generate relevant evidence pose political risks, including the discovery of sub-par performance and misconduct. If aversion to collaboration is non-random, collaborations may produce evidence that fails to generalize. We assess selection into research collaborations in the critical policy arena of policing by sending requests to discuss research partnerships to roughly 3,000 law enforcement agencies in 48 states. A host of agency and jurisdiction attributes fail to predict affirmative responses to generic requests, alleviating concerns over generalizability. However, across two experiments, mentions of agency performance in our correspondence depressed affirmative responses — even among top-performing agencies — by roughly eight percentage points. Many agencies that initially indicate interest in transparent, evidence-based policymaking recoil once performance evaluations are made salient. We discuss several possible mechanisms for these dynamics, which can inhibit valuable policy experimentation in many communities. [R]
74.91 GOLDMAN, Loren —
The consequences of AI for political science, let alone democracy, remain obscure. Scholars would do best not to parrot either the hand-wringing despair or pollyannish enthusiasm of popular perspectives, but to instead soberly approach the advent of new technologies. Given its significant limitations, ChatGPT in particular does not (yet) appear to be the worldhistorical invention initial assessments perceived, as evidenced by the test case of Ernst Bloch. [R]
74.92 GOROKHOVSKAIA, Yana ; SLIPOWITZ, Amy ; SHAHBAZ, Adrian —
The latest edition of Freedom in the World found that the global struggle for democracy approached a possible turning point in 2022. Global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year amid war, coups, and attacks on democratic institutions by illiberal incumbents. Infringements on freedom of expression have been a key driver of longer-term deterioration. Yet the gap between the number of countries that registered overall improvements in political rights and civil liberties and those that registered overall declines was the narrowest it has been through the last 17 years. Notable democratic gains were achieved through more transparent and competitive elections, while the year brought fresh evidence of the limits of authoritarian power. The world is significantly freer today than it was 50 years ago, when the assessment began, and ongoing protests against repression in various authoritarian countries suggest that people’s desire for freedom is enduring. [R]
74.93 GRAAFLAND, Johan —
Previous research has shown that economic freedom is associated with life satisfaction. Nonetheless, how economic freedom affects life satisfaction remains relatively unexplored. Test results on a sample of 238,944 observations from 78 countries in the period from 1990 to 2020 show that individual autonomy is a possible channel (so-called mediator): whereas economic freedom is found to foster individual autonomy, individual autonomy in turn increases life satisfaction. The relationship between economic freedom and individual autonomy particularly concerns two subdimensions of economic freedom: sound money and freedom to trade internationally. The test results show that the indirect effect of economic freedom on life satisfaction through individual autonomy is significant and explains 18% of the total relationship between economic freedom and life satisfaction. [R, abr.]
74.94 GRAF, Antonia ; LOGES, Bastian ; SCHWINDENHAMMER, Sandra —
Inter- and transdisciplinarity (ITD) has been part of political science for quite some time now, but although political science regularly deals with its self-understanding, the consequences for research and researchers of ITD have not yet been systematically considered. To stimulate this debate, we conceptualize ITD as a spectrum of knowledge integration, application, and participation. We use International Relations norm research as a theoretical framework to describe, analyze, and reflect on ITD as a normative dynamic. Autoethnographically and through participatory observation, we examine ITD as a normative dynamic, with insights from three research projects in the field of sustainability. Specifically, we ask what implications ITD has for researchers and research in political science. As a result, we find that ITD offers both opportunities and challenges. In the context of knowledge integration, we discuss the importance of the participation of political science in major societal issues in contrast to ITD’s preferences for a particular understanding of knowledge and research. We reflect on ITD’s application bias in terms of problem-solving opportunities and output orientation. [R, abr.]
74.95 GRAY, Sean WD —
Contemporary democratic theory is focused on empowering the voices of citizens in collective decision-making. The opposite of voice is silence. Increasingly, citizens are remaining silent rather than vocally participating in politics. Among democratic theorists, silent citizenship is equated to civic disengagement and disempowerment. I expand this view by theorizing the conditions under which silence is also a political expression. My analysis identifies four types of silence that can politically communicate. The resulting framework draws out the communicative dimension of silence, providing new tools to assess the unique interpretative challenges and dangers that silent citizenship presents for a democratic system. [R]
74.96 GREENAWAY, Katharine H. —
Engaging in the political process is one way that individuals can exert control over society in general. Yet, emerging research suggests that engaging with political groups also helps people feel more in control of the course of their own lives. The present research examined whether this is always the case, using the natural experiment afforded by political events to probe the psychological mechanisms underpinning the relationship between group identification and personal control. Two cross-sectional studies conducted immediately after the 2016 Presidential election (total N = 752) and one longitudinal study conducted immediately before and after the 2020 Presidential election (N = 743) investigated the relationship between political group identification and personal control. Together, the studies tested whether this relationship is weakened under conditions of low agency (i.e., in a group that lost the election) and low predictability (i.e., immediately following a surprise election outcome). [R, abr.]
74.97 GROENENDYK, Eric ; KIMBROUGH, Erik O. ; PICKUP, Mark —
How should ideology be understood, and should we be concerned if Americans lack it? Combining widely used survey questions with an incentivized coordination game, we separately measure individuals’ own policy preferences and their knowledge of what other ideological group members expect them to believe. This allows us to distinguish knowledge of ideological norms — what liberals and conservatives believe ought to go with what — from adherence to those norms. We find that a nontrivial portion of those reporting ideologically inconsistent preferences do so knowingly, suggesting their lack of ideological constraint can be attributed to pragmatism rather than innocence. Additionally, a question order experiment reveals that priming ideological norms before measuring policy preferences promotes ideological adherence, suggesting ideological constraint is at least partially attributable to norm-conformity pressure. [R, abr.]
74.98 GRUMBACH, Jacob M. —
The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the US. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018, I develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. I then test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions. Difference-in-differences results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period. This result calls into question theories focused on changes within states. [R, abr.]
74.99 HANNON, Michael —
A prevalent political narrative is that we are facing an epistemological crisis, where many citizens no longer care about truth and facts. Yet the view that we are living in a post-truth era relies on some implicit questionable empirical and normative assumptions. The post-truth rhetoric converts epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth. This narrative is also dubious on epistemic, moral, and political grounds. It is epistemically dubious in being largely insensitive to the problem of complexity in politics; it is morally dubious because “post-truth” is often a derogatory label for individuals or groups that are deemed stupid, irrational, or morally compromised; and it is a politically toxic neologism because it purports to use the language of ‘truth’ as a weapon against power, yet these truth-claims are often themselves attempts to exert power over others by delegitimizing their perspectives. [R, abr.]
74.100 HASHMI, Rufaida Al —
The history of immigration policy is marked by the wrongful and discriminatory exclusion of certain groups of people. In this article, I argue that descendants of those who were wrongfully excluded have a pro tanto right to immigrate to the state in question as reparation. I begin by identifying the two main approaches theorists generally take to establish a claim for reparation: the inheritance approach and the counterfactual approach. In the first section, I argue that the inheritance approach does not offer a promising argument for reparations for descendants of those who were wrongfully excluded. In the second section, I argue that the counterfactual approach, by contrast, does. In the third section, I respond to the objection that this prima facie claim for reparation can be undermined by current circumstances. In the fourth section, I show why this reparation should be offered in the form of immigration rights. [R]
74.101 HAYO, Bernd ; VOIGT, Stefan —
An independent judiciary is often hailed as one of the most important aspects of the rule of law. Securing judicial independence (JI) via explicit constitutional rules seems straightforward and there is evidence that de jure and de facto JI are linked, at least in the long term. However, the realized degree of judicial independence often diverges significantly from the constitutionally guaranteed one. Based on a worldwide panel dataset from 1950 to 2018, we find that a negative gap, that is, when de jure JI > de facto JI, is very common. Factors associated with a decreasing gap are the number of veto players and the extent of press freedom and democracy, whereas corruption is associated with an increasing gap between de jure JI and de facto JI. [R]
74.102 HINTERLEITNER, Markus —
The link between opinion and policy is central to the functioning of representative democracy. Democracies are responsive to their citizens’ preferences if citizens can influence governments’ policy output. This article conceptualizes political blame games about policy controversies as venues of democratic responsiveness to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the opinion-policy link in policy-heavy, conflictual democracies. The article shows how political actors convert public feedback to a policy controversy into blame game interactions, which in turn lead to political and policy responses by the government. A comparative-historical analysis of nine blame games in the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland reveals how institutions structure blame game interactions, and thus influence a political system’s responsiveness during blame games. The analysis suggests that an important, yet neglected, expression of democratic quality of political systems is their ability to translate blame game interactions into policy responses. The study of blame games as venues of democratic responsiveness thus provides a new conceptual tool for assessing the health of representative democracies in more conflictual times. [R]
74.103 HINTERLEITNER, Markus ; SAGER, Fritz —
How do politicians in advanced democracies get away with violating political norms? Although norm violators confront a powerful establishment that can penalize them, norm violations currently occur in many advanced democracies. This article analyzes the conflicts between norm-violating challengers and established politicians and parties as norm defenders in multiparty systems to contribute to the discipline’s understanding of norm erosion processes. Based on diachronic and synchronic comparisons of conflicts over norm violations in Austria and Germany, the article reveals how political challengers can already damage democratic norms from a position of institutional weakness. Norm violators that make ambiguous provocations and can leverage their previously acquired democratic credentials, can more credibly dispel attempts to stigmatize them as undemocratic. In doing so, they turn the tables on the political establishment and portray its sanctions as a form of ‘excessive retaliation’ that constitutes a norm violation in itself. The article concludes with the unsettling finding that (verbal) norm protection can facilitate norm erosion. [R]
74.104 HJORTH, Ronnie —
This paper shows that while there seems to be more or less a general acceptance for plurality as a condition of world politics and at least a vague commitment to a pluralist ideal, the challenge remains to formulate a fruitful account of international pluralism. While dominating approaches to international theory present international pluralism as essentially a byproduct and instrumental, this paper suggest an alternative way to conceive of international pluralism when defending the ancient concept variety as a better guide to approach both the understanding of plurality as the human condition and the notion of international pluralism. The paper concludes that it is preferable to accept a variety of pluralist conceptions rather than go on searching for a theoretical conception standing above the controversy; accepting pluralism in a sense involves rejecting just one version of pluralism. [R]
74.105 HOUGHTON, Ruth ; O’DONOGHUE, Aoife —
Feminists and women activists use manifestos to express their frustrations with legal and political systems, expose the harms suffered in their lived experiences under patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, and call for radical political, legal and social change. This special issue on feminist manifestos and global constitutionalism considers the role of feminist manifestos in global constitutionalism. It interrogates the role of feminist manifestos in bringing about legal and political reform, their role as historical texts and sources of global constitutionalization, and their limitations as tools that are potentially both exclusionary and de-political. In their article, Ruth Houghton and Aoife O’Donoghue outline a role for feminist manifestos within feminist approaches to constituent power. Sheri Labenski uncovers from the archives the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom manifesto from 1924 and the outline for a ‘New International Order’. Gina Heathcote and Lucia Kula centre Lusophone African feminist action in Luanda, Angola, to problematize an approach to feminist manifestos that reiterates dominant feminisms, and instead argue for active silence by those more dominant feminist voices. [R, abr.]
74.106 HUTTUNEN, Janette ; SAIKKONEN, Inga —
Are younger generations less supportive of democracy than older generations? This article adds to ongoing scholarly debates on young people’s support for democracy. We contribute to the field by using evidence from a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey with a representative sample of the Finnish population (n = 1030) to examine whether support for core democratic principles is weaker among the younger generations (Generation Z and Millennials) than the older generations (Generation X and Baby Boomers). Our results do not support the expectation that the younger generations in Finland would be systematically less committed to democratic norms than the older generations. However, we find some generational differences in responses to different democratic norm violations. Our findings make a second contribution to the field of youth and democracy by extending our analyses to the youngest generations of age, Generation Z, whose democratic support has not yet been broadly examined. Our study contributes both to the ongoing debate on democratic deconsolidation in established democracies as well as to the literature on young people’s attitudes towards democratic institutions. [R]
74.107 IATRIDIS, Tilemachos ; GKINOPOULOS, Theofilos ; KADIANAKI, Irini —
The problematic of diversity today circulates a discourse on human differences and similarities which is also taken up by actors with controversial political agendas, notably right-wing populist and neoconservative movements. Focusing on contestation over the meaning of “diversity” by lay actors in social media, we suggest here that different constructions of diversity may be seen as clashing projects largely shaping each other through their emphasis on differences or similarities among people. In a qualitative analysis on the tweets mentioning diversity in Greek over a year, constructions of diversity were mirror images of each other across two independent ideological tensions, with distinct social stakes. Individualist constructions of diversity praising individuals’ differences clashed over the legitimation of power with majoritarianist constructions emphasizing social homogeneity, and universalist constructions of diversity advocating the fundamental similarities of individuals clashed over the legitimation of social identities with particularist constructions praising cultural differences. [R, abr.]
74.108 IDE, Tobias, et al. —
Interest in the intersections of environmental issues, peace and conflict has surged in recent years. Research on the topic has developed along separate research streams, which broadened the knowledge base considerably, but hardly interact across disciplinary, methodological, epistemological and ontological silos. Our forum addresses this gap by bringing into conversation six research streams on the environment, peace and conflict: environmental change and human security, climate change and armed conflict, environmental peacebuilding, political ecology, securitisation of the environment, and decolonizing environmental security. For each research stream, we outline core findings, potentials for mutual enrichment with other streams, and prospects for future research. [R]
74.109 IMAI, Kosuke ; KIM, In Song ; WANG, Erik H. —
Matching methods improve the validity of causal inference by reducing model dependence and offering intuitive diagnostics. Although they have become a part of the standard tool kit across disciplines, matching methods are rarely used when analysing time-series cross-sectional data. We fill this methodological gap. In the proposed approach, we first match each treated observation with control observations from other units in the same time period that have an identical treatment history up to the prespecified number of lags. We use standard matching and weighting methods to further refine this matched set so that the treated and matched control observations have similar covariate values. Assessing the quality of matches is done by examining covariate balance. Finally, we estimate both short-term and long-term average treatment effects using the difference-in-differences estimator, accounting for a time trend. We illustrate the proposed methodology through simulation and empirical studies. [R, abr.]
74.110 INAMASU, Kazunori, et al. —
This study examines the relationship between ideology and resistance to the government’s apology to Asian victims of Japan’s colonial rule policy, which varies according to political knowledge. Based on existing research, because only a limited percentage of voters consider politics to be ideology based, it is expected that the association between ideology and resistance to intergroup apologies by one’s own government differs according to their level of political knowledge. We selected three issues of political apologies: colonial rule in Asian countries, comfort women, and the massacre of Korean people based on false rumors at the time of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake; thereafter, we conducted an online survey of a panel selected by Nikkei Research Inc. The results suggest that the relationship between ideology and resistance among voters to political apologies varies with the level of political knowledge, as expected. On the contrary, social dominance orientations (SDO) were associated with resistance to apology, regardless of their level of political knowledge. We then tested the reproducibility of this finding by conducting a follow-up test on registered users of a crowdsourcing service after conducting a preregistration. [R, abr.]
74.111 IZZO, Federica —
Political parties sometimes adopt unpopular positions that condemn them to electoral defeat. This phenomenon is usually ascribed to expressive motives — namely, parties’ desire to maintain their ideological purity. Could ideological parties instead have strategic incentives to lose? To answer this question, I present a model of repeated spatial elections in which voters face uncertainty about their preferred policy and learn via experience. The amount of voter learning, I show, depends on the location of the implemented policy: a more radical policy generates more information. For a party whose ideological stance is unpopular with the electorate, this creates a trade-off between winning the upcoming election so as to secure policy influence and changing voters’ preferences so as to win with a better platform in the future. Under some conditions the party gambles on the future. It chooses to lose today to possibly change voters’ views and win big tomorrow. [R, abr.]
74.112 IZZO, Federica ; MARTIN, Gregory J. ; CALLANDER, Steven —
We propose a model of political competition not over policy programs, but over ideologies: models of the world that organize voters’ experiences and guide the inferences they draw from observed outcomes. Policy-motivated political parties develop ideologies, and voters choose the ideology that best explains their observations. Preferences over policies are then induced by the adopted ideology. Parties thus care about winning the ideological battle as it confers an advantage in the electoral arena. We show that in equilibrium political parties always propose different models of the world. This divergence extends to all features of the environment, not just policy dimensions. A lower degree of policy extremism in the past increases the divergence on the policy dimension, thus leading to higher ideological polarization. [R]
74.113 JAHN, Detlef —
This article gives an initial overview of the explanatory power of established approaches in comparative political science of various lockdown strategies in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic in 35 democracies. In a macro-comparative statistical analysis of the first wave of the pandemic, I test partisan and veto player theories. I distinguish two phases of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which show distinct patterns of political impacts. In the first phase of implementing lockdown strategies, central governments were relatively uncontested and partisan theory has strong explanatory power. In the second phase of lifting lockdowns, party differences lose relevance, but veto players have a strong influence during this time. The analysis shows that political science theories are useful for analysing political processes not only under normal conditions but also in extreme social crises. Moreover, it provides deeper insights into the democratic decision-making process of advanced democracies in exceptional situations. [R]
74.114 JEANGÈNE VILMER, Jean-Baptiste —
Drone warfare is the most emblematic manifestation of so-called remote warfare. Based on extensive interaction with French drone crews, and interviews conducted in 2020, this article shows how drone warfare is not so new, not so distant, not so different, not so indifferent, and not so riskless. In other words, how distancing is a constant in the history of warfare; how the cliché of the drone pilot killing people between the groceries and the family dinner is a partial reflect of reality; how the videogame-like immersive environment of drone pilots is not that different from the one of modern inhabited aircrafts; how drones contradict the widespread assumption that propensity to killing is proportionate to physical distance from target; and finally how drone warfare is not that riskless, at least compared to its most likely alternatives. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.1266]
74.115 JENKINS, Clinton M. ; McQUEEN, Shannon ; WILEY, Susan L. —
The rise of the Covid-19 pandemic changed many facets of life for college students. College students were sent home in the middle of a semester, forced to quickly figure out how to learn virtually and take classes online that had been in-person. This change also resulted in a proliferation of virtual internships. The existing scholarship on virtual internships is sparse, leaving many questions, specifically, what makes a virtual internship “successful?” We examine this question by analyzing feedback of interns collected via a novel survey of students completing a virtual internship during Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021. We explore the effect of remote interning on a student’s overall satisfaction with the internship experience, duties performed, technical difficulties faced while interning virtually, as well as specific factors that may improve the virtual internship experience for students. Results suggest that virtual internships can be highly successful component of student learning. We close by providing recommendations for internship coordinators interested in supporting virtual internship experiences. [R]
74.116 JOHNSON, Chelsea —
While it may be necessary to secure elite buy-in to peaceful competition, the literature is pessimistic about the long-term effects of a power-sharing settlement on the quality of democracy. Designing institutions to guarantee political inclusion is commonly thought to undermine vertical and horizontal accountability by incentivizing rent-seeking over responsiveness to voters. This study employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project to test arguments about the pernicious institutional effects of political power-sharing settlements in post-conflict democracies, relying on a panel dataset of 28 conflict-prone states in Sub-Saharan Africa since the onset of democracy’s Third Wave (1990-2021). The analytical technique is a time-series linear regression distinguishing between upturns and downturns across a range of continuous measures of accountability. The results show that, in line with much of the literature, political power-sharing settlements are associated with increasing executive corruption and fewer improvements in the rule of law. However, none of the other proposed mechanisms linking political power sharing to poor accountability outcomes finds consistent or significant support in the cross-national sample. [R, abr.]
74.117 JONES, Alistair ; LISHMAN, Ros —
Employability is one of these concepts that polarises opinion. There are those who see it as an integral part of student education and learning, and those who see it as undermining conventional academic study. In this paper, we argue it is a key part of student learning experiences and use a case study of a particular module — ‘Politics in Action’ — to highlight the potential benefits to students. This should be seen in conjunction with the rest of a degree programme, where employability maybe embedded but not prioritised. Student feedback reinforces the potential benefits of prioritising employability in one part of a degree programme, while acknowledging the beneficial spillover into other areas of study. There is, however, potential resource cost in adopting this type of approach to delivering such a bespoke module. [R, abr.]
74.118 JONES, Ward E. —
The neologism post-truth is commonly used to characterize a polity in which false and biased beliefs have corrupted public opinion and policymaking. Simplifying and broadening our use of the adjective beyond its current narrow meaning could make post-truth a useful addition to the lexicons of history, politics, and philosophy. Its current use, however, is unhelpful and distracting (at best), and experienced as demeaning and humiliating (at worst). Contemporary polities are better characterized as post-trust. A polity becames post-trust when testimony from either a community of knowledge workers or a social group of complainants — such as women who give testimony of sexual assault — loses influence upon public opinion and policymaking. [R]
74.119 JU, Changwook —
Existing databases on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) feature a disproportionate number of “zero” observations, which conflate a true absence of CRSV with an unknown presence of CRSV. Empirical studies model such zeros as solely indicating a lack of CRSV, thereby obscuring what needs to be known about its determinants and patterns. I present a comprehensive meta-reanalysis of quantitative CRSV studies that have disregarded the two-fold nature of excessive zeros in their data. To redress this neglect, I differentiate the two types of zeros probabilistically and then estimate the prevalence of CRSV conditional on the statistical partitioning of its two zero types. My meta-reanalysis refines previous findings, restoring confidence in intuitive theoretical expectations and resolving inconclusive and unexpected results in the field. [R, abr.]
74.120 KATSAMBEKIS, Giorgos —
Starting from the debate on democratic decline, this article introduces the concept of ‘mainstreaming authoritarianism’ in a bid to turn attention to the role and agency of traditional political actors in the process. The article summarises key findings of relevant studies on autocratisation and highlights issues with the many concepts employed to describe the problem. It moves on to define authoritarianism and suggests a turn towards practice-based approaches. This facilitates the analysis of authoritarian discourses and practices of mainstream political actors in established democracies and helps bridge the gap between social psychology-based and political science-based classic conceptualisations of authoritarianism. Testing the hypothesis that authoritarianism has been mainstreamed, the author develops a comparative survey of the actions and practices of key political actors in Europe, concluding with a note on the importance of acknowledging this authoritarian turn, dealing with its consequences and focussing on the role of agency. [R]
74.121 KEHLENBACH, E. Stefan —
This paper presents results from qualitative student reflections from three upper-level courses taught using the “ungrading” pedagogy. This is a pedagogy that emphasizes student learning and self-evaluation by omitting quantitative grades, replacing them with a structure where students evaluate themselves and define their own grades for the course. This work draws on comments taken from student reflections and personal accounts of the course design and outcomes presented as a comprehensive reflection on the pedagogy. The goal of these reflections is to present the advantages and challenges of using such a system and a firsthand account for instructors who are interested in alternative grading schemes. Overall, students found ungrading to be initially worrying, but ultimately rewarding. Student work improved and individual students reflected on the innovative nature of the class, providing concrete suggestions for future iterations. [R]
74.122 KEYEL, Jared —
War is cruel. Its purpose is to cause suffering. American wars create survivors and victims who confront us with the penetrating gaze of those who demand justice. Their presence implores Americans to make ourselves responsible for the pain we have caused them. Meeting the obligation demanded of us by the millions of individuals we have caused to suffer requires developing a liberatory anti-war praxis informed by distinct ethical and political commitments. While neither exhaustive nor exclusive of other potentially complementary orientations and activities, I ground liberatory anti-war praxis in: (1) Commitment to praxis as a route to liberation; (2) Perpetual unsettledness toward the cruelties of war; (3) Ethical sensitivity to the victims of empire; (4) Dedication to facilitating liberatory peace; (5) Engagement with questions of pacifism, nonviolence, and liberatory self-defense. I locate liberatory anti-war praxis in the pacifist tradition, however anti-war praxis need not commit to absolute nonviolence. Each context is unique, and it is the prerogative of those suffering cruelty to pursue their own strategies and tactics of liberation. [R]
74.123 KIM, Sangyeon ; LIU, Howard ; DESMARAIS, Bruce —
Political actors often interact spatially, and move around. However, with a few exceptions, existing political research has analyzed spatial dependence among actors with fixed geographic locations. Focusing on fixated geographic units prevents us from probing dependencies in spatial interaction between spatially dynamic actors, which are common in some areas of political science, such as sub-national conflict studies. In this note, we propose a method to account for spatial dependence in dyadic interactions between moving actors. Our method uses the spatiotemporal histories of dyadic interactions to project locations of future interactions — projected actor locations (PALs). PALs can, in turn, be used to model the likelihood of future dyadic interactions. In a replication and extension of a recent study of subnational conflict, we find that using PALs improves the predictive performance of the model and indicates that there is a clear relationship between actors’ past conflict locations and the likelihood of future conflicts. [R]
74.124 KOEIJER, Valerie de, et al. —
Increasing research on the humanitarian sector examines how its organizational cultures affect both aid outcomes and humanitarian workers’ private lives. The #MeToo movement and several public scandals have brought to light patterns of sexual violence in crisis zones perpetrated by humanitarian aid workers; surveys suggest rates of sexual assault within the humanitarian community comparable to, if not higher than, those on US college campuses. How do the conditions that produce sexual violence persist in a sector governed by strong, mission-centric principles, professional codes of conduct, and oversight? This article uses participant observation in Iraq and Uganda, in-depth interviews, and textural analysis to examine the social origins of sexual violence in humanitarian communities. It builds on studies of aid organizations to argue that the humanitarian sector operates similarly to a “total institution”. [R, abr.]
74.125 KRÄMLING, Anna, et al. —
Direct democracy is seen as a potential cure to the malaise of representative democracy. It is increasingly used worldwide. However, research on the effects of direct democracy on important indicators like socio-economic, legal, and political equality is scarce, and mainly limited to Europe and the US. The global perspective is missing. This article starts to close this gap. It presents descriptive findings on direct democratic votes at the national level in the (partly) free countries of the Global South and Oceania between 1990 and 2015. It performs the first comparative analysis of direct democracy on these continents. Contradicting concerns that direct democracy may be a threat to equality, we found more bills aimed at increasing equality. Likewise, these votes produced more pro- than contra-equality outputs. This held for all continents as well as for all dimensions of equality. [R]
74.126 KREPS, Sarah ; KRINER, Doug —
The explosive rise of generative AI is already transforming journalism, finance, and medicine, but it could also have a disruptive influence on politics. For example, asking a chatbot how to navigate a complicated bureaucracy or to help draft a letter to an elected official could bolster civic engagement. However, that same technology — with its potential to produce disinformation and misinformation at scale — threatens to interfere with democratic representation, undermine democratic accountability, and corrode social and political trust. This essay analyzes the scope of the threat in each of these spheres and discusses potential guardrails for these misuses, including neural networks used to identify generated content, self-regulation by generative-AI platforms, and greater digital literacy on the part of the public and elites alike. [R] [See Abstr. 74.26]
74.127 KREUTZ, Adrian ; ROSSI, Enzo —
Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism as well as realist responses to those attacks unduly conflate distinctly political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctly political normativity depends on assuming moralism as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgements are moral judgements, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgements are moral judgements. [R]
74.128 KRISTENSEN, Thomas Artmann, et al. —
Indicators are important sources of information about problems across many policy areas. However, despite a growing number of indicators across most policy areas, such as health care, business promotion, or environmental protection, we still know little about if, how, and when such indicators affect the policy agenda. This article develops a theoretical answer to these questions and examines the implications using a new largen dataset with 220,000 parliamentary questions asked by government and opposition MPs in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. The data contain information on political attention to 17 problems, such as unemployment, C02 emission, and crime from 1960 to 2015. Across this wealth of data, the article demonstrates that politicians respond to the severity and development of problem indicators over time and in comparison to other countries. Results also show that politicians respond much more when problem indicators develop negatively than when they develop positively. [R]
74.129 KUDRNÁČ, Aleš ; VEJCHODSKÁ, Eliška ; SLAVÍKOVÁ, Lenka —
Scholars and practitioners endorse public participation in the decisionmaking process as enhancing the health of democracy, justice, and effectiveness of policy outcomes. To sustain or even increase the number of participants in the long run, it is crucial to start raising a new politically active generation already during their youth and even early adolescence. This article presents School Forums as an extracurricular participatory method involving early adolescents (11-15 years old) in decision-making concerning their school and municipality. We made a field experiment on a sample of 480 Czech secondary school pupils to examine the potential of School Forums to enhance prerequisites for youth’s political engagement. Our results revealed a positive effect of School Forum attendance on the sense of internal political efficacy and interest in local affairs. The results suggest a high potential of participative extracurricular programmes in raising a new generation of politically active citizens. [R]
74.130 LAMB, Matt ; PERRY, Steven ; STEINBERG, Alan —
Civic education in undergraduate institutions is of vital importance to the civic health of society, but faculty often find it difficult to incorporate civic components into existing courses and lack the resources to incorporate civic outreach into their curriculum. As a result, research has shown that time spend on civic engagement is limited. Additionally, civic engagement is rarely discussed, much less encouraged, outside of political science or other social science classes. In this article, we assess the outcomes of a unique co-curricular civic engagement research and learning program in which undergraduate students are required to work with an external partner, usually a municipal agency or nonprofit, to complete an independent research project. Using quantitative and qualitative student evaluations, we find that students had an overwhelmingly positive experience with the program. They especially appreciated the opportunity to work on “real world” issues in an interdisciplinary setting. They also expressed a desire for a longer program that extended beyond a single semester. We discuss the potential implications of these findings. [R]
74.131 LANSLEY, Stewart —
This article traces the history of ‘crowding out’, and its use as a justification for austerity and state deflation from its origins in the 1920s to its latest post-2010 incarnation. It examines why governments have kept turning to austerity and continue to justify it on the grounds that public sector activity crowds out more productive private activity, despite the accumulated evidence that this traditional pro-market formulation has failed to deliver its stated goals. It examines three other embedded forms of crowding out that have been highly damaging — leading to weakened social resilience and more fragile economies — but which have been ignored by both governments and mainstream political economists. [R]
74.132 LAWRENCE, Adria —
Is political opposition in monarchies different than in other types of autocracies? This article shows that monarchies are no less vulnerable to regime change than any other authoritarian regime — they fall via coups, collapse during war, and transform into democracies — but they are less likely than other types of autocracies to be overthrown by revolutionary protest. This reduced threat from the street arises from a unique institutional feature: Monarchies can democratize without destabilizing the leadership through transitioning to a democratic constitutional monarchy. The prospect of retaining the ruler appeals to opposition groups who value both democracy and stability, but it also has implications for their ability to organize and sustain mass protest. Monarchies have been extraordinarily common throughout history; investigating how monarchies transition is important for understanding the trajectories of modern states. [R]
74.133 LEITER, Debra —
Election forecasting has become the centerpiece of media coverage of elections. Yet for all the attention paid to forecasting, public understanding remains low and increasingly distrustful. We can improve citizen knowledge and comprehension and increase student engagement by giving students the opportunity to develop their own election forecast. However, the complex methodology associated with forecasting provides barriers for courses that are not methodologically oriented. In this paper I outline a strategy on how to teach forecasting and have students produce their own without the need of using complex quantitative methods. Students engage in qualitative assessment of quantitative data and develop their own forecast. This pedagogical approach gives students the handson learning they need to understand the intuition behind forecasting and increases their comprehension of models of elections and voting behavior. [R]
74.134 LEVITSKY, Steven ; WAY, Lucan A. —
Against widespread perceptions, the authors argue that democracy has proven remarkably resilient in the twenty-first century. Fears of a “reverse wave” or a global “authoritarian resurgence” have yet to be borne out. The vast majority of “third wave” democracies — those that adopted democratic institutions between 1975 and 2000 — have long outlived the favorable global conditions that enabled their creation. The authors attribute the resilience of third-wave democracies after the demise of the liberal West’s post–Cold War hegemony to economic development and urbanization, and also to the difficulty of consolidating and sustaining an emergent authoritarian regime under competitive political conditions. [R]
74.135 LEVY, Neil —
The widespread conviction that we are living in a post-truth era rests on two claims: that a large number of people believe things that are clearly false, and that their believing these things reflects a lack of respect for truth. In reality, however, fewer people believe clearly false things than surveys or social media suggest. In particular, relatively few people believe things that are widely held to be bizarre. Moreover, accepting false beliefs does not reflect a lack of respect for truth. Almost everyone’s beliefs are explained by rationally warranted trust in some sources rather than others. This allows us to explain why people have false beliefs. [R]
74.136 LEWIS, Jacob S. ; TOPAL, Sedef A. —
How does exposure to conflict events shape social trust? Research in political psychology predicts that conflict exacerbates group divisions, enhancing ingroup solidarities while simultaneously reducing outgroup trust. Experimental research has found support for these predictions, and yet measuring the impact of conflict on trust beyond the laboratory is difficult. For example, questions about the lasting salience of experimental treatments remain a challenge in the study of conflict. We develop an empirical strategy using geo-coded individual-level survey data from the Afrobarometer project and geo-coded conflict-event data. We draw spatial and temporal buffers around each survey respondent that allow us to test whether proximate exposure to conflict events correlates with lower social trust, as well as how far and long that salience lasts. We find that exposure to conflict reduces generalized and outgroup trust, as predicted. Contrary to our expectations, we find that it reduces ingroup trust. We investigate further and find that ingroup trust suffers most when respondents live in homogenous ethnic enclaves. Furthermore, we advance an argument that the effects of exposure to conflict are mitigated over distance and time. Our results indicate that the effect diminishes over both time and space. [R]
74.137 LI Zhao ; DISALVO, Richard W. —
An unprecedented number of major US companies announced changes to their campaign contributions following the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. We analyze the role of corporate stakeholders in these announcements as well as their implications for democratic institutions and business–government relations. Mirroring polarized public reactions to the Capitol insurrection, companies with more Democratic-leaning stakeholders (e.g., employees, consumers, shareholders) were more likely to publicly refuse contributing to Republican legislators who objected to the electoral college results. Moreover, these pledges held up in available campaign finance records through the third quarter of 2021, implying significant losses in corporate political action committee contributions for said Republican legislators. Given increasing polarization and heightened expectations of the civic responsibility of businesses, the partisanship of corporate stakeholders may prove important in mobilizing businesses to protect democratic institutions. However, such stakeholder pressure may also weaken businesses’ bipartisan legislative coalitions and compel corporate influence-seeking activities to go dark. [R, abr.]
74.138 LICHT, Hauke —
Established approaches to analyze multilingual text corpora require either a duplication of analysts’ efforts or high-quality machine translation (MT). In this paper, I argue that multilingual sentence embedding (MSE) is an attractive alternative approach to language-independent text representation. To support this argument, I evaluate MSE for cross-lingual supervised text classification. Specifically, I assess how reliably MSE-based classifiers detect manifesto sentences’ topics and positions compared to classifiers trained using bag-of-words representations of machine-translated texts, and how this depends on the amount of training data. These analyses show that when training data are relatively scarce (e.g., 20K or less-labeled sentences), MSE-based classifiers can be more reliable and are at least no less reliable than their MT-based counterparts. Furthermore, I examine how reliable MSE-based classifiers label sentences written in languages not in the training data, focusing on the task of discriminating sentences that discuss the issue of immigration from those that do not. [R, abr.]
74.139 LIN-GREENBERG, Erik —
Escalation is central to many international relations theories. Despite its cornerstone role, conceptualizing and measuring escalation has become increasingly complicated as technologies like cyber and drone warfare proliferate. Existing escalation research often fails to account for emerging technology, and studies that do are often technology specific, comparing a single “new” technology to “traditional” forces. This siloed approach overlooks variation in the means by which states use force and their relative ordering on the escalation ladder. To address this shortcoming, I introduce a means-based framework for characterizing escalation on the basis of the degree to which actions are physically present and visible. Drawing from an original survey fielded on a cross-national sample of foreign policy experts, I construct a more complete escalation ladder in which more physically present and visible actions fall at higher rungs. [R, abr.]
74.140 LINDGREN, Karl-Oskar ; OSKARSSON, Sven —
It is a well-established fact, from decades of research on political socialization, that the children of politically active parents are more likely to become politically active themselves. This poses a challenge for democracy, as it means that inequalities in political influence are reproduced across generations. The present study argues that this problem may be more severe than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reason for this is that previous research on the topic has focused almost exclusively on political transmission between parents and their children, whereas the role played by more distant forebears, such as grandparents, has been largely neglected. In this study, we use Swedish register data to analyze multigenerational associations in electoral participation. The empirical results clearly indicate that the traditional two-generation approach to the study of political transmission tends to underestimate intergenerational persistence in voting behavior. [R, abr.]
74.141 LITTLE, Andrew T. —
The central puzzle of persuasion is why a receiver would listen to a sender who they know is trying to change their beliefs or behavior. This article summarizes five approaches to solving this puzzle: (1) some messages are easier to send for those with favorable information (costly signaling), (2) the sender and receiver have common interest, (3) the sender messages are verifiable information, (4) the sender cares about their reputation for competence/honesty, and (5) the sender can commit to a messaging strategy (often called ‘Bayesian Persuasion’). After reviewing these approaches with common notation, I discuss which provide insight into prominent empirical findings on campaigns, partisan media, and lobbying. [R, abr.]
74.142 LITTLE, William T. H. —
There is an assumption in scholarship focused on seventeenth-century English political thought that the political ideology constructed by royalists writing during the Exclusion Crisis was similar to Robert Filmer’s patriarchalism. This paper contests this assumption by focusing on the inconsistencies between Filmer’s view of history and that of the Exclusion royalists. Filmer’s Adamic history necessitated a static conception of sovereignty that placed virtually no limits on the monarch. Exclusion royalists, however, adopted a fluid and changing view of sovereignty that placed limitations on monarchical power and was motivated by histories grounded in the ancient constitution or the conquest of 1066. [R]
74.143 LIU, Bingsheng ; QIN, Zengqiang ; ZHANG, Jinfeng —
As implementers, public officials have historically enjoyed substantial influence in the public policy process, but little attention has been paid to the effect of psychological elements on their attitudes towards implementing policy instruments. The authors argue that from a behavioural public administration perspective, public officials’ attitudes towards implementing certain policy instruments are not rational, but instead biased. Using two survey experiments on 1,024 Chinese public officials, this study examines the cognitive and motivational bias of public officials’ attitudes towards implementing policy instruments. The findings indicate that when public officials are presented with risk information in a negative framing, they are more reluctant to implement indirect policy instruments than direct ones, and this phenomenon becomes more pronounced when their public interest orientation is activated, rather than their personal interest orientation. The findings contribute to the theoretical understanding of the effect of psychological biases on public officials’ attitudes towards policy implementation. [R]
74.144 LIU, Guoer ; SHIRAITO, Yuki —
Conjoint analysis is widely used for estimating the effects of a large number of treatments on multidimensional decision-making. However, it is this substantive advantage that leads to a statistically undesirable property, multiple hypothesis testing. Existing applications of conjoint analysis except for a few do not correct for the number of hypotheses to be tested, and empirical guidance on the choice of multiple testing correction methods has not been provided. This paper first shows that even when none of the treatments has any effect, the standard analysis pipeline produces at least one statistically significant estimate of average marginal component effects in more than 90% of experimental trials. Then, we conduct a simulation study to compare three well-known methods for multiple testing correction, the Bonferroni correction, the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure, and the adaptive shrinkage (Ash). All three methods are more accurate in recovering the truth than the conventional analysis without correction. Moreover, the Ash method outperforms in avoiding false negatives, while reducing false positives similarly to the other methods. [R, abr.]
74.145 LIU, Yingyan, et al. —
With the improvement of people’s living standards and the awakening of environmental rights awareness, pollution and mass environmental incidents have become the focus of public attention. Using grounded theory analysis in qualitative research and multivariate statistical technology in quantitative research, taking residents and public officials of Shijiazhuang, Tangshan and Heng Shui as the research objects, Study 1 has defined the concept of the political cost of environmental problems (PCEP) and has constructed the PCEP scale by using the methods of interview and questionnaire survey, which provided sufficient theoretical explanation and empirical support for the research on the political cost of environmental problems. Study 2 has explored the relationship between PCEP and the environment-friendly behaviors, verified the applicability of the scale, and found the institutional PCEP, the organizational PCEP, the social PCEP, and the mass basic PCEP all have a positive impact on environment-friendly behaviors. [R]
74.146 LUTSCHER, Philipp M. —
Most authoritarian countries censor the press. As a response, many opposition and independent news outlets have found refuge on the Internet. Despite the global character of the Internet, news outlets are vulnerable to censorship in cyberspace. This study investigates Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on news websites in Venezuela and details how news reporting is related to DoS attacks in an attempt to censor content. For this empirical test, I monitored 19 Venezuelan news websites from November 2017 until June 2018 and continuously retrieved their content and status codes to infer DoS attacks. Statistical analyses show that news content correlates to DoS attacks. In the Venezuelan context, these news topics appear to be not only on protest and repression but also on opposition actors or other topics that question the legitimacy of the regime. By establishing these relationships, this study deepens our understanding of how modern technologies are used as censorship tools. [R]
74.147 LYNGGAARD, Kennet ; TRIANTAFILLOU, Peter —
Discourse analysis (DA) has established itself as a widely accepted and legitimate approach to policy analysis. It is used to study issues such as the role of knowledge in policymaking, political cleavages and coalitions, and legitimacy. However, the proponents of DA have generally been reluctant to provide strategic policy advice. This reluctance limits the utility of DA for providing new and partly alternative policy ideas and advice on how to propagate new policies and to consolidate existing ones. This paper aims to extend the scope of DA to include advice that may change or modify how discourses are utilised in shaping policy. It elaborates on seven types of discursive agency allowing policy actors (including politicians, policy strategists, public managers, and citizen groups) to either consolidate existing policy or propagate new policy by manoeuvring within a given discursive framework, navigating between different and conflicting discourses, or transforming existing discourses. [R] [See Abstr. 74.44]
74.148 MacAULAY, Margaret, et al. —
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many leaders claimed that their public health policy decisions were ‘following the science’; however, the literature on evidence-based policy problematises the idea that this is a realistic or desirable form of governance. This article examines why leaders make such claims using Christopher Hood’s (2011) blame avoidance theory. Based on a qualitative content analysis of two national newspapers in each of Australia, Canada and the UK, we gathered and focused on unique moments when leaders claimed to ‘follow the science’ in the first six months of the pandemic. We applied Hood’s theory to identify the types of blame avoidance strategies used for issues such as mass event cancellation, border closures, face masks, and in-person learning. Politicians most commonly used ‘follow the science’ to deflect blame onto processes and people. When leaders’ claims to ‘follow the science’ confuse the public as to who chooses and who should be held accountable for those decisions, this slogan risks undermining trust in science, scientific advisors, and, at its most extreme, representative government. [R, abr.]
74.149 MACHIN, Amanda ; RUSER, Alexander —
Despite widespread acknowledgement of the value of sustainability, the transition towards more sustainable economies and societies remains a challenge around the world. Civil societies play an important role not only in supporting government efforts on sustainability by ‘filling gaps’ and raising social awareness, but also in pioneering new practices and disrupting particular governmental or corporate strategies, as well as engaging and empowering previously marginalised individuals and groups. Yet civil society is not always a champion of sustainability nor of democracy; these actors may of course also destabilise innovations, depoliticise sustainability issues by reifying certain concepts or approaches and reinforce social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion that can undermine any transformative potential and bolster the unsustainable status quo. This Special Issue is therefore dedicated to interrogating what we see as the ambiguous, yet critical, role played by civil societies in sustainability politics. [R, abr.] [Introduction to a thematic issue of the same title, edited by the authors. See Abstr. 74.15, 205, 1060, 1358, 1436, 1451]
74.150 MADER, Matthias ; SCHOEN, Harald —
A neglected topic in empirical research on national identity is its stability at the individual level, and this is especially true for its content, that is, the meaning elements that people associate with the concept of nation. In this article, we study the stability of key dimensions of national-identity content. We ask three simple questions: How stable is national-identity content — as captured in the ethnic/civic framework — at the level of individual citizens? Are there clear differences in stability across subgroups? What are the implications of interindividual differences in stability? Analyzing data from four waves of a large-scale panel survey of German citizens (N = 4,654) collected over a five-year period (2016-2021), we show that there is high but not perfect stability of the degree to which individuals subscribe to ethnic and civic criteria of nationhood. Second, we find little difference in stability as a function of several theoretically selected characteristics. Third, we show that the association between national-identity content and relevant political attitudes (immigration attitudes and far-right party support) increases with intraindividual stability. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how national-identity content is shaped and mobilized and how it can influence political attitudes and behaviors. [R]
74.151 MARCIANO, Reut ; CRAFT, Jonathan —
This article develops the concept of policy advisory system (PAS) management in recognition of the need to better theorise and empirically study how governments approach the complex systems of advice around them. In our analysis, we go beyond the conceptualisation of degrees of government’s “control” over advisory sources. We use the dimensions of government agency and discretion and argue that PAS management falls into four forms: authoritative, dependent, laissez-faire, or absent. Using evidence from Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, we explore how governments operationalise these approaches through a range of choices and practices. The analysis points to the need to recognise that attempts to manage these systems occur both proactively and reactively with clear differences in the broad or narrow scope of management efforts. [R]
74.152 MARTIN, Alexander P. —
Existing literature on using humor in teaching identifies several social and pedagogical benefits, ranging from making students feel more comfortable and interested in the subject matter to facilitating a critical pedagogy approach. However, there are several risks associated with humor attempts that are detrimental to learning and to student experiences. Through analyzing qualitative data from three focus groups (FGs) with 2nd and 3rd year Politics and/or International Relations (Pol & IR) students, this article advances a student-centric understanding of the pitfalls of using humor in content delivery. While humor is often subjective, timing, frequency, established conventions, subject matter, and lecture persona all impact how students perceive humor used by lecturers. This article juxtaposes existing literature on approaches to using humor in teaching, and its pedagogical benefits, with empirical evidence of student perspectives and expectations to highlight the practical challenges and risks of including humor attempts in effective Pol & IR teaching. [R]
74.153 MAVROT, Céline ; HADORN, Susanne ; SAGER, Fritz —
The motivation of this article is to address the ambivalent position of policy analysis when it intervenes in the real-world policy process through policy evaluation. It tackles the underresearched question of the challenges faced by policy analysis in relation to applied research mandates. It argues that policy analysis is constantly at risk of instrumentalisation by politico-administrative players. The article is based on the evaluation of the medical cannabis policy in Switzerland as a case study. The results point out four specific challenges faced by applied policy analysis: political pressure, scientific integrity, access to sensitive data, and epistemic legitimacy. However, applied policy analysis can contribute to de-escalating controversies by presenting a bigger and contextualised picture of the considered political issues. Policy evaluation can identify deficient implementation processes, but also wider mismatches among legislative and societal processes. Hence, although evidence is subordinated to other factors in the decision-making process, evaluations provide an outside perspective, which can help solving controversies around policies. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.44]
74.154 McKINNELL, Ryan Alexander —
This article clarifies the intellectual origins of Canadian parliamentary government by situating Confederation within a specific strand of liberal political thought. My argument is that the Fathers of Confederation adhered to the political theory of parliamentarianism. Though liberal constitutionalists, the Fathers of Confederation expressly defended a parliamentary political framework that they considered superior to the American system of checks and balances — one characterized by a powerful elected assembly restrained by an unelected upper house, responsible ministers serving in Parliament, and a constitutional monarch. In elucidating the theory of parliamentarianism that underlies the political project of Confederation, my goal is not only to examine a problem in nineteenth-century Canadian political thought but to ground our current political situation within a larger historical perspective. [R]
74.155 McLAUGHLIN, Alex —
An increasingly popular approach to global justice claims we should be ‘integrationist,’ where integrationism represents an attempt to unify our theorising between different domains of global politics. These political theorists have argued that we cannot identify plausible principles in one domain, such as climate justice, which are not sensitive to general moral concerns. This paper argues we ought to reject the concept of integrationism. It shows that integrationism is either trivial, or it obscures relevant disagreement by ignoring the distinctive methodological and substantive commitments held by its opponents. The paper then argues that the relevant disagreement is actually about the role of practices for political philosophy and, as such, should be framed in terms of the distinction between practice-dependent and practice-independent theory. Finally, I provide my own account of that distinction, identifying a practice-dependent claim that those concerned about the narrowness of prominent accounts of global justice should target. [R]
74.156 McMAHON, Richard ; ZHANG, Yixuan —
Academic EU studies (EUS) is both a single transnational community and an assembly of separate national communities, each with different preoccupations, traditions and representations of European integration. This article examines how Chinese EUS represents European integration, based on interviews with leading scholars and a systematic study of the most cited English and Chinese-language articles. Drawing on sociology of knowledge and science studies work on the social sciences, the article contextualizes these representations within the material conditions and historical development of Chinese EUS as a network of scholars and institutions. Two findings are particularly interesting. First, EUS scholarship in China resembles Western EUS in important ways. Like Western counterparts, Chinese EUS scholars focus on EU politics and policy, relegating China-EU relations and EU issues with a particular impact on China to a secondary interest. The Chinese scholars also share the general normative bias in EUS towards representing European integration in a positive light, especially if they co-author with Western scholars. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.1089]
74.157 McMONAGLE, Robert J. ; SAVITZ, Ryan —
We examine the impact of two types of active learning — traditional standardized debate and the newer value-line debate, both under-studied in political science pedagogy — on students. Our study argues that valueline debate is as valuable as the more structured debate, based on student perceptions of learning outcomes through Likert-format survey data (n = 105) across 8 key variables. Therefore, we argue that employment of a combination of debate styles in the classroom is a sensible pedagogical approach. We also argue that upper-level students rate debating experiences higher than introductory-level students rate theirs. In short, one can infer from our research that faculty in a normative sense should be reassured about employing either the newer value-line approach or traditional structured debate type. [R]
74.158 MEIBAUER, Gustav —
Following scholarship on IR’s ‘historical turn’ as well as on neorealism and neoclassical realism, this article finds fault particularly in neorealism’s implicit reliance on the historically contingent but incompletely conceptualised transmission of systemic factors into state behaviour. Instead, it suggests that neoclassical realism (NCR) is well-suited to leveraging ‘history’ in systematic and general explanation. This article interrogates two routes towards a historically sensitive NCR (intervening variables and structural modifiers), and how they enable different operationalisations of ‘history’ as a sequence of events, cognitive tool or collective narrative. The first route suggests history underpins concepts and variables currently used by neoclassical realists. Here, history is more easily operationalised and allows a clearer view at learning and emulation processes. It is also more clearly scoped, and therefore less ‘costly’ in terms of paradigmatic distinctiveness. The second route, in which history modifies structural incentives and constraints, is more theoretically challenging especially in terms of differentiating NCR from constructivist approaches, but lends itself to theorising systemic change. [R, abr.]
74.159 MELLO, Brian —
Political science is ideally positioned to advance integrative learning, an initiative in higher education that fosters students’ abilities to integrate different fields of study in exploring complex real world problems. This essay focuses on ways integrative learning can be incorporated into undergraduate political science classes by developing a narrative of revisions to the curriculum of an introductory European government and politics course. Center the position of the Muslim immigrant experience in Europe while promoting an integrative form of political science that crosses subfields within the discipline, and integrates differing modes of inquiry invites students to think critically about immigration, the rise of the populist right, Liberalism and its limits, and the future of European integration. While this redesigned focus, I suggest, provides a useful model for rethinking approaches to the teaching of European politics, the main focus of the article is on promoting the foregrounding of integrative learning course design practices that can be adapted to other introductory undergraduate political science classes. [R]
74.160 METZ, Florence ; BRANDENBERGER, Laurence —
Polities shape power structures and interaction patterns between actors in policymaking processes. Although the social fabric of interactions is key to successful policymaking, it remains unclear which relational structures are typically found across political systems. By adopting a network approach, we analyse differences in power structures and interaction patterns across four policy networks in German and Swiss consensual-federal, French majoritarian–unitary, and hybrid Dutch consensual-unitary democracies. Using survey data from 149 state and non-state actors, we fit exponential random graph models and calculate predicted probabilities to compare the four networks. Results show that the consensus democracies institutionalize neighbourhoods of networks where actors share power and collaborate with opponents. Our case of a majoritarian democracy illustrates power concentration with restricted access to competitors, limiting the need to interact and search for compromises with opponents. [R, abr.]
74.161 MILBURN, Josh ; VAN GOOZEN, Sara —
Animals have been almost entirely absent from scholarly appraisals of the ethics of war. Just-war theory concerns when communities may permissibly resort to war; who may wage war; who they may harm in war; and what kinds of harm they may cause. Each question can be complicated by animals’ inclusion. After introducing just-war theory and the argument for an animal-inclusive just-war theory, this paper reviews ethical appraisals of war on animals’ behalf and wars against animals. It then turns to consider harm to and use of animals in war. It concludes by considering questions in the ethics of war beyond just-war theory as traditionally construed. [R] [See Abstr. 74.1156]
74.162 MILLER, David —
States claim to have authority over prospective immigrants who have not yet been admitted but are nonetheless expected to comply with immigration law. But what could ground such an authority claim? The service conception of authority defended by Raz appears not to apply in this case. Nor can it be argued that immigrants give their consent to the state by applying for admission. Another approach appeals to the practice of reciprocity between states in respecting each other’s immigration regimes, but many immigrants will fall outside of its scope. Instead, the article defends the view that the natural duty of justice requires immigrants to comply with the state’s immigration regime provided that it is reasonably just. This does not require that the immigrant herself should have authorised the regime through democratic participation. However, the natural duty argument has to be qualified by recognising that some migrants can legitimately appeal to necessity as grounds for breaching the duty and entering unauthorised. [R]
74.163 MISHOR, Efrat ; VIGODA-GADOT, Eran ; MIZRAHI, Shlomo —
This article investigates the importance of civic engagement during emergencies. We consider various individual-level factors such as trust, risk cognition, fears about the emergency and cost–benefit analyses of engagement as factors that motivate citizens to become engaged. We argue that governments should recognise the value of community initiatives and civic engagement in coping with emergencies. Our empirical investigation uses data collected in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results demonstrate that trust in government and interpersonal trust may influence citizens’ perceptions of engagement during emergencies but have no effect on engagement behaviour. However, risk cognition and cost– benefit analyses are better predictors of future engagement intentions during emergencies. These insights may improve our understanding of community resilience and the ability of individuals to bounce back after emergencies. [R]
74.164 MOCCA, Elisabetta —
The EC/EU has been an eminently nation-led project. However, running in parallel, the European municipalist movement, braiding relations among cities across Europe, has sought to build an influential political role for municipalities within the European polity. The study of European municipal cooperation has become a consolidated thread of research in European and Urban Studies. Nonetheless, contributions on the topic tend to focus on the pragmatic aspects of municipal collaborations, glossing over the ideological foundations of European Municipalism. Therefore, by challenging the dominant scholarly view, this article contends that European Municipalism may be considered as a ‘thin-centred’ ideology. To support this argument, the ideological structure of European Municipalism is unbundled by throwing light on its conceptual components. As a result, this article construes European Municipalism as a ‘thin-centred’ political ideology, which postulates universal city-to-city mutualism and proposes a European counter-project built on a polycentric and diffuse conception of power. [R]
74.165 MOORE, Alfred —
“Post-truth” politics is often framed as a failure of the competition of ideas. Yet there are different ways of thinking about the competition of ideas, with different implications for the way we understand its benefits and risks. The dominant way of framing the competition of ideas is in terms of a marketplace, which, however, obscures the different ways ideas can compete. Several theorists can help us think through the competition of ideas. J. S. Mill, for example, avoided the metaphor of the market by focusing, instead, on competition as the testing of arguments in adversarial encounters before a critical audience. Georg Simmel, alternatively, conceived of competition as a form of indirect conflict, where two individuals strive in parallel to gain audience approval. This view emphasizes innovation and creativity in the competition of “all for all.” More recently, theorists have developed the market logic of competition by thinking of a marketplace not for ideas but for rationalizations. This articulates some of the features of Simmel’s view of competition, but underestimates the degrees of constraint required to secure the goods of competition. [R, abr.]
74.166 MORAIS DE SAì E SILVA, Michelle ; PORTO DE OLIVEIRA, Osmany —
The policy transfer literature has addressed the reasons, processes, and impacts of traveling policies. As some globally diffused policies enter their third decade of circulation, it becomes pertinent to ask: How does diffusion change over time? To examine the relevance of time for policy transfer studies, this article compares the long-lasting diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers and of Participatory Budgeting. The analysis presented allows for the understanding of how policy diffusion mutates to adapt to new constraints in a large time scale and policy transfer space. It also allows for a broader understanding of the transnational policy process. [R]
74.167 MULDOON, James ; RAEKSTAD, Paul —
Digital platforms and application software have changed how people work in a range of industries. Empirical studies of the gig economy have raised concerns about new systems of algorithmic management exercised over workers and how these alter the structural conditions of their work. Drawing on the republican literature, we offer a theoretical account of algorithmic domination and a framework for understanding how it can be applied to ride hail and food delivery services in the on-demand economy. We argue that certain algorithms can facilitate new relationships of domination by sustaining a socio-technical system in which the owners and managers of a company dominate workers. This analysis has implications for the growing use of algorithms throughout the gig economy and broader labor market. [R]
74.168 MULKEEN, Nicola —
Earlier generations can jeopardise the opportunities, resources and wellbeing of their successors. Indeed, there is a growing unease with earlier generations leaving large-scale public debts to be paid by younger generations, and many worry that our policies and institutions are being shaped to advantage the interests of older generations at the expense of the young. While much theoretical (and empirical) literature now exists on the many ways in which earlier generations can unjustly jeopardise the well-being of their successors, very little has appeared on how the former’s decisions can generate specifically exploitative relationships. This is all the more surprising, in light of the fact that very large theoretical literatures exist on both intergenerational justice and exploitation. The aim of the article is to bring these two literatures into long overdue contact with one another and analyse an under-researched and yet fundamental problem — intergenerational exploitation. The article answers two questions. (1) What exactly is intergenerational exploitation? (2) What makes this type of exploitation wrong? [R]
74.169 MÜLLER, Jan-Werner —
This research note suggests a number of ways in which architecture and the built environment more broadly might be understood as ideological. [R]
74.170 MÜLLER-CREPON, Carl —
Prominent arguments hold that African states’ geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. To test this argument, I collect comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5×5 km grid using time-varying data on roads and administrative units (1966-2016). I use these data to estimate the effect of changes in travel times to capitals on local education provision, infant mortality rates, and nightlight emissions. Within the same location, decreases in travel times to its capitals are robustly associated with improved development outcomes. The article advances the measurement of state capacity and contributes to understanding its effects on human welfare. [R]
74.171 MUSSELL, Linda —
In Canada, there is renewed attention to the violence experienced by Indigenous peoples in residential schools, by police, through hyper-imprisonment and child removal, in hospitals, and in the contemporary education system. All of these issues are interlinked and outcomes of the carceral state — defined as the policing, monitoring, surveillance, criminalization and imprisonment of people, especially Indigenous and other racialized peoples. In this article, I define and illustrate what the carceral state looks like in Canada. I articulate the current approach to studying the carceral in political science, note the paucity of research in the Canadian context and show where attention has been cast previously. I describe an improved approach to studying the carceral, arguing that a decolonized approach to studying the carceral must be relational and abolitionist, seeking to reduce and eliminate the use of carceral interventions. [R]
74.172 NADEAU, Richard ; DAOUST, Jean-François ; DASSONNEVILLE, Ruth —
Citizens who voted for a party that won the election are more satisfied with democracy than those who did not. This winner–loser gap has recently been found to vary with the quality of electoral democracy: the higher the quality of democracy, the smaller the gap. However, we do not know what drives this relationship. Is it driven by losers, winners, or both? And Why? Linking our work to the literature on motivated reasoning and macro salience and benefiting from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project — covering 163 elections in 51 countries between 1996 and 2018, our results show that the narrower winner-loser gap in wellestablished electoral democracies is not only a result of losers being more satisfied with democracy, but also of winners being less satisfied with their victory. Our findings carry important implications since a narrow winner-loser gap appears as a key feature of healthy democratic systems. [R]
74.173 NATALIZIA, Gabriele ; TERMINE, Lorenzo —
The comments by F. Lawson and M. Legrenzi to our article "Tracing the modes of China’s revisionism in the Indo-Pacific: a comparison with pre- 1941 Shōwa Japan" [ibid 51(1), March 2021; Abstr. 71.5859] contribute to moving the debate on revisionism in international politics a step forward. Their notes on the several issues affecting the International Relations understanding of the phenomenon are on the same page as ours and we appear to share similar doubts and a like-minded curiosity on the subject. While grasping some key topics and shedding light on crucial shortcomings in the literature on international change, power transitions and international order, however, their observations do not come unproblematic. In this reply to their timely remarks, we highlight the perks of their argument but also stress how this falls through in providing a complete framework to understand revisionism in international politics. [R]
74.174 NEUNER, Fabian G. ; RAMIREZ, Mark D. —
Recent scholarship has documented changing norms toward political tolerance and an increase in intolerant beliefs in the US. Descriptive norm theory attributes attitudinal and behavioral changes to beliefs about how we perceive other people think and act. Applied to political tolerance, increasing the perception that society is more or less tolerant should result in corresponding changes among individuals. Neglected from this discussion, however, is the distinction between norms that are applied universally and norms that are applied to specific targets. Four studies show mixed support for descriptive norm theory with norms altering individual tolerance judgments mostly when applied universally. Norms aimed at a particularistic group fail to change tolerance judgments suggesting an important limitation to norm influence. Contrary to expectations, we uncover a reversal effect among Democrats whereby exposure to universalistic norms of intolerance leads to higher levels of tolerance. [R]
74.175 NEWMAN, Joshua ; MINTROM, Michael —
Scholarship on evidence-based policy, a subset of the policy analysis literature, largely assumes information is produced and consumed by humans. However, due to the expansion of artificial intelligence in the public sector, debates no longer capture the full range concerns. Here, we derive a typology of arguments on evidence-based policy that performs two functions: taken separately, the categories serve as directions in which debates may proceed, in light of advances in technology; taken together, the categories act as a set of frames through which the use of evidence in policy making might be understood. Using a case of welfare fraud detection in the Netherlands, we show how the acknowledgement of divergent frames can enable a holistic analysis of evidence use in policy making that considers the ethical issues inherent in automated data processing. We argue that such an analysis will enhance the real-world relevance of the evidence-based policy paradigm. [R] [See Abstr. 74.44]
74.176 NICHOLLS, Kate —
This essay reviews three recent books that address a range of policy issues currently affecting politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dominic O’Sullivan’s Sharing the Sovereign illustrates how treaties between states and Indigenous peoples can provide the basis for power-sharing arrangements across various spheres of public policy. Paul Spoonley’s The New New Zealand outlines the profound immigration-driven demographic changes experienced in recent decades and the failures of decision-makers to adjust to this new reality. Max Rashbrooke’s Too Much Money analyses the issue of social class in New Zealand and the dangers of an apparently increasing class divide. The essay outlines some of these arguments in detail and evaluates each contribution to both scholarship and actual public policy debates as New Zealand arguably enters a more contentious political moment. [R]
74.177 O’HARA, Michael ; HAUN, Phil —
The Decision for War (DfW) game provides an opportunity to explore how information affects the occurrence of war — in theory and in practice. Gameplay, and the subsequent discussion it facilitates, provides the opportunity to explore topics such as differences in risk taking, strategic choice as a function of other’s expected actions, differing perceptions of loss or gain, and updating prior assumptions through experience, along with various psychological and cognitive biases that may preclude individuals and states reaching negotiating agreements that avoid violence. In an academic classroom setting, these questions of information and risk could complement lessons in International Relations, History, Conflict Resolution, Psychology, and Strategic Studies. [R]
74.178 O’SULLIVAN, Luke —
Film matters to political theory, Davide Panagia has argued, because its unique properties as a medium create the possibility of experiencing ideas about politics in a way that the arguments of textual political theory cannot convey. This paper disputes this account by drawing on work on both the nature of political theory and on the concept of visual argument. It uses the work of Gilles Deleuze to argue that even if the filmic image cannot be understood on the analogy of language, insofar as film seeks to convey political ideas, these are always at least implicitly linguistic. Using examples drawn from classic and contemporary political films, the paper provides a classification of political films by genre according to the same criteria as written works of political theory. [R, abr.]
74.179 OESTMAN, Jared ; WILSON, Rick K. —
Do unbiased third-party peacekeepers build trust between groups in the aftermath of conflict? Theoretically, we point out that unbiased peacekeepers are the most effective at promoting trust. To isolate the causal effect of bias on trust, we use an iterated trust game in a laboratory setting. Groups that previously engaged in conflict are put into a setting in which they choose to trust or reciprocate any trust. Our findings suggest that biased monitors impede trust while unbiased monitors promote cooperative exchanges over time. The findings contribute to the peacekeeping literature by highlighting impartiality as an important condition under which peacekeepers build trust post-conflict. [R]
74.180 ORIOLA, Hugo —
After decades of research, discussions related to the link between political events and monetary policy have been ongoing. The purpose of this study is to examine whether electorally induced cycles in monetary policy exist. To achieve this, a unique panel dataset comprising 110 countries over 32 periods (1985-2016) was constructed, incorporating election periods and political regimes. This study provides evidence that elections influence monetary policy in developed and developing countries. Specifically, the study reveals that the growth of monetary mass (measured as the growth rate of M1) is significantly higher during pre-electoral periods. On average, the growth of monetary mass is between 1.1% and 2% higher during the 12 months prior to a national election. Furthermore, the study conducts an extensive analysis on the type of institutional frameworks that may mitigate these political monetary cycles. it suggest that free and fair elections, left-wing incumbents and the seniority of central banks contributes to reducing the magnitude these political monetary cycles. [R]
74.181 ÖSTERMAN, Marcus ; ROBINSON, Darrel —
Political science has long viewed education as an instrumental factor in developing support for democracy and beneficial for democratization. However, governments, both democratic and authoritarian, have substantial control over the curriculum and develop education institutions with the specific aim to instill in students the norms and values that underpin the regime. With this in mind, this study asks, does the effect of education vary by the political regime in which education was undertaken? We use a quasi-experimental approach exploiting European compulsory schooling reforms, implemented under both democratic and authoritarian regimes, to answer this question. We find that education has no effect on principle and functional support for democracy, but that education’s effect on satisfaction with democracy is conditional on regime type. For those educated under a democratic regime, education led to greater satisfaction with democracy, whereas those educated under an authoritarian regime became less satisfied with democracy. [R]
74.182 OVADYA, Aviv —
AI advances are shattering assumptions that both our democracies and our international order rely on. Reinventing our “democratic infrastructure” is thus critically necessary—and the author argues that it is also possible. Four interconnected and accelerating democratic paradigm shifts illustrate the potential: representative deliberations, AI augmentation, democracy-as-a-service, and platform democracy. Such innovations provide a viable path toward not just reimagining traditional democracies but enabling the transnational and even global democratic processes critical for addressing the broader challenges posed by destabilizing AI advances— including those relating to AI alignment and global agreements. We can and must rapidly invest in such democratic innovation if we are to ensure that our democratic capacity increases with our power. [R] [See Abstr. 74.26]
74.183 PANAGIA, Davide —
The following paper asks what forms of critical political science are possible given the advent of Machine Learning algorithms like ChatGPT? The technical conditions that provoke this question stem from the fact that such automated systems do not generate identities and representations (as do traditional media with which critical political science conventionally contends) but produce instead rendered outputs based on Bayesian probability calculations. Thus the challenge before us is to theorize criticism vis-a-vis the technical ontologies of the algorithm dispositif. [R]
74.184 PELKE, Lars —
Democracy is under threat across the globe and a third wave of autocratization manifests in democratic regression and authoritarian hardening. However, although universities have been important pro-democracy hotbeds, the nexus between academic freedom and autocratization has generated little scholarly attention. This article presents the first systematic investigation of the influence of academic freedom on the onset of autocratization. In particular, it reveals how academic freedom protects regimes from an onset of autocratization and argues that more academic freedom reduces the risk of autocratization by imprinting a pro-democracy bias on students and researchers. This article’s research design combines two studies. Study I tests whether graduates that were socialized under more academic freedom develop more democratic support, which I analyse using data from the World Values Surveys and linear fixed effects models. Study II tests whether more academic freedom reduces the onset probability of autocratization using V-Dem data and binomial-response GLMs. [R, abr.]
74.185 PEÑA-MIGUEL, Noemí ; CUADRADO-BALLESTEROS, Beatriz —
This article analyses the effect of political factors on the use of Public Private Partnerships in developing countries. According to a sample of 80 low- and middle-income countries over the period 1995-2017, our findings suggest that Public Private Partnership projects are affected by political ideology, the strength of the government and electoral cycles. Concretely, they tend to be used by left-wing governments to a greater extent than governments with other ideologies. Public Private Partnerships also tend to be more frequently used by fragmented governments and when there is greater political competition. There is also some evidence (although slight) on the relevance of the proximity of elections in explaining Public Private Partnerships in developing countries. [R]
74.186 PIPPENGER, Nathan —
Bounded solidarity has recently been criticized on the grounds that it valorizes homogeneity, arbitrarily prioritizes compatriots over outsiders, and is ultimately unnecessary to democracy. In response, defenders argue that solidarity is valuable because it supports the welfare state or a republican ideal of nondomination. This article argues that such defenses fail to demonstrate that bounded solidarity is not superfluous in the way that critics have claimed, leaving the ideal vulnerable to dismissal. Drawing on deliberative democratic theory, it shows that bounded solidarity among citizens is necessary in order to establish the epistemic preconditions of democratic self-determination. Understood in epistemic terms, bounded solidarity — a disposition among citizens to gather, and assign weight to, the perspectives of other citizens — deserves support because it is inextricable from the valuable goal of democratic self-rule. [R]
74.187 PORTO DE OLIVEIRA, Osmany ; OSORIO GONNET, Cecilia —
With the growth of globalization, comparative policy analysis became increasingly challenging. The contemporary transnational nature of public policymaking processes, which encompasses policies, fundings, individuals, and organizations crossing borders, with its instruments and ideas, extends the logic of territorially circumscribed phenomena. Understanding these movements lies at the core of the fast-growing field of analysis: policy transfer, diffusion, mobilities, and circulation. The purpose of this Special Issue is to broaden and deepen the debate on the transnational circulation of policy models from a comparative perspective. This Special Issue proposes a comparative strategy of analysis for policy transfer that considers three elements: policy instruments, policy transfer spaces, and time. These elements are presented in detail in this introduction, providing an innovative perspective, updating and expanding the classical policy transfer framework posited by Dolowitz and Marsh over two decades ago. This Special Issue brings together original research articles, prepared by diverse group of authors from different regions around the world (from both Global North and South). [R]
74.188 RADAELLI, Claudio M. —
Policy agendas are often cast in semantic constructions that portray them as universally desirable outcomes. These semantic constructions protect and reinforce the power of dominant coalitions and make it hard to pursue alternatives. The semantic space is entirely occupied by the dominant concepts. At the same time, within the dominant coalition, ideational conflict is muted by decontesting concepts. Drawing on political theory, I show the presence of this double act of reducing the semantic space and decontesting concepts with the case of ‘better regulation’. Then I briefly extend the argument to other terms such as policy coherence, agile governance, smart cities and social value judgements. The critical discussion of the implications of dominant language brings in transparency, allows other coalitions to articulate their vision in a discursive level-playing-field, and offers citizens the possibility to discuss what is really ‘better’ and ‘for whom’. [R] [See Abstr. 74.]44
74.189 RADEAN, Marius —
The standard practice in discussing results has shifted from coefficients to substantive quantities of interest. Hypothesis testing nowadays entails computing substantive effects with the 95% confidence interval (CI) for alternative scenarios and comparing them. Absent an evaluation of the difference in estimates, current practice often cannot provide a definitive answer. When CIs overlap, the estimates may or may not be statistically different. This ambiguity invites mistakes, as analysts turn to ill-advised conjectures to infer whether estimates are distinct. My literature survey indicates this is a widespread problem, with more than half of the articles not providing the evidence required to assess significance of differences. I expand the SDI method to accommodate unpaired sample data, asymmetric distributions, and for substantive significance differences larger than zero. [R, abr.]
74.190 RAESS, Damian —
This article investigates the effect of government partisanship on fiscal policy outputs during the three international economic crises of 1981-1984, 1990-1994 and 2008-2013. Encompassing 19-23 advanced democracies, the statistical analysis suggests that partisan effects have increased over time and are characterized, in the two last crises, by a “new asymmetry” whereby left governments pursued more contractionary fiscal policies than non-left governments over the course of the business cycle. Furthermore, it attributes left governments’ endorsement of austere fiscal policies to the constraining effects of financial markets in the context of high/surging debt. This is supported by qualitative analysis of select government responses to the Global Financial Crisis, shedding new light on the new austerity that started in the early 2010s. The ideological mix with political partisanship during hard times surely is confusing to ordinary citizens. The article cautiously points to a neglected yet important international economic origin of our political discontents. [R]
74.191 RANDMA-LIIV, Tiina —
This study investigates the institutionalization of e-participation initiatives in six European countries — Estonia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Spain — using a multiple case study. The following research questions are addressed: How have recently established e-participation initiatives been institutionalized in public administrations? What are the formal and informal aspects of their institutionalization? It is concluded that the adoption of a digital solution does not in itself trigger a change in the policy-making process because the institutionalization of eparticipation is not a linear process. The formal institutionalization increases the sustainability, transparency, and throughput legitimacy of eparticipation and allows citizen proposals to be handled in a standardized way. Although the formal institutionalization of e-participation is key for an institutional change towards deliberative democracy, it needs to be accompanied by informal institutionalization through the supporting ideas, values, and preferences of politicians and public officials who have the power to change public institutions. [R]
74.192 RATKOVIC, Marc —
Valid inference in an observational study requires a correct control specification, but a correct specification is never known. I introduce a method that constructs a control vector from the observed data that, when included in a linear regression, adjusts for several forms of bias. These include nonlinearities and interactions in the background covariates, biases induced by heterogeneous treatment effects, and specific forms of interference. The first is new to political science; the latter two are original contributions. I incorporate random effects, a set of diagnostics, and robust standard errors. With additional assumptions, the estimates allow for causal inference on both binary and continuous treatment variables. In total, the model provides a flexible means to adjust for biases commonly encountered in our data, makes minimal assumptions, returns efficient estimates, and can be implemented through publicly available software. [R]
74.193 REES, Peter —
This article examines the relevance of rhetorical analysis for the theory and practice of rights-claiming. Recent work in the field of human rights proposes that what is important about rights is not what they ‘are’ but what they ‘do’. Utilising performative theory, they suggest that rights-claiming is best understood as a perlocutionary practice of persuasion. The question is, ‘How might rights claims be most persuasive?’ This article applies insights from the field of rhetoric to investigate how practices of rightsclaiming by migrants in France contest French citizenship. It argues that rights claims are ethico-political negotiations of a political situation and that such practices are persuasive when they mobilise transcendent principles embedded within particular political communities. Rhetorical analysis explains how rights can be both inventive and efficacious. In so doing, this article extends the human rights literature by providing a refined rights-claiming analytic. [R]
74.194 REILLY, Jack Lyons ; BELK, Jack K., Jr. —
Experimentalists and survey researchers regularly measure the makeup and size of respondent personal discussion networks to learn about the social context in which citizens make political choices. When measuring these personal networks, some scholars use question prompts that specifically ask respondents about whom they discuss “politics” with, while others use more general prompts that ask respondents about whom they discuss “important matters” with. Prior research suggests that “political” discussion network prompts create self-reported networks that are substantively similar to “important matters” prompts. We conduct a nationally representative survey experiment to re-evaluate this question. Our results suggest that, although the size of networks generated by the two questions may be similar on average, the two questions generate different response distributions overall. In particular, respondents interested in politics report larger political discussion networks than general discussion networks, and respondents uninterested in politics report smaller political discussion networks than general discussion networks. [R]
74.195 REMINGTON, Thomas F. —
The basic premise of liberalism, that a market economy and liberal democracy are mutually reinforcing, is under attack. High inequality, deep dislocations due to globalization and technology advances, and right-wing populism threaten it. But much of what is called liberalism is a neoliberal project that has dominated policymaking since the early 1980s. The rebuilding of the German economy after the Second World War shows that an entirely different model of liberalism, embodied in the “social market economy” ideal, is possible. For liberalism to work, however, we must recognize that a market economy serves society and not the other way around, and that competition in the market arena and political arena helps preserve freedom. [R]
74.196 RENIC, Neil C. ; KAEMPF, Sebastian —
In this article, we argue in favour of a conceptual expansion of the Just War idea of ‘due care’, to include the foreseeable, but indirect harm generated by Western force protection. This harm includes the phenomenon of ‘casualty displacement warfare’ — circumstances in which the prioritisation and relative success of Western force protection incentivises some Western adversaries to redirect more of their own violence away from Western soldiers and onto civilians. Primary moral responsibility for such violence should be allocated to those who violate the principle of noncombatant immunity, whatever their motivations. Critically though, we argue that Western militaries do bear some indirect culpability for the conflict conditions that structure such violence. These same militaries, we argue, are morally duty bound to do what they feasibly can to reduce the risks of casualty displacement, even if this necessitates a relaxation of their own commitment to force protection. [R]
74.197 RITHOLTZ, Samuel ; BUXTON, Rebecca —
This research note argues that political theorists of refuge ought to consider the experiences of refugees after they have received asylum in the Global North. Currently, much of the literature concerning the duties of states toward refugees implicitly adopts a blanket approach, rather than considering how varied identities may affect the remedies available to displaced people. Given the prevalence of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in the Global North, and the growing norm of dissident persecution in foreign territory, protection is not guaranteed after either territorial or legal admission. This research note considers the case of LGBTQ refugees in order to demonstrate the analytical potential of more inclusive and diverse normative approaches. Taking the origin and extension of harm seriously requires a conceptualization of sanctuary after asylum that accurately reflects the experiences of the displaced. [R, abr.]
74.198 ROBERTS, Margaret E. ; YANG, Eddie —
As the race to develop artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates, access to more and higher quality data is becoming increasingly crucial for AI systems. Yet the search for more data for AI facilitates information flow between authoritarian and democratic states in a way that has important implications for the behavior and output of AI. In particular, the homogenization of data, through institutions such as censorship and propaganda in authoritarian regimes can influence the output of AI developed in democracies. On the other hand, data from democracies provide valuable information for AI that is used for repressive purposes in authoritarian regimes. The authors call for greater scholarly and policy attention on the dual effect of the two-way AI-mediated data flow between democratic and authoritarian states and lay out a research agenda that would enable us to better understand the political influences on AI. [R] [See Abstr. 74.26]
74.199 ROSSITER, Ash —
The most prominent feature of Western approaches to warfare in recent decades has been the centrality of precision-strike systems and related capabilities — most notably unmanned platforms — for delivering lethal force with ever-greater remoteness. Comparative advantages derived from this ‘remote warfare’ are waning due to competitors’ partial adoption of precision weapon systems and the development of countermeasures. Analyses by military experts and technology enthusiasts in the West propose that Artificial Intelligence (AI), properly harnessed, will soon resuscitate former advantages derived from remote warfare, which have been subject to diminishing returns. The assumptions underpinning this conclusion, however, rest on weaker ground than is claimed. It is far from clear whether over the longer-term AI will enhance and entrench the central aspects of remote warfare. [R] [See Abstr. 74.1266]
74.200 RUMELILI, Bahar —
This contribution to the Forum, Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19, develops a conception of uncertainty as constituted by cognitive (awareness of possibilities) and affective (mood in which possibility is encountered) dimensions. Based on this conception, it is suggested that the COVID-19 crisis has led to a qualitative leap in our already growing sense of uncertainty, both accentuating our awareness of possibilities that are unforeseen, and rendering us attuned to the world in anxiety rather than fear. [R] [See also Abstr. 74.40, 732, 1016]
74.201 RUSSELL, Jacob Hale ; PATTERSON, Dennis —
Populists are often cast as deniers of rationality, creators of a climate of “post-truth,” and valuing tribe over truth and the rigors of science. Their critics claim the authority of rationality and empirical facts. Yet the critics no less than populists enable an environment of spurious claims and defective argumentation. This is especially true in the realm of science. An important case study is the account of scientific trust offered by a leading public intellectual and historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, and the misapplication of that theory during the coronavirus pandemic. [R]
74.202 RYAN, Holly Eva ; MAZZILLI, Caterina —
One of the latest methods being trialled across the development sector to help advance progress towards achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is ‘twinning’. In this equation, twinning is rendered as a broadly replicable methodology for improving development outcomes, with a particular emphasis on building up human resources and technical capacity within governments and national bureaucracies. It is time-bound, target driven and depoliticised. However, the relationship between twinning and development has not always looked this way. Our paper uses a genealogical approach to unpack and illuminate the historical circumstances and politico-economic conditions under which these discourses have previously converged. It documents the gradual historical trajectory of the phenomenon of twinning from an overt political act to a largely apolitical tool of development practitioners. [R, abr.]
74.203 RYAN, Josh M. ; MINKOFF, Scott L. —
Divergent preferences within and across American lawmaking institutions make it difficult to enact legislation. Yet, individual legislators and parties have incentives to effect policy change, even during periods of gridlock. We claim appropriations offer an alternative means of policymaking when legislation is likely to be unsuccessful using authorizations because appropriations bills have an extreme reversion point. Using an original dataset of appropriations laws, we measure the quantity of policy enacted given distributions of House, Senate, and executive preferences. The findings show that a larger gridlock interval and greater distance between the House and Senate medians promote the use of appropriations bills as substantive policymaking vehicles. This effect is especially pronounced when new chamber majorities come to power. We conclude that divergent preferences among lawmaking institutions affect legislative productivity, but winning coalitions can still make substantive policy changes using unorthodox lawmaking processes. [R]
74.204 SAIYA, Nilay —
Many scholars and prodemocracy organizations have documented a global democratic recession that has been occurring since the mid-2000s. Yet the reason for this democratic decay remains disputed. This article argues that the global democratic recession has coincided with, and can be largely attributed to, the emergence of an antidemocratic form of religious majoritarianism that has swept across the world since the turn of the century. The author calls this development “theocratic democracy.” Theocratic democracy results when religious groups and holders of state power strike an unspoken grand bargain: Political leaders back majoritarian religious groups, and these groups in return use their spiritual authority to back the political leaders. The rise of theocratic democracy has had devastating consequences for democracy. [R]
74.205 SCHILLER-MERKENS, Simone ; MACHIN, Amanda —
As one of the major causes of climate change, there is an urgent need for a fundamental transformation of the food system. Calls for greater sustainability underscore the importance of integrating civil society and the local knowledge of citizens in this transformation process. One increasingly relevant organisation that can actively engage a plurality of actors from across civil society is the Food Policy Council (FPC). In this paper, we explore the potential role of FPCs in sustainability politics to create an alternative food system, with a focus on the co-production of knowledge for policy-making. We propose that the co-production of knowledge requires knowledge inclusion, exchange and transmission, and we focus on the challenges that can arise for FPCs. Our paper shows that bottom-up emerging FPCs constitute a new form of alternative food organisation that can integrate and support the critical capacity of civil society in food system transformation, but also face potential struggles in the co-production of knowledge for sustainable food policy-making. The paper further highlights that co-producing knowledge in and for sustainability transformation is fundamentally a political process, with politics broadly conceived [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.149]
74.206 SCHMITT-BECK, Rüdiger ; SCHNAUDT, Christian —
According to normative theorists, informal conversations between strangers are the most basic manifestation of the political public sphere and truest to the deliberative democratic ideal. Yet systematic empirical evidence on citizens’ everyday political talk outside their social networks is largely missing. Using a unique survey, we examine citizens’ access to the public discursive sphere of political talk with strangers, as well as the frequency and disagreeableness of the conversations held in this arena of the deliberative system. Although widespread and frequent engagement is desirable from a normative point of view, we find this discursive sphere to be considerably smaller in scope and less vibrant than the private and semi-public discursive spheres of political talk within strong and weak network ties. Contrary to theorists’ equation of strangeness with difference, political conversations between strangers also appear rather harmonious. Furthermore, our findings show that psychological dispositions, most notably social trust and conflict orientations, are important drivers of individuals’ involvement in political conversations with strangers. Their impact exceeds the influence of political dispositions, opportunities, and skills. Some aspects of our results raise doubts about the deliberative quality of these conversations. [R]
74.207 SCHNEIDER, Jacquelyn ; SCHECHTER, Benjamin ; SHAFFER, Rachael —
How do emerging technologies affect nuclear stability? In this paper, we use a quasi-experimental cyber-nuclear wargame with 580 players to explore three hypotheses about emerging technologies and nuclear stability: (1) technological uncertainty leads to preemption and escalation; (2) technological uncertainty leads to restraint; and (3) technological certainty leads to escalation through aggressive counterforce campaigns. The wargames suggest that uncertainty and fear about cyber vulnerabilities create no immediate incentives for preemptive nuclear use. The greater danger to strategic stability lies in how overconfidence in cyber exploits incentivizes more aggressive counterforce campaigns and, secondarily, how vulnerabilities encourage predelegation or automation. Both of these effects suggest worrisome relationships between cyber exploits and inadvertent nuclear use on one hand and cyber vulnerabilities and accidental nuclear use on the other hand. Together, these findings reveal the complicated relationship between pathways to escalation and strategic stability, highlighting the role that confidence and perhaps-misplaced certainty — versus uncertainty and fear — play in strategic stability. [R]
74.208 SCHOETTMER, Patrick L. —
This single-lesson simulation is designed to allow students to explore concepts related to bargaining, credible commitments, and the security dilemma in an anarchic environment. The simulation is designed assuming about 20 participants, divided into 4 groups, but is easily modifiable for either more groups or more participants. The goal of each group is resource acquisition, and a failure to acquire adequate resources can result in the elimination of group members from the simulation. Resource acquisition can be done either cooperatively or competitively. The design of this particular simulation is structured to make failure probable for a sizeable minority of participants. This design choice is intentional, as the simulation seeks to turn failure into a pedagogical device. Along with presenting the simulation itself, the piece also argues for the pedagogical merits of designing for failure in classroom exercises. [R]
74.209 SCHRØDER, Thor Bech —
Studies suggest that citizens have higher trust in some groups of scientists than in others. However, we still know little about the causes of these trust gaps. The current study fills this knowledge gap by examining Norwegian citizens’ trust in climate scientists, economists, and so-called “less politicized natural scientists.” I argue that trust in climate scientists and economists is lower than trust in less politicized natural scientists because the former fields are politicized, while the latter are not. Politicization strengthens ideological conflicts between citizens’ ideology and research produced by climate scientists and economists, which leads to lower trust in these groups of scientists. I test this argument by running regression analyses on data from a representative survey of the Norwegian population. The results support the argument: Citizens have significantly higher trust in less politicized natural scientists than in both climate scientists and economists, and these differences can be explained by ideological biases in trust. [R, abr.]
74.210 SCHUSTER, Matthew —
As students and technology change, the way teachers teach must, at least to some extent, change too. One change that is evident in both students and technology is an increase in the use of instructional videos. Traditional-aged college students today have grown up in an age where streaming videos from various formats including free social media and paid formal services have become a standard way to consume information. To that end, there are growing expectations on faculty to meet students where they are and create our own videos for delivering course content. The goal of this study is to examine how effective recorded videos are, in comparison to written lectures, at delivering course content and helping students be successful. Specifically, this study presented students with two different options for receiving lecture content in first- and second-year political science courses at a suburban, midwestern, community college. Students could receive lecture material by either reading lecture notes or by watching videos of the instructor going over the notes– or both. By using both quantitative and qualitative measures, this study examined how students consumed lecture material and compared the differences between their academic outcomes and perceptions of both the course and their instructor. [R]
74.211 SENNINGER, Roman —
Previous research finds that policy complexity affects important political processes including legislative delegation and policy diffusion. However, policy complexity is not directly observable and the search for a reasonable proxy constitutes a major challenge for scholars. This research note presents a concise and measurable definition of complex policy based on two aspects: a policy’s textual sophistication and its ties to other rules and regulations. Using crowdsourcing and a pairwise comparison framework it is shown that the proposed defining features are crucial for humans’ understanding of policy text. The proposed definition is then operationalized using a large corpus of European Union rules and is shown to outperform alternative operationalizations of policy complexity in predicting the level of legislative delegation. [R]
74.212 SERDECZNY, Olivia —
Does using knowledge politically to explain or justify predetermined policy positions make a difference? Most theory suggests no. This article traces how developing country negotiators used knowledge to further their interests in loss and damage (L&D) negotiations from 2003 to 2013. The analysis shows an institutional effect, whereby knowledge was used to establish L&D as a theme under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the same time, an indirect effect emerges at the individual level as knowledge provides actors with a sense of clarity and legitimacy that strengthens their resolve in defending political positions, leaving surprising traces during moments of bargaining. These insights invite critical reflections on the normative dimensions of political knowledge use. [R] [See Abstr. 74.237]
74.213 SHAFI, Saahir ; MALLINSON, Daniel J. —
The theoretical evolution of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) and empirical expansion of its research agenda to non-democratic countries, demonstrate that democratic nations feature less punctuated policymaking than autocracies, owing to informational advantages. However, can these differences be identified cross-sectionally across numerous political systems facing a common policy problem? To assess this, we present a broad and robust empirical analysis of PET dynamics across 166 countries over three years for a single policy issue that affected all nations: the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we theoretically link PET with the concepts of policy learning and bounded emulation and propose the emergence of mini cycles of punctuated equilibrium during a crisis. Then, using weekly data, we examine univariate distributions of COVID-19-related policy changes to better understand how punctuated policy dynamics have differed between political systems. Using multiple approaches, we demonstrate (1) the emergence of PET mini cycles during crises and (2) an absence of macro-level differences in PET dynamics across democratic, partially democratic and autocratic countries. [R, abr.]
74.214 SHIRAITO, Yuki ; LO, James ; OLIVELLA, Santiago —
A common approach when studying the quality of representation involves comparing the latent preferences of voters and legislators, commonly obtained by fitting an item response theory (IRT) model to a common set of stimuli. Despite being exposed to the same stimuli, voters and legislators may not share a common understanding of how these stimuli map onto their latent preferences, leading to differential item functioning (DIF) and incomparability of estimates. We explore the presence of DIF and incomparability of latent preferences obtained through IRT models by reanalyzing an influential survey dataset, where survey respondents expressed their preferences on roll call votes that US legislators had previously voted on. To do so, we propose defining a Dirichlet process prior over item response functions in standard IRT models. In contrast to typical multistep approaches to detecting DIF, our strategy allows researchers to fit a single model, automatically identifying incomparable subgroups with different mappings from latent traits onto observed responses. [R, abr.]
74.215 SIEGEL, David —
Marx argued that transitions to capitalism require the violent dispossession of direct producers from their means of production. Many scholars have gone beyond the violence of transition to argue that state force is continuously used to maintain market relations. A major debate focuses on whether Marx’s “so-called” primitive accumulation was an historical or continuous process. This paper contributes an empirical puzzle to this debate: the dispossession of peasants across the former Soviet Union after 1991, which resulted from land privatization, was predominantly non-violent. This is due, I argue, to a temporal separation between violence, which occurred during the process of Stalinist collectivization, and the subsequent dispossession of cultivators in the 1990s. Peasant dispossession could unfold peacefully after 1991 only because historical violence was embedded in the structure of the collective farm — a structure that was maintained in the process of dispossession — thus constituting a Soviet “subsidy” to the capitalist transition. [R]
74.216 SIKONG, Zhao —
After more than 20 years of the Chinese economic development initiated in 1978, the theoretical debates that had been discouraged by Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic approach to Socialism resurfaced in the form of the discussions and controversies surrounding the Chinese translation of the phrase Aufhebung des Privateigentums from the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Since 2000, there have been three waves of debates. The first wave confronts scholars over translating Aufhebung by yangqi (‘sublation’) instead of xiaomie (‘abolition’) of private property. The second brings into focus the controversial interpretation of ‘abolition’ relating only to ‘bourgeois private property’ rather than ‘individual property based on one’s own labour’. The third wave advances the idea, perceived as radical by some Chinese scholars, that the inclusion of the term Aufhebung in the Manifesto was a fundamental error. [R, abr.]
74.217 SKAANING, Svend-Erik —
A review of three books shows that the crisis of democracy literature is exceptionally diverse. It ranges from overconfident postulations and proposals without systematic arguments and comparative analysis on the one hand to novel theorizing and balanced accounts, including cautious use of historical evidence, on the other hand. Accordingly, there is much variation in how much the different contributions succeed in drawing lessons from historical developments to better understand and reduce contemporary challenges. [R]
74.218 SLATER, Dan, et al. —
Militaries play dramatically different roles in different autocracies. At one extreme, the military remains the supreme political actor for generations. At the other extreme, militaries long remain subordinate to authoritarian leaders. We argue that the roots of this variation — from military supremacy to subordination — lie in military origins. Where authoritarian mass parties created militaries from scratch, the armed forces have generally remained subservient. Where militaries emerged separately from authoritarian parties, they enjoyed the autonomy necessary to achieve and maintain military supremacy. The core lesson is simple: Unless an autocratic regime created the military, it will struggle to control the military. [R]
74.219 SMALLPAGE, Steven M., et al. —
Polls asking respondents about their beliefs in conspiracy theories have become increasingly commonplace. However, researchers have expressed concern about the willingness of respondents to divulge beliefs in conspiracy theories due to the stigmatization of those ideas. We use an experimental design similar to a list experiment to decipher the effect of social desirability bias on survey responses to eight conspiratorial statements. Our study includes 8290 respondents across seven countries, allowing for the examination of social desirability bias across various political and cultural contexts. While the proportion of individuals expressing belief in each statement varies across countries, we observe identical treatment effects: respondents systematically underreport conspiracy beliefs. These findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs may be more prominent than current estimates suggest. [R]
74.220 SONG, Seung Hyun —
Alasia Nuti’s Injustice and the Reproduction of History [Cambridge U. P., 2019] lays out a brilliant structural injustice approach that incorporates the normative significance of the past. This article will introduce Nuti’s framework and critically reflect on its original contributions. First, I will explain how Nuti’s structural injustice approach successfully incorporates backward-looking dimensions. Second, I will provide a detailed analysis of Nuti’s conception of sexism as a specific type of structural injustice. Finally, I will critically engage with Nuti’s idea of structural remedy and explore how her analysis could be extended. [R]
74.221 SOYSA, Indra de ; VADLAMANNATI, Krishna Chaitanya —
Some blame free-market capitalism for increasing income inequality, arguing that richer classes could block access to others for maintaining their privileges. By manipulating the degree of political rights and resources available to others, the rich could reduce opportunities for others. Others argue that growth-promoting free markets raise all incomes, increasing aggregate welfare. We argue that governments more dependent on free markets are likely to focus on increasing access to human capital, thereby narrowing the gap between the rich and poor by increasing opportunities, even if income inequality rises with high growth. We assess the issue by examining the effects of an Index of Economic Freedom on income inequality measured by the standardized GINI and measures of the equity of access to quality schooling, health, and justice covering 128 developing countries during the 1990-2017 period. Our results show that, even if economic freedom is associated with higher income inequality, it also associates robustly with access to opportunity. Our results are robust to alternative models, sample size, and testing methods, including instrumental variables analyzes addressing potential endogeneity bias. [R, abr.]
74.222 SPRY, Amber D. —
Research demonstrates that classroom dynamics benefit from a culture of mutuality and respect, especially in seminar courses that thrive on student discussion and classroom participation. But cultivating such a culture can be challenging, especially because students come from various cultural backgrounds and bring different life experiences with them to the classroom space. This article outlines an activity employed during the first meeting of the semester that facilitates intercultural dialogue in the classroom by encouraging students to provide their perspectives on a shared experience. The activity asks students to answer a straightforward question: “how does your family or your culture cook rice?” By using the example of a simple ingredient found across the globe, the activity demonstrates how students can hold different perspectives on the same topic based on their own experiences, and models for the class how to approach conversation throughout the semester when perspectives on a given topic may vary. This activity provides an example of how a classroom icebreaker can be used in a way that facilitates dialogue, promotes participation, and models intellectual respect. [R]
74.223 STAPLETON, Carey ; OLIVER, Jacob ; WOLAK, Jennifer —
Optimists hope for the best possible outcome, while pessimists plan for the worst. We investigate how people’s predispositions to be optimistic versus pessimistic shape how they approach politics. We argue that an optimistic personality is a psychological resource that contributes to the practice of good citizenship behaviors. Using responses from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that people with optimistic personalities are more politically engaged and participatory than those with pessimistic dispositions. Optimists express more positive views of the American people, the government, and national symbols as well. Because optimists have a more positive outlook toward the nation’s future, they help contribute to levels of diffuse support for government and its symbols. While we might worry that optimists hold an unrealistic view of the political world, we find little evidence that dispositional optimism is associated with less accurate perceptions of political realities. [R]
74.224 STENBERG, Matthew ; SWITEK, Niko —
Despite increasing access to high quality television (TV) series in the golden age of television, political scientists (and especially scholars of comparative politics) have not systematically considered the possibilities that television series might offer for instruction. This article aims to fill this gap by illustrating the opportunities for teaching political science using TV series and outlining ways of integrating television series into the classroom using selected clips, screening full episodes, or using an entire series as a text. We then illustrate these methods by discussing ways that television series might be used in a typical introductory course on European politics. [R]
74.225 STONER, Kathryn —
Over the past decade, the narrative of competence that Putin established during his first two presidential terms was steadily undermined as the quality of governance worsened. Since 2012, the regime has gradually been relying less on persuasion and more on generating fear in its population — a trend that has accelerated in the face of Russian military failures in Ukraine. That ill-fated war now risks the complete annihilation of the myth of autocratic competence. The Russian example demonstrates the importance of identifying and analyzing changes in the quality of autocracies, and calls for a better understanding of why autocracies become more reliant on violent repression than on spinning an informational narrative of legitimacy and competence. [R]
74.226 TAMAI, Toshiki —
A typical approach to evaluating public investment projects requires an appropriate rate for discounting future benefits and costs. In many developed countries, the practical discount rate for benefit–cost analysis has been calculated using the Ramsey formula in an optimal growth model, stretched back to the pioneering work presented by Frank Ramsey in 1928. Intergenerational altruism that is widely observed in our society generates future bias. Therefore, elected governments under democracies are future-biased. In such cases, the Ramsey formula is no longer valid. This paper derives a modified Ramsey formula for an appropriate social discount rate to be applied instead of the conventional Ramsey formula. We also examine properties of equilibrium policy. The degree of future bias depends on the political power of young people relative to elderly people. Demographic effects such as population aging negatively affect public investment through decreasing future bias effects. This paper contributes to the optimal theory of public investment for calculating an appropriate social discount rate, both theoretically and practically. [R]
74.227 TIMPERLEY, Claire ; DOUDNEY, Isabel ; SHASHA, Rita —
Undergraduate students are often assumed to be consumers of the material instructors bring to their attention. Rarely are they seen as producers of original research, other than in elite honors programmes or opt-in research opportunities such as university-based undergraduate research journals. Yet students new to a subject often have highly original responses to what they encounter. Though they may not yet be fully attuned to the contours of the scholarship, they are not limited by preexisting notions of what the defining questions of the field might be, nor are they as committed to the disciplinary boundaries that sometimes — intentionally or not — obscure or prevent promising lines of inquiry. We argue that recognizing students as emerging scholars capable of original, high quality work, and offering a structured assessment in the form of a peer reviewed class journal has the potential to transform how students they see themselves in relation to the discipline, supports the development of advanced research and writing skills, and encourages them to understand academic work as a collective rather than individual endeavor. [R, abr.]
74.228 TOPAL, Reyhan ; SHARGH, Farzin —
Online information sources help undergraduate students acquire knowledge and find supporting evidence for their papers. However, this practicality is often clouded with unreliable sources. As such, instructors need better strategies to teach students how to reach reliable online sources and evaluate the accuracy of the online information they obtain. In this article, we introduce a series of exercises to teach students how to identify the reliability of a source, ways to fact-check information, steps to use online search tools effectively, and examples of online academic blogs to utilize and check the reliability of the information that they present, and how to use online data/survey sources. We believe that educating students on identifying and utilizing reliable sources is essential for their intellectual development and ability to conduct their research independently. Therefore, our exercises aim to provide a roadmap for instructors to improve their students’ virtual literacy. [R]
74.229 TRAVAGLINO, Giovanni A. ; MOON, Chanki —
System Justification Theory posits that individuals are less prone to engage in radical action against a system on which they depend. In the present research, we investigated how the association between system-justifying tendencies and radical intentions is moderated by individuals’ orientation towards power differentials, namely their “power distance.” A stronger power distance orientation implies that individuals perceive power differentials as a fixed feature of society, curtailing prospects for change. We hypothesized that, at lower levels of power distance orientation, system-justification tendencies would be associated with reduced radical intentions. We contend this will occur because individuals feel dependent on a system perceived as malleable (dependency hypothesis). Conversely, at higher levels of power distance orientation, we expected system-justification tendencies to be associated with stronger radical intentions. We argue that this effect reflects the rejection of dependency on a system perceived as fixed (counterdependency hypothesis). [R, abr.]
74.230 TREISMAN, Daniel —
Influential voices contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that — while there has been some recent backsliding — the global proportion of democracies remains close to an all-time high. The current rate of deterioration is not historically unusual and is well explained by the lower income and unseasoned institutions of many new democracies swept upwards in the Third Wave. Historical data suggest the probability of democratic breakdown in the US is extremely low. Western governments are seen as threatened by weakening popular support for democracy and an erosion of elite norms. But systematic evidence for these claims is very limited. While eroding democratic quality in some countries is indeed a cause for concern, the fear of a global slide into autocracy appears premature. [R]
74.231 TRIPATHY, Samit ; SENGUPTA, Angan ; JYOTISHI, Amalendu —
Cloud computing has become relevant due to the increasing need for computing, storage, and communication over the internet. This growth, however, is not same across the geographies. While developed economies have adopted cloud-based services, emerging economies are still lagging. As digitization has become core to policy-level strategies, a slow adoption of cloud-based Information and Communications Technology (ICT) may impact growth. The adoption and growth of cloud-based services depends on the readiness of the broader ecosystem. This study evaluates the factors influencing the cloud computing readiness of selected countries. In the process, the study extends the existing understanding of the ranking system by providing additional insights into the countries’ performances against their potentials by using technical efficiency analysis. The study identifies and categorizes countries into four groups: aspirants, initiators, performers, and achievers. Results suggest that political-regulatory-business environment, investing in research and development, tertiary education, and knowledge-worker significantly impact cloud computing readiness. [R]
74.232 UPPALA, Medha ; DESMARAIS, Bruce A. —
Contagion across various types of connections is a central process in the study of many political phenomena (e.g., democratization, civil conflict, and voter turnout). Over the last decade, the methodological literature addressing the challenges in causally identifying contagion in networks has exploded. In one of the foundational works in this literature, Shalizi and Thomas (2011, Sociological Methods and Research 40, 211–239.) propose a permutation test for contagion in longitudinal network data that is not confounded by selection (e.g., homophily). We illustrate the properties of this test via simulation. We assess its statistical power under various conditions of the data, including the nature of the contagion, the structure of the network through which contagion occurs, and the number of time periods included in the data. We then apply this test to an example domain that is commonly considered in the context of observational research on contagion — the international spread of democracy. We find evidence of international contagion of democracy. We conclude with a discussion of the practical applicability of the Shalizi and Thomas test to the study of contagion in political networks. [R]
74.233 USCINSKI, Joseph E. ; ENDERS, Adam M. —
Growing concern has been expressed that we have entered a “post-truth” era in which each of us willfully believes whatever we choose, aided and abetted by alternative and social media that spin alternative realities for boutique consumption. A prime example of the belief in alternative realities is said to be acceptance of “conspiracy theories” — a term that is often used as a pejorative to indict claims of conspiracy that are so obviously absurd that only the unhinged could believe them. The epistemological standard often involved in this indictment, however — the standard of “obvious” falsity — invites subjectivity in its application, because what is obviously false to one person can be common sense to another. This is not just a truism; considerable research suggests that people’s political beliefs, in general, and their acceptance or rejection of conspiracy theories in particular, tends in large part to be determined by partisan, ideological, and other priors. [R]
74.234 VAN DER DOES, Ramon ; KANTOROWICZ, Jaroslaw —
Citizens that tend to experience political exclusion are often more supportive of direct and participatory forms of decision-making. We empirically verify two competing explanatory logics for such high support: the “anti-establishment” logic, which expects politically excluded citizens to unconditionally express more support than their fellow citizens for democratic innovations (DIs); and the “instrumental” logic, which expects politically excluded citizens to only express more support for DIs than other citizens when these innovations offer procedural control and favorable outcomes. Based on a conjoint analysis of Dutch citizens’ preferences for participatory budgeting, we find no support for the anti-establishment logic and partial support for the instrumental logic. We show how measures of citizens’ own feelings of exclusion help to explain the results. [R]
74.235 VAN DER MEIJDEN, Gerard, et al. —
In a competitive market renewable energy subsidies or postponement of carbon pricing tend to boost emissions and global warming in the short run. This so-called Green Paradox effect may be reversed if fossil-fuel firms operate under an oligopoly and the number of members is low enough. A reversal of the Green Paradox always occurs under a fossil fuel monopoly. If the extraction costs of fossil fuel depend on the aggregate remaining stock of reserves, Green Paradox effects vanish if the number of oligopolists becomes infinitely large. For an intermediate number of members, a Green Paradox occurs. The strength of the Green Paradox effect depends non-monotonically on the number of oligopolists. We also show that a Green Paradox is more likely for higher slopes of the demand curve, higher sensitivities of unit extraction costs with respect to remaining reserves, and lower interest rates. [R]
74.236 VAN ELK, Sam ; REGAL, Britt —
Contemporary governments face dwindling resources and populations who feel disconnected from political systems. In response, both governments and scholars increasingly explore more participative governance approaches. Such efforts have coalesced around ‘co-creation’, a way of governing through collaboration between public and private actors, often including citizens. Increasingly, scholars emphasise ‘co-creation platforms’: devices that use reconfigurable structures and resources to facilitate multiple instances of co-creation. By creating platforms, advocates claim, governments can facilitate widespread co-creation without unfeasible costs. Some even encourage governments to adopt platform-creation as their way of governing — so-called ‘generative governance’. Yet, with governments being time- and cash-poor, they cannot participate in every such co-creation initiative themselves. To realise the promise of generative governance, platforms must enable governments to facilitate co-creation initiatives at arm’s length. While, however, research suggests that governments can be successful platform-users, we know little about how successfully they can forge platforms to encourage co-creation among others. Consequently, we conducted a nested case study of the creation and use of one novel platform: London Borough of Culture. [R, abr.]
74.237 VANHALA, Lisa ; CALLIARI, Elisa ; THOMAS, Adelle —
This introduction brings questions related to politics and political processes to the forefront in the study of climate change loss and damage. The aim of avoiding the detrimental impacts of climate change has been at the heart of the international response to global climate change for more than thirty years. Yet the development of global governance responses to climate change loss and damage — those impacts that we cannot, do not or choose not to prevent or adapt to — has only over the last decade become a central theme within the discussions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Loss and damage has also become a research topic of growing importance within an array of disciplines, from international law to the interdisciplinary environmental social sciences. However, the engagement of scholars working in the fields of political science and international relations has been more limited so far. This is surprising because questions about how to best respond to loss and damage are fundamentally political, as they derive from deliberative processes, invoke value judgments, imply contestation, demand the development of policies, and result in distributional outcomes. In this introduction we describe the context and contributions of the research articles in the special issue. By drawing on a wide range of perspectives from across the social sciences, the articles render visible the multifaceted politics of climate change loss and damage and help to account for the trajectory of governance processes. [R] [Introduction to a thematic issue, edited by the authors. See also Abstr. 74.45, 212, 240, 1058]
74.238 VARAINE, Simon —
Manipulations checks are postexperimental measures widely used to verify that subjects understood the treatment. Some researchers drop subjects who failed manipulation checks in order to limit the analyses to attentive subjects. This short report offers a novel illustration on how this practice may bias experimental results: in the present case, through confirming a hypothesis that is likely false. In a survey experiment, subjects were primed with a fictional news story depicting an economic decline versus prosperity. Subjects were then asked whether the news story depicted an economic decline or prosperity. Results indicate that responses to this manipulation check captured subjects’ preexisting beliefs about the economic situation. As a consequence, dropping subjects who failed the manipulation check mixes the effects of preexisting and induced beliefs, increasing the risk of false positive findings. Researchers should avoid dropping subjects based on posttreatment measures and rely on pretreatment measures of attentiveness. [R]
74.239 VLANDAS, Tim —
One in five people in the EU and nearly one in ten in the world are now aged 65 and over. This demographic transformation is one of the great successes of the twentieth century and has profoundly altered the composition of electorates in many democracies. This article explores whether and how this population ageing reshapes the relationship between democracy and capitalism. I argue that ageing changes the economic and policy priorities of a growing share of democracies’ electorates in ways that incentivise elected governments to prioritise certain social policies and economic outcomes, such as pensions and low inflation, at the expense of others, most notably greater social investments and pursuing economic growth. As a result, gerontocracies increasingly lead to what I call a ‘gerontonomia’ characterised by democratically sustained economic stagnation. [R]
74.240 WALLIMANN-HELMER, Ivo —
From a nonideal justice perspective, this article investigates liability and compensation in their wider theoretical context to better understand the governance of climate loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The usual rationale for considering compensation takes a backward-looking understanding of responsibility. It links those causing harm directly to its remedy. This article shows that, under current political circumstances, it is more reasonable to understand responsibility as a forward-looking concept and thus to differentiate responsibilities on grounds of capacity and solidarity. The article argues that loss and damage entitlements in UNFCCC governance should be understood as entitlements to a threshold of capabilities for resilience. While compensation merely means redressing the situation ex ante a threat, entitlements to capabilities for resilience can entail more demanding responsibilities of support. This means that Article 8 of the Paris Agreement has much more demanding implications than it might at first appear. [R] [See Abstr. 74.237]
74.241 WAMSLER, Christine, et al. —
Responding effectively to climate change requires an understanding of what shapes people’s individual and collective sense of agency and responsibility towards the future. It also requires transforming this understanding into political engagement to support systems change. Based on a national representative survey in Sweden (N = 1,237), this research uses the novel SenseMaker methodology to look into these matters. More specifically, in order to understand the social and institutional prerequisites that must be in place to develop inclusive climate responses, we investigate how citizens perceive their everyday life and future, and the implications for their sense of responsibility, agency, and political engagement. Our research findings show how citizens perceive and act on climate change (individually, cooperatively, and by supporting others), their underlying values, beliefs, emotions and paradigms, inter-group variations, and obstacles and enablers for change. [R, abr.]
74.242 WANG Yi-Ting —
Public support has long been considered crucial for the vitality and survival of democracy. Although the determinants of citizens’ support for democracy have been extensively studied, current literature puts emphasis on domestic factors. While another body of scholarship has documented the propensity of political diffusion, most studies focus on aggregate outcomes, and citizens’ attitudes within this tendency have received less attention. Extending the research on the influence of domestic performance on public attitudes and verifying the micro-foundation underlying political diffusion, we argue that economic performance of other countries can similarly shape citizens’ support for democracy. Using a sample of more than 90 democratic countries across the globe over the past three decades, we find that citizens in democratic countries are more likely to view democracy as the ideal regime type when there is a positive correlation between the level of democracy and economic growth across proximate countries, either geographically or culturally defined. [R, abr.]
74.243 WICKBERG, Sofia —
By analysing the policy process leading to the introduction of interest registers in France and Sweden, this article argues that their use as a policy instrument was crucial for acknowledging and defining conflict of interest as a problem. It challenges rationalist approaches to public policy that focus on how the adoption of policy solutions follows the identification of policy problems, instead, favouring the acknowledgement of how problems and solutions can exist independently. To identify how interest registers became a preferred policy solution, the article traces how policies from the UK and US were integrated in the global anti-corruption toolkit in the 1990s and subsequently adopted in France and Sweden in the 2010s. It uncovers the sequencing of events, and, specifically, the evolution of public discourse on conflicts of interest around the adoption of public interest registers. It shows that interest registers contribute to (re)define the problem of conflict of interest in new contexts of adoption. The sequencing of events suggests that the problem of conflict of interest was rarely used before the instrument’s adoption and, what is important, did not have a clear ‘stabilised’ shared meaning. Interest registers thus give reality to the problem and modify its definition. [R, abr.]
74.244 WIDENGÅRD, Marie —
‘Green’ mining may produce what Le Billon calls ‘spaces of double exception’ – spaces where people are stripped of their rights to give way to both mining and biodiversity offsetting. However, this article highlights that resistance movements can also use the ‘exception’ by claiming that ‘exceptional people’ have special rights to remain on their lands. By drawing on two landmark cases, the article argues that ‘spaces of triple exception’ provides a more suitable picture of the stakes and power battles involved, considering the ambivalent resistance and exclusionary risk of indigenous or tribal claims. [R] [See Abstr. 74.259]
74.245 WILSON, Matthew, et al. —
This paper describes a concept mapping teaching exercise that was implemented in different stages at both the graduate and undergraduate level. First, a small group of graduate students worked to construct a concept map that illustrated the connections between published work as they prepared to take their qualifying examinations. A similar assignment — visually depicting connections between course readings — was implemented between the midterm and final exam in a large-section online undergraduate course. In the undergraduate course, there was noticeable improvement between midterm and final essay responses in which students compared and contrasted readings, and students reported perceptions of it as a valuable exercise. Structured interviews with both undergraduate and graduate students further confirm that concept mapping can improve learning outcomes at both levels of instruction. The project reveals important differences in the way that both sets of students approach relational exercises involving readings and suggests ways of using concept mapping to enhance students’ retention of the material. [R]
74.246 WILSON, Matthew C., et al. —
This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization. [R]
74.247 WU Xu, et al. —
Effective regulations of carbon productivity (CP) at the sectoral level offer a practical path to implement cost-effective CO2 reduction measures. To date, few studies on the temporal changes in sectoral CP have identified driving factors that can be regulated through policy interventions. We took Zhejiang Province (P.R. China) as a case study to assess the changes in CP of 41 economic sectors covering primary, secondary and tertiary industries during 2010-2017 and analyze the underlying driving factors of these changes. During the period, 31 sectors increased their CP, 12 of which decreased in energy-related CO2 emissions and increased in economic values and were potentially usable in ‘carbon peaking and carbon neutrality’ pilots. Meanwhile, 10 sectors reduced their CP, which had priority in the promotion of low-carbon technologies and implementation of transformative policies. We identified that the major contributors to the changes of sectoral CP are the factors involving electricity consumption, projects completed and put into use, water use efficiency, foreign investment and floor space of buildings. Our findings recommended improvement in the infrastructures and institutions of electricity consumption, the efficiency of the procedures for project approval, the utilization of water resources and the low-carbon investment in fixed assets on sectoral level. [R]
74.248 WULIA, Tintin —
This paper explicates the concept of aesthetic resistance (AR) and its connection to sociopolitical change, drawing from resistance studies’ frameworks. Combining semi-structured and integrative reviews of literature on resistance in art and aesthetics across the humanities and social sciences, the paper performs a thematic analysis to identify patterns in AR’s definitions, modes and domains, attributes, and transformative variables. These are synthesized in terms of the evolving resistance studies’ frameworks and an understanding of aesthetics as relating to the senso rium, ultimately revealing three interlocking issues: (1) publicness, (2) potentiality, and (3) plexus. These AR-specific issues contribute to the categorization of resistance, its identification, and the tracing of its network en route to change. [R] [See Abstr. 74.259]
74.249 XU Yiqing ; YANG, Eddie —
We introduce hierarchically regularized entropy balancing as an extension to entropy balancing, a reweighting method that adjusts weights for control group units to achieve covariate balance in observational studies with binary treatments. Our proposed extension expands the feature space by including higher-order terms (such as squared and cubic terms and interactions) of covariates and then achieves approximate balance on the expanded features using ridge penalties with a hierarchical structure. Compared with entropy balancing, this extension relaxes model dependency and improves the robustness of causal estimates while avoiding optimization failure or highly concentrated weights. It prevents specification searches by minimizing user discretion in selecting features to balance on and is also computationally more efficient than kernel balancing, a kernel-based covariate balancing method. We demonstrate its performance through simulations and an empirical example. We develop an open-source R package, hbal, to facilitate implementation. [R]
74.250 YADGAR, Yaacov ; HADAD, Noam —
Adopting the ‘post-secular’ critique of the mainstream discourse on ‘religion and politics’, this article offers a novel consideration of what is commonly identified as religious nationalism. Following the post-secular cue, we highlight the importance of the nation-statist configuration of power for the very construction of the conceptual and categorical frameworks into which discussions of religion, secularity, politics, and nationalism have usually been put. [R, abr.]
74.251 ZHANG Youlang ; WANG Qiang ; ZHAO Menghan —
Extant studies on policy feedback effects have examined how a welfare increase, rather than a decrease, might shape policy attitudes or political engagement. Nevertheless, exploring the effects of welfare decrease on the mass public is significant because of its increasingly crucial relevance to public policy practices worldwide. Using a unique longitudinal national panel survey dataset (2015-2017) related to China’s Minimum Living Standard Guarantee Program, this study examines how welfare program benefits influence the policy perceptions and political participation of more than 10,000 economically disadvantaged respondents. A series of analyses showed that all else being equal, starting to receive program benefits in a year does not necessarily produce a positive effect on policy perceptions or on political participation. However, being deprived of program benefits in a year has a significantly negative effect on policy perceptions and political participation. [R, abr.]