Political Studies

How do policy issues reach the political agenda? This question has received ample scholarly attention over the last decades, yet only recently have researchers explicitly examined the ways in which the agendas of political parties and media interact. This study builds on this ongoing work to examine how the conflict among parties in terms of the policy stances they propose (positional conflict) and the frames they attach to policy issues (discursive conflict) affect media attention. By focusing on party debates on European integration in British, Dutch and German election campaigns between 1987 and 2006 and employing a pooled time-series analysis, the study shows that both positional and discursive conflict among parties boost media reporting on issues. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the dynamics of media attention in relation to particular policy issues, as well as the way in which parties and media interact within election campaigns.

This article addresses an underexplored area of investigation within the global justice debate: To what extent does globalisation structurally undermine the freedom of states? And if it does, what type of injustice does this constitute? It is argued here that a republican theory of freedom as non-domination is better equipped than existing cosmopolitan and social liberal accounts to explain the systemic connections between domestic, international and global injustice. The forms of unchecked power that globalisation sets off create new opportunities for the domination of states – by other states as well as by non-states actors. And when citizens live in dominated states, they are themselves exposed to domination. The upshot is a normative analysis of the global arena that attributes a central role to states, yet is deeply critical of the status quo.

Totalistic ideologies are breeding grounds for radicalization. Communities that adhere to such ideologies tend to rally when they feel threatened by powerful outsiders. Under such circumstances, community leaders become central. If they frame the situation as an existential threat to the community itself or to its most sacred values, they will accelerate the radicalization process and subsequently increase the prospects of violent actions by group members. The shift to violence takes place in the framework of close-knit social networks within the broader radicalized community. These networks consist of individuals who usually live in the same area and engage in continuous interaction among themselves. Such interactions bolster their communal commitment and develop a collective mindset that facilitates the slide of some of the individuals into violence. Those who eventually descend into terrorism usually exhibit strong identification with the community’s values and extreme alienation towards the outside world. They also enjoy high levels of biographical availability. These hypotheses are tested using the case study of Jewish terrorism in Israel between 1948 and 2006.

Why do some state leaders engage in genocide and politicide while others do not? Extant theory focuses on how large openings in the domestic political structure of a country, such as civil or interstate war, increase the likelihood that a government will respond with violence against its civilian population. This article builds from this previous theory to argue that smaller crises can provide governments with the same incentives and opportunities to engage in political mass murder. Statistical tests of all cases of genocide and politicide since 1955 support this argument. In addition to civil wars, assassinations, coups and strikes increase the likelihood of political mass murder, especially genocide. These findings are important as they caution the international community against fixating on large-scale crises as the impetus for genocide and politicide.

Jürgen Habermas argues that Adam Smith believed that men used a calculative form of reason in the economic realm. Yet it was not calculative reason, but a variety of forms of prudence that animated Smith’s economic system. The individual exercise of prudence motivated mankind to labor, the collective exercise of prudence, expressed as supply and demand, disciplined mankind to labor where the disposition was lacking, and the combination of the individual and collective exercise of prudence allowed Smith’s economic system to establish the norm of a just price. The pervasive importance of prudence in Smithian thought implies that the economy of the public sphere should be aligned with a latter-day form of traditional prudence rather than with systematized and calculative rationality. This re-conception implies that Habermas’ democratic theory should be revised to consider free-market economic activity – and especially the process of price formation – one of those autonomous activities that comprise civil society, connect the lifeworld to democracy and require the protection of the democratic polity.

To what degree does Montesquieu advocate religious toleration in De l’Esprit des Lois? Scholars generally interpret Montesquieu in one of two ways: either as a proponent of religious toleration, or as hostile to revealed religion and seeking, so far as possible, to detach souls from religion. This article offers an alternative perspective. Rather than favoring or opposing religious toleration per se, Montesquieu judges a religion in the context of a particular state. Sometimes he views a given religion (e.g. Christianity) favorably, other times unfavorably. He thinks that there are instances when it is appropriate for a state to find non-violent ways to marginalize, weaken or remove a religion from a society. This makes him a proponent of what is called in this article ‘selective religious intolerance’. Montesquieu bases his judgments about the effects of a religion, and how the state ought to relate to it, on a deep consideration of how a particular religion fits into a society.

Bernard Williams was an ethical sceptic, but he was also a proponent of liberalism. To what extent can one finally be both? This article explores this question through a particular emphasis on Williams, but seeks to draw wider lessons regarding what ethical scepticism should and should not amount to. It shows how ethical scepticism can be reconciled with a commitment to what Williams, following Judith Shklar, called ‘the liberalism of fear’, which is revealed as an ecumenical outlook for different stripes of ethical sceptic. The article concludes by drawing some lessons for the recent ‘realist’ turn in political theory.

Martha Nussbaum has argued for the superiority of her capabilities approach over the language of human rights. In this article it is argued that the capabilities approach is incapable of justifying something crucially important expressed in international human rights law: the requirement that every government treat all people as having equal status. Nussbaum has recently grappled with the role of equality within her approach, but has failed to offer a satisfactory explanation of its importance. The reason is that the value and importance of equal status cannot be fully articulated in the language of capabilities alone. While most philosophical conceptions of human rights also fail to incorporate the importance of equal respect, the limitations of the capability approach are more serious. For the purposes of specifying the duties of governments, capabilities are not the only things that matter.

This article examines Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s and Paolo Virno’s use of Michel Foucault’s notions of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ with respect to today’s hegemony of immaterial labor, i.e. work without an end product. In spite of relatively infrequent references to work, Foucault formulates these notions in markedly economic terms: biopower is inextricable from work because, unlike punitive power that represses and disciplines life, it cultivates life by fostering an efficient, productive and active population. Drawing attention to a shift in emphasis in Hardt and Negri’s and Virno’s accounts of work and biopower – from a diagnostic analysis of labor practices to immaterial labor’s latent political possibilities – it is argued in the article that what gets lost in this shift is Foucault’s insistence on questioning the role of work in modern society. Work is not an inherently valuable activity, but, as current contradictions that have emerged with immaterial labor demonstrate, a product of mechanisms which endow it with its present status as the central organizing principle of both social and personal life.

The literature on international political theory is replete with proposals to make world politics a more just and democratic place. This article explores how the cosmopolitan design project can be made more tractable in a world composed of sovereign nation states. Specifically, it argues that flexibility mechanisms – tools common in international cooperation – enhance the feasibility of design. The article draws upon the recent work on political feasibility and argues that economic, institutional and cultural constraints can be overcome by using flexibility mechanisms. In order to gain traction on the argument, prescriptions made in the field of intellectual property rights are analysed. Thomas Pogge and Allen Buchanan, Tony Cole and Robert Keohane have separately advanced institutional proposals to reform the global essential medicine system. The article details how feasibility can be enhanced through flexibility in light of these proposals, and makes a suggestion about their comparative feasibility and desirability.

This article uses critical political theories to engage with regional economic development as a site of exclusion, inequality and interwoven power relationships, which would benefit from theoretical analysis. It does this through the concept of lifestyle from regional development creative industries discourses and regional branding, considering how time operates in the narratives of place used to represent and promote a region to the outside world. Using Cornwall as a case study and an analysis informed by complexity theory, the article claims that regional narratives need to be understood not just for how they are produced and what they say, but also for the futures that they imply. It argues that while strategic development narratives need to be situated within an affective assemblage that resonates with popular perceptions of place, they also need to have a narrative that opens up spaces of possibility for future action and facilitates adaptation.

British public services have traditionally been overseen by appointees. The idea that many of these posts should be filled by direct election, as a means of increasing engagement with local communities and accountability to them, appears to be gaining traction. In Health Board election pilots in 2010, the Scottish government replaced appointees to regional Health Boards (serving six-figure populations) with popularly elected members. The government attempted to maintain the insulation of Health Boards from party politics by restricting the use of partisan labels. Voters were deprived of a heuristic that usually helps them to decide how to cast their votes. Many electors did not vote, while others sought alternative heuristics. Interviewees simultaneously decried partisan politics, lack of information and low turnout by the rest of the population. These dislikes seem to conflict with each other. Moreover, the experience shows how the heuristics available to voters can shape democratic governance.

This article shows how extant theories on women’s representation in parties can only partially explain the Kurdish ethno-nationalist party’s exceptional level of women’s descriptive representation vis-à-vis the Turkish average. It demonstrates that women’s very high level of representation in the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) can be better understood by examining the interaction between party-related and movement-related factors. Drawing on extensive empirical research, the study demonstrates that the party’s leftist ideology, along with the mobilisation strategies and needs of the movement, have had a decisive impact in creating the conditions for women’s self-assertion and their taking positions of power within the party, including the adoption and scrupulous implementation of a voluntary party gender quota. The study suggests that, in the case of parties closely tied to broader social movements, it is the relationship between the two organisations (party and movement), rather than just the former, that should be analysed. This is particularly evident in the case of ethno-nationalist parties that emanate from highly mobilised or even armed movements.