The technocratic tendencies of economists in government bureaucracy

Economists are by many accounts the most influential group of experts in contemporary political decision-making. While the literature on the power of economists mostly focuses on the policy ideas of economic experts, some recent studies suggest that economists also hold particular technocratic ideas about the policy process. The article systematically tests this argument. Focusing on economists within government bureaucracy, the study is based on a quantitative analysis of a large-scale survey of Norwegian ministerial civil servants. It finds that economists are more likely to hold technocratic role perceptions than officials with other educational backgrounds only if they work in the finance ministry or in higher administrative grades. The findings contribute to scholarship on the political sway of economists and to debates about technocracy and the technocratic views of civil servants.     

POLITICS, TOTALITARIANISM AND FREEDOM: THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT

FEW contemporary political thinkers have attempted as much as Hannah Arendt has in the course of her effort to formulate a philosophy capable of comprehending every important aspect of the human condition. Her endeavours have not indeed passed unnoticed; on the contrary, each of her major works has been extensively reviewed and the originality of her thought readily acknowledged. And yet, surprisingly, little attention has been paid to her work considered as a whole;' the complex of ideas which gives her essays their unity as a body of writing on political philosophy has been neglected. In the present paper an attempt will be made to rectify this state of affairs by directing attention away from the trees to the wood.     

Guest Editorial: Political geographies of children and young people

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the present Special Issue of Space & Polity tackling the political geographies of children and young people. Historically given scant attention by the sub-discipline, since children and young people appear to have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, geopolitics and the like, there are now small signs of how and why political geographers might look anew at the experiences and contribu tions of this population cohort. An empirical vignette, based on letters written by children and young people to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great De pression, is deployed to develop this claim. Contrasts are then drawn between political geographies of children and young people that are ‘adult-centred’ and those that are ‘child-centred’, as related to claims about the distinctions and connections between ‘macro-politics’ and ‘micro-politics’. It is suggested that, notwithstanding the exciting insights to be derived from child-centred approaches, the situation should not be a matter of privileging these over adult-centred approaches. Indeed, it is argued that there are dangers in going down such a route and of thereby collapsing ‘the political’ into ‘the personal’, thus missing what is distinctively political about the geographies needing to be researched and written. Following a brief excursion into debates about the supposed political apathy of (post)modern children and young people, the paper then introduces the other contributions to the Special Issue.     

Citizenship,Civic Memory and Urban Performance: Mission Wall Dances

The meaning of art changes in various contexts. This article examines how an outdoor performance transformed an urban street in the Mission District of San Francisco into a site of citizenship and political communication. This is the story of how choreographer Jo Kreiter and her small group of dancers used the power of memory, the social narratives about her San Franciscan performance site and symbolism to enhance the political message about gentrification embedded in her dance piece Mission Wall Dances. The relevance of public performance, however, does not come exclusively from its location, but rather includes its engagement with civic life. The performance of Mission Wall Dances became a dialogue between the physical site, the specific subject matter and the experiences and memories of the audience members. The associations made between the performance and its neighbourhood location in the minds of the audience members can build a sense of civic identity, at both individual and group levels. The images and ideas present in the performance commingled in the minds of the audience creating a new meaning for an urban landscape.     

Banality in Politics: Margaret Thatcher and the Biographers

There are numerous biographies of Margaret Thatcher, but as yet no full-length study has been written by a political scientist. This is a disappointing omission from the literature, and reflects a general tendency to undervalue biographical studies. One result has been the production of scholarly work on the Conservative party between 1975 and 1990 which is unduly abstract and often misleading. Equally, although some excellent biographies have been produced – and Thatcher's memoirs are among the best of their genre – the unique perspectives of political science can yield some fascinating insights into her career, her party and the changing nature of British government. This article traces some of the crucial interactions which influenced Thatcher – her family background, her experiences within the Conservative party, her electioneering and her conduct of government. It concludes that although Thatcher's personality developed as a result of these encounters, as an adult she affected institutions far more than they affected her. This raises interesting, but not insuperable challenges for political scientists. Individuals do matter, and their influence can be appraised within a broader context. Ironically, it seems that complex characters conform more readily to generalisable norms of political conduct; Thatcher, by contrast, broke many of the accepted rules precisely because her personality was so banal.     

The Liberal Rationale of 'Rational Socialism'

This article draws attention to the ideas of an unduly neglected Belgian thinker, Hippolyte Colins. From the 1830s, Colins addressed many issues in the political theory of property, especially problems of interpersonal, intergenerational and inter-societal justice. His ideas are discussed in the first section. A critical examination of his arguments about justified property regimes enables contemporary disputes (notably in the work of Nozick and Steiner) to be placed in a fresh perspective, offered in the second section. This locates the difficulty of distinguishing between liberal and socialist commitments to particular property systems.     

Joseph Stiglitz: The Citizen-Bureaucrat and the Limits of Legitimate Dissent

Since being forced to resign his high-ranking post at the World Bank in 2000 for publicly dissenting from neoliberal ideas, Joseph Stiglitz has become a global policy celebrity, celebrated as the “Rebel Within.” While much has been said about his neo-Keynesian policy framework, little has been done to explore the political significance of his iconic status as a renowned “citizen-bureaucrat.” Yet, Stiglitz's iconic image in many ways has had a greater political impact than his policy ideas. In a world in which government and corporate bureaucracies increasingly squeeze out alternative visions, the citizen-bureaucrat suggests that space still exists within these unwieldy bureaucracies for the independent-thinker to put forward a rebellious agenda. Through an assessment of Stiglitz's policy career, this article argues that the image of the citizen-bureaucrat is, to a large extent, an ideological fantasy that masks a more uncomfortable political reality: that the available options for the “good bureaucrat” in today's neoliberal era, far from expanding, are more narrow than ever before.     

Constituent errors in assessing their Senators

We attempt to explain why some constitutents are well informed and others are poorly informed about the positions taken by their U.S. Senators. The acquisition of political information is modeled in a Bayesian framework. A constituent with virtually no information about a candidate assigns him an average position on a liberal/conservative spectrum. As more political information is acquired with more political involvement, the constituent shifts her prior toward the politician's actual position and thus has a smaller error in assessing positions taken by her representative. In the Bayesian framework, voters make larger errors in evaluating the records of party mavericks than of typical party members. The model is tested using data from the 1982 American National Election Study. Data on the respondent's perceived ideology of their Senators and their socioeconomic characteristics are combined with information on the Senators' actual ideology, length of time in the Senate, political party, and candidacy for re-election in 1982. The empirical analysis provides support for our predictions.     

A rhetoric of style: Eleanor Rigby and the reordering of popular music

In this paper, we present a synthesis of Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric of identification and Jay Lemke’s social semiotics to frame Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles as a unique point in the phylogenesis of recorded popular music. We emphasise the social semiotic functioning of string arrangements as styles, with style also being understood in the manner of Burke, and style names and definitions being drawn from a corpus analysis of string arrangements for popular music. We argue that, through a rhetoric of style, Eleanor Rigby made canonical claims against rock's cultural counterpart, classical music. We demonstrate the working of the rhetoric and its political implications in the context of the counter-cultural forces active during the mid-1960s.     

Transaction Costs and the Perceived Effectiveness of Complex Institutional Systems

This article studies factors affecting how policy actors perceive the effectiveness of political institutions involved in complex water governance systems. The ecology of games framework argues that participants are more likely to perceive institutions as effective when the benefits of solving collective action problems outweigh the transaction costs of developing political contracts within these institutions. The authors hypothesize that transaction costs are a function of conflict, type of participation, political knowledge, scientific knowledge, and actor resources. Survey results suggest that the importance of these different sources of transaction costs varies across study sites in the Tampa Bay watershed in Florida, the Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta in California, and the Paraná River delta in Argentina. Based on the observed differences, some initial ideas are sketched about the evolution of complex governance systems from fairly simple and informal rules and networks to well‐established tapestries of many formal institutions.     

From ‘There is No Alternative’ to ‘Maybe There are Alternatives’: five Challenges to Economic Orthodoxy after the Crash

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, politicians famously told the public and themselves that ‘there is no alternative’ to a neoliberal economic paradigm. Fast‐forward to 2019 and there is, instead, the sense that ‘maybe there are alternatives’. However, when many observers and commentators look back to the 2008 crisis, they see a general continuity with what went before. In order to gain a better understanding of this ‘interregnum’, we map five sets of ideas and practices that challenge the policies, ideas, and conventions of pre‐crash orthodoxy. In doing so, we argue that there has been a fundamental transformation in legitimate public discourse about the economy since 2008: ideas and practices that were previously unimaginable or illegitimate in mainstream economic debate are now commonplace. Although this does not represent a ‘paradigm shift’, it represents significant political change that is important to understand and interrogate on its own terms.     

Sophocles'Antigone and the History of the Concept of Natural Law

This paper focuses on two related questions. The first of these is a general question. Where are the origins of the concept of natural law to be located in the history of political thought? The second is more specific. Sophocles puts into the mouth of the eponymous heroine of his Antigone an argument justifying her disobedience to an edict of her uncle Creon, who forbade her to bury her brother Polyneices. Does this argument involve an appeal to the concept of natural law? The paper takes issue with the claim, first made by Aristotle in his Rhetoric , that Sophocles' Antigone is indeed an early example of the application of the concept of natural law in political argument and debate. This interpretation of the political message of the Antigone is inconsistent with what we know about Sophocles' attitude towards the fundamental questions of Athenian politics in the classical era of Periclean democracy during the fifth century BC.     

Schools of democracy? Disentangling the relationship between civic participation and political action in 17 European countries

Since Tocqueville's seminal writings, voluntary associations have been proclaimed to be schools of democracy. According to this claim, which regained popularity during the 1990s, involvement in voluntary associations stimulates political action. By participating in these associations, members are socialised to become politically active. Supposedly, having face‐to‐face contact with other members induces civic mindedness – the propensity to think and care more about the wider world. Participating in shared activities, organising meetings and events, and cooperating with other members are claimed to induce civic skills and political efficacy. Over the years, many authors have elaborated on these ideas. This article offers a systematic examination of the neo‐Tocquevillian approach, putting the theoretical ideas to an empirical test. It offers a critical overview of the literature on the beneficial role of voluntary associations and dissects it into five testable claims. Subsequently, these claims are tested by cross‐sectional, hierarchical analyses of 17 European countries. The authors conclude that the neo‐Tocquevillian theory faces serious lack of empirical support. In line with the expectations, they find a strong, positive correlation between associational involvement and political action. Moreover, this correlation is positive in all countries under study. However, more informative hypotheses on this correlation are falsified. First, the correlation is stronger for interest and activist organisations than for leisure organisations. Second, passive (or ‘checkbook’) members show much higher levels of political action than non‐involved, whereas the additional effects of active participation are marginal. Third, the correlation between associational involvement and political action is not explained by civic skills and civic mindedness. In sum, the authors find no evidence for a direct, causal relation between associational involvement and political action. The socialisation mechanism plays a marginal role at best. Rather, this article's findings imply that selection effects account for a large part of the correlation between associational involvement and political action. The conclusion reached therefore is that voluntary associations are not the schools of democracy they are proclaimed to be, but rather pools of democracy.     

Self-determination,group identity and the common will

ABSTRACT

Anna Stilz defends a political autonomy account of self-determination that, she argues, best explains our intuitions about why colonization, annexation and foreign occupation are wrong. These are wrong, on Stilz’s view, because they unilaterally coerce individuals living under those systems of government. I argue that Stilz does not show that her account of self-determination explains our intuitions about autonomy in these kinds of cases, because she does not have a separate argument for the value of belonging to particular political groups.     

中国政治经济学研究近期成果综述

中国政治经济学领域近年来的成果,突出表现在政治经济学基本理论建设研究、产权理论与国企改革研究和“三农”与科学发展研究三个方面。广大经济学理论工作者,就这三个方面的各种理论和政策问题,展开了热烈的讨论,出现了很多新颖的观点和看法。这些观点和看法,很值得社会各界高度关注和重视。     

Rancière,religion and the political

In the past few decades, the ‘return of the religious’ has been a recurrent theme in popular and academic discourse. From debates regarding the permissibility of religious dress and symbols in the public sphere, to questions of the integration of Muslim immigrants, concerns about the rise of the Christian Right in American politics and the role of Islam in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, a great deal of attention has been accorded to the presence of religion and religious subjects in the public sphere. Such has been the importance attached to accounting for, categorizing and contending with this phenomenon that it has attracted the attention of many of the major figures in contemporary social and political thought. However, the ideas of Jacques Rancière, one of the foremost figures in contemporary political philosophy, are noticeably absent in these discussions. In this article, I take up the task of investigating how Rancière's political philosophy can be brought to bear on debates surrounding the relationship between citizenship, religion and the political. I argue that his reconceptualization of politics, democracy and political subjectivity makes apparent the limitations, and even futility of current debates between advocates of secular universalism and those of religious pluralism, and, through assisting in the critical analysis of the public presence of religion, provide an opening for the potential emergence of alternative forms of community and political subjectivity.     

Gender Ghosts in McGarry and O'Leary and Representations of the Conflict in Northern Ireland

This article focuses on how ideas about gender function in academic analyses of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Part of the reason for doing this is to explore the paradox afflicting contemporary feminism, namely that in the midst of apparent success feminism still seems largely irrelevant to matters of political significance. A second reason involves a demonstration of the political value of poststructural feminism. To achieve these aims, I first consider the use and political aims of poststructuralist analyses, partly through an analysis of the use of poetry in social scientific analyses. The main site used to demonstrate the functions of gender and the political possibilities of poststructural feminism is John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary's book Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images . The sub-title of this book refers to a Robert Graves' poem, 'In Broken Images', a poem the authors use to explain their desire to 'break images' when explaining the conflict in Northern Ireland. I next reflect on and illustrate how ideas about gender function by focusing primarily on Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images . The final section re-considers the paradox of contemporary feminism, suggesting that feminism's own methodologies contribute towards its persistent marginalisation.     

Learn,Frame and Deploy? Cross-National Policy Ideas and Comparisons in Turkey’s Health Reform

Comparative analysis in health policy not only helps us learn about the organization of health care systems and reforms in other countries but also addresses the difficulties of drawing cross-national policy lessons. This case study on the Turkish health reform of 2003 focuses on the national policy discourse to identify how cross-national ideas and comparative analyses are used by policymakers and other key stakeholders. Building on the ideational perspectives and Kingdon’s streams approach, it explores agenda setting and ideological framing activities. The results provide evidence for the political nature of the process whereby cross-national ideas were deployed in domestic policy battles.     

Defending popular sovereignty: discursive conflict in French and Swedish parliamentary debates on immigrant voting rights (1968-2017)

ABSTRACT

Through a discourse analysis of French and Swedish legislative debates from 1968 to 2017, this article examines how actors challenge and reinforce dominant ideas about the link between nationality and political rights. We argue that the broader political culture influences which discursive strategies – or ‘frames’ – are more likely to structure parliamentary debates in different national contexts. However, our analysis also shows that legislators sometimes develop new discursive frames in which they reinterpret dominant norms to make them consistent with their views. Through this incremental process of reinterpretation and reformulation of dominant ideas, debates over non-citizen voting rights have chipped away at the link between nationality and political rights. Our findings suggest that initiatives to enfranchise non-citizens trigger lower levels of conflict when they can be framed as a policy tool for immigrant integration rather than as a matter of popular sovereignty.     

The Lost Treasure of Arendt's Council System

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's On Revolution offers a critique of modern representative democracy combined with a manifesto-like treatise on council systems as they have arisen over the course of revolutions and uprisings. However, Arendt's contribution to democratic theory has been obscured by her commentators who argue that her reflections on democracy are either an aberration in her work or easily reconcilable within a liberal democratic framework. This paper seeks to provide a comprehensive outline of Arendt's writing on the council system and a clarification of her work outside the milieu of the post-Cold War return to Arendt. Her analyses bring to light a political system that guarantees civil and political rights while allowing all willing citizens direct participation in government. Framing her discussion within the language of the current renewed interest in constituent power, her council system could be described as a blending together of constituent power and constitutional form. Arendt resists the complete dominance and superiority of either element and argues that the foundation of a free state requires nothing less than the stabilization and persistence of constituent power within an open and fluid institution that would resist either the bureaucratization of politics or its dispersal into a revolutionary flux. Although one may conclude that her institutional suggestions are far from flawless, her political principles allow a conceptualization of democracy in more substantial ways than current liberal political philosophy.