(Re)categorization as Resistance: Civil Society Mobilizations Around the Preah Vihear Temple

This paper deals with civil society mobilizations and resistance in relation to a world heritage site—the ninth-century Khmer temple Preah Vihear, which is located in the northern province of Cambodia and borders eastern Thailand. In particular, the paper explores resistance in terms of (re)categorizations from a historical and discursive–materialistic perspective. The field of resistance studies has mainly been preoccupied with entities such as texts, signs, symbols, identity, and language. In this article, however, we bring in physical and material entities in order to display the ways in which matter is of importance in the (re)construction of discourses and thereby for resistance.     

Mapping the Nordic Party Space

The left-right positions of the political parties in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland are compared from the late 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s. To locate the parties, survey data on the voters' self-placements along the left-right continuum are used. In order to study changes in the left-right polarity and the degree of consensus along the left-right continuum in each of the countries, we use the mean party positions to calculate three different measures of party distances. The wing party distance is that between the party farthest to the left and the party farthest to the right. The rival party distance is that between the Social Democratic Party and the traditional Conservative Party. Finally, the mean party distance is the average distance between all pairs of parties. One of the main conclusions is that in Sweden and Iceland the left-right continuum seems to contract, whereas in Norway and Denmark the left-right polarity and the distances between the parties are increasing. In today's Nordic party space, the distance between left and right is longest in Denmark and shortest in Norway. Eventually, 39 Nordic parties are brought together on the same left-right scale. The analysis reveals that there are some clearly distinguishable clusters of parties or party families in the Nordic countries, such as, for example, the socialist parties, the social democratic parties and the conservative parties. Other party groups differ greatly in left-right position, like the progressive parties, the liberal parties and the centre parties.     

Implausible hypotheses in the directional theory of issue voting

Two implausible hypotheses implied by the directional theory of issue voting were tested using six Swedish national election studies, 1979–1994. The hypotheses that (a) centrists are indifferent toward parties, and that (b) people leaning slightly in one direction prefer an extremely intense party on the same side were not supported. However, alternative hypotheses from proximity theory were also not supported consistently. Self–placement on the left–right dimension and liking for a party form a logistic function. Party set and latitudes of acceptance, rejection, and noncommitment are concepts that may prove useful in understanding this relationship.     

Conditionality and Path Dependence in Chinese Lending

China's long insistence on non-interference in sovereign states' domestic affairs has contributed to a widely held impression that China also lends abroad without attaching policy conditions. In this article, we debunk the notion that China's bilateral lending is entirely devoid of conditionality, by showing that it involves elements of political conditionality, embedded conditionality and cross-conditionality, stemming from the varying concerns of Chinese foreign policy-makers and state-linked lenders. We then draw on the path-dependence literature to explore the possibility that there may also be more indirect forms of conditionality associated with Chinese lending practices. By ‘emergent conditionality’, we refer to structural lock-in effects that may cumulatively restrict or redirect recipient countries' policy-making choices similarly as more direct conditionality would do, even if the PRC government officially shuns conditionality.     

Legal Pluralism,Gendered Discourses,and Hybridity in Land‐titling Practices in Cambodia

This article describes and analyses the tensions, ambivalence, and hybridity that prevail in the nexus between discourses of gender and the legal pluralism of the new, formalized, and customary ways of handling land titles. Based on empirical research in Cambodia, it reveals a number of mechanisms, challenges, and inconsistencies in the practice of land‐titling. Foremost, the practice of titling seems to be highly informed by local discourses of marriage, family, gender, and age, which all affect to whom land is assigned; this leaves a hybrid construction in the nexus between statutory law and customary practices. The article departs from this observation and adds three contributions – on a theoretical level – to existing research: by incorporating the dimensions of discourse analysis and legal hybridity, by linking the concept of legal pluralism to the process of hybridization, and by introducing the notion of hybridity of implementation as a supplement to hybridity of law.     

An Empirical Test of the Relative Education Model in Sweden

Numerous studies show that education has a positive effect on political participation at the individual level. However, the increase in aggregate levels of education in most Western countries over the last decades has not resulted in a corresponding increase in aggregate levels of political participation. Nie et al. (Education and democratic citizenship in America, 1996) propose the relative education model as a possible solution to this paradox. According to this model, it is not the skills promoted by education that have positive effects on political participation. Rather, education influences individuals’ social status, which in turn influences political participation. The relative education model expects that the individual-level effect of an additional year of education will decrease as the mean level of education in the environment increases. This article evaluates this theory using Swedish election surveys (1985–2006) and it thus provides the first in depth evaluation of the relative education model outside the US. On voting and political participation related to political parties, support is found for the relative education model.     

The EU’s Asia: renegotiating boundaries, renegotiating norms

The global financial crisis and the shift of economic strength to a rising Asia have ushered in European introspection and allusions to the decline of the European Union (EU). The EU’s ambitions to have a normative impact in the world have been called into question. The seven articles in this guest-edited issue explore processes of change relating to geopolitical definitions, regional actorness, interregionalism, and normative power within the framework of EU–Asia relations. This introduction contextualises the themes taken up in the different articles. It considers important divides in the recent history of Europe–Asia relations and outlines key transformations in the global environment, before critically reflecting on the significance of normative power for Europe.     

History,regionalism, and CARICOM trade: A gravity model analysis

Abstract

A gravity model is fitted to 17 annual cross sections, 1980–1996, of bilateral trade data (imports and exports) between CARICOM member states and selected trading partners. Specifically, the paper investigates the effects of regional integration, colonial legacies and linguistic ties on CARICOM bilateral trade flows between member states and between member states and North American and European Union countries. The empirical results indicate that history and regionalism have had significant and strong effects on CARICOM trade. Additionally, two traditional explanatory variables in gravity models, income per capita and population, have significant and positive effects on CARICOM trade while the distance between trading partners exerts the expected negative effect.     

Correcting mistakes: cognitive dissonance and political attitudes in Sweden and the United States

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (Am. Econ. J. Appl. Econ. 1:86–111, 2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve on previous studies by investigating political attitudes, measured just before elections, when they are highly predictive of voting. In contrast to earlier studies I find no effect of voting on political attitudes. This result holds for both Sweden and the United States.     

Welfare-Ideological Change in Scandinavia: A Comparative Analysis of Partisan Welfare State Positions in Four Nordic Countries, 1970–2003

During the 1990s, the Nordic welfare states, notably Finland and Sweden, faced serious challenges that triggered a number of welfare restructuring processes. This article focuses on the political determinants of these processes, or, more exactly, it analyses changes in partisan welfare policy positions in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden between 1970 and 2003. The main goal of the article is to chart possible changes in party positions on social policy. Has there been a decline in pro‐welfare attitudes during the period 1970–2003, and if so, how are these changes related to ideological and institutional factors? The data analysed in the article consists of election programmes, and more specifically, textual utterances concerning the welfare state. The results indicate a relatively high degree of stability in partisan support for welfare state expansion and investments in social justice, while market‐type solutions to social problems, on the other hand, have become more salient among parties, especially in the Right. The findings suggest that parties still differ from each other as to welfare‐political positions, indicating that Social Democratic and left‐wing parties remain the foremost defenders of the ‘Nordic Welfare Model’, whereas the Right has become more hesitant towards welfare state expansion.