What Is Sociology’s Contribution Beyond the Humanities and Other Social Sciences?

Invitation to Sociology makes known that sociology is a coherent and value-added academic discipline. In exploring the continuing relevance of Invitation to Sociology, the time is ripe to reconsider sociology as a value-added intellectual enterprise. This paper answers this question: What does sociology have to offer beyond what the humanities and its sister social sciences already provide? This paper answers this question by identifying the four elements that compose the sociological tradition. These elements are social action; embeddedness; social problems; and social construction. I argue that these elements are more pronounced in sociology than in any other academic discipline, and hence contribute to the value-added character of sociology.     

Debating Same-Sex Marriage: Lessons from <Emphasis Type="Italic">Loving</Emphasis>, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Roe</Emphasis>, and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Reynolds</Emphasis>

The United States Supreme Court, in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage (SSM). With Republicans now controlling the Congress and presidency, and with value-traditionalists and ‘strict’ constitutionalists influencing the party’s legislative agenda and judicial nominees, Obergefell’s future and the contours of SSM rights are uncertain. Proponents assume the decision will delegitimate opponents, just as Loving v. Virginia (1967) accelerated the delegitimation of racial segregationists. SSM opponents counter with the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and argue that, like Roe, Obergefell undermines the democratic process, which is better suited to resolve a highly-charged moral dispute. Like Roe, Obergefell will not resolve the debate but, instead, trigger a durable opposition. We add a third possible path, drawing on the evolving public discourse on polygamy since the Supreme Court upheld prohibitions in Reynolds v. United States (1878). The politics of polygamy shows that, if SSM opponents are delegitimated, they may reemerge as legitimate participants in the public sphere. These paths offer insights into uncertainties, contingencies, and predictions regarding the durability of SSM resistance and other oppositional movements. They also lead to revisionist interpretations of the effect on public discourse flowing from these three seminal court decisions. The politics of interracial marriage (after Loving) shunned the losing political faction from the public forum, while those of abortion (after Roe), and, recently, polygamy, illustrate a more vibrant, pluralist model of deliberation. Whether SSM opponents will mimic a Roe model, or follow the trajectory of Loving or Reynolds, is now the question.     

Theorien als latente Quellen von Normativität und Verantwortung in der Hochschullehre: Die Bedeutung von didaktischen und fachspezifischen Theoriedebatten am Beispiel des politikwissenschaftlichen Teilgebiets „Internationale Beziehungen“

The article deals with normative aspects that are negotiated in didactic and subject-specific theoretical debates and thus gain relevance in teaching. It turns out that the didactic theories provide divergent answers to the question of what should be taught how and by whom. Similarly, the example of theoretical debates in International Relations shows that, from a subject-specific perspective, there can often be a lack of consensus on the essentials that are to be taught. Such conflicting requirements, however, demonstrate the instructors’ scope for action, which they should realize and use responsibly. Due to academic pluralism, it seems possible that the societal pluralism, which is sometimes perceived as crisis-laden, can be used productively for teaching.     

The politics of policy adoption: a saga on the difficulties of enacting policy diffusion or transfer across industrialized countries

While studies of policy diffusion and policy transfer have focused largely on industrialized countries, it is the exact opposite when it comes to pension policies where the focus remains on national elements such as institutions and partisanship. Focusing on a case with a high degree of programmatic similarities, this contribution fills this gap by analyzing the adoptive process in an industrialized country. The empirical analysis involves the transfer and diffusion of the Swedish pension reform in Norway. Norway has a long history of borrowing from Sweden. Following a highly publicized Swedish pension reform embraced by the World Bank, Norwegian policy makers could have easily introduced this reform at home when they embarked into a reform process in the early 2000s. By analyzing core policy instruments of the Swedish pension reform and the agenda-setting and the formulation stages in the policy process in the Norwegian case, this contribution explains why it proves complex and difficult to attribute the outcome of a reform to a diffuser and it argues that more attention is needed on the process behind the adoption of policies from abroad.     

Corruption: An Alternative Approach to Its Definition and Measurement

Discussion of the definition of corruption has progressed little since Heidenheimer's groundbreaking distinction between definitions centred on public opinion, public office and public interest. All these definitions have been severely criticised. I suggest that underneath these traditional concepts of corruption lurks a much older one based on distributive justice – namely the 'impartiality principle', whereby a state ought to treat equally those who deserve equally. This principle provides a much more plausible reason for why the public condemns corruption than alternative approaches, and, moreover, it is recognised fairly universally: the implicit distinction between 'public' and 'private' is certainly neither as 'modern' nor as 'Western' as many have claimed. The universality of the principle of impartiality does not imply universality of its content: who deserves equally, or, alternatively, on which grounds discrimination is ruled out, will be answered differently at different periods in time and will vary from society to society. The impartiality principle provides a starting point for the discussion of both corruption in 'traditional' societies and contemporary political corruption – corruption involving violations of specific non-discrimination norms governing the access to the political process and the allocation of rights and resources. The impartiality principle calls for rule-bound administration and thus underpins the public office definition of corruption. A central element of the analysis of corruption is the study of specific non-discrimination norms and their comparison across time and place. This approach leads to a significant enrichment of the concept of corruption.     

Sleeping Beauties of Political Science: The Case of AF Bentley

Recognition is what makes science move forward. Yet, late recognition has been an existing phenomenon in the scientific community for centuries. Does this phenomenon of “Sleeping Beauties”, as these works are sometimes called in academic literature, exist in Political Science? The bibliometric analysis we applied showed a positive answer. Our paper is the first case study of “Sleeping Beauty” that is not an article but a book. The book by A. F. Bentley, The Process of Government, serves as an example of “Sleeping Beauty” in the Political Science domain. What put this work to “sleep”? And why, at some point, it has been suddenly “awakened” by a large number of citations? Although it has been discussed previously as a neglected classic, no bibliometric analysis has been applied to examine it and assumptions for its neglect and rediscovery presented by previous authors differ from our bibliometric findings.     

Constitutional political economy,democratic theory and institutional design

Democracy and constitutionalism are both central to the Western political tradition. And yet, constitutional restrictions are often perceived to be in tension with democratic commitments. I argue that the constitutional political economy approach developed by Nobel Laureate James Buchanan resolves the tension between constitutionalism and the values of democratic governance by shifting the analysis from a system-attributes perspective that focuses on the particular institutional properties of a political order to a system-legitimacy perspective that focuses on the manner in which political institutions gain democratic legitimacy. In so doing, the approach reveals that constitutionalism can be understood as a natural expression of democratic values.     

Donald and Winston at the Ministry of Alternative Facts

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian classics have risen in response to the audacious attempts of President Donald Trump to manipulate public opinion by circulating “alternative facts” throughout the presidential campaign and since his November 2016 election victory. Various statements by Trump and his advisors that exemplify what has come to be known as the “post-factual world” account for the meteoric rise and final breakthrough of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the top of the bestseller lists in spring 2017.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Forum Internum</Emphasis> Revisited: Considering the Absolute Core of Freedom of Belief and Opinion in Terms of Negative Liberty,Authenticity, and Capability

Human rights theory generally conceptualizes freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief as well as freedom of opinion and expression, as offering absolute protection in what is called the forum internum. At a minimum, this is taken to mean the right to maintain thoughts in one’s own mind, whatever they may be and independently of how others may feel about them. However, if we adopt this stance, it seems to imply that there exists an absolute right to hold psychotic delusions. This article takes the position that this conclusion is ethically problematic from the perspective of psychiatric treatment and the rights of persons with psychosis. The article reflects on this particular challenge and sets forth an understanding of freedom in the forum internum that might apply to situations where for various reasons it is not, necessarily accurate to maintain that persons have an absolute right to their own thoughts. For the purpose of proposing such an understanding, the article engages with current debates within human rights theory and political philosophy and analyzes discussions about psychotic delusions and the way in which involuntary treatment is justified. Based on this analysis, this article in turn conceptualizes freedom in the forum internum as ‘negative liberty’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘capability’. This article suggests that when forum internum is redefined as encompassing a right to certain internal capabilities, the right remains meaningful for persons with psychotic delusions as well.     

Qualitative Experteninterviews in Internationalen Organisationen

The article addresses the question of how to categorize different expert interviews in empirical research on international organizations. First of all, we discuss what is unique in analysing International Organizations. Afterwards, four different types of expert interviews are distinguished depending on the interest in the subject. Finally, the article connects the typology of expert interviews with the discussion of the organizational turn in IO-studies and discusses the consequences of the methodological approach proposed in this article. The findings are underlaid by case studies from research on international organizations.     

The Plurality of Peter Berger's “Two Pluralisms” in Germany

The aim of this paper is to unfold Peter L. Berger’s new paradigm of the “Two Pluralisms” for the German context, concretizing and localizing the management of religious plurality with regard to central societal fields. It is argued that, besides the bird’s-eye view of the global and national developments, more differentiated analyses of smaller-scale units (like federal states, municipalities, and cities) are needed which zoom into the concrete local negotiation processes, opening them up with regard to their topics, actor constellations, dynamics, and effects. While Berger builds up his new paradigm in the connection of the social macro-level and the individual micro-level, this paper deals primarily with the meso-level and the consequences of the “Two Pluralisms” in the institutional contexts of politics/law, education, symbolic representation, and communication that are currently undergoing a significant change through secularization and religious pluralization while, however, have so far hardly been examined with regard to their dynamics and the intended integrative effects.     

On Public Protest,Violence, and Street Gangs

This article elaborates upon the authors’ 2017 op-ed, “To deal with Antifa, designate it a street gang,” published in The Wall Street Journal. Following recent calls to declare Antifa, a loosely-organized collective of anti-fascists, a domestic terrorist organization, we argue for the categorization of the group as a street gang instead. We advocate for better understanding of groups and group processes and review existing gang definitions, specifically the California penal code and the consensus Eurogang definition. We find that groups within antifa meet gang criteria because they have a collective identity and engage in illegal violent activity. Classification of antifa as a street gang is preferable to domestic terrorism, we argue, because it permits the deployment of evidence-based violence prevention and intervention strategies beyond the current emphasis on crowd control. This article thus contributes to a burgeoning literature that examines the overlap between gangs and other social groups, with implications for broader criminological research and practice.     

Clientelism and Political Participation: Case Study of the Chinese <Emphasis Type="Italic">tongxianghui</Emphasis> in Macao SAR Elections

This paper investigates the close connections between Chinese tongxianghui (Chinese native-place association) and electoral politics in Macao SAR Legislative Assembly’s direct elections. The findings show that the Chinese tongxianghui in Macao SAR adopt clientelist politics based on cultural affinities during the electoral politics in gaining their client-voter supports for the direct elections in 2009 and 2013. The nature of clientelist relationships, such as interest maximizing exchange, reciprocity and iteration, building up long term and stable relationships, are different from the electoral campaigns in Western liberal democracies which are usually center on ideological lines and occasional exchanges which are arguably too random and too anonymous. In essence, this study argues that Chinese tongxianghui in Macao SAR, notably the Fujian Jinjiang tongxianghui and Guangdong Jiangmen tongxianghui, constitute powerful electoral engineering with affiliated interest groups and they have built up stable and long term clientelist relations with their clients, instead of waging electoral battles on ideological lines. Thus, this study contends that Macao’s direct elections represent a unique case study about participation of Chinese tongxianghui in electoral politics which can be characterized as a form of local-level, cumulative and low political-risk clientelism which could be more effective than ideological politics.     

Elk management and policy in southern Greater Yellowstone: Assessing the constitutive process

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA, is recognized globally as a model for land and wildlife conservation, management, and policy. A major policy problem in the region is the highly contentious winter feeding of elk (Cervus elaphus) on 23 government feed grounds in western Wyoming through cooperative management under several state and federal agencies. Numerous non-governmental groups and concerned citizens are also affected by elk management or seek to contribute to management policies. The long-term controversy shows that this issue centers on how management and policy should be made and who should be involved in decision-making—the constitutive policy process. This paper examines and appraises the constitutive process in this case, including how competency, authority, and control are allocated. It also looks at how institutions, analytic techniques, procedures, and people are structured, selected, and included or excluded in decision-making processes. Our data come from a multi-method approach over the past decade, including participant-observation, historical literature, interviews, media analysis, and technical reports. Our analysis shows that institutional dynamics severely constrain the scope of deliberations, the production of practical problem definitions, and the search for improvements in elk management. We recommend that participants focus on the constitutive level of policy making, i.e., the underlying structure and functioning of policy processes, learn how these elements function and affect processes and outcomes, and learn to configure them in ways that embody democratic principles, serve common interests, and resolve policy problems.     

Issue Definition, Information Processing, and the Politics of Global Warming

Past research has proposed various macrolevel theories of issue definition and agenda setting. However, we propose a microlevel theory of issue definition rooted in how individuals process information. We theorize that people process information about policy issues through a filter that emphasizes past assessments, ideology, background, social cues, and the continuing intrusion of new information. Most of these factors lead individual issue definitions toward stability. However, the introduction of an information signal of appropriate magnitude and character can produce punctuations in issue definition by individuals through time. Since the macrolevel definition of an issue is a type of aggregation of individual definitions, understanding how individuals define issues becomes a precursor to understanding issue definition at the system level. In evaluating the theory, we develop and evaluate a survey to study the issue definition process for individuals across multiple issues, and for global warming specifically. The survey also includes two embedded experiments to demonstrate the potential for punctuation in the issue-definition process for individuals and the system.     

Protesting via the Null Ballot: An Assessment of the Decision to Cast an Invalid Vote in Latin America

Rates of invalid voting in Latin America are among the highest in the world. Yet, scholars have not reached an agreement about whether these votes are driven by voter protest and, if so, what voters are protesting. Understanding whether these high invalid vote rates signify anti-democratic tendencies is particularly relevant given recent recessions in democratic quality across the region. This paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical tests using individual level data from 14 Latin American countries to show that invalid voting in presidential contests is used by individuals, particularly those high in knowledge, to protest poor government performance. However, invalid voting is not, on balance, an anti-system behavior. While political alienation differentially predicts invalid voting in countries with mandatory vote laws, the link between performance assessments and self-reported invalid voting is consistent across various contextual features that scholars link to invalid voting behavior.     

Kazin on Dreiser: What it Means to be a Literary Critic

Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work on Dreiser illuminates what it means to be a literary critic and teacher. When we read Kazin in the midst of twenty-first century theory, ideology, and professionalism, we realize all the more clearly the goal in his literary criticism that he aimed for, achieved, and represented—and that now is missing from literary education and experience.     

Court-ordered redistricting and the law of 1/<Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>

This paper examines the effect of redistricting on the law of 1/n, which posits that government spending increases with the number of legislative districts. Our analysis suggests that court-ordered redistricting in the 1960s significantly influenced the 1/n effect, because dividing districts (increasing their number) and merging districts (reducing their number) both reduce public spending. After redistricting, the positive relationship between seats and spending holds for lower chambers in bicameral legislatures. The US experience informs those interested in the design of bicameral institutions about the fiscal implications of legislative apportionment.     

The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism: Defining Antisemitism by Erasing Palestinians

The IHRA definition is one of the most contentious documents in the history of efforts to combat antisemitism. Although it first became well known in the UK as a result of disputes within the Labour Party, the definition reaches well beyond that context, and has been adopted by universities, city councils, and governments. With its intensive focus on the critique of Israel as a marker of antisemitism, the IHRA definition has been heavily implicated in the suppression of Israel-critical speech in recent years. This article is among the first to adopt a global perspective on the definition—both its history and its content—clarifying the political stakes of this definition and broader paratextual apparatus for a general audience, and provides an explanation of why it should be rejected rather than used to censor Israel-critical speech.