Agonism and Hope in William Apess’s Native American Political Thought

This article examines the Native American thinker, William Apess (Pequot), and especially his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), which argues, ironically, that King Philip—the seventeenth century Wampanoag leader who launched the bloodiest rebellion in New England’s history—ought to be embraced as an American pioneer and canonized as a founding father. Apess satirizes conventional founding narratives, even as he upholds the principles of freedom those narratives support. The effect of this irony is to interrupt and invert discourses of progressive history and American patriotism that underlie Manifest Destiny policies, in ways that open spaces for new historical accounts to surface and compete in a force field of agonistic powers. I argue that Apess’s ironic historical revisionism expresses a political theory of hope, one that I contrast with representations of hope by other nineteenth century Native American political thinkers, such as Plenty Coups (Crow).     

History and Thought in China’s Traditions

The recent turn to China??s traditions has the potential to correct for the Eurocentrism of Political Science theories. Nevertheless, the overwhelming emphasis on political thought, especially Confucianism, may have its drawbacks. This article suggests that political scientists who are interested in building theories and drawing policy implications should study the verifiable, i.e., history. Unless the purpose is to study philosophy for its own sake, political scientists should study political thought in practice, rather than political thought divorced from history. This article first discusses why it is important to examine history beyond thought. It then analyzes why scholars should not conflate political thought with historical practice. It anchors the analysis with a high-profile recent book on ancient Chinese thought.     

‘Better in kung fu movies than in political parties’: Labour’s Factionalism and a Reappraisal of Eric Hobsbawm’s Political Thought

Eric Hobsbawm will forever be a giant intellectual figure. Yet, an aspect of his work is underappreciated—the case for a more pluralistic, dynamic and intellectually inquiring Labour Party. As such, his political thought is particularly relevant given the recent election of Keir Starmer, and the avowed quest for ‘unity’ in bringing Labour back to power. Hobsbawm came to believe that political strategies which sought to exploit social and political stratification and conflict—such as vilifying reformist political movements and those of moderate persuasion—doomed Labour to permanent opposition. A broad-based people’s party, uniting objectives of solidarity and aspiration, was the only viable class politics. Although from the Marxist tradition, Hobsbawm believed Labour’s purpose was to make liberal democracy function more effectively, rather than creating an alternative economic and political system. Suggesting conflict was more suited to kung fu movies, Hobsbawm’s predominant theme of ‘anti-factionalism with a purpose’ remains apposite today.     

Political Parties and Minority Governance in Hybrid Political Orders: Reflections from Lebanon’s Palestinian Settlements and Kosovo’s Serbian Enclaves

This article analyses how minority populations govern and are governed in South Lebanon’s informal Palestinian settlements and the Serbian enclave in North Kosovo. Drawing on literature about hybrid political orders, it is argued that in both settings political parties play a linchpin role in local governance. Based on this finding, three key functions of political parties in the governance of minority populations in hybrid political orders are identified: representation, provision and brokerage. Understanding the interdependencies and trade-offs between these different roles contributes to remedying the analytical blind spot regarding the nature, positions and roles of political parties in hybrid political orders.     

Religion and Politics in Western and Islamic Political Thought: A Clash of Epistemologies?

Early Christianity viewed religion and politics as largely separate; early Islam viewed them as largely concurrent. But from the eighth to the eleventh centuries each modified their original position, so that they almost converged. However, they subsequently diverged again. This was because, in the West, political thought became secularised following the eleventh-century papal reform movement and then the Protestant Reformation. Muslim thinkers, on the other hand, beginning with al-Mawardi (974–1058), sought to restore the subsumption of politics into religion, notably during the sixteenth-century Shi'ite revolution in Iran. While today the West views religion and politics as largely separate categories, Muslims see them as necessarily intertwined; attempts to separate them have so far largely failed. Hence Muslim political thought is based primarily on revelation (interpreted in various ways), while Western political thought is based on philosophy.     

China’s Political Stability: Global Comparisons

Throughout most of the 20th Century, China had suffered tremendous economic and human losses due to political instability. It is in the most recent decades that the Chinese people have managed to live with political stability. The economic benefits of political stability can hardly be overstated. Yet, China’s political stability is by no means assured. Is China stable or unstable? Is the Chinese regime strong or fragile? To answer these questions, this study has selected a total of 12 sets of publically available indices to measure political instability and placed China on a global scale of comparisons with all the others, both advanced and developing, in the world. It also makes specific comparisons between China and the other four countries of the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The findings of our global comparisons give China no reasons for celebration. However, China has no reasons for paranoia either. China has indeed faced many threats or challenges to political stability, but, as our study demonstrates, China is no more politically unstable or fragile than many others. Ignoring or underestimating the ripple effect of any destabilizing world event will do China no good, but overreactions also serve China’s interests poorly as fear or paranoia can be highly contagious.     

Uncertainty,Complexity, and Gamson’s Law: Comparing Coalition Formation in Western Europe

According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is proportional to the legislative seat shares of the governing parties. However, portfolio allocation departs systematically from perfect proportionality. This paper proposes a theory of portfolio allocation that seeks to explain the variance in proportionality across different bargaining situations. It argues that the degree to which the coalition formation process is characterised by uncertainty and complexity influences portfolio allocation. In uncertain and complex bargaining situations, parties that otherwise would be in an advantageous bargaining position will have a difficult time exploiting their bargaining advantage. As a result, portfolio allocation in such circumstances will be closer to proportionality. These patterns are observed in data on coalition formation in 14 West European parliamentary systems in the period 1945–1999.     

Reconciliation Arguments in John Rawls’s Political Philosophy

Abstract

Recently debates about the worth of “ideal theory” have directed attention to the functions that an account of a perfectly just society can serve. One function is that of “reconciliation”: learning that a seemingly undesirable feature of the social world would exist even in the perfectly just society can show us the value that it has in the present as well. John Rawls has emphasized reconciliation as among the roles of political philosophy. For instance, Rawls claims that his theory of justice can reconcile us to the pluralism of liberal democracies. In this essay, I argue that Rawls’s political theory also can reconcile the inhabitants of liberal democratic societies to the fact that such societies may be cognitively confusing on account of their complexity. Then I contend that Rawls’s work offers valuable theoretical resources for analysing a society’s transparency or lack thereof.     

‘Constructing a New Socialist Countryside’ and Beyond: An Analytical Framework for Studying Policy Implementation and Political Stability in Contemporary China

This article proposes a two-dimensional analytical framework to investigate the impact of local policy implementation on political system stability and legitimacy in China. It combines David Easton’s political systems theory with policy analysis and a variant of actor-centered institutionalism known as “strategic group analysis”. In the second part of the article, this framework is applied to a case study on local implementation of the official “constructing a new socialist countryside” policy in Qingyuan County, Zhejiang Province.     

China’s Local Political Turnover in the Twenty-First Century

This paper provides empirical evidence on the incentive role of personnel control in China in the twenty-first century. Employing the city-level turnover data of political leaders in China between 2000 and 2018 and utilizing the fixed effects ordered logit model, we find that the likelihood of promotion of local leaders rises with their economic performance. This relationship holds more firmly in the municipal party secretary. The probability is also found to decrease with the economic performance of their immediate predecessors and neighboring cities. This finding is robust to various robustness tests. We interpret the finding as evidence that the relative economic performance (peer effects) also contributes to the local political turnover, in particular within a province. Moreover, after the Third Plenary Session of the 18^th CPC Central Committee, a material change in the personnel arrangement within the party arises and this promotion mechanism shows a dynamic change. Our study sheds some light on the growing literature emphasizing the relationship between political turnover and economic performance.

     

“Performance Legitimacy” and China’s Political Adaptation Strategy

The CCP government has adopted a very pragmatic strategy of “performance legitimacy” since China began its reform. It means that the government relies on accomplishing concrete goals such as economic growth, social stability, strengthening national power, and “good governance” (governing competence and accountability) to retain its legitimacy. While it is able to attain considerable domestic support by implementing this strategy, it has no particular interest in pursuing democratization. This chapter tries to make sense of the main reasons why it has adopted this strategy and to evaluate the political and social outcome of its policies. The chapter intends to discover if China’s adaptation strategy is a “path dependent” decision, and if it will function as a potential catalyst for significant political change in the future. The chapter also explores what the Chinese government has achieved through its adaptation strategy and what and why it has been unwilling or unable to do to obtain an “original justification” of power. Zhu skillfully travels back and forth between the terrains of theory and practice to make better sense of legitimacy and governance in China’s experiences.     

Racial Resentment and Whites’ Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America

Our study investigates how and why racial prejudice can fuel white opposition to gun restrictions. Drawing on research across disciplines, we suggest that the language of individual freedom used by the gun rights movement utilizes the same racially meaningful tropes as the rhetoric of the white resistance to black civil rights that developed after WWII and into the 1970s. This indicates that the gun rights narrative is color-coded and evocative of racial resentment. To determine whether racial prejudice depresses white support for gun control, we designed a priming experiment which exposed respondents to pictures of blacks and whites drawn from the IAT. Results show that exposure to the prime suppressed support for gun control compared to the control, conditional upon a respondent’s level of racial resentment. Analyses of ANES data (2004–2013) reaffirm these findings. Racial resentment is a statistically significant and substantively important predictor of white opposition to gun control.     

Joseph’s Squinting Eye: Race and Individualism in Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country

Peter Matthiessen’s novel Shadow Country offers a fictionalized account of the life of real-life character Edgar Watson. Matthiessen’s portrayal illustrates Jack Turner’s argument in Awakening to Race that atomistic individualism both justifies an individual’s success as a product of that person’s hard work and masks the racial inequality on which that success is actually predicated. Turner advocates an “awakening to race” as an important step toward replacing atomistic individualism with democratic individualism in American society. Matthiessen’s work deepens Turner’s analysis by showing that the whiteness of Watson’s atomistic individualism is inflected by masculinity. Further, Matthiessen depicts the difficulty of awakening to race for many white Americans. The Edgar Watson narrative serves to show that while closing one’s eyes to race may appear to be an advantage for most white people, not awakening to race actually exacts a devastating psychological tax. That kind of insight, which approaching political theory through literature affords, may help white Americans circumvent psychological mechanisms of denial and acknowledge the difficult history of their country.     

Laughing Our Way to a Stronger Democracy: Political Comedy’s Potential to Equalize Political Interest in Community College Students

What effect does political comedy have on political interest? Through an experimental design, changes in political interest are measured through a pre and posttest, comparing groups randomly assigned to watch The Daily Show, NBC Nightly News, Entertainment Tonight and a no-exposure group. Models indicate political comedy significantly affects political interest, measured through a unique 40-point index.