Gendered political space: civil society,contingency theory,and the substantive representation of women

Whilst existing civil society studies generally fail to systematically examine the way that contextual factors shape women’s representation in the civil sphere, political science has predominantly focused on legislative settings. This article responds to the resultant knowledge-gap by examining the hitherto underexplored role of civil society as a political space integral to the substantive representation of women (SRW)—or, the process by which women’s concerns are advanced in policy and politics. The article uses grounded theory in order propose a systematic analytical model showing how the SRW is a contingent process whereby the motives of civil society organizations are translated into action repertoires shaped by three (non-discrete) spheres: political, socioeconomic, and organizational. Its wider contribution to civil society scholarship is in highlighting how civil society is a complex, heterogeneous political space wherein SRW claims-making requires cognizance of the co-presence of contingent factors that offer immanent explanatory power.     

Institutions and representation: How institutional rules shape political recruitment in French regional elections

This article attempts to develop an approach to political recruitment that combines the study of strategies deployed by candidates, party officials and local leaders, with an analysis of the effects induced by the institutional environment within which they act. It is suggested that institutional ‘rules’ specific to French political life shape the competition among political actors who participate in the selection of candidates standing for regional election. More specifically, political recruitment can be fully understood only if three kinds of institutional variables are combined: the rules of the regional electoral system; the organisational features of political activity at the local level; and, above all, the variety of non‐codified norms and criteria which orient the perceptions and beliefs of the political groups involved in the selection process. The main empirical conclusion is that institutional variables engender ‘unexpected effects’ which modify traditional mechanisms of local elite recruitment.     

Political action of immigrants in the Netherlands: class or ethnicity?

Abstract. The political action of immigrant ethnic minorities in the Netherlands is examined in an attempt to assess the relevance of the neo-Marxist theory of the British sociologists Miles and Phizacklea, who identify three processes of political action: the black unity process, the class unity process and the ethnic organisation process. On the basis of available evidence from the Dutch case it is argued that in present circumstances neither black unity nor class unity are very likely, and that immigrants are likely to adopt an ethnic organisation perspective. Such a perspective is not due to racial exclusion within the working class. This conclusion differs from that of Miles and Phizacklea. It is shown that the theory applies to societies in which classes or class fractions can be clearly identified, but less to societies of another type such as the Dutch. Moreover, it is shown that Miles and Phizacklea tend to overemphasise the effects of native white racism on immigrant political action and neglect the dynamics of ethnicity and its mobilising force.     

Professionalised Campaigning in Latin America

Abstract

This paper analyses the process of democratisation within Latin American by focusing on the nature of election campaigning in the region. Particular attention is paid to developments in three former military dictatorships, which now regularly hold elections. The states are Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, and consideration is given to the insights and limitations of applying the “Americanisation” or modernisation thesis in studying their distinctive media and political cultures. The elections held in each state during 1999 are used as case studies. What emerges is a complex pattern in which candidates and parties have simultaneously adopted some of the professional forms of electioneering whilst retaining and valuing the more traditional and interpersonal electioneering techniques. Furthermore, it was pointed out that there were marked differences in politicians' approaches to campaigning both between as well as within the three different political systems.     

新型治理:韩国民主进程中的市民组织

近些年来,在以发展型国家著称的韩国,公民参与政策过程的影响不断增强.本文分析了韩国民主巩固进程中市民组织的政治化问题.论文通过分析市民组织在政策过程中的三个政治活动案例,揭示了韩国市民组织的组织特征和政治功能,最后还对韩国市民组织的特征与日本市民组织的特征进行了比较,并对韩国政治中市民组织在新型治理中的作用及其前景进行了评价.     

Public affairs and political strategy: theoretical foundations

During the past two decades there have been hundreds of articles published within the broad topic of business political strategy, many of them rigorous and innovative. This paper presents a review and assessment of the theoretical bases of extant research, focusing on three broad research questions: Why do firms participate in the political process? What strategies and tactics do firms employ? What are the limitations on firms' capacity for rational action in the political arena? Research in political strategy has been informed by interest group theory, collective action theory, public choice theory, transaction costs theory, game theory, resource dependence theory, institutional theory, agency theory, the behavioural theory of the firm, business strategy, and population ecology. The paper concludes with a plea to scholars to conduct research in this area which is explicitly and consistently grounded in broad theories of social science. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Anti-partyism in the USA and support for Ross Perot

This article provides an initial exploration into the phenomenon of anti-sentiment in the USA. It explores the meaning and measurement of anti-partyism, and introduces a series of empirical measures which tap three distinct dimensions of anti-partyism - dissatisfaction with the existing political parties, a preference for third party alternatives, and a desire to diminish the role of parties in the American political process. After using survey data to establish the basic trends in citizens’ feelings about parties, we probe the current nature and level of anti-partyism in the American system. As a final step, we show how in the 1992 presidential election anti-party sentiment was associated with support for Ross Perot and his grassroots political movement.     

Labour protest and industrial peace: Russian steelworkers’ encounters with economic reforms and unravelling social protections

Abstract

This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frames the crisis differently as an elite political debacle. Political and technocratic elites were hubristically detached from the process of financial innovation as it took the form of ‘bricolage’, which put finance beyond technical control or management. The paper raises fundamental questions about the politicized role of technocrats after the 1980s and emphasizes the need to bring private finance and its public regulators under democratic political control whose technical precondition is a dramatic simplification of finance.     

Politics and Power in the European Convention

The Convention on the future of the European Union has been heralded by many as a unique political setting. So far the process of EU Treaty change was subject to the collision of national political interests in Intergovernmental Conferences. By contrast, the Convention appears to promise a fundamentally open and normatively informed arena. This article probes the validity of this promise by dissecting the political dynamics of the Convention along three dimensions: political behaviour and alliance formation; agenda management; and the norms informing its proceedings.     

Accuracy and Bias in Perceptions of Political Knowledge

Learning through social communication is promoted when citizens are able to identify which of their associates is likely to possess the necessary political information. This paper examines the factors that influence individuals’ evaluations of political expertise. Actual political expertise plays a large role in perceived expertise, but mistakes are made. These are largely the result of assuming that those engaged in politics must also be knowledgeable about politics. This paper uses the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis Study and the 2000 National Election Study to identify factors that bias levels of perceived political knowledge. The paper concludes by demonstrating that perceived expertise plays a larger role than actual expertise in the social influence process.     

‘New politics’ in German labour market policy? The implications of the recent Hartz reforms for the German welfare state

The twin predicaments of German labour market performance and welfare state performance triggered an ongoing debate on reforming the German model. Recently, this debate has yielded an outcome in the form of the so-called Hartz laws, a bundle of labour market policies aimed at the reduction of unemployment and the decrease of non-wage labour costs. The Hartz reforms have played a prominent role in the public discussion, but are they really a watershed as both optimists and pessimists claim? In this article we investigate in what sense the Hartz reforms mark a substantive political change and how they are related to similar processes in other countries. To characterise the policy output we discuss three views of policy reform: reform as a process of policy-learning, reform as a process of competitive realignment and reform as a process of reinforcing path dependence. We show which of the three paradigms accounts for which part of the political result. We find evidence for both policy diffusion and retrenchment, but it is too early to speak of a change of regime. Rather, both the changes thus far and the blocked proposals follow a traditional German logic of strong institutional resistance.     

Political succession and regime change in new states in inter-war Europe: Ireland, Finland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Republics

Abstract. Problems of political succession are particularly acute when new regimes experience not merely the shock of the sudden introduction of democracy but also the challenge of consolidating a new territorial identity. The six North European states examined here, all of which became independent after the first world war, succeeded in establishing their legitimacy against threats from both left and right. The orderly political succession process was broken in three cases, however, by the appearance of authoritarian regimes in the inter-war period. The origins of this disjuncture are to be found not only in economic factors that enhanced the attractiveness of certain contemporary ideologies but also in the nature of elite political culture and the extent to which it had had the opportunity of absorbing liberal democratic norms.     

The Racialization of British Politics

The idea of 'race' was an important part of the post-1945 political and ideological context within which migration from the New Commonwealth began. This is demonstrated by an analysis of an important policy document which provides a foundation upon which to evaluate the character and significance of racism in the subsequent political process. This evaluation contrasts and comments upon rival accounts of the impact of racism offered by writers who have analysed official government files from the period. The paper concludes by arguing against a conception of racism which presumes that it is a constant and unchanging ideological bloc within the British political process.     

Difference and the Concept of the Political in Contemporary Political Philosophy

A striking feature of contemporary political philosophy is the emergence of the nature of the political itself as a central theme of discussion. There are various reasons for this development, but all of them merely reinforce the problem posed in its most stark form by postmodern theory. This is the problem of determining what concept of the political, if any, can accommodate the extreme diversity that is the main feature of contemporary western life. That is the question with which the present paper is concerned.
The three currently influential concepts of the political are analysed, after which it is suggested that a fourth concept, which is a revised and reformulated version of the classical idea of civil association, provides the basis for a concept of the political best suited to modern conditions of increasing diversity.     

Construct accessibility and electoral choice

Chronic accessibility refers to a long-term bias to notice, process, and have available for recall certain types of information across a variety of different stimulus objects in a variety of different situations. This paper illustrates the usefulness of studying the chronic accessibility of political constructs in the field of political behavior. The chronic accessibility of four generic political constructs are operationalized: candidates, issues, groups, and parties. The accessibility of these four political constructs is shown to be relatively stable over time and to guide the processing of information about a wide variety of political objects. Next, a voting model is tested that identifieswhich voters will rely chiefly on issue orientations, group orientations, candidate orientations, and/or party orientations in making their vote decision. The voting model is validated across two distinct ways of operationalizing the political chronicities and three different election studies spanning a 28-year period. Finally, although this paper has focused onindividual political behavior, several ways that an information processing approach could shed light on macrolevel political questions are discussed.     

General election marketing—selling a can of beans,building a favours bank or managing an event?

This paper applies three marketing approaches to identify a possible framework for analysing the 2010 general election. The first approach to be assessed is transactional, which is the traditional view of political marketing. The second approach is relationship marketing, of which there is some evidence that it has applied to politics. The third approach, experiential, has not yet been applied to the political context. As this is an exploratory research project, the data are collected from one small geographical area, Devon. Interviews were conducted with candidates in the 12 seats in this county to identify which, if any, of these three marketing approaches might apply to UK general elections. The article, argues that a hybrid approach to political marketing, drawing on all three approaches can potentially offer researchers a framework for understanding general election campaigns. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Ethics and Public Policy: Homosexuals between Moral Dilemmas and Political Considerations in Danish Parliamentary Debates

Political science has abundantly proved that politics involves power, conflict, and self-serving interests. Much less frequently does political science deal with ethics in public policymaking. This article analyses the appeal to moral principles in the political process of drafting three bills, all concerning homosexuals, in which the Danish parliamentary parties, in contrast to normal practice, allowed their members to deviate from the party line and vote in accordance with their 'conscience'. Analysis of the cases indicates that moral considerations are capable of structuring and constraining arguments and that they are decisive for some politicians' positions in some situations. The cases also raise doubts concerning the widely held view that decisions based on votes of conscience, because they are informed by 'ethical' rather than 'political' considerations, are qualitatively superior to ordinary political decisions.

MANKIND
Men, said the Devil,
Are good to their brothers:
They don't want to mend
Their own ways, but each other's.
– grook by Piet Hein

     

Identity,rights and surveillance in an era of transforming citizenship

This review essay focuses on the problem of citizenship in three different areas, namely human rights, identity politics and surveillance. Heli Askola’s work focuses on the magnitude of demographic challenges that contemporary migrant-receiving states in the Global North face, and specifically focuses on the broader demographic picture of low birth rates, and increasing diversity and populations ageing; thus, focusing the problem of identity politics in the context of citizenship acquisition in Global North states. Richard Sobel’s book explores the empowerment of American citizenship, specifically through a unique reading of constitutional and political apparatus in the United States. Finally, Pramod Nayar’s work addresses state-based surveillance mechanisms like biometrics, biobanks and the internet within the context of citizenship and how new forms of subjectivity are forged within a culture of surveillance. These three works approach citizenship through a legal category of political membership, but also a process of political subjectivization.     

Political actors,linkages and interactions: Democratic consolidation in Southern Europe

While it is assumed that the new regimes in Spain, Greece and Portugal are fully liberal democratic, the question of their consolidation remains to be assessed. Although this raises problems about the nature of that process, focusing on the role of political parties provides a crucial means for determining the extent to which democratic consolidation has been achieved so far and for identifying any problems here. This is done by constructing a comparative approach based on three relationships: parties with the state; inter‐party relationships; and, parties with society. In applying this approach to the three cases, it is hypothesised that regime consolidation may well proceed at variable paces at the different levels.     

What can deliberative mini-publics contribute to democratic systems?

Can deliberative mini-publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem-based approach to democratic theory–to count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real-world case: a deliberative mini-public with a citizens’ assembly design, focused on urban planning convened in Vancouver, Canada. This example was chosen because the context was one in which the city's legacy institutions of representative democracy had significant democratic deficits in all three areas, and the mini-public was a direct response to these deficits. It was found that Vancouver's deliberative mini-public helped policy makers, activists and affected residents move a stalemated planning process forward, and did do so in ways that improved the democratic performance of the political system. Depending on when and how they are sequenced into democratic processes, deliberative mini-publics can supplement existing legacy institutions and practices to deepen their democratic performance.