Praktische Fragen und theoretische Antworten: 50 Jahre Policy-Analyse und Verwaltungsforschung

The article provides an inventory of key issues and results in Policy Analysis and Public Administration research in Germany in the last fifty years. It outlines main trends (planning, implementation, networks, management, ideas and institutions), discusses relations to the international debate, to other areas of political science and theoretical developments, other disciplines, and to political and administrative practice, and it illustrates the central importance of this area for German political science.     

Three Forms of Political Realism

In the recent study of international relations, political realism has, apparently, had as many supporters as detractors. Nonetheless, there seems to be a growing tendency to treat the categories of political realism as if they were passing the way of all flesh, destined to be replaced by system theory, transnationalism, Marxist structuralism, critical theory or whatever. One difficulty with this judgement is that political realism is not a single theoretical entity which can be refuted by single disconfirming instances. Nor is it an understanding of the subject rooted in the views of such well-known exponents of this school as Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Thompson, Martin Wight, Sir Herbert Butterfield, E. H. Carr or Raymond Aron. On the contrary, political realism is a conception of politics which stretches back to the great Indian thinker Kautilya and in fact constitutes a many-mansioned tradition of thought about international relations. Three aspects of that tradition are examined in this essay: Common-sense Realism, Concessional Realism and neo-Aristotelian Realism. These reflections are only very tangentially related to the debates in the 1950s and 1960s concerning realism. This essay focuses, rather, on certain neglected features of contrasting philosophies of science. The article concludes, somewhat tentatively, that neo-Aristotelian Realism is coherent and cogent and superior in important respects to what scientific empiricism has to offer.     

Intelligence Studies Centers: Making Scholarship on Intelligence Analysis Useful

Abstract

Improving intelligence analysis requires bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Intelligence studies as an academic discipline is not very theoretical compared to the more established disciplines of political science and international relations. In terms of conceptual depth, levels of abstraction and theoretical development, even the theoretical portions of the academic intelligence studies literature could be described as policy relevant and potentially useful for practitioners, including intelligence analysts. Yet despite this orientation to the practitioner, there is still a substantial gap between scholars and practitioners, thus replicating within a more applied context the conventional theory/practice divide that exists in other fields. Those fields do, however, possess a variety of ideas and recommendations that could be used to bring scholarship on intelligence analysis closer to practice. If implemented, these ideas might help actualize the benefits of scholarship that are as yet still unrealized potential.     

试论国际关系批判理论——以林克莱特的学术思想为个案研究

法兰克福学派的思想观念被运用到国际关系研究之中,推动了以旨在追求人类最终解放的国际关系批判理论的发展。林克莱特继承了经典马克思主义传统和法兰克福学派的研究旨趣,深入探讨了国际关系理论的现实主义、理性主义和革命主义三种研究传统,提出了国际关系批判理论的研究方向。他还身体力行地探讨了政治共同体的转变以及现代公民观念等问题,从而引导了国际关系理论批判的转向。     

War and Peace in International Relations Theory: A Classroom Simulation

Simulations are increasingly common pedagogical tools in political science and international relations courses. This article develops a classroom simulation that aims to facilitate students’ theoretical understanding of the topic of war and peace in international relations, and accomplishes this by incorporating important theoretical concepts about the causes of war found in international relations theory into the design and implementation of the simulation. In addition to sharing a successful classroom simulation with other international relations instructors, the article makes two important contributions to the pedagogical literature on simulations. First, it shows how simulation design can be usefully based on the theoretical concepts and/or substantive problems that course instructors aim to impart to their students. Second, it demonstrates that it is possible to achieve important learning objectives with low-intensity simulations that do not require a big investment of time, energy, and resources.     

International political marketing: a case study of United States soft power and public diplomacy

• Political marketing can be categorized with three aspects: the election campaign as the origin of political marketing, the permanent campaign as a governing tool and international political marketing (IPM) which covers the areas of public diplomacy, marketing of nations, international political communication, national image, soft power and the cross‐cultural studies of political marketing. IPM and the application of soft power have been practiced by nation‐states throughout the modern history of international relations starting with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Nation‐states promote the image of their country worldwide through public diplomacy, exchange mutual interests in their bilateral or multilateral relation with other countries, lobby for their national interests in international organizations and apply cultural and political communication strategies internationally to build up their soft power. In modern international relations, nation‐states achieve their foreign policy goals by applying both hard power and soft power. Public diplomacy as part of IPM is a method in the creation of soft power, as well as, in the application of soft power.
• This paper starts with the definitional and conceptual review of political marketing. For the first time in publication, it establishes a theoretical model which provides a framework of the three aspects of political marketing, that is electoral political marketing (EPM), governmental political marketing (GPM) and IPM. This model covers all the main political exchanges among six inter‐related components in the three pairs of political exchange process, that is candidates and party versus voters and interest groups in EPM ; governments, leaders and public servants versus citizens and interest groups in GPM, including political public relations and lobbying which have been categorized as the third aspect of political marketing in some related studies; and governments, interest group and activists versus international organizations and foreign subjects in IPM. This study further develops a model of IPM, which covers its strategy and marketing mix on the secondary level of the general political marketing model, and then, the third level model of international political choice behaviour based the theory of political choice behaviour in EPM. This paper continues to review the concepts of soft power and public diplomacy and defines their relation with IPM.
• It then reports a case study on the soft power and public diplomacy of the United States from the perspectives of applying IPM and soft power. Under the framework of IPM, it looks at the traditional principles of US foreign policy, that is Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, and the application of US soft power in the Iraq War since 2003. The paper advances the argument that generally all nation states apply IPM to increase their soft power. The decline of US soft power is caused mainly by its foreign policy. The unilateralism Jacksonians and realism Hamiltonians have a historical trend to emphasize hard power while neglecting soft power. Numerous reports and studies have been conducted on the pros and cons of US foreign policy in the Iraq War, which are not the focus of this paper. From the aspect of IPM, this paper studies the case of US soft power and public diplomacy, and their effects in the Iraq War. It attempts to exam the application of US public diplomacy with the key concept of political exchange, political choice behaviour, the long‐term approach and the non‐government operation principles of public diplomacy which is a part of IPM. The case study confirms the relations among IPM, soft power and public diplomacy and finds that lessons can be learned from these practices of IPM. The paper concludes that there is a great demand for research both at a theoretical as well as practical level for IPM and soft power. It calls for further study on this subject.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intelligence,International Relations and 'Under-theorisation'

This article submits that the conceptual framework within which intelligence is studied must continue to evolve and adapt to the new conditions of the early twenty-first century. As more intelligence and intelligence related material than ever before enters the public domain, scholars of international relations must take greater account study of the role of intelligence. Despite its obvious importance to the course of the Cold War, for example, most accounts of the Cold War tend to ignore or downplay the importance of signals intelligence in particular. Intelligence, moreover, is all but absent in most contemporary international relations theory. The essay argues that intelligence should be placed closer to the centre of new interpretations of both the course of the Cold War and of the political dynamics of authoritarian states.     

US–China Relations in the Contemporary Era: An International Political Economy Perspective

The subject of US–China relations has been examined from a number of perspectives but has rarely been exposed to a critical theory approach. This article argues that US–China relations must be understood at the structural/global level as well as in terms of the interaction of political actors. In this way a broader understanding of US hegemonic power and its relation to China can be developed. This also requires moving beyond viewing the relationship in bilateral terms and taking into account the role of ideas and institutions in the international political economy (IPE).     

The Kantian Liberal Peace (Revisited)

Democratic peace studies have traditionally identified Kantian "republicanism" with procedural democracy and largely ignored liberalism and constitutionalism, which are even more fundamental for Kant's reasoning behind the liberal peace. A closer look into his major political works reveals that peaceful relations are expected from states with the protection of individual freedoms (liberalism), the rule of law and legal equality (constitutionalism), and representative government (democracy). Only when all three constitutive elements are jointly considered can we uncover the multifaceted nature of Kant's approach to the domestic sources of international peace. In this way, we not only find that monadic and dyadic expectations are consistent with Kant's theory, but also that both normative and interest-based explanations for international peace can equally draw on Kant as their theoretical precursor. We further demonstrate that it is plausible to infer that the Kantian legacy is related to civil peace as well. The propositions we derive from our theoretical reexamination of the Kantian legacy are strongly supported in our quantitative empirical test. Moreover, constitutional liberalism, rather than democracy, shows to be both more central for Kant's theory and empirically more robustly related to international as well as domestic peace.     

‘Overcoming the divide’ between comparative politics and international relations approaches to the EC: What role for ‘post‐decisional politics'? 1

Political scientists have normally considered the European Community (EC) from the standpoint either of international relations or comparative politics/public policy. Although the division between the two sub‐disciplines of political science is well known and deeply rooted, it is now commonly viewed as a barrier to greater understanding of the neo‐state structure of the EC. Using a case study of the implementation of EC coastal‐bathing water policy in Britain over the last 20 years, this article argues that closer investigation of the long‐term outcome of individual policies at the national and sub‐national level provides a sounder basis upon which to adjudicate between the two main theories of integration, namely inter‐governmentalism and neo‐functionalism, than studies of short‐term policy outputs emanating from the Council of Ministers or the grand ‘history‐making’ bargains hammered out in the European Council.     

Between Psychoanalysis and Political Philosophy: Towards a Critical Theory of Political Myth

Abstract

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of political imaginaries: political myth. What are political myths? What role do they play within today's commoditized political imaginaries? What are the conditions for setting up a critique of them? We will address these questions, by putting forward a theory of political myth which situates itself between psycho analysis and political philosophy, in line with the tradition of critical theory that many still associate with the name of the Frankfurt School. We will first discuss the notion of political myth by illustrating the contribution of both disciplines to its understanding and then, through a discussion of the notion of social unconscious, we will apply this analysis to a contemporary example of political myth, that of a clash of civilizations.     

The “Role” of Nationalism in Chinese Foreign Policy: A Reactive Model of Nationalism & Conflict

A growing literature has sought to address the question of Chinese nationalism, and particularly whether or not its rise over the last decade could make China more prone to international conflict. Yet these discussions have often not been well grounded in either theories of nationalism or international relations (IR) theory. This paper will seek to fill this gap by using a constructivist approach to examine how nationalism is constituted by the interaction of states. By doing so, it will be argued that Chinese nationalism can best be understood as a reactive response to international events rather than domestic political manipulation. Michael Alan Brittingham is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at McDaniel College. He has previously taught at the University of Louisville. In 2005, he completed his dissertation entitled, “Reactive Nationalism and Its Prospects for Conflict: The Taiwan Issue, Sino-US Relations, & the ‘Role’ of Nationalism in Chinese Foreign Policy” in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests include international relations theory, Chinese foreign policy, and nationalism.     

Eine Disziplin auf der Suche nach Wissenschaftlichkeit: Entwicklung und Stand der Methoden in der deutschen Politikwissenschaft

The article takes stock of methods use in German political science. Based on an analysis of articles published in four German political science journals it is shown that only a minority takes an explicit theory-guided empirical perspective on research. A large share of publications can be better characterized as a knowledgeable discussion of a particular topic. This finding is amended by a placement of Germany in the international context and a glance into the political science curricula at some German universities. The finding is then nuanced by exemplary references to methodologically innovative work by German political scientists in four research areas. This work, however, has only seldom been published in German scholarly journals but has been preferably sent to international ones. The article closes by referring to the specific character of research questions in political science compared to neighbouring disciplines.     

Domestic adjustment costs,interdependence and dissent in the Council of the European Union

Liberal international relations theory posits that the behaviour of states is affected both by domestic interests and other states with which they are linked in significant patterns of interdependence. This article examines the relevance of this proposition to states' behaviour in the most powerful institution in the furthest reaching example of regional integration in the world today: the Council of the European Union. Compared to previous research, more detailed evidence is analysed in this article on the substance of the political debates that preceded Council votes. It is found that states' disagreement with both discretionary and nondiscretionary decision outcomes affects the likelihood that they dissent at the voting stage. Moreover, in line with the theory posited here, the behaviour of states' significant trading partners has a particularly marked effect on the likelihood that they will dissent.     

Genro Rule in China and Japan: A Comparative Perspective

For a time in both Japan (roughly 1890–1915) and much more briefly in China (about 1987–1992), major political decisions were made by cohesive groups of retired elders of the founding generation. Necessary if not sufficient conditions for rule by elders include a closed system, with the elite not held responsible to a wider public; and a constitutional or practical vagueness about the locus of final political authority. The more general pattern in such systems is personal dictatorship, with rule by elders as an alternative when cultural or political conditions stand in the way of one-man rule. This essay explores the pattern, conditions, and characteristics of rule by elders in China and Japan as genro rule serves as an alternative to one-man rule in generational transitions in political regimes with a relatively cohesive ruling group and a weak institutional structure. Peter R. Moody, Jr. is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and he specializes in the study of Chinese politics. His more recent books include Tradition and Modernization in China and Japan, Political Change in Taiwan, and Political Opposition in Post-Confucian Society. He is editor of China Documents Annual and book review editor for the Review of Politics. He has written on Chinese politics, Asian international affairs, Chinese political thought, international relations theory, and theory of political parties.     

国家与国际组织互动关系的“委托-代理”解释框架

在百年未有之大变局叠加新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情的冲击下,作为全球治理主干的众多国际组织面临着深度调整。在这一背景下,厘清主权国家与国际组织的互动机理,深入研究并思考中国应如何主动介入和引导国际组织的变革,已经成为具有重要战略价值的课题。与长期以来主导国际组织研究的主流国际政治理论不同,源于经济学的“委托-代理”理论为分析成员国与国际组织之间的复杂关系和互动逻辑提供了启发性视角。在国家与国际组织复杂的“委托-代理”模型下,国际组织的行为与政策偏好将综合取决于成员国、成员国在国际组织内部的代表、国际组织的秘书处和行政首长等主要行为体在国际组织的决策过程中处于什么位置以及能够施加多大影响。这为我们更全面地认识国际组织,提升我国在国际组织中的影响力与话语权带来了启示。     

Political Culture and the Study of Chinese Politics

It is both a truth and a truism that Chinese politics cannot be understood without reference to Chinese culture (a truth and truism that would apply to any other society as well). But within the academic discipline of political science political culture has lost status over the past generation as not conducive to the development of empirical political theory. The usual candidate for replacement is rational choice theory. But properly understood, political culture is compatible with rational choice, inasmuch as there is no single standard of rationality, but, rather, it will vary from society to society and era to era. Considerations of the cultural background are necessary to provide content to rational choice theory, since without consideration of culture context rational choice threatens to reduce to a set of colorless banalities.

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Overlapping games and cross‐cutting coalitions in the European Union

Despite hopes of theoretical convergence between the disciplines of comparative politics and international relations, the integration of explanations of the European policy‐making process and of the process of European integration is yet to be accomplished. This article looks at how decision‐making crises could be the focal points with which to explore the no‐man's land where comparative politics and international relations could meet each other. The article will highlight the structural ambivalence of the EU policy process and the collision of functional areas and territorial politics over multidimensional decisions. It will also show that the interplay of overlapping policy games, cross‐cutting coalitions and poor coordination mechanisms at all levels can go a long way to explaining the oscillations between path‐dependency and policy instability.