Social identities in the policy process

Policy Sciences - This paper introduces social identity theory and self-categorization theory to policy process research. Drawing from the prominent and widely acknowledged psychological social...     

Electoral alliances: Party identities and coalition games

The emergence of electoral alliances competing for plurality seats has been one of the main consequences stemming form the introduction of the new electoral laws for the Senate and the Chamber of deputies in Italy. This paper analyzes the politics of electoral alliances at the general elections of April 1996, focusing on two factors: the making of electoral alliances and their internal arrangements for coalition management. From both points of view, the elections have shown some important new developments, including a simplification in the number of coalitions. But although the centre–left alliance was able to broaden its range, the centre–right lost the Lega Nord and suffered the split of Movimento sociale–Fiamma tricolore on its right. Moreover, the centre–right alliance also suffered from a lack of cohesion, wasting its previous coalitional capability. As in the 1994 elections the politics of electoral alliances proved to be a key factor in the electoral competition.     

Electoral alliances: Party identities and coalition games

Abstract The emergence of electoral alliances competing for plurality seats has been one of the main consequences stemming form the introduction of the new electoral laws for the Senate and the Chamber of deputies in Italy. This paper analyzes the politics of electoral alliances at the general elections of April 1996, focusing on two factors: the making of electoral alliances and their internal arrangements for coalition management. From both points of view, the elections have shown some important new developments, including a simplification in the number of coalitions. But although the centre–left alliance was able to broaden its range, the centre–right lost the Lega Nord and suffered the split of Movimento sociale–Fiamma tricolore on its right. Moreover, the centre–right alliance also suffered from a lack of cohesion, wasting its previous coalitional capability. As in the 1994 elections the politics of electoral alliances proved to be a key factor in the electoral competition.     

The political identities of neighbourhood planning in England

The collective empowerment imagined in the government rhetoric of localism bears little resemblance to the market model of aggregative democracy that characterizes much of the practice of participation in spatial planning. This paper explores one of the rare statutory strategies to engage collective participation and to mobilize the neighbourhood as an institution of spatial planning. In a study of neighbourhood planning in England, it investigates the new political identities that emerged and the conflicts and antagonism that accompanied them. Drawing on the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, the paper explores the significance of the political practices that resulted for the state strategy of localism.     

The labour of identity: performing identities,performing economies

Recent analyses of workplace organization have stressed that the self-identify of workers constitutes a key resource in new regimes of accumulation. Morever, this significance of self-identify has been understood to form part of an aestheticization of work since the techniques involved in the performance of identity are widely conceived as aesthetic or cultural practices. However, in this article we suggest that in these assumptions the questions of a person's relation to self-identity and of how the labour or work of identity may contribute to the political organization of production remain hidden. Through looking not just at the kinds of self-identity available to and performed by workers but also at the terms and conditions of their performance. We show that a person's self-identity is a key site of conditions of their performance, we show that per' self-identity is a key site of contestation in the struggle that maps out production. In particular, and through a focus on issues of gender and the body, we illustrate the ways in which workers may be denied authorship of their identities and the ability to claim their identity performances as occupational resources. Our analysis indicates that self-possessing workers with performable identities should not be universalized by theorists of the economic and, moreover, that considerations of the aestheticization of work need to be sensitive to what we term socio-cultural regimes of accumulation in which the implications of particular processes of aestheticization for the relation between self and identity and of both to production are explored rather than assumed.     

Postmodern Europe and the resources of communal identities in Northern Ireland

Abstract. Irish Nationalist and Ulster Unionist communal identities have territorial, cultural and economic resources. Catalysts that have mobilized these resources and produced political action include 19th century famine and the Northern Ireland civil rights campaign of the late 1960s. As we approach the 21st century and the conditions and concepts of postmodernity initiate change in the structure and operation of the state, the European Union may realize its potential to affect the resources of communal identity and produce further change in the constitution and structural alignment of Irish Nationalist and Ulster Unionist identities. EU integration and structural initiatives have postmodernist contingencies that are beginning to redefine the structural space of Northern Ireland. The future development of these contingencies will be a fundamental factor in determining the extent to which Irish Nationalist and Ulster Unionist communal identities escape the embrace of modernity and develop with the postmodern world.     

Explaining variation in sub‐state regional identities in Western Europe

While national identities emerged as the dominant source of territorial identification during the twentieth century, sub‐state regional identities are becoming increasingly important in some Western European regions. However, this is not a uniform development. In some regions, nearly half of respondents in Eurobarometer surveys claim a stronger attachment to the region than to the state. In others, less than 4 per cent are primarily attached to their region. This article examines the extent to which these differences are explained by the characteristics of the regions themselves. What, if anything, do regions that mobilise public identity have in common? Developing a model of regional identities, the study examines cultural, geographic, economic and political factors that vary across different regions in Western Europe. The study finds that regional identities tend to be stronger in regions where a regional language is spoken and which do not border the state capital, signalling a cultural and a centre/periphery dimension to regional identity formation. However, there is potentially a more strategic aspect to identification, as regional identities are likely to be stronger in economically developed regions and in regions with highly distinctive voting behaviour.     

Housing and ethopolitics: constructing identities of active consumption and responsible community

Recent developments in social housing policy, including large-scale stock transfers, have been proclaimed as marking ‘the death of council housing’ in the UK. The decline of public housing and new techniques for the governance of social housing provision are symbolic of the transformation of welfarist social regimes in advanced liberal democracies. This paper explores recent social housing policy in the UK and suggests that policy developments reflect changes in technologies for governing the conduct of social housing tenants and practitioners. The ethopolitics (Rose 2001) of social housing are characterized by emerging identities of active, entrepreneurial consumption and the invocation of responsibilized community. The paper examines how ethopower is manifested through technologies of social housing governance and identifies conflicts inherent within this new politics of conduct.     

Making citizenship public: identities,practices, and rights at Woodsquat

The common conception of citizenship is that of belonging to a political community, with the ensuing rights and responsibilities of membership. This community tends to be naturalized as the nation-state. However, this location of citizenship needs to be decentred in order to investigate current modes of democratic participation. This paper investigates current sites and practices of citizenship through reflection on a tactical housing squat of an empty department store staged by an urban social movement in Vancouver in 2002, known as ‘Woodsquat’. It uses a social movement perspective to look at citizenship, emphasizing the identities, practices, and locations of democratic engagement over the collective question of how we will live together in these places. From this point of view Woodsquat shows current limits of national citizenship, conceptually and practically, and suggests alternative possibilities for future citizenship practices located in multiple identifications with (political) communities. Moving from this analysis of political participation at Woodsquat attention is brought to the importance of spaces of democratic communication for possibilities of citizenship, where there seems to be a reinforcing relationship between public spheres, social movements, and democracy. Ultimately, then, actions at Woodsquat are argued to be a form of citizenship that emerged within a democratic public.     

Liberal nationalism,immigration, and the problem of multiple national identities

ABSTRACT

Critics and defenders of liberal nationalism often debate whether the nation-state is able to accommodate cultural and political pluralism, as it necessarily aspires for congruence between state and nation. In this article, I argue that both sides of the debate have neglected a second homogenising assumption of nationalism. Even if it is possible for the nation-building state to accommodate multiple political and cultural communities, it is not obvious that is possible or desirable for it to accommodate individuals belonging to more than one nation. With the rise of international migration, and the growing number of multinational individuals, this flaw is a serious one. I advance an internal critique of liberal nationalism to demonstrate that, from within its own logic, this theory must either reject multiple national identities, or accommodate them at the cost of the normative justifications of nationalism it provides. By analysing David Miller’s influential analysis of national identity in divided societies, I demonstrate how this framework is unable to support an accepting attitude towards multiple national identities.     

Gender,HipHop and Pop-Islam: the urban identities of Muslim youth in Germany

While many opponents construe the growing presence of Muslim headscarves in Germany as evidence of creeping Islamicization, religious activism can also be interpreted as an attempt on the part of migrant offspring to forge positive ‘hyphenated identities’, rooted in urban culture, material consumption, and specific mosque communities. Islam has become ‘young, chic and cool’ among ethnic minorities, often denied citizenship and opportunity in their country of birth owing to jus sanguinis and/or other complex naturalization requirements. Religiosity, in turn, is slowly giving rise to new types of civic engagement, leading more ethnic youth to pursue German citizenship. Drawing on representative surveys, inter alia, this essay argues that while not problem free, an emerging Pop-Islam movement has provided Muslimas especially with an important platform for breaking with traditional gender roles, building social capital and acquiring the participatory skills necessary to bring ‘civil society’ into their own communities. It moreover infers that national policies banning headscarves in public service professions are increasingly at odds with European Union directives addressing gender equality and religious discrimination.     

Enhancing democracy via bureaucracy: Senior managers' social identities and motivation for policy change

This article challenges the depiction of bureaucracy as a hurdle to democratic responsiveness. It proposes that senior civil servants' (SCSs) dual position as professionals and citizens may enhance government permeability to salient public agendas. Building on social identity theory, we argue that salient public agendas may arouse SCSs' social identification with in‐groups and thereby elicit their motivation for policy change within their task domain. Employing a mixed‐methods design, we analyze SCSs' social identification with the participants of the large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during the summer of 2011, and their motivation for policy change in response to the protest agenda. We find that SCSs' social identification with the protesters enhanced their motivation for policy change. In addition, SCSs' perception of a conflict between responsiveness to the protest agenda and their organizational or professional identities shaped their preferences for policy solutions more than their motivation for policy change.     

Activists playing a dual role: identities,organizational goals,and public relations practices

• This study explores the relationship among identities, goals, and public relations practices of an activist organization through in‐depth interviews and document analysis. Findings suggest different levels of the participant organization's identity in communication with its different audiences. In playing its dual role (as a “public” to its target organizations and a “public communicator” to its own publics), the organization acts as an honest representative voice and a credible source of information to both parties, a process that requires a balance position compatible with its mission. Its public relations practices were found to be consistent with the identities it appropriates and the values it respects.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The nature of regional and national identity in Catalonia: problems of measuring multiple identities

Abstract. National identity learning processes become quite problematic in multiple identity territories. In the case of Spain, bilinguism and conflictual identities in the periphery is often opposed to the unilinguism and majoritarian culture of the centre. The contents of actual Catalan identity and the political behaviour that it entails can perhaps be explained by the perception that today's Catalan and immigrant adolescents have of what it means to 'be a catalan'. The view of the political arena by the young depends mainly on the language approach.     

Political participation,political action and political identities: young d/deaf people's perspectives

This paper critically examines the dominant, and predominantly negative, discourses around young people's political participation, or supposed lack of it. Drawing upon contemporary debates about young people within geography, political science and sociology, it considers the ways in which a redefinition of what constitutes ‘the political’ is required if young people's engagement in political participation is to be understood fully. The paper reports on research conducted with young D/deaf people that did not intentionally set out to research their political participation, action or identi ties, but which uncovered a range of political aspects in their lives and experiences. It explores the ways in which volunteering can be defined as political action and, after de Certeau and Scott, how the use of British Sign Language can be a resistive act, a tactic or weapon of the weak. Threaded throughout the paper is a consideration of the ways in which there are complex geographies of activism at play.     

Policymaking with Multiple Agencies

Authority over related policy issues is often dispersed among multiple government agencies. In this article, I study when Congress should delegate to multiple agencies, and how shared regulatory space complicates agency decision making. To do so, I develop a formal model of decentralized policymaking with two agencies that incorporates information acquisition and information sharing, delineating situations where legislators should and should not prefer multiple agencies. Greater divergence between the agencies' ideal points distorts information sharing and policy choices, but it may increase the amount of information acquisition. Congress achieves better policy outcomes by delegating authority to both agencies if the agencies have strong policy disagreements. If the agencies have similar policy preferences, however, then Congress may want to consolidate authority within one agency because this approach mitigates free-riding and takes advantage of returns to scale.