Reinventing Pluralism: Consensus,Hegemony, and the Politics of Affirmation

As inequalities in the United States have intensified in recent decades, Washington, DC’s advocacy system has thrived. Why has this proliferation of interest groups failed to deliver more substantive equality? The dominant response to this question typically cites the advocacy realm’s “upper-class accent,” portraying interest group representation as imbalanced and unresponsive to a broad range of voices. Yet this prevailing account—which I term “post- pluralist”—does not sufficiently explore the inegalitarian ways that neoliberalism shapes contemporary political advocacy. To this end, this article builds upon post-pluralist and post-Marxist insights to outline the advocacy system’s “politics of affirmation.” Using recent antigay legislation to explore this concept, I argue that today’s political advocacy circumscribes, rather than enlivens, prevailing standards of democratic participation by mobilizing hegemonic, neoliberal expressions of democratic citizenship. The article concludes by outlining how groups might pursue a transformative politics in order to destabilize neoliberalism’s hegemony.     

Untimely ripped

In this essay, through an examination of its cultural situation, narrative style, and cinematic structure, I hope to explain the controversy that surrounded Roman Polanski's 1971 film version of Macbeth. With both complex cinematic semiology and poignant sociohistorical mediation, Macbeth brings to a critical juncture the philosophies of the 1960s’ peace‐love—revolution hippies, Vietnam war protestors and civil rights activists, the reified mainstream American populace, and the ruling conservatives, as well as society's preoccupation with aestheticisation. Specifically, I argue that Macbeth manifests what Gilles Deleuze calls the “crystal‐image,”; and, by extension, realises Antonin Artaud's “Theater of Cruelty,”; and, in effect, constitutes a terrorist intervention into a discursive cultural and ideological struggle. Ultimately, I argue that Macbeth itself, in totality, is a “crystalline narration”; that is shot through with various allusions to actual and virtual circumstances particular to the cultural environments from which it initially emerged in Renaissance England and then re‐emerged in the US of 1971. In the first of what is a three‐part analysis, I compare these cultural environments. The second section explicates Deleuze's theories on cinema and discusses them in conjunction with an analysis of the film's Theater of Cruelty. Finally, I contemplate the film ‘s sociopolitical implications.     

An economic theory of a hybrid (competitive authoritarian or illiberal) regime

Recently, not only has dictatorship resurfaced, but a new form of government has appeared that is neither democratic nor dictatorial. There are various names for this new form: “competitive—authoritarian”, “illiberal democracy”, or simply “hybrid”. Some obvious examples are Hungary, Poland and Turkey. Some connect the origin of hybrids in modern times to the rise of populism. Populism is connected to the illiberal or hybrid idea in that populists tend to repress minorities as a way of appealing to the majority. Authoritarian populists typically divide the population into “us” versus “them”. This paper develops a model of how a hybrid can arise from democracy. I introduce a “strongman or strongwoman” as a leader who can implement repression and gain power. I develop a simple model of a “hybrid” regime in which repression is less than that under dictatorship but greater than that under liberal democracy. The hybrid regime is a special case of Wintrobe’s general theory of dictatorship, but it goes further than that by endogenizing equilibrium extremism of the regime as well as repression. I show how the hybrid regime reacts to exogenous shocks, and develop optimal policy for other countries and institutions interested in reducing repression (the UN, US or EU) towards hybrids.     

THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC SERVICE IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT*

I was invited to give an address on the topic “The Changing Role of the Public Service”. With the agreement of the organizers I have changed my title to “The Role of the Public Service in a Changing Environment”. That is a small change—but it is a significant one. Our role has not really changed. It is easy in the public service, as elsewhere, to be preoccupied with contemporary challenges, and to imagine that these are new and different. But that says more about the way memory discounts the past than anything else—the latest problem or challenge is always the worst. When I joined the Treasury in 1952 the economy had just come through the Korean War boom and was in the process of adjusting to Fadden's so-called “horror” budget. The world financial system was in disarray owing to the “shortage” of US dollars. The Arbitration Court in the two or three previous years had made some awards of great concern as to their inflationary consequences. I found the Treasury was a hive of frantic activity. Looking back from the perspective of today I merely note, as the French put it, that the more things change the more things stay the same.     

旧乡村里的新城区：城市“新增空间”的社区风险治理

伴随城镇化建设的迅速推进，我国城市群和中心城市周边出现了大面积“新增空间”。由于地处城乡结合带，人口结构复杂、城乡文明交融，城市“新增空间”很容易成为“风险集中带”，大量风险矛盾向社区层面挤压。调研发现：生长于旧乡村的新城区，面临城镇新市民融城之难、治理主体权利互损之险、社区治理滞后之乱等风险。引入无缝隙政府和整体性治理的视角后分析得出：城市新增空间的社区风险是上游政府职责缺失问题在下游社区的集中爆发，社区治理面临“政府职责脱嵌”与“政府社会失联”的“双重缝隙”。为推进社区治理，应当构建“前期土地审批规划—中期质量监管—后期社区管理和自治”的无缝隙职责体系，强化政府社会之间的整体性治理。     

Glass Walls in State Bureaucracies: Examining the Difference Departmental Function Can Make

Occupational segregation in government employment is an important issue in public administration. Occupation determines pay and benefits, and when women have greater access to quality jobs—especially in the public sector—this promotes their economic, social, and political advancement. This research addresses two questions: (1) What changes have occurred to alter “glass walls” across departmental functions? (2) What impact does departmental function have on the salary of women? The findings reveal that although occupational segregation has decreased over the past two decades in Michigan’s bureaucracy, it is still prevalent. Gender‐based occupational segregation is linked to departmental function. Redistributive departments have much lower levels of occupational segregation than other functional categories. Mean salary is also linked to departmental mission, with distributive departments having both the highest mean salary and the highest level of occupational segregation. Salary differentials across departmental functions are becoming smaller over time. Overall, women appear to be most successful, both financially and career‐wise, in historically male‐dominated fields.     

Justice,Charity, and Disaster Relief: What,If Anything,Is Owed to Haiti,Japan, and New Zealand?

Whenever fellow humans suffer due to natural catastrophes, we have a duty to help them. This duty is not only acknowledged in moral theory but also expressed in ordinary people's reactions to phenomena such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Despite being widely acknowledged, this duty is also widely disputed: some believe it is a matter of justice, others a matter of charity. Although central to debates in international political theory, the distinction between justice and charity is hardly ever systematically drawn. To fill this gap in the literature, I consider three accounts of this distinction— the “agent‐based,” the “recipient‐based,” and the “mixed” view—and argue that they are all unsatisfactory. I then offer a fourth alternative, the “autonomy” view, which successfully overcomes the difficulties affecting its rivals. I conclude by considering the implications of this view for the moral grounds of disaster relief in earthquake‐stricken Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan.     

Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy

The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water is popularly framed as a case of “environmental racism” given that Flint’s population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint’s water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of “racial liberalism” here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism—particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America—drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city’s financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical causes of its duress are masked. Tracing the history of property making and taking in Flint and the effects of austerity urbanism on its water infrastructure, my central argument is that our understanding of Flint’s predicament—the disproportionate poisoning of young African-Americans—can be deepened if we read it as a case of racial liberalism’s illiberal legacies.     

International court curbing in Geneva: Lessons from the paralysis of the WTO Appellate Body

The 21st century has witnessed a backlash against many international courts (ICs). Studies of IC backlash have generally taken an optimistic tack, noting that most courts have survived backlash intact or—in the case of the paralyzed Appellate Body (AB) of the World Trade Organization (WTO)—are likely to do so after a temporary period of slumber. In this context, this paper analyzes the United States' successful effort to paralyze the AB, deriving lessons from this deviant case of backlash against one of the world's most active and independent ICs. Undertaken in the context of the “Reversing Delegation” research project, this account is organized in five parts. First, I demonstrate that the creation of the AB was a classic instance of delegation of dispute-settlement power, and that the AB quickly emerged as an active agent of trade liberalization. Second, I explore the roots of politicization, noting that dissatisfaction with AB jurisprudence preceded the Trump administration, although Trump's delegitimation of the AB was more far-reaching than that of his predecessors. Third, I examine the administration's use of the veto power to paralyze the AB, an act of de facto de-delegation. Fourth, I assess the pushback from the many other WTO members that sought to defend the AB, showing how they failed to blunt the US campaign. Fifth, I analyze the remarkably successful outcome of the US attack, and draw lessons for judicial independence and the rule of law in international politics.     

The Tea Party and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Mainstreaming New Right Populism in the Corporate News Media

Within months of Barack Obama's election, a putatively grass-roots conservative uprising emerged to challenge the Democratic Party's agenda. In this article, we analyze the role of cable news in the rise of the Tea Party during the current “crisis of neoliberalism”—a moment of political-economic volatility brought about by the Great Recession. We argue that the Tea Party's political purpose is to hold together the New Right coalition of business elites and white working- and middle-class Americans that undergirds the neoliberal political project. In the context of a deregulated corporate mass media, we show that both “right-wing” and “moderate” cable networks mainstreamed the Tea Party by framing it as a legitimate social movement, enabling the widespread projection of right-wing populist discourse in support of neoliberalism. In light of our study, we suggest that democratizing the mass media is crucial for a sustained progressive political response in the United States.     

Reconciling legal positivism and human rights: Hans Kelsen's argument from relativism

This article examines the conceptual relationship between legal positivism and human rights, challenging the common idea that the two are in tension or that there exists, at most, a contingent relationship between them, whereby legal positivists can only recognize the normative validity of human rights if they happen to be inscribed in positive law. To do this, I focus on the thought and writings of one of the “founding fathers” of modern legal positivism: the Austrian legal theorist and political philosopher Hans Kelsen. In the first part, I show that Kelsen's conception of legal positivism is inextricably tied to — and, indeed, logically stems from — his moral relativism. In the second, I show that this form of relativism is also the philosophical foundation for Kelsen's commitment to democracy and human rights. Finally, in the third part, I examine the specific conception of human rights that results from this relativistic foundation, contrasting it with the “natural law” version that legal positivism excludes.     

“Tell It Like It Is”: Decision Making,Groupthink, and Decisiveness among U.S. Federal Subcabinet Executives

In addition to difficulties gathering and evaluating complete information, cognitive limitations and biases preclude individuals from making fully value‐maximizing choices when making decisions. It has been suggested that, done properly, involving advisors can compensate for individual‐level limitations. However, the “groupthink” tradition has highlighted ways group‐aided decision making can fail to live up to its potential. Out of this literature has emerged a paradigm Janis calls “vigilant problem‐solving.” For this article, we interviewed 20 heads of subcabinet‐level organizations in the U.S. federal government, asking questions about how they made important decisions. Ten were nominated by “good‐government” experts, 10 chosen at random. We wanted to see whether there were differences in how members of those two groups made decisions, specifically, to what extent executives in the two categories used a “vigilant” process. We found, however, that similarities between the two groups overwhelmed differences: As best as we were able to measure, decision making by U.S. subcabinet executives tracks vigilant decision making recommendations fairly closely. The similarity reflects a common style of senior‐level decision making, which we theorize grows out of government bureaucracy's methodical culture. We did, however, develop evidence for a difference between outstanding executives and others on another dimension of decision making style. Outstanding executives valued decision making decisiveness—“bias for action”—more than the comparison group. Perhaps, then, what distinguishes outstanding executives from others is not vigilance but decisiveness. Contrary to the implications of the groupthink literature, the danger in government may be “paralysis by analysis” as much or more than groupthink.     

Peter Pan Goes to College

Today’s college students are a lot like Peter Pan—they are in no hurry to grow up. Young people are staying in school longer, and taking longer to become economically self-sufficient. They are also waiting longer to marry and start families. The college “hook-up culture” has emerged as a way for students to remain sexually active while avoiding long-term commitment and emotional entanglement. High-achieving young women, in particular, face social pressure to prioritize career development over relationships. Modern feminism has encouraged a singular focus on professional advancement. In terms of relational pursuits, young people are taking longer and longer to “grow up.”     

The cultural labor of surveillance: video forensics,computational objectivity,and the production of visual evidence

This essay argues that the status of video evidence as an index of real events—a sign or representation that offers a direct, empirical connection to material reality—is the result of an intentional process of production. This process involves the repurposing of new technologies borrowed from the domain of creative media production in order to transform a chaotic field of raw surveillance video into useable evidence. In addition to the exchange in technologies, an unavoidable epistemological and interpretive exchange takes place between evidentiary uses of surveillance video on the one hand, and the now prevalent forms of surveillant narration found in both fictional and reality-based storytelling. But despite this exchange in meanings and technical systems, considerable effort has gone in to establish formal standards for the evidentiary uses of surveillance video that distinguish the discovery of video evidence from the production of creative content. Building on Daston and Gallison's historical study of the prevailing “epistemic virtues” that have defined objectivity over time, I argue that what we see emerging in the field of forensic video analysis, as a means of establishing its scientific and legal status, is a commitment to a new epistemic virtue of “computational objectivity.”     

The Morphology of the Labour Party's One Nation Narrative: Story,Plot and Authorship

By applying narrative theory to the party political texts emerging within the UK Labour Party after 2010, which make up the corpus of One Nation discourse, we can grasp the underlying significance of this ideational revision of Labour Party and leftist thought. Through an identification and analysis of the sequence of texts and their constitution as a “story” that interpolates an underlying “plot,” we can see how a revision of Labour's “tale” offers to leadership a new party discourse appropriate to it, mediating—if not reconciling—the problematic duality of narrative authorship by both party and leader.     

Foucault and the Telos of Power

In this paper, I argue that the unique contributions of Foucault’s late work to critical social theory can be identified in the ways in which power relations are refined as the material condition of “politics” as distinguished from that of law, where “politics”: (a) includes both competitive and goal-oriented strategic actions and interactions, (b) excludes the coercive technologies of law embodied in State institutions, (c) presupposes “incomplete” reciprocity between actors engaged in directing others, (d) always entails modes of revealing truth and acting upon the self. By contextualising the break between pastoral power and direction in the 1979–1980 lectures, I show how for the late Foucault, power relations constitute the material condition of “politics” precisely because, unlike relations of control or coercion, their aims and objectives remain open to the possibility of building new relationships and potentially more “political” forms of social action. I conclude by situating this major distinction within Foucault’s unfulfilled project to study the “military dimension” of society, and the relevance and urgency of this project for contemporary struggles against new forms of militarism and austerity.     

When groups contribute to a public good: The importance of institutional framework for making collective decisions

In this paper I discuss how the institutional framework for making collective decisions influences the outcome of a game where groups contribute to a public good. Representative democracy invites each group to act strategically in the election of representatives. I show that this strategic effect reinforces “the tragedy of the common.” The society — all groups taken together — has therefore incentives to restrict groups from making collective decisions through a system of representation.     

Far-Right “Contagion” or a Failing “Mainstream”? How Dangerous Ideas Cross Borders and Blur Boundaries

The article argues that we are witnessing a lethal “mainstreaming” trend across Europe that involves previously taboo ideas, frames, and practices becoming the new “common sense” for growing sections of European politics and societies. As in the case of the dramatic slide into dictatorship and the spread of virulent anti-Semitism in the 1930s, the divisive ideas of the contemporary far right vis-à-vis minorities, immigrants, and Muslims/Islam in particular have been crossing multiple boundaries—between “extremist” and “mainstream” politics and voters, between taboo and legitimate views, as well as between countries. As in the 1930s, the success of this putative “far-right contagion” today owes at least as much to the weakening defenses or cynical opportunism of the mainstream as to the dynamics and appeal of the radical right's ideas themselves.     

The Greening of the Americas

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates global capital’s ecological management and extends the assessment to the “green economy,” as developed in the first “green” neoliberal project, in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has been an important “laboratory” for experimentation in environmental governance mechanisms using debt-for-nature financial exchanges and other instruments of the Kyoto Protocol. I explore how “greening” can be understood as a new phase of capital accumulation, as I go into its five main aspects.     

N Generations of Reform in UK Local Government: Compliance and Resistance to Institutional Pressures

ABSTRACT

The UK government under the Thatcher administration was one of the first to launch NPM-type reforms. Since then, several generations of reform initiatives can be identified in the UK—including the “quality” initiative under Major, the Blair administration's early emphasis on “Best Value,” followed by its emphasis on targets and inspection, and its recent reconversion to public governance concerns. The UK, then, represents an interesting test case for studying how several generations of reforms co-exist and inter-relate. This article examines the imprint of past reforms in the current drive towards contestability and choice in local government modernization. It argues that coercive isomorphism has been evident in local government but that resistance has been successfully mounted against each generation of reforms, that these resistance efforts have themselves displayed isomorphic tendencies but that, nevertheless, a gradual move towards a mixed economy of provision has emerged in many local authorities.