Flexible Adjustment and Political Stability: The Terms of the Debate

Flexibility is a prominent catchword in recent economic and political debate. The need for increased flexibility in various areas of society is generally accepted. The article presents and criticizes the terms of this debate. As part of the general neoliberal trend flexibility is often perceived as a purely desirable quality. Less state, less unions and flexibilization by means of greater reliance upon markets are the policies that are proposed to overcome the crisis of the Western industrialized countries. However, flexible adaptation requires a foundation of stable institutions and behaviour patterns. Japan today represents one successful combination of flexibility and stability. Scandinavia - and other small European countries - have been attributed other successful combinations. Here, political stability seems to arise from a big state and an extended corporatist system and, according to Katzenstein, this does not contradict, but rather reinforces, the capacity for economic flexibility. Recent developmental trends, however, challenge this interpretation. The recent structural changes have been considered part of a general transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. The international race to modernize or to implement post-Fordism might imply a new 'match' of techno-economic structures and sociopolitical institutions - also in the Scandinavian countries.     

The Capability Approach and the Debate Between Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights. A Critical Survey

This paper provides a critical exploration of the capability approach to human rights (CAHR) with the specific aim of developing its potential for achieving a synthesis between “humanist” or “naturalistic” and “political” or “practical” perspectives in the philosophy of human rights. The “Polemical Context: the Debate Between Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights” section presents a general strategy for achieving such a synthesis. The “The Capability Approach to Human Rights” section provides an articulation of the key insights of CAHR (its focus on actual realizations given diverse circumstances, its pluralism of grounds, its emphasis on freedom of choice, its demand for public reasoning, its context-sensitive universalism, and its broad view of obligations). These insights go some way toward the achievement of the desired synthesis. But, as explained in the “Need for Further Development of the Approach” section, in its current form, CAHR faces two serious objections by the defenders of the political perspective: the gap between capabilities–interests and rights objection and the disconnect from practice objection. Answering these criticisms requires some amendments to CAHR. The “Recommending a Contractualist Framework of Normative Reasoning” section suggests a response to the first objection based on the introduction of a contractualist framework of justification. The “Recharacterizing the Cosmopolitanism Inherent in the Humanist Standpoint” and “Focusing on a Three-Dimensional Picture in the Search for Deliberative Reflective Equilibrium about Human Rights” sections tackle the second objection by introducing a recharacterization of the cosmopolitan standard underlying the humanist perspective and by identifying the differences and relations between various dimensions of a conception of human rights and their significance for actual political practice. The paper illustrates the practical implications of CAHR, in its modified form, for the pursuit of some important rights.     

Democracy in the Light of Security: British and French Political Discourses on Domestic Counter-Terrorism Policies

This article aims to question the relationship between security and liberty that lies at the heart of the current debates on European counter-terrorism policies. It analyses the statements reported in the press made by defenders of the emergency rules thesis and their rivals in the UK and France from September 2001 to June 2003. The findings reveal that, in both cases, the legitimation of the emergency measures rests upon a set of sovereignty-related arguments that reframe the notion of freedom and the place of human rights in contemporary democracies. The defenders of the human rights thesis denounce the reframing of civil liberties but fail to address the freedom issue.     

Intolerance and Political Repression in the United States: A Half Century after McCarthyism

What consequences for political freedom arise from high levels of political intolerance among the American public? Comparing surveys from 1954 to 2005, I document the level of perceived freedom today and consider how it has changed since the McCarthy era. Levels of intolerance today and in 1954 are also compared. Next assessed is whether restrictions on freedom are uniformly perceived or whether some subsections of the population are more likely to feel repressed than others. I find that while intolerance may have declined somewhat since 1954, perceived constraints on individual freedom have actually increased. These findings produce telling consequences for the subtheory of pluralistic intolerance. During McCarthyism, intolerance focused on the Left; today, many groups are not tolerated, so the loss of freedom is more widespread. Heretofore, many thought that pluralistic intolerance tended to be benign. At least in the case of the contemporary United States, it seems not to be.     

The Impact of Political Debate on Government Trust: Reminding the Public What the Federal Government Does

Americans' confidence in government is low by historical standards. We fielded a national telephone survey to examine influences on government confidence and whether public discontent was affected by altering the salience of specific government operations. We used a question order experiment where we alternated between first asking a general question about confidence in government and first asking about confidence in specific government operations. We found that posing the specific policy questions first elevated general confidence more than the reverse. The largest and most noticeable effects were observed for Republicans and those most knowledgeable and attentive to politics. Findings of context effects and the partisan subgroup differences are consistent with existing theories on public opinion change as well as with previous question order experiments. But, evidence that the cognitive elite was especially influenced by question order challenges previous theories that presumed that its sophistication made it immune to influence. We suggest that education and political knowledge expand rather than contract the opportunities for priming.     

党的十八大以来党内政治生态若干问题研究述评

党的十八大以来,国内学术界对于党内政治生态的内涵界定、历史经验、现实挑战以及推进路径等问题进行积极的探索和研究,取得一系列有益成果。然而,通过梳理发现,当前学界在研究思路、研究范围、研究方法、研究视域等方面还有待于进一步深化。今后学术界的研究应围绕"四个注重":在研究思路上,注重开展系统化和整体性的研究;在研究范围上,注重拓展不同历史时期的纵向和对比研究;在研究方法上,注重强化地方基层的实证研究;在研究视域上,注重引入交叉学科研究,使党内政治生态的研究不断地走向深化。