Bringing States Back In

There is little of value to be said about the concept of power as such. The term itself is best seen as invoking the 'total structure of actions brought to bear' by some on the actions of others. What is of interest, then, is not power as such but rather the special cases in which relatively stable configurations of power can be identified. Lukes' focus on domination obscures the significance of other configurations. One is the political power of the state, which Lukes simply takes for granted, focusing instead on the question of who has control over its use. Another, which overlaps with political power but is not reducible to it, is government of the state. The system of states is the site of a third major limitation in PRV 's discussion, which is the point of the plural, states , in my title. Neither the American debate to which PRV made an influential late contribution nor Lukes' expanded discussion have much to say about the role of these configurations of power in the world today. A view of power that simply ignores them may be radical in certain respects but it is blinkered in others.     

Bringing the Emigration State Back In

The decades between 1948 and 1980 are often remembered as a time of mass immigration, yet almost 2 million more people left Britain than arrived in those years. Mass emigration has been an enduring part of Britain's modern history and this article explores its effects on British politics. The two world wars, the turn to tariffs, joining the EEC and leaving the EU: at these critical junctures, Britain's overseas diaspora was mobilised to reshape domestic politics and to transform the UK's global political economy. Charting the rise, fall and afterlife of Britain's ‘emigration state’ can contribute to our understanding of these events and help researchers analyse the effects of racism and empire on modern British politics.     

Bringing the Constitution Back In: Political Science and the State

At one time the study of politics centred on the state but for much of this century the emphasis has been on political behaviour and policy-making with governmental decisions explained as a response to societal forces. In the last decade or so, state-centric theorists have sought to bring the state back, arguing that it is more autonomous than society-centred theorists have suggested. I record the retreat of the state in the Anglo-American study of politics and the related rise of a particular kind of political science, going on to outline the more recent growth of a 'new institutionalism' which places the state at the very centre of political science. Bringing the state back in to the study of British politics must necessarily involve bringing the constitution back in but in ways that avoid the limitations of the constitutional approach and a narrow legalism.     

Bringing the State Back In: Retrospect and ProspectThe 2007 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture

Taking off from theoretical and research agendas encouraged in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In , this article traces developments in several areas of scholarship: studies of social revolutions and regime transformations; studies of the development of welfare states; and studies of social capital and democratic effectiveness. In all of these literatures, the author's own research and the research of many other scholars has been enriched by analyses of state-building and of the changing capacities of states to achieve particular goals, as well as by tracing 'policy feedbacks' over time. The original scholarly program called for a 'Weberian' approach to states as independent actors and for a 'Tocquevillian' emphasis on the ways that state structures and actions indirectly affect the ideas, goals and capacities of social groups in politics. The former approach remains relevant, and the latter has proved increasingly fruitful. Particularly vibrant areas of state-society research now focus on the struggles over social policies in mature welfare states and on the political, as well as sociocultural, roots of social capital and democratic citizen engagement.     

Educational Attainment and Social Norms of Voting

Political Behavior - Why does the likelihood of voting increase with education in the US? Prominent theories attribute education’s effect to human capital, which affords individuals resources...     

Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience Cost Theory

According to a growing tradition in International Relations, one way governments can credibly signal their intentions in foreign policy crises is by creating domestic audience costs: leaders can tie their hands by publicly threatening to use force since domestic publics punish leaders who say one thing and do another. We argue here that there are actually two logics of audience costs: audiences can punish leaders both for being inconsistent (the traditional audience cost), and for threatening to use force in the first place (a belligerence cost). We employ an experiment that disentangles these two rationales, and turn to a series of dispositional characteristics from political psychology to bring the audience into audience cost theory. Our results suggest that traditional audience cost experiments may overestimate how much people care about inconsistency, and that the logic of audience costs (and the implications for crisis bargaining) varies considerably with the leader's constituency.     

Social Norms and the Paradox of Elections’ Turnout

People vote although their marginal gain from voting is zero.We contribute to the resolution of this paradox by presentinga model for equilibrium configuration of attitudes regardingthe decision to vote. Each individual is seen as an element ofa social network, within which pairs of individuals expressideas and attitudes, exerting mutual influence. We model therole of such networks in propagating the mutual influenceacross pairs of individuals. We show that it may suffice thata small set of individuals have a strong feeling about showingup to vote to generate a significant turnout in elections.     

Bringing the Outside In: Somaliland,Statebuilding and Dual Hybridity

International norms of what it means to be a state dictate domestic policy within developing and unrecognized states but must co-exist with internal demands. With a mutual dependence between internal and external considerations and, indeed, legitimacy, at the fore of Somaliland’s statebuilding project and its stability, it is a useful study in achieving ‘success’ in statebuilding and in what success can mean in bringing together internal and external demands. This article examines the impact of the hybrid inclusion of traditional authority in the central democratic government as the marriage between internal and external demands. This article argues that the Somaliland state is successful because it is a flexible process rather than a project; a process that reflects the demands and expectations of society, an aspect that is often absent in statebuilding projects.     

Comparative Public Administration Is Back In, Prudently

Comparative public administration, in method and in content, has not successfully integrated with the main field of public administration, to the detriment of both. With globalization and changes in information technology, the current separation impairs public administration education. This assessment is based on a literature review and an appraisal of the contributions of comparative scholarship. Suggestions for future research strategies promote viable, integrative, and relevant cross-cultural studies. They emphasize (1) the utilization of cooperative teams of researchers instead of individual efforts; (2) the use of multi-case analysis instead of the traditional single-case approach; (3) improvement of the definition and verification of cultural influences on administration; and (4) expansion of middle-range analysis to examine specific administrative practices across national boundaries as a strategy for enhancing relevance.     

In Praise of Social Democracy

This article makes the case for social democracy in the context of difficult national and international economic conditions and changes in domestic politics that see a Conservative‐dominated Coalition government and the Labour party in Opposition for the first time since 1997. It rejects much current thinking in the Labour party and instead argues that traditional social democratic values, such as equality and social justice, are of contemporary relevance and can only be achieved through a strong central state committed to those values.