Turkey’s increasingly assertive foreign policy

President Erdogan has moved aggressively in recent years to demonstrate that Turkey sees itself as the pre-eminent political and military power in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. This policy shift reflects growing Turkish capabilities, but is also an attempt by Erdogan to preserve his domestic standing amid deteriorating economic conditions that have undermined the popularity of his political party, the AKP.     

The Consummate Comparative Public Administrationist: A Tribute to Ferrel Heady, 1916–2006

Ferrel Heady died on August 16, 2006, at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Together with Fred Riggs, he is widely known and respected as one of the founders of comparative public administration. In this tribute to our friend and colleague, we touch on the highlights of his distinguished career as a scholar, an academic administrator, and a person who lived up to his own high standards of honesty and integrity in every aspect of his life. We assess his body of work, attempt to summarize its significance, and reproduce comments about him sent to us by his friends and colleagues. This tribute is accompanied by reflections on Ferrel written by Fred Riggs.     

Political competition when media create candidates’ charisma

This paper studies the location decisions of political parties. We propose a game where agents vote according to ideology and valence, and media create candidates’ charisma. The results we obtain show that candidates realize the power of media and therefore, locate themselves at some point between the position of the median voter and that of the media. We further obtain that depending on the media outlets the voters choose to see, the equilibrium location of candidates may differ. Thus, when voters choose among the outlets, candidates may differentiate their platforms. Differently, when voters are exposed to all the outlets, candidates tend more to moderate their ideology, in an attempt to get the favor of all the media.     

Nietzsche on Autonomy and Morality: the Challenge to Political Theory

Nietzsche's challenge to political theory can be located in his claim that autonomy and morality are mutually exclusive. In this paper an examination of Kant's attempt to ground a notion of autonomy through constructing a metaphysic of morals is followed by a consideration of Nietzsche's understanding of autonomy in terms of a notion of supra-moral sovereign individuality. A genealogy of morals represents an attempt to historicize the key notions of moral and political theory. Nietzsche's aristocratic conception of sovereign individuality is seen in terms of the value-basis on which sovereign individuals are to construct a common ethical and political identity and enter into social relationships. Foucaultian and feminist attempts to construct an ethics and politics of difference and a recent attempt to construct a post-modern conception of agency based on a synthesis of Nietzsche's philosophy of power and Kant's ethics are examined.     

On Power and Responsibility

The article focuses on Lukes' treatment of the relation between power and responsibility. By attempting to draw a sharp distinction between power and structural constraint, I argue, Lukes unnecessarily excludes from his analysis a wide range of significant and inegalitarian social constraints on freedom. The article defends a more structural approach to the study of power, one that employs democratic evaluative standards. Power relations are more or less legitimate, by this view, depending on the extent to which they enable the people they affect to help shape and reshape them. Contra Lukes' claim that structural approaches are incapable of accounting for the relationship between power and responsibility, I argue that they are fully compatible with theories of political responsibility. Even if no identifiable agent or agents can be held morally responsible for creating a given relation of domination, those actors whose actions helped produce that relationship are obligated to attempt to understand and to change it.     

BEATING THE ODDS: MAYORAL LEADERSHIP AND THE ACQUISITION OF POWER

During a time of dwindling resources, Boston Mayor Kevin White acquired a significant amount of power. This was in contrast to the experiences of other mayors during the 1960s and 1970s and to the predictions for mayoral leadership in general. Examining the paradox of White's administration underscores the need for politically skillful executives. Effective political skills include the ability to perceive resource opportunities, to select the appropriate strategies and to choose the best arena in which to operate. While all mayors have access to resources, they do not always use them effectively. Resources must be conserved, protected, and pyramided. Focusing on White's role as a power accumulator, his use of federal money, and his shift from audience and media politics to constituent and organization politics, this article examines how a mayor expands his political capital in an environment of limited resources. The major themes that emerge are the importance of political skills and political organization to strong mayoral leadership.     

Government Has No “Religious Agency”: James Madison's Fundamental Principle of Religious Liberty

Religious liberty has reemerged as a problem in liberal democracy. For guidance we can turn to James Madison. Unfortunately, his fundamental principle of religious liberty has been misunderstood. Madison believed that power over religious conscience always remains with the individual, which means that government never has a power to attempt to cause or prohibit religious opinions or profession and only has the power to prohibit religious practices that are “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison's fundamental principle of religious liberty is therefore that government has no “religious agency.” In matters of religious establishment, “no agency” means that government lacks even the power to cognize religious opinions or practices. But in matters of free exercise, “no agency” means that government can accommodate citizens’ religious consciences, even if that accommodation requires cognizing their religious opinions. An important but widely overlooked example of Madison's complex but principled approach to religious liberty is his 1790 proposal for a statutory exemption from federal militia service for religious objectors.     

The paradoxical effects of macluhanisme: Cazeneuve,Baudrillard and Barthes

In the mid-1960s the controversial ideas of media guru Marshall McLuhan hit France like a cyclone. ‘Macluhanisme’ is the summarization of the basic tenets of his theory and marks the paradoxical mire into which one was thrown by engaging with them. For to criticize McLuhan was to resist his truth by rationalization. Criticism. also put one in the position of being labelled a counter-revolutionary since McLuhan aligned himself, albeit rhetorically and despite his conservative politics, with counter-cultural tendencies. Moreover, he was condemned by university professors as a charlatan, but widely supported by media workers. This support exposed the political issue of who was, in French intellectual life, in a position to authenticate ideas. This study traces the effects of macluhanisme through the work of the sociologist of the media and administrator Jean Cazeneuve, the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose debts to McLuhan are well-recognized but little explored, and Roland Barthes, with whom McLuhan met in Paris to discuss (but never accomplished) a collaborative project.     

Body Idiom in Platform Events: Media Representation and the Hegemony of the Vicarious Conversation

Taking a comparative approach to critical semiotics, I describe reciprocal relations between media representation of body idiom in platform events and the interaction order of social relations among people in Hong Kong. I argue that two conflicting representations of body idiom vie for supremacy in the former colony, in broadcast television as well as in print media, business, government and education. These can be related to monofocal and polyfocal platform formats. The predominant semiotic representation of the postural presentation of self in international media, the monofocal platform format, grows out of what we call the Utilitarian Discourse System, and is in a problematic dialectical relationship with Hong Kong and other societies. This model of the monologue is articulated by Dale Carnegie in his 1937 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which advocates establishing and maintaining eye contact and a friendly manner. On the part of the audience, it requires accepting the fiction of a dialogue that is in fact vicarious. I argue that this acceptance evolved in Europe during the Enlightenment in what Foucault described as the disciplines of panopticism, but did not evolve in Hong Kong or China. I sketch the historical development of Hong Kong media and society in an attempt to explain the disjunction between media representation and interaction order, and conclude that critical social semiotics can make a contribution in disentangling these disparate interaction orders and media representations of body idiom.     

Tony Blair's 'Media' Speech: The Commentators

Tony Blair's speech challenged the media over its standards in his valedictory lecture. Many of his charges about the absence of balance, attacks on motive and a pack mentality stand up, even if some are exaggerated and also applied well before his arrival in 10 Downing Street. Mr Blair's solutions did ot match his critique. What is required is a more self‐questioning media, being held to account on the internet and on specialist blogging sites. Vigorous criticism, requiring justification, is a more credible rout than tighter regulation. Tony Blair's speech on the changing pressures on the media is both interesting and convincing in its diagnosis (although generally reported in ways that did not reveal this). It is less convincing in suggestions for change: the fact that on‐line media will fall under Of‐com, and so under its minimal ‘content regulation’ will have little impact. Effective change could begin with other types of (self or other regulation). Some steps towards change might include minimal requirements for journalists and editors to accept elementary forms of accountability, such as disclosing conflicts of interest and payments made for ‘stories’. The scale of media coverage may be crucial in determining the allocation of aid, yet the attention the media pays to particular causes is arbitrary. Many serious disasters are not reported and as a consequence do not receive adequate aid, so that the victims of the crisis will lose out. Chronic long term problems, like famine, are ignored in favour of ‘sudden emergencies’. Reporting seeks sensation and simple stories which influences the way that aid agencies respond to the media. The complex background to a faraway disaster is often overlooked and not properly reported. Tony Blair's speech describing some of the news media as ‘feral beasts’ contained one paragraph which contained an insight into his views on new media. It was known that the outgoing Prime Minister was uncomfortable with some aspects of new technology but his remarks reveal a wider disappointment with how new media has failed to deliver changes which he had hoped for in political communications.This paper records Mr Blair's problems with new media and argues that by focusing on how the new technologies might provide a better way for politicians to by‐pass the traditional media he has missed the point of their wider benefits.     

The colonization of consciousness in South Africa

This essay documents an early phase in the colonization of consciousness, and the consciousness of colonization, among a South African people. Here, as elsewhere, European domination was as much an attempt to seize control of the signs and practices of everyday life as an exercize in material coercion. Nineteenth-century evangelists in the South African interior relied on techniques of persuasion, seeking to introduce an existential ‘state of colonialism’ which anticipated the colonial state. Whatever else it might have been, the history made on this frontier was one of struggle over power and meaning. We trace the attempt of the civilizing mission to invade three domains of African life: its natural resources, techniques of production, and language. We argue that, in order to grasp how new hegemonies were laid down amidst local resistance, it is necessary to distinguish two levels of operation in colonizing cultures. For while its ideological message was widely rejected, the mission enmeshed local peoples in the underlying forms of the European system - the commodity form, linguistic forms, and so on. Thus was initiated the process that incorporated many African peoples into the political economy of Empire.     

A fascist Trojan horse: Maurice Bardegraceche,fascism and authoritarian socialism

Maurice Bardegraveche was an important neo-fascist writer whose ideas derived from those of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach. Bardegraveche was a neo-fascist of the pen, and he used his journal Deacutefense de lposOccident to provide a link between fascism and neo-fascism in an attempt to resurrect the 'purity' of fascism in his post-1945 critique of West European history. Barnes addresses how Bardegraveche utilized a concept of 'authoritarian fascism', present in some old fascisms, to rehabilitate Europe. Bardegraveche commenced by analysing the faults of pre-war fascism and located many of his ideas in the work of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He wanted to replace liberal democracy with an organic regime, both social and economic, but within a hierarchical framework. He opposed bourgeois society and advocated a corporate state of national solidarity. However, he believed that any new civilization must be aesthetic and move away from an insect-like industrialism in order to achieve a society based on peasant virtues. Bardèche appeared to be a utopian fascist, an anti-modernist. Barnes analyses his attack on capitalism, its feudalistic nature and the power of money, which he thought could only be opposed by fascist socialism and an ordered society. Bardèche located his variant of socialism within the context of the fascist philosophies of Drieu la Rochelle, Benito Mussolini, Jos Antonio, Corneliu Codreanu, Oswald Mosley and Jacques Doriot. He condemned political and economic liberalism and the class struggle. He wanted national capital to be protected and thought economic dependence relied on national independence. He believed economic power was held in too few hands and advocated a corporate state. Bardegraveche proves, essentially, to be a utopian, transcendental fascist.     

Power Sharing and Leadership Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes

I examine a fundamental problem of politics in authoritarian regimes: the dictator and the ruling coalition must share power and govern in an environment where political influence must be backed by a credible threat of violence. I develop a model of authoritarian politics in which power sharing is complicated by this conflict of interest: by exploiting his position, the dictator may acquire more power at the expense of the ruling coalition, which may attempt to deter such opportunism by threatening to stage a coup. Two power-sharing regimes, contested and established dictatorships, may emerge as a result of strategic behavior by the dictator and the ruling coalition. This theory accounts for the large variation in the duration of dictators' tenures and the concentration of power in dictatorships over time, and it contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of power sharing and accountability in authoritarian regimes.     

Steven Lukes on the Concept of Power

Steven Lukes has recently reissued his famous book on power, Power: A Radical View . He now admits that the concept of power that he used in his original (1974) book is flawed, but he still wants to defend the position that he advanced there. I argue that he is right to regard his concept of power as flawed, but that admitting this undermines his argument. I conclude that he can rescue his argument by realising that he is not, in fact, using a concept of power at all.     

Greek Everyman: Andreas Papandreou at 100

2019 marks 100 years since the birth of Andreas Papandreou, Greece's first socialist prime minister and an extraordinary figure of twentieth century European politics. Looking back, the central purpose of this article is to answer pivotal questions about Papandreou and his career. What have been the major turning points in his life? What were his main beliefs? What motivated him and his politics? What were his political priorities and methods? What did he want to achieve as prime minister? Why did he become so involved in foreign policy issues? What were his assets as prime minister? Did they outweigh his shortcomings as a politician and leader? Did power change him and how? What will be Papandreou's place in history?     

Keep Rowing: Amitai Etzioni and History

Reflecting on the most recent stage of his career, the communitarian, Amitai Etzioni, gives three reasons for what he perceives as his loss of influence. First, the media prefers an argument between strongly opposed positions, but Etzioni is neither liberal nor conservative. Second, the media prefers specialized intellectuals, but Etzioni has refused to “stick to his knitting.” Third, Etzioni has taken an unpopular, dovish position on China. I argue that Etzioni is mistaken about the reasons for his and communitarianism’s rise and perceived fall and offer a more optimistic assessment than he does of the potential influence of his thought. I use this local problem of historical interpretation to question Etzioni’s global interpretation of modern history.     

The Media as Political Agenda-Setters: Journalists’ Perceptions of Media Power in Eight West European Countries

Studies in different countries have shown that the media can influence the attention politicians devote to different issues. However, knowledge about the cross-national contingencies of the political agenda-setting power of the media is limited. This study compares the perceptions of journalists of the political agenda-setting power of the mass media in eight parliamentary democracies with varying media and political systems: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on a power balance perspective, the article looks at the autonomy of the media system (audience reach and political control) and the concentration of power in the political system (number of political parties, concentration of executive power) to contextualise the role of the media in political agenda-setting. Journalists perceive most media influence in Norway and Sweden and least in Spain. The results indicate that the power balance between the media and political actors to a large extent reflects the institutional structure of the political system, but that media characteristics such as the autonomous position of television should also be taken into account.     

列宁的事业及其当代意义——纪念列宁诞辰130周年

列宁毕生的事业至少有两个部分对今天的中国有重要的启示意义。一是列宁晚年关心的中心问题之一 ,即通过改组工农检察院 ,加强工农群众对党和国家机关的监督 ,反对官僚主义 ,保证政权不改变颜色 ;二是以《帝国主义论》为代表的运用阶级分析的方法对帝国主义问题的研究。前者可以给正在深化改革开放并将长期实行市场经济的中国提供重要的借鉴 ;后者对于我们在全球经济一体化浪潮中保持清醒的头脑大有裨益。列宁的思想和事业最大的特点是对阶级和阶级斗争的极端重视 ,这也是马克思主义的基本特征 ,迄今仍有重要的现实意义     

Governance in the Age of Digital Media and Branding

The politicization of government communications requires intense control. Centralization of government power accompanies advances in information and communications technology, as political elites use branding strategy in an attempt to impose discipline on their messengers and on media coverage. The strategic appeal of public sector branding is that it replaces conflicting messages with penetrating message reinforcement. Among the notable features are central control, a marketing ethos, a master brand, communications cohesiveness, and message simplicity. Together these features work to conflate the party government and the public service, which perpetuates trends of centralization. Using Canada's Conservative government (2006–2015) as a case study, public sector branding explains the hyper control over government communications and demonstrates why these developments can be expected to last, regardless of which party or leader is in control.