Systemic polarisation and spatial voting

The controversy between proximity and directional models of issue voting has not been settled. Instead of appointing an ultimate winner, this article explores the conditioning impact of the level of systemic polarisation and provides evidence that proximity is a more relevant determinant of voter behaviour in less polarised systems, whereas there is a centrifugal and directional dynamic in more polarised contexts. By so doing, the article shows how a largely forgotten notion – namely Sartori's idea of the spatial elasticity of the political spectrum – leads to different spatial viewpoints. In distinguishing between party (supply side) and voter (demand side) polarisation, this framework provides a comprehensive picture about the conditions that turn a centripetal electoral dynamic into a purely centrifugal one.     

Conceptualizing voter choice for directional and discounting models of two-candidate spatial competition in terms of shadow candidates

In contrast to the traditional modeling of voter choice based on proximity, under directional models, selection of candidates is based on the direction and/or intensity of change from a status quo or neutral point. Voter choice can also be modeled as representing both approaches, e.g., as a directional model with proximity restraint, or alternatively, in terms of proximity to discounted positions. We provide a unified perspective for these seemingly disparate models in terms of what we call “shadow” positions. We demonstrate that voter choice in a variety of spatial models including directional components can be viewed as proximity-based choices. Voters choose the candidate whose shadow is nearer, where shadow locations are defined by a simple transformation. We apply this approach to equilibrium analysis, showing that results for a discounted proximity model can be carried over – via shadows – to a variety of directional models.     

An assessment of voting systems under the proximity and directional models of the vote

I evaluate five single-winner voting systems according to their tendency to elect Condorcet candidates under alternative models of issue voting derived from behavioral research. These behavioral models posit that voters have both issue and nonissue motivations; within this framework, I study the effects of both the directional and proximity voting models, with varying degrees of issue voting. Under the proximity metric, all voting systems are most efficient when voters attach little importance to issues, while the opposite is generally the case under directional voting. In contrast to previous results, voting systems tend to be more efficient for large than for small electorates. All voting systems – including the widely-criticized plurality method – are extremely efficient when voters in mass elections are inattentive to issues.     

The Messianic,Sovereignty and the Camps: Arendt and Agamben

Abstract

After centuries of relative neglect, the notion of the messianic is again in vogue in radical discourse. This paper explores the meaning and significance of this concept in the work of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. They have been chosen not only because of their biographical and theoretical linkages to the thinker most responsible for the current resurgence of the concept of the messianic – Walter Benjamin – but also because they offer two alternative readings of precisely this concept. After exploring the meaning of this concept in Benjamin, Arendt and Agamben, the analysis turns to the related concepts of sovereignty and the “camps” in our principals in order to further elaborate the difference between them and to bring into focus the strengths and weaknesses of the theoretical/political deployment of messianism in contemporary leftist thought.     

Desperate equilibrium: on guilt,law and rationality

Abstract

This paper is about the role of guilt in relation to practical reason. It analyses guilt not as a passive emotion but as a particular kind of strategy at the level of subjective rationality. The concept of guilt occupies a complex and contested semantic space with other concepts, most notably shame. There have been many attempts – philosophical, psychological, sociological – to define these concepts in relation to each other. This paper suggests that whilst guilt is a moral concept that is oriented towards a certain kind of legalism, shame is a moralistic concept. As such, the relations between guilt and shame are discussed in relation to some literary examples, for instance Macbeth's guilt and Conrad's Lord Jim. The conclusion is that on the one hand our confusion over the concept of guilt comes down not least to what may be our confusion over the difficult concept of law and that on the other hand this has consequences that can ultimately be political.     

Medicine and ideology

This paper is an excursion on some of the views that Canguilhem expressed about ideology. The paper argues that there are senses in which modern medical rationality is driven by impulses that might – so long as we modify some of our traditional preconceptions about the concept – be described as ideological. Not least of the merits of Canguilhem's thought in this area was that he made the attempt to create an opening for a rethinking of the concept of ideology in the philosophy and epistemology of science which may be useful and challenging at a time when that concept is otherwise rather discredited.     

Waiting for Palestine: refracted citizenship and latent sovereignty in Gaza

This article explores the dynamics of citizenship under conditions of statelessness and in territories with uncertain sovereignty. The Gaza Strip under Egyptian Administration (1948–1967) – a nearly indefinable entity that was under Egyptian authority but no one's sovereignty – offers an especially good site for this exploration. In this period, both the government and the population were invested in some notion of Palestinian citizenship, but there was no Palestinian state to codify that concept. The Palestinian loss of formal citizenship with the end of the British Mandate in 1948, and the continued absence of this legal category, has shaped Palestinian life and political identification in profound ways. Even under these conditions, though, both conceptions about, and the social practice of, citizenship have also been crucially important for Palestinian community. Conditions in Gaza under Egyptian Administration illuminate a ‘refracted citizenship’ that articulated a relationship to both a future state and an existing government. Considering both the earlier dynamics of citizenship and sovereignty under the contested circumstances of the Mandate and the details of Egyptian governing practices in Gaza, the article argues that refracted citizenship provided a mechanism for people to make claims of the existing government and offered a means for that government to better manage the place and people of Gaza. Refracted citizenship also enabled people to build new community relations within Gaza – to develop a sense of specifically Gazan community – without feeling that they were jeopardizing their claims to Palestinian citizenship.     

Equality,risk and responsibility: Dworkin on the insurance market

The concept of risk occupies centre-stage in debates about individual and social responsibilities and, within a broadly neo-liberal regime, the paradigmatic form of risk management is insurance. Nevertheless analysis of these recent shifts in welfare politics appears curiously disconnected from dominant trends of normative political theorizing. The rise of ‘insurance as government’ and ‘risk management as responsibility and opportunity’ has not obviously been addressed even by prominent liberal political theorists. Similarly the analysts of neo-liberalism have devoted little attention to tracing these concepts through the literature on political theory. This article seeks to remedy this disconnection, by showing how Ronald Dworkin – perhaps the foremost liberal theorist writing today – offers us an account of equality which foregrounds the apparatus of insurance, and represents the management of risk within the welfare system as both an opportunity and a responsibility. Furthermore, his account inherits many of the ambiguities and weaknesses of neo-liberal theory and redeploys them within the political theory of equality.     

Ordering Disorder – On the Perplexities of the Partnership Literature

The literature on public‐private partnerships (PPP) has proliferated in recent years. However, confusion about the actual meaning of PPP still abounds. As a consequence, contradicting findings and statements about PPP flourish in the literature. This article reviews the literature, and argues that there are different streams of PPP research which operate with qualitatively different notions of the PPP concept. Accordingly the literature is divided into four different PPP ‘approaches’. By doing so the article offers some clarification concerning an increasingly complex concept. The article concludes that an authoritative definition of PPP – one that can encompass all the different variations of the concept currently in use – is not logically possible.     

The Conceptualisation and Measurement of Issue Ownership

Issue ownership means that some parties are considered by the public at large as being more able to deal with, or more attentive to, certain issues. The theory has been used to explain both party behaviour – parties are expected to focus on owned issues – and voter behaviour – when a voter considers a party to own an issue, this affects the odds of voting for that party. The purpose of this article is, first, to provide a look backward at the existing research through a literature review of the studies that were conducted in the past decade-and-a-half. Secondly, it takes stock of the current conceptualisation and argues that issue ownership is a multidimensional concept. Thereafter the article discusses how this multidimensionality affects both the role of issue ownership in voter and in party behaviour. Finally, the article outlines a number of shortcomings of the extant literature and discusses potential avenues for future research.     

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Understanding Human Security

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non‐military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defence. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of ‘human security’, focusing on the welfare of ordinary people against a broad range of threats. This has aroused vigorous debate. The first part of this article proposes an analytical model of human security. The second part argues that it is important to measure how ordinary people perceive risks, moving beyond state‐centric notions of human security. New evidence is examined that draws upon survey items specially designed to monitor perceptions of human security, included for the first time in the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), with fieldwork conducted in 2010–12. The third part demonstrates that people distinguish three dimensions – national, community and personal security – and then explores some structural determinants driving these perceptions. The fourth part discusses why perceptions of human security matter, particularly for explaining cultural values and value change around the world. The conclusion argues that the shift from a narrow focus on military security toward the broader concept of human security is a natural response to the changing challenges facing developed societies, in which the cost‐benefit ratio concerning war has become negative and cultural changes have made war less acceptable. In this setting, valid measures of perceptions of human security have become essential, both to understand the determinants of the concept among ordinary people and to analyze their consequences.     

Political generations in Northern Ireland

Since the late 1980s, Northern Ireland has seen a radical electoral shift away from the historically dominant parties in the Catholic and Protestant blocs – the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), respectively – towards the traditionally more ‘extreme’ parties – Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). This change in aggregate support has been accompanied by increasing differences between generations as older cohorts of UUP and SDLP supporters have been replaced by newer cohorts of DUP and Sinn Fein partisans. This is not a result of increased polarisation in values and attitudes (whether overtly political or simply communal intolerance) among younger cohorts who are, if anything, slightly more moderate than their forbears. Rather, this results from the changing political context in which new generations have been socialised – in particular the expanded choice sets facing voters as they have reached voting age. This in turn has positive implications for the consolidation of devolved democratic governance.     

A basic tool set for a generalized directional model

In political science, there are two classes of spatial models: those which are based on a distance logic and those which are based on a directional logic. This distinction can be found in terms of diverse topics, as voting theory, coalition theory or legislative politics. While Tsebelis (Br. J. Political Sci. 25:289–325, 1995) among others discussed implications of distance models, the respective counterparts for directional models have not been explicitly derived in the existing literature. We try to close this gap by discussing discrepancies between both kinds of models and derive some of the most relevant tools for analyses based on directional models.     

Ideology,reconciliation and nationalism in Northern Ireland

This article explores the conceptualization of ‘reconciliation’ within modern Northern Irish nationalist discourse. I argue that the case of Northern Irish nationalism adds a new dimension to those understandings that remain currently underappreciated within the literature. The article charts how reconciliation becomes operationalized as a restrictive politics both despite and because of it being framed in a language of pluralism, restoration and openness. While this process points towards the constitution of a political and ideological community, the concept of reconciliation also precipitates contestation and competition – not simply over memory but over a moral vision of the (violent) past. As such, I argue that reconciliation is not so much about the past but about ideological reframing(s). The case of Northern Irish nationalism, then, suggests that those reframings – a closing down and an opening up of debate – take place simultaneously within the rhetoric of reconciliation.     

A Resilience Approach to Transitional Justice?

ABSTRACT

Transitional justice, which is typically part of a liberal peacebuilding strategy, often seems distant, ineffective or even counter-productive. The concept of resilience, to which transitional justice discourses and scholarship have remained relatively indifferent, appears useful to explore justice initiatives in conflict or post-conflict situations. This article argues that much can be gained from better understanding the relevance of – and significant risks associated with – resilience thinking in this context. Through a critical approach to resilience, and embedded within a legal-pluralist framework, it examines some of the ways of dealing with political violence, with a particular focus on the Central African Republic.     

Fundamentalism's encounters with citizenship: the Haredim in Israel

This paper centers on the challenge that fundamentalist groups – such as the Israeli ultra-Orthodox community (the Haredim) – pose for citizenship. It focuses on two issues: challenges centering on contribution to and sacrifice for the Israeli nation-state; and alternatives that fundamentalism poses to definitions of citizenship. Empirically, it is based on research in three arenas: service in the Israeli military; a voluntary organization aiding state agencies after terror attacks (ZAKA), and a charitable association offering help in health and social welfare (Yad Sarah). Two trends – challenges to concepts of security and the state, and the weakening of the state in the economic sphere and social services – have opened up spaces for fundamentalist groups to operate in civil society and complement the state. The Haredi community has gradually developed a new concept of inclusion that both fits the state-centred view of citizenship and their own fundamentalist perspective.     

Democracy and distributiveness: patterns of transition from hegemony in divided societies

Many culturally heterogeneous societies with functioning democratic regimes nonetheless fail to grant equal status to different ethnic and cultural groups within their borders. To a great extent, scholars discuss such inequalities within the analytical boundaries of the discourse on democracy and democratization. We argue that such discussions overstretch the concept of democracy. In this research, we offer a novel axis of inquiry, namely distributiveness. We define distributiveness as the egalitarian distribution of resources – political, material, cultural-symbolic, institutional, and territorial – among different ethnic, religious, or cultural groups which self-identify as collectives within society. The aim of this new conceptualization is to (1) restore conceptual clarity to the literature on democracy, (2) enhance our capacity to assess the allocation of resources within a given polity, and (3) elucidate the processes that lead to change in patterns of allocation.     

Ideology and party support in comparative perspective

Abstract. From the original Downs (1957) conceptualization to the Enelow and Hinich (1984) reformulation, ideology has been the key organizing dimension for electoral competition in the spatial model. The unidimensional spatial model is best suited to responsible multiparty systems where left-right position is known to be an important determinant of individual political behaviour. We contrast the traditional spatial model with the directional model recently proposed by Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989) and test the models using data from six northern European democracies. Based on 57 different parties, the results suggest that even in this unidimensional ideological context the cleavage-oriented directional model provides a better explanation of mass attachments to political parties.     

Clarifying multilevel governance

Despite its widespread use in European studies and beyond, the concept of multilevel governance (MLG) still suffers from a considerable degree of uncertainty as to its precise meaning, which in turn hinders the cumulative development of this research programme. In an attempt to stimulate a systematic methodological discussion of the idea of MLG, this article presents a critical reconstruction of the concept structured around three ‘axes of ambiguity’– the applicability of MLG beyond the European Union; the role of non‐state actors; the focus on policy‐making structures versus processes – followed by a conceptual assessment and clarification strategy based on John Gerring's criterial framework. Building particularly on Gerring's criterion of causal utility, the article argues that the MLG concept is best clarified along the (not necessarily exclusive) lines of two theoretical directions emerging from the literature: MLG as a theory of state transformation, and MLG as a theory of public policy. For each of the two models, the criterial framework also indicates a number of corresponding conceptual shortcomings which MLG scholars should try to reduce as much as possible in future refinements of this idea.