On the Historical Position of Ecological Civilization*†

Ecological civilization is not a new form of civilization that will replace the current industrial civilization, but a basic structure or factor running through all forms of civilization (from hunting and fishing society to agricultural, industrial, and then information civilizations). Information civilization is a new form of civilization following industrial civilization. Only after a new ecological civilization has been achieved will it be possible to sustain an information society.     

Uncertainty,Complexity, and Gamson’s Law: Comparing Coalition Formation in Western Europe

According to Gamson’s Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is proportional to the legislative seat shares of the governing parties. However, portfolio allocation departs systematically from perfect proportionality. This paper proposes a theory of portfolio allocation that seeks to explain the variance in proportionality across different bargaining situations. It argues that the degree to which the coalition formation process is characterised by uncertainty and complexity influences portfolio allocation. In uncertain and complex bargaining situations, parties that otherwise would be in an advantageous bargaining position will have a difficult time exploiting their bargaining advantage. As a result, portfolio allocation in such circumstances will be closer to proportionality. These patterns are observed in data on coalition formation in 14 West European parliamentary systems in the period 1945–1999.     

Splitting the Difference? Causal Inference and Theories of Split-party Delegations

Matthew J. Butler Department of Economics, 549 Evans Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 e-mail: butler{at}econ.berkeley.edu e-mail: daniel_butler{at}stanford.edu (corresponding author) We provide an introduction to the regression discontinuity design(RDD) and use the technique to evaluate models of sequentialSenate elections predicting that the winning party for one Senateseat will receive fewer votes in the next election for the otherseat. Using data on U.S. Senate elections from 1946 to 2004,we find strong evidence that the outcomes of the elections forthe two Senate seats are independent.     

Governance,the State,and the Market: What Is Going On?

Analyses of the 'shrinking state' tend to focus on the pressures being felt by the welfare state. The 'state' is viewed as a provider of social benefits and as redistributing wealth. To the extent these functions are being challenged the state is perceived as being 'rolled back' by the forces of the market. Yet the state is also involved in 'building' markets. This function, overshadowed in the past, has now become an important state activity. Such activity, however, is carried out by state actors different from those involved in the provision of social benefits and the evolution of the welfare state. Majoritarian institutions are largely responsible for the latter while non-majoritarian institutions oversee theformer. Although the balance of power among different types of state actors has shifted, the power of public authority has not necessarily been 'rolled back' by the market.     

Uncertainty,Shifting Power and Credible Signals in US-China Relations: Why the “Thucydides Trap” Is Real,but Limited

Journal of Chinese Political Science - Is conflict between a rising China and a declining United States inevitable? One of the main purported drivers of the “Thucydides Trap” is that...     

On interest,credit and capital ∗

On interest, credit and capital Laurence Harris This article examines the category of interest payments within the problematic of historical materialism. It examines the interest payments which occur under the capitalist mode of production on the basis of credit from capitalists to capitalists, from capitalists to workers, and from workers to capitalists. On the subject of capitalist to capitalist interest payments, the article examines the views of Marx on interest-bearing capital and demonstrates that Marx did consider this interest rate to be subject to determinate and analysable laws. These interest payments are transfers of surplus value as such. On the subject of worker to capitalist interest payments it is demonstrated that these are payments out of wage revenue which are appropriated as profit on merchants' capital rather than as profit on interest-bearing capital. Finally, capitalist to worker interest payments are identical with payments of wage revenue and, therefore, are for capitalists equivalent to the advance of variable capital. These results are established on the basis of the law of value and after considering the concept of value of labour power. In conclusion, the construction of data employed in empirical work is criticised.     

Divided Loyalties,Empowered Citizenship? Muslims in Britain

Fear of Muslims, Islamophobia, is embedded in stereotypical assumptions and pronouncements regarding selected customs and, above all, the inherently fanatical, violent and irrational tendencies of Muslim leaders and their followers. The further point of such discourses is the claim that these alien qualities and attributes have come to be implanted in the Western body itself, no longer simply confined to its 'bloody boundaries', to cite Huntington, but extending within and across them. A substantial Muslim diasporic presence has emerged in Europe and the West, and even some Western liberals, who pride themselves on their enlightened tolerance, appear concerned about the capacity of this culturally alien presence, as they see it, to integrate'. Such doubts surfaced especially during the Rushdie affair and the Gulf war, both of which seemed to expose the chasm between so-called Western 'values' and Islamic ones. In denying the validity of this antagonistic vision according to which Muslim minorities are intrinsically antithetical to Western democractic practices, the aim of the present paper is twofold: first, to highlight the rise of an alternative contemporary debate about the rights and obligations of Muslims as minorities in the West which is currently animating Muslim and Western scholars, clerics and activists; and second, to argue that Muslim diasporic transnational mobilisation, including even the conflicts surrounding the Rushdie affair and the Gulf war, have been key moments in the development of a Muslim British civic consciousness and capacity for active citizenship. Far from revealing ambiguous loyalties or unbridgeable cultural chasms, British Muslim transnational loyalties have challenged the national polity, I argue, to explore new forms of multiculturalism and to work for new global human rights causes. At the same time such mobilisations have been part of the learning process of becoming a politically effective diaspora. In the long run, then, the Muslim diasporic presence in Britain is a potentially enriching one, and particularly so as the state moves to becoming a post-national, multicultural polity.     

Whither Power in Public Administration? Attainment,Dissipation, and Loss

Norton Long's 1949 essay, “Power and Administration,” has a complicated legacy. First, analysis reveals both support for and important refinements of Long's arguments since the article's publication. Second, Long's claim has proven problematic that competition among agencies for power would bring more coordination and a cross‐agency sense of purpose to the federal government. Third, the bureaucratic pluralism that he explained and defended produced special interest biases that were off‐putting to large segments of citizens and thus helped create an unsupportive political environment for needed capacity building in the federal government. Fourth, by not considering how institutions “coevolve,” Long failed to warn that “horizontal power” building by individual agencies would provoke efforts by elected officials to enhance their control over bureaucracy in ways that, over time, diminished their collective sources of power. Finally, much remains to be done before what Long called a “realistic science of administration” incorporating the “budgeting of power” exists in public administration.     

When Should We Use Unit Fixed Effects Regression Models for Causal Inference with Longitudinal Data?

Many researchers use unit fixed effects regression models as their default methods for causal inference with longitudinal data. We show that the ability of these models to adjust for unobserved time‐invariant confounders comes at the expense of dynamic causal relationships, which are permitted under an alternative selection‐on‐observables approach. Using the nonparametric directed acyclic graph, we highlight two key causal identification assumptions of unit fixed effects models: Past treatments do not directly influence current outcome, and past outcomes do not affect current treatment. Furthermore, we introduce a new nonparametric matching framework that elucidates how various unit fixed effects models implicitly compare treated and control observations to draw causal inference. By establishing the equivalence between matching and weighted unit fixed effects estimators, this framework enables a diverse set of identification strategies to adjust for unobservables in the absence of dynamic causal relationships between treatment and outcome variables. We illustrate the proposed methodology through its application to the estimation of GATT membership effects on dyadic trade volume.     

From corporatism to lawyocracy? On liberalization and juridification

In 1997 Robert Kagan questioned whether European countries had to fear the coming of American style adversarial legalism. He answered this question with a qualified “no.” Today we are no longer so sure the answer is “no,” even in a country that Kagan considered the antipole of US adversarial legalism, the Netherlands, traditionally characterized by informal and consensual conflict resolution. In the present article we chart a trend of increasing juridification and legalism, that is, more formal and legal conflict resolution, in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2008. The trend is related to major changes in economic governance institutions, which generated a shift from corporatism toward lawyocracy; from power of the associations of civil society toward power of courts, lawyers, and judges. Yet the newly dominant system of governance is modified and merged with elements of the old system, producing a specific Dutch version, which one could call “corporatist lawyocracy.” We identify two types of liberalization as major driving forces: social liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by economic liberalization in the subsequent decades. If one considers economic liberalization a product of neoliberal “Reaganomics,” the legal changes are in a way an “American export product,” although a different one than the lawyering styles of large international American law firms mentioned by Kelemen and Sibbitt in 2004.     

Are We Being Served? Emotional Labour in Local Government in Victoria,Australia

This paper explores how front‐line street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) cope with the expectations of citizens, clients, or ‘customers’ in daily work and how SLBs may be impacted by emotional labour. The study analyses data from 41 interviews with SLBs in local councils in Victoria, Australia. Although exploratory, it builds awareness and understanding of the emotional labour associated with public service. The situations that SLBs engage with on a daily basis are many and varied and take the form of increased expectations and intense encounters. Respondents experienced abuse, threats, violence, but also ‘sparkle moments’. Resources that helped SLBs cope are diverse and located both within and outside organisations. Implications are discussed and issues that merit additional investigation are raised concerning how SLBs can be supported to better meet the demands of the public. The research is of value to public managers and SLBs operating in a changing society with increased ‘customer’ expectations.     

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too? Cointegration and Dynamic Inference from Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models

Although recent articles have stressed the importance of testing for unit roots and cointegration in time‐series analysis, practitioners have been left without a straightforward procedure to implement this advice. I propose using the autoregressive distributed lag model and bounds cointegration test as an approach to dealing with some of the most commonly encountered issues in time‐series analysis. Through Monte Carlo experiments, I show that this procedure performs better than existing cointegration tests under a variety of situations. I illustrate how to implement this strategy with two step‐by‐step replication examples. To further aid users, I have designed software programs in order to test and dynamically model the results from this approach.     

What matters to citizens in crisis recovery? Being listened to,action, and confidence in government

Policy Sciences - The policy decision-making process in the aftermath of a crisis is a dynamic and iterative process involving circumstances that are emotionally convoluted rather than stable and...     

Aquinas’s Ecological Vision: Natural Law and Friendship in Contemporary Environmental Political Thought

This article examines Aquinas’s thinking about law and nature to show that for Aquinas natural law is not about deriving or finding normative rules (standards) in the order of the cosmos or requirements of practical rationality. Rather, I argue that for Aquinas, natural law is a distinctive way of theorizing relationality and embodiment in the “sublunary realm”: one that aims at “friendship” across species lines (STI-II99.2-3). The word Aquinas uses to describe this ecological practice is synderesis. For Aquinas, synderesis is both the human-creaturely capacity to grasp the analogical structuring of reality and the “disposition” that allows us to work on transforming this reality into belonging-together through our participation in natural law (STI79; DV15-17). Synderesis is thus of central importance to Aquinas’s account of natural law, yet it is largely overlooked by modern natural law theorists. The article concludes by exploring how Aquinas’s natural law thinking might contribute to an environmental politics of friendship.     

Does personalization of officeholders undermine the legitimacy of the office? On perceptions of objectivity in legal decisionmaking

Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non-personalized public administration projects an ethos of technocratic decisionmaking, seeking legitimacy through institutional objectivity and impartiality. We conducted an experiment to examine the efficacy of personalization strategies in the context of a politically charged legal affair: the criminal cases involving the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We focus on people's perceived objectivity of the office of the Israeli attorney general (AG), given exposure (vs. no exposure) to different types of personal information about the AG, and while manipulating the salience of contrasting decisions concerning Netanyahu (indicting him on several counts of corruption versus exculpating him in others). We find that exposure to personal information about the AG decreased the perceived objectivity of his office, compared to no exposure to personal information, regardless of the type of information, decision salience, and respondents' political leanings. Our findings, therefore, support the legitimating potential of the non-personalization of decisionmakers, and show that it pertains to people positioned as both “losers” and “winners” with regard the political impact of the decision. The study further reflects the capacity of nonabstract real-world, real-time, analyses to shed light on the drivers of public trust in legal decisionmaking in politically polarized contexts—an issue of pertinence in many contemporary democracies.     

Is Neoliberalism a Liberalism,or a Stranger Kind of Bird? On Hayek and Our Discontents

Abstract

This paper examines the theoretical ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the key progenitor of the global economic orthodoxy of the past two decades. It assesses Hayek's thought as he presents it: namely as a form of liberal ism. Section I argues that Hayek's thought, if liberal, is hostile to participatory democracy. Section II then argues the more radical thesis that neoliberalism is also in truth an illiberal doctrine. Founded not in any social contract doctrine, but a form of constructivism, neoliberal thought at its base accepts the paradoxical need to "discipline subjects for freedom", however this might contravene peoples' natural, social inclinations. The argument is framed by reference to Aristophanes' great comedy, The Birds, whose off shore borderless empire ironically prefigures the dream of neoliberal social engineers, and their corporate supporters.