Policing Academics: The Arkhè of Transformation in Academic Ranking

This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and establishes the basis for the oligarchic power of the State and its status quo. Central in this founding political moment is the notion of the Arkhè, a necessarily asymmetric “distribution of the sensible” that establishes the basis of the political order, in this case an oligarchic political order. Drawing on Foucault and Rancière, the article argues for a necessary “dissensus” with both the ranking practice and its attendant academic literature, as the first step towards a politics of ranking that is properly critical, and therefore genuinely political.     

A Socialist State of Grace: The Radical Reformism of Jean Jaurès*

Jean Jaurès (1859–1914) forged an innovative theory of radical reform by adopting a universalistic conception of human rights from the liberal tradition and a theory of capitalism and class from Marxism. He urged the labor movement to place less emphasis on the hope of a post-revolutionary “paradise” and instead to “live always in a socialist state of grace,” understanding socialism as a regulative ideal guiding a reformist practice. This liberal socialist politics could only take shape, he suggested, to the extent that liberal norms intersected with the self-interest of existing social movements: Jaurès's socialism, thus, is highly contingent, and makes no promises about political success. Jaurès prompts us to shift the focus of left democratic theory from the polity to the social movement, from “radical democracy” to “radical reform.”     

Sozialstaatliche Kürzungspolitik in Deutschland: Nur eine Mär? Eine quantitative Gesetzgebungsanalyse 1974–2014

Quantitative analyses on welfare state dynamics have to cope with the “dependent variable problem”, as studies on social spending reach different conclusions than analyses of replacement rate data. This article suggests a way around this problem by presenting results from a fine-grained analysis of welfare state legislation in Germany between 1974 and 2014. We show that the German welfare state has seen both cuts and expansions occur in all decades. Moreover, we show by means of a regression analysis that partisan politics play a role. Supporting the “Nixon-in-China”-thesis, social democratic governments are associated with a higher probability of cutbacks—especially in times of budgetary pressure—whereas expansions are more likely under Christian democratic governments.     

Why states have no right to privacy,but may be entitled to secrecy: a non-consequentialist defense of state secrecy

ABSTRACT

Despite an increase in initiatives aimed at enhancing political transparency, democratic states claim the right to withhold information from citizens: classified intelligence and military programs, diplomatic discretion, closed-door political bargaining, and bureaucratic opacity are examples. Can the state’s claim to restrict access to information be justified? In the first part of the essay, I focus on the arguments that defend the state’s claim to restrict access in terms of the state’s right to privacy where the state privacy is presented as a species of group privacy. While I concede that group privacy may be defended, I argue that governments and parliaments are not the kind of groups that may exercise privacy against citizens because of the relation of accountability in which they stand to citizens. In the second part of the essay, I propose an alternative argument to the effect that the scope of openness required in democratic governance is less extensive than traditionally assumed. I focus on the concept of democratic authority and argue that we can understand the practices of classification as an exercise of a special right to secrecy that is implied in the democratic state’s right to rule in a content-independent way.     

The Iraq Coalition of the Willing and (Politically) Able: Party Systems,the Press,and Public Influence on Foreign Policy

Media outlets in multiparty electoral systems tend to report on a wider range of policy issues than media in two‐party systems. They thus make more competing policy frames available to citizens. This suggests that a “free press” is insufficient to hold governments accountable. Rather, we should observe more challenges to the governments’ preferred frames and more politically aware citizens in multiparty democracies. Such citizens should thus be better equipped to hold their leaders accountable, relative to their counterparts in two‐party democracies. I propose a mechanism through which democratic publics can sometimes constrain their leaders in foreign policy. I test hypotheses derived from my theory with cross‐national data on the content of news coverage of Iraq, on public support for the war, and on decisions to contribute troops to the Iraq “Coalition of the Willing.” I find that citizens in countries with larger numbers of parties confronted more critical and diverse coverage of Iraq, while those with more widespread access to mass media were more likely to oppose the war and their nations likely to contribute fewer troops to the Coalition.     

Competing Gender Paradigms: Gender Difference, Fetal Rights and the Case of Johnson Controls

Political debates over the concept of “fetal rights” pose in sharp relief questions regarding the meaning of biological gender difference for gender equality. Can the state's obligation to “protect” fetal health be used to modify or control women's behavior? If so, what does this mean for women's status as full and equal citizens in a democratic society? This article addresses these questions through an analysis of the political, legal, scientific and moral debates over “fetal protection policies” in hazardous workplaces.     

Party,policy – or both? Partisan-biased processing of policy arguments in direct democracy

How do party cues and policy information affect citizens’ political opinions? In direct democratic settings, this question is particularly relevant. Direct democratic campaigns are information-rich events which offer citizens the opportunity to learn detailed information about a policy. At the same time parties try to influence citizens’ decision procedure by publishing their own positions on the issue. The current debate on whether “party” or “policy” has more impact on political opinions has not yet yielded conclusive results. We examine the effect of policy arguments and party cues on vote intention in two Swiss referendum votes using panel survey data. To the simple dichotomous question of “party cues or policy information” we add an additional twist in asking how party cues affect the processing of policy information through processes of motivated reasoning. We find first that both, policy arguments and party cues, have an independent effect on vote intention. However, in a second part of the analysis, we find strong evidence for partisan-biased processing of policy arguments – that is, voters tend to align their arguments with their preferred party’s position. Our conclusions with regard to the democratic quality of these vote decisions are therefore ambivalent.     

When Politics Fails: Hyper-Democracy and Hyper-Depoliticization

Although declining political engagement has been identified as a key problem for advanced liberal democracies, this article suggests that a more profound tension needs to be addressed. Specifically, it identifies interdependences between growing political pressures on national governments, and the tendency to delegate decisions away from control by elected politicians. These processes of “hyper-democracy” and “hyper-depoliticization” arguably create and re-enforce political tensions, magnifying a risk of central government “overload.” Through analyzing the arguments of prominent scholars of democracy, the article picks apart these interdependencies and argues for a more balanced approach to democratic governance.     

AIDS and the politics of rights in South Africa: A contested terrain

The prevalence of HIV/AIDS in South Africa has drawn particular attention in recent years, not only because of the country's high rates of infection but also because of the highly contentious debates between the state, AIDS NGOs, and scientists over AIDS policy. The national AIDS lobby in South Africa, including groups such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), has been forcefully articulating a rights-based discourse as a strategy to realize particular normative claims on the state. I examine these recent public debates and challenges to the human rights based response to AIDS that has gained consensus internationally among AIDS NGOs, governments, doctors and medical researchers. I explore the limitations of framing political demands in terms of the constitution and within a rights-based discourse in the present are of globalization and neo-liberalism, where the state’s capacity to respond to the social welfare demands of its citizens has declined, and where the protection of universal human rights requires that powerful transnational actors, in addition to the state, be held democratically accountable.     

Democracy's Pin Factory: Issue Specialization,the Division of Cognitive Labor,and Epistemic Performance

This article describes how issue specialization through deliberative institutions called “issue publics” can improve the quality of democratic decision making. Issue specialization improves decisions by instantiating a cognitive division of labor among the mass public, which creates efficiencies in decision making and grants large groups of average citizens a scalable advantage over small groups of even the smartest and most capable individuals. Issue specialization further improves decisions by capturing issue-specific information, concentrating it within the specialized deliberative enclaves of issue publics, and refining citizens’ issue preferences. These advantages are brought to bear in wider democratic politics and policy through information shortcuts and through the specialized electoral incentives of representatives. The article responds to concerns about political ignorance, polarization/partisanship, rent seeking, and socioeconomic bias and argues that issue specialization can provide a valuable brake to polarization yet needs institutional supplementation to engage marginalized citizens and combat bias.     

Constructing a global commons in,against and beyond the state

The “commons” is emerging as one of the progressive political key words of our time. Against a backdrop of continuing neoliberal governance of the global economy, there is interest in a “translocal” global commons as an alternative that transcends both state and capitalist forms of appropriation. In this paper, I offer a constructive critique of the global commons. While sympathetic to arguments about the deficiencies of state-centric forms of socialist projects for emancipation, I nevertheless argue that realizing the commons vision of a more democratic politics means continuing engagement with the state, particularly for connecting up and scaling up local autonomous projects to achieve more transformative social change.     

Military Policies and the State System as Impediments to Democracy

Military policies impose severe limits on democracy and call into question the viability of the liberal democratic state. Military mentality undermines democratic culture; the complexity of warfare defies public understanding; speed required in decision-making prevents public debate; secrecy misleads the public while often disguising executive abuse of power; vested interests in high military expenditure skew political processes; and concentration of power among a few obstructs democratic participation. Even state sovereignty, which military policies bolster, obstructs democracy because interdependence requires governments to be held accountable, through transnational law and institutions, to 'foreign' as well as 'domestic' citizens since both are affected by national decisions.     

More Money,Fewer Problems? Cross-Level Effects of Economic Deprivation on Political Representation

While equal political representation of all citizens is a fundamental democratic goal, it is hampered empirically in a multitude of ways. This study examines how the societal level of economic inequality affects the representation of relatively poor citizens by parties and governments. Using CSES survey data for citizens’ policy preferences and expert placements of political parties, empirical evidence is found that in economically more unequal societies, the party system represents the preferences of relatively poor citizens worse than in more equal societies. This moderating effect of economic equality is also found for policy congruence between citizens and governments, albeit slightly less clear-cut.     

Rewarding the Top: Citizens' Opposition to Higher Pay for Politicians

The rewards of politicians are a key part of the implicit contract between politicians and citizens, and the effect of these rewards on democratic legitimacy and political recruitment is a central concern in public debate and democratic theory. Using a survey experiment, we show how citizens respond to hypothetical changes in politicians’ pay. The results indicate that citizens express lower levels of trust in the politicians when these politicians award themselves higher pecuniary rewards. However, our results also show that a devious strategy in which the rewards for politicians are less transparent ensures lower opposition from citizens than open and transparent strategies. Based on this, we outline a reinvigoration of the research agenda on “rewards at the top.”     

Citizenship and Mediated Society

This paper challenges the idea of the liberating potential of information and communication technologies in terms of their meaning related to citizenship. It shows that the mechanisms that are supposedly conducive to the democratization of society can function as the mechanisms of exclusion of citizens. Adopting the critical-cultural perspective applied to issues of consumerism and their relations to citizens in media environment, the paper addresses the mediated appearances and manifestations of citizenship. The line dividing “old” from “new” media that is commonly used to apply to new media their participatory democratic potential lacks a reflection that would more explicitly admit new media limitations. These, when seen more in depth, appear as comparable to those of mass media. If in the beginning of the 1990s the Internet was embraced as truly enhancing political action, today its consumer realities, together with the spread of racism and xenophobia, need to be critically studied. As studies have shown, the Internet increasingly encourages the individual to look for private solutions to the problems of public nature which contributes to the understanding of citizenship not as a public but predominantly as a private affair. If cyberspace is becoming a vital link for new social movements and different groups of political activists, when seen from a broader citizenship perspective, the Internet has to be discussed also with regards to its limited democratic potential.     

Making citizenship public: identities,practices, and rights at Woodsquat

The common conception of citizenship is that of belonging to a political community, with the ensuing rights and responsibilities of membership. This community tends to be naturalized as the nation-state. However, this location of citizenship needs to be decentred in order to investigate current modes of democratic participation. This paper investigates current sites and practices of citizenship through reflection on a tactical housing squat of an empty department store staged by an urban social movement in Vancouver in 2002, known as ‘Woodsquat’. It uses a social movement perspective to look at citizenship, emphasizing the identities, practices, and locations of democratic engagement over the collective question of how we will live together in these places. From this point of view Woodsquat shows current limits of national citizenship, conceptually and practically, and suggests alternative possibilities for future citizenship practices located in multiple identifications with (political) communities. Moving from this analysis of political participation at Woodsquat attention is brought to the importance of spaces of democratic communication for possibilities of citizenship, where there seems to be a reinforcing relationship between public spheres, social movements, and democracy. Ultimately, then, actions at Woodsquat are argued to be a form of citizenship that emerged within a democratic public.     

Repositioning American Public Administration? Citizen Estrangement,Administrative Reform,and the Disarticulated State

Levels of citizen estrangement from government in the United States have risen rather consistently since the late 1960s and have reached all‐time highs in recent years. Evidence is accumulating in political science research to suggest that public administrative theory may have contributed to this trend since the Progressive Era in the early 1900s. The authors develop this thesis by arguing that administrative theory in the United States has persistently portrayed public managers as “bridge builders” who link an expertise‐challenged citizenry to government in ways that emphasize bureaucratic over democratic administration. Moreover, despite claims of yet another “new” paradigmatic shift for the field, collaborative governance scholarship to date exhibits similar tendencies. To support this argument, the authors assess the common citizen‐marginalizing tendencies of three sets of administrative reforms in American public administration: the progressive, associationalist, and polycentric heritages. They offer counterarguments to this thesis and call for critical self‐reflection by the field and a more empirically robust research agenda on this topic.     

Varying Costs to Change? Institutional Change in the Public Sector

Many scholars have argued that social programs are marked by a logic of “increasing returns” that makes change difficult. Yet over the past decades, reformers across industrialized countries have introduced substantial administrative reforms in these services, even as entitlement reform remains politically difficult. This paper explains these shifts by breaking apart the logic of “increasing returns” into three distinct “costs to change”: technical, political, and expectations. Decreases in a particular type of costs produce different logics of institutional change—back end, informal, and front end—that privilege the state, professionals or private, or political actors in distinct ways. I support these claims by reexamining three cases that were considered exemplars of stability but that ultimately had major entitlement reform: health care in the United Kingdom and United States and welfare programs in the United States. I show that even before radical reforms occurred, reformers introduced distinct logics of administrative change that underpinned later changes.     

How do voters perceive ideological congruence? The effects of winning and losing under different electoral rules

The degree of ideological congruence between citizens and their elected representatives is an important feature of democratic systems of government. A long tradition of literature has examined the ideological linkages between citizens and governments, often drawing attention to the differences (or lack thereof) in congruence across different types of electoral systems. Previous research has largely relied on aggregate-level measures of ideological congruence, such as the ideological distance between the position of the median voter and the government. We turn our attention here to how congruence relationships are perceived by individual voters, and how the perceptions of congruence may vary across electoral system types. This individual-level measure of ideological congruence is important in that individual-level, rather than aggregate-level, congruence has been shown to influence other outcomes such as citizen satisfaction with democratic performance. We expect electoral “winners” – those who voted for a party that entered government – to perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government compared to electoral “losers”. We expect this effect to be stronger in majoritarian systems where political competition takes place primarily between two parties, than in proportional systems where electoral losers are more likely to receive a proportional share of representation. We test these expectations by estimating random-effects regressions of perceived individual-level congruence using data from 54 elections held in 23 democracies included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results provide consistent support for our expectations. Electoral winners in all types of electoral systems perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government, and this effect is stronger in majoritarian systems.     

GLOBALIZATION'S IMPACT ON STATE-LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT POLICY

The growing exposure of the U.S. economy to international competition, popularly termed globalization, over the past two decades has brought some momentous changes affecting the American economy, society, and life styles. Not surprisingly, these changes have been reflected in growing political turbulence and shifts in policy paradigms as well. This symposium explores the effects that globalization has had on economic development policy and practice by state and local governments in the United States. Part I charts and seeks to explain“The Expanding Global Linkages” of state and local governments over the last several decades. Part II on the” Potential for Transformation “then argues that the economic transformations set off by globalization are pushing state and local development policy toward strategies that should overcome some of the problems associated with the previous strategy dubbed “smokestack chasing.” Yet, caution is certainly necessary before accepting such optimistic interpretations. Part III, therefore, presents several analyses suggesting that smokestack chasing “struck back” and that blind reliance on free markets and entrepreneurs hip can be dangerous to a community's social and economic health, indicting the existence of “Pitfalls in a Changing Universe.”