Structure, Agency and Ontological Confusion: A Response to Hay

Colin Hay's article 'King Canute and the "Problem" of Structure and Agency' aims to: (1) 'gain an interesting political analytical purchase on a seemingly familiar tale', and (2) 'generate a series of valuable and more general insights into our understanding of the structure–agency relationship'. I argue that he fails on both counts.     

Interacting Capacities: The Indirect National Contribution to Subnational Service Provision

Different levels of government often interact on the ground, providing closely related services. While multilevel governance arrangements have been studied broadly, scarce literature has explored the contribution of national governments to achieving subnational policy goals. By reconceptualizing administrative decentralization as coexisting devolution (to subnational governments) and deconcentration (through field units), this research explores the indirect national contribution to subnational performance by delivering associated services. This article tests the following hypotheses: (1) there is a positive effect of national deconcentrated capacity on subnational policy outputs, and (2) under policy overlap, this contribution diminishes with increasing levels of subnational capacity. While Colombian schooling is decentralized, the national government indirectly contributes to education through a national agency that administers child protection services. Analyzing data for Colombian subnational governments over a decade reveals that national capacity boosts education provision while the least endowed regions benefit the most, thus providing evidence supporting both hypotheses.     

Rethinking Postwar Liberalism: The Road to 2010 and Beyond

The nineteenth and early twentieth century Liberal Party has been well served by British political historians. By contrast, research on the post-1945 Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats has become a specialised field, with strong empirical foundations (including in biographies and political science work) but few connections with the larger narratives that historians tell about postwar Britain. This article explores how the story of the ‘long Liberal revival’ from the late 1950s to the 2010–15 coalition might be reintegrated with contemporary historiography, including debates about deindustrialisation, class dealignment and the rise of ‘popular individualism’. It argues that careful attention to the nature and limits of Liberals’ political agency can help us understand the changing meaning and significance of third-party politics in Britain.     

European Defence Agency: A Flashpoint of Institutional Logics

The European Defence Agency (EDA) works in a policy area traditionally characterised by high diversity among actors regarding basic notions of what level of integration and which principles of interaction in the defence sector are appropriate for the EU, which countries should participate in defence cooperation, and what coordination mechanisms and instruments should be used. In all these dimensions, the EDA has been a flashpoint of institutional logics representing different visions of how various aspects of defence integration in the EU should be organised. There are tensions between the logic of supranational regulation and the logic of intergovernmental networking; between the logic of defence sovereignty and the logic of pooled defence resources; between the Europeanist and the Euro-Atlanticist logic; and finally between the logics of liberalisation and Europeanisation of the defence market. Studying the ways in which the collisions of institutional logics are being accommodated by the EDA can contribute to greater understanding of the emerging political order of European defence.     

Beyond Marx-Weber: A Diversified and International Approach to the State

Marx initiated the definition of the development of the modern state as a process of expropriation of powers. Weber took over this idea and added to it two more definitions of the state: as the holder of a monopoly of the means of violence and as an authority based on rational-legal legitimation. These three definitions of the state held up well until after the second world war. hut since then new developments require that they he modified. Total expropriation of all powers did not take place. Instead a fusion of state and society ensued. The monopoly of violence has not proved usable and legitimation no longer matters so much in ensuring obedience. Furthermore, politics has moved to a new global international system featuring a number of different types of state: autonomous, community. Client, satellite and independent states. The combination of these five types with the previously defined three factors of expropriation, militarization and legitimacy, constitutes a theoretical approach that can relate internal structural disposition to external global position of the state.     

对策研究的协商式方法

对策研究在公共管理与政策领域具有重要地位,体现了中国的治学传统,也是学界服务社会的重要方式。传统的对策研究方法是建立在调研和访谈基础上的问题—原因—对策三部曲式研究。在处理富有争议的政策问题时,问题界定与对策选择难以摆脱研究者个体的视角和思维框架的局限,容易造成研究结论与现实复杂性、多元性之间的鸿沟,使对策建议缺乏社会认同。协商式政策分析是可以用于对策研究的有效方法。它针对复杂的公共管理与政策问题,聚焦其争议,在进行冲突分析和组织相关方开展协商与共识构建的基础上,寻求能够促进公平以及各方可接受的对策建议。胡同更新整治、散煤治理等实践案例验证了该方法的价值和可行性。     

浅议侦查线索的显现与价值体现

侦查线索的显现与价值体现是一种侦查工作理念。侦查线索的本质价值在于其对刑事破案活动的实用意义 ,侦查线索是侦破刑事案件的基础。在刑事案件中 ,侦查线索广泛存在 ,但并非都是显而易见的。侦查线索的显现是实现侦查线索价值的第一步 ,在侦查活动中使侦查线索的价值在刑事案件侦破过程中得以充分体现 ,进而揭露、证实犯罪 ,才是真正地实现了侦查线索的价值。     

Agency, Structure and Causality in Political Science: A Comment on Sibeon

Researchers in political science are devoting increasing attention to the ontological commitments of their theories – that is, to what those theories presuppose about the nature of the political world. This article focuses on a recent contribution to this 'ontological turn' in political science ( Sibeon, 1999 ). Tensions are identified in Sibeon's account of the causal interplay between agency and social structure. It is argued that these tensions can be resolved by reflecting explicitly on ontological issues, in particular the causal efficacy of social structure, using a particular approach to the philosophy of the social sciences known as critical realism. The value of such reflection for the explanatory power of political analysis is highlighted.     

A Systemic Approach to Security: Beyond the Tradeoff between Security and Liberty

The concept of security has shifted from territorial integrity to human security and, after 9/11, to pre-emptive security. Based on the massive implementation of surveillance-oriented security technologies (SOSTs), pre-emptive security emphasizes anticipation of threats and risk management. While liberty and security get framed as standing in a trade-off, SOSTs are massively deployed to increase security. Due to the mutually constitutive relationship between SOSTs and pre-emptive security, security gets framed as a function of surveillance, forcing increasingly monitored citizens to exchange liberty for security. In contrast, a systemic approach to security may enable security policies pursuing liberty and security.     

Embodiment and meaning: moving beyond linguistic imperialism in social semiotics

Social semiotic approaches to multimodality have tended to take language as the model for other modalities even when their professed aim is to move away from it. This kind of “linguistic imperialism” causes problems for theorising the relationship between the two basic semiotic planes of expression and interpretation in different modalities, and how the affordances of the expression plane relate to the meanings of the interpretation plane in each case, as well as in understanding the particular role of language in multimodal texts. The current paper brings together insights from semiotics, sociology of music and philosophy of language, as well as critiques of social semiotic approaches, in order to argue that the missing element in accounts of semiotic systems like language and music is the fundamental role played by embodiment in both these systems.     

The Local Voter: A Geographically Weighted Approach to Ecological Inference

Drawing inferences about individual behavior from aggregate ecological data has been a persistent problem in electoral and behavioral studies, in spite of important methodological advances. In a recent article Anselin and Tam Cho (2002) provided Monte Carlo evidence that King's Ecological Inference (EI) solution will produce biased estimates in the presence of extreme spatial heterogeneity. In this article we provide further empirical evidence that supports their findings and shows that in the presence of spatial effects the residuals of Goodman's naïve model exhibit the same spatial structure that King's local  B ^B _i  estimates. Solving for extreme spatial heterogeneity, it is argued here, requires controlling the omitted variable bias expressed in the spatial structure of much ecological data. In this article we propose a Geographically Weighted Regression approach (GWR) for solving problems of spatial aggregation bias and spatial autocorrelation that affect all known methods of ecological inference. The estimation process is theoretically intuitive and computationally simple, showing that a well-specified GWR approach to Goodman and King's Ecological Inference methods may result in unbiased and consistent local estimates of ecological data that exhibit extreme spatial heterogeneity.     

A Decision Analysis Approach to Policy Issues: The NAFTA Case

This article presents decision analysis concepts and tools that can help scholars and decision makers to get a better understanding of policy issues. It describes the structure of knowledge maps for representing uncertain elements in policy issues, and decision frames for uncovering the information elements behind conflicting positions and helps participants find a common ground for agreement. The article also presents the application of these techniques to issues arising from the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).     

Opening the Black Box of Administrative Reform: A Strategic-Relational Analysis of Agency Responses to Termination Threats

ABSTRACT

How do public agencies respond when reform proposals threaten downsizing, reduction in functions, or termination? Agency survival during administrative reform is conventionally explained by structural characteristics, informed by the hardwiring thesis derived from the politics of the U.S. federal government. Parliamentary systems provide greater opportunity for agency reform, but there is little evidence of how agencies respond to such proposals or how proposals are altered prior to decision. We consider agencies as active participants in the reform processes, using strategic-relational theory to analyse their strategizing. The article employs detailed empirical evidence on 12 agencies subject to reform by the UK government between 2010 and 2013. We identify three archetypical defence strategies—technical expert, network node, and marginal adaptor—and argue that coding agency strategies alongside structural analysis can help better explain reform outcomes.     

From Hybridity to Standardization: Rethinking State-Making in Contexts of Fragility

Having been top of the agenda for the past two decades, debates on state fragility have recently witnessed the emergence of pluralist concepts. While the concept of ‘hybrid political orders’ has invigorated our thinking about fragile states, it yields to the fallacy that pluralism constitutes the birth certificate of statehood. This article introduces an alternative concept to better grasp state trajectories, proposing an understanding of state developments in terms of institutional and identity standardization. Rooted in existing accounts of state-making, the analytical prism of ‘rule standardization’ is original in that it conceptually bridges the gap between statebuilding and nation-building as well as between state-making and state-breaking. Substantiating the theoretical discussion with three case studies from the Somali territories, the paper fundamentally proposes that what is required to sustain states should not be confused with what is required to initiate them.     

从多层次到多支柱:养老保障体系改革再思考

在对多层次养老保险体系反思的基础上,从多支柱理论和我国现实国情出发,构建了以多支柱为核心特征的养老保障体系。零支柱:以低收入者和农民为对象的普惠制国民养老金,旨在防止老年贫困。第一支柱:以正式就业者为对象,由基本养老保险社会统筹部分改造而来的基本养老金,目标在于保障就业者退休后的基本生活,突出社会再分配。第二支柱:以正式就业者为对象,由基本养老保险个人账户部分和企业年金计划合并而来的职业年金计划,使退休职工生活水平比单一的第一支柱有所改善,同时有助于应对老龄化危机。第三支柱:自愿性的个人养老储蓄计划,为有较高需求的高收入者提供的更高层次的保护。