China’s Political Stability: Global Comparisons

Throughout most of the 20th Century, China had suffered tremendous economic and human losses due to political instability. It is in the most recent decades that the Chinese people have managed to live with political stability. The economic benefits of political stability can hardly be overstated. Yet, China’s political stability is by no means assured. Is China stable or unstable? Is the Chinese regime strong or fragile? To answer these questions, this study has selected a total of 12 sets of publically available indices to measure political instability and placed China on a global scale of comparisons with all the others, both advanced and developing, in the world. It also makes specific comparisons between China and the other four countries of the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The findings of our global comparisons give China no reasons for celebration. However, China has no reasons for paranoia either. China has indeed faced many threats or challenges to political stability, but, as our study demonstrates, China is no more politically unstable or fragile than many others. Ignoring or underestimating the ripple effect of any destabilizing world event will do China no good, but overreactions also serve China’s interests poorly as fear or paranoia can be highly contagious.     

Reconciliation Arguments in John Rawls’s Political Philosophy

Abstract

Recently debates about the worth of “ideal theory” have directed attention to the functions that an account of a perfectly just society can serve. One function is that of “reconciliation”: learning that a seemingly undesirable feature of the social world would exist even in the perfectly just society can show us the value that it has in the present as well. John Rawls has emphasized reconciliation as among the roles of political philosophy. For instance, Rawls claims that his theory of justice can reconcile us to the pluralism of liberal democracies. In this essay, I argue that Rawls’s political theory also can reconcile the inhabitants of liberal democratic societies to the fact that such societies may be cognitively confusing on account of their complexity. Then I contend that Rawls’s work offers valuable theoretical resources for analysing a society’s transparency or lack thereof.     

China’s Local Political Turnover in the Twenty-First Century

This paper provides empirical evidence on the incentive role of personnel control in China in the twenty-first century. Employing the city-level turnover data of political leaders in China between 2000 and 2018 and utilizing the fixed effects ordered logit model, we find that the likelihood of promotion of local leaders rises with their economic performance. This relationship holds more firmly in the municipal party secretary. The probability is also found to decrease with the economic performance of their immediate predecessors and neighboring cities. This finding is robust to various robustness tests. We interpret the finding as evidence that the relative economic performance (peer effects) also contributes to the local political turnover, in particular within a province. Moreover, after the Third Plenary Session of the 18^th CPC Central Committee, a material change in the personnel arrangement within the party arises and this promotion mechanism shows a dynamic change. Our study sheds some light on the growing literature emphasizing the relationship between political turnover and economic performance.

     

Political Parties and Minority Governance in Hybrid Political Orders: Reflections from Lebanon’s Palestinian Settlements and Kosovo’s Serbian Enclaves

This article analyses how minority populations govern and are governed in South Lebanon’s informal Palestinian settlements and the Serbian enclave in North Kosovo. Drawing on literature about hybrid political orders, it is argued that in both settings political parties play a linchpin role in local governance. Based on this finding, three key functions of political parties in the governance of minority populations in hybrid political orders are identified: representation, provision and brokerage. Understanding the interdependencies and trade-offs between these different roles contributes to remedying the analytical blind spot regarding the nature, positions and roles of political parties in hybrid political orders.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

“Performance Legitimacy” and China’s Political Adaptation Strategy

The CCP government has adopted a very pragmatic strategy of “performance legitimacy” since China began its reform. It means that the government relies on accomplishing concrete goals such as economic growth, social stability, strengthening national power, and “good governance” (governing competence and accountability) to retain its legitimacy. While it is able to attain considerable domestic support by implementing this strategy, it has no particular interest in pursuing democratization. This chapter tries to make sense of the main reasons why it has adopted this strategy and to evaluate the political and social outcome of its policies. The chapter intends to discover if China’s adaptation strategy is a “path dependent” decision, and if it will function as a potential catalyst for significant political change in the future. The chapter also explores what the Chinese government has achieved through its adaptation strategy and what and why it has been unwilling or unable to do to obtain an “original justification” of power. Zhu skillfully travels back and forth between the terrains of theory and practice to make better sense of legitimacy and governance in China’s experiences.     

Agonism and Hope in William Apess’s Native American Political Thought

This article examines the Native American thinker, William Apess (Pequot), and especially his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), which argues, ironically, that King Philip—the seventeenth century Wampanoag leader who launched the bloodiest rebellion in New England’s history—ought to be embraced as an American pioneer and canonized as a founding father. Apess satirizes conventional founding narratives, even as he upholds the principles of freedom those narratives support. The effect of this irony is to interrupt and invert discourses of progressive history and American patriotism that underlie Manifest Destiny policies, in ways that open spaces for new historical accounts to surface and compete in a force field of agonistic powers. I argue that Apess’s ironic historical revisionism expresses a political theory of hope, one that I contrast with representations of hope by other nineteenth century Native American political thinkers, such as Plenty Coups (Crow).     

A Political Defence of Kant’s Aufklärung: An Essay

The aim of this essay is to analyse the potential for political emancipation that lies within Kant’s conception of Aufklärung, in critical dialogue with enlightenment critics and specialised Kantian literature. My thesis is that Kant’s concept of enlightenment is intrinsically political and so it must be studied from the point of view of his political philosophy, which was fully developed in the decade of the 1790s. From this standpoint, I propose we study the role and place of Aufklärung within Kant’s central political thesis, to wit: that only the united will of the people can be a legitimate authority.     

Laughing Our Way to a Stronger Democracy: Political Comedy’s Potential to Equalize Political Interest in Community College Students

What effect does political comedy have on political interest? Through an experimental design, changes in political interest are measured through a pre and posttest, comparing groups randomly assigned to watch The Daily Show, NBC Nightly News, Entertainment Tonight and a no-exposure group. Models indicate political comedy significantly affects political interest, measured through a unique 40-point index.     

‘Better in kung fu movies than in political parties’: Labour’s Factionalism and a Reappraisal of Eric Hobsbawm’s Political Thought

Eric Hobsbawm will forever be a giant intellectual figure. Yet, an aspect of his work is underappreciated—the case for a more pluralistic, dynamic and intellectually inquiring Labour Party. As such, his political thought is particularly relevant given the recent election of Keir Starmer, and the avowed quest for ‘unity’ in bringing Labour back to power. Hobsbawm came to believe that political strategies which sought to exploit social and political stratification and conflict—such as vilifying reformist political movements and those of moderate persuasion—doomed Labour to permanent opposition. A broad-based people’s party, uniting objectives of solidarity and aspiration, was the only viable class politics. Although from the Marxist tradition, Hobsbawm believed Labour’s purpose was to make liberal democracy function more effectively, rather than creating an alternative economic and political system. Suggesting conflict was more suited to kung fu movies, Hobsbawm’s predominant theme of ‘anti-factionalism with a purpose’ remains apposite today.     

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.     

The EU’s Emissions Trading System,Part 2: A Political Economy Critique

This is part 2 of a paper that revisits the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) in an attempt to take stock of how the system has worked and evaluate it from the standpoint of radical political economy. In part 1 of the paper the basic design, the workings and the outcomes of the scheme were discussed with critical perceptiveness. In particular, the paper revealed the unsatisfactory results of the scheme (even in its own proclaimed aims), including allowances surplus, allowance trades for pure financial profit, low and volatile prices of allowances, windfall profits, extensive use of Kyoto project-based credits, and several malfunctions and instances of fraud. These findings set the ground for part 2 of the paper, which offers a critical assessment of ETS, proclaimed by mainstream analyses as the major vehicle for the transition to a low-carbon economy. In particular, the complications and instabilities created by the increasing financialization of the carbon market are exposed. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of the ETS as a catalyst for investments in clean energy technologies, especially in times of economic crisis, is substantiated. Since the deep embeddedness of the scheme in capitalism risks climate sustainability, the analysis concludes that a more radical transformation of society with an eco-socialist orientation is needed.     

Who’s the Party of the People? Economic Populism and the U.S. Public’s Beliefs About Political Parties

Some observers of American politics have argued that Republicans have redrawn the social class basis of the parties by displacing the Democrats as the party of the common person. While others have addressed the argument by implication, we address the phenomenon itself. That is, we examine whether the populist rhetoric used by conservatives has reshaped the American public??s perceptions about the social class basis of American political parties. To this end, we used NES data and created novel survey questions for examining the class-based images of the parties. We examine whether the public holds populist images of the Republican Party and whether the working class and evangelical Christians are especially likely to hold this belief. Contrary to this argument, most Americans view the Democrats as the party of the people. Furthermore, working class and evangelical Christians are no less likely to hold this belief.     

The Dilemmas of China’s Political Science in the Context of the Rise of China

The rise of China has changed the global balance of power, which could also have an impact on the international development of political science scholarship. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the impact of China’s rise on the development of political science within China. This article examines how the rise of China has posed serious challenges to political studies in China. It addresses critical issues concerning the contemporary features and strategic direction of the discipline. It first analyzes three different meanings of what constitutes China’s political studies and discusses three different intellectual production models. It then highlights the dilemmas that political science faces in China, and exposes problems of and obstacles to its development, such as an unwarranted sense of pride, the bureaucratization of the scholarly community, and, critically, the absence of democracy and academic freedom. The paper examines and engages several ongoing debates on China’s political studies. In responding to the debate over whether it is desirable for Chinese political studies to move towards scientification, this paper presents four arguments for a balance between science and the humanities and outlines four strategies for achieving this balance. It also examines the debate on the localization of Chinese political studies and the doctrine of China’s uniqueness; and points out that the rise of China requires Chinese political studies to be cosmopolitan, global and universal, but the current regime is interested in reproducing the discourse of China’s uniqueness to maintain its political legitimacy.     

Political cartoons as carnivalesque: a multimodal discourse analysis of Argentina’s Humor Registrado magazine

Political cartoons, although generally neglected by academic criticism, are often one of the only forms of socio-political critique permitted during authoritarian rule (Barajas, Rafael. 2000. “The Transformative Power of art: Mexico’s Combat Cartoonists.” NACLA Report on the Americas, 3: 6–41). This paper explores the reasons behind this, reading the genre as a form of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, a participatory space of oppositional discourse outside the official version with which it has an “ambivalent” relationship (Bakhtin, Mikhael. 1984. Rabelais and His World (Trans Iswolsky H). Bloomington: Indiana University Press) and can be allowed to circulate as a “safety valve” (Holquist, Michael. 1984. “Prologue.” In Rabelais and his World, edited by M. Bakhtin, xiii–xxiii. Bloomington: Indiana University Press) of controlled protest. Drawing on tools of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Social Semiotics (Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge) and Semiology (Barthes, Roland. 1968. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang) for methodological purposes, this study investigates this hypothesis through the political cartoons of the covers of satirical fortnightly publication Humor Registrado during the final year of Argentina’s last dictatorship, 1982–1983. The magazine’s role in challenging the dictatorship is explored through an analysis of its representations of key social actors and events during Argentina’s difficult period of transition from dictatorship to democracy following defeat in the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War.     

Levi’s Auschwitz and Dante’s Hell

On reading Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir If This is a Man, one is immediately struck by its literary quality, and especially its generous use of Dante’s Inferno, both of which point to the more general problem of Holocaust witnessing. This paper focuses on Levi’s reasons for using Dante’s poem in particular to communicate his experience. Levi’s choice of Inferno is pointed, not only because of the obvious trope of existence in Hell, but also because Levi conceived of Auschwitz as an experiment designed to destroy the “human,” created in part, at least in the West, by Dante’s poem. What I will be suggesting is that Levi emphasizes the distinctions between his and Dante’s experiences by including in his conversation with Dante’s Inferno (paradoxically) his rejection of that conversation. There may or may not be something “human” which persists after Auschwitz, and the only way to ask this question, without preconceiving an answer, is to dramatize silence. The resultant ambiguity urges readers to, as Levi puts it, “participate in” the events described and/or dramatized.