Positive versus normative economics: what’s?the?connection? Evidence from the Survey of?Americans and?Economists on the Economy and?the?General?Social?Survey

Previous research suggests that positive and normative beliefs about economics are largely unrelated. Using questions from two national surveys, this study finds that: (a)?the underlying determinants of positive and normative beliefs are strikingly similar; (b)?education is by far the strongest overall determinant of both positive and normative beliefs; and (c) the variables known to push positive beliefs in the same direction as formal economic training—education, male gender, income growth, and job security—also push normative beliefs in the same direction. These results strongly suggest that the positive-normative connection has been underestimated.     

Impacting the Political Landscape: Who Registers and Votes Among Naturalized Americans?

Little is known about the voting behavior of naturalized Americans, primarily due to a lack of good quality data on the national level. Using data from the Voting and Registration Supplement to the November 1996 Current Population Survey (CPS), we examine whether region of origin and length of time spent in the United States affect the likelihood of registering and voting among naturalized citizens, net of other socioeconomic and demographic factors already known to influence electoral behavior. We find that naturalized citizens who have a longer length of time at current residence and in the United States, and those who are older, with more education and higher income are more likely to register and vote. Region of origin is not a major explanatory variable, but there are differences in registering and voting by country of origin among naturalized citizens from Asia and Latin America. Finally, being registered is a necessary but not sufficient condition that predicts voting among naturalized citizens from Asia and from Latin America.     

Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans’ Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties

During the past three decades Americans have come to view the parties increasingly in gendered terms of masculinity and femininity. Utilizing three decades of American National Election Studies data and the results of a cognitive reaction-time experiment, this paper demonstrates empirically that these connections between party images and gender stereotypes have been forged at the explicit level of the traits that Americans associate with each party, and also at the implicit level of unconscious cognitive connections between gender and party stereotypes. These connections between the parties and masculinity and femininity have important implications for citizens’ political cognition and for the study of American political behavior.     

Institutionalising participatory and deliberative procedures: The origins of the first permanent citizens’ assembly

In the context of public disaffection towards representative democracies, political leaders are increasingly establishing citizens’ assemblies to foster participatory governance. These deliberative fora composed of randomly selected citizens have attracted much scholarly attention regarding their theoretical foundations and internal functioning. Nevertheless, we lack research that scrutinizes the reasons why political leaders create such new institutions. This article fills this gap by analysing a specific case: the first permanent randomly selected citizens’ assembly that will work in collaboration with a parliament in the long-term (Ostbelgien, Belgium). This case is analysed through a framework that pays close attention to the context in which it developed, the profiles of political elites that supported its creation, as well as the multiple objectives it was vested with. The findings reveal that initiators of citizens’ assemblies fundamentally conceive them as a way to strengthen a polity's identity, to save the electoral model of democracy, and to restore the legitimacy of traditional political leaders. Our analysis of this particular conception lead us to argue for the need of developing context-sentive approaches to participatory and deliberative procedures, as well as to discuss whether we should consider the latter as mere elites’ legitimation tools.     

‘I,the people’: a deflationary interpretation of populism,Trump and the United States constitution

This paper advances a deflationary interpretation of populism, Donald Trump and the United States Constitution. It accepts that Trump utilizes a populist pose but rejects populism as too reductive for understanding his ascension and constitutional challenge. First, it argues that, although he merits the designation, Trump reveals more about populism than populism does about him. Trump illustrates populism’s conceptual elasticity, but employing it as a frame to understand him imposes coherence upon a figure whose monetized politics are chaotic, shallow and unanchored by principle. Second, populism provides a necessary but insufficient condition for critically explaining Trump’s ascension, either in terms of electoral populism or populism in power. Third, while democratic deconsolidation under Trump’s presidency cannot be discounted, the Constitution remains resilient in most important respects. A dispassionate constitutional sociology counsels a deflationary understanding rather than an uncritical alarmism that too frequently reproduces and reinforces the darker aspects of Trump’s populist political logic.     

The perils of multinational intelligence coalitions: Britain,America and the origins of Pakistan’s ISI

This article examines how Great Britain helped create Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) with two goals: (1) establishing a Pakistani branch of a Commonwealth intelligence network; (2) ensuring information security within that network. Ultimately, this endeavor failed because of perceived deficiencies in Pakistan’s security institutions and Britain’s inability to address Pakistan’s security needs. By the mid-1950s ISI forged close ties with the United States which offered more and with fewer political strings attached. This article offers new insights on intelligence alliance formation during the cold war. It also provides a useful case study in the weaknesses of multilateral intelligence coalitions.     

‘Lending by numbers’: credit scoring and the constitution of risk within American consumer credit

Abstract

This paper examines how statistical credit-scoring technologies, sanctioned by the state in the interests of promoting equality, became applied by lenders to the problem of controlling levels of default within American consumer credit. However, these technologies, constituting consumers as ‘risks’, are themselves seen to be problematic, subject to their own conceived sets of methodological, procedural and temporal risks. Nevertheless, as this article will show, such technologies have increasingly been applied to other areas of consumer lending, thus interpreting a wider array of operational contingencies in terms of risk. Finally, it is argued that, since the 1980s, the constitution of credit consumers as risks has been deployed to new ends through technologies of ‘profit scoring’ and new practices of ‘risk pricing’.     

Mapping the northern frontier: Canada and the origins of the US army's Military Information Division, 1885–1898

In 1885, the United States Army established its first official peacetime intelligence organization, the Military Information Division (MID), at least in part to collect intelligence enabling it to strike Canada in the event of conflict with Great Britain. Examining MID's leadership, information collection methods, intelligence objectives, organizational structure, and officer recruitment criteria during its first dozen years of existence reveals that it devoted significant resources to mapping the Canadian border, restructured its organization in part to increase the efficiency of those scouting expeditions, and selected officers to lead MID and conduct its reconnaissance missions based on their topographical skills, their knowledge of Canada, and their ability to keep their work quiet.     

Keeping the ‘Ism’ in ‘cosmopolitanism’ – Wieland and the origins of cosmopolitan discourse

ABSTRACT

After having been dormant for much of the 20th century, the concept of cosmopolitanism has regained some of its former rhetorical power in current academic and political debates. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert Fine as key interlocutors, the article argues that a historically informed analysis of the linguistic context, in which the language of cosmopolitanism first emerged, can help us understand better the political and ideological underpinnings of the concept. In the first part of the article, I discuss the emergence of cosmopolitanism in the context of what I shall refer to as the ‘ismatization’ of political language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the second part, I turn to what I consider to be a key text for understanding the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism: the essay Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (‘The Secret of the Order of the Cosmopolitans’), published by the German novelist, poet and publicist Christoph Martin Wieland in the journal Teutscher Merkur in 1788. At the end of the 18th century, I argue, Wieland makes a similar observation to Fine, namely that the ‘ism’ connotes something doctrinal, even sectarian, and steeped in secrecy and conspiracy.     

The proximity paradox: the legislative agenda and?the?electoral success of ideological extremists

This paper presents a new approach to spatial models of legislative elections in which voters have preferences over the bundles of roll call votes implied by candidate locations rather than over the locations themselves. With such preferences, voters with single-peaked, symmetric preferences and perfect information can sincerely prefer a distant candidate to a more proximate candidate. Moreover, negative agenda control in Congress makes such preference orderings inevitable, so party agenda control can allow majority party extremists to defeat more centrist minority party candidates. The model has implications for theories of parties in Congress, and spatial modeling more broadly.     

United against a common foe? The nature and origins of Euroscepticism among left-wing and right-wing citizens

In Western European democracies opposition to the European Union is commonly found at the ideological extremes. Yet, the Euroscepticism of radical left-wing and radical right-wing parties has been shown to have distinct roots and manifestations. The article investigates whether these differences are mirrored at the citizen level. Using data from the European Election Study (2009/2014) and the European Social Survey (2008/2012) in 15 West European countries, it is found that left-wing and right-wing citizens not only differ in the object of their Euroscepticism, but also in their motivations for being sceptical of the EU. Left-wing Eurosceptics are dissatisfied with the current functioning of the EU, but do not oppose further European integration per se, while right-wing Eurosceptics categorically reject European integration. Euroscepticism among left-wing citizens is motivated by economic and cultural concerns, whereas for right-wing citizens Euroscepticism is solely anchored in cultural attitudes. These results refine the common ‘horseshoe’ understanding of ideology and Euroscepticism.     

Silent citizenship among Asian Americans and Latinos: opting out or left out?

In his classic study, Who Governs?, Robert Dahl interpreted the patterns of political assimilation of ‘white ethnic’ immigrants and their children during the mid-twentieth century as a hopeful sign of the potential of democratic pluralism in the USA. While acknowledging that immigrant groups faced discrimination and structural barriers that might lead them to be silent, Dahl predicted that social mobility and assimilation would eventually erase these deficits in political participation among immigrants. Building from Dahl's analysis, we investigate the extent to which pluralism in the USA can and does work the same way for immigrants who are also racial minorities. We highlight factors that can lead these groups to become silent citizens, including lack of legal status, lower levels of political mobilization by institutions, and discrimination as structural impediments to minority participation. Our findings suggest that both resources as well as structural impediments structure the political behavior of Asian Americans and Latinos, determining whether they are vocal citizens or silent citizens.     

Class Isolation and Affluent Americans’ Perception of Social Conditions

Rising inequality and pro-affluent housing policy have led affluent Americans to become increasingly isolated into neighborhoods that only they are able to afford. I use an under-utilized and unusually large dataset to measure the effects of this isolation on affluent Americans’ perception of social conditions, including crime, healthcare accessibility, joblessness, and public school quality. I find that the affluent form perceptions of such social conditions by extrapolating from the conditions that exist in their own neighborhoods. When these neighborhoods are predominately affluent, offering little hint of the problems faced by the lower classes, the affluent take on perceptions of social conditions that are significantly more positive than the perceptions of everyone else in society. By leading politically and economically powerful affluent Americans to develop the false sense that others’ lives are as problem-free as their own, class isolation may imperil the prospects for improving social conditions in the United States.     

The governance of the European patent system: effective and legitimate?

Abstract

This article argues that effectiveness and legitimacy are two inseparable issues for the success of economic governance systems. Moving beyond the conventional market failure and state failure approaches, the article develops the notion of network governance success, a notion that looks at the formal and informal dimensions of interactions in economic systems. This is further developed into an analytical framework which is then used in the assessment of the structural features of the current European patent system, one of the most advanced, complex, and contested economic systems in Europe. The conclusions elaborate on the normative implications regarding the current weaknesses of the European patent system, and examine the general theoretical implications of the findings, particularly looking at the effectiveness and legitimacy of technically complex governance systems.     

The Dole “Godless Americans” advert: representations of the unfaithful,disloyal villains

Using a rhetorical analytic methodology, this study examines the representations constructed in the “Godless Americans” advert from the North Carolina 2008 US Senate race between incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole and Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. Bringing to consciousness ideologies that influence messages is important because they are often taken at face value without understanding of their underlying meaning. Religious faith, morality and trustworthiness are values conveyed in this advert through the devices of framing, coded language and propaganda techniques. Non-linguistic elements are effectively coordinated to perpetuate the code of disloyal villains, activating cognitive networks of fear and anger toward atheists. By marginalizing atheists, an ideology that runs counter to the US Constitution is exposed coming from a lawmaker entrusted to uphold it.