集体行动困境的应对之道--以广州市老旧小区加装电梯工作为例

老旧小区加装电梯是一项面向特定空间、特定人群的准公共产品,居民协商是实现这一公共产品供给的集体行动,但居民的个体理性会导致实施时出现集体行动困境。广州是国内较早开展这项工作的城市,通过访谈和政策内容分析梳理广州市老旧小区加装电梯的工作历程,结合集体行动理论分析老旧小区加装电梯面临的协商规模和价值偏好的困境,并在此基础上进一步探讨居民协商集体行动困境的破解之策。广州市的经验不仅为其他城市老旧小区加装电梯提供了借鉴,也为今后通过制度设计促成居民集体行动、推进城镇老旧小区改造工作,形成社区治理的长效机制提供了有益的启示。     

‘The dead are coming’: acts of citizenship at Europe’s borders

This article combines the research agenda of the acts of citizenship literature with reflections on emancipatory theatre. I examine the Centre for Political Beauty’s activity-based artwork ‘The dead are coming’ which problematizes the cruelties of the European border regime in symbolically charged spaces in the German public. Focusing particularly on the roles available to ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’, and the directionality of the message conveyed through the artwork, I examine how the performance subverts the ‘sites’ and ‘scales’ of citizenship. My analysis indicates that the artwork’s subversive potential emerges not only from the political vision conveyed by the artist collective, but also from the way in which others become involved in the performance. Acts of political beauty thus most extensively challenge instituted citizenship’s orientalist anchoring, reverse status-based role allocations and subvert the structural violence of borders when the performance enables the enactment of novel forms of political agency and solidarity.     

ANALYZING SELF‐ORGANIZED LOCAL GOVERNANCE INITIATIVES: ARE THERE INSIGHTS FOR DECENTRALIZATION REFORMS?

In spite of the great enthusiasm and arguments supporting decentralization in Africa, its performance has frequently fallen well below expectations. However, a number of self‐initiated, local governance efforts have been quite successful. The article finds that all governance initiatives face a number of collective action problems that they must overcome to succeed. These include issues of collective choice, free riding, principal–agency, and constitutional design. The article explores two cases of locally initiated self‐governance initiatives where smaller population size, the ability to focus on only a few services, and the ability flexibly to redesign their institutions were important in their success in overcoming these governance challenges. In one case, challenge by and negotiation with formal governance institutions furthered their success. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Swedish dystopia: violent imaginaries of the radical right

ABSTRACT

Thorleifsson examines the ways in which violent imaginaries of Sweden have been discursively constructed and used by populist radical-right (PRR) parties and actors in contemporary Europe. Based on multisited fieldwork among politicians and supporters of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Hungarian Jobbik party, this article demonstrates how individual acts of violence are ‘transvaluated’ into violent imaginaries of migrants from Muslim-majority lands. What Thorleifsson terms ‘the Swedish dystopia’ not only entails a message of alarm and warning. PRR actors also use the trope of the Swedish dystopia in their call for action against Muslim migrants and minorities who, they claim, pose an ethnoreligious threat to national identity, security and even (Judaeo)-Christian civilization as a whole.     

Attitude Responsiveness and Partisan Bias: Direct Experience with the Affordable Care Act

This study evaluates the competing influences of motivated reasoning and personal experience on policy preferences toward the Affordable Care Act. Using cross-sectional and panel survey data, the findings reveal that healthcare attitudes are responsive to information that individuals receive through personal experience. Individuals who experienced a positive change in their insurance situation are found to express more positive views toward the health reform law, while individuals who lost their insurance or experienced an otherwise negative personal impact on their insurance situations express more negative views. The results point to personal experience as a source of information that can influence individuals’ preferences. However, although attitudes are responsive to the quality of one’s personal interactions with the healthcare system, the results also suggest that partisan bias is still at work. Republicans are more likely to blame the health reform law for negative changes in their health insurance situations, while Democrats are more likely to credit the law for positive changes in their situations. These motivated attributions for their personal situations temper how responsive partisans’ attitudes are to information acquired through personal experience.     

Online versus offline: Exploring the link between how candidates campaign and how voters cast their ballot

The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in shaping citizens’ political experience. We turn to it to consume political news and, in some countries, to even cast our ballots at parliamentary elections. Leading the way in embracing Internet voting (i-voting) is Estonia where nearly half of the ballots cast during the 2019 parliamentary election were submitted online. Using original data from the 2019 Estonian Candidate Study, this paper explores the relationship between how candidates campaign and their electoral performance. It finds greater use of both offline and online campaign tools to contribute to higher vote shares as candidates win more traditional and i-votes. These positive effects are similar in size, in terms of candidates’ overall electoral performance as well as their ability to attract different types of votes. The results show not only that individual-level campaigns continue to matter, but that online campaigns have become as important as offline campaigns for candidates, and voters’ political activity often transcends the medium through which they receive political communication.     

The private stake in public goods: overcoming the illogic of collective action

Conclusion According to the Logic of Collective Action, most actions in the service of common interests are either not logical or not collective. In a large group, the argument goes, individual action counts for so little in the realization of common interests that it makes no sense for a person to consider group interests when choosing a course of personal conduct. Only private interests are decisive. Their fulfillment, at least, depends in a substantial way on one's own behavior. Individual actions designed to achieve private advantage are therefore rational. Actions aimed at collective goods are a waste of time and effort. Occasionally, of course, a person acting on the basis of private interests may inadvertently provide some collective good from which many other people derive benefit. This is what happens in the case of the Greek shipping tycoon. But it occurs only because one person's private good fortuitously coincides with the collective good of a larger group. From the tycoon's perspective, there are no collective interests at stake in the sponsorship of an opera broadcast, only his own private interests. Nor does his decision to underwrite a broadcast take account of the other people who will listen to it. His action is a solitary one designed to serve a private interest, and it is perfectly consistent with Olson's argument concerning the illogic of collective action, because it is not grounded in collective interest and is not a case of collective behavior. Olson's theory permits people to share collective interests but not to act upon them voluntarily. The only acknowledged exception occurs in the case of very small groups, where each member's contribution to the common good represents such a large share of the total that any person's default becomes noticeable to others and may lead them to reduce or cancel their own contributions. In this instance, at least, one person's actions can make a perceptible difference for the chance of realizing collective interests, and it is therefore sensible for each person to consider these collective interests (and one another's conduct) when deciding whether or not to support group efforts. Outside of small groups, however, Olson finds no circumstances in which voluntary collective action is rational. But in fact the conditions that make collective action rational are broader than this and perhaps more fundamental to Olson's theory. They are inherent in the very ‘collectiveness’ of collective goods - their status as social or group artifacts. In the absence of a group, there can be no such thing as a collective good. But in the absence of mutual awareness and interdependence, it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of a social group. The assumption that group members are uninfluenced by one another's contributions to a collective good is no mere theoretical simplification. It may be a logical impossibility. Being a member of a group, even a very large one, implies at the very least that one's own conduct takes place against a background of group behavior. Olson's assumptions do not acknowledge this minimal connection between individual and group behavior, and they inhibit recognition of the elementary social processes that explain why slovenly conduct attracts special attention on clean streets, or why the initial violations of group norms are more momentous than later violations. It may be argued, of course, that the groups of Olson's theory are not functioning social groups with a collective existence, but only categories or classes of people who happen to share a collective interest. The logic of collective action is intended precisely to show why these ‘potential’ groups are prevented from converting themselves into organized social groups whose members act in a coordinated way. In such latent groups, perhaps, members are unaware of one another, and Olson's assumption that they are uninfluenced by one another's conduct becomes a reasonable one. Another implication, however, is that Olson's theory is subject to unacknowledged restrictions. The logic of the free ride is for potential groups. It may not hold for actual ones. The distinction is exemplified, in the case of public sanitation, by the difference between what is rational on a clean street and what is rational on a dirty one. The logic of the free ride does not make sense for the members of an ongoing group that is already operating to produce collective goods such as public order or public sanitation. While this represents a notable limitation upon the scope of Olson's theory, it apparently leaves the logic of collective action undisturbed where potential or latent groups are concerned. But suppose that a member of an unmobilized group wants her colleagues to contribute to the support of a collective good that she particularly values. Her problem is to create a situation in which such contributions make sense to her fellow members. As we have already seen in the case of the neighborhood street-sweeper, one possible solution is to provide the collective good herself. If it has the appropriate characteristics, its very existence may induce other members of the latent group to contribute to its maintenance. This is not one of those cases in which one person's private interest fortuitously coincides with the collective interest of a larger group. The neighborhood street-sweeper is acting on behalf of an interest that she is conscious of sharing with her neighbors. Her aim is to arouse collective action in support of that interest. She does not expect to pay for public cleanliness all by herself, or to enjoy its benefits all by herself. Her role bears a general resemblance to the one that some analysts have defined for the political entrepreneur who seeks to profit personally by supplying a collective good to the members of a large group (Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Young 1971). Like the neighborhood street-sweeper, the entrepreneur finds it advantageous to confer a collective benefit on others. But the similarity does not extend to the nature of the advantage or the manner in which it is secured. The entrepreneur induces people to contribute toward the cost of a collective good by creating an organizational apparatus through which group members can pool their resources. The existence of this collection mechanism can also strengthen individual members' confidence that their colleagues' contributions are forthcoming. What the entrepreneur gains is private profit - the difference between the actual cost of a collective good and the total amount that group members are prepared to pay for it. By contrast, the neighborhood street-sweeper induces support for a collective good, not by facilitating contributions, but by increasing the costs that come from the failure to contribute. As a result of her efforts, she gains a clean street whose benefits (and costs) she shares with her fellow residents. She takes her profit in the form of collective betterment rather than private gain, and her conduct, along with the behavior of her neighbors, demonstrates that effective selfinterest can extend beyond private interest. Self-interest can also give rise to continuing cooperative relationships. The street-sweeper, acting in her own interest, brings into being a cooperative enterprise in which she and her fellow residents jointly contribute to the production of a collective good. Cooperation in this case does not come about through negotiation or exchange among equal parties. It can be the work of a single actor who contributes the lion's share of the resources needed to establish a collective good, in the expectation that its existence will induce others to join in maintaining it. The tactic is commonplace as a means of eliciting voluntary collective action, and it operates on a scale far larger than the street or the neighborhood. Government, paradoxically, probably relies on it more than most institutions With its superior power and resources, it may be society's most frequent originator of voluntary collective action. Its policies, imposed through coercion and financed by compulsory taxation, generate a penumbra of cooperation without which coercion might become ineffectual. By providing certain collective goods, government authorities can move citizens to make voluntary contributions to the maintenance of these goods. The stark dichotomy between private voluntary action and public coercion - one of the mainstays of American political rhetoric - may be as misleading as the identification of self-interest with selfishness. There is more at stake here than the voluntary production of collective goods. Continuing cooperative behavior can have other results as well. Once group members begin to expect cooperation from one another, norms of cooperation and fairness are likely to develop. Axelrod (1986) has suggested that modes of conduct which have favorable outcomes for the people who pursue them tend to evolve into group norms. Public-spirited action that serves self-interest could therefore engender a principled attachment to the common good, undermining the assumption of self-interestedness that gives the logic of collective action its bite. Laboratory studies of cooperative behavior have already demonstrated that experimental subjects have far less regard for narrow self-interest than rational choice theory requires (Dawes 1980). In one extended series of collective action experiments, however, Marwell and Ames (1981) found a single group of subjects who approximated the self-interested free-riders of Olson's theory. They were graduate students in economics.     

Journeys to the limits of first-hand knowledge: politicians’ on-site visits in zones of conflict and intervention

ABSTRACT

This article explores the practice and political significance of politicians’ journeys to conflict zones. It focuses on the German example, looking at field trips to theatres of international intervention as a way of first-hand knowledge in policymaking. Paying tribute to Lisa Smirl and her work on humanitarian spaces, objects and imaginaries and on liminality in aid worker biographies, two connected arguments are developed. First, through the exploration of the routinized practices of politicians’ field trips the article shows how these journeys not only remain confined to the ‘auxiliary space’ of aid/intervention, but that it is furthermore a staged reality of this auxiliary space that most politicians experience on their journeys. The question is then asked, second, what politicians actually experience on their journeys and how their experiences relate to their policy knowledge about conflict and intervention. It is shown that political field trips enable sensory/affectual, liminoid and liminal experiences, which have functions such as authority accumulation, agenda setting, community building, and civilizing domestic politics, while at the same time reinforcing, in most cases, pre-existing conflict and intervention imaginaries.     

The European refugee crisis,party competition,and voters’ responses in Germany

Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages.     

Service Club Membership and Forms of Social Capital among Swedish Community Elites

Looking at the formation of transnational advocacy networks, this article argues that central aspects evade attention unless approached from a discursive orientation. Utilizing interviews and first-person observation from a particular example of transnational mobilization—critical of negotiations to expand the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade-in-Services—the article demonstrates how an expanded focus on discourse can help research better understand: (1) the self-driving momentum within networks through which those actors involved experience a reconstituted identity and affinity to one another; (2) the role played by earlier moments of collective action in providing both an infrastructure of pre-existing relations and politicization from which the network may draw upon; (3) the often porous character of campaign activity where there is rarely one but, in fact, many overlapping networks at play as part of a much wider discursive process; and (4) the role abstract signifiers such as ‘global’—as in ‘Global Campaign for?…’—play in framing the network despite an often uneven geographic distribution to campaign activity and power within the network.     

Note on Teaching Intelligence

Over the last decade, intelligence has become one of the most widely taught subjects in higher education. In response to this, a sub-discipline has emerged within Intelligence Studies devoted to thinking about how the subject is actually taught. One of the most common arguments to come out of this literature is that there should be more practitioner involvement in the university teaching of intelligence. However, it is rarely specified what exactly intelligence professionals bring to the classroom, save the largely self-evident point that because they have ‘walked the walk’, they are uniquely qualified to teach the subject. Drawing on student questionnaires, as well as interviews with serving and retired intelligence officers, this article attempts to probe a little deeper and identify the specific benefits of incorporating practitioners into the university teaching of intelligence. It is argued that practitioners ‘put a face on the profession’ and help to remove some of the mystique and misperceptions that surround intelligence work. It is claimed that practitioners, especially with their ‘inside stories’, give added meaning to academic theories and make the subject more exciting. Finally, it is argued that practitioners enrich the broader ‘student experience’. In UK higher education, now under a new fees regime, students are looking for departments to go the extra mile not only in terms of their teaching, but also in areas like careers advice and support. In this context, intelligence professionals are enormously valuable.     

Counterterrorism strategies in the lab

We conduct experiments to test the collective action dilemmas associated with defensive and proactive counterterror strategies. Defensive policies are associated with creating public ??bads' (e.g., a commons) whereas proactive policies are akin to the voluntary provision of public goods. When combined, the inefficiency of collective action is exacerbated, resulting in a situation known as a Prisoner??s Dilemma squared (PD²). Deterministic versus probabilistic equivalent versions of the associated externalities are compared within a laboratory setting. Experimental results reveal that the collective action problem associated with counterterror strategies is deepened in uncertain environments, and is indeed a robust regularity that is not easily overcome; as individuals gain more experience, they become even more self-interested.     

Networks and campaigns but not movements: collective action in the disciplining Chinese State

Popular protest, civil society organizing, and non-governmental organizations have become notable features in China’s socio-political development. A mounting body of research has documented both opening opportunity structures and remaining restrictions when it comes to collective action within the authoritarian state. However, given the wide range of definitions and interpretations that are at play in the literature, it can be difficult to distinguish between different forms of collective action and determine which actions represent actual movements. This article argues that a refocus towards the basic components that constitute movement action can provide more clarity and help explain the limitations, as well as the opportunities, that surround collective action within authoritarian states. To illustrate, the article studies the organizational growth, networking, and collective action that have occurred in connection with AIDS in China. It finds that political restrictions and other coordination challenges prevent the mobilization of actual social movements.     

Historical apologies as acts of symbolic inclusion – and exclusion? Reflections on institutional apologies as politics of cultural citizenship

Institutional apologies for historical injustices can be conceived as acts of symbolic inclusion directed to people whose collective experiences and memories of the past have not been recognized in the hegemonic narratives of the past. However, in this article it is argued that such apologies also have exclusionary potential as vehicles of symbolic politics of citizenship in that they may designate the apologizing community, so that it effectively excludes cultural ‘aliens’, like migrants, from the community of ‘remedial’ citizens. The article suggests a crucial point is the rhetoric shifts when one is appealing to both cultural and political solidarity, as when apologizing in the name of the state but simultaneously invoking ‘our’ nation and ‘our’ history. Thus, the increasing number of institutional historical apologies is not necessarily incompatible with the trend of reinforcing the symbolic boundaries around ‘our’ historical–cultural communities that has been visible recently, e.g. in the demands for cultural canons and citizenship tests in many Western societies.     

Enacting multi-layered citizenship: Turkey’s Armenians’ struggle for justice and equality

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s Armenians have been subjected to a trade-off between the limited minority rights granted by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and equal national citizenship. Traditionally a closed, depoliticized community, the citizenship practices of the Armenian minority have become increasingly differentiated in recent years. Building on a notion of citizenship as multi-layered and constituted through collective practice, this article investigates the implications of the political acts of Turkey’s Armenian minority on sub-national and national citizenship in Turkey. We show that Turkey’s Armenians are coupling rights demands, identification, normative references, and mobilization at the sub-national, national, and transnational levels in innovative ways, and are thereby negotiating different layers of citizenship in Turkey in a way that strengthens equal national citizenship.     

Social inequalities and collective action in times of crisis: The case of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area

During the international financial crisis, Portugal found itself in a very difficult and vulnerable socioeconomic situation that has led to an increase in social inequalities. This article seeks to understand two things: firstly, how much the impacts of the crisis contributed to a general perception that people's social position has gone backwards, compared to their pre-crisis situations; secondly, whether it is possible to link this generalized perception that living conditions have gone downhill to an increase in and diversification of collective action practices. The authors analyse data from a 2014 survey of 1,500 residents of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, which they use to measure how far the level of collective action practices has increased and varied in accordance with a set of social inequality indicators, such as resource and educational inequalities.     

The conscience of a fugitive: sheldon wolin and the prospects for radical democracy

Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter-power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has significant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices.     

Issue ownership and salience shocks: The electoral impact of Australian bushfires

As climate change increases the frequency of natural disasters, understanding how such disasters affect voting behavior has become crucial. While the literature has demonstrated that voters punish the party of the incumbent when they experience severe destruction, it remains unclear how other political parties are affected. In particular, we argue that voters shift their support to Green parties following natural disasters, given that these parties have ownership of environmental issues. We further argue that disasters decrease mainstream leftist parties’ vote share because liberal-minded voters are more likely to be the ones switching to Green parties. Empirical tests on bushfires and voting in Australia provide some support for our predictions, as all the expected effects of fires on voting manifest in state-level tests but not constituency-level tests. This suggests that our theory may operate only at certain levels of governance, paving the way for future research into why this might be.     

Exclusivity of citizens’ initiatives: Fuel for collective action?

ABSTRACT

Self-organized citizens’ initiatives are a form of collective action and contribute to society through the production of public goods and services. Traditional collective action theory predicts that such initiatives are near impossible because of the persistent problems of free-riding. Citizens’ initiatives however do exist and function properly, and their numbers seem to be increasing in countries such as the Netherlands. This article argues that free-riding problems can be overcome when some form of exclusivity is arranged in citizens’ initiatives. We assume that citizens’ initiatives use active and/or passive strategies to limit free-riding behaviour. Using three illustrative cases, our research shows that position rules, boundary rules, and authority rules are used in a subtle and often implicit way to differentiate the level of influence and authority between the more and the less committed members, enabling collective action. Such rules, though advantageous, may be paradoxical to the goals of the citizens’ initiatives and can undermine the virtues associated with them.     

Reforming the public sector for leaner government and improved performance: The New Zealand experience

Over the 10 year period from 1984 to 1994 New Zealand has gone through an intense period of restructuring, both of the public sector and of the wider economy. In the process New Zealand has been transformed from a highly protected and regulated economy with a range of intrusive and expensive interventions, to an open and deregulated economy with an efficient and leaned down public sector. The article presents the “New Zealand experience” in restructuring, not necessarily as an example to be copied but as a benchmark to be used in examining the most appropriate restructuring to apply in other circumstances. The stages in the reform are described and the three key success factors set out. One of the key factors is the establishment of a set of clear principles which are then applied with determination. The principles developed in the New Zealand context are set out. The article examines the restructuring of the science sector in New Zealand as one case study; in part because of the author's personal involvement but also because it is a particularly complete example. Areas where work remains to be done are identified including the reforms in education and health and the need for collective action across government. Finally lessons to emerge from the New Zealand experience are discussed. These include especially putting time into fully understanding market characteristics before a market oriented reform is started, carrying reforms through to their conclusion rather than stopping partway, and establishing clear principles to guide the reform process.