Buddhism,Mindfulness, and Transformative Politics

This article examines whether the American cultural phenomena of the practice of Buddhism or the Buddhism-derived technique of mindfulness are likely to be helpful to the political left. It summarizes the central teachings of the ancient Buddhist texts, with particular focus on the issues of mindfulness and politics. It also reviews the political history of Buddhist countries. The author argues that although modern Buddhism has shed its historical embrace of absolutist monarchy in favor of republicanism, and although there is some ideological overlap between Buddhism and the American Left, Buddhism in America is too small a movement for it to be of much significance for progressive politics. Mindfulness appears to be capable of becoming a much larger phenomenon, but its separation from its Buddhist origins makes it also unlikely to be strategically important for the Left.     

Borders of emptiness: gender,migration and belonging

This article argues that we need to consider the question of ‘who belongs’ in terms of individuals' construction as market actors, workers and migrants as well as citizens. Using Hegel's theory of civil society, and Charles Mills' critique of the social contract, it argues for the significance of the process of self-government and the construction of a ‘hard inside’ for understanding migration and its relationship to embodiment, labour and belonging. This approach can take us beyond the distributional framework of the territorial state, and the assumption of stable membership, to interrogate the boundary-setting aspects of the political and the meanings of interdependence and vulnerability.     

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.     

Why the democratic nation-state is still legitimate: A study of media discourses

Focusing on media discourses, this article maps the communicative reproduction of legitimacy in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Switzerland. It argues that political communication constitutes a distinctive dimension of legitimation that should be studied alongside public opinion and political behaviour. Research on legitimation discourses can help us understand why the legitimacy of established democracies remains stable in spite of the challenges of globalisation: Delegitimating communication tends to focus on relatively marginal political institutions, while the core regime principles of the democratic nation-state, which are deeply entrenched in the political cultures of Western countries, serve as anchors of legitimacy. These democratic principles also shape the normative benchmarks used to evaluate legitimacy, thus preventing a 'de-democratisation' of legitimation discourses. Finally, the short-lived nature of media interest as well as ritualistic legitimation practices shield the democratic nation-state from many potentially serious threats to its legitimacy.     

Civil society: Bringing the family back in

This article explores the complex and contradictory positioning of the family within civil society literature. In some accounts, the family is seen as the cornerstone of civil society. In others, the family is positioned firmly outside – even antithetical to – civil society. This paradox arises from the ways in which civil society is variously defined through a series of binary oppositions – in relation to each of which the family sits uneasily. And while feminist critiques have tried to bring women back into view, they too tend to marginalize the family. In addition, the normative nature of these oppositions has meant that while civil society tends to be seen as the property of the political ‘left’, the family is often associated with the political ‘right’. The article argues that we need to move beyond oppositional definitions of civil society and assumptions about the family if we are to understand the multiple ways in which the family is implicated as not only the ‘reproducer’ of particular resources and dispositions but as a principal source and focus of civil society engagement and activism.     

The Politics of Space and the Spatialisation of Politics: New Directions for Examining the Connections between Immigration and Contagion

Politics is thoroughly spatialised and space is thoroughly politicised. Whilst there has been a renewed interest in this contention, marked by the so-called “spatial turn” in political science and related sub-disciplinary fields, much of the literature continues to treat “space” as a mere empirical referent, rather than a product of prior political conflict(s) and competing political discourse(s). This article draws upon an emerging body of literature in political science that treats borders as sites where the inextricable links between space and politics crystallise most clearly, bringing their imbrications sharply into focus. It argues that this body of work underscores the constitutive role of the political in the construction of space and consequential notions of who is “inside” and “outside,” and suggests this is codified in the enactment and administration of immigration law(s). Drawing on examples from migration politics in the Australian context, pertaining to the ways in which HIV and tuberculosis are figured, it illustrates how the proximity of the supposedly “infectious” outsider, their perceived literal and moral “contagiousness” and the supposed “threat” they pose to the “wider community,” is constructed. This always involves the invocation of notions of space through the construction of frontiers delineating who is “inside” and “outside.” The article argues that this approach opens up promising avenues of inquiry that seek to explore the connections between immigration and contagion; two enduring tropes in the public and political imagination.     

Politics and Image: The Conceptual Value of Branding

This article argues that the brand concept is a powerful tool for understanding political images. It challenges typical economic versions of political marketing that tend to deemphasize the significance of communication, popular culture, and personality in politics and argues that the brand as a concept can bring together the economic and the aesthetic, rational choice and cultural resonance. It proposes a model of brand distinctiveness and argues that this may be useful both in the analysis of party communication and in the normative evaluation of that communication.     

Providing information and building capacity: interest group involvement in the application of EU law

Practical implementation has attracted significant scholarly attention in the European Union in the last decade, and the EU compliance literature started to focus more on the players in the domestic arena to help understand the application of EU law. However, a systematic analysis on interest group activities at the application stage is yet to be conducted. Relying on enforcement and management approaches, this article argues that interest groups act as providers of legal and technical information that are needed for correct application of EU law. Also, interest groups actively demand information from political actors to build internal capacity during this period. The results show that interest groups act as providers of information, but only in the national political arena. Moreover, motivation to learn is another factor that explains the level of access seeking during application, and this type of interaction takes place in both European and national venues.     

Territory and Power Revisited: Theorising Territorial Politics in the United Kingdom after Devolution

The article seeks to contribute to theoretical analysis of political decentralisation in the UK occasioned by devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1998–9. It examines the contribution that can be made by Jim Bulpitt's 1983 book, Territory and Power in the United Kingdom . First, it argues that Bulpitt's critique of conventional wisdoms in the early 1980s remains highly relevant to reflecting on shortcomings in the literature today. Key among these is the lack of a common conceptual language for analysis, and Bulpitt's overarching re-conceptualisation of the field as the study of 'territorial politics' would repay renewed reflection. Secondly, the article clarifies Bulpitt's own centre perspective and argues that its application is best understood today as a realist historical institutionalist account of UK territorial politics. In so doing Bulpitt also provides an enduring methodological and interpretative challenge to assumptions of state centralism. Thirdly, the article argues that key methodological/interpretative insights can be adapted from Territory and Power in analysis of UK territorial politics and the advent of devolution. This reinforces the utility of Bulpitt's historical institutionalism to contemporary analysis. Finally, it argues that Territory and Power 's concepts and methods, understood in these ways, would bear application in comparative studies of political decentralisation.     

The Role of Marketing in Politics

ABSTRACT

Political marketing is an exciting new area. Research produced over the last decade has been pioneering in showing the applicability of marketing to politics. However, this article argues that the field now needs to move in a different direction if we are to reach political marketing's full potential. Political marketing needs a comprehensive approach: it can be applied not just to party-electoral behaviour but also legislatures, local government, the media, and public services, with both concepts and techniques from marketing, and an understanding from political science literature as well as management studies. The article, therefore, maps out the route to be taken to reach the end of the rainbow and the pot of gold that the political marketing field potentially offers.     

Democratic Dilemmas of Multilevel Governance: Legitimacy,Representation and Accountability in the European Union

How is sovereignty managed in the EU? This article investigates the relationship between sovereignty and European integration through the prism of national opt-outs from EU treaties, addressing an apparent contradiction in contemporary European governance: the contrasting processes of integration and differentiation. On the one hand, European integration is increasing as states transfer sovereign competencies to the EU. On the other hand, we see a multitude of differentiation processes through which member states choose to disengage from the EU polity by negotiating exemptions or derogations. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's political sociology, the article argues that to understand how sovereignty is interpreted and exercised in the EU, it is necessary to focus not only on the constitutive and regulative dimensions of sovereignty, but equally on the practice dimension. This entails an exploration of how sovereignty claims are managed in a particular social setting. Rather than seeing opt-outs as classic instruments of international law, accentuating the member states' unchanged sovereignty, the article argues that the management of the British and Danish opt-outs quite paradoxically expresses the strength of the doxa of European integration, i.e. the notion of ‘an ever closer union’.     

Contentious Politics and Democratization: Comparing the Impact of Social Movements on the Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe

In this paper, I identify and analyze the interaction between two processes - mobilization and bargaining - by which democratic challengers can transform political institutions, bringing together insights from the literatures on social movements, which tends to analyze movement emergence, and democratization, which tends to analyze the design of democratic institutions. I compare the impact of social movements in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, cases that offer a valuable opportunity to extend the literature on contentious politics beyond its origins in the study of Western parliamentary democracies. The analysis directs attention to an under examined arena of political contestation, agenda setting, or the process by which the demands of social movements are translated into issues for governments. The paper argues that the traditional dichotomy between institutional and non-institutionalized contention has obscured the ways that democratic challengers not only pressure states from the outside but transform them through new forms of political participation. Finally, it considers alternative explanations and suggests new directions for comparative research across different settings and times.     

Official apologies,reconciliation, and settler colonialism: Australian indigenous alterity and political agency

The burgeoning literature on transitional justice, truth commissions, reconciliation and official apologies tends to ignore the conditions of settler states in which ‘reconciliation’ needs to take account of indigenous minorities. The settler colonialism literature is worth including in the general discussion because it is exceptionally reflective about political theory (the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights) and ethnogenesis (the origin and viability of both settler and indigenous identities), challenging mainstream liberalism, in particular, to account for difference beyond platitudes about multiculturalism. This article highlights the postcolonial critiques of the Australian governments' apology to the indigenous peoples of the country. The authors of these critiques seek to protect indigenous alterity from the Australian state, which they regard as irredeemably colonialist, especially in its liberal and progressive mode. The article suggests that Indigenous political agency transcends the resistance/co-option dichotomy presented in much of the apology's commentary.     

Setting the Post War Australian Policy Agenda – Causes and Content

What are the origins of policy agendas and what determines agenda setting? The one robust theory in the literature associates different agendas with different moments in the evolution of the broader party system namely mass, catch‐all and most recently cartel patterns. This article explores Australian evidence for this thesis. It also argues the cartel moment has recently mutated. Agenda setting is now circumscribed by a mismatch between the needs of policy making and the political incentive structure. The media have become primary tissue connecting political elites to their publics. But this traps the system in short term, primarily populist stances. Systemic capacities to mediate agenda setting have thus been corrupted.     

Moving beyond input legitimacy: When do democratic innovations affect policy making?

This article makes three key contributions to debates surrounding the effectiveness of democratic innovation, deliberation and participation in representative political systems. In the first instance, it argues that more attention should be paid to the role that participation actually plays in governance. The literature on democratic institutional design often neglects concern about the effects of innovative institutional designs on more traditional representative fora, at the expense of concerns about their internal procedures. Second, the article argues that despite limitations, replicable systematic comparison of the effects of institutional design is both necessary and possible even at the level of national governance. A comparative analysis of 31 cases of National Public Policy Conferences (NPPCs) in Brazil is presented. Finally, the article shows that popular deliberative assemblies that vary in their familiarity and their policy area of interest, and that organise their structure and sequence deliberation in different ways can be associated with differential effects on both option analysis and option selection stages of the policy process, respectively.     

State‐Building and the European Union's Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus: Why Legitimacy Matters

This article asks under which conditions the state‐building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites “from below.”     

G.W.F. Hegel on Self‐Determination and Democratic Theory

This article claims that the major alternative models of contemporary democratic theory—the aggregative, deliberative, and agonistic models—are grounded on a norm of self‐determination, but each conceptualizes this self‐determination in a different, and one‐sidedly narrow, way. G.W.F. Hegel provides a conceptual scheme in which to understand the development and synthesize the insights of these three articulations of self‐determination. He also argues that the political embodiment of a complete self‐determination must be founded on economic self‐interest, though a self‐interest expanded to a concern for the common good through the experience of self‐government in one's economic and political associations. Thus, rather than separating economic and political spheres, as contemporary democratic theorists do, Hegel makes a case that modern self‐determination requires a structural harmony between these spheres.     

Individual value priorities,education, and political tolerance

Extensive research on political tolerance identifies numerous social, psychological, and political sources of attitudes toward political dissenters. Much of this research underscores the salutary influence of education on greater acceptance of diversity, although some sophisticated work questions the strength of the linkage between education and tolerance. This study has two principal goals. First, it attempts to point to an alternative source of tolerance that has been given very little attention in the extant literature. Specifically, it argues that increases in political tolerance may be tied to the broad-based value shift allegedly sweeping through advanced industrial society. Second, research reported in this paper provides more evidence for the robustness of the education-tolerance relationship and offers one possible explanation for why this relationship exists. It suggests that one of the reasons higher education tends to be linked with greater tolerance is because it leads to individual value priorities that are conducive to greater openness to political diversity. A multivariate model of political tolerance is estimated that demonstrates modern versus traditional values contribute most to variation in tolerant attitudes, followed by education. The explanation of indirect effects of education on tolerance through its direct impact onvalues receives empirical support as well. The endeavor concludes by outlining some tentative predictions concerning the attainment of a more tolerant polity that would fare well when evaluated by the liberal democratic theory yardstick.     

Black Disembodiment in the Age of Ferguson

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on “black bodies.” On one hand, the language of “black bodies,” as opposed to simply “black people” or “black personhood,” makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both of these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of “black disembodiment.” This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates’s book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.