Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout

A number of scholars have demonstrated that voter turnout is influenced by the costs of processing information and going to the polls, and the policy benefits associated with the outcome of the election. However, no one has yet noted that the costs of voting are paid on or before Election Day, while policy benefits may not materialize until several days, months, or even years later. Since the costs of voting must be borne before the benefits are realized, people who are more patient should be more willing to vote. We use a “choice game” from experimental economics to estimate individual discount factors which are used to measure patience. We then show that patience significantly increases voter turnout.

作为一种政治哲学的生态马克思主义

作为一种政治哲学,生态马克思主义不仅构成了对当代资本主义社会条件下生态环境困境或危机的系统性批判,而且指向一种特定而明确的绿色政治变革目标、议程和战略或"替代性愿景",即生态的社会主义政治及其未来.就其发展阶段而言,它至少已经历了经典马克思主义、欧美生态马克思主义、当代中国的生态马克思主义等理论形态.相应地,生态马克思主义已不再简单是一个普通的国外马克思主义理论流派,而是一种普遍性的绿色或批判性政治哲学.它所关涉的是包括我们自己在内的人类社会究竟如何构建并争取一个值得生活其中的生态化社会或未来.     

Environmental Policy as a Political Problem

The politics of the environment may not be unique, but they present some distinctive characteristics. In undertaking policy analyses and administrative strategies an appreciation of concepts, assumptions and circumstances, and underlying environmental policy issues is needed. To ignore these fundamentals is to risk superficiality in analysis, and error in findings and conclusions. Yet getting down to basics is often rejected as diversion from the goal of analysis. It deviates from a "straight to the point" approach, adds cost and time to investigation, and seldom interests practical-minded analysts. Even so, this paper will be prefaced by a concise reminder of some basic factors that make environmental policy problematic. Among these are: (1) incompatible concepts of man-nature relationships—notably conflict between perceived facts and values, (2) inadequate comprehension of the complexities of nature, (3) sectoral subdivisions of knowledge, (4) assumptions, situations and motivations in environmental politics, (5) fractionated structure of laws and administration, and (6) short-range perception of time. In addition to these conceptual factors the widely varied subject-matter of environmental politics narrows the scope of generalization for policy purposes.     

Moral Virtue and the Limits of the Political Community in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

The recovery of Aristotle's view of the political community as guardian of the common good and moral educator has fueled a continuing debate about civic education and virtue. In focusing on the relation of virtue to the common good and that of the individual, however, this debate has obscured Aristotle's insight into virtue's status as an independent end. I argue that by taking account of this dimension of virtue, Aristotle's discussion of the particular moral virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics clarifies the nature and limits of civic education and shows that the full question of the human good emerges only with an investigation of the political community's highest and noblest pedagogic aims.     

The Emergence of Science as a Political Brand

This article seeks to explain how science has emerged as political brand. While science and politics have intersected for centuries, more recent social, cultural, and political events led to increased attention to the role of science in everyday life and how science is used in policy decision-making. This led to a tipping point in 2017 when the March for Science was formed, following what many in the U.S. and countries around the world viewed as anti-science stances by political leaders. The political spectacle of the March for Science not only brought increased attention to the scientific community, but also emerged to define the brand of science in society. Drawing on research from the role of brands in consumer culture – including political marketing, brand resonance, and brand community – I describe the implications of the science brand for the scientific enterprise, and the ways in which the scientific community consider the strategic communication of their brand within the political marketplace.     

SoTL as a Subfield for Political Science Graduate Programs

This article offers a theoretical proposal of how political science graduate programs can emphasize teaching in the discipline by creating the subfield of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Currently, these programs neither prepare their students for academic positions where teaching is valued nor participate in a disciplinary trend that emphasize SoTL. Furthermore, the recent political pressure for political science programs to demonstrate their public worth might be alleviated by the scholarship in teaching and learning, which is more understandable to the public than traditional non-SoTL work. The article concludes with some of the challenges political science programs may confront in institutionalizing a subfield of SoTL and how they can overcome them.     

Privatization as a Political Priority: The British Experience

This article challenges conventional approaches to Thatcher's privatization campaign in which privatization has been judged on the basis of its economic or public policy merits. The privatization programme of the Thatcher Government was driven by political objectives and thus it was more coherent than has been usually asserted. Politicians are motivated by maximizing their political benefits (power) rather than by the pursuit of the common good, that is optimal economic and public policies. Unlike some other papers who have considered the political aspects of the Conservative privatization programme, this paper introduces a distinction between what were the Conservatives' perceptions of the political consequences of privatization and the actual effect of this programme.     

Coordination as a Political Problem in Coordinated Market Economies

The purpose of this article is to explore the political dynamics of employer coordination in three well‐known “coordinated market economies.” We examine differences in how employer coordination has been organized in Sweden, Germany, and Japan in the area of industrial relations, and we examine the extent to which such coordination represents a self‐sustaining equilibrium, as some of the most influential treatments suggest. To preview the findings, we argue that precisely the intensification of cooperation between labor and management in some firms and industries (that the “varieties of capitalism” literature correctly emphasizes) has paradoxically had deeply destabilizing collateral effects that have undermined or are undermining these systems as they were traditionally constituted. All three cases are characterized not so much by a full‐blown breakdown of coordination so much as a very significant reconfiguration of the terms and scope of such coordination. Specifically, all three countries feature the emergence of new or intensified forms of dualism—different in each case based on different starting points—in which continued coordination within a smaller core has in some ways been underwritten through the breaking off of other, more peripheral, firms and workers.     

Patriotic Virtue

Some philosophers argue that the state and its citizens stand in a morally privileged position vis-à-vis one another, but not towards other states or citizens. However, many of those people, particularly philosophical liberals, also hold that morally insignificant differences, such as place of birth, sex or ethnicity, should not affect rights, liberties and life prospects. On the face of it, these two sets of ideas appear incompatible and point to a conflict in some liberal thought. Liberal philosophers, like John Rawls, have attempted to reconcile these conflicting ideas. His attempt has attracted a great deal of criticism, especially from those liberals attracted to a more cosmopolitan point of view. In this article, we use Aristotelian virtue ethics as the basis upon which to reconcile liberalism and patriotism. We argue that the state should be understood as an agent that stands in a special relationship to its citizens (of philia ). The state's virtue depends, in part, on it giving those citizens preferential treatment with regard to justice compared to citizens of other countries. Similarly, if citizens are to be just in their relations with their own state, they must behave in special ways towards that state as compared to other states. Certain forms of justice only arise in relationships of particular kinds.     

Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology

Originally developed to explain cultural variation in moral judgments, moral foundations theory (MFT) has become widely adopted as a theory of political ideology. MFT posits that political attitudes are rooted in instinctual evaluations generated by innate psychological modules evolved to solve social dilemmas. If this is correct, moral foundations must be relatively stable dispositional traits, changes in moral foundations should systematically predict consequent changes in political orientations, and, at least in part, moral foundations must be heritable. We test these hypotheses and find substantial variability in individual‐level moral foundations across time, and little evidence that these changes account for changes in political attitudes. We also find little evidence that moral foundations are heritable. These findings raise questions about the future of MFT as a theory of ideology.