Political sophistication affects how citizens’ social policy preferences respond to the economy

Theoretical and empirical accounts of public opinion show that people’s social policy preferences are affected by the state of economy. According to the countercyclical view, economic downturn increases citizens’ demands for social policy whereas the procyclical view states that citizens demand less social policy during economically tough times. This article argues that individuals’ differences in political sophistication and, specifically, the commonly associated social-psychological characteristics are part of the micro-foundations for those different responses. People acquire and process information differently, which influences their political preferences. Public opinion and macroeconomic data from Europe during the economic crisis support the argument. The results show that people with lower levels of political sophistication tend to be procyclical, whereas this relationship weakens and moves towards countercyclical opinion structures with increasing levels of sophistication. These findings help to explain social policy preferences in response to the economy, and they offer insights into the origins of social policy preferences.     

Sheldon Wolin and Democracy: Seeing Through Loss

This article offers an interpretation of Sheldon Wolin’s political thought and assesses its ongoing significance in the context of a Donald Trump presidency. Given the inegalitarian aspects of Trump’s efforts to “Make America Great Again,” there may now be a temptation to spurn any political narrative rooted in a sense of loss for American democracy’s Golden Age. However, while Sheldon Wolin is a thinker of the Left, the “archaic” vision of decentralized democracy that he advances in the 1980s also warns against the loss of local memories, cultures, and practices. This perspective validates conservative concerns regarding rapid economic and social shifts and yields distinctive insights into the failings of liberalism. The article traces how Wolin’s archaic vision of democracy first develops out of his postwar critique of liberalism and his engagement with student activism of the 1960s. It then examines the limitations of Wolin’s focus on loss and traces shifts in his thought over time. Ultimately, his work urges the Left to be attentive to local traditions and narratives of loss but also suggests that democracy should be understood as “polymorphous.”     

Lander Governance in a Global Era: The Case of Hesse

Subnational governments in federal systems are among the institutionsbeing buffeted by economic trends and institutional developmentsassociated with globalization. While the national governments'ability to maintain policy autonomy in a global age is frequentlyexamined, less attention has been devoted to the subnationalleaders' capacity for responding to global circumstances whilestill preserving the traditions and priorities of their jurisdictions.This article explores the responses of a single German Land,Hesse, to international events between 1982 and 1999. The analysisconcentrates first on changes in governmental structure andprocedure that reflect developments in Hesse's global environment,and then on changes in economic and environmental policy, apolicy domain central to Hessian politics throughout the period.Hesse's political leadership has not been able to insulate theLand from global pressures, but by acknowledging their distinctcircumstances, they have shaped institutions and policies inways that have enhanced their ability to derive significantadvantage from trends originating outside their borders.     

Paradigms and Paradox: The Politics of Economic Ideas in Two Moments of Crisis

This article argues that there is a paradox at the heart of Hall's “Policy Paradigms” framework stemming from the desire to see both state and society as generative of social learning while employing two different logics to explain how such learning takes place: what I term the “Bayesian” and “constructivist” versions of the policy paradigms causal story. This creates a paradox as both logics cannot be simultaneously true. However, it is a generative paradox insofar as the power of the policy paradigms framework emerges, in part, from this attempt to straddle these distinct positions, producing an argument that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second part of the article, I discuss the recent global financial crisis, an area where we should see third‐order change, but we do no not. That we do not strengthens the case for the constructivist causal story.     

Dysfunctional Policy Transfer in National Tax Blacklists

Common sense and much of the policy transfer literature suggests that learning from abroad delivers better policy at lower cost. In contrast, this article argues that policy transfer in tax blacklists has been a dysfunctional process tending to replicate errors. Rather than reflecting learning, normative mimicry, or market pressures, over‐committed policymakers have responded to complexity and crisis by unreflectively cutting and pasting from foreign models. Facing a short‐term political imperative to “do something” about tax evasion in an environment of fiscal crisis, many policy makers have compiled blacklists of tax havens by copying lists of “the usual suspects” from abroad. Evidence for both the process of transfer and the dysfunctional nature of resulting policy is provided by tracking recurring errors in these lists that are unlikely to have arisen independently.     

ASEAN and the Asian crisis: theoretical implications and practical consequences for Southeast Asian regionalism

The following article joins the debate about the theoretical and empirical implications of the Asian crisis on Southeast Asian regionalism. It argues that the realist-institutionalist dichotomy does not provide a fruitful framework of analysis. ASEAN policies are characterized by a policy mix, albeit one that is influenced by a strong dose of realism - a tendency that has been exacerbated by the Asian crisis. The crisis has thrown ASEAN's collective identity into deep disarray - and thus also questions constructivist approaches. Departing from these theoretical issues the article traces ASEAN responses to the crisis in three key areas: economic cooperation, enlargement and values. The article concludes with a few lessons for regionalism which may be derived from the Asian crisis.     

Pretexts and US foreign policy: the war on terrorism in historical perspective

This article analyzes the way that US foreign policy élites have used pretexts to manage public opinion. Policymakers, it is argued, often seize upon threatening external events, and use these events to create a favorable political climate in which to “sell” policies of militarization and external expansion to the public. The article argues that the Bush administration has used the threat of terrorism as a pretext to implement a wide range of policies that had been decided upon in advance of the 9/11 attacks. It also argues that the recent uses of pretexts by the Bush administration have strong historical precedents: extended case studies of pretexts are presented for the events surrounding the Korea crisis of 1950 and the Afghanistan crisis of 1979–1980, as well as the more recent War on Terrorism.     

Privatization and the Courts: How Judicial Structures Shaped German Privatization

This article examines how legal institutional structures shaped the process of East German privatization by the Treuhandanstalt. It argues that the courts, as an important venue for oversight and accountability, were central to achieving the rapid and narrowly defined privatization carried out by the agency. Moreover, the experience of privatization after 1989 suggests the courts played a far more important role in shaping economic policy than one would have expected from traditional scholarship on public agencies, the courts, or the German legal system.     

GLOBALIZATION'S IMPACT ON STATE-LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT POLICY

The growing exposure of the U.S. economy to international competition, popularly termed globalization, over the past two decades has brought some momentous changes affecting the American economy, society, and life styles. Not surprisingly, these changes have been reflected in growing political turbulence and shifts in policy paradigms as well. This symposium explores the effects that globalization has had on economic development policy and practice by state and local governments in the United States. Part I charts and seeks to explain“The Expanding Global Linkages” of state and local governments over the last several decades. Part II on the” Potential for Transformation “then argues that the economic transformations set off by globalization are pushing state and local development policy toward strategies that should overcome some of the problems associated with the previous strategy dubbed “smokestack chasing.” Yet, caution is certainly necessary before accepting such optimistic interpretations. Part III, therefore, presents several analyses suggesting that smokestack chasing “struck back” and that blind reliance on free markets and entrepreneurs hip can be dangerous to a community's social and economic health, indicting the existence of “Pitfalls in a Changing Universe.”     

‘Marx’ or the Market? Intra-party Power and Social Democratic Welfare State Retrenchment

Differences in the intra-party balance of power explain variation in social democratic responses to the economic crisis of the late 1970s. This article evidences this claim by analysing the case of welfare state retrenchment by social democratic parties. Welfare state retrenchment is electorally risky for social democrats and often contrary to their principles. Therefore cases of welfare state retrenchment by social democrats provide an excellent case study of the difficult trade-offs parties have to make between office, policy and vote pay-offs. The article claims that leadership-dominated parties advance office-seeking strategies and are therefore responsive to economic conditions and public opinion. Conversely, activist-dominated parties advance policy-seeking strategies and therefore support traditional social democratic policy platforms or seek more radical solutions. By comparing seven social democratic parties (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK) between 1980 and 2005, this article explains variation in when social democrats introduced welfare state retrenchment.     

Austerity or welfare state transformation? Examining the impact of economic crises on social regulation in Europe

This article provides an encompassing analysis of how economic crises affect social regulation. The analysis is based on an innovative dataset that covers policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013) in the areas of pensions, unemployment, and child benefits. By performing a negative binomial regression analysis, we show that economic crises do matter for social policymaking. Our main empirical finding is that crises impinge on social regulation by opening a window of opportunity that facilitates the dismantling of social policy standards. Yet crisis‐induced policy dismantling is restricted to adjustments based on existing policy instruments. We do not find significant variation in policymaking patterns across different macroeconomic conditions for the more structural elements of social policy portfolios, such as the envisaged social policy targets or the policy instruments applied. This suggests that economic crises do not lead to a profound transformation of the welfare state but to austerity.     

Mexico Under Salinas: Towards a New Record for One Party's Domination?

Nowadays, the Mexican political regime is one of the oldest regimes in the world. Established in 1929, in a few years it could break the USSR record for a party in power. After an important crisis in 1988, president Salinas managed to get the ship out of the storm with an effective set of macroeconomic policies. In fact, he has been seen internationally as a very effective leader, who achieved what Gorbachev could not: a deep economic reform without a political crisis. He proposed and succeeded in starting a North American Free Trade Agreement and reformed the state structure along the lines of what he calls "social liberalism." The prospects for the regime and the party in power look good for the presidential elections of 2994. Nothing however assures that the current policies will really help to solve Mexico's unemployment and inequality problems. The vertical political and administrative structures are not well suited for that purpose and are a source of political instability. It may be the case that the social-liberal model brings economic growth but does not help in bringing about a better distribution of income and more democracy. In this case, either in 2994 or later, the regime may face dificulties and it may not allow for a pacific political transition. To avoid this, the country will need active social, small business, regional and educational policies, handled by a professional administrative apparatus. It will also need more democratic electoral and policymaking systems plus a working division of powers and federalism. In a country with long authoritarian traditions these are difficult to attain, yet possible objectives.     

Is the Westminster System Broken Beyond Repair?

Is Westminster dying as a useful conceptual encapsulation of a particular system of public administration? Scholarly critiques over the last decade have suggested Westminster civil services are evolving in ways that erode crucial Westminster “traditions.” Core elements including security of tenure, merit‐based selection, non‐partisanship, anonymity, and ministerial responsibility are all perceived as in decline or under attack. Influential commentators have proposed concepts such as “new political governance,” changing “public sector bargains,” “court government/politics,” and “presidentialization” to document and interpret these allegedly paradigmatic shifts in public administration. This article places these in context by canvasing different accounts of what Westminster is, before assessing the critiques about what it has become. The article argues that Westminster is not broken beyond repair, but rather it has been remolded to suit the needs of contemporary governance.     

Capitalism,nature, socialism a theoretical introduction∗

This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, over‐production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis‐induced restructuring of productive forces and production relations into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure for an “ecological Marxist”; theory of the contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production, under‐production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis‐induced restructuring of production conditions and the social relations thereof also into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in late capitalist society.

While the two processes of capital over‐production and underproduction are by no means mutually exclusive, they may offset or compensate for one another in ways which create the appearance of relatively stable processes of capitalist development. Study of the combination of the two processes in the contemporary world may throw light on the decline of traditional labor and socialist movements and the rise of “new social movements”; as agencies of social transformation. In similar ways that traditional Marxism illuminates the practises of traditional labor movements, it may be that “ecological Marxism”; throws light on the practices of new social movements. Although ecology and nature; the politics of the body, feminism, and the family; and urban movements and related topics are usually discussed in post‐Marxist terms, the rhetoric deployed in this article is self‐consciously Marxist and designed to appeal to Marxist theorists and fellow travelers whose work remains within a “scientific”; discourse hence those who are least likely to be convinced by post‐Marxist discussions of the problem of capital's use and abuse of nature (including human nature) in the modern world. However, the emphasis in this article on a political economic “scientific”; discourse is tactical, not strategic. In reality, more or less autonomous social relationships, often non‐capitalist or anti‐capitalist, constitute “civil society,”; which needs to be addressed on its own practical and theoretical terms. In other words, social and collective action is not meant to be construed merely as derivative of systemic forces, as the last section of the article hopefully will make clear.     

Rejecting “rights-based approaches” to development: Alternative engagements with human rights

Following the growth of “rights-based approaches,” an increasing trend within recent research has been to establish the diverse opportunities, challenges, and potential pitfalls such approaches offer development NGOs. Although these areas remain important to current policy and practice, they equally stifle further research that is required concerning alternative engagements with human rights. This article argues that closer attention must be directed towards understanding how and why numerous development NGOs have rejected such approaches, whilst also embedding a strong and strategic use of “rights talk” within everyday campaign practice. This article draws upon recent qualitative research into practitioner responses to “rights-based” and wider human rights practice and, in so doing, enlists an in-depth analysis of two distinct subcategories of development NGOs — “faith-based” and “political.” The article proposes two current “perspectives” on human rights practice and a new and alternative engagement with a discourse of rights.     

Europeanization and Domestic Employment Policy Change: Conceptual and Methodological Background

The article deals with the differential domestic employment policy adaptation to the European Employment Strategy that occurred over the past years in two European countries—Italy and France. Building on the Europeanization and welfare state change literature, the contribution operationalizes the “goodness of fit” hypothesis and develops a “policy structure” approach for the analysis of domestic employment policy change. The main argument is that domestic adaptation to the European Union depends primarily on the preferences of key institutional and social actors, and not on the specific design of domestic institutions. More in general, the article not only supports the validity of the misfit hypothesis but also shows how the nature and intensity of domestic preferences do explain differential patterns of adaptation to Europe (policy transformation in the Italian case, policy adjustment in the French case) in similar conditions of policy “misfit.”     

The Logic of the “Tutelary-Style” Monitoring System: An Assessment of State Policies on Social Organisations in the Past 30 Years

This article, concerning various state strategies in different periods since 1978, classifies the evolution of the government’s policy on administering social organisation into three phases. In particular, the state’s policy has gone through a series of shifts from laissez-faire to control, from a non-formal style of administration to using legal instruments as the main means, and with administrative focus from the central to the local level. The supervision mechanism thus formulated implies a totalitarian logic of exercising a “tutelary” style of monitoring—a logic that has to a certain extent revealed “opportunism” on the part of the state. Through an analysis of the state’s governance strategies on social organisations, this article argues that this “tutelary-style” monitoring system explains the interaction between the state and civil society in contemporary China.     

Social Democracy or Social Liberalism? Ideological Sources of Liberal Democrat Policy

Liberal Democrat policy has been labelled as social democratic, yet the party has been reluctant to so describe itself. Taking Crosland's The Future of Socialism as a reference point, there appears to be much shared ground between social democracy and Liberal Democrat policy. Meanwhile, the party's tax policy adopted in 2006 takes the Croslandite approach of taxing wealth rather than income. Despite this, the article argues that the party is a social liberal rather than a social democratic one. These two political philosophies have so much in common that it is understandable that some commentators see the influence of social democracy where they might instead perceive social liberalism. Yet the two differ in their attitudes to the state. Both see a positive role for the state in furthering social goods. However, social liberalism shares classical liberal concerns about the dangers of an over-mighty state. This approach underpins Liberal Democrat policy.     

Tactics,traditions and opportunities: British and French crop‐trashing actions in comparative perspective

This article compares the tactic of trashing genetically modified crops in activist campaigns in Britain and France. In Britain, most crop trashing was carried out covertly, while in France most activists undertook open, public actions. In seeking an explanation for this, the article shows that the analysis of political opportunities, dominant in comparative studies of social movements, can only take us so far. While it helps explain the occurrence of direct action, it is much less useful in explaining the tactical differences between each country. It is argued that a fuller explanation requires an understanding of how action was shaped by different activist traditions. In France, action was staged as a demonstration of serious, responsible, collective Republican citizenship; in the United Kingdom, activists combined a sceptical view of legality developing from anarchist individualism with an explicitly non‐threatening, playful, ethos. The article concludes that a focus on activist traditions can provide an effective bridge between structural and cultural approaches to understanding the determinants of social movement action.