Political Support: Social Capital, Civil Society and Political and Economic Performance

This article assesses two main theories of the decline of political support that is found in many western democracies. The first is society centred and built on the concepts of social capital, trust and civil society. The second is politics centred and focuses on the performance of government and the economy. The two theories are not necessarily incompatible, but they are usually treated in a mutually exclusive way. In this article they are tested against a combination of aggregate cross-national comparative data and detailed case studies of four countries that have suffered exceptional decline of political support for politicians, political institutions and the systems of government. The puzzle is that cross-national comparative evidence about a large and diverse number of nations supports social capital theory, whereas in-depth study of four countries that have experienced substantial decline of political support does not. The erosion of support coincides in all four with poor economic and/or political performance. A way of reconciling the two theories and their supporting evidence is suggested, arguing that while social capital is a necessary foundation for democratic support, it is not a sufficient cause.     

Peter Berger and His Critics: The Significance of Emergence

Peter Berger has attempted to develop an account of the relationship between social structure and human agency that navigates a middle way between voluntarism and determinism. Berger’s approach has been criticised by social theorists for reproducing, rather than transcending, the very errors of voluntarism and determinism that he strives to avoid. However, the critics have focused on Berger’s explicit, meta-theoretical pronouncements about the nature or ontology of the social world, whilst ignoring the more sophisticated account of the structure agency relationship that is implicit in, and presupposed by, his substantive sociological research. The notions of ‘emergence’ and ‘emergent properties’ are used to develop an account of the structure-agency relationship that is consistent with Berger’s concrete sociological work, whilst avoiding the shortcomings of his explicit reflections about the nature of the social world.     

Welfare Reform: Assessing its Political, Economic, and Social Effects

Books reviewed: Rebecca M. Blank, It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty Anne Marie Cammisa, From Rhetoric to Reform?: Welfare Policy in AmericanPolitics Martha Shirk, Neil G. Bennett, and J. Lawrence Aber, Lives on the Line: American Families and the Struggle to Make Ends Meet Robert M. Solow, Work and Welfare     

Partisanship, Political Control, and Economic Assessments

Previous research shows that partisans rate the economy more favorably when their party holds power. There are several explanations for this association, including use of different evaluative criteria, selective perception, selective exposure to information, correlations between economic experiences and partisanship, and partisan bias in survey responses. We use a panel survey around the November 2006 election to measure changes in economic expectations and behavioral intentions after an unanticipated shift in political power. Using this design, we can observe whether the association between partisanship and economic assessments holds when some leading mechanisms thought to bring it about are excluded. We find that there are large and statistically significant partisan differences in how economic assessments and behavioral intentions are revised immediately following the Democratic takeover of Congress. We conclude that this pattern of partisan response suggests partisan differences in perceptions of the economic competence of the parties, rather than alternative mechanisms.     

Size,Democracy, and the Economic Costs of Running the Political System

The search for the optimal size of political systems is one of the most enduring in political thought. Given the validity of arguments for and against small units, one might expect variation in rearrangements of unit sizes. However, the reform trend is uniform: units, often at the local level, are amalgamated to harvest scale effects. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the argument on economies of scale in the economic costs of running political systems. Our testing ground is a recent Danish reform. It allows us to avoid endogeneity problems often facing researchers of size reforms. The reform was directed by the central government and constitutes an exogenous shock to 239 municipalities, whereas 32 municipalities were left untouched. We thus have a quasi‐experiment with pre‐ and posttreatment observations for both an experiment and a control group. Our findings show that scale effects, measured as administrative costs per inhabitant, are considerable.     

Political Institutions, Public Policy and Economic Growth

The argument of the Rise and Decline of Nulions (RADON) opens up a new area of important social science research: to understand the social and political setting of economic growth. The paper tests the argument that institutionalization leads fo the decline of nafions slowing down the rate of economic growth. Employing several indicators on economic growth and controlling for a number of factors the finding with regard to the OECD-nations is that the Olson emphasis on institutionalization is confirmed.     

经济行动、行动主体与社会环境

经济行动是一个对有多种用途的稀缺资源加以选择的行动,行动主体所尝试做出的有目的的经济行动是嵌入在具体的当下的社会环境中的。无论是行动主体个人的偏好、行动的动机,还是行动的决策模式抑或是行动的具体实施过程,都要受到社会环境的影响。行动主体对环境的理解与解释,实际上是一个交互作用为主体性过程,同时是一个客观环境主观化的过程。在主体的诠释中,客观的社会环境就成为行动主体所处的主观环境,它有效地制约着行动主体采取的经济行动。     

Economic Globalization and Political Atrophy

Economic globalization is the systematic expansion of corporate capital across national boundaries in search of markets, raw materials, low-cost labor, and technological advantage, which is made possible by growing capital mobility and facilitated by increasingly open conditions of trade, communications and information-sharing. The process has extended its speed and scope over the past few decades, further solidifying the world capitalist system and with it the leading national and international centers of power. Yet economic trends associated with corporate expansion into every region of the globe have no parallel in the realm of politics, where we see diminution of national and local governing structures, erosion of established ideologies, depoliticization of social movements and NGOs, and the failure of any international system of governance to take hold. We are presently witnessing a profound depoliticizing dynamic in which the global triumphs over the local, the commodity over culture, homogenization over diversity, and economics over politics. This political impasse reflects not only a certain Hobbesian character of global civil society but also the crisis of the left and the limits of Seattle-style protests. More basically, it points toward tremendous material and ideological obstacles facing popular struggles against corporatedriven globalization under any circumstances.