Opening up to OERs: Electronic Original Sourcebook Versus Traditional Textbook in the Introduction to American Government Course

Traditional American Government textbooks are expensive and often unpopular with students. New technologies and Open Educational Resources (OERs) open up the potential for change, but questions of quality are ever present: can OERs really help students learn better, or are they just cheaper? I developed an OER based on original sources and compared student learning outcomes with the OER section to those in a free digital textbook section. While the OER I created did not work as well as I had hoped, I nonetheless developed a redesign of my course and my approach to teaching, which is the true benefit of adopting OERs.     

江泽民“七.一”讲话对我党人文价值观的继承和发展

世界正以“多元”的姿态昂首迈向 2 1世纪的“地球村” ,面对形势与过去迥异的时代 ,中国共产党第三代领导集体的事业心、成熟度以及领导能力是否经得起考验 ,能否紧跟时代步伐 ?这是倍受世人关注的话题。     

The Political Quarterly, 2009 Lecture: Doing Politics Differently

A discussion of how politics is done in Britain, and how it could be done differently. It explores the relationship between culture and structure in politics, and between strong government and effective accountability. The argument is that the concentration on structures can lead to a neglect of the importance of political culture. It suggests that there are three democratic levels, and that Britain does better on one than on the others; and identifies a range of democratic issues to be tackled. It concludes by suggesting that even without major instrumental changes there are cultural changes that would make a difference to how politics is done in Britain.     

Public affairs and political strategy: theoretical foundations

During the past two decades there have been hundreds of articles published within the broad topic of business political strategy, many of them rigorous and innovative. This paper presents a review and assessment of the theoretical bases of extant research, focusing on three broad research questions: Why do firms participate in the political process? What strategies and tactics do firms employ? What are the limitations on firms' capacity for rational action in the political arena? Research in political strategy has been informed by interest group theory, collective action theory, public choice theory, transaction costs theory, game theory, resource dependence theory, institutional theory, agency theory, the behavioural theory of the firm, business strategy, and population ecology. The paper concludes with a plea to scholars to conduct research in this area which is explicitly and consistently grounded in broad theories of social science. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Policing: Continuity,Consensus and Controversy The Political Quarterly Lecture 2010

While British policing has an unparalleled worldwide reputation for excellence, its system of governance has not been formally examined for almost fifty years. Known as the tripartite system, giving overlapping but compatible powers and duties to the Home Secretary, to local Police Authorities and to Chief Officers of Police, it is now long overdue for reconsideration and adjustment. More than one political party is suggesting significant reform but only of individual parts of the system. Given other issues concerning the police, particularly the number of United Kingdom forces and the fixation with the number of police officers as an indication of political success, there is now an urgent need for agreement that policing in Britain should have a holistic and cross‐party re‐examination, possibly but not necessarily in the form of a Royal Commission.     

The Making of Empirical Political Science in the UK: Jean Blondel,David Butler and Peter Pulzer

During the winter of 2022–3, three of the most influential individuals in the development of empirical political science in Europe, died. All had been active in research between at least the early 1960s and the present century. David Butler had pioneered, especially, the study of electoral behaviour and particularly in the UK. Jean Blondel had founded the outstanding Department of Government at Essex University and he was one of the principal academics responsible for the creation and subsequent flourishing of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Peter Pulzer not only published important comparative work on European politics, but he also supervised doctoral theses on topics beyond Europe's own borders. This essay discusses their respective roles and contributions in the founding of a discipline that was only newly forming when they started their own research during the 1950s.     

Political research and practitioner approaches: a review of the research methods used in voting behaviour research

Quantitative research has been the dominant methodological approach used to study voting behaviour. There is an emerging recognition, however, that there are alternative ways of attempting to understand how voters decide. The academic preoccupation with measurement, reliability, validity and generalisability may obscure some of the findings that are uncovered by practitioners using qualitative research. Practitioners of politics, both in the USA and the UK, tend to utilise both methods when formulating policy and exploring voter attitudes towards these policies. This paper will review the arguments for each tradition and examine the apparent divergence of practitioner and academic political research. Finally, it will look at how both positivist and interpretivist methods can be utilised to complement each other when attempting to build a picture of voting behaviour. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Political Decentralization and Technological Innovation: Testing the Innovative Advantages of Decentralized States

Are politically decentralized states better at fostering long‐run technological innovation than centralized states? Societies with decentralized governments are widely seen as agile, competitive, and well structured to adapt to innovation's gale of creative destruction. Meanwhile, centralized states, even when democratic, have come to be viewed as rigid and thus hostile to the risks, costs, and change associated with new technology, or prone to cling too long to foolhardy or outdated technological projects. Therefore government decentralization is often perceived as a necessary institutional foundation for encouraging long‐run technological innovation. However, in this article, I analyze data on international patent activity, scientific publications, and high‐technology exports, and show that there exists little evidence for an aggregate relationship between government structure and technological innovation.     

公共政策仿真方法:原理、应用与前景

从方法论的视角讨论了公共政策仿真的ABM方法原理、应用和前景。学界就社会科学研究应该遵循的方法论问题一直存在着不同取向的争论,在就此形成的认识论连续统的框架下,社会仿真的诸多概念模型也都有各自在"通则论-个体论"的连续统中的位置,而目前公共政策仿真的ABM方法无疑在这样的连续统中占据着重要地位。公共政策过程的复杂性制约了传统研究方法的效果,而基于场景分析的公共政策系统分析和基于机制的政策主体行为分析使公共政策仿真的ABM方法突破了传统研究方法的窠臼,通过科学的建模技术以及严谨的检验环节,结合政策结果的3D场景呈现和群决策平台,为公共政策领域开创了独具科学性和人本性的激动人心的应用前景。     

Introduction: The Future of British Political History

Politics and history are closely intertwined and historians play a vital role in British public life. Yet, British political history, which has a critical contribution to make for understanding British politics today, faces two urgent challenges. First, academic history has retreated from subjects that remain hugely popular in media and trade publishing and of interest to social scientists, such as the histories of political institutions and formal power structures. Second, political history is disconnected from innovative trends in the wider historiography of modern Britain. Combined, these issues leave political historians in an ambiguous position in relation to the wider field, to other academic disciplines and to contemporary political debates. After discussing these challenges, this introduction surveys this special issue, which reflects on what (if anything) is distinctive about political history as practised today, and what its contribution to historiography, social science and public life should be. It ends by posing key questions for historians of all methodological stripes who investigate Britain's political past.     

The importance of personal vote intentions for the responsiveness of legislators: A field experiment

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally-elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.     

Testing the Reciprocal Effects of Campaign Participation

Questions persist regarding the robustness of cross-sectional estimates of effects of variables that are themselves endogenous to the participation process. On one hand, the consequences of working on a campaign have interesting implications for democratic society. Less benign, however, is the possibility that failure to control for reciprocal processes leads to biased estimates of the causes of campaign participation. I use a panel of Democratic and Republican contributors interviewed following each of the past three presidential elections (1996, 2000, and 2004) to explore the relationships between campaign participation and three variables typically parameterized as predictors of participation: receiving a contact, ideological extremism, and strength of party identification. The effect of strength of party identification on campaign participation proves robust; however, I find that nearly all of the associations between contacts and participation and ideological extremism and participation appear to extend from, not into, participation and past participation.

Wire-Walking: Risk Management and Policy Experiments in China from a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Policy scientists have long examined how policy innovation has emerged and diffused by focusing on the interaction between agents and policy programs. In contrast, this article focuses on how uncertainty in policy environments has affected the fate of policy innovation in an authoritarian state. Using original data from China’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily,it is found that the central government’s decision to promote sensitive policy experiments is a function of the perceived risks in the policy environment. The U-shaped relationship between the promotion of sensitive policy innovation and inflation reflects the wire-walking behavior of China’s central government. The central authority in China tends to promote fewer sensitive political experiments when inflation increases and resumes promoting experiments when the inflation rate passes a certain tipping point. It is also found that the central authority intentionally regulates the promotion of political experiments during important political events.     

历史政治学的功能分析

历史政治学的提出引发了中国政治学界的广泛关注。作为一种新型研究路径的历史政治学不但具有客观的分析主义特征,而且和其它政治理论的研究路径一样,还具有鲜明的功能主义特征。历史政治学首先回答了政治理论的知识来源问题,从而为建构中国自主性政治学知识体系提供了可能。基于政治学取向的政治史研究有助于避免因“文化转向”而导致的历史研究的碎片化问题,这意味着历史政治学研究既追求“真相”也关怀“真理”。历史政治学的知识功能自然有其政治实践价值,那就是为治国理政提供历史解释与现实论述,并为认识合法性政治提供一套不同于理性人假设的历时性方案。     

The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in-group is portrayed as being threatened by various out-groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti-elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right-wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in-group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti-elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.     

Mapping the production of political communications: a model to assist in understanding the relationships between the production and consumption of political messages

High public interest today in political communications such as ‘spin’ and in political participation such as electoral turnout suggests that there may be value in exploring the processes by which political messages are produced and consumed, and their inter‐relationship with participation. It may be that what citizen‐voters think of message production influences how they consume political news and publicity (through observing and evaluating), and that the propensity to political participation is subsequently affected. This paper offers a model which traces the production of political communications, starting at their origins in the political class, and flowing via traditional political journalism or controlled media and new media to citizen‐voters who both observe and evaluate them (ie consume them) before, during and after making any political choices. It is hypothesised that the observation and evaluation of message production and content by political consumers influences both their types and levels of participation. Research of this nature into political organisations is relatively rare. Similarly, there is little evidence of investigations into other aspects highlighted in the model: attitudes of the political class towards political communications, the production of political communications before they reach the media and how they are received by the media, and their consumption by citizen‐voters in relation to the propensity to participate in politics. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Measuring Political Brands: An Art and a Science of Mapping the Mind

The field of political brands has developed a host of approaches and explored a variety of cases over the last years. However, less attention has been devoted to brand measurement—specifically efforts to construct a measure that attempts to explain the relationship between voters and parties. Against this backdrop, this article discusses how to measure a political brand by first selecting one part of the diverse brand concept for further investigation. Next, the two existing brand measures in the literature are evaluated, and the article proposes an alternative measure that underlines a stronger connection to the immense political science literature on voters and parties. Then, the three measures are compared by empirically investigating which measure is best at explaining voters' party sympathy. Here, it is demonstrated that the alternative measure seems to be the most valid and reliable construct when it comes to explaining voters' sympathy for a particular party. Finally, the proposed alternative measure is further validated in a representative sample (N = 2251), establishing a preliminary correlation between party brand and voter sympathy.     

Gendered discipline,gendered space: an ethnographic approach to gendered violence in India

ABSTRACT

Why are Indian women’s lives at fatal risk in the public sphere, when Indian democracy is inclusive in terms of gender? Addressing this question reveals a methodological and theoretical blind spot in political science scholarship – a blind spot which results in the reproduction and legitimization of gender-blindness. To understand how and why political science reproduces and legitimizes gender-blindness I reflect on a particularly horrific case of sexual and gender-based violence, the 2012 Delhi gang rape. This analysis is significant because it provides insight into the difficulty of understanding gendered violence in political science and achieving gender equality within democratic societies.