Direct Democracy and its Critics: Support for Direct Democracy and ‘Stealth’ Democracy in Finland

In this article support for direct democracy and for stealth democracy in Finland is analysed. Stealth democracy represents a step towards a democracy in which there would be even less citizen involvement than in the representative form of today's democracy. The authors found that both options gained significant support among the Finnish electorate. Additionally, they found that it is mostly the same variables that contribute to the probability of citizens being supporters of either direct democracy or stealth democracy. It is the people with less education, who do not know much about politics and who feel that the current system does not respond to citizens' needs, that want change. The direction of change appears to be a matter of secondary interest. Political ideology affects which of the two options respondents favour. Right-wing citizens are more likely to favour stealth democracy. Citizens leaning to the left are more interested in direct democracy.     

The ‘I’ and the ‘we’ of citizenship in the age of waning democracy: Wolin and Balibar on citizenship,the political and dedemocratization

Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However, the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We of citizenship.     

The rise of the ‘new agenda’ and the decline of partisanship

Has the rise of so‐called new social movements contributed to an undermining of parties in Western nations? This study reviews the arguments alleging this to be the case, and then summarises the results of 229 public opinion surveys from 17 nations. The surveys indicate that those who hold ‘post‐materialist’ values are stronger partisans than those with ‘materialist’ values. The analysis concludes that much of the literature has overstated the contrasts between movements and parties, that the mass public does not differentiate itself into ‘party’ and ‘movement’ categories, and that parties have been resourceful in protecting themselves against the depradations that movements might cause.     

‘Illiberal Democracy’ after Post-Democracy: Revisiting the Case of Hungary

In taking stock of the ruling Fidesz party's project of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Hungary, this article first develops considerations based on Claude Lefort's democratic theory for critiquing ‘illiberal democracy’ and post-democracy alike, situating the former in an early 2010s post-democratic moment characterised by the emergence of a neoliberal crisis management regime in the Eurozone. ‘Illiberal democracy’ and ‘market-conforming democracy’ are both problematic from this standpoint insofar as they subordinate the key Lefortian dimension of democratic contestation to either the primacy of the markets or a reified conception of the ‘national interest’ as represented by a single party. The analysis then traces the development of ‘illiberal democracy’ and its construction of key signifiers such as the ‘national interest’ in programmatic speeches made by Viktor Orbán, from its beginnings in the post-democratic moment to subsequent crisis conjunctures in which it has redefined itself against ever newer threats.     

Interest groups, public choice and the economics of religion

This article reviews Bob Tollison’s conjoint contributions to the burgeoning area of the economics of religion, underscoring his integration of public choice and interest-group themes into the microeconomic analysis of faith-based organizational architecture, institutional decision making and doctrinal innovation. Beginning with study of the medieval Catholic Church, moving forward to the Protestant Reformation and beyond, it supplies a timeline of developments and the major findings of each phase of his research program.     

Interpersonal incomparability in citizens’ views of democracy: survey evidence from Ukraine

ABSTRACT

Do regional differences within a single country influence how survey respondents use response scales when evaluating concepts like democracy? Further, what determines how respondents will assess the level of democracy at home or abroad? We test three hypotheses to answer these questions. First, we hypothesize that differential item function (DIF) exists between regions that are most different along political, cultural, and historical dimensions. Second, we hypothesize that political attitudes will predict views about evaluations of the level of democracy domestically. Third, we hypothesize that regions with stronger ties to and greater affinity for a foreign state will rate that state as more democratic than other regions. We find support for all three hypotheses using a nationally representative survey of Ukraine, but correcting for DIF generates substantively important changes in our interpretations of the results. Specifically, it increases support for hypothesis two but leads to a more measured conclusion about hypothesis three. An analysis of the responses to anchoring vignettes to control for DIF provides some initial suggestive evidence that Ukrainians outside Kyiv may view democracy as more binary in nature than on a nuanced sliding scale. We conclude with recommendations for researchers on deploying anchoring vignettes in sub-national survey research.     

‘Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems’ the independence echo: the rise of the constitutional question in Scottish election manifestos and voter behaviour

ABSTRACT

Since the formation of the Scottish Parliament, the idea of Scottish independence increased in salience and popularity among Scottish voters to such an extent that it now constitutes the country’s defining political cleavage. Given that Scottish politics is increasingly organized around this constitutional question, support for either side of the debate among voters and elites drives political engagement, election turnout and public attitudes to other major issues. Although much popular and academic work has sought to explain the rise of support for independence, few scholars have explored changes in elite behaviour or its consequences for public opinion. From an elite-driven perspective, the increased salience of independence may be but an echo of elite and partisan attention. Developing hypotheses from this approach, we predict that voters identifying with parties developed stronger views on independence following increased attention in parties’ campaigns. We examine these hypotheses by performing computer assisted, unsupervised content analysis of Scottish Parties’ election manifestos. We then use estimates from a structural topic model to predict change in voter support for independence from the British Election Study. The theory and results suggest that increasing salience on alternative dimensions of politics likely closely relates to elite-driven choices in their election campaigns.     

The rise of the Chinese ‘Other’ in Japan's construction of identity: Is China a focal point of Japanese nationalism?

Abstract

Since 1945, the United States (US) has served as a focal point of both Left-wing and Right-wing Japanese nationalism. Both sides argued that the US was an arrogant hegemon that unjustly robbed Japan of its autonomy, and prevented Japan from achieving its own ideal national identity. Both sides frequently demanded that Japan should be more ‘resolute’ and resist unfair demands emanating from the US. In recent years, however, both camps are increasingly using the same rhetoric to criticise the Japanese government's China policy. China is also being depicted as an overbearing state that unfairly browbeats Japan into making diplomatic concessions. Given the similarities between the portrayal of China and the US, has China now become a nationalist focal point for both the Japanese Left and Right? Utilising constructivist insights, this article seeks to shed light on this question, by examining how the Japanese Right and Left portray China, and explores the implications for Japan's China policy.     

‘No Interest in Land': Legal and Spatial Enclosure of Gypsy-Travellers in Britain

This paper examines the place of Gypsy-Travellers within the British legal system. It considers the function of the law in establishing moral and social norms and pathologising aspects of Traveller life. It examines how a variety of legal principles, discourses and bureaucratic agencies combine to construct travellers as deviant with regard to the moral and social order. It considers the attempts in British law to control Travellers' spatial practices and nomadic lifestyle, and the ambivalent nature of legislation in this area. The Caravan Sites Act 1968 is examined in terms of its formation and implementation. The origin and impact of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 are assessed. It contends that the criminal justice system has its own rationality which may conflict with both that of the formal law and other parts of the state. It is argued that institutional discrimination exists within the legal system, based on ingrained ‘sedentarist' assumptions about what constitutes a normal way of life. Both the 1968 and the 1994 Acts can be criticised in these terms. Travellers have, however, been able to resist many of the practices of legal and spatial enclosure to which they are subject.     

The North Korean abduction issue: emotions,securitisation and the reconstruction of Japanese identity from ‘aggressor’ to ‘victim’ and from ‘pacifist’ to ‘normal’

Abstract

After Kim Jong-il's confession in 2002 that North Korean agents had abducted thirteen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, North Korea has become the most detested country in Japan, and the normalisation of bilateral relations has been put on the back burner. The abduction issue has taken precedence in Japan even over North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. It has also grossly overshadowed the atrocities for which Imperial Japan was responsible in the 20th century. Why has there been such strong emphasis on an issue that could be disregarded as comparatively ‘less important’? This article understands the ascendency of the abduction issue as the epitome of an identity shift under way in Japan – from the identity of a curiously ‘peaceful’ and inherently ‘abnormal’ state, to that of a more ‘normal’ one. The differentiation of North Korea as ‘abnormal’ emphasises Japan's own (claim to) ‘normality’. Indeed, by incarnating the perils of Japan's own ‘pacifist’ ‘abnormality’, which has been so central to the collective sense of Japanese ‘Self’ in the post-war period, the abduction issue has become a very emotional argument for Japan's ‘normalisation’ in security and defence terms. The transformation from ‘abnormal’ to ‘normal’ is further enabled by Japan trading places with North Korea in the discourse, so that Japan is defined as ‘victim’ (rather than former aggressor) and North Korea as ‘aggressor’ (rather than former victim). What is at stake here is the question whether Japan is ‘normalising’ or ‘remilitarising’, and the role of the abduction issue discourse in enabling such foreign and security policy change.     

The Fragility of the EU as a ‘Community of Values’: Lessons from the Haider Affair

Unprecedented in the history of European integration, the sanctions against an Austrian government that included the far right Austrian Freedom Party in January 2000 clearly exposed the necessity to guarantee a minimum level of normative homogeneity in the European Union. However, as the hasty lifting of the sanctions a few months later showed, EU leaders proved both unable and unwilling to defend a durable, common and coherent position on this issue. Classic intergovernmental theories, which predict that the unification process cannot go beyond a certain threshold of politically acceptable integration without coming up against deep national divisions and sharpening tensions between the Union and domestic societies, only partly explain this rapid erosion of the European consensus against the FPÖ. The article argues that the breakdown of this ‘cordon sanitaire’ is also largely due to the reluctance of domestic political elites to institutionalise a principle which might backfire against their own countries and ultimately implies a far-reaching Europeanisation of domestic politics and party strategies.     

‘The clash of races’ and ‘the Jewish intelligence’: a specifically French form of social antisemitism

The phenomenon of ‘social antisemitism’ is well known. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, an idiosyncratic variant had emerged in France. Where, elsewhere, social antisemitism tended to be ingrained and unthinking, this French variant was (typically) more theoretical, and its practitioners tended to be among the most prominent authors and thinkers. It stressed the essential cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘Israelites’, and the ‘separateness’ of the Jews within France, and also developed a series of facile generalizations about the essentially inferior nature of the Jewish intellect. Griffiths examines this phenomenon, both for its characteristics and for its widespread existence in French intellectual circles, by taking a specific subject: the reception of Lacretelle’s 1922 novel Silbermann. A wide range of writers and critics—a number of whom had in other circumstances a reputation for liberal values and attitudes, and had been among those who had deplored the excesses of the antisemitic mob during the Dreyfus affair—are found to echo the views put forward by Lacretelle in that novel, and even to elaborate on them. Many of these writers were to adopt a completely different attitude towards the Jews after the Second World War; when the position of the Jews was fully realized, their earlier ‘social antisemitism’ proved less powerful than their human sympathies. But this is not to devalue the importance of the danger posed by social antisemitism, which could provide the basis for far more virulent forms of racism to flourish.     

Political parties or party systems? Assessing the ‘myth’ of institutionalisation and democracy

No matter the region of the world under study, party (system) institutionalisation has been traditionally considered to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the survival of democracy. Despite being one of the most quoted statements in the democratisation literature, the few studies looking at the relationship between institutionalisation and democratic endurance have found no evidence of the ‘almost magical’ powers of the former. This article revisits the abovementioned research question by making use of an original dataset covering all European democracies between 1848 and 2014. The main findings are threefold: (1) it is not the institutionalisation of political parties but the institutionalisation of party systems as a whole that has fostered the prospects for democratic survival in Europe; (2) there is a threshold of systemic institutionalisation which, once reached, will avoid democratic collapse; and (3) systemic over-institutionalisation does not seem to be so perilous for the survival of democracy.     

Anything goes: Lefort,ideology and the “adventure of democracy’

This article initially introduces and outlines the main aspects of Claude Lefort's theorising of democracy as a radically antagonistic and contingent political formation. This is followed by a critique of those theories, primarily through the application of Slavoj Zizek ‘s work on the politics of community as it applies to the emergence, in Australian politics, of Pauline Hanson and her ^‘One Nation’ party and policies.     

Political space in Vietnam: a view from the ‘rice-roots'

Abstract

Single-party, authoritarian states such as Vietnam are frequently characterised as having ‘closed’ political opportunity structures and ‘un-free’ socio-political systems. The validity of this observation depends, however, on the viewer's frame of reference. Seen from the perspective of active citizens, Vietnamese political structures offer increasingly greater space for collective action than a state-centred institutional analysis would predict. Episodes of contentious politics surrounding land disputes and public parks during 2007 provide evidence of the changing dynamics of participation in politics. Actors involved in these and similar campaigns are broadly optimistic about the future prospects for an opening of political space within the existing system. These findings are contrasted with international reports of violations of political rights and with the Vietnamese government's own efforts at legal reform. Although signals remain mixed, to some extent Vietnam might be becoming a ‘rice-roots democracy’ in practice, while remaining a single-party state. The voices and experiences of civil society actors will continue to shape opportunities and risks in the expansion of political space.     

Forecasting British Elections: The ‘PM and the Pendulum’ Model Reconsidered

Various approaches have been taken to forecasting the outcomes of elections. The “PM and the Pendulum” model uses Prime Ministerial Approval as the sole short-term predictor of the vote in British General Elections. Here we test the forecasting power of this predictor against a close rival – Government Approval. Using a time-varying parameter estimator, we demonstrate that between elections and especially in the months preceding a General Election, PM Approval is the most accurate predictor of both governing party vote intentions and the actual vote on Election Day, as measured in governing party vote share. The autoregressive model for translating votes into seats, based on elections from 1910 onward, provides an almost exact prediction of the outcome of the 2010 contest.     

Governmental behavior in representative democracy: a synthesis of the theoretical literature

What is the impact of bureaucratic behaviors on tax rates? What is preferable: a bureaucrat or a partisan politician? Does a flypaper effect occur when lobby groups influence public policies? This article tries to answer these questions by analyzing and comparing six different models of public choice: (1) the median voter model, (2) the Leviathan model, (3) the slack-maximizing model, (4) a general model of bureaucracy, (5) the partisan politicians model and (6) a general model of lobbying. Among several results, it is shown that the median voter’s income and tax share almost always play a significant role in the design of the public good/tax package, even if the government does not explicitly try to maximize the median voter’s utility. The article also provides a synthesis of the positive analysis of the flypaper effect.     

Keeping the ‘Ism’ in ‘cosmopolitanism’ – Wieland and the origins of cosmopolitan discourse

ABSTRACT

After having been dormant for much of the 20th century, the concept of cosmopolitanism has regained some of its former rhetorical power in current academic and political debates. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert Fine as key interlocutors, the article argues that a historically informed analysis of the linguistic context, in which the language of cosmopolitanism first emerged, can help us understand better the political and ideological underpinnings of the concept. In the first part of the article, I discuss the emergence of cosmopolitanism in the context of what I shall refer to as the ‘ismatization’ of political language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the second part, I turn to what I consider to be a key text for understanding the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism: the essay Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (‘The Secret of the Order of the Cosmopolitans’), published by the German novelist, poet and publicist Christoph Martin Wieland in the journal Teutscher Merkur in 1788. At the end of the 18th century, I argue, Wieland makes a similar observation to Fine, namely that the ‘ism’ connotes something doctrinal, even sectarian, and steeped in secrecy and conspiracy.