God, Mammon and the Rise of Nationalism

Books reviewed in this article:
David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800
Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth
Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
Maurizio Ferrera and Martin Rhodes (eds.), Recasting European Welfare States
Evelyn Huber and John Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets
Paul Pierson (ed.), The New Politics of the Welfare State
Duane Swank, Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States
John Ramsden (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century British Politics
Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
Giles Radice, Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins and Healey
Michael McManus, Jo Grimond: Towards the Sound of Gunfire     

RETRACTED ARTICLE: A Discourse Analysis of Quotidian Expressions of Nationalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chinese Cyberspace

Journal of Chinese Political Science - By conducting discourse analysis on quotidian expressions of nationalism of Chinese netizens and analyzing their “Liking” behavior, this article...     

Retraction Note: A Discourse Analysis of Quotidian Expressions of Nationalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chinese Cyberspace

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

States Divided: The Implications of American Federalism for COVID-19

The explosion of the coronavirus onto the global stage has posed unprecedented challenges for governance. In the United States, the question of how best to respond to these challenges has fractured along intergovernmental lines. The federal government left most of the decisions to the states, and the states went in very different directions. Some of those decisions naturally flowed from the disease's emerging patterns. But to a surprising degree, there were systematic variations in the governors’ decisions, and these variations were embedded in a subtle but growing pattern of differences among the states in a host of policy areas, ranging from decisions about embracing the Affordable Care Act to improving their infrastructure. These patterns raise fundamental questions about the role of the federal government's leadership in an issue that was truly national in scope, and whether such varied state reactions were in the public interest. The debate reinforces the emerging reality of an increasingly divided states of America.     

Beyond Unionism versus Nationalism: the Rise of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has always been a polity noted for its strong links between national identity, religion, and voting, and acute British unionist versus Irish nationalist divisions. The constitutional question of whether Northern Ireland should be part of the UK or a united Ireland dominates. Yet, recent surveys have suggested a sizeable and growing section of its electorate declares itself neither unionist nor nationalist. This development may have assisted the growth of the centrist Alliance Party, which rejects unionist and nationalist identities and claims to be neutral on Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. Alliance doubled its vote across three elections in 2019 and is now the third largest party in the region. This article examines the importance of ideological dealignment relative to other factors, such as Alliance’s opposition to Brexit, in explaining the rise of a non-binary party in a divided society.     

The European Central Bank and the COVID-19 recession

The ECB, turning a page from its sluggish response the 2008–09 financial crisis, has responded to the COVID-19 recession by quickly stabilising banks and flooding the eurozone with cheap capital. Yet the crisis has caused fiscal imbalances – most notably between Germany and Italy – to worsen, with no prospect of making political headway towards mutualising the debts of individual member states.     

Human Security and the Rise of Private Armies

In parts of the developing world, private armed groups are acquiring sufficient capabilities to challenge the state as the sole legitimate fount of order and stability. As a result, there is emerging a notion of clientele politics in which the loyalty of citizens, rooted as it is in the need for protection, is devolving to sub-state actors with highly questionable motives. The result is a malignant dynamic in which the erosion of the state both stems (in part) from the rise of these private actors and reinforces it as well. In their quest for security, citizens are paradoxically drawn to the very groups that have undermined the social order-flawed though it may have been-and compromised individual security. The cases of Sierra Leone and Colombia are presented here in support of this contention; and while their experiences are certainly idiosyncratic, the broad conclusions they occasion hold true for countless other private armed groups challenging the state elsewhere in the world.     

Social Equity and COVID-19: The Case of African Americans

Emerging statistics demonstrate that COVID-19 disproportionately affects African Americans. The effects of COVID-19 for this population are inextricably linked to areas of systemic oppression and disenfranchisement, which are exacerbated by COVID-19: (1) health care inequality; (2) segregation, overall health, and food insecurity; (3) underrepresentation in government and the medical profession; and (4) inequalities in participatory democracy and public engagement. Following a discussion of these issues, this essay shares early and preliminary lessons and strategies on how public administration scholars and practitioners can lead in crafting equitable responses to this global pandemic to uplift the African American community.     

The Quest for Certainty and the Demise of Political Theory

In this paper, I contribute to the ongoing conversation in New Political Science regarding the status of political science in general, and political theory in particular. I argue that the quest for certainty and desire to quantify knowledge has not been limited to empiricist political scientists. The emphasis on quantification and deductive logic is found in many places within the political theory tradition itself. Time and again, mathematics and the physical sciences are held up as the model for all knowledge. I argue that this focus has led theorists to distance themselves from politics, either out of despair or disdain for the ambiguity and variability present in political life. While I do not propose that Aristotle provides a magic remedy for the current problems in the discipline, I suggest that his combined interest in logic and the close examination of material detail provides a perennially viable framework for political theory.     

Social Vulnerability and Equity: The Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19

As the architect of racial disparity, racism shapes the vulnerability of communities. Socially vulnerable communities are less resilient in their ability to respond to and recover from natural and human-made disasters compared with resourced communities. This essay argues that racism exposes practices and structures in public administration that, along with the effects of COVID-19, have led to disproportionate infection and death rates of Black people. Using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index, the authors analyze the ways Black bodies occupy the most vulnerable communities, making them bear the brunt of COVID-19's impact. The findings suggest that existing disparities exacerbate COVID-19 outcomes for Black people. Targeted universalism is offered as an administrative framework to meet the needs of all people impacted by COVID-19.     

The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Nationalist Emulation during the COVID-19 Pandemic

As COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe, every government in the world has been forced to enact policies to slow the spread of the virus. While leaders often claim responses are based on the best available advice from scientists and public health experts, recent policy diffusion research suggests that countries are emulating the COVID-19 policies of their neighbors instead of responding to domestic conditions. Political and geographic considerations play a role in determining which countries imitate one another, but even among countries that are politically or geographically distant, nationalist regimes seem to favor certain approaches towards the pandemic. We investigate why this is the case by examining whether countries that embrace a nationalist ideology are more likely to emulate the COVID-19 policies of similarly nationalist regimes. We demonstrate that, even after controlling for domestic circumstances and linguistic, trade, geographic, and political connections, nationalist countries are emulating each other’s responses. These results are robust and shed light not only on new mechanisms of policy diffusion but also on the growing international cooperation of nationalist regimes and leaders.

     

Nationalism,the Nation and Migration: Searching for Purity and Diversity

This paper adds to debates on the double-edged and contested nature of nationalism and its relationships with migration and diaspora. It does this by focusing on the notion of purity and highlights the ways in which national identities can be based on homogenising constructions of the nation. In an age where the nation-state system and migration are both important and in which there are recurring politicised uses of nationalism in potentially extreme ways, the paper discusses how nationalism can be problematic. It calls for contextualised and grounded research on the everyday meanings of nationalism in order to emphasise the messy and often ambivalent nature of national identities. In this way, it argues that there is potential for ‘rescuing nationalism’ as a more inclusive, diverse notion.     

COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives

Policy Sciences - The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D....     

The Politics of Blaming: the Narrative Battle between China and the US over COVID-19

Journal of Chinese Political Science - During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing a surge of nationalism throughout an ostensibly globalized world. In this article, we focus on the...