Civil society: Bringing the family back in

This article explores the complex and contradictory positioning of the family within civil society literature. In some accounts, the family is seen as the cornerstone of civil society. In others, the family is positioned firmly outside – even antithetical to – civil society. This paradox arises from the ways in which civil society is variously defined through a series of binary oppositions – in relation to each of which the family sits uneasily. And while feminist critiques have tried to bring women back into view, they too tend to marginalize the family. In addition, the normative nature of these oppositions has meant that while civil society tends to be seen as the property of the political ‘left’, the family is often associated with the political ‘right’. The article argues that we need to move beyond oppositional definitions of civil society and assumptions about the family if we are to understand the multiple ways in which the family is implicated as not only the ‘reproducer’ of particular resources and dispositions but as a principal source and focus of civil society engagement and activism.     

President Donald Trump: A Case Study of Spectacular Power

Donald Trump's election as president certainly startled many, though not all political observers. In this article, I offer my own observation that Mr Trump's election represents a developmental progression of America's electoral system from a political process to an entertainment process. The effect of the office of the president now is to distract and entertain. I will aim to convince readers that his election as America's president is not an anomaly, but rather represents how the politics of image and representation now work as an everyday event and should be treated as part of a reality that we should now take for granted.     

A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy

If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite‐driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue‐taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results from five survey experiments where we show that cues from social peers are at least as strong as those from political elites. Our theory and results build on a growing number of findings that individuals are embedded in a social context that combines with their general orientations toward foreign policy in shaping responses toward the world around them. Thus, we suggest the public is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign affairs than many of our top‐down models claim.     

Conflict between Explicit and Tacit Public Service Bargains in U.K. Executive Agencies

Public service bargains (PSBs) define rewards, competencies, and loyalties for civil servants. They involve both explicit and tacit agreements with politicians. The article suggests that these two kinds of bargain may not be closely coordinated with one another, and can become “loosely coupled,” operating and evolving with relative independence. This is particularly likely when there is conflict between rational‐actor preferences and institutional expectations about political‐administrative behavior. Such a trade‐off can be managed by “decoupling” the explicit and tacit PSB, so that they operate differently in public and in private. Loose coupling results in inconsistent PSBs that are resistant to change, whereas decoupling highlights the compliance costs that actors face when securing cultural legitimacy for their bargains. These arguments are illustrated by the long‐term development of “Next Steps” agencies in the United Kingdom, where a marked disjuncture has emerged between the stated and practiced PSB.     

Constitutional Dynamics in the European Union: Success,Failure, and Stability of Institutional Treaty Revisions

ABSTRACT

Despite high institutional hurdles for constitutional change, one observes surprisingly many EU treaty revisions. This article takes up the questions of what determines whether a treaty provision is successfully changed and why provisions are renegotiated at subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences. The article presents an institutionalist theory explaining success and renegotiation and tests the theory using all core institutional provisions by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The causal analysis shows that low conflict potential of an issue is sufficient for successfully changing the treaties. Furthermore, high conflict potential of an issue and its fundamental change are sufficient for it to be renegotiated.     

Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy

The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses.     

Empowering women through the positive birth movement

Childbirth has been positioned as a life changing event that has profound long-term psychological effects upon women. This paper adopts a community psychology approach to explore the role that the Positive Birth Movement (PBM) may have in tackling negative birth experiences by supporting women before and after birth. Six women who all regularly attend UK-based PBM meetings and had given birth to at least one child participated in one to one semi-structured interviews designed to explore the support they received before, during and after their birth, as well as their experiences with the PBM. A Foucauldian inspired discourse analysis explores themes relating to the lack of support and information provided by the NHS and the function of the PBM as a transformative community space which offers social support and information. Within these themes a focus on neoliberalism, choice and the woman’s position as an active consumer of health care is critically discussed. It is argued that the PBM has the potential to prepare women for positive birth experiences but more attention needs to be paid to the wider contexts that limit women’s ability to make ‘free’ choice.     

Members of parliament and governments in Western Europe: Agency relations and problems of oversight

Abstract. The vast majority of West European polities feature an agency relationship between members of parliaments and members of cabinets as the latter depend on the confidence of the majority of the former to remain in office. In this article, the terminology used by principalagent theory to characterise oversight activities – contract design, screening, monitoring and the use of institutional checks – and elements of transaction cost economics are applied to the agency relationship between members of parliaments and cabinet members in Western Europe. Traditional studies of parliamentary oversight have narrowly concentrated on monitoring, although parliaments (with considerable cross–national variations) use a broad range of oversight mechanisms including equivalents of contract design, screening and institutional checks. In addition, traditional studies have focused almost exclusively on one particular type of monitoring often referred to as 'police–patrol oversight', whilst neglecting or underestimating the effectiveness and low transaction costs associated with 'fire–alarm oversight'. Despite the valuable insights the principal–agent framework has already added to the study of executive–legislative relations in parliamentary democracies, future research will have to account more realistically for the role and organisation of political parties which structure the delegation process, help to solve a number of co–ordination problems in parliaments (for example, the co–ordination of committees and floor activities) and generate important internal agency relationships that are fundamental to an understanding of executive–legislative relations in Western Europe.