Liberal republicanism and the role of civil society

This article argues that political liberalism is best placed to accommodate the insights of the civic republican tradition in political theory. Political liberalism is described and its compatibility with certain interpretations of republicanism demonstrated. The reasons why the republican liberal values active citizenship are explained in the context of civil society and the overall theory is defended from the charge that it is an unstable compromise. It is argued that civil society is an essential precondition of liberal democracy.     

Democracy through Time: Identity Politics and Future Generations

Since the 1980s identities have re-emerged as a powerful factor shaping support for specific public policies, often doing so at the expense of prioritising the interests of future generations. Outside the United States a major causal factor has been the declining ability of many political parties to mobilise support for themselves and their policies. Consequently, considerations derived from the past can be at the expense of future citizens. This article analyses two major policies separated by a century—Prohibition in the US and Brexit. With both, the enacted policies featured limited previous public discussion about their likely consequences. Moreover, in both cases it was a ‘hard’ version that would be enacted, even though some supporters had favoured more moderate policy options. While not all policies driven by support from particular identities harm future generations, some do. This results from politicians in public utterances previously being insufficiently focussed in detail on the policy’s consequences.     

Public Sector Governance Reform and the Motivation of Street-Level Bureaucrats in Developing Countries

This article draws on health sector reform in Honduras to examine the mechanisms through which governance reforms shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats. It combines insights from behavioral public administration with original data from lab-in-the-field workshops conducted with more than 200 bureaucrats to assess the relationship between decentralization and motivation. Findings show strong evidence that motivation, measured as self-sacrifice, is higher among bureaucrats in decentralized municipalities compared with bureaucrats in comparable centrally administered municipalities. Increased motivation is most pronounced in decentralized systems led by nongovernmental organizations compared with those led by municipal governments or associations. Additionally, the evidence suggests that higher motivation is related to changes in the composition of staff rather than socialization or changes among existing staff. Overall, this research helps move beyond indiscriminate calls for decentralization by highlighting the interplay between reform design and bureaucratic behavior, as well as the limitations of governance reforms in motivating more experienced bureaucrats.     

The UK's electoral reform referendum of May 2011

The UK's second nationwide referendum, held in May 2011, offers rich opportunities for analysing the dynamics of a referendum campaign. The articles gathered together in this symposium address three themes. The first concerns the determinants and dynamics of public opinion during a referendum campaign, the second relates to the potential for interaction between the referendum and simultaneous elections, and the third focuses on coverage of the referendum in the media. Following a brief outline of the background to the referendum, this paper introduces the contribution that each article makes to these themes.     

Reviews and notes

Visions of Emancipation: The Italian Workers’ Movement since 1945, by Joanne Barkan. New York: Praeger, 1984.

Socialism in History: Political Essays of Henry Pachter, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

The Anatomy of Job Loss: The How, Why and Where of Employment Decline. Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan. (N.Y.: Methuen, 1982. Pp. viii + 258.)

Shutdown at Youngstown: Public Policy for Mass Unemployment. Terry F. Buss and F. Stevens Redburn. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Pp. xv + 219.)

The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown's Steel Mill Closing. Staughton Lynd. (San Pedro: Singlejack Books, 1982. Pp. xx + 244.)

Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy. Frank Fischer and Carmen Sirianni, eds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

The Politics of Terrorism. Michael Stohl, ed. 2nd ed., rev. and expanded. New York and Basel: Marcel Dekker, 1983. 473 pp.

The State as Terrorist: The Dynamics of Governmental Violence and Repression. Michael Stohl and George Lopez, eds. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. 202 pp.     

What's so special aout coercion?

There is a certain form of libertarian argument accordingj to which there is something essentially uncoercive and therefore freedom-respecting about the ‘free market’. The most obvious way to counter this is to meet it head on, to try to show that the market is, on the contrafy, coercive.

But I do not think the obvious approach is the right approach here. The trouble with this particular libertarian view is that it expects the concept is loose enouth to permit a number of interpretations, and I concentrate mainly on Robert Nozick's article, ‘Coercion’, which is is unusual for being an attempt by a political philosopher to come to grips with the concept in detail. In the first section, I consider the broken-backed relationship between Nozick' main guiding assumptions, and the consequent possibility of pursing different ‘strategies ’ when trying to explicate coercion. In the second, I explore some of the implications of this for the libertarian view. In the third, I argue that the pursuit of a ‘baseline’ dividing cases of coercion from others is futile. In conclusion, I suggest that if we really want to understand the relation between capitalism and freedom (or its lack) it is a mistake to focus too closely on coercion alone.     

Big Five Personality Traits and Responses to Persuasive Appeals: Results from Voter Turnout Experiments

We examine whether Big Five personality traits are associated with heterogeneous responses to commonly used Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) appeals in both a survey and a field experiment. The results suggest that Big Five personality traits affect how people respond to the costs and benefits of voting highlighted in GOTV appeals. Our evidence also suggests that one trait—Openness—is associated with broad persuasibility, while others shape responses to particular types of messages. In some cases the conditioning effects of Big Five traits are substantial. For example, in the one-voter households (HHs) included in our field experiment, we find that a mailer that raised the specter of social sanctions increased the likelihood of voting by a statistically greater amount among those scoring high on Openness. The findings constitute an important step forward in understanding how core personality traits shape responses to various aspects of the act of voting.