The Mainstreaming of Far-Right Discourse in Denmark

Building on two recent case studies of public debates concerning political meetings arranged by or involving controversial Muslim actors in Denmark, this article argues that an observed mainstreaming of intolerant discourses, most forcefully expressed by the Danish People's Party, can be explained by the proliferation of a new form of “liberal intolerance” that has transformed old racist or nationalist intolerance into a discourse stressing liberal reasons (autonomy, gender equality, social cohesion, public-private divide, security risks) for not tolerating particular Muslim practices. By comparing the two cases, the different toleration/intoleration positions and arguments in the two debates are brought out, and four different modalities of “liberal intolerance” are identified. Further, the article shows how the spread of liberal intolerance discourses across the political spectrum in Denmark has significantly affected Danish (liberal) Muslim actors’ possibilities of political participation and room for maneuvering.     

Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict

In this article, we extend the classical notion of online tallies to shed light on the psychology underlying the rapid emergence of dominant political leaders. Predicated on two population-based panel surveys with embedded experiments, we demonstrate that citizens (1) store extremely durable tallies of candidate personalities in their long-term memory and (2) retrieve different tallies depending on the context. In particular, we predict and demonstrate that when contexts become more conflict-ridden, candidate evaluations rapidly shift from being negatively to positively associated with online impressions of candidate dominance. Although the notion of online tallies was originally proposed as an explanation of why citizens are able to vote for candidates on the basis of policy agreement, we demonstrate how the existence of context-sensitive online tallies can favor dominant candidates, even if the candidate is otherwise unappealing or does not share policy views with citizens on key issues.     

Adoption of comprehensive risk management in local government

In the aftermath of large company failures in the early 2000s, there emerged a new wave of efforts to enhance risk management (RM) and control in enterprises. The normative RM model has been promoted widely to all organisations, including public sector organisations. Using survey data, this article describes and explains the diffusion and adoption of RM innovation in local government in Finland. Our survey results support the argument that if comprehensive RM is not obligatory, it is not widely used in local government. Our analysis reveals that financial constraints explain to some extent the existence of comprehensive RM in municipalities, while structural factors such as the size of municipalities do not, even though RM is slightly more advanced in larger rather than smaller local governments. Slow adoption indicates that comprehensive RM as a managerial innovation lacks immediate benefit when assessed against the efforts and costs of its introduction and maintenance.     

Either or? Reconciling Findings on Mental Health and Extremism using a Dimensional Rather than Categorical Paradigm

The background for this paper is the debate over what role mental illness plays in radicalization to violent extremism. While one camp points to cases of abnormal functioning of perpetrators, another argues that normal psychological mechanisms are central. Through a review of these perspectives, it becomes clear that mental illness cannot be ruled out as an epi‐phenomenon, but is not a necessary condition either. The paper draws on work in psychiatric nosology on dimensional and categorical conceptions of illness and argues that the perspectives in this literature reflect a categorical approach to normal and abnormal functioning. Under a dimensional perspective, findings converge. The paper concludes by showing how this new dimensional approach to the role of mental illness in radicalization has implications for the design of risk assessment tools and leads to the recommendation for stronger inter‐agency cooperation between mental health professionals, social services, and police and intelligence services.     

Criteria for Evaluation of Burden-sharing Rules in International Climate Policy

This article presents nine criteria for assessing, comparing, and ranking burden-sharing rules and conceptual frameworks used in climate policy negotiations and agreements. Three of the criteria are concerned with fairness principles and six criteria are operational requirements. The application of these criteria is illustrated in the context of six different burden-sharing schemes. The Multi-sector Convergence approach and the Triptych approach received highest average score of the six schemes. The Brazilian proposal received a similar total score, but unevenly distributed with a high score on fairness principles and low score on operational requirements. The European Union member countries employed the Triptych approach when they differentiated their national abatement targets prior to the 1997 Kyoto meeting. The Multi-sector Convergence approach was developed in a joint ECN (Netherlands Energy Research Foundation) and CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo) project. It is a sector-based, global approach that comprises convergence of per capita emissions at the same level in all countries. Sector-based approaches have a distinct advantage compared to other approaches because they reflect the economic structure of countries rather well. Such approaches could play a useful role in future climate policy negotiations, not the least in discussions on binding climate targets for developing countries.     

Burden Sharing and Fairness Principles in International Climate Policy

One of the major challenges facing participants in the global climate change negotiations is to find a scheme of burden sharing that can be accepted as "fair" by all or at least most governments. In this article we first explore which basic principles of fairness seem to be sufficiently widely recognized to serve as a normative basis for such a scheme. We then examine a set of proposals for differentiating obligations that have been submitted by governments in the negotiations leading up to the Kyoto Protocol to see which principles have been honored. In the concluding section we discuss the implications of our analysis for the design of more specific burden sharing rules.     

Lacanian Political Theory: A Reply to Robinson

In this response to Andrew Robinson's review of 'The politics of lack,' I argue that, although Robinson puts forward a number of interesting and succinct points about Lacanian political theory, his review rests on misunderstandings of post-structuralist political theory and misreadings of the texts under consideration. More specifically, I argue that his use of the labels 'Lacanian' and 'theorist of lack' is problematic; that his position rests on a misunderstanding of the relationship between ontology and politics in post-structuralist theory; and that it is a mistake to allege that Lacanian political theory is inherently conservative.     

Representing the People: Laclau as a Theorist of Representation

Going beyond conventional conceptions of political representation, Ernesto Laclau takes representation to be a general category and not just limited to formal political institutions, and he takes representation to be performative in that it also brings about what is represented. This article examines the implications of this conceptualization of representation for Laclau’s theory of populism. Laclau takes populism to be exemplary of his conception of representation because populism is a discourse that brings into being what it claims to represent: the people. This is important for current debates about populism and the crisis of democratic institutions, whether domestic or international. I show how our conceptions of representation inform how we think about populism and liberal democracy, and specifically about populism as a threat to liberal democracy at the domestic or global level. I show this in the context of a reading of Jan-Werner Müller’s influential critique of populism.