Turning on the Citizen: Modern Citizenship and its Cultural Hazards

How is the citizen 'turned on'? That is, how does one 'switch' from being a private person to being a citizen? This article investigates how several prominent models of politics and citizenship account for this switch. In particular, the role of (cultural) identity in performing the 'switch' is highlighted. In the 'standard' liberal model, the switch from private to public is considered an unproblematic 'mind switch'. In the communitarian model, on the contrary, it is considered impossible: the good citizen must be a good person. In the republican model, identity 'restrictions' can be overcome by actively participating in the context of a culture of democratic deliberation. In the liberal multicultural model, cultural identity counts explicitly, although as a handicap, to be overcome by the support of cultural rights. In the model of identity politics, finally, identity counts positively, as an asset. Although identity thus empowers 'switching', its 'transformative' dimension has unpredictable and often unsettling effects, due to unacknowledged elements in the demand for recognition of identity in politics. Throughout the article, the vicissitudes of 'switching' are illuminated by an analysis of the Clinton-Lewinsky case, showing how president Clinton's 'sexualized identity' affected his ability to switch from private to public affairs--for better or for worse.     

Operationalising local governance in Kilimanjaro

Decentralisation is a policy feature common to many African countries. Local governance is therefore gaining in relevance, though not yet in clarity. Based on the experience of a development project in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, the article examines the case of local governance in practice, grounding this in a historical analysis and focusing on the relationship between local government and civil society. Through a phased process from experimentation through piloting to lobbying, the PAMOJA project develops interface mechanisms to structure local government-civil society relations at the district level. Three actors are identified for the success of the project: the external agent as process facilitator, local champions as change agents, and strategic partners for the lobby component. A successful outcome would ultimately strengthen decentralisation processes.     

European civil society

The concept of “civil society” is still the subject of thorough academic research. It emerged, in Europe, in the 18th century and implied a culture of civility which, while emphasising autonomy from established institutions, also emphasised the freedom to associate and a commitment to common good beyond particular interests. A modern definition of the concept makes civil society the sum of “Organisations which are self-governing and constitutionally independent of the State or political parties; do not involve the distribution of profits to shareholders; and benefit to a significant degree from voluntarism”. The emergence of civil society has followed different historical patterns in different EU Member States, and European State institutions have had different ways to accommodate the emergence of civil society and its aspiration to influence policy-making. From the 18th to the early 20th century, civil society associations and networks mostly emerged and operated within local of national frameworks. It is in the second half of the 20th century that the development of civil society acquired a trans-national dimension. The emergence of a truly trans-national civil society in Europe is a rather recent phenomenon which is increasingly taken into consideration in the formulation of policy by the European Union institutions. The EU foreign policy also aims at strengthening civil society in third countries (including Asia) to achieve its objectives, notably in the field of human rights and democratisation.     

Sailors' families and the urban institutional framework in early modern Holland

This article points to a largely neglected theme in the maritime history: the important role of sailors' families in urban seafaring communities during the Early Modern Period. At the end of the seventeenth century and during the first decades of the eighteenth century, about 20% of the crewmembers of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) were married. Accordingly, in the towns in Holland where the VOC was present, many women had to run a household by themselves for a long period of time. The sailors' families were often confronted by emotional and financial distress, which to some extent affected the financial expenses of VOC towns as well. Many of these families were however able to cope because they received material support from various urban institutions. The Company created a system that encouraged sailors to send their money home during voyages, while urban poor relief often temporarily complemented the family's budget. Contrary to other married women, wives of sailors could obtain the legal power to engage in financial transactions, or to have access to inheritances. Town councils, civil courts, church councils, charity institutions and the East India Company were all willing to help the seamen's families. Their motives were twofold: while urban communities benefited from financially stable families, and the VOC compensated for their low pay by offering their employees fringe benefits, the attitudes towards seamen's wives also indicate that the urban elites genuinely wanted to provide some assistance to these needy families.     

Sorting out the Conceptual Muddle: The Role of the Japanese Economy in the Asian Financial Crisis

Karel van Wolferen argues that, since Japan's political economy was the main factor in creating the circumstances that led up to the East Asian financial crisis, studies must focus on it to understand this event. The Japanese economy, which is here described as a war economy operating in peacetime, provided the model for East Asia's 'tiger economies' that imitated the Japanese government in its targeting of sectors for investment, especially the construction industry in the 1980s. These other East Asian economies proved more vulnerable to crisis than the Japanese economy because they were more open to foreign investment and did not have Japan's closely knit economic and financial networks and institutions. After presenting this preface to the crisis, van Wolferen then criticizes the current East Asian economic situation, in which international institutions continue to force the Western ideals of transparency and deregulation on most of the East Asian economies while permitting Japan to remain the least transparent economy of the entire region.     

Topic Modeling the Research‐Practice Gap in Public Administration

The possible existence of a research‐practice gap is the topic of a long‐standing debate in the field of public administration. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors examine the agendas of scholars and practitioners using the topic modeling technique of computational social science. Topic modeling a content analysis of 35 topics identified in Public Administration Review and PA Times (3,796 articles) showed that just over 50 percent of topics were common to both groups, indicating shared interests. There were, however, topics that the two groups distinctly focused on. Moreover, scholars and practitioners attached significant differences to the weights allocated to the prominent topics in their writing. Taken together, these findings indicate that topic modeling can shed new light on the research‐practice gap in public administration.     

Brazil and South Africa: the ‘odd couple’ of the South Atlantic?

Exploring the complexity of South Africa's and Brazil's ‘like-mindedness’ at the regional, multilateral, and bilateral levels, this article argues that shared middle power roles traceable to the pre-Cold War era and beyond set the scene for a great deal of political complementarity and cooperation at the multilateral level where Brazil and South Africa's shared identities drive an interest in reforming global governance processes. This complementarity does not, however, always spill over to the bilateral level, where trans-societal linkages are still relatively limited compared with state-to-state interactions.     

The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.