Reinventing Pluralism: Consensus,Hegemony, and the Politics of Affirmation

As inequalities in the United States have intensified in recent decades, Washington, DC’s advocacy system has thrived. Why has this proliferation of interest groups failed to deliver more substantive equality? The dominant response to this question typically cites the advocacy realm’s “upper-class accent,” portraying interest group representation as imbalanced and unresponsive to a broad range of voices. Yet this prevailing account—which I term “post- pluralist”—does not sufficiently explore the inegalitarian ways that neoliberalism shapes contemporary political advocacy. To this end, this article builds upon post-pluralist and post-Marxist insights to outline the advocacy system’s “politics of affirmation.” Using recent antigay legislation to explore this concept, I argue that today’s political advocacy circumscribes, rather than enlivens, prevailing standards of democratic participation by mobilizing hegemonic, neoliberal expressions of democratic citizenship. The article concludes by outlining how groups might pursue a transformative politics in order to destabilize neoliberalism’s hegemony.     

Transparency by Conformity: A Field Experiment Evaluating Openness in Local Governments

Sunshine laws establishing government transparency are ubiquitous in the United States; however, the intended degree of openness is often unclear or unrealized. Although researchers have identified characteristics of government organizations or officials that affect the fulfillment of public records requests, they have not considered the influence that government organizations have on one another. This picture of independently acting organizations does not accord with the literature on diffusion in public policy and administration. This article presents a field experiment testing whether a county government's fulfillment of a public records request is influenced by the knowledge that its peers have already complied. The authors propose that knowledge of peer compliance should induce competitive pressures to comply and resolve legal ambiguity in favor of compliance. Findings indicate peer conformity affects both in the time to initial response and in the rate of complete request fulfillment.     

Boisterous Russia in emerging Europe

Russia is permanently at a crossroads in its history, or standing in exasperation at a fork in the road but failing to resolve a geographical, historical and metaphysical dilemma: is Russia part of Europe or not? Russia holds a key but vulnerable strategic position in the heartland of Eurasia. Its geographical existence within a larger zone of Eurasian civilization meant that Russian culture had been shaped to a not insignificant extent by influences coming from Asia, that Russia was Eurasian and not European not only by virtue of its cultural patterns but also in terms of anthropological–racial considerations as well. The Eurasian Customs Union is clearly seen by Russia as a vehicle for reintegrating the post‐Soviet space, including the countries that fall within the sphere of the European Union's (EU)'s eastern neighbourhood. The Eurasian Customs Union is the vehicle through which Russia increasingly engages in ‘normative rivalry’ with the EU in the so‐called ‘shared neighbourhood’. These geopolitical and economic contraptions underpin the strategic calculations that have influenced largely the crisis of Russian Lebensraum escapade in Ukraine and EU's reaction. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Who opposes labor regulation? Explaining variation in employers’ opinions

Competing accounts of the effect of globalization on labor politics agree that firms influence regulations, but make contrasting predictions for which firms are most likely to oppose regulations. Using survey data from employers in 19,000 manufacturing firms in 82 developing countries, we examine the determinants of employers’ opinions toward labor regulation. In contrast to the predictions of optimistic theories of globalization, we find that (i) firms that export are more likely to have negative opinions toward labor regulation than those that sell domestically, and (ii) firms that receive foreign direct investment have similar views as firms that rely only on domestic capital. Further, we show that systematic differences in employers’ opinions depend on the intensity of the competitive pressures they face and their use of skilled workers. In doing so, we provide an empirically grounded account of the heterogeneous opinions of key actors in economic policymaking in developing countries.     

Rewards and Consequences: Redistricting on the Chicago City Council

The challenges of understanding gerrymandering are primarily related to its conceptual ambiguity and measurement. This is true despite landmark legal rulings and a rich literature on the subject. In an attempt to alleviate some of the confusion, theories of the gerrymandering process are combined with advanced quantitative and mapping techniques. The focus is on Chicago, where it is frequently claimed that gerrymandering is institutionalised; however, there has not been sufficient study of the causal connections between gerrymandering and a ward’s racial makeup. Employing a mixed methods approach which combines a case study of the 2011–2012 redistricting in Chicago with quantitative analysis of Decennial Census and data from the Chicago Data Portal, this article examines the remapping of Chicago from early 2012 (effective in 2015 and matched with 2010 Census data) to assess how potentially gerrymandered districts are diluting or concentrating vote share of racially homogeneous groups.     

The Intersectionality of Discrimination Attributes and Bullying Among Youth: An Applied Latent Class Analysis

Discrimination is commonly experienced among adolescents. However, little is known about the intersection of multiple attributes of discrimination and bullying. We used a latent class analysis (LCA) to illustrate the intersections of discrimination attributes and bullying, and to assess the associations of LCA membership to depressive symptoms, deliberate self harm and suicidal ideation among a sample of ethnically diverse adolescents. The data come from the 2006 Boston Youth Survey where students were asked whether they had experienced discrimination based on four attributes: race/ethnicity, immigration status, perceived sexual orientation and weight. They were also asked whether they had been bullied or assaulted for these attributes. A total of 965 (78 %) students contributed to the LCA analytic sample (45 % Non-Hispanic Black, 29 % Hispanic, 58 % Female). The LCA revealed that a 4-class solution had adequate relative and absolute fit. The 4-classes were characterized as: low discrimination (51 %); racial discrimination (33 %); sexual orientation discrimination (7 %); racial and weight discrimination with high bullying (intersectional class) (7 %). In multivariate models, compared to the low discrimination class, individuals in the sexual orientation discrimination class and the intersectional class had higher odds of engaging in deliberate self-harm. Students in the intersectional class also had higher odds of suicidal ideation. All three discrimination latent classes had significantly higher depressive symptoms compared to the low discrimination class. Multiple attributes of discrimination and bullying co-occur among adolescents. Research should consider the co-occurrence of bullying and discrimination.     

Discourses of Russian-speaking youth in Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan: Soviet legacies and responses to nation-building

ABSTRACT

Research into post-independence identity shifts among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities has outlined a number of possible pathways, such as diasporization, integrated national minority status and ethnic separatism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people in Almaty and Karaganda, I examine how Russian-speaking minorities identify with the state and imagine their place in a ‘soft’ or ‘hybrid’ post-Soviet authoritarian system. What is found is that Russian-speaking minorities largely accept their status beneath the Kazakh ‘elder brother’ and do not wish to identify as a ‘national minority’. Furthermore, they affirm passive loyalty to the political status quo while remaining disinterested in political representation. Russian-speaking minorities are also ambivalent towards Kazakh language promotion and anxious about the increasing presence of Kazakh-speakers in urban spaces. This article argues that two factors are central to these stances among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities: the persistence of Soviet legacies and the effects of state discourse and policy since 1991.     

Angry White Men: Individual and Contextual Predictors of Support for the British National Party

The British National party (BNP) is the most successful extreme right party in Britain's electoral history and is the fastest growing political party in twenty-first century Britain. This article presents the first ever individual-level analysis of BNP supporters, utilising a survey data set uniquely compiled for this purpose. We find that support for the BNP is concentrated among older, less educated working-class men living in the declining industrial towns of the North and Midlands regions. This pattern of support is quite distinct from that which underpinned the last electorally relevant extreme right party in Britain – the National Front (NF) – whose base was young working-class men in Greater London and the West Midlands. Extreme right voters in contemporary Britain express exceptionally high levels of anxiety about immigration and disaffection with the mainstream political parties. Multi-level analysis of BNP support shows that the party prospers in areas with low education levels and large Muslim minority populations of Pakistani or African origin. The BNP has succeeded in mobilising a clearly defined support base: middle-aged working-class white men anxious about immigration, threatened by local Muslim communities and hostile to the existing political establishment. We conclude by noting that all the factors underpinning the BNP's emergence – high immigration levels, rising perceptions of identity conflict and the declining strength of the cultural and institutional ties binding voters to the main parties – are likely to persist in the coming years. The BNP therefore looks likely to consolidate itself as a persistent feature of the British political landscape.