Citizenship and choice

Citizenship: Rights, Community and Participation. By David Prior, John Stewart and Kieron Walsh. Pitman Publishing, 1995. Pp.194. £20.

Markets, Service and Choice. By Kieron Walsh and John Stewart. Belgrave Paper No.12. Local Government Management Board, 1995. Pp.24.

Public Services and Market Mechanisms. By Kieron Walsh. Macmillan, 1995. Pp.284. £40 hb, £12.99 pb.     

Revisiting Dynamic Social Impact Theory: Extensions and Applications for Political Science

Traditional social science research tends to regard political attitudes as the product of individuals’ internal processes. This approach ignores the existence of external influences on individual attitudes, particularly that of social communication. We argue that political attitudes are neither confined to the individual, nor are they wholly social constructions. This study examines how political information is structured and communicated through a social medium. We employ multi-agent simulation to replicate and extend a previous simulation of attitude formation based on Latané’s (American Psychologist 36:343–356, 1981) theory of social impact. Specifically, our extension of the previous model incorporates motivated reasoning processes, attitude persuasiveness, and agent uncertainty in order to more accurately capture the pervasiveness of social communication. These changes allow us to model effects not previously possible, such as attitude polarization and information cascades. Results from this study show that realistic structures in the distributions of attitudes can be recreated using prevailing aggregate- and individual-level models of attitude formation. By formally modeling the dynamics of social impact, researchers gain insight into social influences on individuals’ attitudes and the consequences for public opinion.     

The determinants of current account imbalances in the euro area: a panel estimation approach

The aim of this paper is to study the main macroeconomic, financial and structural characteristics that affected current account developments in the member-states of the euro area over the period 1980–2008. The model is based on the intertemporal consumption smoothing approach according to which current account positions are determined by saving and investment decisions. The analysis uses a panel of countries that consists of the initial 12 member states of the euro area and then it expands to 17 countries aiming to see whether the enlargement or potential enlargement would in any way alter the current account determinants. All the determinants of saving and investment decisions, which include factors such as the level of development, demographics, macroeconomic policies and competitiveness, appear to be important in underpinning sustained current account positions in the euro area countries.     

A party system in flux: the Swedish parliamentary election of September 2018

In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. The result left the array of parliamentary forces fragmented and finely balanced. Only after months of negotiations could a government be formed. Eventually, the incumbent coalition received a renewed parliamentary mandate. At the same time, the party system was transformed.     

Scale,Security, and Political Economy: Debating the Biopolitics of the Global War on Terror1

Critical scholarship in Political Science and International Relations (IR) theory is turning increasingly to Michel Foucault's writings on governmentality and biopolitics to explore the complex discursive interdependencies between transnational governance and the War on Terror. Marxist critics have assailed this effort recently, however, for its premature assumption that the practices of governmental power can simply be “scaled” without the interventions of specific state-imperial powers. Yet both sides in this “debate about biopolitics” seem to rest their arguments on readings of Foucault which ignore his views on the importance of developments in the discourses of political economy for the emergence of modern governmental relations. Inspired by Foucault's recently published lectures on importance of the concept of “economic man” for neoliberal governmentality in particular, this article suggests that Foucault attributed to governmentality an explicit impulse toward economic globalization. Moreover, based on comments made in the same lectures concerning the emergence of contemporary “anarcho-liberalism” and its radically economic ontology of security, the article closes with an exploration of the crucial role played by economic knowledge in the integration of Iraq into a regime of global-governmental security.