Church Engagement, Religious Values, and Mass-Elite Policy Agenda Agreement in Local Communities

We provide evidence on two prominent but heretofore untested expectations about the relevance of religion for the democratic process: (1) that greater engagement in churches or comparable religious institutions and their organizational life enhances representational processes; and (2) that religious values in a community have greater influence on the latter processes, with more liberal religious values expected to enhance the responsiveness of community leaders to general public preferences. Using data on local communities in the United States in the late 1960s, we find strong support for the expected relevance of religious liberalism for representation, but none for the expected effect of church engagement. We provide evidence, too, that our findings about religious values are generalizable to present-day politics.     

Agonism and Hope in William Apess’s Native American Political Thought

This article examines the Native American thinker, William Apess (Pequot), and especially his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), which argues, ironically, that King Philip—the seventeenth century Wampanoag leader who launched the bloodiest rebellion in New England’s history—ought to be embraced as an American pioneer and canonized as a founding father. Apess satirizes conventional founding narratives, even as he upholds the principles of freedom those narratives support. The effect of this irony is to interrupt and invert discourses of progressive history and American patriotism that underlie Manifest Destiny policies, in ways that open spaces for new historical accounts to surface and compete in a force field of agonistic powers. I argue that Apess’s ironic historical revisionism expresses a political theory of hope, one that I contrast with representations of hope by other nineteenth century Native American political thinkers, such as Plenty Coups (Crow).     

Russian military strategies in the Arctic: change or continuity?

This paper examines the nature of Moscow’s military strategies in the Arctic. It is argued that the roles of military power have radically changed since the Cold War era. According to Russian strategic thinking, instead of being a coercive instrument in a global confrontation between two superpowers and capitalist and socialist systems, now military power has new functions, such as to ascertain Russia's sovereignty over its (not their) exclusive economic zone and continental shelf in the region, protect Moscow’s economic interests in the North, prevent illegal migration and potential terrorist attacks against critical industrial and infrastructural objects, fulfil some dual-use functions (such as search and rescue operations, monitoring air and maritime spaces, providing navigation safety, mitigating natural and man-made catastrophes), help academic community in developing Arctic research, and carry some symbolic functions. These new roles, however, do not preclude military power from fulfilling its traditional functions, such as territorial defence, power projection, deterrence, and containment. Russia’s military modernisation programmes are described. The authors arrive at a conclusion that these programmes do not provoke an arms race or undermine the regional cooperation. To prevent negative security trends, a system of arms control and confidence- and security-building measures should be developed in the region.     

Voting Advice Applications and Electoral Participation: A Multi-Method Study

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help users casting a vote by offering an explicit ranking of viable options. The wide amount of readily available information provided by VAAs to users has been shown to contribute to reducing the transactional costs involved in gathering relevant political information. Available evidence also supports the idea that VAA users are more likely to cast a ballot in elections as a result. The extent to which electoral participation is caused by using a VAA, however, remains unclear. Against this background, we reassess the mobilizing effect of VAAs by means of a multi-method approach. Our cross-sectional analysis of 12 national election study data sets provides further support to the idea that VAA usage increases users’ chances of casting a ballot in elections as compared to non-users. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a randomized field experiment conducted in the context of the 2013 Italian parliamentary election.     

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Processes: Influencing Public Performance

Leaders are essential actors in public performance improvement and organizational change. However, a key question has not been adequately addressed in prior literature on the topic: how do leadership processes make a difference? Using data on New York City public schools, this article explores the organizational mechanisms by which a specific form of principal's leadership—transformational leadership—influences objective organizational outcomes as measured by standardized test scores. The empirical results indicate that a principal's transformational leadership style affects student test scores through the mediating effects of purposeful performance information use and stakeholder engagement.     

Process Tracing in Public Administration: The Implications of Practitioner Insights for Methods of Inquiry

The field of public administration is often seen as a late adopter of cutting-edge research methods. Related disciplines like political science use more advanced research methods for single or small-n case studies including techniques like process tracing. Many elements of process tracing are analogous to investigations. To inform process tracing practices, political scientists looked at Sherlock Holmes novels. We draw on the experiences of a police inspector and a former soldier who worked with intelligence to offer insights on the implementation of process tracing, bridge the academic–practitioner gap, and increase the methodological rigor in public administration research.     

The end of alternatives? Capitalist transformation,rural activism and the politics of possibility in China†

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization–urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state’s focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China’s agrifood transformations.     

Regime Responsiveness to Basic Needs: a Dimensional Approach

Despite a considerable amount of research over the last three decades, an unequivocal conclusion regarding democracy’s impact on social outcomes has not been reached. This paper attempts to enhance understanding of the impact of political regimes on social outcomes by applying a dimensional approach. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on the overall effect of democracy, this paper separates the dimension of elite competition from the dimension of popular participation and tests their relative effects on the satisfaction of basic needs. Cross-national statistical tests demonstrate that effective participation has a positive effect on need satisfaction, whereas excessive competition has a negative impact. Theoretical explanations of these different impacts are provided. It is argued that the best way to understand the relationship between democracy and social outcomes is to realize that democracy’s overall effect might conceal the existence of opposing effects of its component parts. This finding suggests more nuanced ways of reforming political systems that bypass the possible trade-off between democratization and social development.     

Searching for voting patterns in post-communist Poland's sejm elections

This article explores associations between participation and party voting and a number of socio-economic variables observed at the voivodship level in Poland's 1993 Sejm elections. It further identifies similarities and differences between the impact of those factors in the 1991 and 1993 elections. The regression estimates indicate that 1993 was not a “reproduction” of 1991. In the most recent election, increases in voting participation accounted for the great upsurge in support for parties of the left, while socio-economic factors were of lesser significance. Moreover, a geographical political cleavage, not previously identified in other voting studies, had an important influence on both participation and party voting.     

Counterinsurgency for wind energy: the Bíi Hioxo wind park in Juchitán,Mexico

Sustainable development and climate change mitigation policies, Dunlap and Fairhead argue, have instigated and renewed old conflicts over land and natural resources, deploying military techniques of counterinsurgency to achieve land control. Wind energy development, a popular tool of climate change mitigation policies, has consequently generated conflict in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Istmo) region in Oaxaca, Mexico. Research is based on participant observation and 20 recorded interviews investigating the Fuerza y Energía Bíi Hioxo Wind Farm on the outskirts of Juchitán de Zaragoza. This paper details the repressive techniques employed by state, private and informal authorities against popular opposition to the construction of the Bíi Hioxo wind park on communal land. Providing background on Juchitán, social property and counterinsurgency in Southern Mexico, this paper analyzes the development of the Bíi Hioxo wind park. It further explores the emergence of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ counterinsurgency techniques used to pacify resistance against the wind park, enabling its completion next to the Lagoon Superior in October 2014. Discussing the ‘greening of counterinsurgency’, this contribution concludes that the Bíi Hioxo wind park has spawned social divisions and violent conflict, and intervened in the sensitive cultural fabric of Istmeño life.