Towards Robust Hybrid Democracy in Scandinavian Municipalities?

This article calls for the development of democratic hybrids that combine elements of representative democracy with elements of participatory and deliberative democracy. It presents and evaluates an empirical model of hybrid democracy from a Danish municipality and tests whether the positive Danish experiences can be transferred to a Norwegian municipality with less favorable local conditions. The finding is that the hybrid model of democracy is relatively robust in the face of context variation, not least due to conducive local dynamics in the Norwegian case. The relative robustness of the so‐called ‘Gentofte model’ may stimulate its diffusion in countries sharing key elements of the Scandinavian model and inspire municipalities in other countries to experiment with the development of hybrid democracy. The diffusion of hybrid democracy helps to enhance the overall performance of local democracy and reduce the inherent tension between democratic leadership and democratic equality.     

Pigeonholing Partisans: Stereotypes of Party Supporters and Partisan Polarization

Political Behavior - What comes to mind when people think about rank-and-file party supporters? What stereotypes do people hold regarding ordinary partisans, and are these views politically...     

“Good Deeds Aren’t Enough”: Point Four in Iran, 1949–1953

Iran enjoyed some of the earliest fruits and efforts of the Point Four programme, an initiative borne out of President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address. Over the last decade, a robust literature on development theory and American foreign policy has emerged. That research reveals complex motivations and agendas. Point Four in Iran, specifically, offers a discrete, early picture of America’s broader effort to utilise technical assistance to elevate poor peoples’ standards of living and inoculate poor states from communist appeals. It is one of the landmark programmes during this genesis period. The Iranian government was amongst the first that the State Department approached to establish technical aid under this initiative, and, indeed, American aid to Iran continued into the 1970s. By mid-1953, however, larger and more direct aid absorbed this specific assistance and development effort to bolster the shah’s government, which gained secure power after an American Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence—MI6—backed coup that same year. Scholars have argued that Truman’s foreign aid innovations reshaped United States foreign policy. The Point Four programme in Iran, however, also reveals the limits of that revolution.     

Expert intervention: knowledge,violence and identity during the Algerian crisis, 1997–1998

Civil wars and humanitarian intervention became two of the most dominant security concerns of the 1990s and Algeria was one of the many sites where these discourses were played out, especially during the wave of massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of Algerian civilians between mid-1997 and early 1998. The internationalization of the Algerian Civil War was driven as much by the horrific violence as by a lack of certainty as to the identity of those perpetrating the massacres. The indeterminacy of violence in Algeria provided the warrant for experts to fill the void. Yet interpretations of the violence in Algeria, coupled with the generic logics of intra-national armed conflicts and the use of international coercive force for the protection of human rights, produced divergent problematizations of the crisis. This paper thus examines the ways in which Algeria was, and often was not, produced as a civil war and a humanitarian crisis by expert and scholarly knowledge and practice. Through an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the dominant understandings of political violence in Algeria, we are able to understand the conceptual impasse that faced international action against the massacres.     

Averted targeted school killings from 1900-2016

Mass shootings, particularly those that occur on school grounds, often generate intense political debate. Following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School, questions arose on how to prevent these tragedies. Typically, the response generated from these questions revolves around mental illness, bullying prevention, and gun control. Unfortunately, the views on these topics, especially gun control, are often rooted in a strong belief system which is unwavering. Resultantly, the debate on how to avert these incidents often stops at the debate phase. This study sought to better understand how these events can be prevented by examining targeted school killings from 1900–2016 in which the suspect was stopped before the attack. The analysis revealed that the majority of attacks were prevented by other students reporting the threat of an impending attack to school and law enforcement authorities.