Dworkin on external skepticism and moral permissions

This article discusses Ronald Dworkin’s first objection against what he calls external moral skepticism, the view that denies truth-value to moral judgments. According to that objection, an external skeptic denies that substantive moral judgments can be true. But, at the same time, the objection goes, what follows from the skeptical view is that all actions are morally permissible, which is in itself a substantive moral judgment. We call this ‘the self-defeating argument.’ We argue that the objection’s success depends on how we interpret the idea of moral permission, an issue Dworkin does not clearly resolve. Against his objection, we advance two different arguments. First, once we learn what role the idea of moral permission plays in morality, we can see that any plausible view of some agent’s moral permission must acknowledge its complex character, and that the existence of a moral permission must have some impact on the balance of moral reasons for other agents. On this understanding, it is false that it follows solely from external skepticism that everything is permissible. Second, we argue that even if permissions have a simple character, not a complex one, they are plausible only when framed within a moral constellation of rights and obligations. So understood, it is, again, false that it follows from external skepticism that everything is permissible.     

Re-thinking urban citizenship for immigrants from a policy perspective: the case of Barcelona

This article proposes that the role of cities in immigrant integration be reconsidered through the prism of urban citizenship, looking at how local policies co-regulate immigrants’ status, rights and identity. It argues that urban citizenship connects two dominant understandings of citizenship, as city governments are under pressure to reconcile the normative perspective of formal membership of the state with the claims for rights expressed by excluded parts of the urban citizenry. A case study of an inclusive way of regulating citizenship in Barcelona illustrates how a citizenship perspective can cast light on the specific ways in which cities regulate immigrant citizenship in interaction with higher levels of government, and highlights some of the levers cities possess to modify the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion of immigrants locally.     

Governance and transnational civil society: the problem of transnational rent-seeking

The expansion of transnational civil society challenges the regulatory reach of nation-states, both individually and collectively. One regulatory challenge is that transnational civil society organizations (TCSOs) can avail of opportunities to engage in, or facilitate, transnational rent-seeking in ways which benefit a small group of organizations or individuals but which impose significant social costs. This article suggests that certain roles played by TCSOs lend themselves to rent-seeking behaviour and it explores the hypothesis that TCSOs can engage in, or facilitate, transnational rent-seeking where they constitute transnational special interests and/or private transnational authorities. To this end, the article outlines a brief theoretical framework and applies it to case studies of two TCSOs, representing transnational trade associations and industry lobbies, and sports associations and regulators. While the conclusions here are tentative, the article argues for further research including refinement of the theoretical framework and empirical testing.     

Accountability and global governance: The view from paternalism

A standard view is that global governance institutions require strong accountability mechanisms to perform effectively and legitimately. Yet these institutions are much better at preaching than practicing accountability. A standard explanation for this gap references interests. For various reasons, institutions and their creators would rather be less than more accountable, and they are quite content to live with the hypocrisy. This article points to an alternative possibility: the public interest. An article of faith is that modern governance should be staffed by relatively autonomous experts who use their specialized knowledge for the greater good; accordingly, they cannot be accountable to those who are affected by their decisions. Too much democracy, therefore, can be a source of dysfunction. Yet expert authority's virtues also can become vices; namely, insulation from those affected by their decisions can also be a source of dysfunction, most closely associated with the “iron cage.” Although the possibility that expertise is both a virtue (effectiveness) and a vice (dysfunction) is well known in the literature on domestic governance, it has been neglected in discussions of global governance. Indeed, the dangers of, and dysfunctions associated with the iron cage might be greater in global governance than in domestic governance precisely because of the absence of institutional checks that often are produced by a preexisting social contract between the rulers and the ruled. I probe this possibility in the area of humanitarian governance.     

Global Assemblages of Security Governance and Contemporary International Intervention

ABSTRACT

This article draws from the concept of assemblages in order to examine the component parts of contemporary international interventions. It argues that in contrast mainstream analyses of statebuilding and peacebuilding, as well as more critical treatments that tie interventions to the concept of 'international order', the concept of assemblages offers a more compelling vantage point from which to examine the disparate lines of forces that make up modern-day interventions. The article proposes an exploration of some of the component parts that sustain the current assemblage of governance, security, and international intervention and draws our attention to their self-sustaining rationalities.     

Dysfunctional institutions? Toward a New Agenda in Governance Studies

There is a wide‐spread perception among academics and commentators that institutional dysfunction has become increasingly common in important social, political, and economics arenas. Opinion polls show a decline in trust and confidence in major actors and institutions, including inter‐governmental organizations, governments, firms, NGOs, and religious organizations. For some, the core of the problem is that the hitherto well‐functioning states have become less effective in aggregating and acting upon citizens' preferences. Many policy initiatives of the 1990s – deregulation, privatization, new public management, private regulation, regional integration, civil society, and so on – seemed to have failed to meet expectations. This symposium seeks to identify important theoretical and empirical questions about institutional failure, such as why do institutions fail, why are they not self‐correcting, what might be a clear evaluative yardstick and analytic approach by which to measure performance, and to what extent contemporary theories of institutional evolution and design are useful in examining institutional restructuring and institutional renewal? Symposium essays by leading social science scholars offer important insights to inform future work on institutional performance and outline an agenda for institutional renewal and change.     

Picking battles: Correctional officers,rules, and discretion in prison

To outsiders, prisons vacillate between visions of regimented order and anarchic disorder. The place of rules in prison sits at the fulcrum between these two visions of regulation. Based on 131 qualitative interviews with correctional officers across four different prisons in western Canada, we examine how correctional officers understand and exercise discretion in prison. Our findings highlight how an officer's habitus shapes individual instances of discretionary decision‐making. We show how officers modify how they exercise discretion in light of their views on how incarcerated people, fellow officers, and supervisors will interpret their decisions. Although existing research often sees a correlation between “rule‐following” by incarcerated individuals and official statistics on such misdeeds, our data highlight that official statistics on rule violations do not easily represent the rate or frequency of such misbehavior. Instead, these numbers are highly discretionary organizational accomplishments. Our findings advance an appreciation for correctional officer discretion by focusing on the range of factors officers might contemplate in forward‐looking decisions about applying a rule and how they rationalize the nonenforcement of rules.     

习近平法治思想:新时代伟大社会革命的理论产物

习近平法治思想的创立,是马克思主义法治思想中国化进程的第三次历史性飞跃。在中华民族迎来了从站起来、富起来到强起来的伟大飞跃的历史进程中,习近平法治思想应运而生。面对着新时代具有许多新的历史特点的伟大斗争,习近平法治思想深刻回答了在中国这样一个超大型的东方大国为什么实行全面依法治国、怎样实行全面依法治国这一重大时代课题,为新时代伟大社会革命中的全面依法治国、建设法治中国、推进国家治理现代化提供了科学指南。     

Vertical party integration: informal and human linkages between elections in a Canadian province

Examining multi-level vertical party linkages in Canada’s largest province, this paper makes two primary contributions to the literature. First, drawing on data from a unique survey of constituency associations, the paper focuses on an often unexplored aspect of parties: their local organisations. Second, the paper offers an exploratory analysis of constituency level factors in order to determine which types of constituency associations are the most likely to be integrated. The results of the logistic regression demonstrate the possibility of non-party-based factors such as electoral strength that may contribute to vertical party integration.     

“Bad enough governance”: state capacity and quality of institutions in post-Soviet autocracies

This article contributes to current discussions on state capacity, quality of institutions, and political regimes. Our analysis demonstrates that the J-curve argument (“good institutions” in autocracies as compared to hybrid and transitional regimes) may not be generic and is not well supported by empirical evidence from the sample of post-Soviet countries. An explanatory model of the “King of the Mountain” is instead provided. Its focus is on the monopoly of political rent as a precondition for extraction of economic rent. It demonstrates an inverse correlation between the quality of institutions and the extraction of political and economic rent, and explains why an autocrat may not have an incentive to improve institutions that may make his/her monopoly vulnerable, and rather would prefer to preserve a low quality of institutions and “bad enough governance.” An analysis of a variety of external and domestic factors that may endanger this monopoly is provided. Finally, the autocrat's alternative strategic choices are analyzed. It is argued that better payoffs for the autocrat – paradoxically – may result from partial reforms and improvement of the quality of institutions. However, for various reasons, this is not occurring in post-Soviet autocracies.