Identifying with the Nation: Spain's Left-Wing Citizens in an Age of Crisis

This study analyses the extent, sense, and strategies employed by sympathisers with Spanish state-wide left-wing parties to ‘reconstruct’ their affective ties with the Spanish nation after the ‘monopolisation of patriotism’ by Franco's regime. Such an undertaking is further complicated within the context of economic crisis and intensified peripheral nationalism found in Catalonia and the Basque Country. This article applies qualitative analysis to the discourse of left-wing participants from 11 focus groups held in March 2012 amidst the economic (and political) crisis. As expected, this context of crisis favoured the emergence of explicit discourse on the Spanish nation, providing an opportunity to gain a better understanding of its nature. Findings show that welfare nationalism and social patriotism define the kind of attachment developed by the interviewees towards Spain better than the concept of constitutional patriotism, or any kind of ethnic-cultural feeling of belonging.     

Class war-on-terror: counterterrorism,accumulation, crisis

This article discusses US counterterrorism from a class perspective. It sees counterterrorism as a state policy with differential effects on different social classes. In doing so, the article starts to address a lacuna in critical studies of counterterrorism, which tend to be rather structural and formal, thus ignoring the pertinence of counterterrorism to the field of social dynamics. To partly rectify this blind spot by addressing some class implications of counterterrorism, the article examines the effects of counterterrorism policy on capital accumulation and its social conditions. It notes that counterterrorism has different implications along class-lines: for dominant capital, it signifies appropriation of public money and direct participation in political decisions; for everyone else, it means material dispossession and political exclusion. Given that counterterrorism was developed between two crises of neoliberalism, the article distinguishes between economic crises, which tend to benefit capitalism, and political crises, which can be destructive, and suggests that counterterrorism is partly a restructuring of the neoliberal state so that it can manage recurring economic crises, while preventing their evolution into political ones.     

论社会资本的社会性——布迪厄社会资本理论的再澄清与再阐释

社会资本研究沿着关系效用的逻辑发展,只关注其经济性,而遮蔽其社会性,这违背了布迪厄提出资本理论以破解结构与能动二元对立的初衷。资本是结构和能动视角的双重蓄能,社会资本不仅仅是人与人的关系问题,更是人与群的互动问题,社会资本不能仅仅被理解为个体层次的关系资本,而是源于占据了一个熟识关系制度化的社会网络,其网络身份让个人可以借用集体共有的资本和信用。社会网络的社会性即在于网络整体的不可化约性,网络整合人,人也同时占据网络。徐福敦另立门户的例子具体阐释了社会资本如何在道德化、制度化和总体化的过程中进行积累即再生产的。     

Human (In)Security and Democracy in Central America

Human security has increasingly shifted attention to the individual, while the state has become guarantor (or violator) of security given its role in governing the domestic environment. This article examines how variations in regime forms influence security, pointing to the importance of political security in the wider human security framework. To illustrate, the article examines the nature of political security in Central America, a region with weakly democratized states and histories of political violence. The findings suggest a link between democracy and human security that is mediated by state capacity and the ability to control non-state violence against individuals.     

“对赌协议”的裁判路径及政策选择——基于PE/VC与公司对赌场景的分析

PE/VC与目标公司对赌的司法裁判要点从合同效力转入合同可履行性后,需要面对两个层次的追问:一是以什么样的实体标准来判断履行障碍,二是由谁来判断是否存在履行障碍。华工案和"九民纪要"仅处理了第一个层次的问题,且主要以资本维持原则作为实体判断标准。然而,我国现行公司法资本维持原则过于粗疏,且缺乏"大分配"概念和底线规制的思路,导致"对赌协议"下的回购只能通过减资的途径,徒增成本。域外以清偿能力标准替代资本维持原则,体现了另一种以债权人利益为导向限制公司资产单向流出至股东的规制思路,但其商业逻辑上的合理性却无法掩盖更大的操作成本。就第二层次的判断主体而言,以美国特拉华州为代表,法官的商业判断逐渐让位于公司董事会的商业判断,却进一步凸显了公司、不同类别股东、债权人之间利益冲突的复杂状态。立法层面的价值判断与政策选择将最终决定司法裁判的走向,未来我国公司法的修订需要回应商业实践的诉求,同时PE/VC投资者也需要直面投资失败的风险承担。     

Evaluating the cross-national comparability of survey measures of political interest using anchoring vignettes

Making cross-groups comparisons by using survey instruments has raised substantial scholarly concerns due to the potential risk of incomparability resulting from differential item functioning (DIF). However, not every survey item necessarily suffers from DIF. In this paper, we argue that, unlike many other survey items (e.g., political efficacy), the usual question used to measure political interest is likely to be largely immune to DIF. Our theoretical argument centers on the relative specificity of the item and a corresponding cultural homogeneity (at least in advanced democracies) in what it means to be politically interested or not. Utilizing the anchoring vignettes technique (King et al., 2004; King and Wand, 2007) in our original surveys in the UK, France, and the Netherlands, we demonstrate the size of DIF is small for the standard political interest question.     

From voter ID to party ID: How political parties affect perceptions of election fraud in the U.S.

This paper uses a survey experiment to assess what individuals understand about election fraud and under what circumstances they see it as a problem. I argue that political parties are central to answering both these questions. Results from the 2011 CCES survey suggest respondents are able to differentiate between the relative incentives of Democrats and Republicans where fraud tactics are concerned, but whether voters see these tactics as problematic is heavily influenced by partisan bias. The results show little support for the notion that partisan ideology drives fraud assessments, and suggest support for the idea that individual concerns for fraud are shaped a desire for their preferred candidate to win. These results offer insights that might be applied more broadly to questions of perceptions of electoral integrity and procedural fairness in democracies.     

Political participation in Africa: The role of individual resources

This paper aims to examine the role of individual resources in explaining African political participation. If political participation is costly and requires inputs in terms of individual resources, and citizens in young developing country democracies face comparatively high participation costs and have more limited individual resource endowments than citizens in more established democracies, a resource approach to political participation should be particularly relevant in the African setting. On the contrary, however, empirical findings drawing on recent data for more than 27,000 respondents in 20 emerging African democracies suggest weak explanatory power of the resource perspective. Often, the relatively resource poor actually participate to a greater extent than the more resource rich. The results are encouraging in that they suggest fairly broad-based political participation, but also call attention to the need to evaluate the motivational forces behind the decision to take part.     

Expected utility or learned familiarity? The formation of voters' coalition preferences

In most modern parliamentary democracies, it is unlikely that single party governments will be formed, meaning that a voter's preferred party presumably has to share cabinet offices and negotiate policy compromises in a coalition government. This raises the question of how voters evaluate potential (coalition) governments, especially since recent studies have shown that coalition preferences influence voting behaviour. In this paper, we combine theories of voting behaviour, government formation and political learning to derive expectations regarding the factors that may impact voters' coalition preferences. We test our hypotheses by analysing survey data from the German federal and state levels. The results of a mixed logit regression analysis support our arguments: Voters' coalition preferences not only depend on the perceived policy distance between the positions of voters and the most distant party within combinations of parties, but also on predominant patterns of government formation.