Playing the credit score game: algorithms, ‘positive’ data and the personification of financial objects

This paper is about how people are learning to ‘make themselves up’ in response to the market’s new algorithmic ways of seeing. More specifically, it explores how the self-datafication of informal financial relations is being used to affect the calculation of credit score. I argue that credit score functions as a legal technology of arbitration beset with contradictions that are giving rise to inchoate struggles over the distribution of calculative agency in consumer credit markets. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of credit building peer ‘lending circles’, the paper explores how financially marginalized groups and financial inclusion advocates are reacting to the blind spots and biases of credit-scoring algorithms through compensatory and transgressive data-generation practices.     

Deconstructing naturalization ceremonies as public spectacles of citizenship

ABSTRACT

Naturalizations, unlike inaugurations and national party conventions, are one of the few daily repeated political theatre experiences, replete with monologs, dialogues, costumes, props, actors, stage managers, plural audiences, and staged practices. They serve as a public ritual to render foreigners into members. In so doing, they generate a citizen identity, reinforce the power of the state and confirm a relationship between new citizens, current citizens, and the state. In this article, through an interpretive process including participant-observation and grounded theory approaches, I question the presence, interaction, and roles of the multiple publics (immigrants, observers, civil servants, judges and non-governmental groups) in a naturalization ceremony. I present field notes and reflections from a ‘typical’ US naturalization ceremony. I deconstruct the choreography and structure of the public ritual to show what the public performance of naturalization tells us about what it means to be an American citizen. I explore what messages the state is trying to convey to naturalizing immigrants (and others) through the ritual of the naturalization ceremony. The locus of inquiry is New York City where 70,000 of the 680,000 naturalizations take place every year.     

Reforming sacred institutions,part II: the Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church compared

The Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church are conceptualized as hierocratic institutions that faced analogous challenges of adaptation to a changing world from the 1950s onward. Building upon an earlier publication in Post-Soviet Affairs, this article identifies four strategies of “selective inclusion” chosen by these institutions as their leaders sought to reduce the pre-1950s levels of sectarianism: hierocratic reformism; hierocratic managerialism; messianic revivalism; and anti-hierocratic radicalism. Parallels in the adoption of these strategies, and common features of a legitimacy crisis they both came to face, reveal the causal strength of common features, while possible differences in their institutional durability suggest the likely causal impact of differences between them.     

State of the world 2017: autocratization and exclusion?

This article presents evidence of a global trend of autocratization. The most visible feature of democracy – elections – remains strong and is even improving in some places. Autocratization mainly affects non-electoral aspects of democracy such as media freedom, freedom of expression, and the rule of law, yet these in turn threaten to undermine the meaningfulness of elections. While the majority of the world’s population lives under democratic rule, 2.5 billion people were subjected to autocratization in 2017. Last year, democratic qualities were in decline in 24 countries across the world, many of which are populous such as India and the United States. This article also presents evidence testifying that men and wealthy groups tend to have a strong hold on political power in countries where 86% of the world population reside. Further, we show that political exclusion based on socio-economic status in particular is becoming increasingly severe. For instance, the wealthy have gained significantly more power in countries home to 1.9 billion of the world’s population over the past decade.     

Differential inclusion of non-citizens in a universalistic welfare state

The regulation of legal statuses and differentiation of non-citizens’ rights within the states has become a significant site in the management of migration, yet the actual operations of differential inclusion remain an underexamined issue in the migration research. This article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the differential inclusion of non-citizens and demonstrates the legal hierarchies between non-citizens’ entitlements using Finland as a case study. I argue that in addition to the regulation of residence and the access to labour markets, the unequal access to the welfare system represents a significant sphere of differentiation in the immigration process. Non-citizens’ social entitlements differ depending on the nationality, the type of legal status and the form of employment, affecting their position in the labour markets and in the society. The article highlights the role of immigration law in manipulating the residence status of non-citizens, consequently invalidating the universalism of rights and a residence-based welfare system. Immigration controls, rather than representing a neutral framework of regulation of immigration, function as an institution, which produces conditional subjects and asymmetrical social relations in the sphere of universal citizenship.     

A literary approach to Afro-Sino relations: Ufrieda Ho’s Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa and Ken N. Kamoche’s Black Ghosts

The Afro-Sino engagement supports the study of international relations beyond the framework of a West-centric narrative. Ken Kamoche’s fictionalisation of African immigrants in China, and Ufrieda Ho’s narration of the vicissitudes of Chinese communities in South Africa, contemplate the consequence of the Africa–Asia engagement on the human condition. While the attendant political apparatuses in the African continent and China laud the mutual benefits of engagement, Kamoche and Ho, by focusing on issues of transmigration, displacement and belonging, identity-formation, and so forth expose the acute Sinocentrism and Afrocentrism that impede the seamless establishment of migrant communities in both geopolitical spaces. The principal objectives of this essay involve a close reading of Kamoche and Ho’s novels to focus on the non-state participants of the Afro-Sino relations, and to discuss the emerging transnational, migrant literature that is at once African and Chinese. Ultimately, this essay suggests the formulation of a literary subgenre to embrace the Afro-Sino literary imagination.     

Digital Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities in China Under COVID-19: How Far Has China Come?

This article reviews social regulatory and redistributive policies in China that aim at fostering digital inclusion of persons with disabilities. We examine the emerging Chinese policies and how China has responded to the impacts of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on digital inclusion in terms of redistribution, market regulation, involvement of persons with disabilities and disabled people’s organizations (DPOs), and awareness-raising campaigns. The policy review demonstrates that the Chinese policy framework contains a few redistributive initiatives, for example, cash transfer programs, and free distribution of information and communications technology (ICT). These have the potential to increase the uptake of ICT among persons with disabilities. The Chinese policy framework also includes provisions to ensure consultation with individual persons with disabilities and DPOs in the deliberation and implementation of ICT accessibility policies. While China has initiated awareness-raising campaigns among market actors about the importance of digital inclusion, so far, the Chinese government has adopted little legal regulation of the market to foster accessibility to ICT. The article thus argues that some of the limitations may be due to the way state–market relations have developed since the economy opened up in 1978. Apart from the growing benefits of several cash transfer programs, we have not seen major changes or adjustments to the current policy framework during the efforts to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on digital inclusion.     

Exploring Social Capital: as Concept and Practice in Australian Public Health Policies and Programs

Over the past twenty years interest has grown in the concept of social capital in international and Australian public policy. We explore how social capital is understood as a concept and used in practice for guiding policy development and program delivery in South Australian public health programs. The empirical research compared policy makers’ and practitioners’ understandings of social capital and how theories about social capital and health inequality were translated into practice in three case study projects. It found that there are shifting discourses between social capital and related concepts, including community capacity building, and social inclusion/exclusion. Policy makers reported less use of the concept of social capital in favour of social inclusion/exclusion reflecting changing political and policy environments where terms come into favour and then go out of fashion. In this transition period the two terms are often used interchangeably although there are some conceptual points of difference.     

Two dimensions of democracy and the economy

Does democracy influence economic policymaking and outcomes? Our study investigates the implications of Dahl's two dimensions of democracy (‘polyarchy’): contestation/competition and inclusion/participation. We hypothesize that increases in democratic competition inspire policy incrementalism, thus lowering growth volatility and generating fewer deep crises. Meanwhile, increases in substantive democratic inclusion – genuine political voice, or democratic participation in the presence of a minimum of contestation – should increase the political weight of relatively poor voters, who have a differentially strong aversion to deep growth crises. A statistical analysis of 149 countries for 1961–98 finds greater democracy associated with fewer years of sharply negative growth (‘crisis’), with both democratic contestation and substantive inclusion contributing to this outcome. Our conclusions question the wisdom of designing economic policy institutions that are intentionally insulated from the democratic process.     

Coalition Prospects and Policy Change: An Application to the Environment

In most developed democracies, parties adjust their positions to polls and public opinion. Yet, in a coalition government, the policy that emerges is often the outcome of negotiations between governing parties. We argue that the credibility of exit threats by current coalition members and the importance of outside parties for the formation of potential alternative coalitions both matter for policy adoption. Building on a new data set measuring the expected coalition‐inclusion probabilities of parties in parliamentary democracies, we estimate the effect of coalition prospects on an important policy outcome—environmental policy stringency—in nine European countries between 1990 and 2012. Our findings demonstrate that only polling shifts that alter coalition probabilities affect outcomes. Changes in the coalition‐inclusion probability of green parties—regardless of whether they are in government—predict changes in the environmental policy stringency of sitting governments. Political polls, in contrast, do not.