Determining ‘truth’ at the border: immigration interviews,Chinese marital migrants,and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmas

As Taiwan transitions from an immigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country, it struggles to build an immigration bureaucracy while its status as a sovereign nation-state is not recognized by much of the international community. Taiwan's largest immigrant group, marital migrants from China, are perceived as posing the greatest challenges to border control due to longstanding political tensions between the two countries and governmental and societal suspicions about Chinese spouses' marital motives. Based on research conducted with immigration officials and during immigration interviews at the border, this article interrogates the status of ‘truth’ in official efforts to determine definitively immigrants' marital intentions. It analyzes such truth demands in relation to Taiwan's anxieties about its national standing and the ability of an immigration bureaucracy to generate ‘sovereignty effects’.     

Legitimacy through targeted transparency? Regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimate and accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with the democratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solution to increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulation regime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining it and complying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency‐based regulatory regimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as a legitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Do stakeholders perceive the transparency‐based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form of regulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency and proposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluate the legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374 stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The findings describe a transparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizens criticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register's performance as a transparency instrument. The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups about supranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benefits of transparency, but identify few organisation‐level benefits. Organisations that are policy insiders incur more transparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategies and does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in the Register's regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfect regulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support increased transparency and information disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’ participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountable and legitimate supranational lobbying.     

No right to unilaterally claim your territory: on the consistency of Kantian statism

The paper examines the consistency of recent Kantian justifications of state authority through reflection on the normative implications of states’ territorial nature. I claim that their conceptual structure leaves these accounts unable to close the justificatory gap that emerges at the transition from legitimate authority simpliciter, to legitimate state authority. None of the strategies Kantian statists have come up with in order to solve this problem – based on the proximity, occupancy and permissive principles – provides the needed grounds on which to carve up the earth’s surface into jurisdictional domains. Yet, I conclude that this does not require Kantians to cede statist grounds altogether but to take a distinctly ‘global perspective’ on states.     

The Authority–Identity Relation: Symbolic References and Interpretative Authority in Postwar Kosovo

In postwar Kosovo, international and Kosovar political actors claiming authority in the democratization and statebuilding process lacked a long-standing ‘authoritative relation’ with each other and the citizenry. To analyse the structural conditions for the emergence of political authority, the article suggests applying the analytical framework of ‘interpretative authority’, which captures the relational character and simultaneity of authority generation by international and Kosovar actors. Given that Kosovo had unsecured symbolic conditions for authority – no commonly shared symbols of unity for all communities and no commonly agreed interpreter of symbols of unity – political actors were competing intensely for the identity and symbolizations of the ‘new’ Kosovo in their attempts to gain authority in various institutional opportunity structures. The competition over authority and the attempts to denationalize public communications made by the international administration, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), led to the reimbursement of particularistic symbolic references of Kosovar actors, thereby keeping the unsecured symbolic conditions and the weakness of interpretative political authority in Kosovo stable.     

Celebrity-led development organisations: the legitimating function of elite engagement

The past decade has seen a frontier open up in international development engagement with the entrance of new actors such as celebrity-led organisations. We explore how such organisations earn legitimacy with a focus on Madonna’s Raising Malawi and Ben Affleck’s Eastern Congo Initiative. The study draws from organisational materials, interviews, mainstream news coverage, and the texts of the celebrities themselves to investigate the construction of authenticity, credibility, and accountability. We find these organisations earn legitimacy and flourish rapidly amid supportive elite networks for funding, endorsements, and expertise. We argue that the ways in which celebrity-led organisations establish themselves as legitimate development actors illustrate broader dynamics of the machinery of development.     

Identity,procedures and performance: how authoritarian regimes legitimize their rule

ABSTRACT

Constructing convincing legitimacy claims is important for securing the stability of authoritarian regimes. However, extant research has struggled to systematically analyse how authoritarians substantiate their right to rule. We analyse a novel data set on authoritarian regimes’ claims to legitimacy that is based on leading country experts’ assessments of 98 states for the period 1991–2010. This analysis provides key new insights into the inner workings and legitimation strategies of current non-democratic regimes. Closed authoritarian regimes predominately rely on identity-based legitimacy claims (foundational myth, ideology and personalism). In contrast, elections fundamentally change how authoritarian rulers relate to society. In their legitimacy claims, electoral authoritarian regimes focus on their ‘adequate’ procedures, thereby mimicking democracies. All regimes also stress their purported success in proving material welfare and security to their citizens.     

中国基层执法中的相机选择:从策略赋权到话语使用

在基层执法领域,纵向与横向部门之间的推诿、执法队伍与执法相对人之间的冲突,都是相关主体对于行政执法权采取相机选择策略的结果。既有研究局限于末端执法行为及其影响因素,将执法机构的权力配置视为"默认设置"项,忽视了初始权力配置对于执法策略选择的影响。行政执法权的选择性执行包括垂直互动关系中执法权的选择性下放,水平互动关系中执法主体间的选择性协同,以及政社互动关系中执法队伍与相对人对合法性话语的选择性利用。在垂直互动维度上,乡镇政府的赋权诉求与县级执法部门的控权惯性共同塑造出权能有限的乡镇综合执法机构,从而为基层执法权的运行设置了初始条件。在水平互动维度中,受制于条块结构约束和政府科层制特性,不同执法队伍之间缺乏具有约束力的协作机制,促使横向执法协作流于形式。在政社互动方面,党政体制所依赖的两套合法性话语,即伦理化的"人民政治话语"与理性化的"法制话语"之间的张力,塑造了乡镇执法权的名实分离取向,是文明执法诉求与暴力抗法实践两张皮现象的结构化动因。对于基层执法领域相机选择的三维互动分析,突出强调了初始权力配置与党政体制合法性话语对执法行为的重要影响,可以拓展和深化现有的基层执法行为研究。     

历史政治学的功能分析

历史政治学的提出引发了中国政治学界的广泛关注。作为一种新型研究路径的历史政治学不但具有客观的分析主义特征,而且和其它政治理论的研究路径一样,还具有鲜明的功能主义特征。历史政治学首先回答了政治理论的知识来源问题,从而为建构中国自主性政治学知识体系提供了可能。基于政治学取向的政治史研究有助于避免因“文化转向”而导致的历史研究的碎片化问题,这意味着历史政治学研究既追求“真相”也关怀“真理”。历史政治学的知识功能自然有其政治实践价值,那就是为治国理政提供历史解释与现实论述,并为认识合法性政治提供一套不同于理性人假设的历时性方案。     

Gender tropes and colonial discourses in the turbulence of global finance

This article seeks to prick the pretension of neutrality and objectivity in finance as a knowledge construct and regime of power. It does this by focusing on how constructions of risk, the deployment of ‘otherizing’ discourses and, importantly, the mobilization of gender and colonial tropes assisted(s) not only in the normalization of financial practices but also the imperial order of Western-derived financial governance institutions as well.     

Dynamics of NGO legitimacy: how organising betrays core missions of INGOs

International non‐governmental organisations (INGOs) are prominent actors in the international arena, aiming to improve the life of disadvantaged people. However, INGOs often do not succeed in doing this. Consequently, INGO legitimacy is regularly questioned. Increased transparency and tightened accountability mechanisms are often‐mentioned solutions to this problem. Based on an analysis of four dimensions of INGO legitimacy—normative, regulatory, cognitive and output legitimacy—we argue that this is not necessarily adequate. We conclude that INGO mission statements create a normative source of legitimacy, but that this, in itself, is not enough to ground INGO legitimacy: it also needs to be institutionalised and organised. However, as a result of power relations and resulting pressures for accountability and transparency, as defined by their external stakeholders, INGOs experience a permanent struggle to reconcile their mission with the requirements for regulatory, cognitive and output legitimacy. The more these stakeholders press for increased organisation of INGO work, the more the pursuit of the core objectives of INGOs is obstructed. We illustrate this argument with the case of the post‐Tsunami humanitarian intervention (2004/2005). Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.