Political Ambivalence as Praxis: The Limits of Consensus in Habermas's Theory of the Public Sphere

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermasian approach by drawing from sociological theories of ambivalence found in the work of Simmel, Bauman and Ko?akowski. While the theme of ambivalence is not completely absent from Habermas’s work on the public sphere, it is typically described as a structural consequence of contradiction rather than a form of action that is capable of working with and around inconsistencies in ethics, knowledge and social values. This allows for participation to be sustained through contradiction, rather than being withdrawn in frustration, while also encouraging open-minded judgements capable of avoiding forms of fanaticism.     

Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions

A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011–2013. Two key findings extend previous work. First, voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a ‘coalition heuristic’ as a rule-of-thumb. These findings imply that under some conditions voters are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.     

The subjective and objective violence of terrorism: analysing “British values” in newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack

This article examines how ?i?ek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalisation of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press' coverage.     

Entsicherte Verhältnisse – (Un)Möglichkeiten fürsorglicher Praxis

Starting point of the article are the upheavals of employment relationships in modern, post-Fordist societies. These are characterised by the increasing relevance of efficiency in social lives because of blurring boundaries between paid work and private life or growing processes of precariousness through uncertainties of social regulation. The author argues that these processes are accompanied by shifting conflicts between paid work and private care responsibilities, which are still oriented at the Fordist gendered division of work and gender classification but should not be seen as a simple repetition of those. By presenting three case studies from an empirical research project on the retail trade in Brandenburg and Berlin, specific problems of the reconciliation between paid work and private care as well as ways to solve these are analysed. The article ends with a discussion whether (often forced) changes in life style open some (often precarious) capabilities for questioning the gendered division of labour which has been formerly taken for granted.     

Wirtschaftspolitischer Handlungsspielraum im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Eine empirische Untersuchung am Beispiel von Währungskrisen

This article assesses the popular view that currency crises represent a prime example of the constraints that globalization imposes on governments’ policy autonomy. We show that governments in fact have the possibility to respond to speculative pressure in different ways. Whether or not policymakers succumb to this pressure is not solely determined by economic factors but also a question of political considerations. Political preferences, institutions, and events significantly affect policy responses to currency crises. Our results suggest that national governments retain substantial short-run policy autonomy even in highly internationalized policy areas such as monetary and exchange rate policy.     

Amerikanische Außenpolitik im Zeichen des „Krieges gegen den Terror“

The review article systematizes the current academic debate on U. S. foreign policy after 9/11. The main focus lies on different explanations of the causes and consequences of the “war on terror”. Such a problem-oriented approach mirrors the heterogeneity of the debate which cannot adequately be captured by the conventional categories of IR research and foreign policy analysis. It is fair to say that the analysis of U. S. foreign policy as a case of empirical investigation profits from this disciplinary emancipation.     

Zwischen Macht und Gerechtigkeit

The nuclear nonproliferation regime is an amazing success story: The number of countries which have stopped nuclear weapons activities in various stages of progress is much larger than the number of nuclear weapon states. At the apex of its success, however, the regime is threatened by erosion from two different directions: A small number of rule-breakers and outsiders undermines its central objective: to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. The refusal of the official nuclear weapon states to fulfill their undertaking of nuclear disarmament violates the principle of justice enshrined in the treaty, and thereby destroys its legitimacy. This insight has meanwhile expanded beyond the group of stubborn disarmers into the mainstream security establishment. How successful this expansion will be will determine the future of the regime — with far-reaching consequences for global security.     

Bildung und die „neue“ Sozialdemokratie: eine Analyse aus der Sicht der vergleichenden Staatsausgabenforschung

The rhetoric of “reformed” social democracy has emphasized education and investment in human capital formation since the 1990s. Nevertheless, scholarly accounts of social democratic government policies have neglected the study of education politics. This article addresses the question of whether the move from traditional to reformist social democracy can be traced in the analysis of public social and education spending in the 1980s and 1990s. I show that government participation of social democrats went along with increases in social transfer spending in the 1980s, whereas in the 1990s, social democrats have instead increased spending on education, and higher education in particular, and curtailed spending on social transfers. The final section of the article discusses the implications of these findings for the future development of partisan theory.