Authoritative Actors Research Articles

“The man, the administration and the counter-discourse”: An analysis of the sudden turn in Dutch nature conservation policy

The Netherlands were at the forefront of European nature conservation policy until recently. For years, a stable ‘social contract’ around Dutch nature conservation existed. To the surprise of many, this stability suddenly disappeared and Dutch nature policy has taken a dramatic shift with changing discourses on nature conservation, the halting of implementation of several key-policies and budget cuts up to 70%. This paper engages with discursive-institutionalism to understand such abrupt institutional changes through emerging ideas and discourses that reshape and undermine existing institutional arrangements. We show how the institutionalization of policy not only engendered but also restricted the impact of critical discourses in the 1990s and 2000s. However, critical discourses eventually played an important role in the sudden turn in nature conservation policy. The rise of a general populist discourse and the economic crisis contributed to the credibility of critical discourses and their translation into popular frames and storylines. Authoritative actors such as a new State Secretary opened up popular media for the critical discourses and contributed to their resonance among larger audiences. As such, the man and his new administration successfully used already existing counter-discourses to de-legitimise nature policy and break down important institutional arrangements at a pace unseen in Dutch politics. Adding a discursive element to institutionalism provides for analytical tools to understand change from both external as well as internal forces. In turn, enriching discourse theory with insights from neo-institutionalism helps to evaluate which ideas and discourses become materialized in policy and practice.

REFORMA AGRARIA: MOMENTUM KEADILAN DAN KESEJAHTERAAN

At least there were two types of political events at the time of the implementation of agrarian reform in Indonesia, in both the process and practice. However, both events were not adequately used. As a result, the justice and welfare for poor Indonesian farmers were not yet fulfilled. The opportunity should be gained in order to implement the agrarian reform by the authoritative actor assisted by an institution various social sheltering social forces. Key words: agrarian reform, political momentum, agrarian justice

Who Gets on the News? The relation between media biases and different actors in news reporting on complex policy processes

Having a voice in media is important to gain power and legitimacy in policy processes. However, media are biased in transmitting information. Using a quantitative content analysis of ten years’ news reporting around water management policies in the Netherlands, we study how much media attention different groups of actors receive and how media biases relate to this attention. Executive politicians get on the news because of their authoritative position; less authoritative actors getting on the news is more related to information biases. Information biases can thus function as a form of checks and balances in news reporting on policy processes.

Cultivating “Postmodern Citizens”? Reflections on the New Trends of Education in Taiwan

The institutionalist theory of world polity advanced by John W. Meyer and his colleagues provides us an insightful analytical tool to understand the ontological basis of the contemporary world constituted by nation-states and citizens, both of which are constructed through the rationalization process of modernity. However, does this theory still hold in a so-called postmodern or global era, in which the foundations of nation-states are said to be undermined? Are nation-states still the major authoritative actors in world polity? Does education as the main institution for social reproduction still produce reliable citizens for nation-states? This paper uses Taiwan as an illustrative case to explore the above questions. The author makes two arguments. First, the recent trends of education in Taiwan, epitomized in the so-called “chaos of educational reform,” are in part a reflection of the “postmodern condition” resultant from Taiwan’s national question. Taiwan’s abnormal status qua a nation-state can be viewed as an “ethnomethodoligical case” that demonstrates the resilience of institutional structures of world polity. In other words, the ontological principles that legitimate nation-states (on the collective level) and citizens (on the individual level) as constitutive members of world polity remain steadfast despite the impacts of globalization. Second, however, we have also observed in Taiwan new trends in education that may eventually undermine the rational foundation of such structures. The new trends in education can be characterized as “postmodern” for two reasons: first, due to its abnormal status qua a nation-state, metanarratives of nationalism can hardly hold in Taiwan; as a result, there is an overall incredulity towards metanarratives in Taiwan’s educational system, where instead instabilities and dissensions are prominent features. Secondly, during the educational reform in the past two decades, postmodernism has been both implicitly and explicitly promoted in education. In addition to a variety of postmodern scenes that can be characterized as Disney-zation of education, we have observed a tendency of moral indifference towards ethical principles and civic virtues in students. While we may call these new subjects thus cultivated “postmodern citizens,” their impacts on the future of institutional structures of the modern world are yet to be explored.

Discovering Knowledge-Sharing Communities in Question-Answering Forums

In this article, we define a knowledge-sharing community in a question-answering forum as a set of askers and authoritative users such that, within each community, askers exhibit more homogeneous behavior in terms of their interactions with authoritative users than elsewhere. A procedure for discovering members of such a community is devised. As a case study, we focus on Yahoo! Answers, a large and diverse online question-answering service. Our contribution is twofold. First, we propose a method for automatic identification of authoritative actors in Yahoo! Answers. To this end, we estimate and then model the authority scores of participants as a mixture of gamma distributions. The number of components in the mixture is determined using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), while the parameters of each component are estimated using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This method allows us to automatically discriminate between authoritative and nonauthoritative users. Second, we represent the forum environment as a type of transactional data such that each transaction summarizes the interaction of an asker with a specific set of authoritative users. Then, to group askers on the basis of their interactions with authoritative users, we propose a parameter-free transaction data clustering algorithm which is based on a novel criterion function. The identified clusters correspond to the communities that we aim to discover. To evaluate the suitability of our clustering algorithm, we conduct a series of experiments on both synthetic data and public real-life data. Finally, we put our approach to work using data from Yahoo! Answers which represent users’ activities over one full year.

Document collections, mobilized regulations, and the making of customary law at the end of the Middle Ages

Using late medieval examples from Switzerland, this paper argues that the emergence of formally organized archives around 1500 was part of an important shift in how documents could be deployed. However, this shift was not away from an oral and toward a literate culture, as argued in some earlier studies, but rather away from seeing documents as testimony that reminded a community about past authoritative actors, and toward relating the texts of documents to other texts, that is, to contexts. This shift took place largely through the appropriation of methods for using and organizing written material that had been developed in the realms of scholastic theology and liturgy, and applying them to secular lordship and administration. These methods provided new models for organizing collections of parchments and papers into connected archives and gave rise to new forms of text collection such as reorganized versions of law books (Spiegel, Coutumiers) containing new search tools such as tables of contents (capitulationes) and indices (abecedaria). Individual charters and scattered legal norms were also organized into textus–glossae structures in larger and smaller administrative units. In the Swiss case, the contextualization of legal texts was accompanied by an increased attribution of authority to ‘custom’ in general, because the community-oriented attribution of meaning found in earlier use was lost. Ultimately, recasting individual documents as part of larger textual contexts increased the power of rulers and ushered in an age of lawyers and of archives.

Disasters, Lessons Learned, and Fantasy Documents

This article develops a general theory of why post‐disaster ‘lessons learned’ documents are often ‘fantasy documents’. The article describes the political and organizational barriers to effective learning from disasters, and builds on general theory building on learning from extreme events to explain this phenomenon. Fantasy documents are not generally about the ‘real’ causes and solutions to disasters; rather, they are generated to prove that some authoritative actor has ‘done something’ about a disaster. Because it is difficult to test whether learning happened after an extreme event, these post‐disaster documents are generally ignored after they are published.

Balancing Security and Democracy, and the Role of Expertise: Biometrics Politics in the European Union

What is the relationship between security policies and democratic debate, oversight and rights? Does coping with security threats require exceptions to the rule of law and reductions of liberties? The inquiry that follows tries to answer such questions in the context of the European Union and takes the case of biometric identification, an area were security considerations and the possible impact on fundamental rights and the rule of law are at stake. Some hypotheses are explored through the case study: “securitisation” and “democratisation” are in tension but some hybrid strategies can emerge; the plurality of “authoritative actors” influences policy frames and outcomes; and knowledge is a key asset in defining these authoritative actors. A counter-intuitive conclusion is presented, namely that biometrics, which seems prima facie an excellent candidate for technocratic decision-making, sheltered from democratic debate and accountability – is characterised by debate by a plurality of actors. Such pluralism is limited to those actors who have the resources – including knowledge – that allow for inclusion in policy making at EU level, but is nevertheless significant in shaping policy; it explains the central role of the metaphor of balancing security and democracy, as well as the “competitive cooperation” between new and more consolidated policy areas. The EU is facing another difficult challenge in the attempt at establishing itself as a new security actor and as a supranational democratic polity: important choices are at stake to assure that citizens’ security is pursued on the basis of the rule of law, respect of fundamental rights and democratic accountability.

Path Dependency and the Reform of English Local Government

This paper uses the concept of path dependency to examine the changes to the political management structures of English local government. We note how the possible experience of decreasing returns among some local authority actors combined with the powerful intervention of politicians within New Labour at the national level led to a significant break from past policy and the imposition of measures to establish a separate executive that was claimed as a radical step forward for local democracy. Using survey data from the Evaluating Local Governance research team ( http://www.elgnce.org.uk), we explore the establishment of a separate political executive in all major local authorities and map out the style of decision-making that is emerging. We find that some established institutional patterns reasserted themselves in the process of implementation, but that increasing returns are not as great as some theorists of path dependency would suggest and they may be a force for system change as well as for stability

Doctors and retribution: the hospitalisation of compensation claims in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

The cultures in the Papua New Guinea Highlands are characterised by a tradition of retribution. Compensation is part of an elaborate system of exchanging gifts, goods and services. Compensation is paid to those who have suffered some kind of loss for which others are held responsible. Such incidents include death or injury caused by fighting, a road accident or domestic violence, theft, rape, gossip, and property damage. Fear of revenge is an important motive for paying compensation. The hospital has become an increasingly important institution for retribution. It provides medical reports to support compensation claims of physical damage in cases involving violence or an accident. Case material, collected by one of the authors who conducted fieldwork in a hospital in the Southern Highlands, shows that the hospital has established itself as an authoritative actor in the local compensation culture. Doctors spend about one afternoon per week writing medical reports for compensation claims. These reports have become an attractive extra source of income for the hospital. The article describes and analyses a number of cases to illustrate the hospital's role in the production and legitimisation of retribution.

Doctors and retribution: the hospitalisation of compensation claims in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

The cultures in the Papua New Guinea Highlands are characterised by a tradition of retribution. Compensation is part of an elaborate system of exchanging gifts, goods and services. Compensation is paid to those who have suffered some kind of loss for which others are held responsible. Such incidents include death or injury caused by fighting, a road accident or domestic violence, theft, rape, gossip, and property damage. Fear of revenge is an important motive for paying compensation. The hospital has become an increasingly important institution for retribution. It provides medical reports to support compensation claims of physical damage in cases involving violence or an accident. Case material, collected by one of the authors who conducted fieldwork in a hospital in the Southern Highlands, shows that the hospital has established itself as an authoritative actor in the local compensation culture. Doctors spend about one afternoon per week writing medical reports for compensation claims. These reports have become an attractive extra source of income for the hospital. The article describes and analyses a number of cases to illustrate the hospital's role in the production and legitimisation of retribution.