Domestic Actors Research Articles

The Political Economy of Shock-Responsive Social Protection: Analysis from Malawi

Using social assistance systems to address acute needs arising from wide-scale shocks – commonly known as ‘shock-responsive social protection’ (SRSP) – raises significant political economy questions. Previously, acute needs caused by disasters across sub-Saharan Africa have primarily been met by humanitarian actors alone. SRSP disrupts the status quo by reducing humanitarian actors’ access to and control over humanitarian funding. This raises significant political questions; likewise, the introduction by SRSP of greater accountability and transparency into the implementation of humanitarian responses. This article addresses a current gap in the literature: the politics of SRSP. Referencing the concept of political settlements, the article asks what explains the evolution of SRSP in Malawi by examining the actions of domestic and international actors. It finds that there is scant evidence of national ownership of SRSP and that lack of consensus among international actors is a key obstacle to the concept becoming embedded within the political settlement.

Mitigating the Political Cost of Financial Crisis with Blame Avoidance Discourse: The Case of Turkey

How do centralized governments mitigate the political cost of severe financial crises? The economic voting scholarship has established that the clarity of responsibility, i.e., government accountability for economic conditions to the mass public, is a necessity for electoral reward or punishment for economic performance. On the one hand, political centralization, which reduces the number of veto players, may increase the visibility of the role of the executive in policy success or failure. On the other hand, it allows an uncontested blame avoidance discourse, especially when accompanied with democratic backsliding. Furthermore, the recent backlash against globalization has enabled blame shifting to international actors in many countries. Against this theoretical framework, we comparatively analyze the responsibility attribution discourses for the 1994, 2001, and 2018-2022 financial crises in the statements of incumbent presidents, ministers, and parliament members of Turkey. We find that while blame avoidance discursive strategies have been attempted in all three cases, the responsibility attribution for the 1994 and 2001 crises mostly targeted the executive. In contrast, for the ongoing crisis, the responsibility discourse is dominated with blaming international political economy factors, creating ambiguity, and targeting domestic non-governmental actors.

Rights in China: Myths, Abuses, and Politics

This article presents a sociological perspective on understanding rights in China, examining the interplay between multiple myths of rights, rights abuses, and the politics of rights within various social and physical spaces. It highlights competing myths of rights held by the state, ordinary citizens, rights activists, and legal professionals. The article examines how rights abuses contribute to rights consciousness and mobilization across different human rights domains in a repressive political context. By analyzing the politics of rights in interconnected spaces, such as the street, the legal system, the global arena, and cyberspace, it emphasizes the importance of continuous engagement between domestic and overseas actors in shaping China's human rights future. The article encourages social science researchers to thoroughly examine the myths, abuses, and politics of rights before making normative judgments about China's human rights conditions.

Business and human rights as Swedish foreign policy: The soft implementation of international regulatory norms

AbstractThis article aims to explain why national governments choose soft policies in the domestication of international norms even when those norms may explicitly call for harder measures. The article achieves this aim by exploring domestic adoption of National Action Plans (NAPs) for implementing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The UNGPs are an international soft law instrument that calls for a mix of voluntary and mandatory policies to promote human rights due diligence, and NAPs are soft domestic policy instruments that lack the bindingness of mandatory due diligence legislation now found in several states. Most governments with NAPs have adopted them specifically as foreign policies, treating them not as regulatory initiatives but as tools for enhancing national reputations. Using a range of primary and secondary sources, the article constructs a case study of Sweden to explain why governments might opt for softer implementation of the UNGPs in the form of NAPs. It draws several conclusions: (1) governments may emulate the approach to domesticating international regulatory norms that is promoted by international organisations; (2) support from domestic actors motivates norm implementation, and the policy style selected is likely to reflect power constellations in the state and, under consensus‐based governance systems, the lowest common denominator of actor preferences; and (3) path dependency following institutional venue selection influences the type of policy developed and adopted. These findings shed new light on the reasons why international policy norms are implemented in ‘softer’ ways than perhaps intended by their architects.

Schengen visa marketing in China: the street-level competition to attract tourists to Europe

ABSTRACT Before COVID-19, visitors from China, were a prime target for the European tourism industries. Yet, their mobility was constrained by the Schengen visa requirement for any trip to a European Union (EU)’s Member States. While the literature on Schengen visa policy has highlighted the repressive practices of street-level bureaucrats processing visa applications abroad, this article seeks to understand how Schengen visa policy is implemented when the objective is to attract potential visitors rather than drive them away. The paper argues that the economic imperative to attract Chinese tourists to Europe is turning local consular cooperation from Schengen into local consular competition. To support this claim and using ethnographic methods as well as a relational approach to implementation, the paper develops the concept of visa marketing to analyse the race to attractiveness between French and Italian consulates based in Beijing, the capital of China. Visa marketing refers to the use of visa procedures (receipt conditions, reliability, processing speed, etc.) by consulates as sales arguments to advertise the destination they represent. In essence, the article presents a case of domestic actors appropriating common visa regimes, engaging in competition to entice foreign consumers to their territories.

The Politics of Punishment: Why Dictators Join the International Criminal Court

Abstract Scholars commonly argue that international law and organizations promote democracy by helping dictators to credibly commit to accountability, individual rights, and transparency. Yet dictators routinely join treaties and international organizations without transitioning to democracy. International law and organizations can generate asymmetric costs for domestic actors because international rules often apply to both governments and non-state actors, yet dictators can limit how these rules are upheld at the domestic and international level. We argue that dictators are most likely to join such treaties and international organizations when they face strong domestic political competition. We illustrate our argument using the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has extensive powers to prosecute individuals for international crimes, including crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. We show that ICC investigations and prosecutions have become a tool for incumbent dictators to target their domestic opponents. We examine the implications of our theory for multiple outcome variables, including the decision to join the ICC, violence, and the survival of dictators in power. Our evidence suggests that dictators are most likely to join the ICC when they face strong political opponents and are subsequently less likely to commit violence and more likely to survive in office.

Reinforcing each other: How the combination of European and domestic reforms increased competition in liberalized industries

There is a consensus over Europe’s transformation into a highly competitive economy through a series of ambitious pro-competition reforms. However, both the European Commission and national actors have legislative authority over competition policies. Thus, who are the critical actors behind this legislative and economic transformation in this multi-level system? Focusing on the liberalization of state-owned industries and using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, the paper shows that the effectiveness of European directives in decreasing firm-level market power increased with the extent of preceding domestic pro-competition reforms. For every unit increase of the early domestic reform index, EU directives decrease market power in liberalized industries by an additional 7.8%. However, this effect is not significant in countries that did not reform their industries ex-ante. This finding contradicts the established view in the literature identifying the Commission as the dominant force driving this transformation, which implemented ambitious reforms by often overcoming the resistance of reluctant national governments. Instead, it is shown that the effectiveness of the Commission’s reforms depends on the support of domestic actors and compatible national institutions.

Foreign Election Interference in Africa’s De-Democratization Culture

The 2016 USA elections appear to have made Russia the “poster-boy” for election interference across the globe, allegedly using tools such as disinformation, misinformation, mal-information, email hacking, leaking of confidential information, and others. All such activities are a threat to national self-determination, democracy, and the autonomy of the people. Since then, elections in developing democracies in Africa are also alleged to have experienced interference by the usual suspect: Russia. In Africa, the actors of election interferences have been expanded beyond Russia to include foreign countries and companies in past elections in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Ghana. The next general elections in Ghana are in December 2024. In the previous general elections in Ghana, there were no significant allegations of election interference, although, in 2020, the specter of foreign election interference emerged in the political discourse. The actions of the domestic actors to de-democratize elections were mentioned selectively. It may be simplistic to argue in favor of election non-interference in Ghana’s political business cycle every four years since 1992, but the allegations are not supported by evidence and are merely anecdotal and subjective or based on geopolitical realism. What can be proven is the de-democratization of incumbents and other domestic political actors in domestic elections through open vote-buying by politicians and vote-rigging by incumbent political leaders. In such a political dysmorphic situation, it is difficult to accuse any entity of being the mastermind of election interferences in Africa.

Explaining sender–receiver gaps in signalling: Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’ and Solomon Islands’ multi-alignment

Amid growing strategic competition, regional powers have intensified their engagement with Pacific Island Countries. This article examines Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’, a signature foreign policy initiative of the Scott Morrison government (2018–2022), from a signalling perspective. Through the Step-up, Australia sought to affirm its resolve to be partner of choice for Pacific Island Countries. This was not cheap talk but led Canberra to invest substantially in its ties with the region. Despite this and significant prior Australian engagement leading to a bilateral security pact, Solomon Islands’ government signed an additional security agreement with China in 2022. How can we explain this sender–receiver gap? I argue that close attention to the agency of domestic actors on the receiver side and the context in which such agency occurs – in this case, an extended history of insecurity in the Pacific country – provides us with analytical leverage when examining concrete instances of signalling.

Democracy and Autocracy in Africa

Contrary to the widespread claims of democratic regression in sub-Saharan Africa, our research on democratic processes reveals a different reality. We have found that the region's democratic journey over the past two decades has largely remained stagnant, with no significant advancements or setbacks in terms of political and civil liberties since the initial transitions in the early 1990s. However, this apparent lack of progress in African democratization masks the active efforts of incumbent leaders to undermine key actors, such as civil society, and structural conditions, such as urbanization, that could potentially lead to greater liberalization. To explain the uneven progress in democratization, despite increased political participation across the region, we argue that Africa's incumbent leaders have employed two often overlooked processes: legal institutions and international relationships. Firstly, these leaders have utilized the law and courts to restrict the ability of domestic actors to mobilize against them. By strategically using the law to consolidate their power and strengthen executive authority, they have undermined other institutional checks and balances. Secondly, incumbent leaders have effectively manipulated their international relationships to counteract the democratizing influence of external actors, including foreign donors and transnational civil society. This manipulation includes employing claims of sovereignty to resist external intervention in domestic politics.

Refugee solidarity activism in times of pandemic: reorganizing solidarity practices at the EU border

ABSTRACT This article explores how grassroots refugee solidarity groups adapted their solidarity practices to the unprecedented challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. By taking as a case study the EU border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, which is situated along the Western Balkans migratory route, this piece explores how grassroots solidarity groups continued to provide first aid in the field to people on the move during the pandemic by adapting their practices to the changed circumstances. Combining a spatial and relational perspective to the study of solidarity activism, this article found evidence that solidarity groups managed to continue their activities during the pandemic thanks to two specific conditions: the existence of established networks and strong ties between international and domestic actors; and the spatiality of the border, which provided fertile ground for these relationships and ties to develop and thrive. The study placed social movement literature into dialogue with critical border studies and critical geography and is based on online and offline participant observation as well as in-depth qualitative interviews with solidarians engaged in refugee solidarity activism.

Communism, Cold War, and the 1953 Coup

Even as it passed its seventieth anniversary, the 1953 coup in Iran has remained a hotly debated political topic. This is true in the public spheres of Iran, which saw its last democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, overthrown in the coup, and in those of the United States and the United Kingdom, which helped stage the ouster. There also has been an attempt at historical revisionism about the coup, usually by overemphasizing the domestic factors that led to the coup and placing less importance on the role of the CIA or questioning Mossadeq's democratic credentials. This revisionism has been robustly rebutted by the scholarly community, which has held to a general consensus on the basic narrative of the coup: that it overthrew a popular leader and that it took place with significant interventions from London and Washington. The release of the final batch of US documents related to the coup in 2017 (following many years of undue delay) also bolstered evidence for this consensus. But, although most public debates about the coup center on questions such as the constitutional process of Mosaddeq's dismissal or the relative weight given to domestic and international actors behind the coup, there is another historiographical question that has been subject to widely divergent perspectives in the field: the relationship of the coup to the Cold War. In other words, can the 1953 coup be considered a Cold War confrontation, or is this a misleading frame of reference? Both sides of this argument have often focused on the motivations of coup plotters (mostly those in Washington, DC, and London) and whether they are more readily explained by a genuine fear of the communist movement in Iran or whether this was a rhetorical smokescreen, masking the neocolonial drive for the control of Iran's resources. This tension is not limited to scholarship on Iran. Even as new global histories of the Cold War have grown in recent years, some have cautioned against the use of this framework for understanding politics in the Global South. Jeremi Suri, for instance, speaks of a “group of scholars” who have “questioned the very utility of the Cold War as an analytical concept” by pointing to “the ways in which this geopolitical term privileges state actors in the United States and Europe and neglects local forces of change, many of which had little apparent connection to the basic issues and personalities of the Cold War.” In his analysis of the global place of Algeria's drive for independence, Matthew Connelly suggests “taking off the Cold War lens,” arguing that such a lens did less to shape the views of historical actors (such as the Eisenhower administration) than “those of the historians who have studied them.”

Timing bombs and the temporal dynamics of Iranian nuclear security

Abstract For more than two decades, Iran’s nuclear programme has concerned policymakers and scholars alike. Whether speeding up uranium enrichment, slowing down international negotiations, or disrupting the timing of key initiatives, actions around Iran’s nuclear programme bear a clear time signature. Yet systematic accounts of the importance of time in shaping foreign and security policymaking have been largely neglected. Through foreign policy timing theory’s (FP4D) reconceptualisation of time we show how actors both constructed and then used time to pursue their strategic interests, creating, altering, and sabotaging the timing mechanism linking Iranian nuclear technology and international sanctions. These manipulations of time by both domestic and international actors resulted in prolonged international negotiations and fluctuating periods of crisis and produced a temporally flawed agreement frozen in time. We consider time’s impact on the current challenges and future direction of nuclear diplomacy with Iran as well as its importance for broader nuclear security issues.

First public dataset to study 2023 Turkish general election.

In the context of Turkiye's most recent parliamentary and presidential elections ("seçim" in Turkish), social media has played an important role in shaping public debate. It is of utmost importance to capture social media trends during the 2023 Turkish elections, since it uncovers a great deal of information of election propaganda, political debates, smear campaigns, and election manipulation by domestic and international actors. We provide a comprehensive dataset for social media researchers to study Turkish elections, develop tools to prevent online manipulation, and gather novel information to inform the public. We are committed to continually improving the data collection and updating it regularly leading up to the election. Using the #Secim2023 dataset, researchers can examine the social and communication networks between political actors, track current trends, and investigate emerging threats to election integrity. Our dataset and analysis code available through Harvard Dataverse and Github, respectively.

Psychosocial dimensions of being a child in women's shelters: A phenomenological study on the experiences of battered women - A case study from Türkiye's Northern Region.

Violence against women has numerous devastating effects. Exposure to violence not only impacts women but also affects their children both physically and psychosocially. The study aimed to evaluate the psychosocial problems of children living with their mothers in women's shelters from the mothers' perspective with a phenomenological approach. Utilizing the phenomenological research method, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 14 individuals in a women's shelter in a province in northern Türkiye. The criterion sampling method, a purposive sampling technique, was employed to select participants. Interviews continued until data saturation was achieved. All interviews were audio recorded and then transcribed, and thematic analysis was applied to analyze the data. The study adhered to the COREQ checklist for reporting. The data analysis revealed four main categories (effects of violence on the mother, actions taken to protect children from violence, effects of violence and staying in a shelter on the child, and psychosocial needs for the protection of the child's mental health in the shelter) and 10 sub-themes (psychological effects, physical effects, social effects, domestic actions, organizational actions, psychological effects, physical effects, social effects, support system, and coping). The study concluded that violence significantly impacted the mental, physical, and social well-being of both women and children, posing challenges to their ability to cope with the aftermath. Women exerted considerable effort in protecting their children from violence, and they needed psychosocial support to ensure the well-being of their children's mental health during their stay in shelters.

Introducing public choice in international relations: the Russian invasion of Ukraine

With this article, I present a public choice perspective on Russia’s war on Ukraine. I criticise the realist view according to which Russia’s security concerns, defined by President Putin, prompted the conflict. I argue that realism offers a deficient analytic framework to the extent that it disregards the political and economic structure of Russia and, generally speaking, how the political economy of each case study shapes preferences, strategies and intra-elite relations, which feed into foreign policy formation. Russia is a government-controlled economy and society; a key property of Russia’s political economy is the dependency of key socio-economic actors and groups on the regime’s survival. This landscape pre-empts the expression of genuine feedback and dissent from society, and explains why Putin’s decision has faced very little disagreement and resistance. Given the previously close economic ties between Russia and Ukraine, this article also challenges capitalist peace theory for its blanket assertion that dense economic relations would provide a strong disincentive for countries to resort to war. Instead of talking about capitalism generically, we can discern varieties of capitalism, as they condition state–society relations differently. In Russia, the value that key socio-economic elites assign to their relationship with Putin outweighs the costs they are experiencing from the conflict and the external sanctions. Developing a public choice perspective in the study of international relations focuses on the preferences and strategies of the leadership and of domestic elite-level actors within the aggressor state, and invites attention to the power asymmetries that characterise their relationship.

U.S. Military Training, External Support, and Security Defections during Nonviolent Resistance

Why do some armed forces remain loyal to the regime while others switch sides during nonviolent uprisings? The existing research predominantly focuses on the roles of domestic actors and dynamics in explaining security defections. We extend this line of research by exploring external factors that might potentially affect troops’ decision to defect. In particular, we suggest a combined effect of U.S. military training and external support for campaigns on defection decisions. Our findings show that substantial Western power involvement in support of campaigns might induce security defections in militaries with which the U.S. military has established ties. We further probe this relationship by disaggregating Western power support into its constituents and find that security defections are most likely to occur when a campaign is backed by both the U.S. and at least one other Western power. This study contributes to an understudied aspect of security force defections during nonviolent campaigns, highlighting how external dynamics might shape militaries’ decisions regarding loyalty and defection.

To Arrest or Not Arrest? South Africa, the International Criminal Court, and New Frameworks for Assessing Noncompliance

Abstract What are the consequences of prioritizing one obligation over another in a norm conflict on the norm that “loses”? How do these difficult choices affect how we understand the intent behind noncompliance with international law? This article examines South Africa’s decision not to arrest the then-President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, in the face of conflicting pressures from multiple international and domestic actors. South Africa’s conundrum over whether to arrest al-Bashir resulted in what we call “collateral noncompliance”: noncompliance with one obligation as a product of compliance with another. Understanding noncompliance like this highlights how seemingly bad-faith noncompliance can be a consequence of weighing competing obligations, rather than a deliberate attempt to shirk or undermine the nonchosen norm. It offers an alternative to perspectives that frame African states’ noncompliance with the International Criminal Court as inherently problematic, contributing instead to more critical, reflexive understandings of noncompliance and contestation as a natural part of norm development.

The process of personalization in Nicaragua: Lessons from the hybrid regime

This article explores how personalization was formed in Nicaragua under the leadership of Daniel Ortega, focusing on four factors: short-term, long-term, domestic, and international perspectives. Nicaraguan politics are often structured by the country's relationship with the USA and regional powers. However, domestic actors make decisions regarding political regime changes. Therefore, the process of personalization must be considered in both domestic and international politics. This study's analysis unequivocally demonstrates that domestic and international factors have always influenced political regime changes in Nicaragua. However, personalization is primarily formed by domestic factors, with external factors reinforcing domestic movement in Nicaragua. In addition, this study shows that it is challenging to explain the process of Ortega's personalization according to short-term factors such as populism. Instead, it is a long-term factor, specifically the traditional power-sharing method in a duopoly, that pushes Ortega's personalization forward. We conclude that Nicaragua's hybrid regime resulted in personalization.

China’s Contemporary Strategies for the Promotion of Security, Development, and Governance in the Horn of Africa

This study focuses on “China’s Contemporary Strategies for Promoting Security, Development, and Governance in the Horn of Africa”. This study explored the key outcomes and challenges of these new strategies by China for security, development, and governance in the Horn of Africa region. The Horn of Africa as it is often called is one of the most culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse and growing cosmopolitan regions in Africa. The region comprises countries with the most similar as well as unique philosophies. The strategic proximity of the region to the Middle East, Europe, and Asia underscores its strategic importance. However, these cultural, religious, and ethnic philosophies have for some ages thrown the region into a severe crisis. The Horn of Africa to date continues to be the most conflict-prone area in Africa. The finding indicates the strategic and geopolitical importance of the region has poorly been translated into human, capital, and socio-economic development for the good of the people. The region continues to remain one of the most volatile, unstable, and under-developed in Africa. The diversity of domestic and international actors has had great complications on the region's peace, security, and development. However, a recent pronouncement by China for a new strategy toward the attainment of security, development, and governance in the region is worth exploring. The proposal includes the appointment of China’s special envoy to the Horn of Africa while advocating that an internal solution is the best option for the crisis in the region. 
 
 Received: 29 December 2023 / Accepted: 25 February 2024 / Published: 6 March 2024