Domestic Political Contestation Research Articles

Iran’s Troubled Relations with Afghanistan and Tajikistan: A Compound Alignment Dilemma

ABSTRACT Afghanistan’s reversion to Taliban rule poses severe threats to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran faces a dilemma over how best to respond to these dangers: it could continue to conciliate the Taliban or it could revert to the antagonistic posture it adopted towards Kabul in the 1990s. While each of these strategies can improve Iran’s security situation to some extent, they also entail unintended consequences that exacerbate Iranian vulnerabilities. More importantly, whatever policy Tehran pursues has an impact on Iran’s nascent alignment with Tajikistan, as well as on Tajikistan’s relations with Afghanistan. The fact that Iran’s decision to conciliate the new leadership in Kabul did not prompt Dushanbe to scale back its belligerence towards the Taliban poses a puzzle for Glenn Snyder's concept of the alliance security dilemma. Its solution requires a reconsideration of adversary–ally dynamics that highlights the reciprocal interaction between shifts in inter-state alignment and changes in domestic political contestation.

Religion, Ideology, and Political Parties’ Positions on Refugees in South Asia and the Middle East

Some political parties adopt rhetoric and policy stances favorable to refugees, while others view refugees as a potential economic or security threat or a challenge to the asylum country's predominant identity and push for refugees’ rapid return. We argue that, despite material constraints in asylum countries, like those stemming from the level of economic development, domestic political contestation and differences shape refugee politics and associated outcomes. We further posit that the key element of those domestic political differences is not that leftist parties are systematically more sympathetic to refugees than rightist parties. Rather, our empirical analysis shows that, in the non-Western contexts that we study, parties that emphasize a religious identity shared with most refugees are more likely to view those refugees more favorably than parties that do not emphasize that religious identity or that emphasize a religious identity not shared with refugees. We build on moral foundations theory to explain why religion and politics matter and why rightist parties are not necessarily less favorable to refugees than leftist parties. We carry out a comparative study of party positions toward Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Turkey and toward Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and explain why party leaders’ choices regarding religion and politics shape refugee politics. While others have questioned the claim that leftists are more likely to favor refugees than conservatives, we contribute to the literature by specifying the conditions under which that is unlikely to be the case, and we develop a theoretically grounded explanation for that pattern.

International Relations in the Anthropocene

International Relations in the Anthropocene

The political background of a pattern transformation in the Chinese system of science and technology during the 20th century

The development of modern science and technology in China involved three transformations: from a traditional mindset to a modern one through the enlightenment of scientific thought, from the Anglo-Saxon pattern to the Soviet pattern in the process of instituting the Chinese system of science and technology, and from national defence to economics due to an awakening of technical economics after the ‘Cultural Revolution’. This paper surveys the political background of the second transformation. The idea of ‘doing science for science’s sake’ never had a footing in China because the Chinese began to learn about modern science and technology only under the threat of colonists’ gunboats. Developing science and technology has always been one of the means for China to cast off national humiliation and regain its status as a major country in the world. Compared with science and technology in other countries, Chinese science and technology were more susceptible to the international political environment and domestic political situation. It took about two decades, between the establishment of the Academia Sinica in 1928 and the inauguration of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1949, for China to form its system of science and technology. The system had three successive configurations because of the international competition among Japan, the US and the Soviet Union over China, and the domestic political contest between the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1912) and the Communist Party of China. China’s science and technology system started by modelling itself on its counterparts in Europe and America. After undergoing a series of unconventional developments during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931–1945) and the War of Liberation (1946–1949), the system transformed to the Soviet pattern after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

Memory, Institutions, and the Domestic Politics of South Korean–Japanese Relations

AbstractHow does collective memory shape politics in the domestic and international spheres? I argue that collective memory—an intersubjective understanding of the past—has no inherent meaning and its salience is entirely contextual. What it means politically depends on the historical trajectory through which it came to form and the political exigency for which it is mobilized in the present. I propose three strategies by which social actors mobilize collective memory: framing—negotiating how the past can be interpreted; accrediting—redefining which narrators are authorized to speak; and binding—enforcing the narrative bounds to which narrators must conform. Using this framework, I reassess the failure of South Korea–Japan reconciliation and find that it has as much to do with the mobilization of collective colonial memory in South Korea over the course of its democratization as with Japanese impenitence. Anti-Japanese memory reflects continued domestic political contestation about how South Korea remembers and identifies itself.

Adding Fuel to the Flames? Politicisation of EU Policy Evaluation in National Parliaments

Under which conditions does national parliamentary discourse politicise European Union (EU) policy evaluation? In times of multiple crises and uncertainty, the alleged ‘democratic deficitʼ of the EU, defined as an apparent lack of legitimacy, has regained scholarly and popular attention. The European Commission and academic commentators consider policy evaluation a specialised and targeted tool to improve the ‘output legitimacyʼ of the EU by assessing policy effectiveness and efficiency. While evaluation can strengthen output legitimacy directly via learning, evaluation can be particularly effective when it becomes part of the national communicative discourse on the EU. This discourse is most likely to take place in national parliaments, as they are the forums in which the government can be held to account. This paper relies on an automated content analysis of the share of keywords related to EU policy evaluation in debates in six national parliaments, covering a period of 20 years. The findings show that the combination of popular and party Euroscepticism is crucial in determining parliamentary debate on EU policy evaluation. Pro-European parties generally do not refer to policy evaluation. However, if political parties are critical of European integration, EU policy evaluation is mentioned more frequently. Under these conditions, members of parliaments also refer more frequently to EU policy evaluation as the public becomes more Eurosceptic. These findings suggest that EU policy evaluation is used as a tool for domestic political contestation, with potential negative normative implications for the output legitimacy of the EU and for evaluation as a tool for learning.

State liability for ‘politically’ motivated conduct in the investment treaty regime

AbstractIn framing investment treaty claims against host states, foreign investors routinely assert that the state’s conduct was ‘politically’ motivated. Arbitral tribunals must then grapple with these allegations. Yet, tribunals lack both a coherent conception of what constitutes politically motivated conduct and a consistent understanding of the relevance, if any, of such motivations for the disposition of an investor’s legal claims. This uncertainty points to an underlying tension within the investment treaty regime between the protection of investors’ interests on the one hand, and the legitimate scope for democratic decision-making and responsive politics on the other.Using concepts drawn from political science, we develop a new framework to map the variety of conduct that tribunals characterize as ‘political’. Our framework draws attention to different types of influence over government decision-making, as well as differences between government actors responsible for the conduct. We use this framework to show that tribunals have adopted different conceptions of what constitutes illegitimate political influence over government decision-making in factually similar cases. We then evaluate tribunals’ competing approaches in light of normative theories spanning both public law and private law. Engaging with multiple normative theories allows us to examine whether tribunals’ different approaches to politically motivated conduct might reflect diverse underlying normative commitments. We argue, however, that many arbitral tribunals demonstrate a reflexive distrust of domestic political contestation that is difficult to justify within any of the theories that we consider.

Language Intermediaries and Local Agency: Peacebuilding, Translation/Interpreting and Political Disempowerment in ‘Mature’ Post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina

The peace negotiations ending the 1992–95 Bosnian war established a constitutional system of ethnic power-sharing giving international peacebuilding a significant role in post-conflict Bosnia’s governance and economy. This indefinite mission depended – like any other intervention where foreigners work across linguistic boundaries – on interlinguistic mediation by locally-recruited translators/interpreters, an aspect of knowledge production that even current research into peacebuilding’s micropolitics often neglects. On an individual level, their frequently-overlooked agency was integral to peacebuilding practice. Yet theorizing their agency must also acknowledge the macrosocial level, where critics argue the post-war constitution has stripped Bosnians of political agency, foreclosing political participation as anything but ethnic subjects corresponding to three institutionalized ethnic identities. The entrenched, growing disconnect between political elites and the public, expressed through social protest in 2014, foregrounds agency and dis/empowerment in Bosnian society more sharply than pre-2014 research accounted for, revealing further interlinkages between international peacebuilding and domestic political contestation.

International Hegemony Meets Domestic Politics: Why Liberals can be Pessimists

Many theories of hegemonic orders assume that systemic incentives will discipline the hegemon to maintain a status quo policy supporting that order. These theories make too strong a claim that domestic actors will not see any self-interested gain in opposing hegemony or strategies necessary for hegemony. Yet policies sustaining hegemony are unlikely to remain perpetually exempt from domestic political contestation. Indeed, US political institutions—especially political parties—may provide incentives for actors to undermine hegemony in order to reward their core constituencies or to distinguish their electoral brand from a rival party. Whether by producing overt policy shocks, through diminished expectations of gains from future cooperation by other states, or some combination of the two, these processes can erode the foundations of hegemonic order. This threat to international order has been illustrated by the 2016 US election, but the conditions that produced that result were present long before and would have persisted regardless of the outcome.

Foreign policy anarchy in multiparty coalitions: When junior parties take rogue decisions

How do disagreements within multiparty coalitions affect foreign policy, and how can junior parties exert their influence? These questions are of growing importance as new media increases domestic pressure on politicians to interject in international events, and as foreign affairs become more salient in domestic political contestation. Whereas prior research on foreign policy in multiparty coalitions focuses on the influence of junior parties over cabinet decisions, this article proposes a new theoretical concept of ‘rogue decisions’ to describe a distinct outcome of partisan disagreements. Rogue decisions are autonomous decisions by junior parties impacting foreign affairs, taken without cabinet coordination, that undermine their senior partners’ foreign policies. This resembles the ‘anarchy model’ of foreign policy previously attributed to less institutionalized systems. Having identified the necessary conditions that make rogue decisions possible, and the factors that increase their likelihood, the analysis is applied to cases in Britain and Israel. These represent polar opposite parliamentary systems, with Israel among the most proportional, where rogue decisions may be most expected, and Britain the most majoritarian, where they would be least expected. The identification of rogue decisions in contrasting parliamentary democracies challenges the assumption that cabinet is where foreign policy disagreements are managed, according to established decision-making rules. The article therefore prompts new thinking about the potential for junior parties to disrupt the foreign policy agendas of their senior partners, and challenges in new ways the assumption that states act as coherent units.

POLITIK ISLAM MAHATHIR MOHAMMAD DI MALAYSIA DAN SOEHARTO DI INDONESIA

This study explains the role and strategy of Malaysia during Mahathir Mohammad era and Indonesia in the Soeharto era in facing their Islamists group opposition. In their early period, these two regimes used an iron cage to defeat their political enemies. Mahathir fought with the power of PAS (Parti Al-Islam Se-Malaysia) which becomes more radical in the early of 1980s; meanwhile, Suharto faced the Islamic extremist groups in the early of 1970s. Mahathir consisted to give enough spaces for competition, Suharto did not want to compromise. In its progress, these two regimes chose softer strategy by playing 'Islamic cards’ due to the double purposes: coopting the opposite and building a better image as an Islamic regime. Hence, the political project of Islamization of Mahathir and Soeharto could not be separated from the problem of domestic political contestation and an effort to look for new legitimacy. Thereby, their Islamic political projects ended differently. Due to the monetary crisis and democratic reforms in 1998 affected the Soeharto regime to step down and make an end to all of the political projects he has designed. On the contrary, the Mahathir regime has successfully survived in facing the similar crisis, so that his pro-Islamic policy has passed off although not as aggressive as in the past.

Minority Inclusion in Central and Eastern Europe

The question of how governments deal with ethnic diversity is fundamental to the future of peace and democracy in Europe. The way this question is articulated and addressed has changed significantly, as European governments and social actors respond to problems of regional security, domestic political contestation, and economic well-being. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the collaborative efforts of European organizations – primarily the Council of Europe (CoE), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union (EU) – provided a historic opportunity for the development of common European standards about minority inclusion across the whole spectrum of political and economic rights and opportunities available to state majorities. Europeanization – which involved the deepening of transnational institutional structures in member states, the enlargement of the EU to include an increasing number of countries from the former Soviet bloc, and the diffusion of European norms and practices in the EU and its neighbourhood – had a profound impact on the evolution of state-minority relations across the continent. Although Europeanization reaches all aspects of life in EU member and aspiring member states, the governance of ethnic diversity has evolved in diverse directions across the continent, rather than gradually converging toward common standards.

Indian “Strategic Restraint” Revisited: The Case of the 1965 India-Pakistan War

ABSTRACTPolitical scientists and analysts have long argued that Indian strategic restraint is informed primarily by Indian political leaders’ aversion to the use of force. For some scholars, India’s apparent fixation with restraint can be traced to the very foundation of the modern Indian state. This article contests what it considers to be a reductionist position on strategic restraint. Instead, it argues that Indian strategic restraint has in fact been shaped more by structural issues such as the limited availability of logistics and capabilities, the impact of domestic political contest, the effect of international attention to a crisis and the need for international legitimacy, and the political, economic, and military cost-benefit analysis associated with the use of force and the potential for escalation. In sum, it contributes a historically grounded understanding of strategic restraint. The article looks closely at India’s decision-making process in one major experiment with the use of force against Pakistan in 1965. The case clearly shows that political leaders were hardly uncomfortable or unsure about the use of force. It was the military leadership at the time that sought to temper the ambitious and potentially escalatory policies considered by the then prime minister.

Bounded political contestation: the domestic translation of international health and housing rights in Australia

ABSTRACTPolitical contestation within liberal democratic states is an important, albeit limited, guide in defining how these states domestically implement their international human rights obligations. While often ritualistically endorsing human rights standards, political actors allow themselves a limited policy space with their domestic political contest circumscribed by more pervasive influences, often at odds with the state's international commitments. This article examines recent health and housing policy initiatives by Australia's two major political parties and assesses them against its international commitments. Applying a social constructivist approach, this article argues that the dominant neoliberal political discourse and the state's institutional structure set contextual boundaries to the parties’ policy contestation and reveal the limited influence of domestic political contestation in determining Australia's rights implementation.

Party family or nation state? The post-decisional politics of supranational socio-economic regulation

Do parties matter in the course of the domestic implementation of policy that is made beyond the nation state? Based on within-country and cross-country comparisons and empirical evidence from the regulation of working time by governments of the Left and the Right in Britain and France, this article offers two insights. First, the partisan composition of government matters, in line with cleavage theory of party positioning on European integration but, second, the national context in which ruling parties implement that policy affects the scope of the validity of the partisan hypothesis. Thus it is argued that, far from ending domestic political contestation on the Left-Right axis, policy made beyond the frontiers of the state in the context of European integration and its concrete domestic manifestations are subject to it but in domestically-defined ways.

Expanding the Electorate: Comparing the Noncitizen Voting Practices of 25 Democracies

Historically, citizenship has been the sine qua non for the franchise. Yet in the last several decades, dozens of democracies have created some form of voting rights for resident aliens. Noncitizen voting rights are conceptually important because they suggest some democracies have fundamentally redefined the body politic. What explains the emergence of the noncitizen franchise? Why do some democracies limit these rights to municipal elections while others allow resident aliens to vote in parliamentary elections? To answer these questions, this study tests two competing theses: the national process thesis that emphasizes domestic institutional constraints and political contestation, and the liberal convergence thesis that emphasizes international and transnational factors that shape states’ citizenship regimes. The study uses a time-series cross-section research design to explain both variations in the content of noncitizen voting rights and the timing of these policy changes. The study finds that although international factors may explain the timing of enfranchisement of noncitizens, domestic factors explain why the content of these rights vary considerably from state to state.

The Great Game Rebooted or the Long March to Acceptance? The Legal and Policy Impediments to Chinese Investment in Australian Corporations and Business Opportunities

The rise of state capitalism poses profound questions for Australia. Long a beneficiary of China’s hunger for security of supply in natural resources, the country now finds itself increasingly as an investment target and source of business opportunities in sectors as diverse as telecommunications, natural resources and agriculture. As a consequence, elements of Australia’s legal and policy framework are coming under pressure. In particular, the operation of the Foreign Investment Review Board, created as a consequence of the Foreign Acquisition and Takeovers Act (1975), has now become a source of domestic political contestation. This paper explores the implications through the lens of the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper consultation process. It argues that ongoing ambiguity has the potential to undermine the cogency and coherence of the underpinning legal and policy framework. If unresolved it risks Australia becoming bypassed by the emergence of a new Southern Silk Road that positions China, in particular, at the centre of an integrated trading hub dominated by state capitalism.

The Nordic Human Rights Paradox

Existing research paints a contrastive picture of how the Nordic states engage with international human rights. In this paper, we critically survey scholarly literatures on ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ in the field of human rights in order to reframe Nordic human rights-related scholarship as a set of multi-disciplinary research problems and propose an agenda for future research. In particular, we argue that existing essentialist accounts, which emphasize values, culture and ideas as the key factor shaping Nordic approaches to human rights, need to be complemented. The paper sets out alternative theoretical approaches that focus on how: idealist commitments and branding exercises may backfire when international norms gain new authority; rights policies are shaped by domestic political contestation; and growing social pluralism is reshaping the domestic uptake of rights. We also suggest that thorough comparative studies, both within the Nordic group and with relevant points of reference, could diversify our knowledge of the Nordic states varying commitment to and compliance with international human rights norms. In sum, we suggest that a more theory-driven approach may make the alleged Nordic Sonderweg less of a paradoxical enigma.

A 'Need to Know': How Institutional Design Impairs Articulation of Interests in Trade Negotiations

In the present text I ask whether the WTO performs the functions it ‐ as an international institution ‐ should perform. I examine its institutional framework from the perspective of quality of information transmission, and in particular from the perspective of its ability to have all the member states eectively articulate their interests in the trade liberalization negotiations (the Doha Round). I put forward a conjecture that the exclusively intergovernmental design of the WTO is functionally inappropriate in a situation in which much of what is going on in the trade negotiations has potentially dramatic distributive consequences across societal groups within the negotiating states. To demonstrate this I develop and test a hypothesis about how the given WTO institutional setup ceases to perform its information transmission function as the degree of domestic political contestation of the issues that are dealt with in the negotiations increases. I test the hypothesis by examination of the WTO Doha negotiations across dierent issue

Between the Party and the European Union?

Do parties matter when EU policy is implemented in France? This article examines this question first in the context of cleavage theory and the literature on party positioning on European integration that draws attention to the origin and the nature of party preferences, and second in light of empirical evidence from the implementation of the Working Time Directive in France. It shows that, when faced with the same issue, governments of different ideological orientation responded in a way that reflected their historically defined référentiel rather than an EU Diktat. The argument here, then, is that far from ending domestic political contestation on the Left-Right axis, European integration and its concrete domestic manifestations in France are in fact subject to it.