Political Science Literature Research Articles

Litigation process of social movements as a driver of norm transformation?

The political science and international relations literature has extensively analysed the role of norm entrepreneurs, states, and international institutions as relevant actors generating norm transformation. However, although social movements’ reliance on courts to address core social problems has become a significant phenomenon, the role of the litigation process of social movements in norm transformation is understudied. Social movements have an ambiguous relationship with litigation. On the one hand, social movements perceive litigation to be the tool of the powerful, reproducing the status quo; on the other hand, it is argued that even when social movements lose their cases before the courts in the short term, legal mobilization can provide longer-term achievements. This article constructs a theory about the process through which the litigation of social movements impacts norm transformation. It proposes four mechanisms through which litigation plays a role in norm transformation: legal framing, legal interpretation, precedent setting and public attention. Through the examination of the Sardar Sarovar Dam as a case study, the analysis reveals that the role of the litigation process of social movements in norm transformation depends on how litigation mechanisms impact norm transformation in specific cases.

Religion, Cleavages, and Right-Wing Populist Parties: The Italian Case

:The political science literature analyzing the genetic profile of European political parties has mainly focused on the salience, for the identity of today’s parties, of four social cleavages rooted in European history: among them, a religious/secular cleavage created by the birth of the modern national state. However, in the past two decades, some contributions about new party types developed after the end of the Cold War have hypothesized the existence of new cleavages, based on materialist/post materialist sets of values and on the acceptance or rejection of globalization and Europeanization processes. This article will work on this latter hypothesis, by highlighting how some European parties, previously secular or focused on the “traditional” religious cleavage, are increasingly using religion-related arguments in the context of a civilizational stance focused on anti-globalization and anti-EU discourses, but most of all on the idea of migrants and Muslims as a threatening other. The second section of the paper will focus on the Italian case and on the development of a right-wing populist discourse on religion by the Lega Nord party.

Securing Social Security Solvency Addressing an important social determinant of the health of seniors and the American polity.

Adequate income is a social determinant of health. In the United States, only Social Security beneficiaries receive inflation-protected guaranteed income. Social Security needs another 1983 compromise in which stakeholders accepted "shared pain" to avoid insolvency. We propose indexing the benefit using the chained consumer price index (CPI) for all urban consumers and providing a one-time bonus of 8% to 10% for beneficiaries in their mid-80s, when needs become greater. The chained CPI has little impact when beneficiaries start receiving benefits, but older beneficiaries need protection. The estimated 75-year savings from this restructured benefit amount to 14.2% to 18% of Social Security deficits. Modest increases in payroll taxes and maximum earnings taxed should make up most of the shortfall. Including unearned income with wages and salaries subject to the 6.2% individual tax would produce much more revenue. The discussion explores the proposal's political feasibility, grounding in current policy and political science literature, and the role of income as a social determinant of health.

Shrinking and shouting: the political revolt of the declining middle in times of employment polarization

Automation, digitalization and smart software fundamentally reshape the employment structure of post-industrial societies. The share of routine jobs is constantly shrinking while non-routine jobs at both ends of the skill distribution tend to grow. We contend that the existing political science literature has not sufficiently connected the distributive implications of technological change with contemporary political disruptions. The fact that disadvantages are strongly concentrated among blue- and white-collar routine workers in the lower middle class is of crucial importance. Routine workers are a large and electorally relevant group with all the necessary means for political participation. Increasingly bleak prospects in the labor markets of tomorrow create a demand for social, cultural, and economic protectionism. Socially conservative parties in general and right-wing populist parties in particular have recognized the electoral potential of disaffected routine workers and skillfully address and acknowledge their anxieties. We conclude that a lower middle class no longer protected from the vagaries of economic modernization is a potential electoral game changer.

Is climate change mitigation compatible with environmental protection? Exploring voter attitudes as expressed through “old” and “new” politics in Norway

AbstractThe international literature on public attitudes finds that attitudes to climate change are closely related to attitudes to environmental protection. We ask whether this conclusion also holds for Norway.Our starting point is the political science literature on “old” versus “new” politics, old politics being defined in socio‐economic left or right terms and new politics being defined in accordance with an authoritarian or libertarian dimension in which environmental protection plays an important role. Based on these two axes, Herbert Kitschelt finds a new axis—a diagonal—combining old and new divides. According to Kitschelt, voters with traditional environmental attitudes have leftist and libertarian values, while voters favouring economic growth have rightist and authoritarian values.Using Norwegian data, we compare voters who favour traditional environmental protection and take climate change seriously with voters who only take climate change seriously. We expect that if climate change is perceived as one of many environmental threats, then the two voter groups are similar.We find that half of the voters see climate change as a big problem. Two thirds of these voters are in favour of environmental protection. However, the last third of these voters who take climate change seriously do not want greater environmental protection. Moreover, we find interesting differences between these groups. Those in the latter group have leftist and libertarian values, whereas climate‐only voters have rightist and authoritarian values. Thus the two groups of voters are dissimilar. Interestingly, this pattern corresponds to alignments along Kitschelt's new diagonal axis for party competition.

Rentier States, International Finance, and Governance

The political-science literature is divided on the relationship between resource rents and politics. This may be related to its narrow focus on democracy and on the domestic influences upon governance outcomes. This paper argues that rents are in fact damaging, on balance, but that we need to look at political outcomes beyond democracy while taking account of international causal pathways as well as domestic ones. It also uses the new ICTD dataset while employing regressions with unit fixed effects to avoid omitted-variable bias, The analysis yields two main results. First, a “resource curse” on governance does exist, but in the short term it has more to do with state capacity, corruption, and economic freedom than with democracy or civil liberties. Second, it appears that many of the negative effects of resource abundance are associated with the relaxation of the foreign-exchange constraint — that is, we see them on the current account balance variable more often than on the rents variables. In regressions with five-year lags, the current-account balance appears to constitute the dominant negative influence on democracy and civil liberties — although these effects are not robust to changes in lag length. The main results hold for two measures of resource rents and are robust to the exclusion of observations from the Middle East and North Africa, or observations prior to 1981, and to a “difference GMM” dynamic panel-data analysis.

Administrative Law for an Era of Partisan Volatility

Contemporary politics is characterized by a polarized national discourse, weak party organizations, volatile control of government, and an increasingly assertive executive. These political dynamics interact with a system of administrative law inherited from different political times that is ill-suited to addressing the risks of the current moment, which include threats to administrative values such as efficiency, impartiality, and expertise; to democratic values such as accountability, transparency, and participation; and, most generally, to the ability of the law to benefit social well-being through sound policymaking. In recent years, some legal scholars have become attuned to the interaction between administration and these features of the political environment. Unfortunately, administrative law itself has been slow to catch up, with potentially dangerous consequences for the stable functioning of the U.S. administrative state. Drawing from the political science literature that examines the interacting features of organized politics that generate stable party systems, we examine how prior administrative law regimes have responded to political transformations in the past. With this research in view, we find that administrative law as it stands today, which emerged during an earlier party system, is ill-suited to meet the challenges of modern politics. Time will tell whether courts will shape doctrine to better align administrative law with the needs of the times.

Tożsamość i pamięć zbiorowa w badaniach politologicznych

The social sciences have experienced an unprecedented interest in the issue of collective memory dating back at least to the 1990s. There has been a veritable avalanche of studies into this topic, editorial series and periodicals have appeared devoted exclusively to it. Simulta- neously, an analysis of the literature on this topic shows that collective memory is not a partic- ularly frequent subject of political science research. It is therefore routine in many works of political scientists to acknowledge the limited number of studies on memory. All that does not mean that the trend has not begun slowly to change. The number of texts on the political as- pects of memory is systematically growing, there are editorial series and monographic issues of scientific periodicals concerning the issue of memory or the political instrumentalization of history. Political scientists are also co-authors of collective works and periodicals of an inter- disciplinary character. The objective of this paper is to analyze a single, but highly influential, issue related to political science research into memory, namely the topic of identity perceived from the perspective of collective memory. The purpose is not so much the exhaustive presen- tation of all the surveys into memory and collective identity in the field of political science but rather establishing the set of main concepts, themes and issues explored by political science literature written in English.

The politics of numbers: explaining recent challenges at the Australian Bureau of Statistics

ABSTRACTThe Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has experienced several significant challenges in recent years, including a declining operating budget, criticisms of its technical capability and concerns about political interference. In-depth interviews were conducted with senior ABS and Treasury Department officials to obtain their perspectives on the causes of the agency’s difficulties. Interview data were interpreted using frameworks from the political science literature on delegation, including the principal-agent paradigm, models of bureaucratic strategy and the public service bargains approach. The study finds that the principal-agent perspective does not help to explain the ABS’s difficulties, but that problems of administrative strategy and tacit bargains between the government and the ABS have contributed significantly to the agency’s challenges. The findings provide insights into the politics of official statistics, and shed light on the evolving role and status of expertise in Australian politics and government.

The Long Arm of Whitehall Post-Brexit: Evidence from the Common Assembly (1952-1956)

This article provides an analysis of the institutional design (creation and form) of the administrative organisation in the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community 1952 - 1956 (precursors of the European Parliament and European Union, respectively). Based on a set of theoretical expectations grounded in institutional theory approaches, the article provides a historical analysis of the choices made for the administrative organisation in the Common Assembly including the role of the UK. The article studies the UK’s behaviour as a non-member of the EU and, thus, provides insights into possible British behaviour after Brexit. It concludes that even on issues of European integration which are of low saliency for the EU, the UK may step in and try to shape the course of future European integration. While the article is based on historical data, the analytical framework anchors it in the political science literature of the European Union.

An Enemy We Will Not Tolerate: The Politics of Punishment Attacks and Policing

The prevailing wisdom in the political science literature holds that insurgent groups serve their own interests most effectively when they use selective violence against suspected collaborators hidden amongst their constituents. By targeting those that are believed to be disloyal, the insurgents demonstrate their own lethal efficiency while simultaneously undermining promises made by the government to protect those that prove willing to provide intelligence on local insurgent activity. However, insurgents have also demonstrated a tendency to use selective violence in order to establish their own systems of law enforcement to deal with common criminals, such as thieves and vandals. These acts of rough justice serve as part of the insurgent group's overall strategy to build institutions of governance to replace those provided by the state, although they are unlikely to serve as effective deterrents to collaboration and often appear to have the opposite effect. Vigilante actions draw on the same pool of relatively scarce resources — manpower, money, vehicles and the like — that insurgents must also rely on in their pursuit of victory over government forces on the battlefield. As a result, the institution-building and war-fighting goals of insurgent groups are often in tension with each other. This paper offers a formal model to explain how insurgents resolve this tension in the context of their competition with the state to become the dominant providers of law enforcement. Hypotheses are derived from the model and evidence is presented from a variety of intrastate conflicts to justify the core assumptions of the model and demonstrate the plausibility of the hypotheses.

Core community structure recovery and phase transition detection in temporally evolving networks

Community detection in time series networks represents a timely and significant research topic due to its applications in a broad range of scientific fields, including biology, social sciences and engineering. In this work, we introduce methodology to address this problem, based on a decomposition of the network adjacency matrices into low-rank components that capture the community structure and sparse & dense noise perturbation components. It is further assumed that the low-rank structure exhibits sharp changes (phase transitions) at certain epochs that our methodology successfully detects and identifies. The latter is achieved by averaging the low-rank component over time windows, which in turn enables us to precisely select the correct rank and monitor its evolution over time and thus identify the phase transition epochs. The methodology is illustrated on both synthetic networks generated by various network formation models, as well as the Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators and on real data reflecting the US Senate’s voting record from 1979–2014. In the latter application, we identify that party polarization exhibited a sharp change and increased after 1993, a finding broadly concordant with the political science literature on the subject.

How Messages About Gender Bias Can Both Help and Hurt Women’s Representation

Gender bias in elections is both a source of debate in the political science literature and a prominent topic in U.S. political discourse. As a result, Americans are exposed to differing messages about the extent to which women face disadvantages in their campaigns for office. We argue that such messages can have differing effects—some of which benefit female candidates, but others that may perpetuate the gender gap in political ambition. Using a survey experiment administered on samples of the U.S. public, campaign donors, and college students, we show that messages portraying women as facing gender bias boosts female candidates’ support and young people’s willingness to engage in campaign activism on their behalf. Simultaneously, it does not affect female candidates’ fundraising ability. But paradoxically, such messages also reduce young women’s confidence in their own ability to run a political campaign. These results suggest important implications for women’s underrepresentation.

Long Term Risk Governance: When Do Societies Act Before Crisis?

Many environmental problems entail a temporal dilemma. Societies benefit from resource use now that will have cumulative negative impacts on future generations. All too often, societies only act to address these risks after a crisis (such as a fisheries collapse or a river on fire) has occurred. Climate change presents a particularly challenging case since when society decides the harms are too great to withstand, reducing greenhouse gas emissions drastically will take time and society will be left to suffer, adapt, or undertake risky geoengineering. In this paper we ask the question: Under what conditions do societies act to address a long term risk before crisis? We draw from the literature in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science to provide a range of potential factors that would contribute to addressing long term risks. We find that long term risk governance is under-theorized and that existing relevant understandings are highly fragmented. We also find that empirical studies testing these theories are limited in number and have mixed results. We propose that case studies of long term risks that have been addressed could be a fruitful avenue forward in developing a more cohesive and empirically rooted theory of when societies address a future risk before a crisis point.

Exploring Political CSR in the Context of Middle Eastern Authoritarianism

How can Multinational Corporations (MNCs) pursue their Political CSR, which emphasizes corporate engagement in the democratic governance of business conduct through public deliberation, in the socio-political context of Middle Eastern Authoritarianism? Authoritarian regimes limit political pluralism and participation, and governmental agencies continue to play the most central role in regulation and its enforcement. Drawing on political science literature on state power and authoritarianism, I elucidate the boundaries and room for responsible management in the sense of Political CSR in these challenging institutional contexts differing from is standard case.

A federalist’s dilemma: Trade-offs between social legitimacy and budget responsibility in multi-tiered welfare states

In multi-tiered states, subnational policymakers face a dilemma: on one hand, they must ensure the social legitimacy of their subnational unit by owning relevant policies including their potentially negative consequences; on the other, they have to manage their budget responsibly, which limits the scope of policy development. We study this dilemma in relation to social policies, by examining how the constituent units and municipalities in Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland deal with it, taking social assistance as an empirical example. Our analysis suggests that the combination of the federation’s history and a multinational political context affects the incentives and the choices made by the policymakers regarding ownership and disownership of policy competencies in the field of social assistance. By analysing mechanisms that are likely to play out in multi-tiered welfare states, our article contributes to both the social policy and the political science literatures.

Corporate political connections in global strategy

Research Summary: The role of corporate political connections (CPC) in global strategy has been examined in a variety of institutional contexts and analyzed from different theoretical perspectives. This literature, along with the articles in this special issue, demonstrate the importance of contextualization in understanding the motivations, processes, and outcomes of firms developing and utilizing CPC in global strategy. We argue that context‐specific aspects of CPC, such as the political system in which the firm is operating, need to be incorporated more systematically to advance theory development globally. Future studies on CPC can advance this agenda through cross‐country comparative research, deeper engagement with political science literature, linking CPC with other nonmarket strategies, and configurational analysis of the multidimensional context of CPC. Managerial Summary: Multinational companies not only compete in a market environment, they engage with political actors in both their home and host societies. This special issue brings together research that explores how companies use their corporate political connections (CPC) to achieve firm objectives. Each study takes a different approach to studying the phenomenon, informed by the national context of their empirical data. Together, these studies highlight the importance of CPC around the world. However, the variation in research approaches also highlights that the “how and why” of companies' development and utilization of CPC vary across cultures and political systems. In consequence, the development of managerial recommendations always needs to carefully consider the pertinent political context of the available empirical evidence.

Contesting deep sea oil: Politicisation–depoliticisation–repoliticisation

Between 2010 and 2017, the New Zealand Government undertook a range of subtle yet disturbing tactics to create a legislative environment that enabled deep sea oil exploration. This included forms of public endorsement, policy documents and legislative change that prioritised further oil development in the country to create a certain common-sense around increased fossil fuel extraction. In response, a range of communities and autonomous Oil Free groups have emerged to contest both the legislative changes and this underlying common-sense. We draw on this example to respond to calls within geography and political science literature to situate analysis of contemporary politics in empirical contexts. We use Rancière’s thought combined with the frames of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation to explore the entangled nature of government and oil industry actions, and community climate change activism. We argue that while there were clearly attempts by government and the oil industry to close down spaces of dissent and limit debate around fossil fuel development to technocratic questions of health and safety, the effects of attempts at closure are paradoxical. Such attempts at closure are always incomplete and at times, mobilise people to contestatory action. We show how activists have strategically drawn on certain discourses to exert claims of, and for, equality in public debates around the pressing issue of climate change.

Dimensions, Dialectic, Discourse. Three Political Perspectives on the Sustainability of the German Healthcare System.

This review article deals with the topic of sustainability in the German healthcare system and presents an overview of how the six articles of our research relate to one another. After introducing to the context of the research, its internal principles, and the methods applied, three perspectives are presented, each also discussed in terms of the respective literature in sustainability science and political science. The review concludes by presenting a circular model and by discussing the general limitations as well as the practical implications of our research.

Justice, truth and oral history: legislating the past ‘from below’ in Northern Ireland

Drawing on the ‘from below’ perspective which has emerged in transitional justice scholarship and practice over the past two decades, this article critically examines the dealing with the past debate in Northern Ireland. The paper begins by offering an outline of the from below perspective in the context of post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies which are struggling to come to terms with past violence and human rights abuses. Having provided some of the legal and political background to the most recent efforts to deal with the past in Northern Ireland, it then critically examines the relevant past-related provisions of the Stormont House Agreement, namely the institutions which are designed to facilitate ‘justice’, truth recovery and the establishment of an Oral History Archive. Drawing from the political science and social movement literature on lobbying and the ways in which interests groups may seek to influence policy, the paper then explores the efforts of the authors and others to contribute to the broader public debate, including through drafting and circulating a ‘Model Bill’ on dealing with the past (reproduced elsewhere in this issue) as a counterweight to the legislation which is required from the British government to implement the Stormont House Agreement. The authors argue that the combination of technical capacity, grass-roots credibility and ‘international-savvy’ local solutions offers a framework for praxis from below in other contexts where activists are struggling to extend ownership of transitional justice beyond political elites.