Political Compliance Research Articles

Gender and Political Compliance Under Authoritarian Rule

When autocrats do not impose explicit rules of behavior on their subjects, what does political compliance look like? Existing research suggests that such conditions generate uncertainty, leading risk-adverse individuals to self-censor in an effort to minimize the risk of punishment. In this paper, we find that women and men differ in how they express political compliance under conditions of uncertainty. Focusing on Confucius Institute teachers who are given broad objectives but no specific rules of political behavior, we use interviews, a global survey, and an experiment to show that women express compliance by increasing uncensored discussions to persuade host country students toward the Chinese regime’s point of view. In contrast, men comply by vociferously defending the party line and censoring further discussions. These gendered strategies of political compliance are rooted in the differing gender socialization experiences of men and women, who face divergent expectations on how they should interact with others.

Voting and Violence in Competitive Autocracies: The Case of the 2008 Runoff Election in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT How, when and where violence is deployed during periods of extreme regime crisis is determined by regime support expectations. Regimes use political geography to direct violence and ensure political compliance. Areas have ‘core’ high regime loyalty, ‘swing’ loyalty where government and opposition have supporters, or ‘costly’ and loyalty opposition support. During elections, regimes accommodate, suppress or force voters in each area. In runoffs, regimes use new information to increase vote share in core support areas, and use violence against suspected defecting voters. In Zimbabwe during 2008, violence patterns maximised the regime’s favourable political geography, placing typically safe communities in danger.

Chinese Corporate Leaders’ Early-life Exposure to Confucianism and Political Compliance Strategy

Chinese Corporate Leaders’ Early-life Exposure to Confucianism and Political Compliance Strategy

Party-led public participation in neighborhood governance: a comparative analysis of two forms of social networks

Neighborhood governance has been the center of attention in urban politics and public policy for many decades. Although wide-ranging literature explores the favorable effects of public participation on neighborhood governance, it is only relatively recently that attention has been directed to the manner in which effective participation develops and the consequent implications for participatory democracy. This article examines how local states encourage public participation in neighborhood governance using social networks in contemporary China. Based on a case study of the Minor Facts program, our findings demonstrate that even when participation mechanisms are introduced by the Party, horizontal networks also play a role in participation. Moreover, we present two forms of social networks and their mechanisms to illustrate how local states strategically mobilize them. These social networks also increase the social status and moral authority of Party members and political elites in ways they find useful for strengthening local government capacity to ensure political compliance. This article provides an important qualitative insight into network-related activators of participatory behaviors in the community.

(Mis)Led by an Outsider: Abusive Supervision, Disengagement, and Silence in Politicized Bureaucracies

Abstract Employing loyal external appointees has been identified as a key strategy used by incumbents to gain control over the state bureaucracy. This phenomenon is known as politicization and has been associated with democratic backsliding. Frequently, career civil servants perceive these appointees as illegitimate outsiders, leaders whose main objective is to ensure political compliance rather than advance the organization’s mission. In this study, we explore how civil servants interpret the presence of outside leaders in their organizations in the context of politicization and how this influences their job attitudes and behaviors. We use a mixed methods exploratory sequential design to examine a recent case of politicization in environmental agencies in Brazil. First, we interviewed 25 civil servants who reported an environment of abuse, fear, disengagement, and alienation due to the actions of outside leaders. We identified silence (both defensive and acquiescent) as a key outcome of this process. We extended and confirmed these findings with a quantitative study using a new sample of 255 civil servants. This second study allowed us to test the relationship between the variables identified in the qualitative analysis. Our combined findings indicate that politicization may reduce the effectiveness and capability of public agencies not only because some external appointees lack competence or a commitment the organization’s mission (as suggested by previous studies), but also because their behaviors and decisions can have a significant negative impact on civil servants’ job attitudes and behaviors.

Educated acquiescence: how academia sustains authoritarianism in China

As a presumed bastion of the Enlightenment values that support a critical intelligentsia, the university is often regarded as both the bedrock and beneficiary of liberal democracy. By contrast, authoritarian regimes are said to discourage higher education out of fear that the growth of a critical intelligentsia could imperil their survival. The case of China, past and present, challenges this conventional wisdom. Imperial China, the most enduring authoritarian political system in world history, thrived in large part precisely because of its sponsorship of a form of higher education closely tied to state interests. Although twentieth-century revolutions brought fundamental change to Chinese politics and pedagogy, the contemporary party-state also actively promotes higher education, cultivating a mutually advantageous state-scholar nexus and thereby reducing the likelihood of intellectual-led opposition. As in the imperial past, authoritarian rule in China today is buttressed by a pattern of educated acquiescence, with academia acceding to political compliance in exchange for the many benefits conferred upon it by the state. The role of educated acquiescence in enabling Chinese authoritarianism highlights the contributions of a cooperative academy to authoritarian durability and raises questions with prevailing assumptions that associate the flourishing of higher education with liberal democracy.

Robots and Immigrants: Employment, Precarisation and the Art of Neoliberal Governance

This article identifies the points of divergence and convergence between the discourses of technological displacement and low-skilled immigrant labour and argues for the understanding of a new model of neoliberal governance. New technologies, new managerial and organisational strategies, and new models of exploitation emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the UK. What are the main features of this crisis? The article points to two different yet interconnected processes. First, due to demands for higher productivity and economic growth the advent of automation, robotics and AI is presented as an irreversible process capable of producing a new corporate environment in which low labour costs and efficiency co-exist with massive job losses, waning of workers’ collective defences and re-training programmes. Second, for all the increasing popularity of protectionist politics and of demands for tight immigration controls the need for low paid and low-skilled immigrant labour across several sectors of the UK economy remains unchanged. Demands for economic growth render the presence of low-skilled immigrants necessary as long as they are subjected to the minimum political, economic and social provisions such as wages, political participation and mobility. As a result, low-skilled immigrants must exist within a political and economic environment in which they are perceived as useful and at times essential accessories for sustaining economic growth and public services. The concepts of precarisation and precarity provide a useful insight into the underlying logic that connects and differentiates those two discourses. In particular, precarisation becomes at once the dominant mode of governing the population and the most effective means for capital accumulation. In contradistinction to old understandings of government that demanded political compliance in exchange for the promise of social protection, the neoliberal process of precarisation increases instability and provides the minimum of insurance. Precarisation is not limited to employment but more generally to the formulation of homo œconomicus as a collective neoliberal subject living in fear and uncertainty. Precarity, on the other hand, designates a sense of hierarchy amongst insecure workforce and the compensations they receive. The article concludes by arguing that the dividing lines between national and foreigner, domestic and immigrant, become integral notions of neoliberal governance for differentiating between precarious groups and maintaining order in contemporary capitalism.

The Effects of Authoritarian Iconography

Do public images of state leaders affect individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors? If so, why do they have that effect and among whom? Authoritarian iconography could increase compliance with and support for the state via three causal mechanisms: legitimacy, self-interest, and coercion. This article uses a laboratory experiment in the United Arab Emirates to evaluate the effect of public images of state leaders on individuals’ compliance with and support for an authoritarian regime. Using a pre-registered research design, it finds no meaningful evidence that authoritarian iconography increases political compliance or support for the Emirati regime. Although these null results may be due to a number of factors, the findings have important implications for the future research agenda on how and why authoritarian leaders use political culture to maintain power.

Local Politics, Local Citizenship? Socialized Governance in Contemporary China

AbstractThe demise of collective units that attach citizens to the state in China has been overstated; the hegemonic form of Chinese citizenship today links participation and welfare entitlement to membership in a collective unit in a specific locality. This article presents an ethnographic account of the operation of this “normal” form of local citizenship in resident and villager committees in Tianjin. These committees combine participatory and welfare dimensions of citizenship in one institutional setting. Here, citizens are bound to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making, a mode of rule I term “socialized governance,” which blurs the boundaries between political compliance and social conformity, and makes social norms a strong force in the citizenship order. While variably achieved in practice, this form of citizenship represents an ideal that shapes conditions for politics and perceptions of inequality.

Intervención del legislador y selección de candidatos por los partidos politicos: una perspectiva comparada = Public intervention in the selection of candidates by political parties

This paper addresses the limits of public intervention in the selection of candidates by political parties. The issue is analyzed from the comparative perspective, although some documents of soft law adopted by the Venice Commission, OSCE, and ODIHR have also been taken into account. The study concludes that the legislation on political parties has increased in the last decade. However, the main constraints imposed on political parties do not come from specific legislation on political parties but from electoral laws. In some cases, the electoral laws impose a method of decision making on the nomination process since these laws require political parties compliance with the basic rules of the democratic principle. In other cases, the laws do not impose a method but a result, as in the case of case of the laws which impose quotas in favor of women. In any case, such measures should meet certain conditions to be effective. Firstly, the limits must respect the freedom of association proclaimed by international treaties and ensured by the ECHR; secondly, the requirements must be compatible with the electoral system; finally, any exigency on candidate selection must be guaranteed by monitoring systems and by sanctions for non-compliance.El presente trabajo aborda la posible densidad de la intervención pública a la hora de imponer a los partidos políticos procedimientos para la selección de candidatos. La óptica con la que se analiza el problema es, fundamentalmente, el derecho comparado, si bien se han utilizado también textos de «soft law»elaborados por la Comisión de Venecia, OSCE y ODHIR. En el mismo se concluye que, aunque la legislación sobre partidos políticos se ha incrementado en los últimos años, las mayores limitaciones impuestas a los partidos políticos no provienen de esta normativa específica sino de las leyes electorales. Dichas exigencias tienen una doble vertiente. En algunas ocasiones, se regula el método para la elección de candidatos, imponiendo a los partidos los requisitos inherentes a la toma de decisiones democráticas. En otras, se impone a los partidos un resultado, esto es, la presencia de candidatos de distinto sexo en las listas electorales. Cualquiera de estas medidas, para ser legítimas, tienen que respetar la libertad que corresponde a los partidos en cuanto asociaciones. Además, han de adaptarse al resto del sistema electoral y, especialmente, prever sistemas para verificar el cumplimiento de los requisitos impuestos por la ley.

Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies

This article advocates for ethnographic and historical study of the political roots of corruption. Focusing on informal economies of Belarusian universities, it reexamines two theoretical propositions about corruption in autocracies. The first proposition is that authoritarianism breeds bureaucratic corruption; the second is that autocrats grant disloyal subjects corruption opportunities in exchange for political compliance. Using qualitative data, the author finds that autocracies can generate favorable as well as unfavorable preconditions for bureaucratic corruption. The author argues that lenient autocratic governance, characterized by organizational decoupling, creates favorable conditions for bureaucratic corruption. In contrast, consolidated autocracy, defined by rigid organizational controls, is unfavorable to such corruption. The author also concludes that in autocracies, disloyal populations may be cut off from rather than granted opportunities for bureaucratic corruption. These findings suggest that the relationship between autocratic governance and corruption is more complex than current studies are able to reveal due to their methodological limitations.

Engineering Stability: Authoritarian Political Control over University Students in Post-Deng China

AbstractGiven their critical influence on society and politics, university students are one of the key target groups for authoritarian political control around the world. To further our understanding of the endurance and resilience of authoritarianism in post-Deng China, it is necessary to examine one of the Party-state's most crucial control frameworks: the institutional mechanism through which it preserves social stability in the nation's 2,358 university campuses, and maintains control over its more than 22 million college students. Drawing upon intensive field research conducted in 2011, this article attempts to map out the structures and measures deployed by the post-Deng regime to nurture political compliance and consolidate its domination of university campuses. By deciphering an essential component of the state's political control apparatus, this article aims to shed new light on the internal operations of the authoritarian system that is running China today.

Paying a visit: The Dalai Lama effect on international trade

Is political compliance a precondition for healthy trade relations with China? The Chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners' officials and the Dalai Lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties. We run a gravity model of exports to China from 159 partner countries between 1991 and 2008 to test the extent to which bilateral tensions affect trade with autocratic China. In particular, we empirically investigate whether countries that receive the Dalai Lama despite China's opposition experience a significant reduction in their exports to China. In order to account for the potential endogeneity of meetings with the Dalai Lama, the number of Tibet Support Groups and the travel pattern of the Tibetan leader are used as instruments. Our empirical results support the idea that countries officially receiving the Dalai Lama at the highest political level are punished through a reduction of their exports to China. However, this ‘Dalai Lama Effect’ is only observed for the Hu Jintao era and not for earlier periods. Furthermore, we find that this effect is mainly driven by reduced exports of machinery and transport equipment and that it disappears in the second year after a meeting took place.

Comparative Sources of Judicial Empowerment

Since the end of World War II, courts across the globe have been increasingly involved in debates and decisions of national and international political import (Tate and Vallinder 1995; Russell and O'Brien 2001; Hirschl 2004, 2008). Judges have weighed in on a vast range of issues, including the treatment of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; the boundaries of religious and reproductive freedom; past human rights abuses; the meaning of social rights; the punishment of official corruption; and executive accountability in matters of public security, to name just a few (see, for example, Smulovitz 1995; Klug 2000; Della Porta 2001; Guarnieri and Pederzoli 2002; James, Abelson, and Lusztig 2002; Sathe 2003; Scheppele 2003, 2005; Sieder, Schjolden, and Angeli 2005; Gargarella, Domingo, and Roux 2006). Courts have always engaged in some amount of policy making, in the United States and elsewhere (Shapiro 1964; Tocqueville 1969; Bickel 1986; Becker 1970; Unger 1976; Feeley and Rubin 1998; Guarnieri and Pederzoli 2002). Some have suggested that increasing post-World War II concerns for civil and human rights coupled with an explosion of legislation expanding the role of the state in general has vastly expanded the issue areas into which courts have been expected to intervene (Guarnieri and Pederzoli 2002). Whatever its causes, there is broad agreement among political scientists that the judicial role has expanded significantly at both the national and international levels during the past half century (Epp 1998; Stone Sweet 2000; Cichowski 2000; Russell and O'Brien 2001; Widner 2001; Guarnieri and Pederzoli 2002; Ginsburg 2003; Hirschl 2004, 2008; Scheppele 2005; Sieder, Schjolden, and Angeli 2005; Malleson and Russell 2006; Moustafa 2007). This increase in judicial involvement in policy making has led to a virtual explosion in work on comparative and supranational judicial politics.1 Scholars who focus on polities outside the United States have begun to make an important mark on theoretical and methodological development in work on law and courts. Building on the pioneering work of scholars such as Schubert and Danelski (1969), Murphy and Tanenhaus (1972), Shapiro (1981), and Galanter (1984), a new generation of political scientists has devoted themselves to examining] and comparing] the influence of courts on and the influence of on courts across democracies (Whittington, Kelemen, and Caldeira 2008, 11-12) and even in nondemocratic regimes (see, e.g., Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008). Some have focused on the upholding or weaknesses in judicial independence and the rule of law (Russell and O'Brien 2001; Widner 2001; Finkel 2003; Chavez 2004; Maravall and Przeworski 2003; Helmke and Rosenbluth 2009), or of legal tools, such as bills of rights and judicial review, that grant courts broad formal powers (Klug 2000; Ginsburg 2003, 2008; Hirschl 2004; Epp 1996). Other scholars have turned their analytic lenses to the roots of judicial intervention, seeking to explain when and why judges (do or do not) act to defend rights, to hold powerful actors accountable, or to otherwise enter the political thicket (Osiel 1995; Epp 1998; Ginsburg 2003; Helmke 2005; Woods 2005, 2008; Staton forthcoming; Vanberg 2005; Hilbink 2007, 2009; Kapiszewski 2007). More recently, a few scholars have begun to analyze political compliance with judicial decisions (Staton 2004; Vanberg 2005; Kapiszewski 2007). Many hope that their work will help to unpack both the causes or the consequences of what has been called the judicialization of politics (Tate and Vallinder 1995), that is, the reasons behind and implications of more frequent judicial, rather than legislative or social, resolution of political conflict (Stone Sweet 2000; Guarnieri and Pederzoli 2002; Hirschl 2004; Dotan and Hofnung 2005; Sieder, Schjolden, and Angeli 2005; Wilson and Rodriguez Cordero 2006; Gauri and Brinks 2008). Some of the most influential works in comparative judicial are those that have focused their analysis, at least in part, on the conditions under which judges gain formal independence and expanded legal powers - especially judicial review (Ginsburg 2003; Hirschl 2004; Chavez 2004). …

Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland

<i>Jindabyne</i>’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland

The vocational crisis in medicine and nursing

Unlike many occupations medicine and nursing are primarily and historically vocational professions. A wish to comfort, relieve pain and hopefully to cure other human beings who are ill should be the essential motivation to pursue these professions. Social status, remuneration and political bureaucratic compliance are of secondary importance. Both professions have traditionally been held in high regard by the public, but changes associated with advances in understanding disease processes and technological innovations have altered the nature of both medicine and nursing.

Ecological Risks and Community Perceptions of Fairness and Justice: A Cross-Cultural Model

ABSTRACT Intergenerational justice is implicit in international commitments to sustainability. If ecological, economic, and social components of sustainability are to be achieved there is a necessity for intergenerational justice considerations to be included in decision-making. The present generation's risk judgments should include consideration of the possible outcomes for their children. But intergenerational issues cannot be considered in isolation from other current risk and fairness concerns. This article reports a community-based integrative model that describes justice and other attitudes and motivations that determine community and individual pro-environmental behavior in two nations: Germany and Australia. This model can account for a considerable amount of the variance in political compliance as well as various pro-environmental behaviors. Group or individual self-interests have nearly no effects on global protective behavior. It is shown that universal as well as contextual principles including distributive (within or between generations), procedural and interactive justice, play a crucial role in fairness judgments. Other principles are also taken into account, such as efficiency, environmental rights, and rights to economic welfare. The results are discussed in relation to the importance of complex community fairness judgments in predicting and evaluating acceptance of political decisions, and for promoting proenvironmental behavior.

Checks, Balances, and the Cost of Regulation: Evidence from the American States

This manuscript examines the relationship between political veto points, credible commitments and regulatory compliance costs. We extend the work on credible commitments in comparative political economy and apply this framework to environmental compliance costs in the American states. Our central purpose is to assess whether different types of political veto points credibly constrain regulatory change, and thus lower compliance costs. We conceptualize veto points broadly, including legislative oversight, gubernatorial powers, and direct democracy. We analyze state-level environmental regulatory compliance costs from 1988 to 1994 as a function of the structure of state political institutions and state political and economic characteristics. Our results suggest that a key veto point, the authority for legislators to review bureaucratic behavior, consistently reduces compliance costs. In comparison, citizen initiatives, gubernatorial powers, and stringent discharge rules do not systematically influence compliance costs.

Political Liberalism and Political Compliance: Part 2 of The Problem of Political Compliance in Rawls’s Theories of Justice

AbstractThree interlocking features appear to underpin Rawls’s justification of political compliance within the context of political liberalism: namely, a specific territory; a specific society; and a specific conception of what it is to be reasonable. When any one feature is subject to critical examination, while presupposing that the other two are acceptable, Rawls’s argument for political compliance may seem persuasive. But when all three features are critically examined together, his justification of political compliance within political liberalism can be seen to lack cogency. Thus, political compliance fails to be justified by a free-standing political liberalism.

The Evolution of Rawls's Justification of Political Compliance: Part 1 of The Problem of Political Compliance in Rawls's Theories of Justice

AbstractAs Rawls's thought evolved from his 1958 article ‘Justice as Fairness’ to the 1996 edition of his book Political Liberalism, his response to the problem of political compliance would seem to have undergone a number of changes. This article critically evaluates the development of Rawls's various explicit or implied arguments that serve to justify compliance to just social arrangements, and concludes that the problem of political compliance remains without any cogent solution within the vast corpus of Rawls's work.