Political Innovation Research Articles

Indigenous nation building for environmental futures: Murrundi flows through Ngarrindjeri country

ABSTRACTIn 2015, the Ngarrindjeri Nation in concert with the South Australian government won the Australian Riverprize for best practice in water management, after leading the development of a co-management approach to the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth (CLLMM) region during the Australian Millennium drought crisis. The purpose of this article is to explain why the prize-winning advances in water management in this region are an outcome of a strategic political process of Indigenous Nation (re)building, pursued by Ngarrindjeri leaders with the ongoing support of a formal research program focussed on Aboriginal governance. The primary insight revealed by the research is that Indigenous contributions to successful environmental management are not best conceived in terms of the protection of ‘cultural flows’ – as is suggested by much of the literature in the field – but instead should be understood primarily in political terms. Like other Indigenous Nations, Ngarrindjeri consider they have an inherent and sovereign right to enjoy, use and protect the flow of water through their Country. Ngarrindjeri have effectively articulated their sovereign Aboriginal environmental rights and have successfully negotiated these rights with the South Australian state by producing targeted legal and political innovations that enable shared authority in the co-development of natural resource management policy. The article argues that Indigenous Nation (re)building and self-governance has positive implications for the development of best practice models of land and water management, both in Australia and internationally.

Political innovation, digitalisation and public participation in party politics

Citizen engagement is seen as a way to address a range of societal challenges, fiscal constraints, as well as wicked problems, and increasing public participation in political decisions could help to address low levels of trust in politicians and decreasing satisfaction with political parties. This paper examines the perceived impacts of an experiment by the Austrian People’s Party which, in response to reaching a historic low in the polls, opened up its manifesto process to public participation via digital technology. Analysis of survey data from participants found that self-efficacy is positively associated with participation intensity but negatively related to satisfaction. In contrast, collective efficacy is related to positive perceptions of public participation in party politics but does not influence levels of individual participation. Future research is needed to explore the outcomes of political innovations that use digital technologies to enable public participation on voting behaviour, party membership and attitudes to representative democracy.

Research on the Innovation of Ideological and Political Education of Grassroots Units from the Perspective of Strong Military Dreams in China

Current continuously with profound and complex changes in the international pattern, the deepening of economic globalization, political multi-polarization continues to strengthen, the international security problem is increasingly complex, socialist modernization construction in China is entering a new eriod, the party’s 19 big army blue prin, draw the outline of the new era of weapons dream is the great ejuvenation of the Chinese nation important based on the Chinese dream, the army ideological and political education work is an important part of military construction work, a strong army must need to have a firm’s soul and faith as the support, grassroots units of the ideological and political education work is facing the international and domestic new opportunities, new challenges, The defects of the traditional ideological and political education are increasingly prominent, and the effectiveness of the ideological and political education work in the grassroots army cannot be well improved. The ideological and political education work innovation of layer army is imperative.

The Soviet Culture of Victory

The Soviet Union after the Second World War can serve as a prime example of how victory ’locks in’ a political system. In a mirror image of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s argument of how ‘cultures of defeat’ encourage social and political innovation, the Soviet ‘culture of victory’ reaffirmed a dictatorial system of government and a command economy based on collectivized agriculture and centrally planned industry. At the same time, however, the war also engendered changes, which played themselves out somewhat subterraneously at first. They include a complex system of veterans’ privileges, a growing welfare state, a more routinized administration, and an economy where individual and family farming played a major role in the provisioning not only of the rural, but also of the urban population. Moreover, counter-narratives and counter-memories of this war could never be completely silenced by the bombastic war cult and would break forth at the end of the Soviet century. Finally, the economic and human costs of this victory were such that they formed a constant dark underbelly to the celebration of the ‘Great Victory’. This article surveys these contradictory legacies of the war and the ways in which they helped shape late Soviet society.

Political conservation, or how to prevent institutional decay

Sometimes established institutions aren’t perfect but cannot be replaced with better solutions. As technological, economic, ecological and other developments might indirectly further impair these imperfect institutions, non-change becomes normatively desirable and a practical challenge for legislators. In contrast to the progressive task of improving the established order, the task of preventing institutional achievements from being lost has been largely neglected by political theorists. To fill this lacuna, the article explores conservation as a mode of political action. It specifies the conditions under which it is reasonable to oppose institutional innovation in politics in order to keep things as they are and develops a formal solution to Edmund Burke’s ‘conservation paradox’ in which existing arrangements can only stay the same if they are changed. The solution construes political conservation as renovative reformism that adapts institutional structures, cultures or mechanisms to changing circumstances in order to prevent indirect transformations of institutional mandates.

Political institutions, human capital and innovation: evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACTUsing data for a sample of 35 sub-Saharan African economies for 1995–2015, this study examines the extent to which political institutions identified as belonging to democratic or autocratic regimes explains the existing differences in innovation across sub-Saharan Africa. While the very few existing studies focus only on the direct effect of institutions, this article examines the impact of the interaction between different regime types and human capital development on innovation in developing countries. The evidence provides very strong support for the direct effect of democratic development on innovation as well as for its indirect effect via its impact on human capital development. However, the results do not support theories that argue in favour of interaction between democracy and human capital, thereby pointing to the need for better calibration of the numerous existing theories and related empirical measures.

La trasparenza: immaginario politico e dimensione globale

Trasparency has become a beacon of global politics. No normative and political concept has reached a widespread popularity than institutional transparency. Most of world nations have enacted statutes and policies favoring access to public records and accountability of the administrative, economic and political centers of authority. Transparency « belongs » to contemporaineity peering with other technological- political innovations as open government and e-democracy. Neverthless the idea of a transparent state is other than recent, laying its foundation in early XX century. Transparecny is the product of a given historical imaginary based on powerful metaphors like the «glass house » (Italy) or the «sunshine as best disinfectant » (United States). Relying on the political theory of social imaginaries (Yacob Ezrahi) this paper aims to de-construct the dynamics of institutional transparency. The idea of a transparent state offers the illusion of a self-evident political realm whose secrets could be « seen » or « taken » by an informed citizenry. The imaginary of transparency collides with the contradictions and limits of actual transparency, by forming a hiathus between reality and expectations.

Political Innovation

Political Innovation

Uruguay, 1968. Algunas líneas de análisis derivadas del estudio de la protesta estudiantil en un país periférico

This paper – focused on a deep analysis of the student movement that occupied the streets of Montevideo in 1968 – aims at proposing some analytical lines to understand this and other contemporary cycles of protest in different places of the world. After locating these events in a wide geography characterized both by political acceleration and the dramatic display of cultural change, four relevant themes in the growing body of literature on the «global Sixties» are raised. First, it is addressed the relationship between social movements and groups or political parties in these «short cycles» of protest. Second, the idea that violence was rather a catalyzer of political innovation rather than the result of political polarization is proposed. Third, it breaks down the diversity of possible links between culture, in a broad sense, and the forms of political participation in youth mobilizations. Finally, it can be more rewarding to look at different scales of analysis of these processes, from the strictly national to the transnational circulation of ideas and people.

La identidad partidista en la Ciudad de México. El PRD y MORENA el 1 de julio de 2018

<p>El artículo presenta las variables explicativas de la identificación partidista con el Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA) en la Ciudad de México. A través de un modelo logístico multivariado y utilizando datos de la encuesta de salida realizada, en la capital del país, por el Laboratorio de Innovación Política, el trabajo comprueba que el partidismo morenista no radica en una vinculación emocional y estrictamente ideológica, como postula la formulación teórica original sobre las bases de la membrecía hacia un partido. Por el contrario, el artículo muestra que la identificación con morena se constituye de un partidismo racional, que se explica más por la desaprobación de la gestión de Miguel A. Mancera como Jefe de Gobierno de la Ciudad de México; por el impacto de la candidatura de Andrés Manuel López Obrador a la Presidencia, y por el beneficio concreto de los programas sociales implementados durante los gobiernos perredistas, que por posturas favorables al aborto, el matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo y la legalización de la mariguana, propias de una ideología de izquierda. En este sentido, se observa que las características que en su momento fueron propias de la identidad partidista perredista en la Ciudad de México ―como la ideología de izquierda y la preocupación por la pobreza― hoy son elementos constitutivos de la identificación política con MORENA.</p><div> </div>

Policy labs in Europe: political innovation, structure and content analysis on Twitter

Recent years have seen a veritable boom in the creation of policy labs. These institution-based innvation laboratories aim to open up the processes of public policy design to the social stakeholders involved. In 2016, the European Union Policy Lab commissioned a report that identified 64 such laboratories in Europe. In the present study, we use network analysis to reveal the structure of the relationships between the 42 of these labs that have a presence on Twitter. We then conduct a content analysis of their tweets to identify the topics of interest. Our results describe a fragmented, country-based network and the principal concepts and key issues addressed by these institutions.

Money, Refuge, and Justice

Abstract Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey have introduced a novel, and potentially powerful, vision of migration rights, on which European states might respond to the current crisis of migration by conditioning admission on the payment of an entry fee. In this comment, I raise a worry about the morality of a world governed by such a principle. While Osterloh and Frey foresee a world in which migration is made more sustainable, with benefits for all stakeholders as a result, I am worried their program would lead to a lessening of support for the moral principles that gave rise to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This Convention, I argue, ought to be preserved as a public statement of the principle that wealthy states have an obligation to bear some costs in the defense of human rights; Osterloh and Frey, I argue, might be undermining support for those moral principleswe currently have the most need to reinforce. Nevertheless, I argue that under emergency circumstances we might have a need for experimentation and political innovation, even if we are confident that what they produce will necessarily involve some degree of political wrongdoing; we might, in short, have a reason to try out proposals of the sort Osterloh and Frey defend, even if the moral worries I defend here are correct.

End-user innovation of urban infrastructure: key factors in the direction of development

Is there such a thing as an urban direction to infrastructure innovation in today's rapidly expanding cities? City growth has driven evolution of urban infrastructure through a combination of technological, political and commercial innovations to produce today's top-down, centralised models; however, these now stand in the way of the innovation necessary to accommodate the city growth anticipated in the future. The significant investment set out in the UK government's National Infrastructure Delivery Plan provides an opportunity to address this problem. This paper postulates that applying a decentralised (bottom-up/user-led) approach to the provision of infrastructure can create the space necessary for a new direction of urban innovation to emerge. It draws on case study examples from the literature, where there have been innovations along these lines, to develop a theoretically informed understanding of what needs to be in place for them to be successful. These findings, together with data from semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, are used to assess the likelihood of a successful, decentralised approach to a proposed, large infrastructure redevelopment at Digbeth in Birmingham.

Party Politics in Socialist Countries: One Hundred Years of Exploration

Over the long history of political civilization, the 100 years of the party politics of socialist countries has emerged as a new form of politics. Exploration of the last 100 years of the party politics of socialist countries deals with the self-governance and national governance of Marxist ruling parties. It reflects intraparty relationships, interparty relationships, relationships between party and government and relationships between party and society, as well as foreign relations, and spans three historical periods, comprising the first establishment of party politics in Soviet Russia; the adoption of party rule in other countries, with concomitant setbacks; and the achievement by China, Vietnam and other countries of party political innovation and development. A review of the experience of the past hundred years shows that success in making party politics the basic system in socialist countries and in tapping its full potential is attributable to the efforts made by Marxist ruling parties to undertake fruitful theoretical reflection and grasp values, adhere to the truth and correct mistakes on the basis of exceptional strategic confidence and policy commitment, while constantly opening up new stages of theoretical understanding and practical development. The party politics of socialist countries in the 21st century drives their modernization and cultivates and improves their practice. The union of the two in the magnificent historical process of the sustainable development of socialist institutional civilization will have major and far-reaching significance for building a brighter future for humanity.

Justice and reconciliation in world politics

Despite the realist view according to which world politics is the realm of power and abuse, much research has been conducted over the last decades on how ethics could domesticate power. Academics have been tasked with making sense of a variety of different political innovations—including truth and reconciliation commissions, international tribunals, official apologies and reparations—which have tried to introduce ethical values into international relations. Have these attempts been successful? Have they, at least, managed to morally reproach the international crimes committed in the past and that continue to be committed today? These are the questions addressed by Catherine Lu’s book.

Grabbing Land for Equitable Development? Reengineering Land Dispossession through Securitising Land Development Rights in Chongqing

AbstractThis article examines the securitisation of land development rights under the dipiao scheme in Chongqing, China. It argues that this instrument is based on the dispossession and exploitation of rural households but these unequal relations have been concealed and naturalised through the complex geographies and temporalities of dispossessory arrangements, financing mechanisms and discursive tactics. By overcoming political barriers to land commodification and dispossession in this way, the Chongqing government has expanded the frontier of commodifiable land and sustained a land‐based, urban‐centric and debt‐financed accumulation. Instead of narrowing the urban–rural divide, this instrument reproduces and solidifies it. On this basis, the article argues that conceptual and political innovations for inclusive and equitable development needs to shift the attention from land to people.

De-Politicization and Innovation: A Study Based on Chinese A-Share Companies

This study analyzes whether the loss of political connections in the Chinese listed firms affects their innovation. Using number of firm patents as a proxy for innovation, we construct a quasi-natural experiment, which focuses on independent directors with political connections were forced to resign due to CPC regulation in 2013 to explore the casual relation between political connections and firm innovation. The baseline results indicate that the innovation output has improved significantly since the promulgation of the Chinese government’s policy in 2013. In addition, we also find that firms that lose political ties tend to increase R&D investments. The results suggest that de-politicization has been conducive to promoting technological innovation in China, which are also confirmed in additional robustness and placebo tests.

Is Lying Contagious? Spatial Diffusion of High-Yield 'Satellites' during Chinaas Great Leap Forward

Situated in China’s Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign in 1958, this study examines the spatial diffusion of “launching high-yield satellites” – exaggerating grain yields, which contributed to the 1959-1961 GLF famine that claimed millions of human lives. We conceptualize exaggerating grain yields as a political innovation adopted by local cadres to endorse the GLF and signal political loyalty to their superiors. Drawing on the social diffusion literature, we focus on two contextual factors, geographic proximity and structural equivalence in the form of political proximity. We geocoded county-level event history data from historical newspaper archives. Results from exploratory spatial data analyses show strong spatial-temporal correlations of exaggerating grain yields across the country that could not be attributed to two independent processes in space and time. The spatial-temporal correlation peaked at relatively small scales–roughly 40 kilometers in terms of geographic radius and two days in terms of time window. Results from event history models indicate both geographic proximity and political proximity at work, although the main effect of the latter was slightly stronger than that of the former. More importantly, the diffusion process was primarily driven by the interaction between geographic proximity and political proximity.

Challenges of the Aging Policies in Spain

Rapid population aging and the constant rise in human longevity represent one of the greatest social, cultural, economic and political transformations of today, especially in developed countries and, as a consequence of this, population aging has become one of the most important challenges for modern societies. In this regard, the World Health Organization said that due to the increase in life expectancy and the decline in the fertility rate, the proportion of people over 60 years of age is increasing more rapidly than any other age group in almost all countries. The aging of the population can be considered a success of public health policies and socio-economic development, but it also constitutes a challenge for society, which must adapt to this in order to improve the health and functional capacity of older people as well as their social participation and their security. For this reason, it is necessary to design political initiatives that are capable of responding to the different social demands but which, in turn, safeguard the rights of elderly people, focusing their activity on the concept of Active Aging, as proposed at the II World Assembly on Aging (2002). In Spain due to health policies and a healthier lifestyle has increased life expectancy, in this sense it is expected that Spain is the country in 2040 with this indicator highest in the world with a life expectancy of 85.8 years. On the other hand, the current design of the Spanish pension system is unsustainable in the long term since it has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. This document aims to deepen the debate on aging in Spain from a political and social perspective, based on the approach that active and healthy aging opens a window of opportunity for social and political innovation.

Fuzzy Comprehensive Model of Quantitative Evaluation of College Student Party Members' Evaluation Indexes

With the rapid development of education, the number of college student party members has risen due to the expansion of university enrollment. However, the quality curve of college student party members is declining. They have a series of problems in their personal motivation and leading role. Constructing the evaluation indexes and quantitative assessment system for college students are not only the inevitable requirement for the Party Central Committee to improve the quality of party members, but also the necessary means to establish and improve the quality and quantity system for college students. This paper sets the five aspects of the political quality, daily performance, learning ability, work ability and innovation ability of college student party members as the first-level evaluation indexes, and adopts five principles such as the principle of directional assessment, the combination of qualitative and quantitative assessment principle, comprehensive principle, operability principle, diversity and multi-level principle. Each first-level evaluation index is refined into several secondary evaluation indexes. Through using the variation coefficient method, double weight method, parameter classification method and the like, we’ve given the specific steps to establish this fuzzy comprehensive model of the quantitative evaluation of college student party members' evaluation indexes so as to evaluate the overall quality of college student party members. Finally, an example is given to verify the rationality and accuracy of the proposed model.