Political Scholarship Research Articles

Labor’s reversal of fortune: contentious politics and executive aggrandizement in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Before the presidency of President Joko Widodo (2014 – present), Indonesia’s small but feisty labor movement was remarkably successful in defeating government policies that it opposed and winning pro-labor policies. Labor’s success, however, was quickly reversed after Joko Widodo became president. I argue that social movement and contentious politics scholarship provides insufficient analytic leverage to explain labor’s sudden reversal of fate. The budding literature on democratic backsliding, which analyzes the incremental steps through which democracies become less democratic, provides critical insights to understanding labor’s changing fortunes. This broader regime context of executive aggrandizement, not deficiencies in the labor movement or a mere closing of the political opportunity structure, explains both the rapidity and the depth of labor’s reversal of fortune since 2014.

The Deepening of Jokowi’s Populist Leadership Amidst COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring its Effect to Economy and Global Partnership

The rise of populist leaders amidst the pandemic has become the fundamental debate of political scholars nowadays. This article described the populist leadership pattern of Jokowi in times of the outbreak COVID-19 pandemic and its implication toward the economy and global partnership. The qualitative method and descriptive analysis approach have been used in this article. Through library research in several resources, this article explained the casual relationship of Jokowi’s populist leadership amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and its implication toward the economy and global partnership. The result of this research has shown that Jokowi’s populist leader in the form of bias optimism, anti-science, and leadership ambiguity has led Indonesia into the worsening of pandemic cases among Southeast Asia countries. The incapability of the Indonesian government to tackle the increased number of COVID-19 cases has been proven by the negative economic growth in the scope of regional and global partnerships. Furthermore, this article concludes that Jokowi’s populist leadership has failed to maintain the economy and global partnership.

Governing Democracy Outside the Law: India's Election Commission and the Challenge of Accountability

AbstractComparative law and politics literature widely recognizes the role of election management bodies (EMBs) in securing the well-being of constitutional democracies. Scholars have noted the political desirability of both independence and accountability of these institutions. But striking balance between these two values is easier said than done. This Article highlights the dilemma of accountability by focusing on India's Election Commission (ECI) as a paradigmatic version of a powerful EMB. Scholars of Indian politics have long noted the institution's widening powers – often beyond the original constitutional intent or parliamentary legislation – over the last few decades. This, they argue, has impaired its institutional accountability. This Article adopts a fresh perspective on the ECI's expansive functions, and the attendant concerns these raise. It argues that the ECI regulates the electoral process not through what we may ordinarily identify as the law. The most compelling and consequential of its functions are through extra-legal modalities of regulation. Drawing from recent scholarship on regulation, the Article argues that the ECI shapes the electoral environment and behaviour through non-legal modalities of architecture, nudge and notice-based regulations. Much like the other fields where they are deployed, these extra-legal modalities exhibit unique, and in many ways, inherent limitations with respect to transparency. It is thus this character of the ECI's functions – rather than only their widening breadth – that poses the most significant challenge for democratic accountability. Based on this assessment, the Article notes that for powerful EMBs like the ECI, accountability in the form of on-going operational accountability is inherently limited in compelling ways. This increases the stakes for accountability of these institutions through other means, particularly by securing their constitution, composition and tenure.

Editorial

This issue is—in many ways—united by a common theme: revisiting the past and rethinking the problems it poses. Beginning with a renewed test of the biographical availability hypothesis, moving through a reassessment of the dynamics of collective identity formation, and stopping at a re-evaluation of the legacies of the 2011 protest wave, this issue begs that we reconsider that which we thought we already knew and open our minds to novel nuance and differential dynamics. It is thus fitting that it closes with a reflection on the life's work of William Gamson, whose work prompted a great many scholars of social movements and contentious politics to reassess and re-evaluate much that we had assumed to know over the years.

Saudi-Iranian Relations and the Future of the Middle East

ABSTRACT Mason explores Saudi-Iranian rivalry in the Middle East with particular reference to the growth in political contentions post-1979. He covers work by Ghattas who provides a more social perspective on the fallout from increased Saudi-Iranian rivalry from 1979, including sectarian violence from Egypt through to Pakistan, and a more policy-orientated appraisal and outline for conflict resolution between the parties provided by Fraihat. Taken together, they afford a comprehensive overview of the causes and effects of this “conflict.” For a political science scholar, it is Fraihat who tackles substantive conflict resolution issues of enduring concern: rebalancing the regional order, reforming conflict strategies, mediation, Track II diplomacy, and bottom up peace-building, which may hold the keys to shaping the next four decades in more peaceful ways than the previous four. Given the limited avenues of exploration in these areas, a partial GCC state backlash against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) during the Obama administration, and the political consolidation underway in both states, one might despair of a breakthrough. The Biden administration represents an opportunity to at least contemplate de-escalation measures resulting from talks such as those underway in Iraq in 2021. Meanwhile, the policies of small states such as Oman and Qatar provide insights on pragmatic foreign policy behavior, some of which could be replicated by the key protagonists.

Confucianism and Corruption: The Sources of Support for Democracy in Northeast Asia

Scholars of comparative politics have long sought to understand the relationship between Confucianism and support for democratic regimes and institutions. Confucianism can manifest itself in a preference for economic growth over democratic politics among citizens. In this paper, we consider the effect of corruption perceptions on support for democracy in Asia s liberal democracies (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). Using latent class analysis (LCA), we find that although some in Northeast Asia value economic growth more than democratic development, this view does not necessarily threaten evaluations of democratic performance or translate into a clear preference for dictatorship. We also find that perceptions of government corruption fully color the views individuals have about how desirable democracy is as a political regime and how it performs in their country. All told, our research reconceptualizes the relationship between regime performance and cultural orientations in East Asia s Confucian democracies.

The Nonlinear Effects of Political Advertising

Political communication scholars who study the persuasive effects of political advertising often assume that the relationship between advertising volume and vote choice is linear. Even though the product advertising literature has long recognized that advertising has both “wear in” and “wear out” effects, few political communication scholars consider this possibility. This study explains why it is both normatively and empirically important to determine the precise relationship between advertising and vote choice. We then use data from two published studies to investigate inductively how persuasion effects vary with different television advertising levels. The findings suggest that political advertisements do indeed have both “wear-in” and “wear-out” effects. We conclude by investigating three ways to model advertising effects in a more parsimonious manner and settle on log transforming the measure of advertising as the preferred method.

(Re)sketching the theorizing around “missing women”: imageries of the future, resistance, and materializing aspects of gender

ABSTRACT Recent sex ratio data indicate that the number of “missing” women and girls has reached approximately 200 million. This is a significant increase since 1990, when roughly 100 million women and girls had “disappeared.” What are the contemporary discussions concerning the widespread practice of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals? Moreover, how should we, as scholars of law and global politics, name and theorize these “missing” bodies? Despite decades of rigorous scholarship on the connections between sex, gender, and “missing” bodies, there appears to be no agreed understanding of the current and ongoing elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. In this article, we go beyond some well-argued and thought-provoking elaboration and critique of the concept of gendercide to further inquire: what claims should be secured to establish a solid theoretical base for further research on the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals? By building on – in empirical terms – the case of India, our suggested answer to this question rests on two main arguments. First, to capture the motivations and practices of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals, the productive and materializing aspects of gender should be further interrogated. Second, we argue that previous research has failed to include a temporal dimension to the debate around the “missing” women. We should embrace the imagined emotional encounters with the future, mainly on the part of parents or other family members who perform the sex-selective practices. By integrating these two arguments, we conclude that rethinking the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals also means rethinking the resistance to its practices.

Towards Religious Ways of Knowing: Reflections on the REL Symposium and the Future of the Field

The article issues a call for scholars of religion and global politics to reach beyond dominant positivist epistemologies and methodologies—which it does not reject—and to engage in “ways of knowing” that adopt a “first person standpoint” that aims to adopt, or at least get as close as possible to, the perspective of people and communities who practice religion. These might include understanding the phenomenon of religion itself from this standpoint; engaging in practical reasoning; crediting knowledge gained through testimony; and crediting faith as a mode of access to truth.

Review: Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics, by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith

Review: <i>Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics</i>, by Christopher D. DeSante and Candis Watts Smith

Review: American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship, by Niambi M. Carter

Review: <i>American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship</i>, by Niambi M. Carter

Bread or Roses: How Economic Inequality Affects Regime Support in China?

Much comparative politics scholarship has examined whether economic inequality affects democratic values or political support in democracies. Nevertheless, they lack a close examination of the political effects of economic inequality and, more importantly, how economic inequality shapes political support in non-democracies. We provide an empirical test of the effect of economic inequality on regime support using the China data from the Asian Barometer Survey between 2002 and 2015. We argue and demonstrate that perceived economic inequality significantly reduces regime support in China. Moreover, using a causal mediation analysis, we find that the detrimental effect of perceived economic inequality on regime support is not driven by demands for redistribution, but rather by the political value orientation. These findings advance our understanding of the connection between economic inequality and political values and the economic base of political legitimacy in non-democracies.

The Rise of Populism and the Reconfiguration of the German Political Space.

The paper explores the notion of a reconfiguration of political space in the context of the rise of populism and its effects on the political system. We focus on Germany and the appearance of the new right wing party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). The idea of a political space is closely connected to the ubiquitous use of spatial metaphors in political talk. In particular the idea of a “distance” between “political positions” would suggest that political actors are situated in a metric space. Using the electoral manifestos from the Manifesto project database we investigate to which extent the spatial metaphors so common in political talk can be brought to mathematical rigor. Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new populism in Western Europe and the United States with respect to a new political cleavage related to globalization, which is assumed to mainly affect the cultural dimension of the political space. As such, it might replace the older economic cleavage based on class divisions in defining the dominant dimension of political conflict. An explanation along these lines suggests a reconfiguration of the political space in the sense that 1) the main cleavage within the political space changes its direction from the economic axis towards the cultural axis, but 2) also the semantics of the cultural axis itself is changing towards globalization related topics. In this paper, we empirically address this reconfiguration of the political space by comparing political spaces for Germany built using topic modeling with the spaces based on the content analysis of the Manifesto project and the corresponding categories of political goals. We find that both spaces have a similar structure and that the AfD appears on a new dimension. In order to characterize this new dimension we employ a novel technique, inter-issue consistency networks (IICN) that allow to analyze the evolution of the correlations between the political positions on different issues over several elections. We find that the new dimension introduced by the AfD can be related to the split off of a new “cultural right” issue bundle from the previously existing center-right bundle.

Bayeh, Jumana – Oleinikova, Olga (eds.): Democracy, Diaspora, Territory: Europe and Cross-Border Politics

This volume offers a profoundly new interpretation of the impact of modern diasporas on democracy, challenging the orthodox understanding that ties these two concepts to a bounded form of territory. Considering democracy and diaspora through a deterritorialised lens, it takes the post-Euromaidan Ukraine as a central case study to show how modern diasporas are actively involved in shaping democracy from a distance, and through their political activity are becoming increasingly democratised themselves. An examination of how power-sharing democracies function beyond the territorial state, Democracy, Diaspora, Territory: Europe and Cross-Border Politics compels us to reassess what we mean by democracy and diaspora today, and why we need to focus on the deterritorialised dimensions of these phenomena if we are to adequately address the crises confronting numerous democracies. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in migration and diaspora, political theory, citizenship and democracy.

The Generative Power of Protest: Time and Space in Contentious Politics

How do social movements sustain themselves under authoritarian rule? This remains a crucial puzzle for scholars of comparative politics. This article gains traction on this puzzle by foregrounding the generative power of protest, namely the power of protest experiences themselves to deepen and broaden movements. Some studies have started to draw attention to those questions without yet systematically examining how the form of protest differentially affects those outcomes. I argue that different forms of protest have varying effects on movements depending on their duration and geographic scope. While short, multiple-site actions, such as marches, can broaden movements by expanding their base, extended, single-site actions, such as sit-ins, are more likely to deepen movements by fostering collective identities and building organizational capacities. This article is based on field research in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, and Morocco and interviews with more than 100 movement participants and civil society activists.

Uses of ‘the East’ in international studies: provincialising IR from Central and Eastern Europe

This is an introduction to the JIRD special issue Uses of 'the East' in international studies: provincialising IR from Central and Eastern Europe. The special issue makes a twofold contribution. Our first aim is to take stock of the uses of ‘the East’ in the scholarship of politics and international relations in order to account for the relative silence about CEE in the debates on ‘worlding IR’. Our second objective is to explore what provincialising the discipline from CEE might look like. Combining bibliometric, historical, ethnographic and discourse-analytic methods with the participants’ ‘deep hanging’ in the fields of IR and CEE area studies, this special issue is both an empirical stock-taking exercise of the disciplinary traffic patterns between the CEE area studies and IR theoretical debates, and a critical attempt at theorising the interaction between these discrete academic fields of study and research.

The Interplay of Actors in Political Communication: The State of the Subfield

ABSTRACT In this article, we systematically assess how recent political communication scholarship has empirically demonstrated the interactions of the three main actors: elites, citizens and media. We found that research has focused overwhelmingly on within-actor relationships involving citizens, to the exclusion of elites and media, and concentrated mostly on micro-level processes. Most inter-actor relationships also tended to be moderated than mediated, implying the nature of findings as more exploratory and conditional than confirmatory and causal, and that cases were overdrawn from Western countries. In discussing possible reasons and implications for these findings, we call on scholars to move beyond studying micro-processes related to citizens' cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors, and explicitly anchor them to higher-level societal ramifications; incorporate the investigation of causal processes of inter-actor relationships; and make concrete affirmative actions to de-Westernize political communication research.

Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi, 1966–74: Before the Rivalry

When the Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) gave the clarion call of Total Revolution, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded heavy-handedly by imposing the Emergency in India in 1974–5. This all-encompassing duel has dominated politics and political scholarship since. Their domestic clash has established many analytical prisms for the contemporary public sphere in India, particularly personality politics versus people’s power, single party versus coalition grouping, electoral democracy versus authoritarian dictatorship, and student/youth movements versus generational status quo. Simultaneously, it has also highlighted their differences in a way that has served to bury their affinities and agreements—not only on obscure matters. This article seeks to soften this dichotomy on the basis of their correspondence, and complemented by other primary material, to sketch their consensus in an earlier period. It shows that before their break, the socialist JP and the statist Indira Gandhi exhibited complementary stands on national issues regarding Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh. This national nearness complicates their later adversarial politics on domestic issues, adds dimension to our understanding of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, and contributes to contemporary understandings of their respective places in narratives of the state against society in India.

Review: American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation, by Kirsten Fischer

Review: <i>American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation</i>, by Kirsten Fischer

Populism in the 21st century: Today, tomorrow, always?

The concept of populism has been known since Antiquity. However, in recent decades it gained new prominence amongst politicians and political experts. The present paper attempts to reconstruct the image of populism of the 21st century and to assess the viability of populist parties and movements involved in the context of current social and political processes within Western societies. The first section of the paper examines various definitions of populism elaborated by both Russian and foreign political scholars. On that basis the author attempts to identify the core meaning of this phenomenon, its historic roots and psychological underpinnings, as well as a social-political profile today. The author highlights such constituent elements of the populist discourse that crystallized throughout its development, as direct appeal to the public sentiments, oversimplification of reality and the use of manipulative techniques. The second section of the paper examines the origins and characteristic features of the populist wave that spanned across both developed and developing countries in the early 21st century. For that matter, the effects of globalization are considered particularly problematic, as they have uncertain implications for international relations and exacerbate social and economic tensions even within developed societies creating both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. They also allowed various populist movements to take advantage of the growing social instability in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Additionally, the author links the recent rise in the populist sentiments to the deepening crisis of traditional political party systems, the erosion of principles of parliamentarianism and the development of new information and communication technologies. The author stresses that in these circumstances different charismatic leaders gain new opportunities for mobilizing public support. The research concludes that the prospects for the ongoing populist wave are best described by a formula, proposed by a German political scientist Klaus von Beyme: ‘Populism never lasts very long — but it is somehow always around’.