Political Science Research Articles

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Paisley Currah on the Impact of Trans Studies in Political Science

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Paisley Currah on the Impact of Trans Studies in Political Science

What Defines a Discipline and How We Teach and Study It? The Changing Scope and Role of the Subject Benchmark Statement for Politics and International Relations (IR) and Its Implications For the Teaching and Study of Politics and IR in Higher Education

The paper asks whether there is a typical Politics and IR curriculum before reviewing the content and design of the revised fifth edition of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Politics and IR Subject Benchmark Statement that was launched in March 2023. The paper examines the manner by which the most recent edition differs from earlier subject benchmark statements and reflects on the implications of the strategic direction taken by the QAA to include new content areas that primarily focus on the development of disciplinary statements on Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), Accessibility and sustainability and Enterprise and entrepreneurship education (EED). The paper explores the implications of benchmark statements, given that while they are not a regulatory requirement, they nevertheless seek to define what can be expected of a graduate and are drawn upon by Higher Education Institutions (HEI) to inform the development and revision of Politics and IR undergraduate provision.

Sovereignism as a product of crises: a comparative analysis of German and Spanish parties and their use of sovereignist claims

ABSTRACT Sovereignism is frequently considered as an important phenomenon in political science but barely studied on its own. This paper understands sovereignism as a distinct concept and explores sovereignist claims comparing two different political systems. It addresses the yet-to-be-discovered link between crises and increase (or stagnancy/decrease) in the adoption of sovereignist claims by political parties. Following a framing approach, we examine the euro, migration and COVID-19 crises to capture how these crises were used by German and Spanish parties to shape sovereignist claims. The analysis confirms that these three crises facilitated discursive opportunities for an increased use of sovereignist claims. Although newly emerged radical parties are identified as the main discursive entrepreneurs, mainstream parties also accommodate the sovereignist discourse under certain conditions. This paper makes an important contribution to studies on sovereignism offering an analytical framework as well as fresh insights on the conditions for the adoption of sovereignism.

The state of contemporary intergroup conflict in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Purpose This paper aims to discuss the scholarship over the past 30 years on what used to be called Melanesian warfare or “tribal fighting” and is termed in this paper “intergroup conflict” in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The paper categorises the drivers of intergroup conflict that make up the landscape for conflict in the Highlands. It starts with cultural factors and the understandings about conflict that have long been used to explain such violence, then adds newer factors. It argues that while the individual existence of each driver is important, far more important is the way in which they interact with each other in reinforcing feedback loops that propel the actors involved towards violence. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a thorough review of the scholarly and grey literature on the topic, drawing from the fields of anthropology, criminology, political science, law, justice and peacebuilding. Findings The overall finding of the paper is that the nature of intergroup conflict, its scale and dynamics, has changed considerably over the past 30 years, most prominently in the entanglement of the state with local-level conflicts. This has significantly affected the nature of intergroup conflict today, deepening the attractors towards violence and conflict, while weakening the ability of existing state and non-state systems to prevent it. The picture that emerges is one in which the interconnectivity of factors promoting violence has intensified, the rate of change is accelerating and levels of violence are amplified. Originality/value This paper is an original work.

Medicaid Waivers to Address Homelessness: Political Development and Policy Trajectories.

This article reviews the role of Medicaid Waivers in homeless policy, and their emerging role as a mechanism to address homelessness. We evaluate the political development of Waivers in housing and homeless policy over the past thirty years, and investigate the status of current and approved Waivers targeting homelessness. We then consider how Waivers may shape homeless policy governance going forward, including the success of existing systems, and ethical questions related to the role of healthcare payers in solutions to homelessness. We find that the scope of Medicaid Waivers to address homelessness has always been present, but significantly expanded post Affordable Care Act (ACA) and more notably following the COVID-19 pandemic. These expansions brought new opportunities for states to fund responses to homelessness through Medicaid social determinants of health (SDoH) provisions providing wrap-around medical services for populations at-risk of or experiencing homelessness, and now through time-limited direct housing costs paired with essential medical services. Over one third of states have an 1115 Waiver specifically targeting homelessness, with nearly one in five states including provisions that cover direct housing costs (e.g., rent). Going forward, Medicaid's involvement in homeless policy has the potential to reshape state and local responses to homelessness.

Can informal lobbying be responsible? Evidence from Brussels

PurposeThis study links the notion of responsible strategic communication to the field of lobbying at the European (EU) level. It provides empirical findings on the relevance of informal interaction and communication in EU public affairs (PA). Focusing on functional expectations and uses tied to informality from an actors’ perspective, this study not only includes lobbyists and their attempts to gain influence on political actors but also attempts of lobbyists to control journalistic output through informal relationships and exchange mechanisms. The results are discussed with a view to further inform the concept of “responsible lobbying.”Design/methodology/approachBuilding on a theoretical background from strategic communication, informal politics and interest group research, findings from a qualitative content analysis of 43 semi-structured interviews with actors from PA (n = 27) and journalism (n = 16) at the EU level are reported, focusing on one policy case.FindingsThe study shows motives for establishing and using informality for both actor types. Functional expectations relate to a range of tasks at the core of the respective actors’ day-to-day activities: monitoring political developments, pre-negotiating policy options in protected, confidential spaces with political decision-makers, receiving relevant sectoral background information and “technical coaching” on legislative dossiers directed to journalists.Originality/valueStudies on lobbying have rarely been conducted from a strategic communications perspective, especially focusing the EU level. Albeit widely accepted, the understanding of lobbying and PA as an informal activity has not been scrutinized by academic research.

Integer estimation of inner-cell values in RxC ecological tables

The estimation of the inner entries of a set of related RxC contingency tables when only the margins are known poses one of the most difficult problems in the field of the social sciences, present in many areas from marketing to quantitative history; being particularly prevalent in political science and sociology. With dozens of methods proposed to solve this, (almost) all of them have been devised to infer conditional proportion distributions, despite interior values of contingency tables being integers. This paper develops, within the linear programming framework, a new algorithm to output integer solutions, and assesses it using real data from more than 500 elections where actual cross-distributions of votes are known. Although the new approach is proposed with the expectation that more accurate solutions would be obtained by narrowing the search space from a continuous to a discrete simplex space, the results attained suggest that the use of a pure integer approach does not lead to more accurate solutions. The recommendation is therefore to integer-adjust decimal solutions when the focus is on counts. Interested practitioners can easily use the new models as they have been programmed in the R-package lphom.

The Acculturation of Pakistanis in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article explores the process of acculturation for Pakistanis in Singapore and their later generation descendants from the country’s colonial period to the present day, focusing on the complexities brought about by migration, colonialism, and nationhood. It analyses how the historical context, namely Singapore’s unique position as a multicultural British colony situated in the Malay peninsula has shaped the experiences of this diaspora community in a variety of ways. Using qualitative research methods and employing cross-cultural psychologist John Berry’s acculturation strategies and multicultural adaptation hypothesis, the article argues that the acculturation process has been facilitated by the sense of cultural and socio-economic security among Pakistani immigrants and their families, amidst evolving political developments and top-down policies during Singapore’s transition from a British colony to an independent nation. The findings of this study will contribute to our understanding of diaspora experiences in multicultural societies and provide insights into the complex dynamics of acculturation in a rapidly changing social context.

Rhetorical action in a liberal international order in crisis: theorising EU and NATO enlargements post-2022

ABSTRACT The Russian invasion of Ukraine has thrust the issue of European Union and NATO enlargement back into the political spotlight. However, it remains uncertain whether established theoretical frameworks are still applicable in today’s rapidly changing world. In response to this uncertainty, this debate section brings together five short reflection pieces, with a response from Frank Schimmelfennig, to assess the relevance of the theory of ‘rhetorical action’ in light of recent developments in European and international politics. How effectively does rhetorical action explain current EU and NATO enlargement processes, as well as broader forms of international cooperation? The authors find strong overall support for the theory’s continued validity. However, they caution that the increasing politicisation of issues, the rising competition from populist, non-liberal forces, and the broader crisis of the Liberal International Order require more careful reflection and specification of the scope conditions that define the theory’s limits.

Early Voter Engagement Through Smart Voting Movement RRI Makassar

General elections target novice voters as a flying vote. Novice voters are those who are eligible to participate in general elections for the first time with a minimum age of 17 years. Among them are class XII SMA/MA or new students. In the 2024 General Election, novice voters as a whole dominated the permanent voter list (DPT) with a number reaching around 56.45% of the total voters. However, the level of voter participation has decreased, due to disappointment in the results of previous elections and local elections. Various problems have resulted in a decrease in voter participation, including the tendency of pragmatic political elites who do not want to know about citizens' participation rights. In order to increase public confidence in domestic democracy, a strategy to increase political participation is needed. The development of Indonesian politics must be known to all citizens, in order to understand the correct political choices and in accordance with decisions without tendency and intimidation according to applicable rules. The research method used is descriptive qualitative method, because it explores the phenomenon in depth. The Smart Choosing Movement (GCM) is effective in increasing political awareness among first-time voters. GCM succeeded in raising awareness of the importance of elections, government functions, and rights and responsibilities as citizens. GCM is effective in increasing understanding of the electoral process, from registration to voting. The program is able to increase the motivation of novice voters to be directly involved in elections.

See, Touch, Feel: Theorizing Twitter/X Images for Diplomacy

Social media images are central to the practice of digital diplomacy. Some of the most contentious political engagements involve digital images designed to challenge or reaffirm the national identity of key political players. Yet the role of touch in conditioning how social media images are seen is curiously absent from International Relations analyses of the visual politics of digital diplomacy. We know far too little about this phenomenon. This article seeks to contribute to the study of images in global politics by developing a tripartite theorization of how the visual, tactile, and emotional intersect to mediate how Twitter images are seen within the practice of digital diplomacy. The article pays attention to the tactile experience of using Twitter, bridging the gap between seeing social media images as visual objects, and the affective resonance these images have as a marker of political power. I argue that touch acts as a conduit between the embodied, material, and visual to produce an affective encounter that contributes to how users feel about Twitter images. The intertextuality of the visual, tactile, and emotional dynamics of Twitter images are important elements of visual social media practices sustaining the strategic representation of identity. This framework allows me to build a theoretically grounded skilful speculation as to how digital diplomacy crisis events such as the China-Australia Twitter spat unfold and resonate beyond the digital.

A local convergent ecological inference algorithm for RxC tables

ABSTRACT Over the years, a number of methods have been proposed to forecast the unknown inner-cell values of a set of related RxC contingency tables when only their margins are known. This is a classical problem that emerges in many areas, from economics to quantitative history, being particularly ubiquitous when dealing with electoral data in sociology and political science. However, the two current major algorithms to solve this problem, based on Bayesian statistics and iterative linear programming depend on adjustable (hyper-)parameters and do not yield a unique solution: their estimates tend to fluctuate (when convergence is reached) around a stationary distribution. Within the linear programming framework, this paper proposes a new algorithm (lclphom) that always converges to a unique solution, having no adjustable parameters. This characteristic makes it easy to use and robust to claims of hacking. Furthermore, after assessing lclphom with real and simulated data, lclphom is found to yield estimates of (almost) similar accuracy to the current major solutions, being more preferable to the other lphom-family algorithms the more heterogeneous the row-fraction distributions of the tables are. Interested practitioners can easily use this new algorithm as it has been programmed in the R-package lphom.

Paradigms of leadership: A study of doctoral dissertations in two Mexican universities

Latin America is increasingly contributing to scientific research on leadership, although less than other regions. What are the predominant paradigms on leadership within the scientific community in Mexico? The article reviews doctoral dissertations on leadership from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Anahuac University of Mexico (UA) defended before 2021. The findings highlight that 1) the number of doctoral dissertations has grown from 2016 onwards, especially in educational leadership. 2) In both universities a “functionalist” paradigm prevails, based on the transformational leadership model. 3) Two other leadership paradigms are present, referred to in this article as ‘political’ and ‘humanistic’. 4) These three paradigms have their characteristics and preferences in terms of research methodology, language, and reference authors. 5) The use of a paradigm is associated with the type of faculty rather than the type of university (public or private): in business faculties the functionalist paradigm predominates, in education faculties the humanist paradigm, and in political science or communication faculties the political paradigm. In conclusion, it is recommended to confirm the exploratory result obtained and to promote the dialogue between leadership paradigms.

Democratic Stability and Backsliding <!--EndFragment-->

In light of mounting concerns about democratic backsliding, Rawls’s work – which has an unusual focus on considerations of stability – is now being mined for insights about democratic fragility. This paper begins by arguing that the key mechanism underlying Rawls’s account of stability cannot, consistent with a proper recognition of the burdens of judgment, explain what makes democratic stability possible. It is, therefore, not well-positioned to help us to think productively about how to mitigate the risk of backsliding. Building on an influential literature in political science, I describe an alternative way of thinking about what enables democratic stability that focuses on the importance of giving key actors self-interested reasons for compliance. This account provides a more productive framework for understanding the causes, and thinking about how to mitigate the risk, of backsliding. It should, therefore, contribute to how we evaluate political institutions and proposed reforms.

Curriculum reform and practice of Experimental Acupuncture and Moxibustion under the background of "emerging medicine discipline"

Experimental Acupuncture and Moxibustion, as an interdisciplinary course, integrates traditional acupuncture and moxibustion with modern science. It is an important way for cultivating students' scientific thinking and innovation. The teaching group of Experimental Acupuncture and Moxibustion in Shandong university of TCM developed the content of courses under the guidance of talent construction of "emerging medicine discipline", aiming to cultivate the talents for the upright and innovation of acupuncture and moxibustion, and being abide to the advanced teaching concepts of students' cognitive law and outcome based education. Base on teaching design, teaching mode, curriculum ideological and political development, and teaching evaluation, a series of new measures have been implemented, e.g. "two-line, three-stage and eight-step measures", "six dimensions and five combinations" and "five combinations and three measure gauges". Through practice and exploration, the students' satisfaction, the innovation and creativity, and teaching ability of teachers have been enhanced. These reforms could provide the new approach to the development of the first-class courses related to traditional Chinese medicine.

Inside or outside the federation of Pakistan: the Gilgit-Baltistan conundrum

ABSTRACT For more than seven decades, since the partition of India and the first conflict over Kashmir in 1947–1948, the former Northern Territories, renamed Gilgit-Baltistan in 2009, have remained in a constitutional limbo. Under the control of Pakistan, but not part of its federal structure, these Himalayan lands, strategically located on the road to China, are a prisoner of the Kashmir dream. As Pakistan still refers to the old UN resolutions for solving the Kashmir dispute with India, Gilgit-Baltistan has not been made a province of Pakistan, despite many promises to do so. Gilgit-Baltistan was overlooked in the constitutional developments around the 18th Amendment. The latest official proposal in 2020, to grant GB ‘provisional provincial status’ was supposed to keep open the option of a plebiscite on Kashmir. However, this initiative stalled with Pakistan being engulfed in multiple crises. These complex circumstances create a conundrum whereby the political development of the region is held back, while divergent views on the future of the region are debated.

Actors and structures in politics

This manuscript reports, with minor variations, the opening Key Lecture of the Italian Political Science Association Conference held in Trieste on September 12, 2024. This text consists of tentative but hopefully not random thoughts on the topic of the relationship between ‘actors’ and ‘structures’ in politics. It defends some lines of research that the author regards as definitely needed in the current state of the discipline. It covers a great number of complex topics that is compelled to treat succinctly and for this owes apologies to the audience. The title includes three terms; actors, structures and politics. The first two terms do not require special clarification, except for two points. First, they are used as synonymous of the terms ‘micro’ (referring to actors) and ‘macro’ (referring to structures). Second, the text avoids to enter in the extensive theoretical literature that discuss the terms ‘structure’ and ‘structuralism’. The term ‘structure’ is used for the ‘constellation of political actors’, as discussed later in the text. In this context, the term ‘politics’ means simply that the relationship between actors and structures will be seen from the specific point of view of political science. This is a vantage point of view with respect to how the problem is usually framed in sociology and economics.

Finland: Political Developments and Data in 2023

AbstractParliamentary elections in 2023 brought in a discourse on debt. Power was passed from the Marin I to the Orpo I government. This was historically the most right‐wing government to date in Finland, whose formation also took historically long but finally united both the populist‐nativist right with the liberal right in the same coalition. The ministerial appointments raised questions among the opposition, and the issue of racism was discussed in connection to the coalition partners. The government's austerity policies sought to limit the power of trade unions, which in turn generated strong reactions. Proposals to limit strike action were faced with opposition. As the three largest parties shifted around, the political centre chose to remain in the opposition and also took issue with the underfunding of social services. The parliamentary polarisation formed a stark contrast to the consensual way in which Finland had approached North Atlantic Treaty Organisation membership, for which a compatible institutional setting was built.

„Ich küsse deine Augen, Oma!“ – Wertschätzung im Alter. Ein didaktischer Streifzug aus interkultureller Perspektive

Understanding social reality as well as political developments and contexts is not only an important part of our participatory life, but also one of the main tasks of teachers in language integration work. This fundamentally involves juxtaposing the familiar and the target culture, which often becomes a topic in the classroom. These confrontations are closely accompanied by ideas and feelings of belonging and attachment as well as perceived foreignness and otherness. The relationships between the generations and the connections to one's own family play an important role here, especially as they are characterised by emotionality. The article will therefore analyse how the position of older members of the family and society is presented in the textbooks for integration courses, with respect to both the linguistic and intercultural embedding. Based on the existing offer, ideas for supplementary materials will be developed and presented as examples. Particular attention is paid here to a constructive approach, which primarily looks for connecting. The emphasis is deliberately not placed on the differences, as is the case with the prevailing conception, but a narration of the points of contact is sought.

Historicizing Latin American urban politics and governments

ABSTRACT Existing studies about the politics of southern cities, particularly Latin American cities, need to pay more attention to the political institutions behind urban governance. These institutions, additionally, were not created by design but are a product of intertwined historical processes. This article analyzes the main features and transformations of Latin American local governments, their politics, and governance, looked at from the angle of their historical formation. Mobilizing arguments from urban studies and political science usually developed apart, I start with the legacies of two intertwined historical processes—urbanization(s) and state formation(s)—to later observe their recent transformations since the recent return(s) to democracy. The reconstruction of these intertwined historical trajectories and of the effects of the present democratic period help to jointly explain the most important features of the politics of local governments in Latin America that influence their governance and actions—capacities, political grammars, actors, and coalitions—as well as their recent transformations.