Political Settings Research Articles

Bringing Back the State: Understanding Varieties of Pension Re-reforms in Latin America

ABSTRACTPension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation. Analyzing the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this article shows that where a weak legacy, characterized by low coverage and savings rates, a weakly organized pension industry, and strong societal groups that oppose the private system, combines with a strong institutional setting, characterized by a government with large support in Congress and where the president concentrates decisionmaking, re-reform outcomes may lead to the outright elimination of the private pillar. Conversely, where a strong legacy combines with a weak institutional setting, re-reform outcomes will tend to maintain the private pillar and expand only the role of the public one.

Speaker-audience intercommunication in political speeches: A contrast of cultures

This paper presents a contrastive approach to speaker-audience interaction in political speeches, specifically, in relation to culture. It begins with a review of seminal and subsequent research based in the UK, which has shown how speakers use rhetorical devices to invite audience responses, typically applause. This is followed by evaluation of political speech research set in other nations – both Eastern (Japan and South Korea) and Western (USA and European), English-speaking and non-English-speaking – investigating how the behaviour of speakers and audiences contrasts across cultures. Proposals include, that whereas speakers in Western nations predominantly use rhetorical devices to invite audience responses implicitly, their counterparts in East Asian nations are more inclined to use explicit invitations. Furthermore, whereas invited booing is a salient feature from observations of American and French political speeches, the same cannot be said of others, particularly Japan, where such behaviour is reportedly absent. Speech-making was once regarded as monologic, but studies reported herein show how political speeches can be considered dialogic, akin to how people in conversations take turns. However, it is shown here that behavioural specifics of this form of dialogue need to be understood in the context of culture.

11.F. Workshop: Provision of strategic information during the COVID-19 pandemic through a multiple-layers model

Abstract The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been random across the world's geographic, economic, social, and political settings, with no one unique approach identified as most successful. The fact is that to respond to a pandemic domestically, public health decision makers need timely and extensive knowledge from international settings, especially about successful practices. Within the Robert Koch Institute, different departments monitor and respond to the epidemic situation domestically. To supplement routine data from domestic settings, the Centre for International Health Protection (ZIG) deployed three additional mechanisms to feed strategic pandemic-related international information into the domestic response. The evidence provided to the appropriate decision makers was collected, evaluated, and synthesized on a daily, bi-weekly, and need-based frequency. Each of the three mechanisms will be presented with a focus on a specific analysis example. The discussion that follows will allow us to share our lessons learned on using international data in domestic epidemic control. Our objective is to inform the public health community on a variety of mechanisms to utilize information from international settings to control their domestic epidemic. Key messages Domestic epidemic response should comprise evidence from international settings: a systematic and structured process for data monitoring and analysis is needed to support evidence-informed policies. Departments of international health imbedded within domestic public health agencies can deploy a multiplicity of mechanisms to provide such evidence.

Cities and migrant transnational mobilization: a cross-movement and cross-context comparison

ABSTRACT This paper studies the dynamics of political mobilization of two transnational organizations – Assemblea Nacional Catalana and Marea Granate – formed by Spanish/Catalan migrants in different European cities. By conducting cross-organization and cross-city research, we analyze why and how migrants’ transnational networks perceive themselves to be stronger in some cities and weaker in others. This paper demonstrates that there is no one-size-fits-all mechanism that explains perceived organizational strength in all contexts. The same urban context might provide different opportunities and constraints depending on organizational characteristics of migrant movements. Our study shows the ways that organizations’ political agenda and their preferred action forms affect the perception of positionality as they navigate in different urban contexts with diverging national/local political settings, political cultures, civil society networks, and migration trajectories. The empirical data in this research stem from a content analysis of the events organized by the organizations and semi-structured in-depth interviews with organizations’ representatives.

The limits of the state's power to control crime

In the effort to control harmful behavior the state uses force against individuals, mainly in the form of detention and, in some places, execution. The Enlightenment, through Cesare Beccaria, gave us a model, sometimes called the Classical Model, for appropriate limits upon those uses of force. The state may use such force, according to this model, but only against individuals who have violated laws set down in advance by the people’s representatives, and only to an extent proportional to the harmfulness of the behavior, an amount also to be decided in advance by the legislature. The model was intended to limit discretion and thereby to limit arbitrariness, and it succeeded (I believe) to the extent reasonably possible. In this book (Rejecting Retributivism) —a book whose many virtues space prevents me from remarking upon in detail—Gregg Caruso proposes an alternative model which I will call the Quarantine Model. In the course of developing that Model he attacks our current system of crime control from two directions: he attacks the retributive base upon which the Classical Model been argued to rest, and he attacks the excesses of the existing system. His arguments on both scores are persuasive, but they do not support his proposed model against a classical, Beccarian alternative. First, the failure of retribution should not be mistaken for a failure of the Classical Model. That Model must be distinguished from the retributive justification that philosophers have attempted to fit it up with. My position in this is (with Caruso) that retribution doesn’t succeed as a justification for the classical approach; that it may be that the classical approach, insofar as it depends upon interfering in the lives of individual offenders, can never be fully justified; but (against Caruso) that it is nevertheless morally superior to any of the alternatives that have been proposed, including Quarantine. Second, it would be a mistake of the first order to suppose that the existing system of crime control is an example of the Classical Model. It is a confused hybrid of both classical measures and preventive measures of the sort Caruso would recommend. I find the current system as deplorable as Caruso does, but I do not consider objections to it to be a sufficient reason for rejecting the Classical ideal in favor of Quarantine. My project here is to set out three concerns about Professor Caruso’s Public Health-Quarantine alternative, which I will refer to simply as the Quarantine Model. The first is that the edges of his model simply cannot be softened in the way he would like to soften them. Both preemptive detention and indefinite detention are essential and ineliminable features of it. The second is that the justification for the model, self-defense and the defense of others, doesn’t seem workable and in particular doesn’t seem to limit the state’s use of detention in the ways he suggests. And the third and most troubling thing is that since we do not get to pick the political setting in which our proposals land, a system of broad discretion such as Professor Caruso proposes is dangerous. It leaves the door wide open to the very sorts of excess that motivated Beccaria to set down his model in the first place.

The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject

This research article critically interrogates the implications and unintended consequences of the World Health Organization’s purported elimination of leprosy as a public health problem. I explore how leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone—a temporal framing I call the ‘grammar of leprosy’. I recount the experiences of Daniel, my interlocutor in Tanzania, whose existence became a problem for his doctors. This problem they ultimately resolved by fabricating negative test results in order to record what they already knew: leprosy had been eliminated. I also analyse how researchers working for Novartis (the supplier of leprosy’s cure) continue to push for an always imminent ‘elimination’, while field researchers repeatedly caution about the potential problems of this approach. Finally, I reveal how the grammar of leprosy operates through a complex set of temporal politics, pulling into its orbit and being enabled by multiple interwoven temporalities. I conclude that—due to this grammar, the impossible subjects it produces, and the temporal politics through which it operates—leprosy elimination campaigns may have dire consequences for the lives of people with leprosy today, impeding rather than enabling treatment.

Measuring Agenda Setting in Interactive Political Communication

AbstractAlthough strategies exist to measure actors' efforts to set policy, media, and lawmaking agendas, political scientists lack a method for identifying and accurately measuring another form of agenda setting that lies under the surface anytime two people talk. Within interactions, such as debates, deliberations, and discussions, actors can set the agenda by shifting others' attention to their preferred topics. In this article, I use a topic model that locates where topic shifts occur within an interaction in order to measure the relative agenda‐setting power of actors. Validation exercises show that the model accurately identifies topic shifts and infers coherent topics. Three empirical applications also validate the agenda‐setting measure within different political settings: U.S. presidential debates, in‐person deliberations, and online discussions. These applications show that successfully setting the agenda can shape an interaction's outcomes, demonstrating the importance of continued research on this form of agenda setting.

The Emergence of Transcultural Humanistic Buddhism through the Lens of Religious Entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT This article investigates the innovative strategies that have allowed a young, transcultural Humanistic Buddhist organisation in China and elsewhere to emerge, endure and expand in challenging environments. Developing religious entrepreneurship as an analytic tool, we explain how this organisation survives and thrives in a diverse range of geographical, cultural and political settings. This in-depth case study draws on original data from extensive fieldwork in mainland China, revealing a transcultural turn within a movement that has already become a global force in Chinese Buddhism. This case study also contributes to our theoretical understanding of how innovation and controlled risk-taking allow religious start-ups to expand their influence and carve out new spaces for growth.

Dancers win at work: unionization and Nowak v Chandler Bars Group Ltd

In the United Kingdom, United Sex Workers is organizing as the sex workers' branch of the trade union United Voices of the World (UVW). Sex workers have located dancer unionization and labour rights within a political framework and set of demands relating to socially reproductive labour and decriminalization of all forms of sex work. Their efforts have led to an Employment Tribunal decision that dancers fall within the definition of “worker” found in various UK labour laws. At the same time, the broad perspective and demands of the sex-worker rights movement expose the limits of worker status, and the gains made through unionization have, at least at this time, been eclipsed by COVID-19.

When ‘sustainability’ becomes the norm: Power dynamics in the making of a new eco-label for low-environmental-impact, small-scale fisheries

In 2020, the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food launched a new state-led ecolabelling scheme for fish originating from small-scale, ‘low-environmental-impact’ fisheries; “NaturSkånsom”. The label was introduced to a domestic market where the vast majority of the fish landed by Danish vessels was already certified by the global leader in certification of (wild caught) fish products, Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). MSC’s high market penetration created a situation where especially small-scale fishers felt that MSC certification had developed into a market norm without providing fishers the benefits of demonstrating extraordinarily sustainable practices and thereby gain competitive advantages. Rather, MSC’s market penetration was perceived as undermining efforts to brand and market fish originating from small-scale fisheries as particularly sustainable. This article explores the processes that led up to the NaturSkånsom labeling scheme by applying a ‘power in planning and policy framework’ as an analytical lens. Through the NaturSkånsom process, the article investigates what happens when an ecolabel becomes a market norm, how small-scale fisheries actors who feel disadvantaged by such a development and environmental organizations form alliances, mobilize support and multiple resources to strengthen their positions in the political settings. The examination of this case highlights how stakeholders traditionally thought of as less resourceful can gain political influence. The article offers a glimpse into a possible, emerging future where those perceiving themselves as the most sustainable producers may increasingly view large and dominating ecolabels simultaneously as obstacles and forces for positive change.

Assigning Guilt and Dispersing Blame: Conspiracy Discourse and the Limits of Law in the Nuremberg Trials

Abstract This essay investigates how Allied postwar planners sought to overcome a set of legal, political, and pragmatic problems in the punishment of Nazi perpetrators by turning to conspiracy law. In doing so, they sought to glean the rhetorical benefits of conspiracy discourse and argument but were largely thwarted due to the specialized burdens of proof required by law. Here, I suggest that while everyday uses of conspiracy discourse can overcome the problem of assigning individual guilt in the midst of dispersed and collective criminality due to its low burdens of proof, the heart of the Western legal tradition—the fault principle—stymies the effectiveness of conspiracy law as a charge. Despite its relative inefficacy, conspiracy law has had a significant legacy in shaping postwar understandings of World War II and in providing a precedent to hold perpetrators accountable in recent postconflict trials. The continued usage of conspiracy law, despite its shortcomings, points to the limits of legal solutions in the wake of mass atrocities and the need for creative mechanisms for dealing with perceptions of individual and collective guilt.

The advocacy coalition framework in Japan: Contributions to policy process studies and the challenges involved

AbstractThe advocacy coalition framework (ACF), a unified framework for understanding the policy process, has been applied in various countries and regions; however, there are few contributions from Japan, despite seemingly favorable conditions for applying it. An exploration of what hinders ACF applications in Japan is worthwhile for developing the ACF as a framework for comparative policy process studies across various social and political settings. Therefore, this study aims to systematically review previous Japanese ACF studies. Our review found that Japanese ACF studies are fewer in number, have less coverage of policy fields, and have less methodological diversity and transparency than international trends. While most of the Japanese ACF studies supported the basic hypotheses of the ACF, we found a need to refine some hypotheses and research methods of the ACF studies. We also discuss the background factors in the inactivity of ACF studies in Japan and suggest solutions for it.

Women, Civility and the Language of Politics: Realities and Representations

AbstractThis article draws on research which analyses both the actual speech of women in political and public settings and the way their speech is represented in media reports and other commentary. It argues that there is a disconnect between reality and representation, and that the effect is to place a particular burden on women. Women are judged in relation to the belief that they will civilise public discourse thanks to their ‘naturally’ less adversarial speech style, and when they deviate from this stereotype they are liable to attract punitive responses. The idea(l) of civility is thus a double‐edged sword: while it may be invoked to deplore the abuse to which women in public life are subjected, it can also be deployed to police or discredit women's own public speech. A feminist politics of civility must pay attention to both these manifestations of sexism.

Deception Detection in Politics: Can Voters Tell When Politicians are Lying?

In this study, we investigate voters’ unaided perceptions of whether politicians are lying. We conduct an experiment in which participants attempt to uncover politicians’ dishonesty by watching videos of their speeches. We find that verbal cues (specifically, the amount of detail in the speech) and general demeanor cues explain the success (failure) of veracity judgments far better than paraverbal and nonverbal cues. We also find evidence of a truth bias—people are more likely to judge statements to be true than false—despite the political setting, where voters might have been more skeptical. However, gender plays a deterministic role for veracity judgments in political context; female politicians are more likely to be judged as honest.

Tobacco and Deforestation Revisited. How to Move towards a Global Land-Use Transition?

Articles 17 and 18 of the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control address the environmental sustainability of tobacco as a contested agricultural crop. They require regulatory land-use policies to be introduced and designed to enhance a sustainability transition to diversified farming practices and/or alternative livelihoods. Related activities of the UN Study/Working Group on Economically Sustainable Alternatives to Tobacco Growing are reviewed to assess and monitor the crop’s impact on natural resources with a focus on methods to identify tobacco-attributable deforestation (remote sensing, proxy values, secondary statistics, natural valuation, ecological/social surveys). It is posited that since 2007 no advances have been achieved in framing woody biomass destruction/degradation due to land extension and curing (i.e., drying green leaf using wood). Building on support by digital technologies and land surface monitoring systems, a novel post-2020 strategy is proposed to mainstream an extended set of indicators integratively, i.e., addressing biodiversity losses, soil carbon reservoirs and land degradation neutrality of tobacco as an agricultural crop. Thus, the point is emphasized that land stewardship requires political priority setting that makes the framing of land-use sustainability metrics more than a purely technical matter.

Can Ethical Political Leadership Restore Public Trust in Political Leaders?

This article presents findings from a qualitative study (via in-depth interviews with 121 local political leaders from 65 local authorities in the UK) that aims to understand how ethical leadership practices can restore public trust in political leaders. The study finds that being a moral person, an ethical political leader sets good examples of behaviour, sets the tone at the top and challenges those who do not behave ethically, as well as encourages, supports and rewards those who perform and conduct themselves well. As a result, the level of public trust in political leaders is likely to increase gradually.

Examining wind energy deployment pathways in complex macro-economic and political settings using a fuzzy cognitive map-based method

Long-term sustainable wind energy deployment faces an array of challenges due to various complex interconnected impediment factors. These inherent endogenous and exogenous uncertainties preclude obtaining an accurate future trend, which in turn complicates the design of the good policy. This study employs Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) to semi-quantitatively explore the scenarios of wind energy deployment in Iran. The FCM-based framework was built using participatory workshops and a subsequent questionnaire survey to identify 26 influential factors shaping the dynamics of the system. The developed scenarios originated from the latest narratives of real-world geopolitical variations. The findings demonstrated that the sector is governed by six major groupings of factors predominated by economic and political concepts with strong interconnections between them. Five key concepts, including two economic, one legal, and two political, were ascertained that contribute to the stability of the system. Of the four scenarios, only one optimistic trajectory expects an acceleration in the deployment. Another scenario projects that there will not be any considerable change between the future scheme and the current state of development. However, the other scenarios envisage a substantially slower growth than the current trend.

Trajectories of middle-aged and elderly people\u2019s chronic diseases Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs): cohort, socio-economic status and gender disparities

BackgroundThe accelerated aging trend brought great chronic diseases burdens. Disabled Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) is a novel way to measure the chronic diseases burden. This study aimed to explore the cohort, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender disparities of the DALYs trajectories.MethodsA total of 15,062 participants (55,740 observations) comes from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) from 2011 to 2018. Mixed growth curve model was adopted to predict the DALYS trajectories in 45–90 years old people influenced by different birth cohorts and SES.ResultsWe find significant cohort, SES (resident place, education level and income) disparities differences in the chronic diseases DALYs. For individuals of earlier cohort, DALYs are developed in a late age but grow fast with age but reversed for most recent cohorts. Living in urban, having higher SES level will decrease the growth rate with age, but converges for most recent cohorts. Meanwhile, DALYs disparities of resident place and education level show gender differentials that those for female are narrowed across cohort but for male are not.ConclusionsThe cohort effects on chronic diseases DALYs are accumulated with China’s unique social, and political settings. There are large inequalities in early experiences, SES and DALYs. Efforts of reducing these inequalities must focus on the lower SES individuals and those living in rural areas, which greatly benefit individuals from recent cohorts.

An Exploration into the Satiric Significance of Abuse in Selected Nigerian Drama

A general survey of the contemporary Nigerian theatre and drama reveals that several contemporary Nigerian dramatists have harnessed the art of abuse—invectives— as a device for conveying meanings in their works and achieving their satiric goals. These dramatists create characters that engage abuse to articulate the thematic concerns of their drama, accentuate the conflicts in them, and establish the socio-cultural and political setting of their drama. Although extant works on satiric plays have focused on the use of language, and other satiric devices such as grotesque, irony, burlesque, innuendo, sarcasm, among others (Adeoti 1994; Adenigbo & Alugbin 2020; Mireku-Gyimah 2013; Nyamekye & Debrah 2016), sufficient scholarly attention has not been given to the art of abuse as a trope in Nigerian drama. The article explores the artistic significance of abuse and its forms in selected works of two contemporary Nigerian dramatists: Femi Osofisan’s Altine’s Wrath (2002) and Ola Rotimi’s Who is a Patriot? (2006). These two plays are selected because they manifest ample deployment of the art of abuse and engage various sociopolitical issues. Hence, the article discusses how the art of abuse in these plays projects and addresses such sociopolitical realities as oppression, exploitation, resistance, self-interest versus national interest, and capitalism, among others. The article engages the principles of superiority theory of humour as espoused by Henri Bergson (2003) for textual analysis. It contends and concludes that abuse, as an inherent part of social and human interactions, has been an effective tool in satirising ills in individuals and society at large.

‘This is not a case of gender inequality. This is a case of injustice’: Perceptions of online resistance to camera sexual voyeurism

In November 2018, Monica Baey, a student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) was recorded by a fellow student while showering in university accommodation. After the perpetrator was issued a formal warning and a one-semester suspension, Baey posted about the case on social media and named the perpetrator. This generated public support, news coverage and institutional reform. In this article, we explore a range of responses to the Monica Baey case through a thematic analysis of publicly available comments about the case on a popular message board forum, Hardwarezone. By contextualising our analysis within the political setting of Singapore, this research demonstrates that public responses to testimony-based resistance require close analysis, as extant tools for citizens to engage in ‘naming and shaming’, were relevant to understanding these responses to this mode of resistance and reflected what Ibrahim (2018) calls ‘everyday authoritarianism’.