Political Theory Research Articles

Confucian Familialism and the Crisis of Care

Abstract This paper critically examines Confucian proposals for social welfare espoused by contemporary Confucian moral and political theorists, who promote a familialist, residual welfare state in which welfare provision should be the family's primary responsibility and public assistance be a last resort only available to the poor without family support. By investigating the situation in South Korea, a country whose welfare system bears a striking resemblance to the Confucian ideal, I argue that the Confucian scheme is inherently flawed. It considers poverty to be a personal failure, idealizes the family as a single unity of common interest free from power hierarchies, and lacks knowledge about social reproduction. Their proposal in actuality humiliates and excludes disadvantaged and marginalized people from social protection, abdicates the state's responsibility for the well-being of citizens, and colludes with capitalism in free riding on women's unpaid labor.

Testing the Relationship Between Local Context and Immigrant-Serving Nonprofit Strategies

Abstract Studies at the nexus of immigration, organizations, and migrant mobilizations find that the strategies that immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations (INOs) employ differ in cities with disparate levels of immigrant inclusion. Yet studies yield mixed results abound other shortcomings in the literature. This study draws from disparate literatures and theoretical frameworks to assemble an understanding on the interrelations between local context and strategies. I investigate the following questions: how does the level of citizenry inclusion impact the strategies employed by INOs, and do more inclusive cities facilitate or constrain contentious advocacy? I draw from a national sample of INOs to test the empirical relationship. The results have implications for political opportunity theory and future lines of research drawing from this framework. Research, nonprofit practice, and policy implications are discussed.

The theory of democratic integration

The outcome of the 2024 European Parliament elections highlights the need for the EU to underpin its functioning as a European democracy with a proper political theory. This article introduces the theory of democratic integration as a political philosophy of the EU. It aims to provide the EU with a philosophical foundation by analysing its evolution as a deviation from the Westphalian system of international relations and its doctrine of absolute sovereignty. The article finds that the EU is succeeding in creating a new democratic home for its citizens and its member states. In times of increasing support for parties which promote national sovereignty as the recipe for the future and which consequently call for the dismantling of the European Parliament and the deconstruction of EU democracy, the theory will empower the Union to defend its constitutional achievements and prevent it from backsliding into an undemocratic organisation of illiberal states.

Introduction: the cultural deliberation of Europe

ABSTRACT This special issue started years ago as part of a collective reading group on the public sphere with colleagues at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. A significant portion of our initial time was dedicated to understanding Jurgen Habermas’ (1989 [1962]) foundational contributions, which established the basis for a wide-ranging and complex field of study. This field spans social and political theory, media and communication studies, sociology, and philosophy. Since then, scholars from diverse disciplines have responded to and critiqued Habermas’ concept, contributing to the development and refinement of its analytical potential by challenging the implicit normativity of Habermas’ initial notion. These critical reactions have further enriched the theoretical landscape by expanding its scope and applications. One point on which Habermas’ initial work was opened significantly related to the exclusionary nature of the historical practice described by Habermas by exposing the historical situatedness and specificity of his concept of the public sphere.

Articulating the ‘How’ of Social Return on Investment: Foregrounding the Plural and Pluralizing Character of Its ‘Moments of Judgment’

ABSTRACTSocial accounting practices attribute value to an organization's activities beyond traditional economic conceptions of success. In assessing the merit of such practices, we argue that it is helpful to extend our analytical focus beyond questions of what is evaluated and who evaluates to how valuations are performed. Social accounting literature has already explored a crucial aspect of the “how question,” emphasizing the need to widen stakeholder input and engage in agonistic democratic deliberation beyond applying technical expertise. We extend these insights by drawing attention to an important dimension of the how question that remains underexplored, namely, where such deliberation can or should be applied and explaining why this matters. In doing so, we disclose the complexity and messiness of social accounting processes, as well as their normative and political significance. We deploy political discourse theory to highlight the virtues of focusing on where value is constructed along the social accounting chain, illustrating our contribution with examples drawn from our experience conducting a Social Return on Investment (SROI) for a not‐for‐profit organization. We present and unpack key decision‐junctures in the SROI process, demonstrating the plural and pluralizing character of these “moments of judgment” by showing how contestability and normativity enter the valuation process, aspects that are often obfuscated by an over‐reliance on, and the rhetoric of, the technical aspects of quantification and monetization. By foregrounding the contingency and subjectivity embedded in valuation practices, we argue there is a need to navigate agonistically, deliberatively, and pragmatically their plural and complex character.

LA INCONCEBIBILIDAD DE LA POBREZA EN LA SOCIEDAD LIBRE. EL ARGUMENTO JURÍDICO.

Poverty, an open wound on humanity, is also a pending issue for libertarian political theory, the current of thought that advocates minimization of coercion, and thereby maximization of freedom, as an ideal of social organization. While libertarians have prolifically argued that a free society would be much more prosperous in all its strata, they have never sought to demonstrate so ambitious a proposition that such a society would become incompatible with the very phenomenon of poverty. This essay provides demonstration thereof by means of a legal-philosophical argument built upon the legal treatment that so-called famine theft would presumably receive in the non-statist legal community. Based on the primacy of human life and dignity over any other legal value, famine theft would constitute an exception to the inviolability of private property. Echoing the historical development of maintenance obligations arising from a family relationship, the evolutionary nature of decentralized law would gradually widen the range of material needs suitable to qualify as determinants of poverty, the presence of which would legitimize the resort to this exception. Likewise, it would spontaneously result in the voluntary articulation of social assistance networks, the contribution to which would be judicially recognized as a counter-exception to the admissibility of famine theft and similar behaviors—thus affording full legal protection of property.

Practical Teaching Mode Structure for Ideological and Political Theory Course Based on Fuzzy System Theory

The application of graph theory is instrumental in the construction of a practical teaching mode structure for an ideological and political theory (IPE) course rooted in fuzzy system theory. In recent years, IPE education has received more and more attention. System theory can well construct the IPE teaching mode, so we need to have a good grasp of system theory. This paper starts with the significance of system theory in the practical teaching of IPE, finds the IPE curriculum that conforms to system theory, and constructs the basic mode of practical teaching of IPE on this basis. Using the idea of a multi-level fuzzy comprehensive evaluation to quantify teachers’ teaching quality, this paper establishes an algorithm model to quantitatively measure teachers’ teaching quality fuzzy.

Dialectics of training: A critique of recommendation engines’ aesthetic judgment

In this article, we evaluate the politics of recommendation engines by focusing on an indispensible feature of their operation: training. We use the notion of training as a key word which helps us link three bodies of knowledge: data science, the history of automation, and aesthetic and political theory. Training is a staple in the operation of algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence more generally; it is a practical methodology by which these systems become intelligent. Training is also a key feature of how workers throughout history came to perform their labor, and how, during the 20th century, machines came to acquire this human ability, that is, automation. And lastly, drawing on Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment, Hannah Arendt offers a political theory where training is key to political judgment. We trace the meaning and significance of ‘training’ in these three fields in order to draw conclusions from one field to another.

Embodied Cognition in Dark Times

Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s The Mind-Body Politic sets out to combine both the philosophy of essentially embodied cognition (EEM) and emancipatory political theory to put forth a “new critique of contemporary social institutions.” There remains, however, an explanatory gap between the general, normative foundations of their approach in EEM, and the particular critiques of neoliberalism and the alternative presented. This paper explores an alternative totalitarian pathway (as understood by Arendt) that such general EEM normativity might lead us, as a friendly invitation for further elaboration on the normative basis of MBP’s critiques of—and proposed alternative to—neoliberal institutions.

The Opportunities and Challenges of ChatGPT for Ideological and Political Education of College Students

In the 21st century, humanity ushered in a wave of artificial intelligence. In the context of big data, generative artificial intelligence has become an important auxiliary tool in the field of education. ChatGPT has gradually entered the learning life of students and reflected its value in ideological and political education in particular. Through a questionnaire survey, this article takes college students as the research object and aims to grasp their evaluations of using ChatGPT and their views on its application in the field of ideological and political education. Research has found that ChatGPT has advantages in optimizing ideological and political evaluation and management systems, helping students understand political theories, enriching teaching models, and meeting the personalized needs of students. The integration of ChatGPT into the class can not only improve teaching quality but also enhance student's learning efficiency and interest. However, the arrival of ChatGPT has also raised a series of ethical risks, such as spreading incorrect information, personal information leakage, academic misconduct, shallow thinking among students, and alienation of teacher-student relationships. In response to these problems brought about by ChatGPT, this article also proposes corresponding risk governance policies. It is necessary to establish a legal supervision mechanism, improve the level of software research and development, enhance the information literacy of teachers and students, and strengthen academic standardization awareness.

Research on Enhancing the Affinity of Ideological and Political Theory Courses in Private Universities in the New Era

In the new era, the ideological and political theory courses in private colleges and universities have the problem of insufficient affinity. College students in the new era have distinct personalities, psychology, and value orientations, but some college students feel distant from ideological and political theory courses. They do not pay attention to, understand, or even resist "big concepts" and "big propositions" such as the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics, as well as the lofty ideals and beliefs. Therefore, effective countermeasures must be formed to create a warm ideological and political classroom from the aspects of teaching content, teaching methods, teaching practice, and teacher team building, so as to increase the closeness of ideological and political theory courses among college students. Only in this way can the spirit of patriotism take root in the hearts of students and give play to the positive influence of ideological and political theory courses on the values of young college students.

Linking the natural man to the res publica in the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero

AbstractThere is no consensus on the importance of Cicero's doctrine of the state (res publica) among the prominent figures and scholars of political theory. In our view, the main reason for this is that the discussion of the political theoretical insights of the corpus Ciceronianum is too often reduced to a repetition of stereotypes. Cicero's key works on political doctrine, such as the De oratore, the De re publica and the De officiis, are mostly analysed from a philosophical point of view, with historical and legal aspects being put to one side. The characteristics of the mixed constitution (mikte politeia), which is at the heart of Cicero's theory of the res publica, are only superficially examined. What is also mostly overlooked is the extremely significant fact that in the De re publica Cicero (unlike Plato, for example) not only develops a philosophically grounded theory of the state, the res publica, but also applies his theory to finding the state, and in particular its ideal form, the optimus status civitatis, in the historical reality of Rome, that is, his own state. In this way, Cicero connects ratio and res, thus establishing the harmony and, indeed, unity of idea and history. The value of this important idea is not in the least affected by the fact that Cicero was undoubtedly an eclectic thinker rather than a consistent exponent of the views of any school or current. That, it seems to us, helped him greatly to lay the foundations of a doctrine of the state that could influence political thought centuries, even millennia, later, up to the political thought of the first decades of the 21st century.

The art of listening in the age of AI

Listening is essential to student learning. But how can instructors build practices of listening into their courses? This article makes the case for adopting a listening-centered approach to university instruction to subvert the dominant “transmission model” of education. It also provides an example of how such an approach can be implemented in practice. Specifically, I present the “plague narrative,” a reflective writing assignment modeled after Thucydides’ account of the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The plague narrative gives instructors the opportunity to listen to students’ experiences and to learn about their needs and situations. The exercise also offers students a relatively “low stakes” opportunity to engage in political theorizing and critique. Instructors, if properly focused on listening, can use this assignment to better understand their students while helping them make sense of contemporary political life. I conclude by considering how this assignment can disrupt the forces that might push a student to rely on generative AI tools and instead encourage them to use their own critical thinking and writing skills.

The Five-Year Plan and target allocation cycle of environmental pollution in China

Summary This paper establishes a theoretical connection between China’s Five-Year Plan (FYP) and environmental pollution. We propose a target allocation cycle theory to explain the periodic feature of environmental pollution, which advances political business theory in different institutional contexts. By analysing industrial SO2 and PM2.5 data as well as the political career data of officials in 277 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2019, we reveal a significant influence of China’s political business cycles, as dictated by the FYP, on the periodicity of environmental pollution. Specifically, the emissions of industrial SO2 and PM2.5 exhibit a U-shaped periodic trend, peaking during the initial 2 years of each FYP, followed by a gradual decline in subsequent years, only to peak again in the first year of the succeeding FYP. These findings suggest that local political leaders strategically allocate their efforts in managing environmental pollution. Initially, there is a relaxation of environmental regulation during the early stages of a FYP, which is then followed by a shift towards more stringent environmental governance after the midpoint of the FYP.

Meritocratic Democracy: A Cross-Cultural Political Theory, written by Elena Ziliotti

Meritocratic Democracy: A Cross-Cultural Political Theory, written by Elena Ziliotti

BYSTANDERS, JEWS, AND HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the vast historiography on everyday life in Vichy France to address the moral questions and historical claims implicit in the bystander category. It addresses how historians conceive the relationship between bystanders and Jews, arguing that they implicitly erase the structural violence between the two groups by reproducing the liberal ethics implicit in the slogan “never again” in their own method—and in spite of their commitment to a boundary between history and memory. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial and political theory, it suggests that the category, if rethought, might account for popular complicity in genocidal violence.

Government officials first, then opposition: The spreaders of political and religious conspiracy theories during Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia

Conspiracy theories during Covid-19 pandemic spread worldwide, including in Indonesia. What political and religious factors explain their spread in Indonesia with particular reference to the DKI Jakarta province, its surrounding municipalities, and West Sumatera province? This study aimed to answer the questions. It employed a qualitative approach with multi-data collection methods, including those from media, documents, and interviews. The spread of Conspiracy theories benefited from the democratic system that promotes the freedom of information in using social media. First, the government officials initially spread conspiracy theories to satisfy people’s anxiety about the obscured Pandemic. However, they resulted in the government’s ambiguous, controversial, and reckless policies leading to people’s distrust of the government. Jokowi-Makruf Amien, political opponents capitalized on the government’s poor policies to spread conspiracy theories which partly discredited the Jokowi-Amien administration. Both government officials and the opposition capitalized on politics and religious teaching or supra-natural pretexts to posit their conspiracy theories.

Speaking for music?

How does musicology articulate the value of music and the study of music? This is an urgent question given the collapse of music provision in schools and its impact on the discipline at university level. One response has been to demonstrate the pro-social benefits of music through empirical work allied with approaches in psychology and sociology. While this is important, we should be wary of downplaying the aesthetic value of music at the expense of more obviously instrumental functions. A recent convergence of disciplinary interest in aesthetics, from neuroscience to political theory, suggests the aesthetic dimension of music, far from being some outdated fiction, remains a powerful challenge to habitual academic discourse. Against the trivialisation of music on the one hand, and the reductive readings of critical orthodoxies on the other, I argue that music affords modes of sense-making that have never been more needed. (This article is published in the thematic collection `The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)

How to Do Things with Normative Political Theories: The Performative Nature of Political Philosophy

Recently, there has been much debate about the role and nature of political theories. Jeremy Waldron has argued that we misconstrue a theory’s purpose if we summarize it in terms of ‘What Plato Would Allow’, because a normative theory is a conceptual exploration and should not be reduced to a policy wish list. To make sense of such phrases beyond Waldron’s critique, this paper provides some conceptual tools to clarify the practical purpose of normative political theories. First, it draws on Bernard Williams’ distinction between the enactive and structural models in political theory. Second, it seeks to reconstruct normative political theories as sets of speech acts having an illocutionary point that expresses the relation between theory and practice. Third, the paper outlines five types of illocutionary points (Intervention, Justification, Reconciliation, Critique, and Imagination of alternatives). The idea of an illocutionary point can make sense of the practical import of a theory in a multifaceted manner and without subscribing to a specific conception of practicality.

Quantifying theory in politics: Identification, interpretation, and the role of structural methods

The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantees their identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of explicitly integrating rigorous theory into this process and focus on the advantages of doing so. By integrating a theoretical structure into one’s empirical strategy, researchers can quantify the effects of competing mechanisms, consider the ex-ante effects of new policies, extrapolate findings to new environments, estimate model-specific theoretical parameters, evaluate the fit of a theoretical model, and test competing models that aim to explain the same phenomena. As a guide to such a methodology, we provide an overview of structural estimation, including formal definitions, implementation suggestions, examples, and comparisons to other methods.