Political Literature Research Articles

Willingness, capacities and (non)compliance with human rights norms

ABSTRACT Poor compliance with human rights norms is the most pressing challenge for scholars and practitioners alike. Drawing from International Relations and Comparative Politics literature, this article outlines a comprehensive and clearly specified theory of compliance, which stresses the centrality of the combined influence two key intervening variables – willing state elites and capable state institutions. Only the combination of a willing state elite and capable state institutions can successfully disrupt complex and entrenched mixtures of factors that cause noncompliance. The article argues that state elites that experience significant and persistent pressure from transnational and domestic human rights advocates – in domestic contexts in which societal actors that favour compliance with human rights are more influential than pro-violation constituencies – will become willing to attempt to change the organisational and structural conditions that generate noncompliance. Willing state elites will only succeed, however, if they have strong state institutions to rely upon.

Despair and Voter Turnout in the United States.

Deaths of despair, a term used to capture rising mortality rates among Americans who appear to be suffering from growing mental and physical distress, have received added attention from those seeking to understand this disturbing trend. Yet it is unclear how, if at all, despair influences the political behavior of the people and communities where it is most prominent. The authors contribute to the health and politics literature by examining whether personal and community-level despair shapes political participation. The authors examine the relationship between despair and voter turnout using novel data at both the aggregate and individual levels. First, a custom survey is used to test whether despair is associated with individual-level voter participation in several recent elections. Second, a new measure of community despair is developed at the county level that spans nearly 20 years to assess whether there is a relationship between despair and voter turnout in U.S counties. The results suggest that higher levels of despair lead to lower turnout rates at both the individual and community levels. This study suggests that the effects of experiencing despair are far reaching and shape political behavior among individuals and within communities.

State Capacity and COVID-19 Responses: Comparing the US States

Abstract This article addresses the interstate differences in outcomes from the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on state capacity. State capacity refers to states’ ability to create and implement policy. We posit that states want to limit death and destruction within their borders. COVID-19 created an instance in which states had a shared, preferred outcome but had very different levels of success. Using a novel measure of state capacity that allows for subnational comparisons – and is independent of ideological political will – we show that states with greater capacity experienced fewer excess deaths during 2020 and more successfully distributed vaccines in early 2021. The findings are robust to various measures of partisanship, social capital, geography, and demographics. Our work bridges US state politics literature and comparative politics literature on state capacity, and it contributes to research on the politics of pandemics.

Identifying and developing the roles of private business actors in international regime complexes

Abstract Business actors play increasingly important roles in global governance and international regulation. This paper considers how regime complexity influences the roles of businesses and impacts opportunities for business influence on international regulatory regimes. We conducted a scoping literature review of 243 articles from the International Regime Complexity (IRC) theory literature to explore if and how complexity affects the roles of businesses and their influence on international regulation. We found that complexity presents opportunities for businesses to regime shift and exploit knowledge asymmetry in order to influence international regulation. Further, IRC theory illustrates how the roles of businesses interact and leverage one another in order to create better opportunities for influence in specific international regulatory regimes. This paper contributes to IRC theory by building on the existing non-state actor discussions and offering specific theorization of business behavior, thus starting to bridge the gap between the empirical and theoretical understanding. Second, it contributes to existing discussions in business and politics literature by developing existing knowledge on the roles of businesses in global governance to better reflect the added dimension of complexity.

Cyber risk logics and their implications for cybersecurity

Abstract Cybersecurity in national and international security is frequently discussed in an existential register. However, most cybersecurity activities are normal and routine, including diverse practices of cyber risk management. The intricacies of cyber risk and its connection to security and threat politics have received surprisingly little attention in the cyber politics literature. This article addresses this gap through a twofold theoretical proposition. The first argues that cyber risk in policy and practice inhabits a continuum between ‘classical’ risk and security postures. The second proposes the existence of multiple risk logics, located at different points along this continuum. To illustrate this, we outline two distinct cyber risk logics: ‘risk as potential threats’ and ‘risk as uncertainty’. Through an exploratory case-study of cyber risk policy and guidance in the United Kingdom, we find indications of the simultaneous existence of these risk logics, including in specific organizational contexts. We propose that the ‘risk as potential threats’ logic, in particular, acts as a ‘bridge’ between conventional risk and security. We conclude by discussing how differentiating cyber risk logics facilitates a more finely grained appreciation of cybersecurity policy and practice and provides opportunities for disciplinary engagement with the organizational and institutional politics of cybersecurity and ‘the international’.

Social Media and Conflict: A Visual Analysis of War and Peace Frames in Pakistan

Based on traditional peace communication scholarship, this study, embedded in journalism studies and visual politics literature, analyzes photographs of conflict using war and peace frames and explores the role social media can play in digital peacebuilding practices. A content analysis of 674 visuals of the second deadliest terrorist attack in Pakistan posted on Twitter revealed the dominance of war photographs. The majority of the visual tweets were related to the afflicted victims and the visiting elites. Our analysis revealed that the visual narrative predominantly adopted a war approach. Results also showed significant variations in the war and peace narrative over time. Overall, this study challenges the views of peace journalism scholars that social media would lead to a more peace-oriented approach. We argue that peace narratives may be difficult to occur on digital platforms in securitized national conflicts where elites and a dominant public opinion oppose alternative perspectives.

Applying Insights from China: A Typology for Subnational Comparative Politics

AbstractIn this study, we draw on theories of subnational analysis and comparison to introduce a novel framework for better understanding central-local dynamics in China. We argue that careful consideration along the dimensions of interests and information of national and subnational actors can allow us to predict how the central state evaluates local actors, variation in local implementation, and the potential for findings to be generalized to settings beyond China. We apply this 2$$\times$$ × 2 typology to several policy areas—social stability, social security, environmental governance, and economic development—to derive expectations about the behavior of central and local states, and identify when researchers can (and cannot) treat subnational units as independent observations. By identifying the underlying dynamics of central-local relations in different policy domains, this typology provides researchers with tools to construct a more precise analytical framework and helps scholars of Chinese politics conducting subnational analyses design research agendas better able to contribute to the larger comparative politics literature.

Innovation in Political Communication Strategy: A Qualitative Approach in Examining the Influence of Campaign Messages

This research investigates innovations in political communication strategies through a qualitative approach, focusing on the influence of campaign messages in the context of general elections in Indonesia. Through content analysis of campaign messages, this research identifies the main themes, framing strategies, and rhetoric used to influence voter perceptions. The findings of this research have practical implications for designing more effective campaign strategies, increasing more informed voter participation, and contributing new thinking to political literature and political marketing in Indonesia.

Biofinancing Citizenship: Gotong Royong and the Political Construction of National Health Insurance Ideology in Indonesia

This paper examines the fund-collecting model of Indonesia's national health insurance system, Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional (JKN), performed by its organizing body, Badan Penyelenggara Jaminan Sosial (BPJS). The system is based on the home-grown idea of gotong royong, often vaguely defined as ‘mutual assistance.’ As gotong royong has been prominent in Indonesia's nation building projects since before independence, scholars have argued that the term has carried numerous interpretations shared by political elites and the larger public they sought to mobilize. Analyzing recent public debates regarding the JKN, we argue that these debates are rooted in the unstable nature of the gotong royong principle. We begin with a brief history of Indonesia's national health insurance system and the evolution of the gotong royong notion, before presenting the various interpretations of gotong royong in the national health insurance system. We also examine the concept of biofinancing citizenship that has emerged as a consequence of the current implementation of the gotong royong principle as the central ideology of Indonesia's national health insurance system. This paper aims to enrich the literature in welfare politics by providing insights from one of the world’s largest and most ambitious national health insurance programs.

Migrant necropolitics in No Man’s Land camps

Abstract Through genealogical explorations of the understudied No Man’s Land camps at Rukban and Zero Point, this paper aims to contribute a decolonial, South-centric perspective to critical refugee politics literature. The two No Man’s Land camps are conceptualized here as necropolitical spaces of migrant abandonment and containment, where States effectively determine ‘who may live and who must die’ through their violent expulsion of unwanted populations, securitized border policies and restrictions on life-saving aid. Despite their immobilization, the paper highlights how the displaced migrants formed self-government and engaged in claim-making for aid, rights, and homeland political change, thus transforming the death worlds of the No Man’s Land camps into spaces of vibrant political contention. This necropolitical resistance comes with the risk of death or redisplacement, but it provides tantalizing clues of the possibilities of living, even if only momentarily, beyond the law and the State.

Understanding Cycles of Protest and Elections in Lebanon

Abstract While contentious politics literature links protest and voting as connected forms of claim making, in Lebanon, scholars, activists, and citizens generally have treated them as distinct phenomena, resulting in cycles of anti-system protests and elections characterized by wins by the status quo and low turnout. This unusual situation reflects how confessionalism has become deeply intertwined with neoliberalism, closing off necessary opportunity structures for change. Neoliberal policies, even while causing general harm to the average Lebanese citizen, generated high rents which sectarian parties could then distribute to supporters. To keep this system going, the collusive sectarian elite consciously and largely successfully removed economic policy as an electoral issue. By starting from how the ruling sectarian parties dominate the economy, it is possible to explain the cycles of protest and voting behavior.

Another sleeping giant? Environmental issue preferences in the 2019 European Parliament elections

Seminal works have highlighted a growing polarisation regarding the environment, with supporters advocating for immediate emissions reduction and others downplaying or even denying human-caused climate change. Despite this debate, little attention has been focused on how voters’ environmental preferences influence their electoral behaviour. Using the metaphor of the ‘sleeping giant’ from European Union politics literature, the article empirically explores how environmental issue preferences impact voting choices. Analysing stacked data from the 2019 European Election Study, the article examines the phenomenon of environmental issue voting by shifting the unit of analysis from individuals to party-voter dyads. Results reveal that environmental preferences moderately, yet significantly, affect vote choice. This effect is more pronounced among left-leaning voters and in countries where the environmental issue is more salient among the public. Our findings shed light on patterns of environmental preference and their role in European electoral competition.

Communist Parties and Threat to Democracy in Nepal: A Historical Analysis, 1949–2023

Communist parties are major actors in Nepali politics. This study is an attempt to explore if they pose a threat to democracy in Nepal given that communist parties are formed to operate a dictatorship of the proletariat. Findings suggest that democracy in Nepal is not under threat from communist parties for three reasons. First, communist parties in Nepal have contributed more to the arrival of democracy than its departure. Second, communist parties dominant in current Nepali politics have accepted democracy as an ideology. Third, communist parties and leaders have strongly stood up against the authoritarian tendency crept into the communist movement of Nepal. Since this study is the first exclusive research on the relationship between democracy and communist parties in Nepal, this work makes an original contribution to the Nepali political literature. This study also makes an original contribution to the general democratization literature by refuting the assumption that democracy can never coexist with communist parties. Furthermore, this study invites more research on the relationship between democracy and communist parties from other democratic countries that have communist parties. The method used in this study is historical analysis.

“The Political Dimension of the Unification-Disintegration Paradox in Mantra (2001) by Rodrigo Fresán”

Rodrigo Fresán’s writing had a significant impact on Southern Cone literature when his first book, Historia argentina, was published in 1991. Despite its high sales and favorable reviews, which earned Fresán the status of a celebrity writer, his works have often been criticized for possessing “an esthetics of insensitivity and/or an ethics of indifference” (Freidemberg). This essay refutes these accusations of postmodern shallowness in Fresán’s writing and instead proposes an examination of the “politics of literature” (Rancière) in his 2001 work Mantra. The purpose of this essay is to challenge the aporias of the theory of “littérature engagée” derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy that were debated among Latin American intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s. The main objective of this essay is to demonstrate that Fresán’s writing is not only literary but also political in nature. In Mantra, we can observe a system of heterogeneities that disrupts the realm of experience, creating a non-dialectical paradox between the forces of unification and disintegration that elicits an emotional response and challenges the illusion of a concrete, complete identity. This, in turn, allows us to reconsider central themes such as memory.

The contingent nature of the political skill-employee performance relationship.

The prevailing perspective in the organizational politics literature is that political skill facilitates heightened employee performance. Indeed, meta-analytic results have consistently found a positive relationship between political skill and both task and contextual performance. However, the literature has neglected the possibility of a contingent relationship between political skill and employee performance, despite arguments that organizations are political arenas in which employees also need political will. This is problematic because although politics are described as an ever-present facet of organizations, the extent to which work environments are politicized varies (Pfeffer, 1981), and such contexts can either constrain or enhance organizational behavior (Johns, 2006, 2018). Therefore, underpinned by the multiplicative framework of performance (i.e., P = f(M × A × C); Hirschfeld et al., 2004), we argue that the effects of political skill on employee task and contextual performance are contingent upon employee political will and the degree to which the work context is politicized. Results from a sample of working adults and their supervisors provided support for our hypothesis. Namely, political skill and political will interacted to predict heightened levels of task performance and citizenship behavior within more political contexts, but not within less political contexts. The contributions of this study to the politics literature are discussed commensurate with this study's associated strengths and limitations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

“Turning Others’ Leaves”: The Politics of National Literary Identity in Renaissance England

The origins of the sense in Renaissance England for a distinct English literary identity may be traced back to Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower in the fourteenth century. However, it was with the Elizabethan generation of writers and poets in the second half of the sixteenth century that this sense became a serious concern and constituted the essence of their literary politics at the time. In fact, at a time when political, ideological, cultural, economic, commercial, and colonialist nationalism was on the rise in Renaissance Europe, it would not be unusual for the Elizabethans to pursue radical policies of nationalism in every sphere, including most importantly the formation of a national literary identity. Accordingly, for the literati of the time, especially for the generation of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and their contemporaries, literary creativity and originality and, consequently, independence from foreign influence were to be prioritized and privileged over imitation and traditionality. Therefore, they increasingly turned away from the imitation of Continental literary norms and explicitly rejected Petrarchan populism; instead, they were involved in a deliberate and focused engagement in a process of theoretical and pragmatic politics for the creation of national literature. The new national literature they envisaged was not only to be authentic and native in identity but also to match up the intellectual standards of Renaissance humanism and literary performance at large. So this article is an analytical and argumentative attempt, with the main focus on Sidney and Spenser, to demonstrate in what ways and by what perceptions the Elizabethans were motivated for the formation of a national literary identity.

The worthy and the fallible: Framing the issue of state party funding

The party politics literature has shown that parties being mostly reliant on state funding (as in most of Europe) is more conducive to equal representation than them being mostly reliant on big donors (as in the US and UK). But what do citizens think? Relatively little attention has been paid to public opinion on party funding. We only know that citizens tend to instinctively oppose both ways of funding parties. Yet, party funding is not a salient issue except in times of scandal, meaning it is an issue on which citizens are ill-informed. In this paper, I test what happens when citizens in the UK and Denmark are exposed to arguments in support of state party funding, through survey experiments. I find that highlighting state funding’s ability to reduce party reliance on big donors substantially increases support for the policy, especially among low trusting Britons.

Between ‘transmission’ and usurpation: (far-)right remapping of European literature

ABSTRACT For the French Nouvelle Droite, literature plays an important role as a means to propagate questions of identity and the transmission of tradition. Literature is seen as a mirror not only of society but also, more specifically, of politics. If ‘literary politics is […] currently the central field of intervention of the New Right think tanks’, then it is high time to gain an understanding of it. Through the analysis of an anthology published by right-wing editors, I elicit the idea of Europe and Europeans it seeks to propagate and reveal the strategies of subtle and deliberate confusion that it employs in order to include far-right authors in a universally accepted literary canon.

Party responsiveness over time: From left-right to issue specific dimensions

Parties’ ideological responsiveness to public opinion is a key finding in the party politics literature. Leveraging the longitudinal coverage of public opinion and party position data, this research note shows that findings of left-right ideological responsiveness are limited to a specific time period. We find that since the mid-1990s, left-right shifts in public opinion are no longer significantly associated with party position changes on the same dimension. By examining over-time changes in responsiveness on more specific issue dimensions, we also uncover that at about the same time, a pattern of responsiveness on issues related to nationalism/immigration has emerged. These findings highlight the need to move beyond a focus on a single left-right dimension for studying public opinion and party behavior.

The international political economy of Saudi Arabia: Sovereign fund and foreign policy

AbstractThis article develops a framework for attributing motivations to Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) investment by noting that there are two major subdivisions, those that argue that the investments are undertaken due to macroeconomic factors and those that argue there is a political element as well. The political literature is divided into three subcategories of domestic political considerations, geopolitical competition and economic diplomacy. The literature of the Public Investment Fund (PIF) does not include any discussion of economic diplomacy as a consideration, an omission this article seeks to rectify. Using a realist understanding of international political economy (IPE), the article explores the influence of elites, the nature of PIF investments in America, India, China and Russia, and collaboration with other SWFs on investment. The article concludes that economic diplomacy should be considered as one of a multitude of variables that determine how and where the PIF invests.