Political Scholarship Research Articles

Mini-publics, student participation, and universities’ deliberative capacity

ABSTRACT Meaningful student participation is essential to realizing democratic ideals within the university. However, existing structures for involving students within university governance suffer from a variety of shortcomings, leaving scholars calling for ways to make student participation more inclusive, effective, and thoughtful. To address this challenge, this article draws on deliberative democracy as both a theoretical framework and a source of practical innovation. In doing so, it explores the ways in which student participation in university government both does, and could, contribute to universities’ ‘deliberative capacity’—that is, their capacity to host inclusive, authentic, and consequential deliberation on shared issues. By evaluating the most prominent forms of student participation against these democratic ideals, the article offers a deliberative democratic critique of student participation that coheres, builds on, and gives new significance to existing criticisms. In response, the article then introduces deliberative mini-publics as a democratic innovation which, while of increasing significance in the public sphere, has been neglected in the university context. Drawing on empirical literature to account for universities’ unique institutional realities, the article ultimately demonstrates mini-publics’ potential to bolster deliberative capacity in university governance, both in terms of introducing deliberative inputs into decision-making and by cultivating the abilities and environment which support deliberative governance more generally. In all, by bringing together higher education and political scholarship, this work advances theory on student participation and university governance and offers novel directions for university practice.

Between Westminster and Brussels: Putting the “Parliament” in Parliamentary Ethnography

AbstractGender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible.

Misplaced Concern

Misplaced Concern

A future research agenda for transformational urban policy studies

There is a gap between the policy problems faced by twenty-first century cities and their proposed solutions, which are often small-scale, siloed and unsustainable. Cities face growing poverty, a rise in precarious work, unaffordable housing, decaying infrastructure, climate change, social polarisation and, most recently, a deadly infectious disease. The urban crisis is rooted in the failures of neoliberal policy characteristic of advanced capitalism, intersected with other systems of oppression. Turning the clock back to liberal urban policymaking will be insufficient. We propose a policy agenda that studies transformative urban movements, including local activism and movement building, policy agenda-setting and design, and policy implementation and evaluation. While these are the expertise of scholars of urban politics and policy studies, transformative urban movements have not been on their radar. In this article, we explore why and examine how urban politics and policy studies can ground and support transformative change.

Co-ethnic bias and policing in an electoral authoritarian regime: Experimental evidence from Uganda

Why do people cooperate with police in multi-ethnic societies? For scholars of comparative politics and international relations, examining the effects of ethnicity on patterns of conflict, cooperation, and state repression remains a foundational endeavor. Studies show individuals who share ethnicity are more likely to cooperate to provide public goods. Yet we do not know whether co-ethnic cooperation extends to the provision of law and order and, if so, why people might cooperate more with co-ethnic police officers. In the context of policing, I theorize co-ethnic bias affects interactions between people and the police because individuals prefer officers who share their ethnicity and fear repression more when encountering non-co-ethnic officers. Using a conjoint experiment in Uganda, I demonstrate that individuals prefer reporting crimes to co-ethnic officers, even after controlling for potential confounders. Broadly, this result is strongest among individuals with no trust in the police, the courts, or the political authorities. These findings have important implications for the politics of policing, conflict, and social order.

Strategic Choices: How Conservative Women Activists Remained Active throughout Tunisia's Democratic Transition

Gender politics scholars conclude that conservatives and religious actors curtail women's rights and political participation during a democratic transition, except in post‐conflict contexts. Yet, this was not the case in Tunisia. This article documents how Islamist women activists remained active throughout the democratic transition in Tunisia. I argue that Islamist women within Tounissiet remained politically active by making two strategic choices: (1) not challenging conservatives and (2) aligning with liberal feminists when it was in their interest. This article builds on the emerging scholarship on women's roles in a democratic transition, especially conservative women, by providing original empirical work on an Islamist women's rights organization in a democratizing Tunisia. I suggest that more needs to be understood about conservative women and new actors that democratic transitions empower and embolden.

An Intelligent system for the categorization of question time official documents of the Italian Chamber of Deputies

ABSTRACT In this work, we present an intelligent system for the automatic categorization of political documents, specifically the documents containing the parliamentary questions collected during the weekly Question Times at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic. The proposed intelligent system leverages text classification models to perform the document categorization. The system is aimed at supporting and facilitating the research activities of political science scholars, who deal with comparative and longitudinal analysis of thousands of documents. To select the best classification models for our specific task, several classical machine learning and deep learning-based text classification models have been experimentally compared.

Ready for Their Close-Up? Ideological Cues and Strategic Televising in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Federal judges offer several stated purposes for pursuing greater publicity in the judicial process, including improving the quality of reporting and educating the public. They are less candid about other goals that influence steps they take as they shape how they are perceived, including strategically using publicity to secure others’ compliance, neutralize policy disagreement, or build legitimacy. Despite these judicial goals, scholars of American politics know little about how federal judges shape the public’s perceptions. We leverage a notable exception to federal judges’ aversion to publicizing their proceedings by analyzing how Ninth Circuit appellate judges respond to media requests to televise oral arguments. We find that the televised representation these judges present to the public is a selective one: decisions to televise appear to be motivated by portraying unanimity, while at the same time avoiding the spread of perceived politicization among the public. These results shed much-needed light on how federal judges navigate a publicity-politicization tradeoff through their strategic use of televising.

Explanations for the Vanishing Trial in the United States

The phenomenon Marc Galanter famously termed the vanishing trial has been widely explored by scholars of law and politics, particularly as the continued decrease of trials in court raises concerns about access to justice and legal recourse in the United States. But a lingering question remains: Where have trials gone? This article argues that we need to diversify the potential range of explanations for the vanishing trial by taking an interbranch perspective that brings to bear the ongoing tension between legal and other forms of dispute resolution and governance. Given that courts are but one venue in which disputes are resolved, this approach expands upon the thesis that disputes have not disappeared but rather have been diverted elsewhere. I argue that reframing the conversation in this way stands to generate a revised set of explanations for this trend that are worthy of future research.

Evil Deeds in High Places: Christian America's Moral Struggle with Watergate by David E. Settje

Reviewed by: Evil Deeds in High Places: Christian America's Moral Struggle with Watergate by David E. Settje Robert Benne Evil Deeds in High Places: Christian America's Moral Struggle with Watergate. By David E. Settje. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 275 pp. As a rule, Lutherans' political presence in American life has been neglected by scholars of religion and politics. Lutheran political involvements are not as well-known as those of the mainline denominations nor as effective as the Southern Baptists or United Methodists. Lutherans have not played as prominent a political role in American life as Roman Catholics and they have not spawned politically powerful voluntary associations—Moral Majority, Christian Coalition—as have fundamentalists and evangelicals. Yet, they have been involved far beyond the attention they have been given by scholars. This book by David Settje, Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Concordia University Chicago, corrects that lack of attention. Here he adds to his considerable prior efforts to plumb the political involvements of American Lutherans in the great issues of the day. Two books precede this current effort: Lutherans and the Longest War: Adrift on a Sea of Doubt about the Cold and Vietnam Wars, 1961–75 (Lexington, 2006) and Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York University Press, 2011). This book focuses on the Watergate scandals that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August of 1974. As the "evil deeds in high places" and the dishonesty that surrounded them shook the confidence of the country, Settje argues that the churches played an increasingly important role in political life in America. The crisis especially provided an occasion for conservative religion to provide a stronger voice in public life. That is where at least some Lutherans (Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod) come into play in the book. Other Lutherans (Lutheran Church in America) trained their influence on the liberal side. But all Christian traditions exercised new and important roles in both moral judgment and renewal in America. So, while Settje gives due attention to Lutheran voices, he also covers other major traditions, as well as the journals that represented those traditions. [End Page 241] The main part of the book provides an exhaustive account of those religious bodies' grappling with the many facets of the Watergate crisis. It is highly detailed and thorough. The notes and bibliography together are forty pages long. Recounting that upheaval brings back many memories of that era and its primary actors to those who lived through it. To those who did not it provides excellent historical instruction. While for the most part, Settje's work is fair-minded, it is clear that he favors liberal Protestant political incursions. He tends to argue that evangelicals have violated their emphasis on piety in their affection for Nixon and later Trump. He ends the book by arguing that Christians "must advocate for the moral and ethical leadership that will protect democracy. But this requires, within the Christian comfort of mixing religion and politics, they put morality first and politics a distant second." (216) This obviously is a criticism of those who thought that Nixon's—as well as Trump's—political agendas were important enough to support in spite of their personal foibles. The choice between a politician's character and his or her agenda is not as neat as Settje suggests. Liberal support for Clinton demonstrates that ambiguity on the other side of the political spectrum. Settje also makes the claim that the Watergate imbroglio was the doorway to much more religious involvement in politics, whereas it seems to me that the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war provided an earlier occasion for heavy religious involvement. Also, the Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade was a huge stimulation for religious involvement in politics that was just as strong as Watergate and far more long-lasting. Nevertheless, this book is a welcome examination of a watershed moment in American politics as well as American religions' political role in it. [End Page 242] Robert Benne Institute of Lutheran Theology Brookings, South Dakota Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran...

Radical Republicanism

Over the last two decades republican thought has attracted a growing interest from political, moral and legal scholars. These contemporary theoretical syntheses of ‘neo-republican’ thought have been closely related to intellectual history and the idea of recovering an overshadowed tradition of political thought. In this vein, a classical set of historical moments and places (e.g., ancient Rome, renaissance Italy, civil-war England or revolutionary America among others) and specific political practices within those contexts appear to be the main source of what republicanism meant – and what it could mean today.

The Way we Were: How Histories of Co-Governance Alleviate Partisan Hostility

Comparative politics scholars argue that consensual democratic institutions encourage power-sharing that promotes “kinder, gentler” politics. We uncover one reason why this is the case: elite inter-party cooperation in consensual systems is associated with reduced inter-party hostility in the mass public. This is because governing parties’ supporters feel much more warmly toward their coalition partner(s) than we can explain based on policy agreement alone. Moreover, these warm affective evaluations linger long after the coalition itself has dissolved. We substantiate our arguments via analyses of CSES survey data from 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017, showing that current and past co-governance is associated with substantially warmer inter-party affective evaluations. This implies that electoral systems which encourage coalition governance may defuse partisan hostility.

How global norms matter: norm diffusion and the tangled web of localization in Ghana’s extractive industry

ABSTRACT A critical scholarship within the International Relations and Comparative Politics scholarship continues to challenge the conventional view that upheld the extractive sector in developing countries as the space where global technocratic norms take root irrespective of socio-economic bargains and contestations. Through an in-depth account of the politics that augment the implementation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the Public Interest and Accountability Committee in Ghana’s oil industry, this article joins this fast-growing literature by tracing the localized dynamics of norm diffusion. It combines the analytical lenses of governed interdependence and contentious politics, alongside critical interpretations about the pathways of norm diffusion in Africa, with data compiled from field interviews and documentary sources to identify the complex dynamics that have sustained the localization of global norms in the country’s extractive industry.

Invasive Species in Post-2020 Global Environmental Politics

Abstract As goods and people more rapidly traverse our interconnected world, invasive alien species (IAS) are increasingly frequent, ecologically damaging, economically significant, and culturally concerning. Through examinations of IAS, global environmental politics (GEP) scholars can more deeply engage long-standing and newly emerging research problems within the three areas of global governance, global political economy, and environmental security. First, GEP scholars can use IAS research to further develop insights about the impact of problem structure on global governance. Second, examining IAS dispersal risks and associated costs, as well as intercountry variation in management responses, can generate insights about North–South power dynamics in the global political economy and how distributive conflict is likely to shape future invasion risk. Third, notions of environmental security in GEP scholarship can be challenged and further developed by examining the conceptualization and operationalization of “biosecurity” amid increasingly diverse multispecies assemblages. Greater research attention to IAS in GEP is long overdue, and we intend for this article to open novel pathways for GEP interdisciplinary research on IAS.

Beyond Duterte: Conceptualizing a Research Agenda of Populism Research in the Philippines

Abstract This article is an attempt to carve out a research agenda for an enriched populism research in the Philippines. Specifically, it analyzes journal articles drawn from academic database collections, examines its domains of publication, and core analytical approaches. Then, it situated these studies within the broader landscape of the Philippine political scholarship. The results suggest a thriving and flourishing populism research in the Philippines. Yet, it also suffers from the same theoretical and empirical obscurities that typifies global research on populism. The article contends that future Philippine populism studies must (a) adhere to a minimalist theoretical anchor, (b) be methodologically pluralistic and innovative, and (c) be thematically grounded on a host of other significant domains of Philippine politics that go beyond Duterte. Ultimately, the article urges prospective scholars to strongly engage with these arguments and suggested line of political inquiries in order to refine the scholarly enterprise of populism in the country.

When reorganizing coercion backfires: explaining the mechanisms of revolt in Sudan and Algeria

ABSTRACT When autocrats seek to coup-proof coercive institutions after revolts, how does it affect future revolutionary mobilization? Scholars of contentious politics describe the mechanisms by which citizens can oust autocrats from the streets, while the literature on civil–military relations asks how rulers mitigate elite threats by restructuring their barracks. This article introduces the concept of reorganizing coercion to investigate how the effects of restructuring armed state actors can resonate in society and strengthen revolutionary mobilization. Using the cases of Sudan and Algeria, I trace the way both regimes reorganized coercion following the Arab Spring and argue that these processes interacted with economic shocks to affect one collective action issue during the 2018–2019 uprisings: mobilization across centre-periphery cleavages. Three iterative mechanisms define this relationship: the reorganization of coercive institutions, resource policies influenced by the reorganization of coercive institutions, and the spatiality of repression shaped by both aforementioned factors. I develop this plausibility probe through an analysis of protest data and process tracing that leverages original interviews as well as secondary sources in Arabic, French, and English. By suggesting that reorganizing coercion might explain similarities between these cases, this study shows how the concept can bridge debates between contentious politics and civil–military relations.

Curating Vraca Memorial Park: Activism, Counter-Memory, and Counter-Politics

Abstract In 2005, officials designated Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo, Bosnia–Herzegovina, as a national monument. However, official disputes over responsibility for curating stalled progress on the site's restoration. In response, activists initiated two campaigns to save and restore Vraca: “Let's Save and Restore Vraca Memorial Park” and a campaign to restore the vandalized monument Ženi borac (woman fighter). Challenging the slide toward ruination, activist curators produced the site as a lively space of politics. Contributing to international political sociology scholarship on memory and its curation, the article develops the concept of activist curatorship through sustained engagement with activist practices of clearing, cleaning, and re-curating at the site between 2005 and 2020. Activist curation is an evolving and open-ended counter-memorial practice engaged by variously situated curators, both ordinary people and museum professionals. At Vraca, activist curating is held together through an alternative mnemonic community that mobilizes the legacy of anti-fascism, while curation is central to how activist interventions endure. Activist curators create space for political commentary on the past and open space for alternative forms of political community to proliferate, those which reach beyond the fragmentation of political, social, and memorial life in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina.

Addressing the norms gap in international security through the India-US nuclear relationship

ABSTRACT While scholars (mainly from the Global North) in International Relations have been turning to a (critical) constructivist agenda in norms research, the field has increasingly become devoid of applying this area of research in understanding the nuclear behavior of deviant states from the Global South. The paper therefore attempts to bridge this research gap by using the case of the India-US nuclear relationship. To do so, the paper: i) identifies the probable convergences of the existing literature on nuclear policy and the research on constructivist norms, ii) highlights India’s racial treatment as a Southern nuclear state in academia and policy discourse, and iii) recognizes plausible avenues for the expansion of the Western dominated normative research agenda by analyzing India’s nuclear relationship with the US ― with a specific focus to norm contestation and normative change. In bringing together (critical) constructivists and scholars in nuclear politics to further our understanding of how we perceive security of non-western states, this work makes an epistemological and ontological contribution in the field of international security studies.

The Avengers and the PLA Wolf Warrior: Popular Narratives and Major Power Competition

In recent years, some scholars of international politics have argued for the need to integrate the use of visual media into our understanding of global politics. In this respect, film (or movies) represents an effective media of communicating powerful ideas and political worldviews through a smorgasbord of sound and sensory experiences. This essay seeks to draw on the theoretical insights of scholars of visual international politics to analyze the ongoing geopolitical conflict between the United States and China. It will do so by examining two box-office hits in the West and China, namely, the Avengers and Wolf Warrior. Through a study of some of the key storylines in these films, this essay seeks to flesh out the differences in Sino-Western conceptions of patriotism, good and evil, and salvation. It argues that these differences are not just a matter of aesthetic preferences, but reflect more fundamental ideas and political worldviews salient in the thinking of China and the West.

The Past is Holding Us Back: Applying Foresight to Move the Disciplines of Political Science and International Relations Forward

This article examines the extent to which the academic disciplines of political science and international relations (IR) are incorporating foresight or futures thinking into their work. The disciplines of political science and IR grapple with important issues that affect lives across the world and have the potential to influence the future in ways that reduce conflict, enhance allocation of resources, and improve processes in general. This article offers a review of the political science and IR literature and course content that incorporates foresight, concluding that only a handful of journals appear to be publishing research that applies foresight. Some academic institutions on the other hand are encouraging a more multidisciplinary approach to resolving global challenges with an eye toward the future in their course content. The article concludes with several recommendations on how political science and IR scholars can incorporate foresight’s best practices to ensure the disciplines are more forward looking and effective at shaping a better future.