Abstract
74.6707 ALAM, Edris, et al. —
This article investigates how a district administration in Bangladesh managed COVID-19 pandemic risk governance. Interviews were conducted with civil administrators, local government representatives, and representatives from community-based organizations and nongovernmental organizations. The findings indicate that, despite limited health facilities, widespread ignorance of the virus, joblessness among wage earners, economic pressure, and a massive outbreak of COVID-19, the district administration has demonstrated its diligence, professionalism, local knowledge, and promptness in providing optimal public services through coordination and information sharing among all stakeholders. The synergies and coordination between local administration, security forces, and local government representatives were great challenges in implementing nonpharmaceutical polices and support programs. [R]
74.6708 ALLARD-TREMBLAY, Yann —
This article critically engages with the Canadian framing of settler colonial/decolonial politics in terms of guilt and innocence. I argue that centring innocence, even as something to be snatched away from settlers, as with the theorization of settler moves to innocence, can corrupt the practice of moral responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that the desire for and expectation of innocence, in the face of structural injustices such as settler colonialism, are illusionary and that complicity is widespread. In contrast, I follow Iris Marion Young’s focus on political responsibility, but I argue that public collective actions need not be as centred as she suggests. Given the nature of settler colonialism and of coloniality, I argue for the acknowledgment of the political significance of daily individual acts and for the cultivation of dispositions that disrupt unjust structures, such as a disposition to transgress. [R]
74.6709 ANGHEL, Veronica ; JONES, Erik —
Why did Hungarian democracy have a harder time developing and rooting itself than democracy in other countries? The answer lies in the overlapping institutions and incentives that create democratic resilience. Hungary’s political elites never finished their constitutional transition from communism to democracy by agreeing on a new democratic constitution. The 1998 elections polarized Hungarian politics around competing conceptions of democracy in ways that made it hard to reach consensus on a shared constitutional arrangement. Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party rose to power in the late 1990s by offering a strong state that would protect Hungarian society from the threat of social liberalism and foreclose a potential return of communism. Orbán returned to power in 2010, on the heels of the global financial crisis, and began centralizing and entrenching power by deft manipulation of democratic institutions. The case of Hungary tells us what to look for in anticipating democratic failure and serves as a cautionary tale for the EU. [R]
74.6710 ARAÚJO, Victor ; ARRETCHE, Marta ; BERAMENDI, Pablo —
This article analyzes the conditions under which major infrastructural investments generate electoral returns. It addresses when and how the constraints imposed by myopic voters under democracy can be overcome. We argue that sustained policy spillovers are critical to broadening the pool of beneficiaries and yielding significant returns to the incumbent in the medium to long run. We make this case by analyzing Luz para Todos (LPT) — a large-scale rural electrification scheme implemented in Brazil by the Workers’ Party (PT). Leveraging the LPT’s quasi-experimental allocation, we document its positive and persistent impact on the PT’s vote support several years after the program started running. We then illustrate the mechanism of policy spillovers by showing the impact of the LPT on the provision of education in targeted areas. [R, abr.]
74.6711 ASHE, Fidelma —
Constitutions reflect national values and set out the foundational principles of governance. Traditionally, those values and principles have been male-defined. As such, constitutions often form the basis of the ‘gendered state’ with all its attendant inequities. Feminist constitutionalism challenges the wider domain of constitution-making to consider questions relating to gender inequality in constitutional debate, design and redesign. Through a case study approach, this article utilises a feminist lens to examine ongoing constitutional debates in Northern Ireland that have been deepened by Brexit. Any new constitutional arrangements on the island of Ireland will drive multiple transformations in social, legal and economic life that will impact on the lives of women. Subsequently, this article explores the gender dynamics of current debates to contribute to the broader feminist literature on constitutional transitions in deeply divided societies. [R]
74.6712 ATKINSON, Joel —
Official Development Assistance (ODA) is defined by a motive: the promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries. This review article considers the motives of one donor, South Korea, with a close reading and comparison of three authoritative texts. It argues that Korean ODA is primarily motivated by increasing status and influence, and supporting the overseas expansion of Korean companies. There is also a contribution from secondary motivations more clearly related to the definition of ODA: humanitarianism and being a good global citizen. [R]
74.6713 AYBAR TOLEDO, Luis Emilio —
The Cuban Revolution is construed as a discursive formation, searching in its evolution — and in its connection with an evolving revolutionary praxis — the causes of its weakening and/or survival. A balance is drawn at three crucial moments: crisis, resistance and creation. The mechanical identification of Revolution with State has impoverished the revolutionary discourse. The deeper meaning of the Revolution, in connection with a renewed praxis, needs full restoration. To overcome the imbalance or dissociation between the various dimensions of the Revolution, the effort must concentrate on transforming the current state of affairs through the intervention of popular forces, i.e., the inaugural factors of the Cuban Revolution itself. [R]
74.6714 AZMEH, Zeina Al ; DILLABOUGH, Jo-Anne —
How does a crisis of the state and its ‘emergency politics’ lead to a crisis of the intellectual, or what does it mean to be an intellectual in our contemporary conjuncture beyond Western clichés and the universalistic bias of their declinist arguments? In responding to these questions, we draw upon data collected from Turkish and Syrian academics living in exile to argue that the critical commitments exiled intellectuals presume are under threat as rising authoritarianisms take hold globally and advanced neo-liberal practices tighten their grip on universities. The promise of Said’s figuration of the ‘intellectual in exile’ and its political potential is also under threat as displaced scholars navigate democratic backsliding and structural precarity in the contemporary university and in the nation-states to which they have found themselves tied, eroding even further the conceptual idea of the critical intellectual and the potential power of the ‘post-colonial intellectual’. In our research, this crisis of the intellectual is recounted by exilics paradoxically in both the autocratic and the ‘nominally democratic’ higher education (HE) context where in some cases the very idea of the intellectual can represent, at least in part, a banal political figuration epitomised in what Nancy Fraser refers to as progressive neo-liberalism. [R, abr.]
74.6715 BACCINI, Leonardo ; LODEFALK, Magnus ; SABOLOVÁ, Radka —
What are the distributional consequences of migration, and how do they affect attitudes toward migration? In this paper we leverage a natural experiment generated by the ousting of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which created an unprecedented influx of economic migrants from African countries to Europe. This surge of low-skilled labor benefited low-productivity firms by lowering their production costs and expanding their labor supply. Employing a triple difference-in-differences design, we document that attitudes toward migration became more positive in Western European regions with large shares of migrants and low-productivity firms. Evidence from Sweden, which provides finely grained geographical data, confirms these findings. We then test the economic microfoundations of this attitudinal shift. We show that the surge in the supply of low-skilled labor increased the profitability of low-productivity firms more in areas that experienced larger migration flows. We find no evidence that migration worsened natives’ labor market conditions. [R]
74.6716 BARLOW, Matt, et al. —
How do we account for the ability or otherwise of regional organisations in the global South to enable equitable and inclusive responses to the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question with a focus on Africa and in relation to the rights of women and girls. Drawing on theoretical insights from Feminist Global Health Security and from data on the African Union, other regional organisations in Africa and from non-governmental organisations, local activists and medical centres, we show that regional organisations acted quickly to identify the gendered socio-economic and health needs of women and girls and alerted member states to their responsibility to consider gender rights in their policy responses. But weak gender norms led to a disconnect between this early recognition of the importance of policies to protect women and girls and the behaviour of regional organisations. [R, abr.]
74.6717 BASIC, Goran ; DELIĆ, Zlatan —
This article explores the connections among the discursive nature of ideology, identity politics, forced displacement, and symbolic and actual war violence leading to genocide. The general framework of the article is the Bosnian War (1992-1995), waged against the country and its civilians. The analytical basis is a literature review of various studies from the domains of sociology of knowledge, war sociology, and social epistemology. It is based on the perspective of the genocide in Bosnia as a process that began in northwest and east Bosnia in 1992 and terminated in Srebrenica in 1995 (in the municipality Prijedor in northwest Bosnia in 1992, more than 3000 civilians were killed). Mass crimes and the policy of fear mongering were intended to create and recreate the collective belief that coexistence in Bosnia was impossible and that establishing “ethnically pure cultures” and “ethnically pure territories” should be accepted as a deterministic historical necessity. The results of our research indicate that crimes against civilians can be “normalized” only after a “new social order” has been established as a war order with the help of media propaganda. Genocide can be committed only if the perpetrators (and its advocates acting in the name of specific identity politics) believe that committing violence can be justified by a “higher cause.” [R]
74.6718 BEISER-MCGRATH, Liam F. ; BERNAUER, Thomas —
We shed new light on a long-standing question in political science: When confronted with costly policy choices, do citizens form their preferences using material (economic) concerns or other-regarding motivations, such as the distribution of costs, and how are these moderated by political ideology? Using the case of carbon taxation, a widely advocated policy solution to climate change, we conducted survey experiments in Germany and the US to assess the relative importance of these forms of preferences. The results show that individuals are primarily concerned with how a carbon tax would affect their individual income. There are also important cross-national differences with high-income German respondents being more receptive to redistributive policy design, especially in contrast to high-income Democrats who significantly decrease support for carbon taxation. [R, abr.]
74.6719 BEKMEN, Ahmet —
This article puts Turkey’s current state crisis into a historical perspective. During the transition to neo-liberalism after the hegemony crisis of the late 1970s, a critical objective for those in the high echelons of bureaucracy and ruling politicians was to ensure the security of state apparatuses. However, the policies implemented to achieve this led to fragmentation in both the state and the political spheres. Thus, during the second half of the 1990s and during the 2000s, the state became a field for open warfare between power networks that had established direct links between state apparatuses, political society, and civil society. These fragmentations — that is the parcellation of state apparatuses — triggered an intra-state crisis. Regarding the formation of the state and the political spheres in the neo-liberal era, this article shows that Turkey is a unique case in the debate on variegated forms of authoritarian statism. [R]
74.6720 BENNETT, Aine —
This article poses the question of how incorporating the “subjugated knowledge” of queer histories of the Troubles in Northern Ireland affects understandings of the conflict in international relations and security studies. It argues that while the centrality of the “two communities” model drives all other issues to the political margins and perpetuates division, adopting a queer approach can deconstruct the identities of those communities and suggest ways to move beyond that model. It uses Jack Halberstam’s queer methodology as a “scavenger methodology” to draw on existing published interviews, as well as plays and films representing queer experiences during the Troubles, and a queer theoretical approach that seeks to both foreground queer experiences and challenge normative and binary understandings of identity in this context. Focusing on queer lives during the conflict reveals that constructing the identities of the two communities depends on excluding the queer subject, that queer people’s security during the conflict was shaped by their queer identity, and that queerness can and has been mobilized to deconstruct received narratives and the apparently essential identities of the two communities, demonstrating some possibilities for dismantling the unionist/nationalist dichotomy. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6537]
74.6721 BERENS, Sarah ; DEEG, Franziska —
Middle-income countries experience various types of migration: transients, emigrants, refugees, and returnees. Their domestic economy is especially influenced by refugees and returnees. Since returnees and refugees vary in access to social policy programs and in skill composition, different types of migration should vary in “threat potential” for social policy demands, with the low-skilled responding more negatively to refugees, while the highskilled face greater competition from returning natives. We test our argument with original survey data from Mexico, distinguishing respondents’ concerns about two distinct streams of migration: Central Americans seeking refuge in Mexico and Mexicans returning from living in the United States. Surprisingly, we find that the low-skilled’s welfare preferences suffer neither type of migration concern, whereas high-skilled Mexicans oppose expanding social welfare when concern about returnees is high. Social solidarity in the welfare state is most depressed by returning natives. [R]
74.6722 BERMÚDEZ LENIS, Héctor Fabio —
We analyse the working conditions of Venezuelan migrants, who participate in delivery work in Argentina, based on a conceptual discussion on the ‘precarisation’ processes of migrant workers in the countries of the global south. The labour conditions of workers in South America have historically deteriorated for several decades, but its effects have intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis is focused on the dynamics of Venezuelan migrant labour within digital platforms in Buenos Aires, contrasting data obtained between 2019 and 2020 from two surveys and interviews conducted with this population. Drawing upon contributions from the sociology of migration and the sociology of work, this article seeks to understand how irregularised migrants employed in the platform work, at the intersection of super-exploitation and super-exposure to contagion, have been brutally affected by the expansion of delivery work. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.6014]
74.6723 BESSEN, Brett R. ; CONNELL, Brendan J. —
How, if at all, does self-interest bear on individuals’ economic policy preferences? Though conventional theories of preference formation usually assume a role for self-interest, the informational demands associated with understanding economic policies can prevent individuals from forming attitudes on an egocentric basis. Building on work showing that policy specific information facilitates egocentrism, we argue that personal experience with alternative policy options is necessary for self-interested preferences to materialize. To test this argument, we leverage Ecuador’s adoption of the US dollar (i.e., dollarization) and examine whether material-based preferences toward exchange rate policy are conditional on individuals experiencing the transition from the Ecuadorian sucre to the dollar. We find that lived experience with dollarization causes policy preferences to align more closely with citizens’ self-interest, as proxied by measures of capital ownership and skill level. In addition, personal experience with dollarization drives attitudes against a dollarized economy, but primarily among poor and low-skill workers — precisely the groups that benefit less from this policy shift. Rather than entirely discredit the role of economic self-interest, these findings suggest that scholars devote greater attention to how contextual factors can strengthen egocentric policy attitudes. [R]
74.6724 BIABACK ANONG, Dorothea —
The COVID-19 pandemic publicly exposed the urgent need for seasonal workers in agriculture. In Germany, an entry ban and entry quotas for seasonal workers at the beginning of the pandemic caused major attention. The article asks how the German seasonal labour migration regime is constructed (legally) and legitimated (discursively), and in how far the pandemic has caused shifts within this regime. Based on an analysis of the legal framework and the political discourse around seasonal work from 2018 to 2020 in Germany, the seasonal labour migration regime is characterised as just-in-time migration tailored to the needs of agricultural business, where migrants’ work force is not absorbed homogenously by precarious labour sectors, but rather specific groups of migrant workers are integrated differently through mechanisms of differential inclusion. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.6014]
74.6725 BLECK, Jaimie, et al. —
This study explores urban youth clubs in Mali and asks: is membership in these groups associated with greater trust and trustworthiness toward society? It leverages 18 months of fieldwork, including 375 group surveys, 2,525 individual surveys, over 1,300 trust games, and transcripts from 66 focus groups. We use propensity score matching to analyze how members and nonmembers play the trust game with strangers. Members are more trustworthy; they return 12% more to their partners than nonmember peers. We do not find a systematic effect of membership on trust. Trustworthiness in the game is also positively correlated with self-reported trust and tolerance as well as real-world behaviors including volunteering and helping friends. Focus group data highlight five mechanisms by which membership fosters general trustworthiness: bonding among diverse members, bridging, public goods provision, socialization, and psychological support. [R, abr.]
74.6726 BLOCK, Fred ; KELLER, Matthew R. ; NEGOITA, Marian —
This essay revisits an earlier article, published in 2008, that argued that the United States had created a “hidden developmental state” that helped move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. In the intervening fifteen years, this apparatus has become more elaborate with ever more government initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, the major pieces of legislation passed in the first two years of the Biden administration have added considerable new funding. Nevertheless, this set of programs has not yet become a part of political debates outside of the federal government. It remains hidden to most of the electorate. [R]
74.6727 BOGDANOV, Michail —
Russia’s war against Ukraine is having various consequences in Buriatia. Numerous Buriats are fighting in Russia’s army. Others refuse to involve themselves in this crime. The war is prompting Buriats to think of Russia as am empire and a colonial power. It is promoting the reemergence of a Buryat national movement. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6728 BOLGUROVA, Rossitsa —
This article explores shifts in workplace festivities in Bulgaria as part of the transition from socialism to post-socialism and analyses how work celebrations are used to express and uphold the moral economies informing them. During the socialist period, labour was glorified and work celebrations were a key instrument in the ideological and cultural engineering efforts of the state. Since the 1990s, private business owners have been reinterpreting and (re-)inventing festive traditions to stage their identities and moral orientations in discursive and performative ways. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation in industrial production and high-tech companies from 2017 to 2019, I argue that highly mediated company celebrations are, in the wake of promotional cultures, an opportunity for employers to brand themselves as “good.” [R, abr.]
74.6729 BOVE, Vincenzo ; LEO, Riccardo Di ; GIANI, Marco —
Does military conscription reduce the distance between the ordinary citizen and the state? Decades after its abolition, numerous European policy makers from across the political spectrum advocate the reintroduction of conscription to foster civic virtues, despite a lack of empirical evidence in this respect. Leveraging quasi-random variation in conscription reforms across 15 European countries, we find that cohorts of men drafted just before its abolition display significantly and substantially lower institutional trust than cohorts of men who were just exempted. At the same time, ending conscription had no effect on institutional trust among women from comparable cohorts. Results are neither driven by more favorable attitudes toward the government, nor by educational choices. Instead, this civil-military gap unfolds through the formation of a homogeneous community with uniform values. [R, abr.]
74.6730 BOWLES, Jeremy —
How do states build their informational capacity? This article argues that distributive politics conditions how the state’s capacity develops. I study civil registration, where citizens comply with the state’s informational demands in exchange for documentary proof of identity, which may simultaneously facilitate access to public resources and exposure to taxation. Though the rich are particularly threatened by taxation, the narrow benefits of registration induce their compliance over that of the poor. I leverage a set of reforms in early postindependence Tanzania which provide quasirandom variation in citizens’ registration status and show that registration promotes access to narrow-based resources, rather than broad-based ones, while increasing tax payment. In turn, citizens’ decisions to comply reflect the economically stratified local incidence of these net benefits. The results suggest how nominally universal state-building schemes can have regressive effects on the state’s coverage. [R]
74.6731 BROSIO, Giorgio —
This article discusses a regionalization project, known as Minghetti’s bill, that was presented to the Italian parliament just after the creation of the country in 1861, debated at length, and finally rejected. The bill was the most advanced point reached on the decentralization front in Italy before the Second World War. Minghetti’s bill is the first example of a regional process ever brought to parliamentary discussion. It was also a precursor of other regionalization schemes, such as the creation of French regions in 1972. [R]
74.6732 BUBEN, Radek ; KOUBA, Karel —
Latin American democracies have gone through a series of perfect storms over the recent years. In what ways have these challenges transformed the institutional infrastructure of democracy? How have institutional reforms impacted the democratic prospects? This review article analyzes four recent edited volumes that approach the problems of institutional change against the backdrop of the multiple crises unfolding throughout the region. It describes two modes through which the reforms of political institutions have had an ambivalent or outright negative effect on the quality of democracy, and assesses the resilience of political institutions. Arguing for a more prominent role of informal institutions and political parties in institutional analyses, the article suggests that changes in formal political institutions have had a limited impact vis-à-vis the profound changes in political cleavages, culture wars, swift changes in religious identities and the decline of political parties. [R] [See Abstr. 74.]
74.6733 CABRAL, Lídia —
Feminist scholarship regards the Western scientific revolution and twentieth-century agricultural modernization as patriarchal endeavors and technoscientific regimes as entangled in societal interests and politics. In this article, I engage with these perspectives by focusing on women scientists working in Brazil’s leading agricultural sciences organization, Embrapa. My analysis draws on life history interviews with three women, juxtaposing their personal and career trajectories with the history of the organization, which is a symbol of the triumph of science over nature. Besides filling the gaps in a male-dominated history, these women’s accounts reveal what I argue to be feminist struggles for more equitable and pluralistic agricultural sciences and practices. I refer to them as “fringe heroines” as they adopt research agendas that are at odds with the prevailing technoscientific paradigm and often find themselves subject to condescending attitudes and discrimination. These fringe heroines experienced a short-lived moment in the limelight during a period of progressive politics in Brazil. However, confronted by a less favorable context during the Bolsonaro era, they have taken a step back but have maintained their resolve to swim against the tide in their unyielding quest for justice and diversity with respect to agricultural knowledge production. The time is ripe for reflecting on the place of their situated struggles and knowledges in the past, present, and future of Brazilian agricultural sciences. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6537]
74.6734 CARBONE, Giovanni ; CASSANI, Andrea —
The vast majority of sub-Saharan countries have adopted constitutional clauses establishing that elected presidents cannot serve more than two mandates. While an extensive literature has examined why African leaders comply with or else try to manipulate term limits, the policy implications of the latter remain unexplored. Existing studies of other world regions suggest that setting a maximum number of terms presidents can serve tends to make them ‘lame ducks’ during their final mandate. We reconsider this argument, and posit and demonstrate empirically that constitutional limits can actually induce positive effects on second-term presidents’ actions compared to their first terms. More specifically, the absence of electoral pressures, the concern for their post-presidential future and legacybuilding motivations may lead to improvements in the rule of law, especially regarding the functioning of the judiciary. This article represents the first empirical investigation of the performance of Africa’s second-term lame-duck presidents. [R]
74.6735 CASTILLO, Ernesto del ; CABRAL, René —
In 1997, after a costly bailout, the central government of Mexico passed legislation intending to improve subnational finances through fiscal decentralization. As a result, many states rapidly began to accumulate debt during the following decade. Subnational public debt grew threefold between 1996 and 2006. The global financial crisis only aggravated the debt accumulation problem, which increased by 320% between 2006 and 2016. In response, a new law with a set of fiscal rules for subnational governments was enacted in 2016, namely, the Law of Fiscal Discipline (LDF) for states and municipalities. This study evaluates the impact of the fiscal rule alert system on the levels of debt accumulation across Mexican states. Using a quarterly panel dataset comprising the period 2013-2020 and employing difference-in-differences techniques, we observe a significant reduction of 4% in public debt between treated and untreated states and 5.8% in debt per capita. Moreover, we document that even after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new fiscal rule effectively reduced the pace of subnational public debt in Mexico. [R]
74.6736 CASTORENA, Oscar, et al. —
Classic theories of public opinion suggest that negative shocks can undermine system support in weak democracies, but scant work has systematically assessed this thesis. We identify Peru’s explosive Vacuna-gate scandal as a most-likely case for finding a connection between corruption and political support. The scandal’s unexpected revelation in the middle of the 2021 AmericasBarometer Peru survey created conditions for a natural experiment. Applying an unexpected-event-during-survey design, we consider the consequences of the scandal for perceptions of corruption, system support, and support for democracy. We find robust evidence that the scandal increased even already high perceptions of corruption and lowered system support. Contrary to expectations derived from prior theories, we find no effect on explicit support for democracy. In the conclusion, we discuss the nuanced ways that scandal may shape democratic stability. [R]
74.6737 CASTRO NEIRA, Yerko —
This article presents the results of an ethnographic research conducted in the northern border of Mexico from 2019 to 2021, specifically in the city of Tijuana. It analyses the role of bodies in border and migration management with special emphasis on the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. I focus on three situations. First is the case of migrants whose bodies are exploited in the precarious work opportunities they find along Mexico’s northern border. Second, I look at migrants who experience detention and confinement in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention centres in the United States. And third, I analyse the situation of missing migrants whose bodies are sought by family members and numerous collectives in Mexico. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6014]
74.6738 CHO, Young Nam —
This article aims to analyze the process of policy-making through a case study on the reform era China. First, it will look at three kinds of China’s policy-making modes in the reform era: bureaucratic, campaign-style, and experimental policy modes. Second, we will focus on campaign-style policy mode and analyze the characteristics of the mode in normal period and crisis period. Third, it will use COVID-19 quarantine as a case to investigate in detail how campaign-style policy mode actually works in crisis period. Inn the conclusion, this will be synthesized and evaluated. Through this, we will be able to understand how China decides and implements major policies in crisis period. [R]
74.6739 CHONG, Dennis ; CITRIN, Jack ; LEVY, Morris —
Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the theory that norms are transmitted through social learning, we show that these developments have spurred a dramatic realignment in public tolerance of offensive expression about race, gender, and religious groups. Tolerance of such speech has declined overall, and its traditional relationships with ideology, education, and age have diminished or reversed. [R, abr.]
74.6740 CHRISWELL, Kaitlyn ; HUBERTS, Alyssa —
We argue that collective action infrastructure — place-based connections, organizations, knowledge, and practices formed while organizing — can reduce the costs of local collective action, even in communities without preexisting social and civic organizations. We adapt theories from the social movements literature about mobilizing structures and personal networks to the neighborhood context and propose that, even absent preexisting structures, an initial act of organizing in the face of a salient problem can itself facilitate future organizing. In contrast to expectations that local organizations will disband quickly upon achieving their initial goal, we argue that, because neighborhood problem-solving involves fixed costs and overlapping constituencies, local organizing infrastructure is often repurposable across issue areas. Observational data, a natural experiment, and a survey experiment from an online survey of residents across Mexico City demonstrate these downstream effects of organizing, even across unrelated issues. [R, abr.]
74.6741 CIFUENTES-FAURA, Javier —
This paper analyzes the role of accounting in disaster mitigation and the importance of transparency to avoid corruption. During the Ukrainian war, accounting has allowed the redistribution of war material, the quantification of economic aid, or the efficient management of humanitarian aid. This paper aims to set a research agenda on transparency and corruption in foreign aid to a fragile and conflict-affected country. In order to analyze the situation of corruption in Ukraine during the war, first a review of the latest corrupt events is carried out and its position in the Corruption Perception Indicator is analyzed. Subsequently, we analyze the aid that Ukraine has received from other countries and institutions, and whether it is transparent. The possible dependence of the Corruption Perception Indicator on the transparency index of each country in the management of aid to Ukraine is studied. [R, abr.]
74.6742 CLARK, Alistair —
Administering elections is costly, requiring considerable resourcing. The extent to which election administration is funded can reveal government priorities towards democratic rights and affects every potential voter. Yet, little is known of this crucial aspect of public administration, in any type of democracy. This research innovates by seeking to establish overall levels of variation in public funding of election administration in a national general election, and by applying this to the local level to investigate whether socio-economic, administrative or political factors are more important as drivers of costs. The article deploys a unique dataset which integrates rare government election administration budgeting data, with Census and political data to provide an exploratory analysis from a British general election. It finds that key production costs of voting infrastructure appear to drive funding. [R, abr.]
74.6743 CLOUGH, Emily ; HARDACRE, Jill ; MUGGLETON, Elizabeth —
For decades, scholars, NGOs and observers have expressed concern about the use of sensationalised images of people in the developing world in NGO fundraising advertisements. They fear that these negative messages, often known as ‘poverty porn’, lead to a perception of people in developing countries as helpless and lacking in agency. Despite this ongoing concern, there has been no empirical assessment of the effect of exposure to these negative messages on the perceptions of people living in poverty in developing countries. Our research employs an online experiment of 450 UK respondents to address this gap. It examines how watching charity advertisements affects people’s perceptions of the agency of those in poverty in developing countries. We find that those who viewed negative portrayals of those in poverty were more likely to rate people in poverty lower on measures of agency. [R, abr.]
74.6744 CODOGNI, Paulina —
This article analyses the Ukrainian Revolution on Granite — as a starting point for Ukraine’s independence aspirations, and as a prototype for subsequent Ukrainian revolutions. This Revolution constitutes an example of an event whose significance was discovered many years later. Although it was partially successful, and more importantly it should be treated as one of the milestones on the road to Ukraine’s independence, until the second decade of the 21st c. it was assigned marginal significance and almost ignored as a research subject. This article searches for the basic factors of the Revolution’s success, based on the methodology provided by civil resistance theory and thus concentrating on its internal factors, especially on its objectives, strategy, and methods of struggle. One of the main purposes is to analyze the sources of experiences from which the leaders of the protests drew. [R, abr.]
74.6745 D’ARCY, Michelle —
The literature on early modern state-building in Europe has focused on war as its main driver and therefore on states’ relationships with men. I suggest an alternative theoretical starting point for theories of early modern state-building: the political imperatives created by the demographic fluctuations of the Malthusian trap. Harnessing Foucault’s concept of biopower and its application to the construction of gender, I argue that population fluctuations incentivized demographic regulation, in particular of childbearing, in order to keep birth rates high and maternal and infant mortality low, implying that early modern European states were constituted through the construction and maintenance of gender regimes. I propose strategies for empirical investigation and argue that a more accurate account of early modern European state-building needs to incorporate demographic regulation and therefore requires gender to be at its center. [R, abr.]
74.6746 DE KADT, Daniel ; JOHNSON-KANU, Ada ; SANDS, Melissa L. —
Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa’s Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbents who preside over state violence may be held electorally accountable by voters. Second, such accountability seemingly depends on the existence of credible opposition parties that can serve as a vector for disaffected voters. Where such parties do not exist, violence may create political cleavages that facilitate the formalization of opposition movements. Third, immediate proximity to violence is correlated with holding incumbents accountable. [R]
74.6747 DE LA TORRE, Renée ; GUTIÉRREZ ZÚÑIGA, Cristina —
This article underlines another aspect of New Age spirituality developed in Mexico: although emerging from the Global North, it is also a matrix that gives value to those elements excluded by modernity and produces decolonial critiques and deconstructions from the Global South. The authors analyse four strands of neo-Mexican spirituality in which the decolonial perspective is corroborated: (1) the rise of post-national ethnic nations; (2) the criticism of patriarchy and the emergence of ecofeminist spiritualities; (3) the critique of capitalism and the alternatives of sustainable economy; and (4) the consumption of sacred plants and medicines as a spot where the struggle of indigenous ontologies and modern epistemologies takes place. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6025]
74.6748 DEATH, Carl —
Ecomaternalism remains the dominant narrative concerning the role of families in climate politics. The centrality of ecomaternalist narratives to intersectional constructions of race, gender, heteronormativity, and nature means that interrogating and disrupting these dominant representations of families is a crucial task of ecofeminist, postcolonial, and queer political theory. This article explores other ways to narrate familial politics that might challenge rather than reproduce dominant power relations. Examining three Africanfuturist short stories by Nnedi Okorafor (“Spider the Artist”), Tlotlo Tsamaase (“Virtual Snapshots”), and Terh Agbedeh (“Mango Republic”), set in Nigeria and Botswana, I argue that they draw our attention to transformations within cyborg, digitized, and utopian families and social structures, as well as the potential for violence within the heteronormative patriarchal family. They narrate alternative discourses about families in crisis, families as threat, and families as ruination that are rarely articulated in climate politics. In these stories, the family is not the solution to climate politics, but a social relation that will (and should) change as the climatic and social context changes. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6537]
74.6749 DENEVA, Neda —
This paper explores the constitution of a moral economy of welfare through acts of benefit fraud. The structural conditions of contemporary labour, citizenship, and migration regimes in Europe exclude large shares of workers from access to social citizenship and place them in a position of undeserving trespassers of the social contract. Drawing on the case of Bulgarian Roma engaged in precarious labour and short-term intensive mobility between Bulgaria and the Netherlands, I show how labour conditions in both countries and the structures of the welfare regimes effectively exclude them from access to social citizenship and confine them to the realms of informal work, thus putting them in a position of differential inclusion. The benefit fraud in this context has multiple interpretations — ranging from crime through a survival strategy to a claim to social justice. [R, abr.]
74.6750 DIAZ-RIOSECO, Diego ; ALBERTI, Carla —
Subnational governments are generally funded by fiscal rents, that is, transfers of centrally levied taxes. Existing literature concurs that fiscal federalism breeds rentierism and, consequently, hinders subnational democracy. However, in Argentina, fiscal rents do not always lead to low provincial contestation. Building on research on oil-based rentierism and fiscal federalism, we argue that this variation results from the provincial fiscal institutions that distribute central-government transfers from the province to municipalities. Specifically, we claim that as provincial fiscal institutions decentralize fiscal rents from the province to municipalities, they empower mayors to challenge governors. Conversely, as these institutions centralize rents at the province, they empower governors and weaken opposition from below. Using panel data and a comparison between Tierra del Fuego and Santa Cruz—the provinces that receive the largest fiscal transfers — we show that the effect of fiscal rents on incumbent party advantage decreases and eventually disappears as institutions become province-decentralizing. [R]
74.6751 DIONNE, Kim Yi —
While other African states experienced democratic erosion, Malawi has defied the odds and weathered attacks on its democracy, including those initiated by its powerful presidents. As a “hard place” for democracy — a poor country with a long authoritarian past and politically relevant ethnic divisions — what explains the resilience of Malawi’s democracy? The courts and civil society served as countervailing forces against democratic backsliding. Through legal challenges and popular mobilizations, they have countered attempts by presidents to consolidate power and extend their terms. Unfortunately for Malawians, these countervailing forces were likely facilitated by other negative conditions, namely economic distress and presidential unpopularity. Malawi’s experience, complemented by Zambia’s recent pivot away from authoritarianization, provides some optimism for those concerned about democratic backsliding in Africa by demonstrating the potential for resilience even in challenging contexts. [R]
74.6752 DUVAL, Dominic ; VILLENEUVE-SICONNELLY, Katryne —
As shown by Bélanger and Nadeau (2009), Québec’s traditional identity-based axis appears less and less predominant on the political scene. This situation created a need for a different strategy in the various sovereigntist parties. In this context, how has the Bloc Québécois tried to reposition itself? To explore this question, we collected over 7,500 press releases issued by the party between 2002 and 2021. Using automated content analysis methods and a Latent Semantic Scaling approach developed by Watanabe (2020), we illustrate and discuss the prevalence of the sovereigntist issue throughout this period, as well as the party’s tone on this issue. The results indicate that elections and election results play a crucial role in the Bloc Québécois’ communications on the topic of sovereignty. More generally, we observe significant fluctuations in the attention paid to this issue, and significant variations in the framing of this issue around elections. This research note sheds new methodological light on the theories surrounding the political realignment underway in Quebec and the salience of the sovereignty divide. [R]
74.6753 EKANEM, Minika, et al. —
This paper explores the roles and influence of institutions on the speed, direction, timing, and sequence of energy transitions. A conceptual framework integrating the hierarchy of institutions with an historical institutionalist approach is developed and applied to explore transitions in Norway’s electricity sector as a case study. Results show that conversion followed by layering emerge as the dominant modes of institutional change in Norway’s electricity sector reform, illustrating the importance of alignment between institutions in creating the conditions for large-scale energy transitions and the importance of boundaries to maintain alignment between levels of institutions. Governments can minimize potential gaps between transition intentions and outcomes through effective conversion and layering of institutional arrangements, but layering challenges emerge when institutional change introduces new actors or energy arenas to existing policy paradigms. [R, abr.]
74.6754 FAGIOLI, Monica —
Since the mid-2000s, state-building in Somaliland has emerged as a complex mixture of coexisting, competing programs, political aspirations, and foreign agendas. This article applies a dialectical approach to focus on the scalar relations among actors and models of capacity-building, from programs’ design to their implementation. Drawing on science and technology studies, I use the term “complexities” to describe the “multiplicities” of programs, actors, and different ways of ordering that coexist and overlap, sometimes in tension among them, other times in coordination. Specifically, this article examines two approaches to state-building in Somaliland: the UN Development Program’s institution-building and US Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded stabilization programs. Going beyond fixed binaries, such as international and local, homogenous and hybrid, state-building and state-formation, this article observes how these dichotomies are formed and how, rather than being separate, they combine together, generating techno-political arrangements. [R, abr.] [See also Abstr. 74.6620]
74.6755 FAWCETT, Louise ; JAGTIANI, Sharinee L. —
This paper offers a revised and decentred perspective on regional power behaviour in world politics. Our revisionist approach departs from existing accounts by incorporating three key elements. First, in focusing attention on the regional–global nexus within which the international relations of regional powers have been conducted, demonstrating how regions can be mobilised as part of a status-seeking strategy at the global level. Second, examining this nexus historically: historical trajectories are vital sites of learning about the long-standing ambitions and policies of regional powers. Third, drawing on insights from critical geopolitics in highlighting the fluid and socially constructed nature of regions. We illustrate the interdependence of regional strategies and global outlooks through the cases of India and Iran, states in which we find parallels and shared insights demonstrating the value of a revisionist approach to analysing regional power behaviour, especially as their rise and growing capabilities inform a changing world order. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6831]
74.6756 FINKEL, Steven E. ; NEUNDORF, Anja ; RASCÓN RAMÍREZ, Ericka —
How can democratic values and behavior be induced in new democracies? We designed and tested three original civic education interventions to answer this question, using Tunisia as a case study. Participants were recruited through Facebook and Instagram, where they were randomly assigned to either one of three treatment groups or a placebo. Two treatments were derived from prospect theory, emphasizing the gains of a democratic system or the losses of an autocratic system. A third treatment, derived from self-efficacy theory, provided practical information regarding participation in the upcoming 2019 elections. Our findings suggest that online civic education has a considerable effect on democratic citizenship, including a significant reduction in authoritarian nostalgia and increasing intended political behavior. [R, abr.]
74.6757 FLOM, Hernán —
Police accountability has long been deemed an essential component of democratizing reform. Reformist administrations in Latin America and other developing regions have consequently created oversight agencies to monitor police misconduct. However, the literature has not yet explored how these institutions operate and the politics that undergird them. This paper examines how police accountability institutions work in developing democracies. I focus on the police of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, using an untapped database of more than 6400 expelled police officers. I find that the extent to which reformist ministers expel police officers and thus exercise greater control of the police peaks during their first year in office. Contrarily, it is not bolstered by mid-term electoral victories or factors such as scandals or violent crimes. [R, abr.]
74.6758 FUNK, Kevin —
Rio de Janeiro’s long-marginalised, majority Afro-descendant old port area, home to the remains of the Americas’ largest slave disembarkation wharf and Brazil’s first favela, has been subjected to recurring elite-led ‘revitalisation’ projects. A contemporary plan, Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port), seeks to address the region’s decline through a culture-led, publicprivate development scheme that refashions this space as a tourist and residential hub. Based on participant-observation, interviews with protagonists, and discursive analysis of official texts, this article analyses the most spectacular addition to Rio’s previously derelict waterfront — the grandiosely titled Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) — to demonstrate how efforts to neoliberalise space, within this postcolonial and settler-colonial urban context and beyond, are increasingly given a progressive twist. [R, abr.]
74.6759 GAO, Haoyu ; CHEN, Fukang ; OUYANG, Yiling —
Our study investigates the impact of local political uncertainty on public financing costs in China. By examining a series of unexpected turnovers of municipal government leaders, we find that the offering yield spreads of municipal corporate bonds increase by around 23 basis points shortly following an anti-corruption investigation and reverse afterward. Indicators show that the anti-corruption investigation escalates the short-term uncertainty about government actions. The pricing effect is stronger for issuers with higher exposure to government policies or lower financial resilience. A transparent information environment alleviates the impact. In contrast, temporary government inefficiency does not explain the increase in yield spreads. Our findings suggest that political uncertainty is a determinant of public financing costs. [R]
74.6760 GARZON, Jorge F. —
More than a decade has passed since an intense research interest in Regional Powers arose in IR. However, this original impetus has of late notoriously tailed off. This was in part the result of an unfavourable international environment but also, I argue, of an exhaustion of the programme’s conceptual and analytical framework as such. This can be specially seen in three fronts. First, in the inability of the initial theoretical framing to account for new empirical observations, and an insufficient engagement of Area Studies research for revising these initial propositions; second, in a conceptualisation of global-level influences that has been too restrictive and theoretically impairing; and third, in the difficulties encountered by efforts to explain the formation of regional orders by leveraging regional powers as main explanatory variables. A second argument is that some of the fresh approaches needed to overcome these problems might be found in Comparative Regionalism. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6831]
74.6761 GASPARYAN, Olga —
This paper contributes to the conflicting literature about indirect rule by delivering a new theoretical explanation for the persistent effects of indirect rule on contemporary provision of public goods. It looks at a single region of India which has areas that historically experienced both direct and indirect rule. The theoretical mechanism focuses on the principal-agent problem and the incentives that it produces for local leaders. Unlike local princes, colonizers were under stricter oversight and had to be more accountable to the top due to the obligations to extract resources. A spatial regression discontinuity design is used to compare directly and indirectly ruled territories. The empirical results show that indirect rule has predominantly long-term negative effects on the provision of selected public goods. [R]
74.6762 GIBBS, Ewan ; McCARTNEY, Gerard ; PHILLIPS, Jim —
Public ownership has emerged as desirable and achievable in the United Kingdom in the 2020s. The ongoing water crisis in England and concerns about ‘greedflation’ in sectors such as electricity and gas following recent price rises have encouraged interest in public ownership. Informed discussion is compromised, however, by a gap in public knowledge. This partly stems from the distance of time, a generation or more, since publicly owned enterprises operated in these sectors across Britain. We argue that public ownership is best understood in terms of fundamentals. Our proposed typology presents the predominant form of public ownership, nationalisation, as a response to fundamental problems, or devised as more efficient management of fundamental sectors, or established to achieve fundamental citizenship values. The typology is developed in dialogue with historical British experiences, then applied to contemporary examples of Scottish government policy, namely shipbuilding, social care and railways. [R]
74.6763 GOLDSTEIN, Josh A. ; GROSSMAN, Shelby ; STARTZ, Meredith —
Research suggests that partisanship and social media usage correlate with belief in COVID-19 misinformation and that misinformation shapes citizens’ willingness to get vaccinated. However, this evidence comes overwhelmingly from frequent internet users in rich, Western countries. We run a panel survey early in the pandemic leveraging a pre-pandemic sample of urban middle-class Nigerians, many of whom do not use the internet. Analysis shows that opposition party support and social media usage are correlated with belief in antigovernment misinformation but not other types of COVID-19 misinformation. Surprisingly, we find no relationship between overall belief in misinformation and willingness to be vaccinated several weeks later. Partisanship and ethnicity are predictive of vaccine hesitancy, while men are both more likely to believe misinformation and more willing to be vaccinated. These findings have significant implications for understanding vaccine hesitancy in Nigeria and beyond. [R]
74.6764 GOLUBEV, Alexey ; YAROVOY, Gleb —
Karelia is one of Russia’s 21 national republics. But this designation is misleading. Created in the 1920s, the Autonomous Soviet Republic was not the result of a strong national movement, but of geopolitical decisions. Karelians were always in the minority there. During the Soviet era, the second language after Russian was Finnish. A national movement emerged during the perestroika period, but it was so weak that it did not even manage to establish Karelian as an official language. The Karelians are also not named as a titular nation in the republic’s constitution. Since mid-2014, the state has suppressed any social movement with political ambitions, and in 2022, repression increased yet again. The state tolerates and promotes only the preservation of the Karelian and Vepsian languages. However, as these languages play no role in politics or the economy, they have an uncertain future. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6765 GORE, Ellie —
Peer education has become an increasingly popular mode of community-level human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention around the globe. In Ghana, networks of volunteer peer educators are mobilized by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to conduct sexual health outreach among populations disproportionately affected by HIV, including men who have sex with men (MSM). In development discourse, peer education is typically rationalized in terms of its cost efficiency and “community empowerment” objectives. This article explores whether these initiatives are indeed “empowering” for the working-class men who work as MSM peer educators in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, as well as their broader impact on queer political organizing. Empirically, the article draws on ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2014, including participant observation in an HIV/MSM NGO, group and life story interviews with peer educators, and semi-structured interviews with key civil society actors involved in HIV/MSM and wider lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI) rights work in Ghana. The article conceptualizes peer education as a form of social reproductive labor that is systematically devalued and frequently invisibilized within the global capitalist economy. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.6537]
74.6766 GÖTZ, Roland —
The Russian Federation is divided into national territories and non-nationally defined federal subjects. The titular nation represents an absolute majority of the population in only ten of the 27 territories. The peripheral location of many national territories as well as difficult physiographic and transport-geographical conditions mean that many of the inhabitants there are significantly poorer than average among Russia’s population. Apart from the regions rich in raw materials, most national territories run a budget deficit. They therefore receive considerable financial allocations from Moscow. The social situation, and not ethnicity, explains why in some national republics willingness to serve in the military is greater than the national average — and with that the casualty rate in the war against Ukraine. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6767 GRASSE, Donald ; SEXTON, Renard ; WRIGHT, Austin —
Rebels regularly provide public services, especially legal services, but the consequences of such programs are unclear. We argue that rebel courts can boost civilian support for insurgency and augment attack capacity by increasing the legitimacy of the rebellion, creating a vested interest in rebel rule, or enabling rebel coercion of the civilian population. We study the impact of the Taliban’s judiciary by leveraging cross-district and over-time variation in exposure to Taliban courts using a trajectory-balancing design. We find that rebel courts reduced civilian support for the government and increased it for the Taliban, and were associated with more attacks and more coalition casualties. Exploring mechanisms, we find that courts resolved major interpersonal disputes between civilians but also facilitated more insurgent intimidation of civilians, and that changes in public opinion are unlikely to have been driven solely by social desirability bias. Our findings help explain the logic of rebel courts and highlight the complex interactions between warfare and institutional development in weak states. [R]
74.6768 GRAZIANO, Paolo ; QUARANTA, Mario —
Given the academic and media salience of democracy and its measurement, in this contribution we take a closer look at the various existing datasets. For this purpose, in the first two sections we look at democratic conceptualization and measurement, and then focus on the most used datasets on democracy and assess them against the conceptual criteria illustrated in the first section. The third section focuses on the notion of quality of democracy and how it has advanced the understanding of contemporary democracies. The subsequent section illustrates changes in democratic scoring in European countries over the past 15 years. Our results show that democracy has not become more robust in European countries: on the contrary, several countries witnessed significant democratic deterioration. Furthermore, we show that — with the exception of Polity — the indexes analysed are highly correlated and therefore could be equally useful for an ongoing analysis of European democracies. [R]
74.6769 GREWAL, Sharan —
The Algerian military’s response to the 2019-2020 Hirak protests was relatively peaceful. In contrast to its violent repression of protests in 1988, and subsequent coup and civil war in the 1990s, the military showed considerable restraint toward the Hirak. Leveraging a survey of 2,235 selfreported military personnel, I show that the military’s restraint emanated from protesters’ use of nonviolence and fraternization, as well as from a recognition that the military’s more repressive approach in the 1990s was a mistake. At the same time, a priming experiment suggests that the military’s willingness to repress increases when protesters threaten the military’s corporate interests, and when Russia, Algeria’s primary arms supplier, reiterates its support for the regime. Overall, the results show how protester tactics, international reactions, and political learning can condition the military’s repression or restraint during times of unrest. [R]
74.6770 GROSSMANN, Jakub ; JURAJDA, Štěpán ; ROESEL, Felix —
Can staying minorities who evade ethnic cleansing affect political outcomes in resettled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning antifascists. We study quasi-experimental local variation in expulsion policies, a result of the surprising presence of the US Army, which indirectly helped antifascist Germans stay. We find a long-lasting footprint: Communist party support, party cells, and far-left values are stronger today where antifascist Germans stayed in larger numbers. Postwar German Communist elites appear to be behind this effect along with the intergenerational transmission of values among active party members. [R]
74.6771 GULZAR, Saad ; LAL, Apoorva ; PASQUALE, Benjamin —
How does political representation affect conservation? We argue that the mixed evidence in the literature may be driven by institutional arrangements that provide authority to marginalized communities, but do not make adequate arrangements to truly boost their voice in resource management. We study a 1996 law that created local government councils with mandated representation for India’s Scheduled Tribes (ST), a community of one hundred million. Using difference-in-differences designs, we find that the dramatic increase in ST representation led to a substantial increase in tree cover and a reduction in deforestation. We present suggestive evidence that representation enabled marginalized communities to better pursue their interests, which, unlike commercial operations such as mining, are compatible with forest conservation. While conservation policy tends to stress environmentally focused institutions, we suggest more attention be given to umbrella institutions. [R, abr.]
74.6772 HAHN, Caroline —
Recent research has revealed a considerable representation gap disadvantaging the lower social class in the political process. However, we know little about the underlying mechanisms of this bias or the measures that could compensate for it. Combining cross-national data from a general population survey and an elite-level survey, the present article addresses this knowledge deficit by looking at one potential determinant of workingclass underrepresentation: the unequal composition of parliaments. Building on arguments for descriptive representation, I argue that members of the working class experience similar living situations and life chances that form their preferences. Consequently, working-class politicians may be better suited to representing working-class views. The results confirm lower congruence levels between the political elite and working-class citizens. However, class-based preference gaps among politicians are relatively small, and politicians’ social class appears to have a limited impact on compensating for the representational inequality of the working class. [R]
74.6773 HALASZ, Iván —
The study deals with the historical narrative of the modern Central European constitutions. The earlier 20th century constitutions were also in some way responsive to historical changes, but in the post-1989 constitutions, the historical narrative has also acquired a strong legitimating function. This was partly related to the fact that several states gained state independence at the time. Another important aspect is the confrontation with the communist past. Typically the constitutional preambles deal with history. The normative nature of the preambles is disputed, but they can play an important role in the process of legal interpretation by constitutional courtes. The most interesting in this respect is the Hungarian preamble adopted in 2011, which is both the longest and the most ideological in the Central European region. The ideological elements in the post-transitional constitutions has not weakened over time, but rather strengthened. This is particularly obvious in Hungarian constitutional development. However, a strong historical narrative can sometimes become counterproductive. This is especially true for states, where there is no co-decision consensus on the judgement of certain key historical events and thus an onesided presentation of historical issues can also make it difficult for constitutions to fulfil their social integration function. [R]
74.6774 HALBACH, Uwe —
Chechens were involved in the fight against the Tsarist Empire’s expansion into the Caucasus in the 19th c. However, the centre of resistance was in Dagestan, and the Circassians fought longer than they did. Even under Soviet rule, when Stalin had entire ethnic groups deported, the suffering of the Chechens did not exceed that of the other peoples who also suffered this trauma. The special case refers to the massive experience of violence and extermination that the Chechens experienced in two wars against Russian troops after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to the character of the political order that emerged after the ceasefire between Moscow and Groznyi, and to Chechnya’s position in the federation. Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov has become a “private state” claims a degree of autonomy and dynastic rule that is at odds with Putin’s “power vertical”. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6775 HAN, Xin, et al. —
In response to public complaints about the chaotic management of donations during the emergency, the site of the first identified COVID-19 case, Wuhan (in central China), underwent a contingent governance transition. And given the public complaints about the disorganized management of donations during the early stage of emergency management in Wuhan in January 2020, local governments initiated a minor governance transition in philanthropy, involving multiple stakeholders such as public and private charities, as well as private enterprises. In contrast to the abundance of literature on governance actors such as the state, the market, and societal actors, this review discusses the changes in governance mechanisms using publicly available data from governmental websites, policy documents, and news reports. It examines a minor governance change in local philanthropy from hierarchical bureaucratic governance to embryotic non-monocentric governance and to expedient collaborative/interactive governance. [R, abr.]
74.6776 HARADA, Masataka ; ITO, Gaku ; SMITH, Daniel M. —
Does war enhance or impede the long-term community-level development of social capital? While wartime mobilization and collective-action efforts might strengthen social ties, extreme destruction can potentially erase these effects. We use historical aerial photographs taken after the indiscriminate firebombing of Tokyo during World War II to measure conditionally independent microvariation in neighborhood-level damage and investigate the relationship between the amount of damage sustained and the present-day strength of neighborhood associations, a key indicator of geographically rooted social capital. Even after decades of population recovery, economic growth, and transformations of the urban space, the most heavily damaged neighborhoods continue to have less organized neighborhood associations and also exhibit lower socioeconomic well-being in terms of education, occupation, and residential stability. [R, abr.]
74.6777 HARRIS, Peter ; McKINNEY, Jared M. —
What is the best way to restore or uphold deterrence when an existing deterrent is perceived to have decayed? One common answer is that deterrers should simply add more of the ingredients that generally make for strong deterrents: more certainty that threats will be carried out, more capabilities to inflict severe punishments upon an adversary, and greater capacity to carry out threats with celerity (speed). This answer draws upon an intuitive quantitative logic that more is always better when it comes to dissuading an adversary from taking unwanted actions. In this article, however, we explain how following this quantitative logic can have the unintended consequence of worsening security relations and provoking war, especially under conditions of shifting power. Using proposals for the United States to provide ‘strategic clarity’ regarding its intentions to defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression as a case-study, we show how efforts to maximize the certainty, severity and celerity of threats can backfire in practice. In general terms, our conclusion is that scholars and policy practitioners must assess the viability of deterrents from a qualitative perspective. With specific reference to Taiwan, we find that strategic clarity would be unlikely to strengthen deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. [R]
74.6778 HAY, Colin —
In the wake of the deepest and longest recession that the UK has experienced since the 1930s, the consequences of Brexit and now COVID too, this article examines the origins, sustenance and puncturing of the growth dynamic it enjoyed since the early 1990s. It identifies what is termed the ‘Anglo-liberal growth model’ and its social policy corollary, ‘asset-based welfare’, considering the symbiotic yet increasingly tense and dynamic interdependence of the two. It argues that although both are compromised by the compound shocks of the crisis, Brexit and COVID, they have in fact become more not less intertwined and interdependent in these more troubled times. It considers the implications for the long-term sustainability of this fractious coupling and the wider consequences for UK economic performance and social welfare in the years ahead. [R]
74.6779 HEINEMANN-GRÜDER, Andreas —
According to its constitution, Russia has a federal state structure. 25 of the more than 80 regions are national republics or autonomous districts, the rest are self-governing regions that were not constituted according to ethnic criteria. In terms of area, population, and economic structure, the regions are extremely heterogeneous. In the early 1990s, strong republics were particularly able to develop their formal rights of autonomy and the right to have a say at the centre. But from the second half of the 1990s on, there was a reversal. One of the catalysts was the military response to separatist efforts in Chechnya, which Moscow crushed in two ruthless wars. The model developed in Chechnya, the integration of loyal regional leaders into a centralized power vertical, was transferred to all regions in the 2000s. Almost all sources of autonomous power were eliminated. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6780 HEISS, Claudia ; SUÁREZ-CAO, Julieta —
Expressions of social discontent that trigger deep political reform appear to be a sign of the times. Emerging political actors challenge delegitimized political elites with promises of a closer relationship with electorates, new rules to fight corruption, and more open access to the benefits of economic growth. Often, however, reforms in recent decades have weakened instead of strengthened democracy, leaving political systems less fair and more exclusive than before. The Chilean constitution-making process of 2021-2022 reasonably raised hopes for a different outcome. [R] [Introduction to a symposium. See Abstr. 74.6036, 6120, 6437, 6459, 6781, 6793, 6841]
74.6781 HEISS, Claudia ; SUÁREZ-CAO, Julieta —
A distinctive feature of 21st-century constitution-making is the role assigned to citizens through various forms of direct participation, as well as special efforts to include groups underrepresented and marginalized in ordinary politics. The legitimacy of these processes increasingly requires a role for actors and groups previously excluded from crucial institutional decisions (Elster 1998; Fishkin 2011; Reuchamps and Welp 2023; Rubio-Marín 2020; Welp and Soto 2020). However, vested interests have proven challenging to overcome amid a global crisis of representation. The failed Chilean process of 2021–2022 provides valuable lessons about the triumphs and pitfalls of embracing an open approach to constitution-making. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6780]
74.6782 HELLMANN, Olli —
As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a longrunning conflict between a Euro-centric ‘master narrative’ of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the ‘top-down’ perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of history. To broaden the methodological scope, the analysis developed in this paper follows the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which makes it possible to map the distribution of collective memories across individuals and investigate their attitudinal effects. By means of a rigorous survey study (N = 1,066), the paper reveals three key findings about collective remembering in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, individuals in the ‘critical years’ of adolescence are more open to weaving Indigenous Māori perspectives into their understandings of history than older generations. Second, when compared to the monocultural master narrative, historical reconstructions that reflect Māori experiences promote a more inclusive understanding of national identity and generate public support for redressing historical injustices against Māori. Third, the empirical analysis finds no evidence for claims made by conservative political actors that creating space for the articulation of Māori histories perpetuates social division and weakens popular identification with the nation. [R]
74.6783 HELMS, Benjamin —
Nativist political movements are globally ascendant. In advanced democracies, rising anti-immigrant politics is in part a backlash against economic globalization. In emerging economies, where nativists primarily target internal migrants, there is little investigation of whether trade liberalization fuels antimigrant sentiment, perhaps because trade benefits workers in these contexts. I argue that global economic integration causes nativist backlash in emerging economies even though it does not dislocate workers. I highlight an alternative mechanism: geographic labor mobility. Workers strategically migrate to access geographically uneven global economic opportunity. This liberalization-induced mobility interacts with native–migrant cleavages to generate nativist backlash. I explore these dynamics in the Indian textile sector, which experienced a positive shock following global trade liberalization in 2005. Liberalization can fuel nativism even when its economic impacts are positive. [R, abr.]
74.6784 HIDAYAHTULLOH, Muhammad Ammar —
The shifting ideological centre of gravity from what has been termed “democratic cosmopolitanism” to “religious nationalism” in Indonesia and its impacts on diverse areas of policymaking has been a subject of scholarly debate. This article investigates how these ideological developments affect gender policy reforms in post-Reformasi Indonesia. To do so, it develops a framework to examine ideological contestation by centring the role of Pancasila and gender politics in its analysis. By employing this framework, the article examines three attempts at gender policy reform: the 2008 Pornography Law, and two most recent bills on the elimination of sexual violence (RUU Penghapusan Kekerasan Seksual) and family resilience (RUU Ketahanan Keluarga). It is argued that the battle over the interpretation of Pancasila has ideologically shaped gender policy reforms through which political actors contest their ideal gender order and relations. This article concludes by reflecting on broader issues around gender, democracy, and ideology in post-Reformasi Indonesia. [R] ]
74.6785 HOEKMAN, Bernard ; TAŞ, Bedri Kamil Onur —
Public procurement regulations aim to ensure the state minimizes contract award prices by specifying the processes to be used in issuing calls for tenders and award of contracts. Cost minimization goals may be complemented by ancillary objectives such as supporting small firms or disadvantaged groups. Recent theory suggests procurement regulations and practices constraining the ability to exercise discretion in awarding contracts may increase average procurement costs. Using detailed data on procurement awards in 33 European countries, we find that restrictions on exercise of discretion are associated with higher average contract prices, and that increases in prices are greater in countries with above average government effectiveness. We also show that realizing price-reducing benefits from exercising greater discretion, where permitted by law, reduces the probability small firms win contracts and continue to do so. Our findings point to a tradeoff between the potential to lower prices by exercising discretion and policies that aim to increase the likelihood SMEs are awarded contracts. [R]
74.6786 HORNE, Cynthia M. —
As part of de-Communization, states in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union used lustration measures to remove Communist officials and secret police collaborators from positions of power and to bring to light Communist-era abuses. As a form of transitional justice, lustration is unusually temporally tethered to the Communist past. However, in practice some states stretched lustration’s temporal parameters, reaching back up to eighty years to pre-Soviet and Nazi World War II (WWII) abuses, and extending forward decades into the post-Communist present. This temporal stretching expanded lustration’s goals beyond vetting mechanism to corruption fighter, historical memory marker, and nation-state (re)builder. This article presents three temporal approaches to the window of time covered by lustration in eleven post-Communist states between 1990 and 2018. [R, abr.]
74.6787 HUHTANEN, Heather ; JOHNSON-FREESE, Joan —
This article explores the relationship between masculinity and national security. There may be a reluctance to view the values, attitudes, and beliefs associated with a particular version of masculinity as a driver for violence. Yet, the “real man” version of masculinity is consistently correlated with those who in engage in mass violence, mobilized violence, and violent extremism — which present a threat to national security. The “real man” identity is also correlated with significant gender disparities in quality of life including income, health, happiness, and mortality for men. Such grievances represent yet another driver of discontent and violence. National security requires that we recognize and understand potential threats and subsequently work to mitigate those threats. Men in the US military have traditionally been viewed as prototypical of masculine identity and its associated values, attitudes, and beliefs. [R, abr.]
74.6788 IHLANFELDT, Keith ; YANG, Cynthia Fan —
It is well known that the racial composition of a neighborhood influences who chooses to live there. Less established is whether the political party mix of the neighborhood influences neighborhood choice. In this paper, we study racial and political neighborhood sorting, their interaction, and how they are changing over time. Our methodology involves the estimation of a conditional logit model with data on hundreds of thousands of homebuyers whose race and political affiliation are known. The neighborhood choices of homeowners categorized by race and party are explained by a typology that defines neighborhoods by their dominance of a particular party and race/ethnicity. We find that both Democrats and Republicans prefer living in a neighborhood that matches their race and political party, but both show an increased willingness to live in a non-matched neighborhood over the past decade. Our results are encouraging, suggesting that both political and racial/ethnicity neighborhood segregation may subside in the future. [R]
74.6789 JONES, Calvert W. —
Research suggests that interacting with women may encourage civic and prosocial attitudes, yet findings to date have been limited to democracies notable for their egalitarian norms. Using simulated contact experiments under controlled conditions, this article tests hypotheses for the first time in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, arguably “hard cases” given persistent norms of patriarchy and gender segregation. Yet, despite stronger contexts for male dominance, results suggest that interacting with women may indeed steer Saudi and Kuwaiti men toward more civic and other-regarding orientations, including aspects of tolerance, egalitarianism, openness, and community rule-following. These findings add much-needed comparative perspective to experimental research on mixed-gender dynamics and align with broader work highlighting the benefits of diverse interactions for groups and nations. [R]
74.6790 KAPPELER, Andreas —
Russia’s external and internal borders are a product of Soviet nationality policy. Its polyethnic character goes back to the prerevolutionary Tsarist Empire. For the most part, the federation consists of the territory of Muscovy, which was settled by a majority of Russians, but also other ethnic groups. The areas with non-Russian populations were annexed through military conquest, economic development, agreements on loose sovereignty of the tsar, and voluntary subordination. Most ethnic groups were able to retain their identity for centuries. The constant territorial expansion offered settlers new arable land and ethnic minorities refuge. The centre pursued a cautious mission policy: religious or linguistic unification was not a primary goal. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on “Soil sample: war, the state and the peoples of Russia”. See also Abstr. 74.6273, 6340, 6367, 6409, 6464, 6727, 6764, 6766, 6774, 6779, 6791, 6804, 6812, 6830, 6868, 6878]
74.6791 KAUSEN, Ernst —
In Russia, over 120 other languages from 11 language families are spoken alongside the state language, Russian. However, the majority of these languages are endangered or moribund. Even languages spoken by tens of thousands of people are being displaced by Russian and other major languages. Only a few languages, such as Tatar, Chechen, and Bashkir, are stable. With the extinction of each language, humanity loses part of its cultural heritage, which is preserved in stories, verses, epics, and creation myths that for the most part have been passed down orally. Specific ways of talking about the world and human experience are disappearing. This current linguistic overview gives an impression of the diversity of the Russian world of languages, but also of the dimension of the loss. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6792 KAWATA, Keisuke ; McELWAIN, Kenneth Mori ; NAKABAYASHI, Masaki —
Survey experiments have shown mixed results about the effect of information provision on attitudes toward controversial policies. We argue that one reason is varied receptiveness to different modes of information. Prior research suggests that people selectively ignore factual, statistical information that contradicts prior beliefs but are more attentive to narrative information that describes individual experiences. We test this in the context of Japanese attitudes toward poverty relief programs, which are less popular than other welfare expenditures. Using a conjoint survey, we show that there is a “narrative premium”: Respondents who are shown a narrative story about the plight of a single mother are more likely to support higher expenditures on poverty relief than those who are shown statistical information about the share of single parents living in poverty. This premium is particularly effective in strengthening the convictions of those who are already aware of levels of societal poverty. [R]
74.6793 KEEFER, Philip ; NEGRETTO, Gabriel L. —
Normatively, democratic constitutions should express how citizens want to govern themselves collectively. Little is known, however, about how citizens’ constitutional preferences can be elicited and aggregated in practice. An intuitively appealing approach is to allow various forms of popular participation during a constitution-making process, including a popular vote to accept or reject the draft constitution. Based on the Chilean experience with democratic constitution-making, this article identifies unanticipated and previously unexplored distortions that can lead to incongruence between the preferences of voters and representatives regarding the extent and direction of constitutional change. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6780]
74.6794 KIM, D.G. —
The deadly outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has accompanied a worldwide surge in anti-Asian hate crimes and racial violence. In this paper, I experimentally assess the downstream effects of the health crisis on the racial attitudes of the American public. Survey respondents were randomly assigned to different messages about COVID-19 and its association with China and answered a battery of racial attitude questions, including a new measure of anti-Asian racial resentment. Across all outcome measures, I find null effects for both treatment messages, which suggests that racialized views toward Asians may be stable individual-level dispositions that have shaped American responses to the pandemic. Findings from this study have important implications for research on the far-reaching societal and political consequences of the pandemic in the United States and beyond. [R]
74.6795 KIM, Jaeho ; KIM, Chong Sup —
This paper critically examines the implementation of self-determination principled governance in the post-conflict contexts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Myanmar. It delves into the complex and dynamic nexus of ethnically fractionalised states’ peacebuilding regimes, exploring whether the selfdetermination framework, often considered a cornerstone of post-conflict governance, has worked positively in achieving sustainable peace and reconciliation in these contexts. This paper evaluates key indicators of success or failure in peacebuilding regimes, such as minority rights. By utilising Dahl’s polyarchy and Habermas and Fraser’s participation parity framework on governance, this research evaluates the underlying discrepancies in the desired results of the application of self-determination principles. it offers an authentic matrix for analysing into the difficulties of selfdetermination-grounded peacebuilding, shedding light on the potential obstacles associated with self-determination. The findings of this study provide a basis for maturity-first peacebuilding governance, based on ethnic participation rather than conceptual “determination” as an alternative to be considered in future peacebuilding. [R]
74.6796 KISLER, Rudy —
I discuss the case of the Heritage Plan, Israel’s official cultural heritage policy. Specifically, by using the discursive approach, I expose and assess cases of silencing competing histories which would challenge the history promoted by the Heritage Plan. My findings suggest that, in addition to privileging Jewish heritage, the Heritage Plan is used as a mechanism for erasing competing, non-Jewish histories. This article presents three case-studies of silencing: the first investigates the Druze heritage center; the second inquires into Israeli heritage practices in the West Bank; the third examines the Castel national heritage site associated with the 1948 war. The analysis of these cases reveals how the Heritage Plan is guided by ethnic and religious factors, whereby heritage assets are not necessarily promoted according to their full historical value, but are instead used to sustain current power structures. [R, abr.]
74.6797 KOSEC, Katrina ; MO, Cecilia Hyunjung —
Could perceived relative economic standing affect citizens’ support for political leaders and institutions? We explore this question by examining Pakistan’s national unconditional cash transfer program, the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP). Leveraging a regression discontinuity approach using BISP’s administrative data and an original survey experiment, we find that perceptions of relative deprivation color citizen reactions to social protection. When citizens do not feel relatively deprived, receiving cash transfers has little sustained effect on individuals’ reported level of support for their political system and its leaders. However, when citizens feel relatively worse off, those receiving cash transfers become more politically satisfied while those denied transfers become more politically disgruntled. Moreover, the magnitude of the reduction in political support among nonbeneficiaries is larger than the magnitude of the increase in political support among beneficiaries. [R, abr.]
74.6798 KRAWATZEK, Félix ; SOROKA, George —
Russia has taken steps to legislatively and juridically safeguard the legacy of the USSR’s involvement in World War II. This has institutionalized an interpretation of the fight against Nazism that was already widely held in society, making the Russian case a “hard test” for evaluating when the violation of a historical norm is deemed appropriate and what the impact of a memory law might be relative to other factors. Drawing on two vignette experiments conducted in 2021, our article demonstrates both that the discursive context in which a controversial statement about the past is made matters when respondents assess whether the person making it should be punished and that criticism of a historical norm is more likely to be accepted when it emanates from an in-group member. [R, abr.]
74.6799 LADERMAN, Charlie —
It takes only one side to decide that war is inevitable for that assessment to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. [R]
74.6800 LADI, Stella ; MOURY, Catherine ; STOLFI, Francesco —
This article argues that differences in sociopolitical reputation can explain why interest groups fail or succeed in influencing policymakers and that therefore sociopolitical reputation is a useful addition to the conceptual toolbox of interest groups scholars. Focusing on pharmacies and their associations in Greece and Portugal between 2005 and 2021, this article uses the concept of sociopolitical reputation to explain why reform attempts to reduce pharmaceutical spending and increase competition in the pharmacy sector were successful in Portugal but not in Greece, even though pharmacists are a much stronger interest group in Portugal than in Greece and even though both countries were under significant exogenous pressure to introduce structural reforms in the wake of the Eurozone crisis. [R]
74.6801 LEBAS, Adrienne ; YOUNG, Lauren E. —
State repression and protest are common in modern authoritarian and hybrid regimes, yet individual responses to these events are not well understood. This article draws on unique panel data from the months spanning Zimbabwe’s 2018 election, which we view as a moment of uncertainty for most Zimbabwean citizens. Using a difference-in-difference estimator, we estimate change in individual protest intentions following exposure to repression and dissent and we assess three individual-level mechanisms hypothesized to drive responses. We find evidence that exposure to local repression and dissent are mobilizing among opposition supporters and nonpartisans. Analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that the effects of exposure to dissent may be driven by information updating, whereas relational and emotional mechanisms seem to drive backlash against repression, despite increased perceptions of risk. [R, abr.]
74.6802 LEE, Chengpang ; CHEN, Meei-Shia —
In the past, scholars of academic dependency have tended to focus their discussions on social sciences while treating other fields as separate. They suggest that in order to escape dependency, alternative discourse and autonomy should be developed. In this paper, we examine the Public Health Liberation (PHL) movement in Taiwan and theorize on the marketization and medicalization of the healthcare system since the 1980s as a dependency syndrome. The PHL was initiated by a group of public health scholars — with the second author of this paper being one of its key protagonists — and frontline public health practitioners after the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003. Inspired by the mass mobilization model in public health in Asian and Latin American countries, particularly China, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, PHL trains grassroots public health educators, nurtures critical research, and has built a network of activists for radical public health reform in Taiwan. Based on participatory action research, this paper analyzes the emergence of this influential public health movement and situates it within the global context of neoliberal health reforms. [R]
74.6803 LEE, Sean —
This article draws on regime newspaper archives and the Arabic-language speeches of and interviews with Syrian president Bashar al-Asad over the last two decades to track how Syrian governmental rhetoric on the question of “terrorism” has changed over time. Engaging with the literature on how ideas, technologies, and contentious repertoires diffuse and spread and how regimes learn from each other, I show how the Asad regime has moved from a discourse that saw “terrorism” as a Western and/or Israeli concept used to delegitimize primarily Palestinian and Lebanese resistance sponsored by Damascus to a discourse that embraces the rhetoric of the “war on terror” in order to legitimize the regime’s counterinsurgency policies during the current conflict. [R, abr.]
74.6804 LEISSE, Olaf —
Only a third of Buriatia’s population belongs to the titular nation. The collectivisation of agriculture and industrialisation under Soviet rule have left their mark. Since Perestroika, a renaissance of the Buddhist faith has been observed. The desire for a merger with Buriat-populated territories, which arose in Buriatia in the early 2000s, remained unfulfilled. The Putin regime has curtailed the rights of national republics and exercises strict control over their political decision-makers. Support for the war against Ukraine is strong in Buriatia. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6805 LERCH, Alejandro —
This article provides a long-term historical periodization of federal police agencies under Mexico’s single-party regime (1930s-2000). Based on archival findings in Mexico and the United States, as well as interviews with former law-enforcement officials, the article documents and reflects, in particular, on the entanglements between federal policing agencies and organized crime (police protection rackets). Drawing from bandit studies and critical perspectives on policing, the article argues police protection rackets to be an integral but overlooked mechanism in Mexico’s modern state-formation process. The article also hints at the important but largely overlooked role of police protection rackets in the making of capitalist modernity more generally. [R]
74.6806 LESSA, Francesca ; BALARDINI, Lorena —
Transnational repression, i.e., the deliberate targeting of refugees and dissidents by states across borders, is a relatively understudied subject in international relations. This article analyzes why states act together to persecute political opponents abroad and explains variations in such practices. It proposes a theory of cooperation in transnational repression and uses the case study of Operation Condor in the 1970s to test it. Through Operation Condor, South American authoritarian states willingly forewent key aspects of their sovereignty to establish a sophisticated system of cooperation to target dissidents abroad. This scheme was a critical extension of these countries’ domestic-level policies of repression against political opposition and enabled them to target politically active refugees wherever they were located. [R, abr.]
74.6807 LI, Zeren —
While the existing literature focuses on how revolving-door officials deliver benefits to firms after taking corporate positions, this article shows that officials distort public resource allocation for private-sector job opportunities while still in office. To test this theory, I construct a new dataset that links over 160,000 corporate subsidy programs approved by three levels of local government with former officials who joined publicly listed Chinese firms between 2007 and 2019. I show that forward-looking officials provide favorable subsidies to their future employers. To verify the exchange of favors, I document that firms repay officials who have provided favorable subsidies by hiring and compensating them in cash. Moreover, this revolving-door exchange is a preferred choice for firms because these subsidy providers could deliver benefits after joining firms. [R, abr.]
74.6808 LIN, Wan-Ping —
How can liberalist Hong Kong and socialist China coexist without posing a threat to each other? Based on L. H. M. Ling’s Daoist-Zhongyi theory and China’s ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (OCTS) policy over Hong Kong, this article analyses how the differences could be addressed through the Daoist-Zhongyi treatments of political healing, namely mutual resonances with respective legacies and desires, open engagement of parity and comity, power-sharing and trust. However, it also discusses how the Daoist–Zhongyi treatments might be misused for control when principles of healing are abandoned. First, drawing on the Chinese classics Daodejing and Huangdinejing, it outlines healing treatments of the Daoist–Zhongyi theory. Second, by examining the formation of the OCTS in the 1980s, it illustrates how the Daoist–Zhongyi treatments could be practised through mutual recognition, compassion, and trust through political commitments and compromises. Third, it discusses how the recent imposition of China’s National Security Law for Hong Kong exploits the Daoist–Zhongyi approach, making OCTS a tool for control rather than healing. The article concludes by indicating the indefinite nature of the Daoist–Zhongyi approach as a dialectical statecraft. Its potential for healing or control depends on whether the treatments deviate from Dao. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6604]
74.6809 MACFARLANE, Kate —
Child soldier disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) practice has a strong normative commitment to protect children from harm and violence. However, there exist policy and research knowledge gaps in comprehending the translation of such norms in meeting the social and protective needs of children. In Sri Lanka from 2009, 594 former child soldiers from the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam (LTTE) underwent a national rehabilitation programme. National engagement with international child protection norms could not materialize from a militarized governance framework implemented at the end of the civil war. This article provides a primary source of data based on 45 semi-structured interviews with former boy and girl child soldiers from the LTTE. The Sri Lankan case-study demonstrates that the DDR programme resulted in the re-calibration of social and political control over child and adult participants. Former child soldiers’ social and protective needs therefore remain complex and unresolved because of state generated structural violence related to poverty and militarization. The article advances a framework to account for a generational power dynamic of adult–child relations, and the politics of institutionalized protection to account for children’s formal rehabilitation and return experiences. [R]
74.6810 MAKOVICKY, Nicolette ; WIEGRATZ, Jörg ; KOFTI, Dimitra —
This special section [examines] moral milieus and agencies in contemporary capitalist central and eastern Europe. Drawing on case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia, it offers insight into changing perceptions of proper economy and practice amongst a broad range of actors — from landfill workers to business managers and the super-rich. The contributors explore how actors at various scales morally construct, contest, and defend ideas of justice, (re-)distribution, and social worth, as well as socio-economic hierarchy, inequality, and harm. They analyse the capitalist moral transformation and order in the region and examine the local appropriation of and buy-in to (as well as critique of) aspects of neoliberal moral orders — a topic sidelined in much of the existing moral economy scholarship. [R, abr.]
74.6811 MALITO, Debora Valentina —
How do international interventions contribute to authority-making? I argue that authority certifications hold a twofold cure/poisoning potential producing a selective right to rule. By analysing the politics of recognition in the Libyan conflict between 2011 and 2016, this article unpacks mechanisms of legitimacy certification and decertification throughout three stages of international intervention (regime change, democratisation, and mediation). Certifications promote a simulacrum of sovereignty by legitimising domestic forces, who then utilise certification to enhance their claim to power. By combining a focus on recognition politics with a process-oriented perspective on the mechanics of authority-making, I advance the notion of certification as a tool for political re-ordering. Theoretically, I define a selective right to rule as an externally filtered entitlement resulting from certification practices that shape complex power struggles. Empirically, I demonstrate how certification systems further divided and split Libya after 2011. [R, abr.]
74.6812 MALYCH, Artem —
Udmurt is one of over 155 languages spoken in Russia. Measured by the number of speakers, it is one of the larger languages in the country. In the Republic of Udmurtia, the Udmurts are the titular nation, and their FinnoUgric idiom has the status of state language. Nonetheless, Udmurt is under serious threat. The decisive factor is the integration of the Udmurts into the urban working world, which is dominated by Russian. Only in rural areas is the language still passed on from parents to children. Added to this is the toothless language policy of the republican authorities, who have been politically incapacitated by Moscow. A prerequisite for the survival of Udmurt is overcoming Russia’s authoritarian centralism. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6813 MANCHANDA, Nivi —
This paper investigates the incursions, or more accurately, the interventions of the Indian state into what are often called its “Northeast borderlands.” Theoretically, it works through conceptions of “sovereignty” and “intervention” to underscore what is at stake for those who lie within the remit of recognized state sovereignty but are nonetheless subject to brutal and invasive “intervention.” The article engages Naga author Temsula Ao’s writing on questions of “tribal” identity, globalization, and borders to situate India as a postcolonial “settler” state. Finally, it puts her work in conversation with Manu Karuka’s notion of “counter-sovereignty” to highlight the ways in which even critical IR theory risks falling into the trap of reifying “sovereignty” and unwittingly giving credence to Westphalian and Euro-centric understandings of sovereignty at the expense of alternative and prior imaginaries. [R, abr.] [See also Abstr. 74.6620]
74.6814 MANOLOVA, Polina —
This article contours the collective imaginary horizons of post-socialist subjects as they emerge within and around the ‘routinised’ practice of labour migration and its pressing materialities. Taking the case of Bulgarianorigin migrants in the UK, the article problematises the common conceptualisation of (semi-)peripheral imaginations as medium for enacting the hegemonic project of Western modernity-coloniality. Rather than passive subscribers to powerful but deceitful political utopias, ‘peripheral’ migrant subjects emerge as autonomous agents, articulating radically different visions of the desirable and possible. The politicisation of the socialist past as a historical context of shared social meaning and experience, as well as a symbolic resource of forgotten ideals, opens up a space for critical engagement with the capitalist mechanisms producing despair in the present. Invoking meaning and value from previously existing ideals of solidarity, justice and egalitarianism as they relate to the realms of work, selfhood and socio-political organisation, my interlocutors countermap the trauma of the present to the stability and fullness of what was before, in the process hinting at a possible moment of ‘rupture’ and ‘re-institution’. [R, abr.]
74.6815 MELÅS, Anders M. ; VIK, Jostein ; FARSUND, Arild A. —
This article contributes to the Historical Institutionalism literature on stability and change by unpacking how an institution has persisted for more than 70 years despite substantial contextual changes. The overall stability of the institution comes both through changes in policy instruments and their settings, and through the incorporation of differing, but aligned rationales. Ideational multidimensionality yields stability by providing leeway to recondition the institution in response to changing circumstances. This allows for different interests in the coalition to stimulate overall institutional stability by supporting incremental changes in policy instruments whilst avoiding institutional exhaustion and third order changes. This shows that policies initiated under a certain set of circumstances may be better equipped to persist when circumstances change if they are able to incorporate differing, but aligned, rationales and to respond to upcoming issues through policy instrument changes. [R, abr.]
74.6816 MESQUITA, Rafael ; SEABRA, Pedro —
Political, military and humanitarian crises endanger regional order. But even though regional powers are expected to act as stabilizers in these cases, their responses to dire demands vary in intensity and loci. Reactions go from zealous engagement to prolonged indifference and reluctance, often leaning on global multilateral institutions as well as regional or ad hoc mechanisms. This study explores the variation in the provision of stability by regional powers via a mixed-methods approach. By contrasting the intensity of regional crises with issue salience at the UN General Assembly, we select crises that drew varying attention from regional powers, despite similar severity. Focusing on Brazil and South Africa as potential regional stabilizers, we compare responses to regional crises that displayed high (Haiti and Somalia) and low (Colombia and Congo-Brazzaville) salience. We find that domestic support, concerns with status and potential competition with other stabilizers tend to play a large part in calibrating regional power responses. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6831]
74.6817 MICA, Adriana ; PAWLAK, Mikołaj ; KUBICKI, Paweł —
This article articulates the phenomenon of failure privilege on the terrain of public policy, that is, circumstantial and institutionally ingrained dispositions to use policy downfalls, derailments, and crises as resources of policy action, tools of integration, and dynamism. Building on analyses of policy failures, the article advances a typology of three forms of privilege: exploitation, (in)visibilization, and projection of policy futures. It brings illustrations from abortion policymaking in Poland. Here, failure privilege interacts with a bio-political and culturally polarized setting that further blends neoliberal mechanisms of failing with post-Communist transformation of cultures of failure. This leads to the argument that exploitation and controversial interventions in public policy demand legitimacy that is today constructed by advancing imaginaries and models of failure that allow actors to both visibilize new futures and advance a policy stalemate. [R, abr.]
74.6818 MIMICA, Nicolás ; NAVIA, Patricio —
While the success of the president’s legislative agenda is measured by examining the rate of passage of presidential bills (the batting average), the dominance of the president over the legislative process can be better understood by considering the share of presidential bills among bills introduced and laws enacted. Studies on the success of the president’s agenda outnumber those on the dominance of the president, but the latter more directly address the debate on the proactive legislative powers of the executive. Reviewing the 13,358 bills introduced and the 2603 laws enacted in the eight legislative terms in Chile between 1990 and 2022, we associate the constitutional changes in 2005 and the electoral reform of 2015 with a decline in the legislative dominance of the president. There was a progressive decline in presidential dominance in legislative inputs and outputs long before the 2019 social upheaval weakened the Piñera government. [R] [See Abstr. 74.]
74.6819 MONIER, Elizabeth —
The states of the Arabian Gulf present a novel case for the examination of relations between authoritarian governance and Christian organizations. The economic clout of the Gulf states has been central to political stability and legitimacy but they are increasingly seeking to expand and consolidate the soft power and resilience through political and diplomatic initiatives. This article examines how the Christian organizations established in recent decades by large migrant communities are incorporated into this strategy and how they are responding. It argues that religious tolerance has formed a central discourse in governmental policies and narratives that construct the Gulf states as modern progressive nations, despite their unique political systems based mainly on constitutional monarchies with limited political participation. This constructs local Christian communities as a source of soft power, despite their position as a religious minority. [R]
74.6820 MURREY, Amber —
Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists experienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally supported,” and misappropriations of the anti-imperial mantel by government representatives. Over the preceding several decades, the state fostered a political environment antagonistic toward Cameroonians of the diaspora, and this was instrumentalized in the widespread dismissal of activists as foreign, foreign-backed, or foreign-influenced. In the context of the state’s appropriation of an anti-imperialist ideology, I argue that transnational solidarities must be attuned to and integrated with local politics in Cameroon. [R, abr.] [See also Abstr. 74.6620]
74.6821 MYKKÄNEN, Juri ; REPO, Petteri ; MATSCHOSS, Kaisa —
Energy agendas in national parliaments are crucial when countries seek to develop their energy futures while adhering to international obligations. This article examines how energy agendas emerge and evolve in parliamentary debates using data from Finland over a period of 12 years. By relying on topic modelling, we can show how the key energy agendas relate to an overall energy solution, promoting domestic energy production and seeking carbon-neutral energy, and how they evolve successively alongside general concerns for the country’s task ahead in the field. Examining more detailed agendas, in turn, validates the first analysis and exposes some differences in the agendas of political parties. These differences were few. This further specifies the nature of Finnish energy politics, which is often considered consensual except for nuclear power and peat as sources of energy. [R, abr.]
74.6822 NADIBAIDZE, Anna —
The gap between Russia’s aspirations to become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to do so has become increasingly more visible, especially following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. I examine the mismatch between the Russian leadership’s AI narrative and the country’s technological capabilities via the lens of Russia’s quest for great power status and ontological security. Connecting literatures on status-seeking, ontological security, and narratives in IR, I show the need to scrutinise narratives surrounding technology, especially AI technologies and their associated ambiguities, as part of how states deal with the constant uncertainty about recognition of their self-perceived identity. I find that the Russian official AI narrative embeds three of the elements forming Russia’s conception of a great power, namely the ability to compete, modernise, and attain technological sovereignty. [R, abr.]
74.6823 NEUBAUER-SHANI, Michal ; LEPICARD, Etienne —
Various processes in recent years have brought about trends of polarization within democratic societies, challenging political stability. Against this backdrop, policy patterns that are being adopted regarding controversial issues are significantly affected by these countries’ aspiration to create and maintain a consensus, which may have implications not favoring the public. One such issue is human experiments in medicine (clinical trials), which has been regulated by most countries through primary legislation. As a deeply divided society, Israel has been addressing this issue through regulation and secondary legislation, despite several attempts to have it regulated through primary legislation. This article employs the consociational model alongside Public Choice Theory to explain the adoption of this policy pattern on the issue of human experiments. Based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and existing sources, it sheds light on the normative choice that weighs the merits of primary legislation against the virtues of accommodation and consensus. [R]
74.6824 NEUPERT-WENTZ, Clara ; MÜLLER-CREPON, Carl —
To what degree and why are traditional institutions persistent? Following up the literature on the long-term effects of precolonial institutions in Africa, we investigate whether and where today’s traditional institutions mirror their precolonial predecessors. We do so by linking data on contemporary traditional institutions of African ethnic groups with Murdock’s historical Ethnographic Atlas. We find a robust association between past and present levels of institutional complexity, differentiating between institutions’ political centralization and functional differentiation. However, this persistence originates almost exclusively from former British colonies governed with more reliance on precolonial institutions than other colonies, in particular French ones. These findings contribute to research on the development and effects of traditional institutions, highlighting the need to account for varying persistence of traditional institutions. [R]
74.6825 OPALO, Kennedy Ochieng’ —
The recent coups in Africa do not portend a return to praetorian politics in the region. They are the outcomes of country-specific historical processes associated with the underdevelopment of state capacity, the decay of political institutions, and the failures of electoral politics to improve citizens’ material conditions. At the same time, the coups are an important warning regarding the state of democracy in Africa. Surveys show that majorities of Africans harbor both a deep dissatisfaction with democracy and an openness to military interventions to address civilian political dysfunction. While coup contagion is a remote possibility due to strong norms against military rule in much of the region, popular dissatisfaction with democracy and permissiveness towards military interventions in politics present a real risk of autocratization through elections. [R]
74.6826 OSMAN, Omar —
This article presents a theoretical view that describes how the rooted Western imperial political structure in the Arab region has trapped the latter in a perpetual development crisis. It follows a de facto analysis and contends that Western imperialism has maintained a counter-development of Arab governance since the mid-19th century, which has resulted in a persistent economic deficiency in the region. This article discusses why Washington Consensus endeavors have failed to deliver the promised results in the development of the region, and argues that it has condoned the principal problem, which is the foreign de facto hostile Western strategic rule that has an inherent disinterest in achieving comprehensive development in the Arab region. This article provides an argument against the views that blame the Arab’s economic failures on domestic institutional factors, and maintains that the foreign Western hostile domination is the primary source of the lasting backwardness in the Arab region. This article defines the West as the consortium of European and North American nations that have had imperial enterprises in the Arab region in the modern period. The most notable of these nations are the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. [R]
74.6827 PARK, Sang-Hee —
This study argues that, from the standpoint of social suffering, the perspective that sees refugees in terms of their “bare life” (Agamben) overrepresents the legal-political system and treats them as apolitical subjects. This study posits that when seen not only in the legal-political but also in personal-relational- social dimensions, refugees can be understood as political subjects during their transnational journeys from North to South Korea. In-depth interviews with North Korean refugees who have settled in South Korea are used to support this point. Other Asian states approach North Korean refugee migrations according to their own particular social and political circumstances and the refugees describe their experiences of exploitation and social dislocation as “bearable pain” or “temporary pain” in light of the hoped-for survival and legal asylum. While helpful in adapting psychologically or emotionally to adverse circumstances, such perceptions support the continuation of inhumane relationships and unjust practices in the formal and informal socio-economic arena made up of North Korean refugees and the local subjects who interact with them. The lived experiences and storytelling of refugees, however, expose contradictions in the social structure and demonstrate they are political subjects. [R]
74.6828 PARK, Seo-Hyun —
In 2018, the South Korean government denied refugee status to all but two of the almost 500 Yemenis who, fleeing civil war in their home country, had arrived earlier in the year on the resort island of Jeju. This decision was made in the context of a short-lived but intense public backlash, even though the overall number of refugees has remained consistently low. Three years later, nearly 400 Afghans were evacuated to South Korea with government support and little controversy. What explains these different patterns of refugee politicization in South Korea? I argue that the 2018 episode of anti-refugee activism in South Korea does not follow the typical script in immigration politics which pits “natives” against “outsiders”; rather, it is a reflection of internal political divisions. In this article, I focus on political framing contests involving governmental and non-governmental actors that draw upon prior rhetorical frames of political mobilization which had developed in a broader context of state-building, development, and democratization. The 2018 Jeju “crisis” was partially a reaction against state-led multiculturalism (damunhwa), which had gained momentum since the 2000s. It also signalled a political backlash against previous decades of social and political movements that framed labour rights, migrant workers’ rights, and other minority rights as a necessary expansion of human rights befitting a responsible “advanced nation.” [R, abr.]
74.6829 PEREZ ALMANSI, Bruno —
The article aims to analyse how the business power of actors in the Argentine automotive industry influenced the foreign trade policies relevant to the sector between 2002 and 2015. The research methods employed combine documentary sources, interviews with key informants and descriptive statistics. The overall findings show how automakers achieved considerable power in the first stage of the period, obtaining clear benefits in terms of foreign trade policy. However, macroeconomic and political changes in Argentina after 2008 had a negative impact on their business power, leading to their enjoying a reduced number of trade policy concessions. [R]
74.6830 POLIAN, Pavel ; VÖLKER, Bestrafte —
In the Soviet Union, deportations were a collective coercive measure. This instrument of power was used for political, economic, and, more broadly, military purposes. Various social, religious, and ethnic groups were affected. Most deportations were ethnically motivated. Around twelve million people were involved. After Stalin’s death, the practice of mass forced migration came to an end. Public discussion and scientific analysis of the topic began to emerge only at the end of the 1980s. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6831 PRYS-HANSEN, Miriam ; FRAZIER, Derrick —
This article examines ways in which the study of regional powers can enhance our ability to understand the dynamic nature of the international system today. The article, first, summarizes and highlights how the study of regional powers remains relevant to the broader discipline of international relations but also indicates that there remains much to improve and investigate, for instance by more systematically including less traditional issue areas for regional power engagement, including the environment or public diplomacy, by integrating disciplines beyond IR, including sociological and linguistic approaches. In today’s shifting global order, researching regional powerhood is needed for a better understanding of the emergence of order(s); by highlighting, for example, less-than-global forms of cooperation and conflict, and their often-complex simultaneities. We highlight the need to investigate forms of power beyond increases in military and economic power, but also to expand the types of actors beyond the state that we consider taking on functions of regional powerhood. [R] [Introduction to a thematic issue on “The rise and fall of regional powers”, edited by the authors. See Abstr. 74.6599, 6633, 6638, 6662, 6669, 6672, 6692, 6755, 6760, 6816]
74.6832 PULAY, Gergely —
In the most notorious, mixed Roma and non-Roma Romanian neighbourhood of Bucharest, structurally accumulated problems of governance turn into practical challenges that need to be tackled with the means at each person’s disposal. Under conditions of capitalist incorporation and prolonged crises on the post-socialist periphery, the main protagonists of this account — male members of an extended network of Spoitori Roma with diverse livelihoods — strive for relative independence not only from market forces but also from actors who may expose them to abuse. In this article, I reflect on personalized value struggles associated with marketization. Instead of accepting sectorial divisions between formality and informality, I show how marketization elucidates moral evaluations of being and doing good among men who hope to be or become “their own bosses” in precarious urban conditions. [R, abr.]
74.6833 PUTNIŅA, Aivita —
In June 2020, an earnest debate occurred in Latvian society surrounding controversy around the local ice cream brand called “Blacky” in English. While some pointed out that this was an expression of racism, others defended the right to name things “as they were” and relocated the political context within a nationalist perspective that “lacked” a racial history. This article explores “racial innocence” as a form of racism in Latvia. Racism and racial innocence, universalism, and particularism in interpreting race mobilize different sets of connections, not only revealing diverse understandings of race but also claiming authority and presenting inner logic to assert these positions. Despite the claimed lack of racial encounters and the absence of a history of colonial superiority, Latvians use racism as a part of the nation-building process and as a way of placing the country on the global map. [R, abr.]
74.6834 RABELLO KRAS, Helen —
Does information about the way victims of gender-based violence (GBV) are treated by the police influence evaluations of government policies to combat gender-based violence? I theorize that because most citizens have incomplete information about such policies, information about procedural fairness should be given more weight when forming evaluations of the government’s performance in this domain. Using original experiments embedded in public opinion surveys collected from Brazil, I find that information about procedural unfairness powerfully predicts more critical evaluations of GBV laws and the government’s performance in helping victims. In addition, these critical opinions influence bystander intervention attitudes. Mediation analysis confirms that views of procedural unfairness are critical in explaining these effects. The implications of the findings for the implementation of specialized services are discussed in the results and conclusion. [R]
74.6835 REILLY, Wuna —
Establishing new land rules is often a central part of how a modern state is constructed and sustained. In China, a state-led territorial process resulted in a set of land rules in 1962 that demarcated rural land in accordance with the production experience spaces of acquaintance communities and granted these communities key ownership rights over a fixed territory. These rights created structural conditions that encouraged village groups to establish their own operational rules, which in turn incentivized cooperation among group members on collective production and distribution. This system thus generated “quasi-voluntary” compliance, as farmers met their tax obligations in exchange for these land rights. This article explores how the 1962 land rules evolved and their role in producing the PRC’s communal-owned land system, which still formally covers almost half of China’s territory and population today, and the implications for the range of possible rural land governance arrangements in modern societies. [R]
74.6836 RIDGE, Hannah M. —
Polls from the Middle East/North Africa show high support for democracy. However, the veracity of this support has been called into question. This study uses a conjoint analysis to show that citizens support democratic institutions, as well as favoring an effective welfare state and a state religion. The results demonstrate that support for elected governance is not contingent on the state’s providing economic benefits; citizens are more likely to favor participatory government at each level of economic outcome. Interest in incorporating religion in the state, however, is contingent on the political and economic profile described; the contingent effects suggest interest in Islamic governance is, at least partly, instrumental. Although prodemocracy public opinion alone does not secure democratization, it creates fertile ground for future democratization movements. [R]
74.6837 RODRÍGUEZ-POSE, Andrés ; VIDAL-BOVER, Miquel —
Decentralisation has frequently been sold as a means to increase wellbeing and development. Yet, questions remain as to whether decentralisation improves economic performance. This is possibly because decentralisation processes have often led to ‘unfunded mandates’, that is, a mismatch between the powers transferred to subnational tiers of government and the resources allocated to them. In this article, we analyse how unfunded mandates shape regional economic growth across 518 regions in 30 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries over the period 1997-2018. There is a negative, statistically significant, and robust impact of unfunded mandates on economic growth. This effect is higher in more politically and less fiscally decentralised regions and in regions with a higher level of wealth. Unfunded mandates thus represent a serious drag on the potential positive economic effect of political decentralisation. Hence, for those benefits to materialise, better not more decentralisation — ensuring that finance follows function — should be pursued. [R]
74.6838 ROMBI, Stefano ; VALBRUZZI, Marco —
This article investigates the pattern of economic voting at the regional level in Italy. It focuses on the elections held in 18 out of 20 Italian regions from 1995 to 2020. Retrospective voting is examined by using the theory of economic voting, measured at the subnational level. By providing some inferential models and controlling for the impact of phases of recession, this article tests the hypothesis whereby the incumbent regional government is rewarded (or punished) by voters in the event of a good (or poor) state of the regional economy. It mainly considers macroeconomic variables, focusing on the relationship between the unemployment rate (at both national and regional levels) and the electoral performance of the incumbent executive. The empirical analysis shows that, particularly during periods of ‘quiet politics’, economic voting also occurs at the local level and thus the regional unemployment rate affects regional rulers’ electoral outcomes. [R]
74.6839 ROSENBERG, Sophie T. —
This article explores the Malian government’s decisions to support or suspend accountability efforts against prominent individuals during the peace negotiations between 2012 and 2017, including those with links to jihadist groups. By tracing the micro-processes determining how and why certain individuals faced justice for crimes and not others, the article shows how Malian authorities used implicit amnesty measures as a tool of strategic legitimation for certain rebel leaders. This helped constitute certain actors as part of the legitimate opposition and gloss over both their alleged responsibility for human rights abuses and their involvement in jihadist groups excluded from the talks. This article presents a framework that demonstrates how elite bargaining around accountability follows four political rationales and shows how a government’s selective approach to justice can enable actors to use peace processes as a means of impunity and political rehabilitation. [R, abr.]
74.6840 ROSS, Tobias ; SULLIVAN, Jonathan ; LAI, Hongyi —
Business-government relations play a crucial role in China’s economic development and policy implementation. Situated in an asymmetric dependency nexus, local officials court business investments to facilitate policy and boost their political careers, while under Xi Jinping private firms are increasingly incentivised to support party-state goals to gain access to political capital. In this study, we use the case of football development to show how private business actors and government officials enter reciprocal relationships based on the exchange of respective financial and political capital. Using insights from semistructured interviews with practitioners and macro-level data, such as investors’ characteristics and financial data, we explore the role of political capital in state–business exchanges, specifying the mechanisms of this interaction (motivations, forms, and perceived benefits) and three distinct investment scenarios in the case of football. Besides insights into the sector, the article contributes to the understanding of the modus operandi of private business and local government in the Chinese political economy at large. [R]
74.6841 ROZAS-BUGUEÑO, Joaquín —
On November 15, 2019, following almost a month of massive daily demonstrations across Chile, most political parties agreed to initiate an unprecedented constituent process. This process introduced institutional innovations for the Constitutional Convention elections, including gender parity, reserving 17 seats for indigenous individuals, and allowing nonparty candidates to run as independent candidates (Heiss 2021; Suárez-Cao 2021). [R] [See Abstr. 74.6780]
74.6842 RUIQING, Fang ; KIM, Chong Min —
In both Korea and China, the population issue has been recognized as an important policy issue in establishing and promoting the overall national development plan. This study compared and analyzed the background, process and policy contents of the changes in population policies of Korea and China for about 70 years from the 1950s to the 2020s.The common points of the two countries are that they have had similar perceptions and practices about marriage and childbirth for thousands of years in agricultural society and Confucian culture, that they realized a rapid change in the population within a short period of time through the implementation of effective birth control policies in the modernization period, and that the goal of population policy of population control has been converted to improving the quality of the population. However, although Korea and China faced similar population problems such as low birth rate and aging population, there were differences in the process, response method, and content of policy. While Korea promulgated the new population policy in 1996 and began to seek a shift to the policy of encouraging childbirth, China did not immediately abolish the birth control policy, but gradually eased the birth control policy from the 2000s to implement the “two-child policy” and “three-child policy”. [R]
74.6843 SABEL, Charles ; ZEITLIN, Jonathan ; HELDERMAN, Jan-Kees —
Advanced welfare states are under pressure to customize services, promptly enough to prevent a cascade of harms. With these goals, the Netherlands in 2015 decentralized social care services to municipalities, and within municipalities to neighborhood teams in continuing contact with clients. The overall results have been disappointing. But the experience of Utrecht, the Netherlands’ fourth-largest city, has been strikingly different. By using hard-to-resolve cases to signal conflicts in rules, obstructive jurisdictional boundaries, and the shortcomings of private service providers, Utrecht is learning to customize and speed delivery of social care through incremental steps. This article explains how Utrecht’s success addresses apparently intractable limits to the adaptability of the rule-bound welfare state, such as the problem of low-level discretion or street-level bureaucracy and the division of services into silos, in the process bridging, and perhaps effacing, the gap between the Habermasian life world and the system world of formal rules. [R]
74.6844 SANDAL, Nukhet Ahu ; OZTURK, Ahmet Erdi —
This article employs interviews and primary and secondary sources to examine the discrimination, securitization, and instrumentalization faced by four main Christian denominations throughout Turkish history: the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, and Protestant communities. We shed light on how some religious minority groups have been utilized and represented within the framework of Turkish diplomacy and the pursuit of neo-Ottomanism. We contend that the blanket term ‘Christian’ is less applicable in Turkey’s context, where religion becomes intricately intertwined with ethnicity. Thus, it becomes imperative to investigate each non-Muslim community independently, considering their unique trajectories, historical traumas, internal divisions, and relationships with the state. [R]
74.6845 SCHENONI, Luis L., et al. —
After the Napoleonic Wars interstate war regularly occurred throughout the Western Hemisphere — until in matter of decades it disappeared. After the 1930s even low-level militarized interstate conflict became less frequent, shorter, and less severe over time. What explains the change in this specific region and historical juncture? We argue that leaders in the Americas identified territorial disputes and foreign intervention as interrelated problems that frequently caused the interstate war. In response, they developed a unique regional norm-complex that bundled together the norms of territorial integrity and non-intervention with the principle of peaceful conflict-resolution. This norm complex emerged via Latin American entrepreneurship shortly after independence, cascaded with Pan-Americanism, and crystallized around the signature of the Saavedra Lamas Treaty in the early 1930s. [R, abr.]
74.6846 SCHIMPFÖSSL, Elisabeth —
This article explores the dominant morality to which wealthy Russians adhered in their vision of how society should be organized and the role they see for themselves. The interviews with, and observations of, eighty Russian multi-millionaires and billionaires, their spouses, and their children, on which the article is based, were conducted from 2008 to 2017, a time when Russia’s rich were most settled in their positions. The interview analysis highlights the role of Soviet history and shows how it is integrated into, and harmonizes with, contemporary upper-class Russians’ notions of meritocracy. The author argues that drawing on international sociological research considerably advances our understanding of how Russian elites ideologically construe and morally legitimize the concentration of money and power in their own hands and how they model themselves as “good” in their actions and “deserving” of their fortunes. [R, abr.]
74.6847 SCZEPANSKI, Ronja —
Transnational European identities influence public debates and electoral dynamics across Europe, with sociodemographic factors strongly associated with these identities. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to how people’s perceptions of a political group’s sociodemographic profile relate to their identification with Europe. I argue that such perceptions, in combination with social identities, are significantly associated with the strength of individuals’ identification with political groups. An individual is more likely to have a robust European identity if they perceive that social groups they like share the same pro-European opinion. In contrast, if they perceive that groups they like align with the anti-European camp, they are likely to have a weaker European identity. By employing novel survey data from Italy and Austria, I find empirical support for my argument. [R, abr.]
74.6848 SELIKTAR, Ofira —
The failure to anticipate Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 is multilayered and will be investigated for years to come. However, the preliminary consensus has blamed the konceptcia, the Hebrew word for paradigm, that guided the intelligence and security forces. With the advent of AI and its complex search algorithms, the resultant paradigm was shaped by an input imbalance that depicted Hamas transitioning from its jihadist past to a rational governance player. The politicization of the academic and lay Middle East discourse legitimized resistance to Israel, feeding the bias. Equally, the virtual absence of understanding of the military wing of Hamas and its role in Iran’s Axis of Resistance deepened the imbalance. [R]
74.6849 SHENG, Junrong —
The question how pro-women elements became possible in the statesponsored movements despite the prevalence of state patriarchy in Maoist China has been on scholars’ radar for a long time. Previous studies answered it through researching the nature of various women’s groups in the state. Some argued that women’s groups were passive followers of the central political agendas, whereas others contended that women’s groups exhibited autonomy in creating anti-patriarchy cultural front. Results are diverse partly because they focused on different women’s groups. While findings above greatly advanced our understanding of roles of women’s groups in Maoist China, few have examined how women’s groups acted strategically in different political upheavals, either in complicity or in defiance of state patriarchy. To fill the gap, this research uses the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) — a national women’s group as an example — and investigates its adopted gender discourse and cultural strategies in different times of Maoist China. Drawing on content analysis of ACWF’s publication — the Women of China (1955-1965) — this research finds that the capacity of gender discourse to separate itself from class-centered politics (flexibility) and to challenge patriarchal conventions (strength) varied across historical periods. Along with the variation are different cultural strategies. Results above unveil a more complicated relationship between the women’s group (i.e., ACWF) and the state in Maoist time. [R, abr.]
74.6850 SHIN, Seungyop —
Beginning in the mid-1930s, and later as a member of the Axis Powers, imperial Japan allied with Nazi Germany and historians have extensively examined how the two countries viewed each other and what material and ideological conditions underpinned their alliance. However, researchers have paid little attention to colonial Korea’s intersection with the fascist moment because Korea did not exist as an independent entity until Japan’s defeat in World War II. This article explores how the public discourse of colonial Korea engaged with the politics of fascism, the varying influence of Adolf Hitler, and Japan’s relationship with Nazi Germany. This essay investigates how different agents in colonial Korea, including the Japanese authorities, Korean leaders, and various print media, adopted, undercut, or opposed Japanese fascism by focusing on their shifting perspectives on totalitarian rule and the geopolitical situations in Europe and Asia. Because experiencing the discrepancy between the rhetoric of inclusive assimilation and its actual practice, Korean leftists, pro-Japanese intellectuals, and nationalist students appropriated fascist ideology regardless of their divergent political goals. These Korean elites tried to bridge that divide by embracing the fascist will to power, a move that led some to seek domination and elevate their status within the imperial structure and others to defy it. [R]
74.6851 SIKA, Nadine —
In 2018 new economic reform measures were implemented in Egypt and Jordan under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund. These measures were met with public outrage in both countries. In Jordan, mass mobilization, demonstrations and strikes took place, lasted for a month and ended in policy concessions. In Egypt, however, only few independent demonstrations erupted, no mass mobilization occurred, and no policy concessions were enacted by the regime. This article seeks to understand, why activists were able to mobilize large numbers of citizens and attain policy concessions in Jordan, while they were not able to in Egypt. I argue that in authoritarian regimes, different types of repressive strategies against activists and their movements impact their ability to develop networks and advance short-term policy concessions. Targeted repression against activists enables the development of formal and informal networks in addition to coalitions, increasing a movements’ bargaining power. However, widespread repression hampers the development of all types of networks, especially formal networks, which impedes activists’ ability to bargain for policy concessions. [R]
74.6852 SLATER, Dan —
The man who has spent the past three decades doing more than anyone to deny Indonesians the right to elect their leaders has now been elected Indonesia’s leader. Riding the coattails and benefiting from the brazen interventions of Joko Widodo, the wildly popular outgoing president, Prabowo Subianto has completed his quarter-century-long political rehabilitation from Indonesia’s most notorious human-rights abuser to the world’s third-largest democracy’s commander-in-chief. The murky circumstances of Prabowo’s electoral landslide, combined with the likely prospect that he will rule effectively unopposed, seem certain to accelerate recent processes of democratic erosion in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. [R]
74.6853 SOLAR CABRALES, Frank Josué —
The Cuban Revolution is passing through one of the most complex moments of its history. After more than a decade of profound economic, political, and social reforms, the Cuban socialist project faces enormous challenges, amid difficulties arising from intensified imperialist harassment, the sequels of the pandemic, the global crisis, and internal bureaucratic errors. Cuba’s economic and social development model stands at several crossroads. The Caribbean island must deepen its socialism along revolutionary lines and with greater worker and popular control. [R]
74.6854 SONG, Yunpeng ; LI, Yanwei —
Policy piloting has become a popular form of organization in implementing public policies. However, the current literature surprisingly discusses little about its management. This study investigates how two policy-pilot attributes — ambiguity and compatibility — shape policy-pilot management. To accomplish this, we developed an analytic framework consisting of four management strategies: experimentation, refinement, upscaling, and institutionalization. We chose a representative policy pilot in Chinese health governance, the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme, to examine the adoption of these four strategies. Our finding that, at various junctures, the Chinese state adopted these four strategies to manage policy piloting demonstrates the applicability of the analytic framework constructed in this study. This study contributes to the existing public policy literature by providing new insights into policy implementation in temporary organizing settings. [R]
74.6855 SOSNA, Daniel —
This article examines the internal dynamics and relationality of moral economies. It focuses on labor relations to understand how people find balance between collective moral frameworks and individual everyday acts. Drawing on ethnographic research among Czech landfill workers during the neoliberalization of the waste industry in the 2010s, the article explores two spheres of waste management: the informal scavenging of landfill workers and the management of wastewater. Salvaging things via scavenging and management of wastewater provides two arenas for analyzing the ways people reason about the good, dignity, and justice while following their own goals. The article points at a scalar reshaping of moral economies and brings attention to a morality that does not reflect only direct transactions but also more imaginative relations to distant others. [R, abr.]
74.6856 STEFANICK, Lorna ; TAIT, Myra J. —
The Canadian child welfare system has been characterized as being in crisis for over a decade; the number of children in care (and dying in care) has increased dramatically, straining an overburdened system. Physical or sexual abuse is not the reason most children are removed from their homes; rather, the state deems them lacking the necessities of life, usually because their family is impoverished. Because the majority of children in care are Indigenous, the child welfare system is described as the new version of residential schools. Using the lens of historical institutionalism, this study argues that the current child welfare system reflects colonial and neoliberal assumptions that some parents are incapable of sound decision making by virtue of their race or socio-economic situation. Canada’s child welfare system is both a product and contributor to the institutions and policies that reinforce intergenerational poverty, a key determinant of removing children from their families. [R]
74.6857 STIVAS, Dionysios ; COLE, Alistair —
Securitization was a common practice of governments during the first phases of the COVID-19 outbreak. To successfully securitize a pandemic, a government has to convince its citizens of the magnitude of the threat. Trusted governments should be able to do this more effectively than untrusted ones. Hong Kong, our case study, is unique because the government managed to control the pandemic in a context of extremely low political trust. This paper examines the extent to which trust in the government and smart technologies influenced the securitization and management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. The results of this study suggest that under certain circumstances governments can successfully manage a health emergency even when they do not enjoy much political trust. [R]
74.6858 STOLFI, Francesco ; FRITSCH, Oliver —
Through a meta-analysis of all publicly available research over a span of 25 years, the article assesses the productivity impact of the employment protection legislation reforms that have been introduced in Italy since 1997. European Union institutions and domestic reformers advocated the reforms in order to increase the competitiveness and productivity of the Italian economy. Yet, by incentivising temporary employment, the reforms have favoured competitive strategies that have reduced the productivity of the country’s firms. [R]
74.6859 STRANGE, Austin —
Why do governments pursue flashy international development projects despite more basic material needs? I argue that economically questionable “prestige projects” can be politically useful for legitimacy-seeking governments of small states in the Global South. Prestige projects provide these governments with otherwise unavailable symbolic capital as well as a means for seeking international status. Using new data on China’s global development finance since 1949, I document nearly 400 prestige projects and show they are concentrated in developing countries with small economies that increase their support for China’s diplomatic interests. An illustrative case study of Costa Rica’s national stadium shows how host countries use prestige projects to acquire national symbolic capital and pursue status. Evidence from a survey experiment in Papua New Guinea further demonstrates that prestige projects are uniquely associated with the national government and status-seeking motives. [R, abr.]
74.6860 THIEMANN, Louis ; GONZÁLEZ MARRERO, Claudia —
During the height of its power over everyday life, between 1968 and 1993, the Cuban Communist Party outlawed virtually all non-state labour and exchange. Since then, however, its continuity in power has increasingly depended on devolution: shifting responsibility for the provision of basic goods and services from failing state enterprises back to the self-employed. The latter now produce the majority of food and basic products; receive most of the national income from tourism, remittances and foreign investment; and generate most new jobs. Nevertheless, they subsist under a subaltern regime of fragile and conditional freedoms. The article adapts James Scott’s consideration for the subaltern’s ‘hidden transcripts’ and agencies to contemporary Cuba. It analyses the unavoidability of informal and illegal practices for daily subsistence; their naturalisation in society in contrast with their delegitimisation as opportunistic self-enrichment in party-controlled media; and how the self-employed resist such judgements in favour of more conciliatory civic visions. [R]
74.6861 TIPEI, Alex R. —
This article argues that discussions about and plans for female education emerged in early 19th-c. southeastern Europe in connection with broader programs of modernization. It suggests that when officials and educators in the early Greek state and Danubian Principalities created curricula for women, they seldom took regional realities or the needs of potential pupils into account. Rather, the courses of study they proposed more closely reflected the aspirations these regional elites had for their communities. The article explores how education helped (re)inscribe gender roles within modern institutions and allowed state officials and educators to formalize boundaries between the public and private spheres. Modernization, primary instruction, and gendered hierarchies were intimately related. [R]
74.6862 VAN DER HEIDE, Arjen ; KOHL, Sebastian —
Contemporary capitalist societies use different institutions to manage economic risks. While different public welfare state and financial institutions (banks, capital markets) have been studied across coordinated and liberal market economies, the different worlds of private insurance institutions have been understudied. Building on new insurance data sets (18802017), we find that countries with a Maritime (USA, GBR, CAN) in contrast to the more backward Alpine (AUT, DEU, CHE) insurance tradition developed bigger life and nonlife insurance earlier, with less state-associated and reinsurance enterprises, but riskier investments steered toward financial markets. We argue that the larger and more “Maritime” the insurance sector, the more it made welfare states liberal and securities markets large. Insurance is thus a hidden factor for countries’ varieties of capitalism and worlds of welfare. The recent convergence on the Maritime model, however, implies that the riskier and risk-individualizing type of private insurance has added to privatization and securitization trends everywhere. [R]
74.6863 VERHOEVEN, Harry ; GEBREGZIABHER, Tefera Negash —
Why and how do African states become peacekeepers? Through a singlecase study, this article accounts for a transformation in peace and security: how Ethiopia became the world’s prime source of blue helmets in the early twenty-first century, having largely shunned peacekeeping in preceding decades. We propose that peacekeeping came to serve as an unexpectedly useful technology to pursue state-building agendas. Historically, regional proxy wars undermined state-building efforts in Ethiopia and mismanagement of ethno-linguistic diversity rendered it vulnerable to externally supported rebellions. In the 2000s, an evolving approach to peacekeeping dovetailed with the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF) vision for recalibrating political order domestically and in the Horn of Africa. EPRDF became convinced that changing Ethiopia required changing its surrounding region. Regional intervention as peacekeeping was supported by global powers and helped bind neighbouring states to Ethiopia in new ways. This entailed the crafting of deep political ties in Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan that mitigated historical fears of Ethiopian hegemony and shielded EPRDF state-building from outside destabilization. Moreover, as Ethiopia’s increasingly prominent role in United Nations and African Union missions improved the external environment for the EPRDF developmental state, it also expanded Ethiopian National Defence Force’s role in the political economy, buttressing the partystate’s hegemony. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6585]
74.6864 WANG, Chao —
Hong Kong presents a test case of China’s willingness to adapt Western liberal values of individual freedom and the rule of law in a corner of China. The Western model of governance, along with its common law system and capitalist economic system, has been permitted to operate side by side with the Chinese socialist system within the framework of Chinese sovereignty and the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) political and legal system. The formation and implementation of the policy of ‘one country, two systems’ (OCTS) entail Chinese law-makers’ selective integration of international and Western rules of governance into the Hong Kong and China context to serve the interests of the PRC party regime. This article explores the approaches taken by the PRC to the governance of Hong Kong in light of the regime’s political and economic goals and how the Western concept of rule of law and autonomy is perceived and substantiated in terms of the communist ideology. The author argues that the intrinsic value of OCTS lies in seeking complementarity and coexistence between the Western liberal norms of governance and Chinese communist ideology, and that this intrinsic value should be upheld and remain in full force to serve as a normative consensus between China and the West. [R]
74.6865 WANG, Min —
Securing long-term environmental pollution control in a system where local leaders in China hold tenure for only a short term is a challenge. The innovative Chinese accountability audit of natural resources (AANR) pilot project attempts to address this problem by mandating lifelong accountability for local leaders. Using this pilot as a quasi-natural experiment, we explored macro-effectiveness and micro-mechanisms of AANR. The results show that AANR has a positive impact on the environmental investment behaviour of enterprises. This paper finds that AANR stimulates enterprises’ investments in the environment by improving the environmental behaviour of local leaders. During mobilisation meetings, local leaders convey signals on environmental matters. Political connections are bridges which convey the signals of mobilisation to enterprises. Those enterprises receive the signals and increase environmental investment. AANR thus promotes collaborative governance by ensuring that the interests of key stakeholders are aligned to prevent pollution. [R]
74.6866 WEISS, Chagai M., et al. —
What is the impact of uncommon but notable violent acts on conflict dynamics? We analyze the impact of the murder of a Palestinian child on the broader dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian violence in Jerusalem. By using novel micro-level event data and utilizing Discrete Fourier Transform and Bayesian Poisson Change Point Analysis, we compare the impact of the murder to that of other lethal but more typical Israeli-Palestinian events. We demonstrate that the murder had a large and durable impact on the average number of daily riots in Jerusalem, whereas the other events caused smaller, short-term effects. We demonstrate that scholars should devote more attention to the analysis of atypical violent acts and indicate a set of tools for conducting such analyses. [R]
74.6867 WELLINGS, Ben ; GHAZARIAN, Zareh —
This article shows how Australian politics played an under-researched part in the development of the Anglosphere idea. By examining the contestation of nationhood in Australia from the republic referendum of the 1990s until the mid-2000s, this article offers a new interpretation of the genesis of the Anglosphere idea. The article suggests that debates about national identity in Australia and the Anglosphere idea are co-constitutive. These co-constitutive relationships are with the United Kingdom (via the republic debate, the process of reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples and civics and citizenship education), New Zealand (via ‘Anzac’ war commemoration) and the US (via defence and security). The Anglosphere idea remains important to debates about national identity and public policy in Australia and provides context for decisions about how Australia positions itself in the world at a time of significant transnational challenges and threats. [R]
74.6868 WINGENDER, Monika —
Over 150 languages are spoken in the Russian Federation. However, they enjoy very different kinds of status. Russian is the national state language, and in the federation’s 21 national republics, this also applies to the language of the titular nation. But even the importance of these major languages is declining. This is seen by the example of Tatarstan, where Tatar is well established. Until 2018, children from Russian-speaking families had to learn Tatar at school. This requirement was effectively abolished in accordance with the language ideology centred around the “great and mighty Russian language”. Russian increasingly dominates the public sphere. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]
74.6869 YAMAMOTO, Andrei —
What is the role of emotions in conflict resolution, and how can a reconceptualisation of emotions in international relations beyond the discipline be used to understand North Korea’s state conduct and conflict on the Korean peninsula? Drawing on the ontology and epistemology of East Asian medicine, this research explores the role of emotions in conflict resolution by using insights from Wuxing, the medical theory of the five elements/phases, its modus operandi of healing emotional imbalance with counter-emotions, and the principles of harmony and proportionality. I propose the following ‘treatment’: uncovering counterproductive roles and relations of American, South Korean and North Korean actors, given the attention to pathogenic factors in East Asian medicine; reconceptualising emotions in non-binary terms and accounting for suppressed and disproportionally expressed emotions and their effect on relations; strengthening the North Korean corpus to increase resilience; and countering emotional imbalance with counter-emotions. East Asian medicine addresses a system of disharmony, relocates misplaced radicals, and re-adjusts roles, powers and responsibilities. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.6604]
74.6870 YI, Ma ; WEN, Xiang —
Numerous studies have examined China’s authoritarian environmentalism, with a focus on policy-making and implementation. We argue that law enforcement should also be investigated as a crucial stage. Specifically, we examine environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) and analyse a novel dataset of 7010 EPIL court judgements from 2015 to 2020. We find that state prosecutors dominate EPIL activities, while the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is strictly limited. We also show great variations in EPIL lawsuits filed by state prosecutors across provinces, indicating high local discretion over environmental law enforcement. Lastly, we doubt whether the great number of EPIL outputs from state prosecutors will produce significant environmental outcomes, because they tend to target low-hanging fruit, in contrast to the more challenging and environmentally profound EPIL cases initiated by NGOs. We highlight the value of using the authoritarian environmentalism framework to contextualise debates surrounding the development of EPIL in China.
74.6871 YILDIRIM, Tevfik Murat —
Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has evolved into a comprehensive theory of organisational information processing over the past two decades, with hundreds of studies adopting it to examine various aspects of the policy process. Despite the growing number of studies building on PET, however, our understanding of stability and change in media agendas remains rather limited. I propose a theory that seeks to explain the conditions under which media agendas are more punctuated and test my hypotheses using a dataset of 7 million news stories from 15 newspapers in Belgium, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK between 2000 and 2019. Results, based on an analysis of change distributions and a series of regression models, highlight two important findings: first, punctuations in the media agenda are less severe and frequent than those in other organisational agendas. Second, the severity of punctuations is greater in politicised news and diminished in issue areas related to ‘core functions of government’ (Jennings et al, 2011), relative to non-politicised news and issues outside the core areas, respectively. Results also suggest that despite the varying media and political characteristics of the countries examined in this study, change distributions of media attention are strikingly similar across the country cases. Through this novel and innovative study, the article contributes to PET theory by considering different elements of news stories, as well as re-engaging with the discussion of the relationship between the media and politics. [R]
74.6872 YU, Branda Yee-Man ; LAM, Calvin ; CHAN, Christian S. —
Political disagreement with family members can have a deleterious impact on familial relationships, but the long-term consequences are understudied. This study examined the relational outcomes of familial political incongruence two years after the 2019 social unrest in Hong Kong and the extent to which frequency and types of family contact explain their association. This two-wave questionnaire study augmented with a 14-day daily record of family contact recruited (1) young adults and (2) parents with children aged 18–30 (N = 559). Nearly half of the respondents reported significant political incongruence with their parents/children. We observed consistent findings in both adult children and parents. Greater parent–child political differences were associated with reduced likelihood of having positive family communication and family functioning. Increased political differences with family members were associated with greater odds of family dysfunctionality. Moreover, expression of love and care mediated the effect of political differences with family members on changes in family functioning. This study demonstrates familial political incongruence exerts an influence on families two years after the unrest. Parent–child political differences are associated with a decline in the quality of family communication and family environment. We discuss how parent–child political incongruence drives a family to worsened well-being through dysfunctional family dynamics. [R]
74.6873 ZHAN, Yang —
Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of “world anthropologies” to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colonialism to liberalism and then to postcolonialism, anthropology in China began with a progressive agenda of anti-colonialism, and then leaned toward liberalism. In the context of China’s rise, “China” has been further embroiled in a puzzle of imperialism. This reversed ideological tendency contributes to the disorientation of the critical energy in anthropology focused on China. Second, just as China has taken an active role in the competition for education and research in a globalized, yet uneven academia through discipline construction, anthropology in the West, particularly the United States, has become provincialized in terms of its intellectual agendas. Many of the younger generation of Chinese anthropologists have become stuck in the disjuncture, struggling to channel their critical energy through engaged scholarship, both within and beyond academic institutions. The epistemic politics in and of China, at both the intellectual and institutional levels, reveals that the post-socialist condition deserves to be reference points in world anthropologies. [R, abr.]
74.6874 ZHANG, Changdong ; DICKSON, Bruce —
Taking China as an ideal case, we use a nation-wide random sample of urban residents to study how citizens under strong authoritarian states perceive their tax burdens. We find that Chinese citizens have low tax consciousness, defined as the perception of fairness both in comparison to people they know and to the amount of public goods they receive. Citizens’ income, the amount of public goods they receive, and media consumption have important effects on their tax perception. We argue that there are three mechanisms used by China’s “half-tax state” to reduce their citizens’ tax perception: (1) reduce the salience of people’s tax burden, conditional on their income level, (2) generate fiscal illusion effects while providing public services in return for taxes paid, and (3) use propaganda to shape the ideology of tax compliance. [R, abr.]
74.6875 ZHAO, Xiuli ; GAO, Xiaojie ; YANG, Yang —
Operating through digital platforms, the digital economy has flourished, becoming the core driver and new motive force of economic growth and demonstrating its advantages in terms of scale, effectiveness, and penetration. Nevertheless, the digital economy, as an important element in the socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics, remains dominated by private capital, and this has caused many problems. The government of China proposes not only to prevent the disorderly expansion of capital, but also to use the role of capital as an important factor of production in the market economy and a means of subjecting capital to a system of “traffic lights.” In this context, the article starts out from the theoretical logic of the dual nature of capital and of the “tension” created by the inherent contradictions of digital capital and the practical logic of the “gravitational force” exerted by the mega-size of the socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics. The article then expounds on the historical inevitability of the emergence of digital public capital, and systematically sets out the compositional map of the pluralistic digital capital system dominated by digital public capital and developed together with digital non-public capital. Finally, and on this basis, it draws conclusions and makes policy recommendations. [R]
74.6876 ZISAKOU, Anastasia ; FIGGOU, Lia ; ANDREOULI, Eleni —
The current research explores refugee integration through the analysis of active constructions of everyday life in Greek cities. It draws from critical social and political psychology literature that explores spatial aspects of intergroup relations and developments in citizenship and migration studies. For the purposes of the study, 25 walking interviews with refugees from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, and Syria were conducted in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki. Interviews were analyzed with tools and concepts of critical discursive social psychology. Analysis indicated three main repertoires related to corresponding space nuclei: “city squares and surrounding areas as minorities’ spatial nuclei,” “political spaces as urban enclaves of belonging,” and “neighborhoods as un/familiar places.” Each of these broader compounds represented different people–place dynamics and presupposed different citizenship constructions and claims. These constructions entailed different ways of positioning oneself and others and constituted the ground for redefining integration based on local experiences and multilevel connections with urban networks. Drawing on these findings, the article proposes to reconsider integration through the concept of urban citizenship to explore everyday politics of intergroup relations in contexts of migration. [R]
74.6877 ZUMBRUNN, Alina —
Since political trust is crucial to the survival of political systems, securing its high levels is essential. While Switzerland exhibits a large rural-urban divide in direct democratic votes, it has not yet been researched whether such a divide also exists with regard to political trust. In my investigation of the Swiss rural-urban divide in political trust, I bring in place as a social identity and evaluate whether the rural-urban divide is contingent upon place-based identity. I employ OLS regression models using original survey data from 2022 with about 4,000 respondents. Results reveal a significant but irrelevantly small rural-urban difference in political trust. However, when interacting place-based identity with place of living, I find that identity inverts the rural-urban divide. When place-based identity is low, rural residents exhibit higher levels of political trust than urban residents, but when place-based identity is high, trust is higher in urban than in rural places. [R]
74.6878 —
In January 2024, in Bashkortostan, a part of Russia’s Volga Federal District, a leading member of the banned Bashkir national movement Bashkort received a sentence of four years in a penal colony. Several thousand people protested against the sentence in front of the court building. A wave of arrests began immediately afterwards. The trial has revealed: In Russia’s most populous republic, outrage over the environmental destruction caused by mining is linked to the question of rights of national self-determination. The republic’s leadership is weak and serves the central authorities in Moscow by conducting especially repressive measures. Critics are stigmatized as “extremists” and “agents of foreign secret services”. The war against Ukraine has inflamed the mood. A report from the day of the verdict was announced. [R] [See Abstr. 74.6790]