Political Studies

Governments have turned to public deliberation as a way to engage citizens in governance with the goal of rebuilding faith in government institutions and authority as well as to provide quality inputs into governance. This article offers a systematic analysis of the literature on the effects of deliberative events on participants’ political efficacy and trust. The systematic review contextualizes the results from a 6-day deliberative event. This case study is distinctive in highlighting the long-term impacts on participants’ political trust and efficacy as key outcomes of the deliberative process unfold, that is, City Council receives then responds to the participants’ recommendations report. Using four-wave panel data spanning 2.5 years and three public opinion polls (control groups), the study demonstrates that participants in deliberative events are more efficacious and trusting prior to and after the deliberative event. Despite the case study’s evidence and the systematic review of existing literature, questions remain about whether enhanced opportunities for citizen engagement in governance can ameliorate low levels of political trust and efficacy observed in Western democracies.

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union highlights the importance of White majority opposition to immigration. This article presents the results of a survey experiment examining whether priming an open form of ethno-nationalism based on immigrant assimilation reduces hostility to immigration and support for right-wing populism in Britain. Results show that drawing attention to the idea that assimilation leaves the ethnic majority unchanged significantly reduces hostility to immigration and support for Hard Brexit in the UK. Treatment effects are strongest among UK Independence Party, Brexit and White working-class voters. This is arguably the first example of an experimental treatment leading to more liberal immigration policy preferences.

Prefigurative politics, the idea of ‘building the new world in the shell of the old’, increasingly forms part of the common sense of radical social and political movements but deserves more careful conceptual analysis. Traditionally, such ideas have been discussed in contrast to ‘strategic’ politics, but this has been challenged by recent scholarship, which has stressed that they can and should be seen as strategic. This article agrees but points to a more fundamental tension rooted in attempting to enact the future in the present. This is discussed through two broad approaches to prefiguration: ends-guided and ends-effacing. The former leads to a practical dilemma between acting to bring about the future and acting as if it has already been achieved. The latter addresses this, but nonetheless requires further articulation of the relationship between present and future action, which the article argues can be achieved by drawing on ideas from critical pedagogy.

Political parties often appeal to groups. Yet, existing work does not consider how such group-based appeals are used, presumably because they are thought to have grown ineffective. Contrary to this, I argue that group-based appeals are central to party electoral strategy, and that time has only strengthened the incentive to use them. Using original data on 10,000 group-based appeals found in sentence-by-sentence coding of British election manifestos, I demonstrate an increasing use of group-based appeals from 1964 to 2015. Furthermore, I show that the range of groups emphasized, the concentration of group emphasis, and the specific group categories targeted also follow the electoral incentives prevalent over this 50-year period. These findings shed new light on how political parties appeal for votes and suggest that we view group-based appeals as a distinctive feature of party electoral strategy. I discuss the implications for our broader understanding of electoral competition.

Case studies and correlational evidence suggest that celebrity political advocacy leads to media coverage and public attention. With a new dataset of celebrity witnesses at congressional hearings, we develop a systematic analysis that allows us to estimate whether celebrities increase media coverage of the issues they advocate in official government venues. We also use this dataset to measure how much celebrity advocacy efforts increase public engagement with policy issues—a necessary condition for the expansion of issue publics. We find that the issues addressed in congressional hearings featuring celebrity witnesses are about three times more likely to be the subject of the New York Times reporting, but the average celebrity witness has no discernible effect on public issue attention, as measured by Wikipedia page views. We conclude that while the Internet vastly expands the opportunities for political communication, it is difficult to appropriate non-political social network infrastructures to promote policy change.

An adequate interpretation of our liberal and cosmopolitan traditions depends absolutely on an adequate understanding of the history of the idea of human rights. There is, however, deep disagreement about this history. In this article, I argue that disagreement about the emergence of human rights is resolvable and can be explained through attention to problematic methodological commitments within exemplary historical narratives. I first consider, and reject, Micheline Ishay’s claim that the concept of human rights can be found in the ancient world. I then move on to a detailed critical engagement with Samuel Moyn’s contrary thesis that human rights are a radically novel political phenomenon. I argue that Moyn’s analysis can only be taken seriously as an action-based account of human rights and therefore cannot sustain the dramatic conclusion he advances. I then defend an alternative, belief-based framework for approaching, and rethinking, the history of the idea of human rights.

There is a general presumption against arming outlaw states. But can that presumption sometimes be overturned? The argument considered here maintains that outlaw states can have legitimate security interests and that transferring weapons to these states can be an appropriate way of promoting those interests. Weapons enable governments to engage in wrongful oppression and aggression, but they also enable them to fend off predators in a manner that can be beneficial to their citizens. It clearly does not follow from the fact that a state is oppressive or aggressive that it will never be a victim of wrongful aggression itself, and while an outlaw state’s primary aim in repelling such aggression will often be the preservation of its own power, its defensive manoeuvres will sometimes also serve its citizens’ interests. In short, supplying weapons to outlaw states may sometimes contribute to the protection of innocents.

There is a deep divide among political philosophers of an egalitarian stripe. On the one hand, there are so-called distributive egalitarians, who hold that equality obtains within a political community when each of its members enjoys an equal share of the community’s resources. On the other hand, there are so-called social egalitarians, who instead hold that equality obtains within a political community when each of its members stands in certain relations to other members of the community, such as non-domination and lack of oppression. In this article, we have three aims. Our first aim is to cast doubt on the helpfulness of characterizing the debate in this way. Our second aim is to reconstruct this debate in alternative and more precise terms, so that disagreements between advocates of either side are easier to evaluate. Our third aim is to advance a hybrid account that integrates element from both views.

Why are some states more corrupt than others? Drawing on the literature on governance in parliamentary democracies, we suggest that the degree of corruption depends on the ability of key political actors to control ministers who have been delegated power. We argue that the Prime Minister has incentives to limit corruption within the cabinet and has the ability to do so when there are certain “control mechanisms” at hand. One such mechanism is the PM’s ability to fire or demote ministers who are not behaving in accordance with his or her wishes. We hypothesize that governmental corruption will be lower in systems where the constitution grants the PM strong powers. Using a new dataset (Varieties of Democracy), which provides more specific measures on high-level corruption across a longer time period, we analyze corruption in 26 West and East European democracies over the post-war period and find support for our hypothesis.

When casting a split-ticket ballot, voters in established democracies have strong political predispositions and electoral experience that influence their decision. However, voters in a new democracy, lacking long-term party attachment and experience with democracy, may instead be informed and motivated by their social networks. Using the 1990 Cross-National Election Project German Unification study, I examine which factors predict split-ticket voting for East and West Germans. I find that political disagreement within a social network is more influential for East Germans, while partisan predispositions, particularly party supporter type, play a greater role for West Germans. These findings indicate that, in absence of competition between long-term partisanship and democratic experience, network characteristics may have a profound impact on political decision-making.

Recent decades have witnessed a revival of interest in ancient friendship both as a normative and as an explanatory concept. The literature concurs in holding Hobbes responsible for the marginalisation of friendship in political science and suggests that Hobbes devalued friendship because of his understanding of man. This article argues that although Hobbes’ appraisal of friendship hinges on his assumption that man is self-interested, his critique of normative friendship does not rest on that notion. Hobbes’ challenge to us is this: without foundation in the ‘truth’ (i.e. the ‘Good Life’) that underpinned ancient friendship, modern friendship, whether self-interested or selfless, cannot be assumed to be a civic virtue, nor an index of the health of a political association, nor a facilitator of domestic or global peace. Hobbes’ critique is especially relevant for writers who maintain that a resurgence of friendship can nurture concord and foster reconciliation within contemporary liberal democracies.

In this article, we highlight the importance of accounting for time in the study of pledge fulfillment, effectively adding a significant element to the ongoing academic discussions of the factors that influence the fulfillment of party promises. Unlike previous analyses in which pledge fulfillment is assumed to be a uniform process occurring over time, we analyze party pledge fulfillment using a discrete time approach: doing so highlights yet unobserved dynamics. More precisely, we find that if the government does not enact pledges within the first half of its mandate, the probability of these pledges ever being fulfilled drops drastically. The discrete time modeling approach also allows us to investigate the relationships existing between the budget balance and pledge fulfillment more thoroughly. Our research also extends the study of pledge fulfillment to a new case, the province of Quebec, for the period of 1994–2014 encompassing six governments. Finally, we also conduct similar analyses on Canadian pledge fulfillment data spanning seven successive governments from 1993 to 2015. This study analyzes a total of 1431 manually coded election pledges.

What drives people to protest in an authoritarian country? Drawing from a rich set of individual-level data from the China General Social Survey 2010, we address the question of protest participation by focusing on the factors of resources, and rewards vs risks, that might be unique to protestors in an authoritarian state. We find strong evidence for education, typically conceived as a key enabling resource in protests, to be negatively associated with likelihood of participation. There are, however, significant differences between political behavior in urban and rural samples. We find some, though rather weak, evidence to suggest that as urban residents become wealthier over time, they will increasingly turn to protests as a form of political participation, demanding greater accountability of government and corporate actions.

The principle that parties should make policy commitments during election campaigns and fulfil those commitments if elected is central to the idea of promissory representation. This study examines citizens’ evaluations of promise keeping and breaking. We focus on two aspects of trust as explanations of citizens’ evaluations. When trust is defined in terms of mistrust, it implies that vigilant and well-informed citizens base their evaluations on what governments deliver. When trust is defined in terms of distrust, it implies that citizens use heuristic thinking when evaluating governing parties’ performance, regardless of what those parties do. Our evidence is from a survey experiment in the British Election Study, which asked respondents to evaluate whether governing parties fulfilled specific election pledges made during the previous election campaign. The findings indicate that both mistrust and distrust affect citizens’ evaluations.