A Popular Public Theology

Abstract

The article begins by exploring what is meant by a popular public theology drawing on the work of the missiologist Werner Ustorf. A popular public theology refers to the informal and unofficial theological speech of society, distinct from the more formal theology of the Church and academy. Such popular public theology is found in contemporary culture, albeit often in diffuse and incoherent form. It is then argued that a popular public theology has an inbuilt relevance to the concerns of society, avoids problems associated with public theologians needing to be fluent in more than one academic discourse, and is not in danger of being reliant on the social sciences. Finally, it is suggested that by discussing the implications of cultural theological statements, public theologians are able to contribute critically to social and political debates.     

Reconstituting Community in Divided Society: Faith-inspired Civil Organizations and the Case of Corrymeela

Abstract

Faith-inspired civil organizations (FICOs) are growing in recognition for their relational and sustainable approaches and contributions to peacebuilding, especially in areas where religious or cultural identities have complicated contexts of violent conflict. The capacity of FICOs to penetrate the deeper and long-term obstacles to peacebuilding is largely a consequence of their underlying faith-based motivations and methods for intervention. This article explores one particular FICO: the Corrymeela Community, which has played a notable public role in the work of peacebuilding and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. In examing the theological roots and operational character of Corrymeela, this article explores possible answers to three important questions. First, as a Christian-inspired organization emphasizing an ecumenical, interfaith approach to sustainable peace, where does Corrymeela locate its theological understanding of violent conflict and purposeful intervention? Second, how does this theological understanding inform and shape its operational strategies for strategic peacebuilding in Northern Ireland? Finally, in a “post-Troubles” Northern Ireland, what is the way forward for such an organization? How might its work and lessons-learned as a FICO continue to impact Northern Ireland, while at the same time contribute to the convoluted work of reconciliation in other regions confronting religiously-fueled violence?     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Speculative Realism and Public Theology: Explorations

Abstract

The paper argues that ideas emanating from the speculative realists can inform a new approach to public theology, one that is broadly consistent with Christian realism and opposed to that of radical orthodoxy. Linking the two disciplines through an exploration of the ethical consequences of speculative realism, it takes in particular the work of Latour, his concept of the "gathering," his distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern, and his questioning of the fact-value distinction, and through a lived example shows how the language of human and non-human offers a critique of reductionist approaches to the political.     

Civil Society and Development: Scientific and Professional Associations in Public Policy in Santa Catarina and Sergipe, Brazil

This paper uses Brazil's regional inequality to carry out comparative research on the role of civil society in economic development. Through quantitative event count data buttressed with primary archival research, greater involvement of civil society in public policy is shown to correlate with economic and social development. The results suggest that a robust, free civil society can improve development outcomes by providing additional informed voices in the policy process. These serve both as independent voices to vet policy proposals, and as sources of new policy initiatives themselves.     

The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much

This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.     

Doreen Finneron and Adam Dinham (eds.), Building on Faith: Faith Buildings in Neighbourhood Renewal

Abstract

This article responds to Adam Kotsko's counter-positioning of Thomist-Milbankian hierarchy on the one hand and Deleuzian-Surinian univocity on the other as competing visions for an ontologically grounded universal socialism. Pointing to Milbank's declaration that it would be "ridiculous" to debate Christianity's universality, Rubenstein raises suspicion about the ethical and political value of universality as such. Ultimately, she points to Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of "sharing" as a means of relating existents that neither reconsolidates a static hierarchy nor abolishes transcendence. Rather, sharing "shares beings out," clearing a space for genuine debate among those who are essentially different.     

Exploring the Contributions of Cultural Theory for Improving Public Deliberation about Complex Policy Problems

In this article, we argue that the Cultural Theory pioneered by Mary Douglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or “minipublics”) that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use Cultural Theory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe John Dryzek's and Simon Niemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how Cultural Theory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.     

Agents of Change: The Role of Public Managers in Public Policy

Our article outlines a number of ways that theories of public management can contribute to the work of public policy scholars. We first outline some of the ways in which public managers have been incorporated into previous work on public policy, and the limitations faced by previous treatments. We then discuss the role that public management plays in the policy process, with a specific focus on managerial quality, networking, and performance evaluation.     

我国博物馆展示教育和开放服务现状、问题和对策思考

现代博物馆经营的核心是展示教育和开放服务.在免费开放后,如何提升我国博物馆的展示教育和开放服务水平,提高博物馆服务社会的质量,是我国博物馆经营面临的一个重大问题.我们要借鉴国外发达国家的博物馆发展、管理经验,制定相关考核指标,促进馆际交流与合作,推动博物馆展览延伸和拓展教育活动的开展并加强对文化产品的开发,以促进我国博...     

The Effects of Beneficiary Targeting on Public Support for Social Policies

We assess the tendency for the public to use group‐centric policy evaluations with evidence from a survey experiment concerning two issues within the social policy domain, health care and aid to cities. By randomly varying target group identity within each issue and using both negatively and positively regarded groups our evidence shows that differences exist in the tendency for members of the public to use group‐centric heuristics. Group‐centric evaluations are related to party identification and political ideology. Across both issues conservatives and Republicans are more likely than liberals or Democrats to adopt a group‐centric heuristic. Partisan and ideological differences suggest that established theories miss the mark by emphasizing how universal policy designs are preferred to designs that target unpopular groups.     

Paying Attention to Politics: Public Responsiveness and Welfare Policy Change

In order for the democratic process to work properly, it is vital that the public pays attention to politics and signals its opinions and preferences back to its representatives; if this is not the case, representatives have less incentive to represent. This article deals with the question of whether and how the public responds to welfare policy change. The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public responds to policy change with negative feedback, in relation to its preferred level of policy. The empirical analysis tests this model on public responses following the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care. Did the reform trigger a thermostatic response from the public, and how should this be interpreted? A contribution in relation to previous research is the inclusion of ideological orientation and proximity, variables which, I argue, condition the nature and direction of public responsiveness. The study was designed as a natural experiment in which preferences of privatization of health care were measured before and after the health care reform of 2009/2010. The results provide partial support for the thermostatic model: preferences for further privatization decrease after the reform, but primarily within one subgroup. Additionally, public responses are demonstrated to vary according to ideological orientation, where the right‐oriented react thermostatically and the left‐oriented do not. The article contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policymaking and public opinion and to the expansion of thermostatic theory.     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

Trans-Subsystem Dynamics: Policy Topography, Mass Opinion, and Policy Change

We argue that the treatment of trans-subsystem change, and particularly the role of public opinion in fostering such change, within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been underspecified. We propose a model of "policy topography" that combines the concepts of public opinion, clusters of linked subsystems, and policy issue venues. While the ACF has characterized subsystems as relatively self-contained, we argue that they are more usefully understood as operating in a relatively permeable fashion among evolving clusters of subsystems linked together by networked relations, strategically overlapping policy considerations, and public opinion disruptions. The "policy topography" model offers opportunities to assess the relationships across policy subsystems, and to better specify the critical relationship between public policy and mass opinions. We offer examples, and suggest hypotheses along with avenues for appropriate empirical analysis.     

The Role of Public Opinion in US and Canadian Immigration Policies

Considering that the United States and Canada are neighboring North American countries with fairly similar liberal democratic political cultures, their immigration policies are noticeably different. While US policies prioritize family reunification, Canadian policies favor labor demands and employability. This difference reflects the varying degrees to which the public influences their respective immigration policies. Examining contemporary immigration policies of the United States and Canada, this paper compares the role of public opinion in each, and argues that public opinion plays a more prominent role in immigration policies in the United States than it does in Canada. This observation is due in part to the partisan nature of the US political structure and to the cohesiveness among immigrants, particularly Latinos. Canada, in contrast, favors a policy of multiculturalism that empowers immigrant groups and limits individual groups’ capacity and inclination to dominate policy decisions.