The Intersection of Narrative Policy Analysis and Policy Change Theory

Narrative policy analysis and policy change theory rarely intersect in the literature. This research proposes an integration of these approaches through an empirical analysis of the narrative political strategies of two interest groups involved in policy debate and change over an eight‐year period in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Three research questions are explored: (i) Is it possible to reconcile these seemingly disparate approaches? (ii) Do policy narrative strategies explain how interest groups expand or contain policy issues despite divergent core policy beliefs? (3) How does this new method of analysis add to the literature? One hundred and five documents from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Blue Ribbon Coalition were content analyzed for policy narrative strategies: identification of winners and losers, diffusion or concentration of costs and benefits, and use of condensation symbols, policy surrogates, and science. Five of seven hypotheses were confirmed while controlling for presidential administration and technical expertise. The results indicate that interest groups do use distinctive narrative strategies in the turbulent policy environment.     

Understanding large-scale institutional change

A remarkable reform in modern Swedish political history was the transformation of the local government structure between 1952 and 1974. In a mere 22 years, the number of municipalities was reduced from 2,498 to 277. This study aims to answer how such large-scale reforms could come about politically, particularly since much of the literature on institutions and political reform asserts that carrying out large-scale political change should be a difficult task. Two opposing stories of institutional change are presented: evolutionary accounts, which see the amalgamations as rational adaptations to changing circumstances, are contrasted with a social conflict perspective, which explains amalgamations in terms of their distributional consequences. By investigating the processes leading up to this vast restructuring of Swedish local political geography, we demonstrate that an understanding of these reforms as rational adaptations to changing circumstances, made on the basis of consensus among leading political actors, is not accurate. The reforms were not as uncontroversial and non-conflictual as they often have been portrayed. Our results weaken the evolutionary approach to institutional change, whilst supporting the social conflict perspective.     

NGOs,Disaster Relief and Asset Transfer in the Horn: Political Survival in a Permanent Emergency

Famines have winners and losers. Conventional analysis has concentrated on the losers: what has been neglected is that famines can result from the conscious exercise of power in pursuit of gain or advantage by the politically strong. This article is an attempt to analyse the process of political survival in the context of permanent emergency. Through examples of local asset transfer, and indicating how this process articulates with a wider regional parallel economy, the paper offers an analysis of political survival in the arc of crisis that runs from Sudan through southern Ethiopia to Somalia. The role of donors and NGOs is examined in terms of how they relate to the weak and the strong within the asset transfer economy. Donors are seen to have supported the strong whilst the position of NGOs is more contradictory. Although programme measures to protect assets have been developed, and the disjuncture between the rules of sovereignty and the protection of human rights has been highlighted, these measures have essentially failed. A review of trends since the end of the Cold War suggests that the chances of preventing the further consolidation of a transfer economy within the region are negligible. The position of those who gain from such a destructive se the process of political survival in the context of permanent emergency. Through examples of local asset transfer, and indicating how this process articulates with a wider regional parallel economy, the paper offers an analysis of political survival in the arc of crisis that runs from Sudan through southern Ethiopia to Somalia. The role of donors and NGOs is examined in terms of how they relate to the weak and the strong within the asset transfer economy. Donors are seen to have supported the strong whilst the position of NGOs is more contradictory. Although programme measures to protect assets have been developed, and the disjuncture between the rules of sovereignty and the protection of human rights has been highlighted, these measures have essentially failed. A review of trends since the end of the Cold War suggests that the chances of preventing the further consolidation of a transfer economy within the region are negligible. The position of those who gain from such a destructive process seems assured.     

Between rejected socialism and desired capitalism: social sciences’ discourse on the transformation in Poland

The transformation of the socialist societies of Central and Eastern Europe has been commonly described as a transition from a planned economy to a market economy and from a (semi)authoritarian system to a liberal democracy. According to this perspective, the implementation of new political and economic institutions was supposed to free the – so far suppressed – nature of all societies to become capitalist democracies. Such a vision of transformation dominated Polish public and academic discourse. It has been challenged by critics, who emphasized that transformation is an ambiguous process taking place at the level of social life rather than a macro-institutional level. Nevertheless, new concepts often reproduced characteristics of the rejected approach – a tendency to build dichotomous models based on simplified images of a pathological socialist legacy on one hand and of desired capitalist order on the other. Only recently a shift in the transformation discourse might be observed. The best examples are studies employing ethnographic methods, which focus on the level of everyday practices, and study how systemic changes were experienced by social actors. The article is an analysis of the social sciences’ discourse on transformation in the context of the broader public discourse in Poland. It depicts the transitology paradigm and its critique evolving from institutional and cultural perspectives. The focus is on concepts of homo sovieticus, ‘winners and losers’, learned helplessness and the like. Finally, the implications of ethnographic approaches are discussed. The case provokes questions about the role of social scientists in the vital processes of their own society.     

Winners and losers. Turnout,results and the flows of vote

Not all general elections can be considered as being equal: some are placed in continuity with the previous political phase and therefore do not change the most relevant features of the party and political system; others, however, tend to represent a watershed between distinct political phases. Without a doubt, the 4 March 2018 Italian general elections belong to the latter category. This article analyses those same elections from three points of view: firstly, it reconstructs and explains electoral turnout, both following a long-term diachronic perspective, as well as comparing the various areas of the country from a territorial point of view. Secondly, similar diachronic and territorial comparisons are conducted with respect to electoral results, so as to clearly identify winners and losers of the 4 of March. Finally, it presents flows of votes in thirty-eight different territorial contexts (cities or electoral constituencies): in this way, it is possible to precisely reconstruct the reasons behind the ‘electoral earthquake’ of 4 March 2018.     

Turnout,preferential voting and vote flows in the E.U. election1

ABSTRACT

This article aims at focusing on four main features of the European elections that were held on 26 May 2019. Firstly, it analyses electoral turnout, both from a diachronic and a geographical point of view. Secondly, it presents electoral data and identifies winners and losers of the vote, not only by comparing 2019 E.U. results to 2014 E.U. results and 2018 political results, but especially focusing on the territorial dimension of electoral dynamics. Thirdly, it discusses flows of vote in five Italian cities (Brescia, Turin, Florence, Naples, Palermo), in order to give a clearer picture of how citizens (potentially) changed their electoral preferences from 2018 to 2019. Fourthly, it focuses on preferential vote, with the aim of distinguishing between parties characterized by ‘micro-personalization’ and ‘macro-personalization’. On many of these aspects, the 2019 European elections in Italy can be understood on the basis of the well-known ‘second-order election theory’. Yet, there are also interesting empirical findings that deviate from this pattern, among which the electoral success of the League – one of the two parties in government at the moment of the elections – merits further attention and can be mostly explained on the basis of government political action. That same electoral success, in addition, represented one of the causes that led to the end of the so-called yellow-green government in August 2019.     

People, Places, and Policy: A Politically Relevant Framework for Efforts to Reduce Concentrated Poverty

This article identifies the persistence of spatially concentrated poverty, reviews the literature on an implicit people-place binary theory of antipoverty policy, proposes a more integrated heuristic for understanding policy, and discusses how the classification can be the basis for a more refined understanding of the evolution of antipoverty policy, how and when politics drive the antipoverty agenda and uses the heuristic to encourage evaluators to refocus research on the multiple aspects of poor peoples' lives. In general, proponents of either people-based or place-based policies have dominated the urban poverty debate. This tension has led to a fragmented and piecemeal approach to spatially concentrated poverty that focuses on either people or places and does not best serve the poor. The new heuristic specifies both the policy targets and the policy mechanisms for major programs, examining the degree to which each focuses on people or places, and the degree to which each relies on supply and demand side assumptions. This reclassification suggests that the assumptions inherent in public policy can provide insight into how antipoverty policy makers and advocates might respond to political cycles and major sociopolitical events, as well as how they might more critically evaluate their efforts.     

Are All Policy Decisions Equal? Explaining the Variation in Media Coverage of the UK Budget

A country's budget is one of the most important public policy instruments, as it establishes the government's policy priorities and has the potential to determine winners and losers. The budget, however, is a mixture of different components and these get varying degrees of attention in the media. Drawing on sociology of news research, this paper seeks to explain this heterogeneous coverage of a budget's policy decisions. To do so, it uses a unique data set of over 5,000 articles of press coverage of six UK budgets (2008–2012). These articles are coded for the presence/absence of each of the budget's policy decision, via automated content analysis. On the basis of a multivariate negative binomial model, we find that the salience of a policy decision in the coverage is determined by its cost, whether it is negative (i.e., tax hikes and spending cuts) or positive, the income group that is the most affected by it, and the level of attention given to it by the government.     

Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity: waiting for social justice in Wentworth, South Africa

South Africans today inhabit a fragmented and discontinuous landscape, often despite their most cosmopolitan intentions. Grounded in the Coloured neighbourhood of Wentworth in Durban, this paper asks how remains of the past appear as differently temporalised artefacts, some buried in the archaic past and others more readily used to critique the present. In particular, I explore photographs of inmates of a concentration camp from 1902, township youth appropriating a specific commons in the early 1980s, black political photography from the late 1980s, and film wrestling with the ambiguities of post-apartheid political life in a Coloured neighbourhood next to an oil refinery. What unites these moments is not just a meta-theoretical concern with photography as both documentary and aesthetic, but the specific political uses of images, exemplified by the work of two black political photographers. Their practice provides cues for situating these other photographs in a long century of multiple dispossessions. The paper explores when and how photographs might shock the viewer into recognising resemblances, connections and potential solidarities, not just with the past, but with subaltern critique of racial space and subjectivity in the present. I suggest how we might view photographs from various moments relationally, to understand how, in one corner of contemporary South Africa, people continue to wait for justice despite uncertainty and official dissimulation, in a state of anticipatory frustration.     

KLAVS RANDSBORG AND THE NINTH CENTURY AD

Archaeology over the past fifty years has shown that in the early 9^th century Western Europe experimented with a coalescing of states affirmed by a common reform ideology and with it increased communication to regions beyond. At different speeds, regions of Western Europe adopted this new strategy known as the correctio. Within a generation, the correctio gave rise to a new ‘feudal’ economy and significantly a new regionalism. The archaeology of Europe shows that there were winners and losers in these fast‐changing regions. The losers, in many cases, controlled the written narratives and ascribed their altered socio‐economic condition to the Others of the time, not least because the Others were leading exponents of the post‐correctio economic agenda. This paper revisits Klavs Randsborg's groundbreaking book, The Viking Age of Denmark, in the context of post‐war approaches to Europe's post‐classical narrative.     

The Search for Policy Coordination: Ministerial and Bureaucratic Perceptions of Agency Amalgamations in a Federal Parliamentary System

The imperative to coordinate is strong, but the means remain contentious. One approach is to amalgamate agencies into a few large organizations, the other to encourage a diversity of policy options. Drawing on the federal amalgamations of departments in Australia since 1987, this paper reports that senior bureaucrats find more policy coordination benefits than costs from working in larger structures, while ministers report a loss of options and a risk of information overload.     

From Husbands and Housewives to Suckers and Whores: Marital‐Political Anxieties in the ‘House of Egypt’, 1919–48

This article traces the transformation in the symbolic role of the modern, bourgeois Egyptian home and the political and personal relationships it allegedly engendered, showing that what had originally appeared as promising became the potential site of treason and deceit. The article relies on archival materials, political caricatures and articles from the popular press. Beginning with an assessment of the political discourse of 1919, it then illustrates how, by the 1930s, home life and marriage appeared as zones of crisis rather than promise. By the late 1940s, as a stand‐in for political commentary, the domicile appeared as a space from which men had to escape at all costs, presaging a revolution in which a new political order would restore the household to its previous order and centrality.     

Inter‐person Separation: A New Objective Standard for Evaluating the Spatial Fairness of Political Redistricting Plans

The fundamental basis for territorial political representation is the presumption that people share greater common interests with others in closer geographic proximity than with people farther away. This principle is found in U.S. legal requirements that districts for the House of Representatives and state legislatures should not needlessly divide “communities of interest” and should be “reasonably compact.” We propose a new objective standard to evaluate spatial fairness of redistricting plans: the extent to which a delineation minimizes total distance between all pairs of people assigned to the same district. To date, the legal standard of compactness has primarily been thought of in terms of the shapes of political districts, but boundary shape may have little correspondence with how populations are actually clustered and dispersed. Inter‐person separation, by contrast, provides a direct, intuitive metric for evaluating the congruence of districting plans with the territorial basis of political representation. To operationalize an inter‐person separation standard, we propose a model and present a heuristic method for delineating comparator districting schemes. We apply the standard to the current U.S. Congressional Districts in the states of Arizona and North Carolina to demonstrate how inter‐person separation could be used to develop and vet future redistricting plans.     

Managing the interlocking climate and resource challenges

Energy security, climate change and food and water concerns are posing serious challenges to the management of international relations in an already turbulent world. These new developments—and the corresponding risk management strategies—will change the calculus of interests, powers and strategies for all actors, with significant impacts on the global political economy. Climate change action (such as targets for emissions reductions) will challenge the existing power structures, with the transition to a low-carbon economy creating new winners and losers in the global economy. Today, there is a fresh appreciation about the consequences of bad policy choices. Comparisons have been drawn between the fallout in the global financial system and the kind of risks that unmitigated climate change may bring. Even though the pressure on some resources may have eased since the onset of the global economic downturn in 2008, it is unlikely that the longer term trajectory has been reversed. This calls for renewed understanding and appreciation of the magnitude of risks foreseen. Multiple public goods need to be generated from the same production systems or sectors. In the context of climate change, international cooperation offers the only option that can best serve even narrowly defined national interests. Ensuring human security and peaceful relations among states in the decades to come will require short-term common action within the framework of long-term strategizing and visionary leadership as well as concerted efforts to deal head-on with worst case scenarios in our forecasting and policy planning.     

Russia's Managers in Transition: Pilferers or Paladins?

Two American economists use their recent (1994 through 1996) survey data to evaluate Russian managers as winners or losers in the country's economic reform. The survey covered 123 enterprises located in Moscow, Tver', Nizhniy Novgorod, Rostov, Taganrog, Volgograd, Volzhskiy, and Novosibirsk. A total of 159 interviews, involving top-level managers, were conducted to elicit information on compensation, decision making, workforce size, structure of overhead costs, asset stripping, and survival strategies. The interviews, most in privatized (N= 107) and private (N= 31) firms, embraced 64 in heavy industry, 35 in light industry, 29 in food processing, 25 in service, and 4 in other industries. The study reports empirical results of the testing of five hypotheses, as well as concluding observations. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D21, D63, Ml 3. 6 tables, 90 references.     

Sectarianism, Socioeconomic Competition and the Political Economy of Ulster Loyalism

Within this paper we chart the link between class and the politics of Loyalism in Northern Ireland. In so doing we argue that sectarianism is a socio-cultural construct which undermines the potential for political stability. The paper analyzes the evolution of Loyalism and in so doing contends that the extreme political violence which emanated from certain paramilitary groups was conditioned by socio-economic and political alterations in Northern Ireland. The paper indicates how class relationships clearly cross-cut politics, economics, ideology and culture.     

Governing Paris—Planning and Political Conflict in Île-de-France

In this paper we examine some of the major planning challenges facing the Paris region and we locate these in the context of problems of institutional coordination and cooperation. Finding the right institutions for metropolitan governance is a challenge for most of Europe's large cities. Our approach to the Paris region emphasizes the need to understand the evolution of institutions of governance and the struggles between political actors around these institutional legacies. Political competition motivates key actors in the multi-level governance of the region. We examine the struggle to develop new social housing and conflicts around transport policy in Paris. Political conflict and different perspectives on regional planning stand in the way of solutions to current problems. In the final part of the paper we discuss how potential political and institutional solutions might develop.     

Unravelling the “Thin Blue Line”: Policing as an Engine of Inequality

This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the “thin blue line” symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.     

Spatial and temporal dynamics of linkage strategies in Arab-Israeli water negotiations

Water issues are inherently multi-faceted and therefore water policy often involves linkages to other issues. By providing opportunities for bargaining, use of policy linkages in transboundary water negotiations can increase the possibilities of reaching agreements; however, they also involve potential political costs. While there is ample theoretical literature on the potential benefits and risks of linkages in transboundary water negotiations, there is little empirical work exploring if, how, and why linkages are implemented in practice, especially in areas of conflict, in which they have perhaps the largest potential impact. This study evaluates the rationales behind decisions to adopt or refrain from linkage strategies by examining their actual use in Arab-Israeli water negotiations. The study finds that the likelihood, scale, and scope of linkages change over time, and they depend on factors such as the political climate, the level of trust between the parties, the degree of power asymmetry between parties, and political affiliation. Other variables such as size of negotiating parties were weakly correlated with likelihood of linkages. Knowing the opportunities and limits afforded by such linkages is crucial for negotiators and policymakers who are often drawn to linkage strategies without considering their inherent risks.     

Parties and factions in the late middle ages: the case of the Hoeken and Kabeljauwen in The Hague (1483–1515)

The late medieval political history of Holland is dominated by two opposing parties of noblemen and citizens: the ‘Hoeken’ (Hooks) and ‘Kabeljauwen’ (Cod). From approximately 1350 until 1500 these two parties determined the political landscape in Holland on a provincial and local level. The situations of open conflict between the two parties, usually in times that the position of the count of Holland was weak, have been studied thoroughly in recent years. The networks of both parties during periods of relative peace, however, have been for the most part neglected. Here it is argued that it is vital to study the networks during periods of peace as well to be able to say what the nature was of both parties. An analysis of the networks of the ‘winners’, the Kabeljauwen in The Hague at the end of the fifteenth and start of the sixteenth century, serves as an example of how fruitful the analysis of party networks can be after, or in between, periods of open violence. The importance of the Kabeljauw networks for three decades after the end of open friction is demonstrated. Studies of parties and factions in late medieval Italy serve as a constant base of comparison throughout the paper.